by Tom Clancy
“What seems to be the problem with your daughter?” The father answered this time.
“She cannot eat, and her other end—”
“Vomiting and diarrhea?” MacGregor asked, checking her eyes out next. They seemed unremarkable as well.
“Yes, Doctor.”
“You’ve arrived here recently, I believe?” He looked up when the answer was hesitation. “I need to know.”
“Correct. From Iraq, just a few days.”
“And your daughter has a mild case of asthma, nothing else, no other health problems, correct?”
“That is true, yes. She’s had all her shots and such. She’s never been ill like this.” The mother just nodded. The father clearly had taken over, probably to get the feeling of authority, to make things happen, the physician surmised. It was fine with him.
“Since arriving here, any unusual things to cat? You see,” MacGregor explained, “travel can be very unsettling to some people, and children are unusually vulnerable. It could just be the local water.”
“I gave her the medicine, but it got worse,” the mother said.
“It is not the water,” the father said positively. “The house has its own well. The water is good.”
As though on cue, Sohaila moaned and turned, vomiting off the examining table and onto the tile floor. It wasn’t the right color. There were traces of red and black. Red for new blood, black for old. It wasn’t jet lag or bad water. Perhaps an ulcer? Food poisoning? MacGregor blinked and instinctively checked to be sure his hands were gloved. The mother was looking for a paper towel to—
“Don’t touch that,” he said mildly. He next took the child’s blood pressure. It was low, confirming an internal bleed. “Sohaila, I’m afraid you will be spending the night with us so that we can make you well again.”
It could have been many things, but the doctor had been in Africa long enough to know that you acted as though it were the worst. The young physician consoled himself with the belief that it couldn’t be all that bad.
IT WASN’T QUITE like the old days—what was?—but Mancuso enjoyed the work. He’d had a good war—he thought of it as a war; his submarines had done exactly what they’d been designed to do. After losing Asheville and Charlotte—those before the known commencement of hostilities—he’d lost no more. His boats had delivered on every mission assigned, savaging the enemy submarine force in a carefully planned ambush, supporting a brilliant special operation, conducting deep-strike missile launches, and, as always, gathering vital tactical intelligence. His best play, COMSUBPAC judged, had been in recalling the boomers from retirement. They were too big and too unwieldy to be fast-attack boats, but God damn if they hadn’t done the job for him. Enough so that they were all down the hill from his headquarters, tied alongside, their crews swaggering around town a bit, with brooms still prominent on their sails. Okay, so he wasn’t Charlie Lock-wood exactly, modesty told him. He’d done the job he’d been paid to do. And now he had another.
“So what are they supposed to be up to?” he asked his immediate boss, Admiral Dave Seaton.
“Nobody seems to know.” Seaton had come over to look around. Like any good officer, he tried to get the hell out of his office as much as possible, even if it only meant visiting another. “Maybe just a FleetEx, but with a new President, maybe they want to flex their muscles and see what happens.” People in uniform did not like such international examinations, since they were usually the ones whose lives were part of the grading procedure.
“I know this guy, boss,” Bart said soberly.
“Oh?”
“Not all that well, but you know about Red October. ”
Seaton grinned. “Bart, if you ever tell me that story, one of us has to kill the other, and I’m bigger.” The story, one of the most closely guarded secrets in the Navy’s history, still was not widely known, though the rumors—one could never stop those were many and diverse.
“You need to know, Admiral. You need to know what National Command Authority has hanging between his legs. I’ve been shipmates with the guy.”
That earned Mancuso a hard blink from CINCPAC. “You’re kidding.”
“Ryan was aboard the boomer with me. Matter of fact, he got aboard before I did.” Mancuso closed his eyes, delighted that he could finally tell this sea story and get away with it. Dave Seaton was a theater commander-in-chief, and he had a right to know what sort of man was sending the orders down from Washington.
“I heard he was involved in the operation, even that he got aboard, but I thought that was at Norfolk, when they parked her at the Eight-Ten Dock. I mean, he’s a spook, right, an intel weenie ...”
“Not hardly. He killed a guy—shot him, right in the missile room—before I got aboard. He was on the helm when we clobbered the Alfa. He was scared shitless, but he didn’t cave. This President we’ve got’s been there and done that. Anyway, if they want to test our President, my money’s on him. Two big brass ones, Dave, that’s what he’s got hangin’. He may not look like it on TV, but I’ll follow that son of a bitch anywhere.” Mancuso surprised himself with the conclusion. It was the first time he’d thought it all the way through.
“Good to know,” Seaton thought.
“So what’s the mission?” SUBPAC asked.
“J-3 wants us to shadow.”
“You know Jackson better than I do. What are the parameters?”
“If this is a FleetEx and nothing else, we observe covertly. If things change, we let them know we care. You’ve got point, Bart. My cupboard’s pretty damned bare.”
They had only to look out the windows to see that. Enterprise and John Stennis were both in drydock. CINCPAC did not have a single carrier to deploy, and wouldn’t for two more months. They’d run Johnnie Reb on two shafts for the retaking of the Marianas, but now she lay alongside her older sister, with huge holes torched from the flight deck down to the first platform level while new turbines and reduction gears were fabricated. The aircraft carrier was the usual means for the United States Navy to make a show of force. Probably that was part of the Chinese plan, to see how America would react when a substantive reaction was not possible, or so it would appear to some.
“Will you cover for me with DeMarco?” Mancuso asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Bruno’s from the old school. He thinks it’s bad to get detected. Personally, I think sometimes it can be a good thing. If you want me to rattle John Chinaman’s cage, he has to hear the bars shake, doesn’t he?”
“I’ll write the orders accordingly. How you run it is your business. For the moment, if some ’can skipper talks to his XO about getting laid on the beach, I want it on tape for my collection.”
“Dave, that’s an order a man can understand. I’ll even get you the phone number, sir.”
“AND NOT A damned thing we can do,” Cliff Rutledge concluded his assessment.
“Gee, Cliff,” Scott Adler responded. “I kinda figured that one out for myself.” The idea was that subordinates gave you alternatives instead of taking them away—or in this case, telling you what you already knew.
They’d been fairly lucky to this point. Nothing much had gotten out to the media. Washington was still too shell-shocked, the junior people filling senior posts were not yet confident enough to leak information without authorization, and the senior posts President Ryan had filled were remarkably loyal to their Commander-in-Chief, an unexpected benefit of picking outsiders who didn’t know from politics. But it couldn’t last, especially with something as juicy as a new country about to be born from two enemies, both of whom had shed American blood.
“I suppose we could always just do nothing,” Rutledge observed lightly, wondering what the reaction would be. This alternative was distinct from not being able to do anything, a metaphysical subtlety not lost on official Washington.
“Taking that position only encourages developments adverse to our interests,” another senior staffer observed crossly.
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p; “As opposed to proclaiming our impotence?” Rutledge replied. “If we say we don’t like it, and then we fail to stop it, that’s worse than our taking no position at all.”
Adler reflected that you could always depend on a Harvard man for good grammar and finely split hairs and, in Rutledge’s case, not much more than that. This career foreign service officer had gotten to the seventh floor by never putting a foot wrong, which was another way of saying that he’d never led a dance partner in his life. On the other hand, he was superbly connected—or had been. Cliff had the deadliest disease of a FSO, however. Everything was negotiable. Adler didn’t think that way. You had to stand and fight for some things, because if you didn’t, the other guy would decide where the battlefield was, and then he had control. The mission of diplomats was to prevent war, a serious business, Adler thought, which one accomplished by knowing where to stand firm and where the limits on negotiation were. For the Assistant Secretary of State for Policy, it was just an unending dance. With someone else leading. Alas, Adler didn’t yet have the political capital to fire the man, or maybe make him an ambassador to some harmless post. He himself still had to be confirmed by the new Senate, for example.
“So just call it a regional issue?” another senior diplomat asked. Adler’s head turned slowly. Was Rutledge building a consensus?
“No, it is not that,” the Secretary of State pronounced, making his stand within his own conference room. “It is a vital security interest of the United States. We have pledged our support to the Saudis.”
“Line in the sand?” Cliff asked. “There’s no reason to do that yet. Look, let’s be sensible about this, okay? Iran and Iraq merge and form this new United Islamic Republic, fine. Then what? It takes them years to get the new country organized. In that time, forces which we know to be under way in Iran weaken the theocratic regime that’s been giving us such a royal pain in the butt. This is not a one-way deal, is it? We can expect that from the influence the secular elements in Iraqi society will necessarily have in Iran. If we panic and get pushy, we make life easier for Daryaei and his fanatics. But if we take it easy, then we lessen the imperative for them to stoke up the rhetoric against us. Okay, we can’t stop this merger, can we?” Rutledge went on. “So if we can’t, what do we do? We think of it as an opportunity to open a dialogue with the new country.”
There was a certain logic to the proposal, Adler noted, noting also the tentative nods around the conference table. He knew the proper buzzwords. Opportunity. Dialogue.
“That’ll really make the Saudis feel warm and fuzzy,” a voice objected from the far end of the table. It was Bert Vasco, the most junior man here. “Mr. Rutledge, I think you underestimate the situation. Iran managed the assassination—”
“We have no proof of that, do we?”
“And Al Capone was never convicted for Valentine’s Day, but I saw the movie.” Being called into the Oval Office had enlivened the desk officer’s rhetoric. Adler raised an amused eyebrow. “Somebody is orchestrating this, starting with the shooting, continuing with the elimination first of the military high command, and then second with the slaughter of the Ba’ath Party leadership. Next, we have this religious revival now under way. The picture I have of this is one of renewed national and religious identity. That will attenuate the moderating influences you referred to. The internal dissent in Iran will be knocked back a full year at least by these developments—and we don’t know what else might be going on. Daryaei’s a plotter, and a good one. He’s patient, dedicated, and one ruthless son of a bitch—”
“Who’s on his last legs,” one of Rutledge’s allies in the room objected.
“Says who?” Vasco shot back. “He’s managed this one pretty sharp.”
“He’s in his seventies.”
“He doesn’t smoke or drink. Every tape we have of him in public, he looks vigorous enough. Underestimating this man is a mistake we’ve made before.”
“He’s out of touch with his own people.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know that. He’s having a good year so far, and everybody likes a winner,” Vasco concluded.
“Bert, maybe you’re just worried about losing your desk when they form the UIR,” someone joked. It was a low blow, aimed by a senior man at a junior, with chuckles around the table to remind him of that. The resulting silence told the Secretary of State that there was a consensus forming, and not the one he wanted. Time to take control again.
“Okay, moving on,” Adler said. “The FBI will be back tomorrow to talk to us about the purloined letter. And guess what they’ll be bringing?”
“Not the Box again,” someone groaned. Nobody noticed the way Rutledge’s head turned.
“Just think of it as a routine test for our security clearances,” SecState told his principal subordinates. Polygraphs weren’t exactly unknown for the senior people here.
“God damn it, Scott,” Cliff said, speaking for the others. “Either we’re trusted or we’re not. I’ve already wasted hours with those people.”
“You know, they never found Nixon’s letter of resignation, either,” another said.
“Maybe Henry kept it,” a third joked.
“Tomorrow. Starting at ten o’clock. Myself included,” Adler told them. He thought it a waste of time as well.
HIS SKIN WAS very fair, his eyes gray, and his hair had a reddish tinge, the result, he thought, of an Englishwoman somewhere in his ancestry, or such was the family joke. One advantage was his ability to pass for any Caucasian ethnicity. That he could still do so was the result of his caution. On his few “public” operations, he’d tinted his hair, worn dark glasses, and let his beard grow—that was black—which resulted in jokes within his own community: “Movie star,” they said. But many of the jokers were dead, and he was not. Perhaps the Israelis had photos of him one never knew about them, but one did know that they rarely shared information with anyone, even their American patrons, which was foolish. And you couldn’t worry about everything, even photographs in some Mossad file cabinet.
He came through Dulles International Airport after the flight from Frankfurt, with the requisite two bags of the serious businessman he was, with nothing more to declare than a liter of Scotch purchased in a German duty-free store. Purpose of his visit to America? Business and pleasure. Is it safe to move around Washington now? Terrible thing, saw the replay on the TV news, must be a thousand times, dreadful. It is? Really? Things are back to normal now? Good. His rental car was waiting. He drove to a nearby hotel, tired from the long flight. There he purchased a paper, ordered dinner in, and switched on the TV. That done, he plugged his portable computer into the room’s phone they all had data jacks now—and accessed the Net to tell Badrayn that he was safely in-country for his reconnaissance mission. A commercial encryption program transformed what was a meaningless code phrase into total gibberish.
“WELCOME ABOARD. My name is Clark,” John told the first class of fifteen. He was turned out much better than was his custom, wearing a properly tailored suit, button-down shirt, and a striped tie. For the moment, he had to impress in one way. Soon he’d do it in another. Getting the first group in had been easier than expected. The CIA, Hollywood notwithstanding, is an agency popular among American citizens, with at least ten applications for every opening, and it was just a matter of doing a computer search of the applications to find fifteen which fit the parameters of Clark’s PLAN BLUE. Every one was a police officer with a college degree, at least four years of service, and an unblemished record which would be further checked by the FBI. For the moment, all were men, probably a mistake, John thought, but for the moment it wasn’t important. Seven were white, two black, and one Asian. They were, mainly, from big-city police forces. All were at least bilingual.
“I am a field intelligence officer. Not an ‘agent,’ not a ‘spy,’ not an ‘operative.’ An officer,” he explained. “I’ve been in the business for quite some time. I’m married and I have two children. If any of you have ideas about meeting a
sleek blonde and shooting people, you can leave now. This business is mainly dull, especially if you’re smart enough to do it right. You’re all cops, and therefore you already know how important this job is. We deal with high-level crime, and the job is about getting information so that those major crimes can be stopped before people get killed. We do that by gathering information and passing it on to those who need it. Others look at satellite pictures or try to read the other guy’s mail. We do the hard part. We get our information from people. Some are good people with good motives. Some are not such good people who want money, who want to get even, or who want to feel important. What these people are doesn’t matter. You’ve all worked informants on the street, and they’re not all Mother Teresa, are they? Same thing here. Your informants will often be better educated, more powerful people, but they won’t be very different from the ones you’ve been working with. And just like your street informants, you have to be loyal to them, you have to protect them, and you’ll have to wring their scrawny little necks from time to time. If you fuck up, those people die, and in some of the places you’ll be working, their wives and children will die, too. If you think I’m kidding on that, you’re wrong, people. You will work in countries where due process of law means whatever somebody wants it to mean. You’ve seen that on television just in the last few days, right?” he asked. Some of the Ba’ath officials shot in Baghdad had made world news telecasts, with the usual warnings about children and the sensitive, who invariably watched anyway. The heads nodded soberly.
