by Tom Clancy
A working-class background. His father had been a truck driver. His mother had died when he was nine. Catholic schools, of course. A copy of his college transcript showed him to be bright enough. O’Donnell had graduated from university with honors, and his degree was in political science. He’d taken every course on Marxism that the institution had offered, and been involved on the fringes of civil-rights groups in the late sixties and early seventies. This had earned him attention from the RUC and British intelligence agencies. Then, after graduating, he’d dropped out of sight for a year, reappearing in 1972 after the Bloody Sunday fiasco when British Army paratroopers had gotten out of control and fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing fourteen people, none of whom had been proven to have a gun.
“There’s a coincidence,” Ryan whispered to himself. The paratroopers still claimed that they’d been fired upon from someone in the crowd and merely returned fire to defend themselves. An official government report done by the British backed this up—of course, what else could they say? Ryan shrugged. It might even have been true. The biggest mistake the English had ever made was to send troops into Northern Ireland. What they’d needed was good cops to reestablish law and order, not an army of occupation. But with the RUC out of control then, and supplemented by the B-Special thugs, there hadn’t been a real alternative. So soldiers had been sent in, to a situation for which they were unsuited by training ... and vulnerable to provocation.
Ryan’s antennae twitched at that.
Political-science major, heavy course-load in Marxism. O‘Donnell had dropped out of sight, then reappeared about a year later immediately after the Bloody Sunday disaster, and soon thereafter was identified by an informer as the PIRA’s chief of internal security. He didn’t get that job on the basis of college classwork. He’d had to work to earn that. Terrorism, like any other profession, has its apprenticeship. Somehow this Kevin Joseph O’Donnell had earned his spurs. How did you do that? Were you one of the guys who stage-managed the provocations? If so, where did you learn how, and does that missing year have anything to do with it? Were you trained in urban insurgency tactics... in the Crimea maybe ... ?
Too much of a coincidence, Jack told himself. The idea of Soviet training for the hard-core members of the PIRA and INLA had been bandied about so much that it had lost credibility. Besides, it didn’t have to be something that dramatic. They might just have figured out the proper tactics for themselves, or read them in books. There were plenty of books on the subject of how to be an urban guerrilla. Jack had read several of them.
He flipped forward in time to O‘Donnell’s second disappearance. Here the information from British sources was fairly complete for once. O’Donnell had been remarkably effective as chief of internal security. Nearly half the people he’d killed really had been informers of one sort or another, not a bad percentage in this sort of business. He found a couple of new pages at the end of the report, and read the information that David Ashley had gathered a few months before in Dublin.... He got a little carried away.... O‘Donnell had used his position to eliminate Provos whose politics didn’t quite agree with his. It had been discovered, and he’d vanished for a second time. Again the data was speculative, but it tracked with what Murray had told him in London. O’Donnell had gone somewhere.
Surely he’d convinced someone to provide his nascent organization with financing, training, and support. His nascent organization, Ryan thought. Where had it come from? There was a lapse of two years before O’Donnell’s disappearance from Ulster and the first positively identified operation of the ULA. Two complete years. The Brit intel data suggested plastic surgery. Where? Who paid for it? He didn’t do that in some jerkwater third-world country, Ryan told himself. He wondered if Cathy could ask her colleagues at Hopkins about the availability of good face-cutters. Two years to change his face, get financial backing, recruit his troops, establish a base of operations, and begin to make his impact.... Not bad, Ryan thought with grudging admiration. All that in two years.
Another year before the name of the outfit surfaces....
Ryan turned when he heard someone working the lock on his office door. It was Marty Cantor.
“I thought you stopped smoking.” He pointed at the cigarette.
Ryan crushed it out. “So does my wife. Have you seen all this stuff?”
“Yeah.” Cantor nodded. “The boss had me run through it over the weekend. What do you think?”
“I think this O’Donnell character is one formidable son of a bitch. He’s got his outfit organized and trained like a real army. It’s small enough that he knows every one of them. His ideological background tells me he’s a careful recruiter. He has an unusually high degree of trust in his troops. He’s a political animal, but he knows how to think and plan like a soldier. Who trained him?”
“Nobody knows,” Cantor replied. “I think you can overestimate that factor, though.”
“I know that,” Ryan agreed. “What I’m looking for is ... flavor, I guess. I’m trying to get a feel for how he thinks. It would also be nice to know who’s bankrolling him.” Ryan paused, and something else leaped into his mind. “What are the chances that he has people inside the PIRA?”
“What do you mean?”
“He runs for his life when he finds out that the PIRA leadership is out for his ass. Two years later, he’s back in business with his own organization. Where did the troops come from?”
“Some pals from inside the PIRA, obviously,” Cantor said.
“Sure.” Jack nodded. “People he knew to be reliable. But we also know that he’s a counterintelligence type, right?”
“What do you mean?” Cantor hadn’t been down this road yet.
“Who’s the main threat to O’Donnell?”
“Everybody wants him—”
“Who wants to kill him?” Jack refocused the question. “The Brits don’t have capital punishment—but the PIRA does.”
“So?”
“So if you were O’Donnell, and you recruited people from inside the PIRA, and you knew that the PIRA was interested in having your head on a wall plaque, you think you’d leave people inside to cue you in?”
“Makes sense,” Cantor said thoughtfully.
“Next, who is the ULA’s political target?”
“We don’t know that.”
“Don’t give me that crap, Marty!” Ryan snapped. “Most of the information in these documents comes from inside the Provos, doesn’t it? How the hell do these people know what the ULA is up to? How does the data get to them?”
“You’re pushing, Jack,” Cantor warned. “I’ve seen the data, too. It’s mainly negative. The Provos who had the information sweated out of them mainly said that certain operations weren’t theirs. The conclusion that ULA did ’em is inferential—circumstantial. I don’t think that this stuff is as clear as you do.”
“No, the two guys who did this report make a good case for putting the ULA fingerprint on these ops. What the ULA has is its own style, Marty! We can identify that, can’t we?”
“You’ve constructed a circular argument,” Cantor pointed out. “O’Donnell comes from the Provos, therefore he must have recruited from there, therefore he must have people in there, et cetera. Your basic arguments are logical, but try to remember that they’re based on a very shaky foundation. What if the ULA really is a special-action group of the Provisionals? Isn’t it in their interest to have something like that?” Cantor was a splendid devil’s advocate, one of the reasons he was Greer’s executive assistant.
“Okay, there is some truth to that,” Ryan admitted. “Still, everything I say makes sense, assuming that the ULA is real.”
“Granted that it’s logical. But not proven.”
“So it’s the first logical thing we have for these characters. What else does that tell us?”
Cantor grinned. “Let me know when you figure it out.”
“Can I talk to anybody about this?”
“Like who—I just want to as
k before I say no.”
“The Legal Attaché in London—Dan Murray,” Ryan said. “He’s supposed to be cleared all the way on this material, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, he is, and he works with our people, too. Okay, you can talk with him. That keeps it in the family.”
“Thanks.”
Five minutes later Cantor was sitting across from Admiral Greer’s desk.
“He really knows how to ask the right questions.”
“So what did he tumble to?” the Admiral asked.
“The same questions that Emil Jacobs and his team have been asking: What’s O’Donnell up to? Does he have the PIRA infiltrated? If so, why?”
“And Jack says ... ?”
“Same as Jacobs and the FBI evaluation: O’Donnell is a counterintelligence type by training. The Provos want his hide on the barn door, and the best way to keep his hide where it belongs is to have people inside to warn him if they get too close.”
The Admiral nodded agreement, then looked away for a moment. That was only part of an answer, his instincts told him. There had to be more. “Anything else?”
“The training stuff. He hasn’t sifted through all the data yet. I think we should give him some time. But you were right, sir. He’s pretty sharp.”
Murray lifted his phone and pushed the right button without paying much attention. “Yeah?”
“Dan? This is Jack Ryan,” the voice on the phone said.
“How’s it going, teacher?”
“Not bad. Something I want to talk over with you.”
“Shoot.”
“I think the ULA has the PIRA infiltrated.”
“What?” Murray snapped upright in his chair. “Hey, ace, I can’t—” He looked at the telephone. The line he was talking on was—“What the hell are you doing on a secure line?”
“Let’s say that I’m back in government service,” Ryan replied coyly.
“Nobody told me.”
“So what do you think?”
“I think it’s a possibility. Jimmy came up with the idea about three months back. The Bureau agrees that it makes sense. There is no objective evidence to support the theory, but everybody thinks it’s a togical—I mean, it would be a smart thing for our friend Kevin to do, if he can. Remember that the PIRA has very good internal security, Jack.”
“You told me that most of what we know about the ULA comes from PIRA sources. How do they get the info?” Ryan asked rapidly.
“What? You lost me.”
“How does the PIRA find out what the ULA is doing?”
“Oh, okay. That we don’t know.” It was something that bothered Murray, and James Owens, but cops deal all the time with anonymous information sources.
“Why would they be doing that?”
“Telling the Provos what they’re up to? We have no idea. If you have a suggestion, I’m open to it.”
“How about recruiting new members for his team?” Ryan asked.
“Why don’t you think that one over for a few seconds,” Murray replied immediately. Ryan had just rediscovered the flat earth theory.
There was a moment of silence. “Oh—then he’d risk being infiltrated by the Provisionals.”
“Very good, ace. If O’Donnell’s got them infiltrated as a security measure to protect himself, why invite members of the group that wants his ass into his own fold? If you want to kill yourself, there’re simpler ways, Jack.” Murray had to laugh. He could hear Ryan deflate over the phone.
“Okay, I guess I had that coming. Thanks.”
“Sorry to rain on your parade, but we buried that idea a couple of months ago.”
“But he must have recruited his people from the Provisionals to begin with,” Ryan objected belatedly. He cursed himself for being so slow, but remembered that Murray had been an expert on this subject for years.
“Yeah, I’ll buy that, but he kept the numbers very low,” Murray said. “The bigger the organization gets, the greater the risk that the Provos will infiltrate—and destroy—him. Hey, they really want his ass on a platter, Jack.” Murray stopped short of revealing the deal David Ashley had cut with the PIRA. CIA didn’t know about that yet.
“How’s the family?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Fine.”
“Bill Shaw says he talked to you last week....” Murray said.
“Yeah. That’s why I’m here now. You’ve got me looking over my shoulder, Dan. Anything else that you’ve cued in on?”
It was Murray’s turn to deflate. “The more I think about it, the more it looks like I got worried over nothing. No evidence at all, Jack. It was just instinct, you know, like from an old woman. Sorry. I think I just overreacted to something Jimmy said. Hope I didn’t worry you too much.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Jack replied. “Well, I have to clear out of here. See ya.”
“Yeah. ’Bye, Jack.” Murray replaced the phone in the holder and went back to his paperwork.
Ryan did much the same. He had to leave by noon in order to make his first class of the day. The messenger came back with his cart and took the files away, along with Jack’s notes, which, of course, were also classified. He left the building a few minutes later, his mind still sifting through the data he’d read.
What Jack didn’t know was that in the new annex to the CIA headquarters building was the headquarters of the National Reconnaissance Office. This was a joint CIA-Air Force agency that managed the data from satellites and, to a lesser degree, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft.
The new generation of satellites used television-type scanning cameras instead of photographic film. One consequence of this was that they could be used almost continuously instead of husbanding their film for coverage of the Soviet Union and its satellites. This allowed the NRO to assemble a much better data base on world trends and events, and had generated scores of new projects for hundreds of new analysts—explaining the newly built annex behind the original CIA building.
One junior analyst’s brief was coverage on camps suspected to be used for the training of terrorists. The project had not yet shown enough results to be treated more importantly, though the data and photographs were passed on to the Task Force on Combating Terrorism. TFCT used the satellite photos, as was the norm in government circles. The staffers oohed and ahhed over the clarity of the shots, were briefed on the new charge-coupled devices that enabled the cameras to get high-resolution pictures despite atmospheric disturbances, noted that, despite all the hoopla, you really couldn’t read the numbers on a license plate—and promptly forgot about them as anything more than pictures of camps where terrorists might be training. Photoreconnaissance interpretation had always been a narrow field for experts only. The analysis work was simply too technical.
And as was so often the case, here was the rub. The junior analyst was better described as a technician. He collected and collated data, but didn’t really analyze it. That was someone else’s job, for when the project was finished. In this particular case the data being processed noted infrared energy. The camps he examined on a daily basis—there were over two hundred—were mainly in deserts. That was remarkably good luck. While everyone knew that deserts suffer from blistering daylight heat, it was less appreciated that they can get quite cold at night—falling below freezing in many cases. So the technician was trying to determine the occupancy of the camps from the number of buildings that were heated during the cool nights. These showed up quite well on the infrared: bright blobs of white on a cold, black background.
A computer stored the digital signals from the satellite. The technician called up the camps by code number, noted the number of heated buildings in each, and transferred the data to a second data file. Camp 11-5-18, located at 28° 32’ 47” North Latitude, 19° 07’ 52” East Longitude, had six buildings, one of which was a garage. This one had at least two vehicles in it; though the building was unheated, the thermal signatures of two internal-combustion engines radiated clearly through the corrugated steel roofs. Of th
e other five buildings, only one had its heater on, the technician noted. The previous week—he checked—three had been warm. The warm one now, the data sheet said, was occupied by a small guard and maintenance group, thought to be five men. It evidently had its own kitchen, since one part of the building was always a little warmer than the rest. Another building was a full-sized dining hall. That and the dormitories were now empty. The technician made the appropriate notations, and the computer assigned them to a simple line graph that peaked when occupancy was high and fell when it was low. The technician didn’t have the time to check the patterns on the graph, but he assumed, wrongly, that someone else did.
“You remember, Lieutenant,” Breckenridge said. “Deep breath, let it half out, and squeeze gently.”
The 9mm Browning automatic had excellent sights. Ryan centered them on the circular target and did what the Gunny said. He did it right. The flash and sound of the shot came almost as a surprise to him. The automatic ejected the spent round and was ready to fire again as Jack brought the pistol down from recoil. He repeated the procedure four more times. The pistol locked open on the empty clip and Ryan set it down. Next he took off the muff-type ear protectors. His ears were sweaty.
“Two nines, three tens, two of them in the X-ring.” Breckenridge stood away from the spotting scope. “Not as good as the last time.”
“My arm’s tired,” Ryan explained. The pistol weighed almost forty ounces. It didn’t seem like much weight until you had to hold it stone-steady at arm’s length for an hour.
