Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 1-6

by Tom Clancy

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, no more boat rides. I mean you guys don’t handle the material anymore.”

  Piaggi smiled. He’d done this four times now, and the novelty had already worn off. “You have no argument from me on that. If you want, I can have my people take deliveries whenever you want.”

  “We separate the stuff from the money. We handle it like a business,” Tucker said. “Line of credit, like.”

  “The stuff comes over first.”

  “Fair enough, Tony. You pick good people, okay? The idea is we separate you and me from the drugs as much as possible.”

  “People get caught, they talk,” Morello pointed out. He felt excluded from the conversation, but wasn’t quite bright enough to grasp the significance of that.

  “Mine don’t,” Tucker said evenly. “My people know better.”

  “That was you, wasn’t it?” Piaggi asked, making the connection and getting a nod. “I like your style, Henry. Try to be more careful next time, okay?”

  “I spent two years getting this all set up, cost me a lot of money. I want this operation to run for a long time, and I’m not taking any more chances than I have to anymore. Now, when can you pay me off for this load?”

  “I brought an even hundred with me.” Tony waved towards the duffel bag on the deck. This little operation had grown with surprising rapidity as it was, but the first three loads had sold off for fine prices, and Tucker, Piaggi thought, was a man you could trust, insofar as you could trust anyone in this line of work. But, he figured, a rip would have happened already if that was what Tucker wanted, and this much drugs was too much for a guy running that kind of setup. “It’s yours to take, Henry. Looks like we’re going to owe you another. . . five hundred? I’ll need some time, like a week or so. Sorry, man, but you kinda sandbagged me this way. Takes time to front up that much cash, y’know?”

  “Call it four, Tony. No sense squeezing your friends first time out. Let’s generate a little goodwill at first, okay?”

  “Special introductory offer?” Piaggi laughed at that and tossed Henry a beer. “You gotta have some Italian blood in you, boy. Okay! We’ll do it like you say, man.” Just how good is that supply of yours, Henry? Piaggi couldn’t ask.

  “And now there’s work to do.” Tucker slit open the first plastic bag and dumped it into a stainless-steel mixing bowl, glad that he wouldn’t have to trouble himself with this mess again. The seventh step in his marketing plan was now complete. From now on he’d have others do this kitchen stuff, under his supervision at first, of course, but starting today Henry Tucker would start acting like the executive he had become. Mixing the inert material into the bowl, he congratulated himself on his intelligence. He’d started the business in exactly the right way, taking risks, but carefully considered ones, building his organization from the bottom up, doing things himself, getting his hands dirty. Perhaps Piaggi’s antecedents had started the same way, Tucker thought. Probably Tony had forgotten that, and forgotten also its implications. But that wasn’t Tucker’s problem.

  “Look, Colonel, I was just an aide, okay? How many times do I have to tell you that? I did the same thing your generals’ aides do, all the littler dumb stuff.”

  “Then why take such a job?” It was sad, Colonel Nikolay Yevgeniyevich Grishanov thought, that a man had to go through this, but Colonel Zacharias wasn’t a man. He was an enemy, the Russian reminded himself with some reluctance, and he wanted to get the man talking again.

  “Isn’t it the same in your air force? You get noticed by a general and you get promoted a lot faster.” The American paused for a moment. “I wrote speeches, too.” That couldn’t get him into any trouble, could it?

  “That’s the job of a political officer in my air force.” Grishanov dismissed that frivolity with a wave.

  It was their sixth session. Grishanov was the only Soviet officer allowed to interview these Americans, the Vietnamese were playing their cards so carefully. Twenty of them, all the same, all different. Zacharias was as much an intelligence officer as fighter pilot, his dossier said. He’d spent his twenty-odd-year career studying air-defense systems. A master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in electrical engineering. The dossier even included a recently acquired copy of his master’s thesis, “Aspects of Microwave Propagation and Diffusion over Angular Terrain,” photocopied from the university archives by some helpful soul, one of the unknown three who had contributed to his knowledge of the Colonel. The thesis ought to have been classified immediately upon its completion—as would have happened in the Soviet Union, Grishanov knew. It was a very clever examination of what happened to low-frequency search-radar energy—and how, incidentally, an aircraft could use mountains and hills to mask itself from it. Three years after that, following a tour of duty in a fighter squadron, he’d been assigned to a tour of duty at Offutt Air Force Base, just outside Omaha, Nebraska. Part of the Strategic Air Command’s war-plans staff, he’d worked on flight profiles which might allow American B-52 bombers to penetrate Soviet air defenses, applying his theoretical knowledge of physics to the practical world of strategic-nuclear war.

  Grishanov could not bring himself to hate this man. A fighter pilot himself, having just completed a regimental command in PVO-Strany, the Soviet air-defense command, and already selected for another, the Russian colonel was in a curious way Zacharias’s exact counterpart. His job, in the event of war, was to stop those bombers from ravaging his country, and in peace to plan methods of making their penetration of Soviet air space as difficult as possible. That identity made his current job both difficult and necessary. Not a KGB officer, certainly not one of these little brown savages, he took no pleasure at all in hurting people—shooting them down was something else entirety—even Americans who plotted the destruction of his country. But those who knew how to extract information did not know how to analyze what he was looking for, nor even what questions to ask—and writing the questions down would be no help; you had to see the man’s eyes when he spoke. A man clever enough to formulate such plans was also clever enough to lie with enough conviction and authority to fool almost anyone.

  Grishanov didn’t like what he saw now. This was a skillful man, and a courageous one, who had fought to establish missile-hunting specialists the Americans called Wild Weasels. It was a term a Russian might have used for the mission, named for vicious little predators who chased their prey into their very dens. This prisoner had flown eighty-nine such missions, if the Vietnamese had recovered the right pieces from the right aircraft—like Russians, Americans kept a record of their accomplishments on their aircraft—this was exactly the man he needed to talk to. Perhaps that was a lesson he would write about, Grishanov thought. Such pride told your enemies whom they had captured, and much of what he knew. But that was the way of fighter pilots, and Grishanov would himself have balked at the concealment of his deeds against his country’s enemies. The Russian also tried to tell himself that he was sparing harm to the man across the table. Probably Zacharias had killed many Vietnamese—and not simple peasants, but skilled, Russian-trained missile technicians—and this country’s government would want to punish him for that. But that was not his concern, and he didn’t want to allow political feelings to get in the way of his professional obligations. His was one of the most scientific and certainly the most complex aspects of national defense. It was his duty to plan for an attack of hundreds of aircraft, each of which had a crew of highly trained specialists. The way they thought, their tactical doctrine, was as important as their plans. And as far as he was concerned, the Americans could kill all of the bastards they wanted. The nasty little fascists had as much to do with his country’s political philosophy as cannibals did with gourmet cooking.

  “Colonel, I do know better than that,” Grishanov said patiently. He laid the most recently arrived document on the table. “I read this last night. It’s excellent work.”

  The Russian’s eyes never left Colonel Zacharias
. The American’s physical reaction was remarkable. Though something of an intelligence officer himself, he had never dreamed that someone in Vietnam could get word to Moscow, then have Americans under their control find something like this. His face proclaimed what he was thinking: How could they know so much about me? How could they have reached that far back into his past? Who possibly could have done it? Was anyone that good, that professional? The Vietnamese were such fools! Like many Russian officers, Grishanov was a serious and thorough student of military history. He’d read all manner of arcane documents while sitting in regimental ready rooms. From one he’d never forget, he learned how the Luftwaffe had interrogated captured airmen, and that lesson was one he would try to apply here. While physical abuse had only hardened this man’s resolve, he had just been shaken to his soul by a mere sheaf of paper. Every man had strengths and every man had weaknesses. It took a person of intelligence to recognize the differences.

  “How is it that this was never classified?” Grishanov asked, lighting a cigarette.

  “It’s just theoretical physics,” Zacharias said, shrugging his thin shoulders, recovering enough that he tried to conceal his despair. “The telephone company was more interested than anybody else.”

  Grishanov tapped the thesis with his finger. “Well, I tell you, I learned several things from that last night. Predicting false echoes from topographical maps, modeling the blind spots mathematically! You can plan an approach route that way, plot maneuvers from one such point to another. Brilliant! Tell me, what sort of place is Berkeley?”

  “Just a school, California style,” Zacharias replied before catching himself. He was talking. He wasn’t supposed to talk. He was trained not to talk. He was trained on what to expect, and what he could safely do, how to evade and disguise. But that training never quite anticipated this. And, dear God, was he tired, and scared, and sick of living up to a code of conduct that didn’t count for beans to anyone else.

  “I know little of your country—except professional matters, of course. Are there great regional differences? You come from Utah. What sort of place is it?”

  “Zacharias, Robin G. Colonel—”

  Grishanov raised his hands. “Please, Colonel. I know all that. I also know your place of birth in addition to the date. There is no base of your air force near Salt Lake City. All I know is from maps. I will probably never visit this part—any part of your country. In this Berkeley part of California, it is green, yes? I was told once they grow wine grapes there. But I know nothing of Utah. There is a large lake there, but it’s called Salt Lake, yes? It’s salty?”

  “Yes, that’s why—”

  “How can it be salty? The ocean is a thousand kilometers away, with mountains in between, yes?” He didn’t give the American time to reply. “I know the Caspian Sea quite well. I was stationed at a base there once. It isn’t salty. But this place is? How strange.” He stubbed out his cigarette.

  The man’s head jerked up a little. “Not sure, I’m not a geologist. Something left over from another time, I suppose.”

  “Perhaps so. There are mountains there, too, yes?”

  “Wasatch Mountains,” Zacharias confirmed somewhat drunkenly.

  One clever thing about the Vietnamese, Grishanov thought, the way they fed their prisoners, food a hog would eat only from necessity. He wondered if it were a deliberate and thought-out diet or something fortuitously resulting from mere barbarity. Political prisoners in the Gulag ate better, but the diet of these Americans lowered their resistance to disease, debilitated them to the point that the act of escape would be doomed by inadequate stamina. Rather like what the fascisti did to Soviet prisoners, distasteful or not, it was useful to Grishanov. Resistance, physical and mental, required energy, and you could watch these men lose their strength during the hours of interrogation, watch their courage wane as their physical needs drew more and more upon their supply of psychological resolve. He was learning how to do this. It was time-consuming, but it was a diverting process, learning to pick apart the brains of men not unlike himself.

  “The skiing, is it good?”

  Zacharias’s eyes blinked, as though the question took him away to a different time and place. “Yeah, it is.”

  “That is something one will never do here, Colonel. I like cross-country skiing for exercise, and to get away from things. I had wooden skis, but in my last regiment my maintenance officer made me steel skis from aircraft parts.”

  “Steel?”

  “Stainless steel, heavier than aluminum but more flexible. I prefer it. From a wing panel on our new interceptor, project E-266.”

  “What’s that?” Zacharias knew nothing of the new MiG- 25.

  “Your people now call it Foxbat. Very fast, designed to catch one of your B-70 bombers.”

  “But we stopped that project,” Zacharias objected.

  “Yes, I know that. But your project got me a wonderfully fast fighter to fly. When I return home, I will command the first regiment of them.”

  “Fighter planes made of steel? Why?”

  “It resists aerodynamic heating much better than aluminum,” Grishanov explained. “And you can make good skis from discarded parts.” Zacharias was very confused now. “So how well do you think we would do with my steel fighters and your aluminum bombers?”

  “I guess that depends on—” Zacharias started to say, then stopped himself cold. His eyes looked across the table, first with confusion at what he’d almost said, then with resolve.

  Too soon, Grishanov told himself with disappointment. He’d pushed a little too soon. This one had courage. Enough to take his Wild Weasel “downtown,” the phrase the Americans used, over eighty times. Enough to resist for a long time. But Grishanov had plenty of time.

  12

  Outfitters

  63 VW, LOW MLGE, RAD, HTR. . . .

  Kelly dropped a dime in the pay phone and called the number. It was a blazing hot Saturday, temperature and humidity in a neck-and-neck race for triple digits while Kelly fumed at his own stupidity. Some things were so blatantly obvious that you didn’t see them until your nose split open and started bleeding.

  “Hello? I’m calling about the ad for the car . . . that’s right,” Kelly said. “Right now if you want. . . Okay, say about fifteen minutes? Fine, thank you, Ma’am. I’ll be right there. ’Bye.” He hung up. At least something had gone right. Kelly grimaced at the inside of the phone booth. Springer was tied up in a guest slip at one of the marinas on the Potomac. He had to buy a new car, but how did you get to where the new car was? If you drove there, then you could drive the new car back, but what about the one you took? It was funny enough that he started laughing at himself. Then fate intervened, and an empty cab went driving past the marina’s entrance, allowing him to keep his promise to a little old lady.

  “The 4500 block, Essex Avenue,” he told the driver.

  “Where’s that, man?”

  “Chevy Chase.”

  “Gonna cost extra, man,” the driver pointed out, turning north.

  Kelly handed a ten-dollar bill across. “Another one if you get me there in fifteen minutes.”

  “Cool.” And the acceleration dropped Kelly back in his seat. The taxi avoided Wisconsin Avenue most of the way. At a red light the driver found Essex Avenue on his map, and he ended up collecting the extra ten with about twenty seconds to spare.

  It was an upscale residential neighborhood, and the house was easy to spot. There it was, a VW Beetle, an awful peanut-butter color speckled with a little body rust. It could not have been much better. Kelly hopped up the four wooden front steps and knocked on the door.

  “Hello?” It was a face to match the voice. She had to be eighty or so, small and frail, but with fey green eyes that hinted at what had been, enlarged by the thick glasses she wore. Her hair still had some yellow in the gray.

  “Mrs. Boyd? I called a little while ago about the car.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Bill Murphy, Ma’am.” K
elly smiled benignly. “Awful hot, isn’t it?”

  “T’rble,” she said, meaning terrible. “Wait a minute.” Gloria Boyd disappeared and then came back a moment later with the keys. She even came out to walk him to the car. Kelly took her arm to help her down the steps.

  “Thank you, young man.”

  “My pleasure, Ma’am,” he replied gallantly.

  “We got the car for my granddaughter. When she went to college, then Ken used it,” she said, expecting Kelly to know who Ken was.

  “Excuse me?”

  “My husband,” Gloria said without turning. “He died a month ago.”

  “I’m very sorry to hear that, Ma’am.”

  “He was sick a long time,” said the woman, not yet recovered from the shock of her loss but accepting the fact of it. She handed him the keys. “Here, take a look.”

  Kelly unlocked the door. It looked like the car used by a college student and then by an elderly man. The seats were well worn, and one had a long slash in it, probably by a packing box of clothes or books. He turned the key in the lock and the engine started immediately. There was even a full tank of gas. The ad hadn’t lied about the mileage, only 52,000 miles on the odometer. He asked for and got permission to take it around the block. The car was mechanically sound, he decided, bringing it back to the waiting owner.

  “Where did all the rust come from?” he asked her, giving the keys back.

  “She went to school in Chicago, at Northwestern, all that terrible snow and salt.”

  “That’s a good school. Let’s get you back inside.” Kelly took her arm and directed her back to the house. It smelled like an old person’s house, the air heavy with dust that she was too tired to wipe, and stale food, for the meals she still fixed were for two, not one.

  “Are you thirsty?”

  “Yes, Ma’am, thank you. Water will be just fine.” Kelly looked around while she went to the kitchen. There was a photo on the wall, a man in a high-necked uniform and Sam Browne belt, holding the arm of a young woman in a very tight, almost cylindrical, white wedding dress. Other photos cataloged the married life of Kenneth and Gloria Boyd. Two daughters and a son, a trip to the ocean, an old car, grandchildren, all the things earned in a full and useful life.