by Tom Clancy
“No, actually ‘off the record’ doesn’t quite mean that. But if I tell you, right here and right now, that I will never use it in any way—and there are other people around to back you up—and then I break my word, you can wreck my career. People in my business are allowed to get away with a lot, maybe even too much,” Plumber conceded, “but we can’t lie.” And that was the point, wasn’t it?
Laurence looked over to his mother. Her poor English did not denote a poor mind. She nodded to him.
“He was with my dad when he got killed,” the youth reported. “He promised Pop that he would look after us. He does, and yeah, he pays for school and stuff, him and his friends at CIA.”
“They had some trouble here with some rowdies,” Holtzman added. “A guy I know at Langley came over here and—”
“He shouldna done that!” Laurence objected. “Mr. Clar—well, he didn’t have to.”
“How come you didn’t go to Johns Hopkins?” Holtzman asked.
“They accepted me,” Laurence told them, hostility still in his voice. “This way I can commute easier, and help out here with the store. Dr. Ryan—Mrs. Ryan, I mean—she didn’t know at first, but when she found out, well, ’nother sister starts at the university this fall. Pre-med, like me.”
“But why ...?” Plumber’s voice trailed off.
“’Cuz maybe that’s the kind of guy he is, and you fucked him over.”
“Laurence!”
Plumber didn’t speak for fifteen seconds or so. He turned to the lady behind the counter. “Mrs. Zimmer, thank you for your time. None of this will ever be repeated. I promise.” He turned. “Good luck with your studies, Laurence. Thank you for telling me that. I will not be bothering you anymore.”
The two reporters walked back outside, straight to Holtzman’s Lexus.
Why should I trust you? You’re reporters. The artless words of a student, perhaps, but deeply wounding even so. Because those words had been earned, Plumber told himself.
“What else?” he asked.
“As far as I know they don’t even know the circumstances of Buck Zimmer’s death, just that he died on duty. Evidently, Carol was pregnant with their youngest when he died. Liz Elliot tried to get a story out that Ryan was fooling around and the baby was his. I got suckered.”
A long breath. “Yeah. Me, too.”
“So, what are you going to do about it, John?”
He looked up. “I want to confirm a few things.”
“The one at MIT is named Peter. Computer science. The one going to Charlottesville, I think her name is Alisha. I don’t know the name of the one graduating high school, but I could look that up. I have dates for the purchase of this business. It’s a sub-chapter-S corporation. It all tallies with the Colombian mission. Ryan does Christmas for them every year. Cathy, too. I don’t know how they’ll work that now. Pretty well, probably.” Holtzman chuckled. “He’s good at keeping secrets.”
“And the CIA guy who—”
“I know him. No names. He found out that some punks were annoying Carol. He had a little chat with them. The police have records. I’ve seen them,” Holtzman told him. “He’s an interesting guy. He’s the one who got Gerasimov’s wife and daughter out. Carol thinks he’s a great big teddy bear. He’s also the guy who rescued Koga. Serious player.”
“Give me a day. One day,” Plumber said.
“Fair enough.” The drive back to Ritchie Highway passed without another word.
“DR. RYAN?” BOTH heads turned. It was Captain Overton, sticking his head in the door.
“What is it?” Cathy asked, looking up from a journal article.
“Ma’am, there’s something happening that the kids might like to see, with your permission. All of you, if you want.”
Two minutes later they were all in the back of a Hummer, heading into the woods, close to the perimeter fence. The vehicle stopped two hundred yards away. The captain and a corporal led them the rest of the way, to within fifty feet.
“Shh,” the corporal said to SANDBOX. He held binoculars to her eyes.
“Neat!” Jack Junior thought.
“Will she be scared of us?” Sally asked.
“No, nobody hunts them here, and they’re used to the vehicles,” Overton told them. “That’s Elvira, she’s the second-oldest doe here.”
She’d given birth only minutes before. Elvira was getting up now, licking the newborn fawn whose eyes were confused by a new world it had no reason to expect.
“Bambi!” Katie Ryan observed, being an expert on the Disney film. It only took minutes, and then the fawn wobbled to its—they couldn’t tell the gender yet—feet.
“Okay. Katie?”
“Yes?” she asked, not looking away.
“You get to give her her name,” Captain Overton told the toddler. It was a tradition here.
“Miss Marlene,” SANDBOX said without hesitation.
45
CONFIRMATION
AS THE SAYING WENT, miles and miles of miles and miles. The road was about as boring as any civil engineer could make, but it hadn’t been anyone’s fault. So was the land. Brown and Holbrook now knew why the Mountain Men had become Mountain Men. At least there was scenery there. They could have driven faster, but it took time to learn the handling characteristics of this beast, and so they rarely got above fifty. That earned them the poisonous looks of every other driver on I-90, especially the cowboy-hatted K-Whopper owner-operators who thought the unlimited speed limit in eastern Montana was just great, plus the occasional lawyer—they had to be lawyers—in German muscle cars who blazed by their truck as though it were a cattle-feeder.
They also found it was hard work. Both men were pretty tired from all the preparation. All the weeks of effort to set up the truck, mix the explosives, cast the bullets, and then embed them. It had all made for little sleep, and there was nothing like driving a western interstate highway to put a man to sleep. Their first overnight was at a motel in Sheridan, just over the line into Wyoming. Getting that far, their first day driving the damned thing, had almost been their undoing, especially negotiating the split of I-90 and I-94 in Billings. They’d known that the cement truck would corner about as well as a hog on ice, but actually experiencing it had exceeded their worst fears. They ended up sleeping past eight that morning.
The motel was actually a truck stop of sorts that catered both to private cars and to interstate freight carriers. The dining room served a hearty breakfast, wolfed down by a lot of rugged-looking independent men, and a few similarly minded women. Breakfast conversation was predictable.
“Gotta be rag-head sunzabitches,” opined a big-bellied trucker with tattoos on his beefy forearms.
“Think so?” Ernie Brown asked from down the counter, hoping to get a feel for how these kindred souls felt about things.
“Who else would go after younguns? Sunzabitches.” The driver returned to his blueberry pancakes.
“If the TV has it right, those two cops got it done,” a milk hauler announced. “Five head shots. Whoa!”
“What about the one guy who went down hard, standing up like that against six riflemen! With a pistol. Dropped three of them, maybe four. There died a real American lawman.” He looked up from his pancakes again. This one had a load of cattle. “He’s earned his place in Valhalla, and that’s for damn sure.”
“Hey, they were feds, man,” Holbrook said, chewing on his toast. “They ain’t heroes. What about—”
“You can stick that one, good buddy,” the milk hauler warned. “I don’t wanna hear it. There was twenty, thirty children in that place.”
Another driver chimed in. “And that black kid, rollin’ on in with his -16. Damn, like when I was in the Cav for the Second of Happy Valley. I wouldn’t mind buying that boy a beer, maybe shake his hand.”
“You were AirCav?” the cattle hauler asked, turning away from his breakfast.
“Charlie, First of the Seventh.” He turned to show the oversized patch of the First Air Cavalry D
ivision on his leather jacket.
“Gary Owen, bro’! Delta, Second/Seventh.” He stood up from the counter and walked over to take the man’s hand. “Where you outa?”
“Seattle. That’s mine out there with the machine parts. Heading for St. Louis. Gary Owen. Jesus, nice to hear that one again.”
“Every time I drive through here ...”
“You bet. We got brothers buried out yonder at Little Big Horn. Always say a little prayer for ’em when I come through.”
“Shit.” The two men shook hands again. “Mike Fallon.”
“Tim Yeager.”
The two Mountain Men had not just come into the room for breakfast. These were their kind of people. Supposed to be, anyway. Rugged individualists. Federal cops as heroes? What the hell was that all about?
“Boy, we find out who bankrolled this job, I hope that Ryan fella knows what to do ’bout it,” machine parts said.
“Ex-Marine,” cattle replied. “He ain’t one of them. He’s one of us. Finally.”
“You may be right. Somebody’s gotta pay for this one, and I hope we get the right people to do the collectin’.”
“Damn right,” the milk hauler agreed from his spot on the counter.
“Well.” Ernie Brown stood. “Time for us to boogie on down the road.”
The others nearby took a cursory look, and that was all, as the truckers returned to their informal opinion poll.
“IF YOU DON’T feel better by tomorrow, you’re going to the doctor, and that’s final!” she said.
“Oh, I’ll be all right.” But that protestation came out as a groan. He wondered if this was Hong Kong flu or something else. Not that he knew the difference. Few people did, and in a real sense that included docs and he did know that. What would they tell him? Rest, liquids, aspirin, which he was already doing. He felt as though he’d been placed in a bag and beaten with baseball bats, and all the traveling didn’t help. Nobody liked traveling. Everyone liked being somewhere else, but getting there was always a pain in the ... everywhere, he grumped. He allowed himself to fade back off to sleep, hoping his wife wouldn’t worry too much. He’d feel better by tomorrow. These things always went away. He had a comfortable bed, and a TV controller. As long as he didn’t move around it didn’t hurt ... much. It couldn’t get any worse. Then it would get better. It always did.
WHEN PEOPLE GOT to a certain point, their work never really stopped. They could go away, but then the work came to them, found them wherever they might be, and the only issue, really, was how expensive it was to bring the work to them. That was a problem for both Jack Ryan and Robby Jackson.
For Jack it was the speeches Callie Weston had prepared for him—he’d be flying tomorrow, to Tennessee, then to Kansas, then to Colorado, then to California, and finally back to Washington, arriving at three in the morning on what was going to be the biggest special-election day in American history. Just over a third of the House seats vacated by that Sato guy would be selected, with the remainder to be done over the following two weeks. Then he’d have a full Congress to work with, and maybe, just maybe, he could get some real work done. Pure politics loomed in his immediate future. This coming week he’d be going over the detailed plans to streamline two of the government’s most powerful bureaucracies, Defense and Treasury. The rest were in the works, too.
Since he was here with the President, Admiral Jackson was also getting everything developed by the office of J- 2, the Pentagon’s chief of intelligence, so that he could conduct the daily around-the-world brief. It took him an hour just to go over the materials.
“What’s happening, Rob?” Jack asked, and instead of a friendly inquiry into how a guy’s week was going, the President was asking the state of the entire planet. The J- 3’s eyebrows jerked up.
“Where do you want me to start?”
“Pick a spot,” the President suggested.
“Okay, Mike Dubro and the Ike group arestill heading north to China, making good time. Good weather and calm seas, they’re averaging twenty-five knots. That advances their ETA by a few hours. Exercises continue on the Formosa Strait, but both sides are hugging their coasts now. Looks like maybe the shoot-downs got everybody to calm down a bit. Secretary Adler is supposed to be in there right now, talking to them about things.
“Middle East. We’re watching the UIR military run exercises, too. Six heavy divisions, plus attachments and tactical air. Our people on the scene have Predators up and watching pretty closely—”
“Who authorized that?” the President asked.
“I did,” Jackson replied.
“Invading another country’s airspace?”
“J-2 and I are running this. You want us to know what they’re up to and what their capabilities are, don’t you?”
“Yes, I need that.”
“Good, you tell me what to do, and let me worry about how, all right? It’s a stealthy platform. It self-destructs if it goes out of control or the guys directing it don’t like something, and it gives us very good real-time data we can’t get from satellites, or even from J-STARS, and we don’t have one of those over there at the moment. Any other questions, Mr. President?”
“Touché, Admiral. What’s the take look like?”
“They’re looking better than our initial intelligence assessment led us to expect. Nobody’s panicking yet, but this is starting to get our attention.”
“What about Turkestan?” Ryan asked.
“They’re evidently trying to get elections going, but that’s old information, and that’s all we know on the political side. The overall situation there is quiet at the moment. Satellites show increased cross-border traffic—mainly trade, the overhead-intelligence guys think, nothing more than that.”
“Anybody looking at Iranian—damn, UIR—troop dispositions on the border?”
“I don’t know. I can check.” Jackson made a note. “Next, we’ve spotted the Indian navy.”
“How?”
“They’re not making a secret of anything. I had ’em send a pair of Orions off from Diego Garcia. They spotted our friends from three hundred miles out, electronic emissions. They are about four hundred miles offshore from their base. And, by the way, that places them directly between Diego and the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Our defense attaché will drop in tomorrow to ask what they’re up to. They probably won’t tell him very much.”
“If they don’t, I think maybe Ambassador Williams will have to make a call of his own.”
“Good idea. And that’s the summary of today’s news, unless you want the trivia.” Robby tucked his documents away. “What do your speeches look like?”
“The theme is common sense,” the President reported.
“In Washington?”
ADLER WAS NOT overly pleased. On arriving in Beijing, he’d learned that the timing wasn’t good. His aircraft had gotten in on what had turned out to be a Saturday evening—the date line again, he realized—then he learned that the important ministers were out of town, studiously downplaying the significance of the air battle over the strait, and giving him a chance to recover from jet lag so that he would be up to a serious meeting. Or so they’d said.
“What a pleasure to have you here,” the Foreign Minister said, taking the American’s hand and guiding him into his private office. Another man was waiting in there. “Do you know Zhang Han San?”
“No, how do you do, Minister?” Adler asked, taking his hand as well. So, this was what he looked like.
People took their seats. Adler was alone. In addition to the two PRC ministers, there was an interpreter, a woman in her early thirties.
“Your flight was a pleasant one?” the Foreign Minister inquired.
“Coming to your country is always pleasant, but I do wish the flight were faster,” Adler admitted.
“The effects of travel on the body are often difficult, and the body does affect the mind. I trust you have had some time to recover. It is important,” the Foreign Minister went on, “that high-le
vel discussions, especially in times of unpleasantness, are not clouded by extraneous complications.”
“I am well rested,” Adler assured them. He’d gotten plenty of sleep. It was just that he wasn’t sure what time it was in whatever location his body thought itself to be. “And the interests of peace and stability compel us to make the occasional sacrifice.”
“That is so true.”
“Minister, the unfortunate events of the last week have troubled my country,” SecState told his hosts.
“Why do those bandits seek to provoke us?” the Foreign Minister asked. “Our forces are conducting exercises, that is all. And they shot down two of our aircraft. The crewmen are all dead. They have families. This is very sad, but I hope you have noted that the People’s Republic has not retaliated.”
“We have noted this with gratitude.”
“The bandits shot first. You also know that.”
“We are unclear on that issue. One of the reasons for my coming here is to ascertain the facts,” Adler replied.
“Ah.”
Had he surprised them? SecState wondered. It was like a card game, though the difference was that you never really knew the value of the cards in your own hand. A flush still beat a straight, but the hole card was always down, even for its owner. In this case, he had lied, but while the other side might suspect the lie, they didn’t know for sure, and that affected the game. If they thought he knew, they would say one thing. If they thought he didn’t know, they’d say another. In this case, they thought he knew, but they weren’t sure. He’d just told them otherwise, which could be a lie or the truth. Advantage, America. Adler had thought about this all the way over.
“You have said publicly that the first shot was taken by the other side. Are you sure of this?”
“Completely,” the Foreign Minister assured him.
“Excuse me, but what if the shot were taken by one of your lost pilots? How would we ever know?”
“Our pilots were under strict orders not to fire except in self-defense.”
