True Faith and Allegiance

by Tom Clancy

  As she stood there alone and sipped her drink she glanced in the direction of the good-looking grad student, hoping to catch his eye, and while she did so it occurred to her that America itself had turned into something of a battle zone in the past few weeks. The same ISIS monsters she’d been fighting over there were now over here—the Chicago massacre the evening before was naturally the main topic of conversation here at the party—and every day on the news there were new stories about a soldier or intelligence officer being targeted somewhere in the country.

  It pissed her off, and made her eager to go back to work, where she might be able to have an effect on the war here at home.

  She glanced up from her drink again to see the grad student looking her way, and then he smiled and began walking over, leaving his friends behind. Carrie Ann started to blush, and she hoped like hell the tan she’d picked up in Afghanistan would hide it, while she simultaneously wished like hell she had poured a double shot of gin in her tonic to calm her nerves.

  Just as the guy approached he made a peculiar face. It suddenly did not look like he was interested in her at all, but almost immediately she realized he was focused on something behind her. She smiled at his expression and looked back over her shoulder.

  And when she did, her own face took on a look of confusion.

  An African American woman and a Middle Eastern man, both in their early twenties, walked up the driveway around to the party at the back of the house. There were African Americans and Middle Easterners all around the party, but these were the only two wearing black windbreakers that were clearly covering something attached to their bodies, and as they moved forward they separated, one going to the right along the fence at the far end of the carport, and the other breaking left along the rear of the house.

  Their dead-set expressions, their dress, their movements. Instantly Carrie Ann knew something was seriously wrong.

  The Middle Eastern man was just twenty-five feet away from Carrie Ann when he reached back over his head with both hands and then flung them forward. From each hand she recognized live grenades launching out, over her head and toward the dozens of men and women behind her. The woman standing on the driveway did the same, and one of her grenades arced through the air in the direction of the picnic table bar and Carrie Ann’s own position.

  Carrie Ann Davenport turned around, took two steps toward the stunned master’s student, and she tackled him across the top of the table, knocking over bottles and cans and ice and stacks of Solo cups along with them. The two rolled off and over, and had just landed on the ground, he on top of her, as the four grenades exploded all over the garden party.

  Screams and yells from the wounded and the panicked, and the chants of “Allahu Akbar” rang above it all, and then Carrie Ann heard the gunfire. From under the picnic table she could see both the attackers moving forward, pistols in their hands, shooting at men and women scrambling away in front of them.

  Carrie Ann rolled off the U of M student, hiked her white sleeveless blouse out of her skirt, and reached to the small of her back. She drew a tiny Smith & Wesson Bodyguard .380 pistol, reached over the top of the table, and aimed it at the body of the man walking toward her. She was just about to press the trigger when she recognized the man might have been wearing body armor under his big jacket, so she activated the Crimson Trace laser on the weapon and put the shaking laser dot on his forehead.

  The Middle Eastern man fired at someone behind her running away, then he noticed her there, on her knees behind the table, just twenty feet in front of him.

  United States Army Captain Carrie Ann Davenport shot the man through the left eye, dropping him to the ground and sending him writhing in shock and agony. She stood up and put another round in the back of his head, stilling him instantly.

  A bullet cracked by her left ear and she looked up, saw the black female aiming at her, and then she saw the woman stumble to her right on the driveway and fall down on her side. She’d been shot by a party guest Carrie Ann had been introduced to earlier, a warrant officer and Chinook copilot. He held a Beretta M9 in his hand, one of the pistols given out to military personnel stateside in the last week, by order of the President, to help protect them from terrorists.

  Carrie Ann looked back to the woman lying on the driveway, and saw her pistol out of reach; she also saw a small device in her right hand, hanging from a cable run under the cuff of her jacket.

  Carrie Ann spun away, dove to the ground, and again tackled the good-looking grad student, who had just begun to climb to his knees. As she covered him a massive detonation erupted behind her, louder than all four grenades going off at the same time, and shrapnel ripped across the backyard. She felt the wind sucked from her lungs, the bits of debris cutting into her legs, and she heard nothing other than the ringing in her ears.

  For a time, everything went still, then, over the ringing, she heard the cries and screams ring out anew.

  Carrie Ann looked down at the man—she didn’t even know his name—and saw he was alive but out of it, dazed and disoriented.

  He looked up at her and blinked. “Are you . . . okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She rose to her knees, felt blood on her legs, and then pulled herself up to her feet, using the picnic table to do so. There were easily twenty dead or wounded around her, and she staggered into the mass of carnage, hoping to help in some small way.

  Somehow, even in the middle of this, she already knew the best way for her to help was to get back into her attack helicopter and wreak some righteous payback for what had happened here just now.

  69

  Tears streamed down the eyes of Dr. Olivia Ryan, older daughter of the President of the United States, and she fought hard the need to sniff, because it was a sound she did not want to make at the moment. She held her hand in front of her mouth, covering a small amount of the shock and surprise on her face.

  And then she nodded quickly, blinking away more tears.

  For several seconds she couldn’t take her eyes off the ring in the little box in front of her, and she pried them away only to look into the eyes of her boyfriend, kneeling before her.

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course I will!”

  Davi stood and they kissed for a long moment, promised each other their undying love, and then she put the ring on her finger. Holding each other they turned and looked out over the rolling hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains that played out in a perfect vista behind the big log cabin: the sunset behind them lit the sky in orange and bathed the green hills below them in soft light.

  Olivia squeezed Davi hard, and said, “It’s perfect. Everything . . . is . . . perfect.”

  As they gazed on at the incredible view through tears of joy, both of their heads swiveled suddenly to the sight of a man in a parachute dropping through the evening air not fifty yards from the rear of the cabin.

  The parachutist hit the rolling grassy pasture hard and tumbled head over feet several times, and then his rectangular canopy collapsed on top of him. He crawled up to his knees, tried to control the lines and the chute as it re-formed, and then it pulled taut and started to drag him with it.

  Olivia muttered softly, “Is this . . . part . . . of your proposal?”

  Davi just said, “Uhh . . . I don’t know what this is.”

  A second man appeared in the sky just above the first, and he landed expertly on the struggling man’s parachute, collapsing it and arresting the first man’s slide across the hill below the cabin. The second pulled out of his harness, helped the man on the ground out of his own rig, and then both men noticed the two standing by the swing on the back porch of the log cabin.

  Davi stared back at them. “What on earth am I looking at?”

  As one, the two men down the hillside drew submachine guns from packs harnessed to their bodies.

  “Oh my God!” Olivia shouted. “Back inside! Lock the
door!”

  —

  Jack Ryan, Jr., recognized his sister as she ran off, and his blood went cold. As Chavez began collecting the chutes he said, “She’s not supposed to be here.”

  Ding said, “Get them in a car and on the road in the next five minutes!”

  Jack raced up to the back porch of the cabin and pounded on the door. “Sally? Sally? It’s me! It’s Jack! Open up!”

  The door opened slowly, and standing in front of him with wide eyes and a baffled expression on his face was Dr. Davi Kartal.

  His sister’s boyfriend.

  “J . . . Jack?”

  Olivia appeared in the doorway behind Davi, saw her brother, the gun in his hand, the gear on his body. “What the hell is going on?”

  Jack looked back out to the trees in the fading light. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Olivia said, “Well, I’m not pulling guns on my sibling!”

  “Sorry . . . I didn’t recognize you at first.” He looked around some more. “Where’s the team? Where is your Secret Service detail?”

  “We left them in D.C. It was a pain in the ass to get them to agree to it, but we wanted to be alone.” There was a note of frustration in Olivia’s voice, but it was clear she was astonished that her brother and another man had just dropped from the sky. “Seriously? You parachute? Since when do you know how to parachute?”

  “It’s kind of a work in progress. Listen, we have to—”

  Olivia held up the ring on her finger. “Davi just asked me to marry him. We were enjoying the moment, and then you dropped in unannounced.”

  Jack took Davi by the shoulder quickly. “Welcome to the family.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.” Davi looked like he needed to sit down. Olivia just looked annoyed. She didn’t know what Jack did for a living, only vaguely that he was in corporate intelligence and worked enough with the government that she wasn’t supposed to ask any more questions. She was a strong-willed woman, so if she really had been interested she would have peppered Jack with queries—her mom and dad as well, for that matter—but she left it alone. She saw it as her brother trying to live up to her dad’s legacy in some small way, and she totally got that part of it.

  Before his sister could ask him a third time why he was here, he said, “I’ve got to get you both out of here. I don’t know how much time we have. I can’t really explain but something bad is about to happen, and you need to get in your car and drive off. Get to a hotel and—”

  Davi said, “My Nissan broke down coming up the mountain. It’s in a shop down in Etlan. They gave us a lift up here.”

  Jack realized he hadn’t noticed a vehicle at the cabin as he parachuted down, but he’d been a little too worried about breaking his legs on landing to pay much attention at the time. “Shit,” he said.

  Olivia grabbed him by the shoulder harness of the chest rig full of ammunition he wore on his body. “You are going to tell me right now what is happening!”

  Jack said, “There is no other way to say this, so I’m just going to say it. The ISIS attacks going on in America?”

  Olivia cocked her head. “What about them?”

  “Well . . . I have a strong suspicion some of those terrorists are on their way here. Now.”

  “You mean, here to the cabin?” Olivia asked, shock in her voice. “Why on earth would they—”

  Jack shrugged sheepishly. “Because I invited them. Kind of a long story.”

  Just then, Jack’s radio chirped. He hadn’t put his earpiece in, and he had not answered his buzzing phone in the pack on his chest, so Clark overrode the mute feature on the UHF radio strapped to his chest and his voice blasted. “Jack, I’m in position on overwatch. How copy?”

  Olivia looked at the walkie-talkie. “Is that Uncle John? He’s with you?”

  Jack took the handheld unit and pressed the PTT button. “I read you five by five.”

  “Why aren’t you up on comms?”

  “Uhhh . . . we’ve got a bit of a . . . complication. My big sister is here.”

  Olivia, still standing just behind Davi, pursed her lips and jerked her head toward Davi. Jack saw the expression and knew it well.

  “Oh . . . along with her boyfriend . . . I mean, fiancé.”

  Clark didn’t skip a beat. “Well, we’ll have to toast to their future some other time. For now you need to get them the hell out of there. I’ve got movement on the road. Three vehicles.”

  “Three?” Jack said. He’d hoped that if he made it clear in the targeting information that he would be alone, al-Matari would just send a couple of his soldiers after him. But three vehicles sounded like more than a couple soldiers.

  “You have a read of the number of pax involved?”

  “Negative. Too far out. But they are pulling off the road, out of my view. I think they are going to debus there and move into the woods to approach. Don’t go into the woods, you need to hunker down.”

  “Roger that. I’ll figure out what we’re doing in here.”

  Chavez came through the front door now. “Jack, three doors to this building, lots of ground-floor windows. Say a dozen access points in all. We need to bunker on the second floor and engage them in the bottleneck of the stairs.”

  He saw Olivia. “Hey, kiddo. It’s been a while.” He looked to Davi. “You Secret Service?”

  Olivia answered for him. “He’s my fiancé, Davi.”

  “Oh. Congratulations. Sorry to ruin your day, Jack didn’t tell me this was going to turn into a family affair.”

  Jack said, “Didn’t know. She left her Secret Service detail in D.C.”

  “Too bad,” Ding said. “We sure as hell could have used a couple more guns.”

  Jack shuffled everyone up the staircase off the main room. As he did so, Davi took his new fiancée by the hand.

  “Tell me this doesn’t happen every day.”

  Olivia said, “I swear it doesn’t.”

  Jack said, “Davi, do you know anything about guns?”

  The young doctor almost stammered his reply. “Well . . . uh . . . I did my two years of mandatory service in Turkey. Fifteen years ago. I was a medic, but they gave us some firearms training.”

  “On pistols?”

  “Yeah, a little, and rifles.”

  “Well, I’m not giving you my SMG, so you get my Glock 19.” He held it out for Davi.

  “Is it loaded?”

  “Yes, no safety, so keep your finger off the fun switch till you’re ready to go bang.”

  Sally and Davi stepped into the upstairs bathroom. Jack tried to get Sally to get into the tub for her protection, but she refused.

  “Sal . . . that’s a cast-iron tub. It’s the safest place in this whole damn cabin. You will get in it.”

  “I’m not sitting in a damn tub!”

  “Mom and Dad will kill me if something happens to you.”

  “Well, that doesn’t really matter, because I’m going to kill you for screwing up Davi’s proposal.”

  Jack sighed, and looked to Davi. “Dude, I’m powerless with her. It’s up to you. You need to lock this door behind me, both climb into that tub, and point the gun at the door. Unless you hear me, Clark, or Ding calling your name, don’t unlock it, and shoot at anything that kicks or shoots the door.”

  Davi nodded; Jack saw he would play ball. He just hoped he had some ability to control his iron-willed sister.

  And with that Jack headed out of the bathroom and back down the stairs.

  —

  Abu Musa al-Matari parked far enough away from the GPS coordinates programmed into his phone that he knew it would be pitch-black before he and the other teams arrived at the cabin. Including al-Matari himself, there were eight: one from the Atlanta cell and two from the Santa Clara cell, as well as Omar and one more man from Detroit, and longtime ISIS operatives Tri
poli and Algiers.

  The leader of the Atlanta cell and one of her team had been killed just hours earlier in D.C. This left al-Matari with fewer attackers, but he felt confident in pressing on.

  They all carried Uzis or AKs, as well as hand grenades, with the exception of Tripoli, who had an RPG-7, along with a Glock pistol shoved into his waistband in the small of his back.

  Along the side of the road they turned on their walkie-talkies and put on headsets. They broke into four groups of two, with al-Matari taking Omar along with him.

  The woods here were thick, oak and pine mostly, but each team had a phone that gave them their distance to their target pinpointed on a map. From the satellite view it showed the front and rear of the cabin had large open grassy areas, but the north and south sides both had wood lines within twenty-five meters of the walls of the large two-story building.

  Al-Matari and Omar, along with the Atlanta man and the other Detroit operative, went to the north. Algiers took a Pakistani member of Santa Clara and would approach from the southwest to get a view of the cabin. Tripoli took the other Santa Clara member, and they would come up from the woods on the south.

  Algiers and a twenty-year-old engineering student from Caltech named Jamal crawled on knees and elbows alongside a hill due west in the fading light. Algiers led the way, because he had one thousand times more combat experience than the young college student who, other than three successful bomb and grenade attacks in the past week and his three weeks at the Language School, had none.

  After twenty minutes of advancing, they finally had a view of the front of the property, still across a gravel road and some two hundred meters away. Algiers knew al-Matari and the second team hitting from the north would still be several minutes from their position, and the team approaching from the southeast would be so deep in the thick woods there they wouldn’t have a view of the target until they were almost on top of it.