Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 1-6

by Tom Clancy

  He’d tried, done everything a man could do, after it was too late, which was so often the way of things. It had just been too much. His wife, discovering a lump, still a pretty young woman in her thirty-seventh year, his best and closest friend. He’d supported her as best he could after the surgery, but then came another lump, another surgery, medical treatment, and the downhill slide, always having to be strong for her until the end. It would have been a crushing burden for any man, and then followed by another. His only son, David, drafted, sent to Vietnam, and killed two weeks later in some nameless valley. The support of his fellow workers, the way they had come to Davey’s funeral, hadn’t stopped him from crawling inside a bottle, desperately trying to cling to what he had left, but too tightly. Doris had borne her own grief, something Raymond hadn’t fully understood or appreciated, and when she’d come home late, her clothing not quite right, the cruel and hateful things he’d said. He could remember every word, the hollow sound as the front door had slammed.

  Only a day later he’d come to his senses, driving with tears in his eyes to the police station, abasing himself before men whose understanding and sympathy he never quite recognized, desperate again to get his little girl back, to beg from her the forgiveness that he could never give himself. But Doris had vanished. The police had done what they could, and that wasn’t much. And so for two years he’d lived inside a bottle, until two fellow workers had taken him aside and talked as friends do once they have gathered the courage to invade the privacy of another man’s life. His minister was a regular guest in the lonely house now. He was drying out—Raymond Brown still drank, but no longer to excess, and he was working to cut it down to zero. Man that he was, he had to face his loneliness that way, had to deal with it as best he could. He knew that solitary dignity was of little value. It was an empty thing to cling to, but it was all he had. Prayer also helped, some, and in the repeated words he often found sleep, though not the dreams of the family which had once shared the house with him. He was tossing and turning in his bed, sweating from the heat, when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, is this Raymond Brown?”

  “Yeah, who’s this?” he asked with closed eyes.

  “My name is Sarah Rosen. I’m a doctor in Baltimore, I work at Johns Hopkins Hospital.”

  “Yes?” The tone of her voice opened his eyes. He stared at the ceiling, the blank white place that so closely matched the emptiness of his life. And there was sudden fear. Why would a doctor from Baltimore call him? His mind was spinning off towards a named dread when the voice went on quickly.

  “I have somebody here who wants to talk to you, Mr. Brown.”

  “Huh?” He next heard muffled noises that might have been static from a bad line, but was not.

  “I can’t.”

  “You have nothing to lose, dear,” Sarah said, handing over the phone. “He’s your father. Trust him.”

  Doris took it, holding it in both hands close to her face, and her voice was a whisper.

  “Daddy?”

  From hundreds of miles away, the whispered word came through as clearly as a church bell. He had to breathe three times before answering, and that came out as a sob.

  “Dor?”

  “Yes—Daddy, I’m sorry.”

  “Are you okay, baby?”

  “Yes, Daddy, I’m fine.” And incongruous as the statement was, it was not a lie.

  “Where are you?”

  “Wait a minute.” Then the voice changed. “Mr. Brown, this is Doctor Rosen again.”

  “She’s there?”

  “Yes, Mr. Brown, she is. We’ve been treating her for a week. She’s a sick girl, but she’s going to be okay. Do you understand? She’s going to be okay.”

  He was grasping his chest. Brown’s heart was a steel fist, and his breathing came in painful gasps that a doctor might have taken for something they were not.

  “She’s okay?” he asked anxiously.

  “She’s going to be fine,” Sarah assured him. “There’s no doubt of that, Mr. Brown. Please believe me, okay?”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus! Where, where are you?”

  “Mr. Brown, you can’t see her just yet. We will bring her to you just as soon as she’s fully recovered. I worried about calling you before we could get you together, but—but we just couldn’t not call you. I hope you understand.”

  Sarah had to wait two minutes before she heard anything she could understand, but the sounds that came over the line touched her heart. In reaching into one grave, she had extracted two lives.

  “She’s really okay?”

  “She’s had a bad time, Mr. Brown, but I promise you she will recover fully. I’m a good doc, okay? I wouldn’t say that unless it were true.”

  “Please, please let me talk to her again. Please!”

  Sarah handed the phone over, and soon four people were weeping. Nurse and physician were the luckiest, sharing a hug and savoring their victory over the cruelties of the world.

  Bob Ritter pulled his car into a slot in West Executive Drive, the closed-off former street that lay between the White House and the Executive Office Building. He walked towards the latter, perhaps the ugliest building in Washington—no mean accomplishment—which had once held much of the executive branch of government, the State, War, and Navy departments. It also held the Indian Treaty Room, designed for the purpose of overawing primitive visitors with the splendor of Victorian gingerbread architecture and the majesty of the government which had constructed this giant tipi. The wide corridors rang with the sound of his footsteps on marble as he searched for the right room. He found it on the second floor, the room of Roger MacKenzie, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. “Special,” perversely, made him a second-line official. The National Security Advisor had a corner office in the West Wing of the White House. Those who reported to him had offices elsewhere, and though distance from the Seat of Power defined influence, it didn’t define arrogance of position. MacKenzie had to have a staff of his own in order to remind himself of his importance, real or illusory. Not really a bad man, and actually a fairly bright one, Ritter thought, MacKenzie was nonetheless jealous of his position, and in another age he would have been the clerk who advised the chancellor who advised the King. Except today the clerk had to have an executive secretary.

  “Hi, Bob. How are things at Langley?” MacKenzie asked in front of his secretarial staff, just to be sure they would know that he was meeting with an up-and-coming CIA official, and was therefore still very important indeed to have such guests calling on him.

  “The usual.” Ritter smiled back. Let’s get on with it.

  “Trouble with traffic?” he asked, letting Ritter know that he was almost, if not quite, late for the appointment.

  “There’s a little problem on the GW.” Ritter gestured with his head towards MacKenzie’s private office. His host nodded.

  “Wally, we need someone to take notes.”

  “Coming, sir.” His executive assistant rose from his desk in the secretarial area and brought a pad.

  “Bob Ritter, this is Wally Hicks. I don’t think you’ve met.”

  “How do you do, sir?” Hicks extended his hand. Ritter took it, seeing yet one more eager White House aide. New England accent, bright-looking, polite, which was about all he was entitled to expect of such people. A minute later they were sitting in MacKenzie’s office, the inner and outer doors closed in the cast-iron frames that gave the Executive Office Building the structural integrity of a warship. Hicks hurried himself about to get coffee for everyone, like a page at some medieval court, which was the way of things in the world’s most powerful democracy.

  “So what brings you in, Bob?” MacKenzie asked from behind his desk. Hicks flipped open his note pad and began his struggle to take down every word.

  “Roger, a rather unique opportunity has presented itself over in Vietnam.” Eyes opened wider and ears perked up.

  “What might that be?”
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  “We’ve identified a special prison camp southwest of Haiphong,” Ritter began, quickly outlining what they knew and what they suspected.

  MacKenzie listened intently. Pompous though he might have been, the recently arrived investment banker was also a former aviator himself. He’d flown B-24s in the Second World War, including the dramatic but failed mission to Ploesti. A patriot with flaws, Ritter told himself. He would try to make use of the former while ignoring the latter.

  “Let me see your imagery,” he said after a few minutes, using the proper buzzword instead of the more pedestrian “pictures.”

  Ritter took the photo folder from his briefcase and set it on the desk. MacKenzie opened it and took a magnifying glass from a drawer. “We know who this guy is?”

  “There’s a better photo in the back,” Ritter answered helpfully.

  MacKenzie compared the official family photo with the one from the camp, then with the enhanced blowup.

  “Very close. Not definitive but close. Who is he?”

  “Colonel Robin Zacharias. Air Force. He spent quite some time at Offutt Air Force Base, SAC War Plans. He knows everything, Roger.”

  MacKenzie looked up and whistled, which, he thought, was what he was supposed to do in such circumstances. “And this guy’s no Vietnamese . . .”

  “He’s a colonel in the Soviet Air Force, name unknown, but it isn’t hard to figure what he’s there for. Here’s the real punchline.” Ritter handed over a copy of the wire-service report on Zacharias’s death.

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah, all of a sudden it gets real clear, doesn’t it?”

  “This sort of thing could wreck the peace talks,” MacKenzie thought aloud.

  Walter Hicks couldn’t say anything. It wasn’t his place to speak in such circumstances. He was like a necessary appliance—an animated tape machine—and the only real reason he was in the room at all was so his boss would have a record of the conversation. Wreck the peace talks he scribbled down, taking the time to underline it, and though nobody else noticed, his fingers went white around the pencil.

  “Roger, the men we believe to be in this camp know an awful lot, enough to seriously compromise our national security. I mean seriously,” Ritter said calmly. “Zacharias knows our nuclear war plans, he helped write SIOP. This is very serious business.” Merely in speaking sy-op, merely by invoking the unholy name of the “Single Integrated Operations Plan,” Ritter had knowingly raised the stakes of the conversation. The CIA field officer amazed himself at the skillful delivery of the lie. The White House pukes might not grasp the idea of getting people out because they were people. But they had their hot issues, and nuclear war-plans were the unholy of unholies in this and many other temples of government power.

  “You have my attention, Bob.”

  “Mr. Hicks, right?” Ritter asked, turning his head.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Could you please excuse us?”

  The junior assistant looked to his boss, his neutral face imploring MacKenzie to let him stay in the room, but that was not to be.

  “Wally, I think we’ll carry on for the moment in executive session,” the special assistant to the President said, easing the impact of the dismissal with a friendly smile—and a wave towards the door.

  “Yes, sir.” Hicks stood and walked out the door, closing it quietly.

  Fuck, he raged to himself, sitting back down at his desk. How could he advise his boss if he didn’t hear what came next? Robert Ritter, Hicks thought. The guy who’d nearly destroyed sensitive negotiations at a particularly sensitive moment by violating orders and bringing some goddamned spy out of Budapest. The information he’d brought had somehow changed the U.S. negotiating position, and that had set the treaty back three months because America had decided to chisel something else out of the Soviets, who had been reasonable as hell to concede the matters already agreed to. That fact had saved Ritter’s career—and probably encouraged him in that idiotically romantic view that individual people were more important than world peace, when peace itself was the only thing that mattered.

  And Ritter knew how to jerk Roger around, didn’t he? All that war-plans stuff was pure horseshit. Roger had his office walls covered with photos from The Old Days, when he’d flown his goddamned airplane all over hell and gone, pretending that he was personally winning the war against Hitler, just one more fucking war that good diplomacy would have prevented if only people had focused on the real issues as he and Peter hoped someday to do. This thing wasn’t about war plans or SIOP or any of the other uniformed bullshit that people in this section of the White House Staff played with every goddamned day. It was about people, for Christ’s sake. Uniformed people. Dumbass soldiers, people with big shoulders and little minds who did nothing more useful than kill, as though that made anything in the world better. And besides, Hicks fumed, they took their chances, didn’t they? If they wanted to drop bombs on a peaceful and friendly people like the Vietnamese, well, they should have thought ahead of time that those people might not like it very much. Most important of all, if they were dumb enough to gamble their lives, then they implicitly accepted the possibility of losing them, and so why then should people like Wally Hicks give a flying fuck about them when the dice came up wrong? They probably loved the action. It undoubtedly attracted the sort of women who thought that big dicks came along with small brains, who liked “men” who dragged their knuckles on the ground like well-dressed apes.

  This could wreck the peace talks. Even MacKenzie thought that.

  All those kids from his generation, dead. And now they might risk not ending the war because of fifteen or twenty professional killers who probably liked what they did. It just made no sense. What if they gave a war and nobody came? was one of his generation’s favored aphorisms, though he knew it to be a fantasy. Because people like that one guy—Zacharias—would always seduce people into following them because little people who lacked Hicks’s understanding and perspective wouldn’t be able to see that it was just all a waste of energy. That was the most amazing part of all. Wasn’t it clear that war was just plain awful? How smart did you have to be to understand that?

  Hicks saw the door open. MacKenzie and Ritter came out.

  “Wally, we’re going across the street for a few minutes. Could you tell my eleven o‘clock that I’ll be back as soon as I can?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Wasn’t that typical? Ritter’s seduction was complete. He had MacKenzie sold enough that Roger would make the pitch to the National Security Advisor. And they would probably raise pure fucking hell at the peace table, and maybe set things back three months or more, unless somebody saw through the ruse. Hicks lifted his phone and dialed a number.

  “Senator Donaldson’s office.”

  “Hi, I was trying to get Peter Henderson.”

  “I’m sorry, he and the Senator are in Europe right now. They’ get back next week.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Thanks.” Hicks hung up. Damn. He was so upset that he’d forgotten.

  Some things have to be done very carefully. Peter Henderson didn’t even know that his code name was CASSIUS. It had been assigned to him by an analyst in the U.S.-Canada Institute whose love of Shakespeare’s plays was as genuine as that of any Oxford don. The photo in the file, along with the one-page profile of the agent, had made him think of the self-serving “patriot” in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Brutus would not have been right. Henderson, the analyst had judged, did not have sufficient quality of character.

  His senator was in Europe on a “fact-finding” tour, mainly having to do with NATO, though they would stop in on the peace talks at Paris just to get some TV tape that might be shown on Connecticut TV stations in the fall. In fact, the “tour” was mainly a shopping trip punctuated by a brief every other day. Henderson, enjoying his first such trip as the Senator’s expert on national-security issues, had to be there for the briefs, but the rest of the time was his, and he had made his own arrangements.
At the moment he was touring the White Tower, the famous centerpiece of Her Majesty’s Tower of London, now approaching its nine hundredth year of guardianship on the River Thames.

  “Warm day for London,” another tourist said.

  “I wonder if they get thunderstorms here,” the American replied casually, examining Henry VIII’s immense suit of armor.

  “They do,” the man replied, “but not as severe as those in Washington.”

  Henderson looked for an exit and headed towards it. A moment later he was strolling around Tower Green with his new companion.

  “Your English is excellent.”

  “Thank you, Peter. I am George.”

  “Hi, George.” Henderson smiled without looking at his new friend. It really was like James Bond, and doing it here—not just in London, but in the historical seat of Britain’s royal family—well, that was just delicious.

  George was his real name—actually Georgiy, which was the Russian equivalent—and he rarely went into the field anymore. Though he’d been a highly effective field officer for KGB, his analytical ability was such that he’d been called back to Moscow five years earlier, promoted to lieutenant colonel and placed in charge of a whole section. Now a full colonel, George looked forward to general’s stars. The reason he’d come to London, via Helsinki and Brussels, was that he’d wanted to eyeball CASSIUS himself—and get a little shopping done for his own family. Only three men of his age in KGB shared his rank, and his young and pretty wife liked to wear Western clothes. Where else to shop for them but London? George didn’t speak French or Italian.