by Tom Clancy
Jesus! “Dr. Elliot, if you want to play with the big kids in D.C., Lesson Number One is, Business is Business. You want to tell me something, tell. You want to ask me something, ask.”
“What the hell are you doing in Colombia?” she snapped at him.
“What are you talking about?” Jack asked in a more moderate tone.
“You know what I’m talking about. I know that you know.”
“In that case would you please refresh my memory?”
“Another drug lord just got blown up,” she said, casting a nervous glance up and down the corridor as though a passerby might wonder if she was negotiating price with someone. There is a lot of that at political conventions, and E.E. was not physically unattractive.
“I have no knowledge of any such operation being conducted by the American government or any other. That is to say, I have zero information on the subject of your inquiry. I am not omniscient. Believe it or not, even when you are sanctified by employment in the Central Intelligence Agency, you do not automatically know everything that happens on every rock, puddle, and hilltop in the world. What does the news say?”
“But you’re supposed to know,” Elizabeth Elliot protested. Now she was puzzled.
“Dr. Elliot, two years ago you wrote a book about how pervasive we are. It reminded me of an old Jewish story. Some old guy on the shtetl in Czarist Russia who owned two chickens and a broken-down horse was reading the hate rag of the antisemites—you know, the Jews are doing this, the Jews are doing that. So a neighbor asked him why he got it, and the old guy answered that it was nice to see how powerful he was. That’s what your book was, if you’ll pardon me: about one percent fact and ninety-nine percent invective. If you really want to know what we can and cannot do, I can tell you a few things, within the limits of classification. I promise that you’ll be as disappointed as I regularly am. I wish we were half as powerful as you think.”
“But you’ve killed people.”
“You mean me personally?”
“Yes!”
Maybe that explained her attitude, Jack thought. “Yes, I have killed people. Someday I’ll tell you about the nightmares, too.” Ryan paused. “Am I proud of it? No. Am I glad that I did it? Yes, I am. Why? you ask. My life, the lives of my wife and daughter, or the lives of other innocent people were at risk at the times in question, and I did what I had to do to protect my life and those other lives. You do remember the circumstances, don’t you?”
Elliot wasn’t interested in those. “The Governor wants to see you at eight-fifteen.”
Six hours’ sleep was what that meant to Ryan. “I’ll be there.”
“He is going to ask you about Colombia.”
“Then you can make points with your boss by giving him the answer early: I do not know.”
“If he wins, Dr. Ryan, you’re—”
“Out?” Jack smiled benignly at her. “You know, this is like something from a bad movie, Dr. Elliot. If your man wins, maybe you will have the power to fire me. Let me explain to you what that means to me.
“You will then have the power to deny me a total of two and a half hours in a car every working day; the power to fire me from a difficult, stressful job that keeps me away from my family much more than I would like; and the power to compel me to live a life commensurate with the money that I earned ten or so years ago; the power to force me to go back to writing my history books, or maybe to teach again, which is why I got my doctorate in the first place. Dr. Elliot, I’ve seen loaded machine guns pointed at my wife and daughter, and I managed to deal with that threat. If you want to threaten me in a serious way, you’ll need something better than taking my job away. I’ll see you in the morning, I suppose, but you should know that my briefing is only for Governor Fowler. My orders are that no one else can be in the room.” Jack closed, bolted, and chained the door. He’d had too many beers on the airplane, and knew it, but nobody had ever pushed Ryan’s buttons that hard before.
Dr. Elliot took the stairs down instead of the elevator. Unlike most of the people in the entourage, Governor Fowler’s chief aide was cold sober—he rarely drank in any case—and already at work planning a campaign that would start in a week instead of the customary wait until Labor Day. “Well?” he asked E.E.
“He says he doesn’t know. I think he’s lying.”
“What else?” Arnold van Damm asked.
“He’s arrogant, offensive, and insulting.”
“So are you, Beth.” They both laughed. They didn’t really like each other, but political campaigns make for the strangest of bedfellows. The campaign manager was reading over a briefing paper about Ryan from Congressman Alan Trent, new chairman of the House Select Committee for Intelligence Oversight. E.E. hadn’t seen it. She had told him, though he already knew (though neither of them knew what it had really all been about), that Ryan had confronted Trent in a Washington social gathering and called him a queer in public. Trent had never forgiven or forgotten an insult in his life. Nor was he one to give gratuitous praise. But Trent’s report on Ryan used words like bright, courageous, and honest. Now what the hell, van Damm wondered, did that mean?
It was going to be their third no-hit night, Chavez was sure. They’d been out since sundown and had just passed through the second suspected processing site—the signs had been there. The discoloration of the soil from acid spills, the beaten earth, discarded trash, everything to show that men had been there and probably went there regularly—but not tonight, and not for the two preceding nights. Ding knew that he ought to have expected it. All the manuals, all the lectures of his career, had emphasized the fact that combat operations were some crazy mixture of boredom and terror, boredom because for the most part nothing happened, terror because “it” could happen at any second. Now he understood how men got sloppy out in the field. On exercises you always knew what—well, you knew that something would happen. The Army rarely wasted time on no-contact exercises. Training time cost too much. And so he was faced with the irksome fact that real combat operations were less exciting than training, but infinitely more dangerous. The dualism was enough to give the young man a headache.
Aches were something he already had enough of. He was now gobbling a couple of his Tylenol caplets every four hours because of muscle aches and low-order sprains—and simple tension and stress. A young man, he was learning that the combination of strenuous exercise and real mental stress made you old in a hurry. In fact he was no more tired than an office worker after a slightly long day at his desk, but the mission and the environment combined to amplify everything he felt. Joy or sadness, elation or depression, fear or invincibility were all much greater down here. In a word, combat operations were not fun. But then, why did he—not like it, not that, really, but... what? Chavez shook the thought away. It was affecting his concentration.
And though he didn’t know it, that was the answer. Ding Chavez was a born combat soldier. Just as a trauma surgeon took no pleasure from seeing the broken bodies of accident victims, Chavez would easily have preferred sitting on a barstool next to a pretty girl or watching a football game with his friends. But the surgeon knew that his skills at the table were crucial to the lives of his patients, and Chavez knew that his skills on point were crucial to the mission. This was his, place. On the mission, everything was so wonderfully clear—except when he was confused, and even that was clear in a different, very strange way. His senses searched out through the trees like radar, filtering out the twitters of birds and the rustle of animals—except when there was a special message in that sort of noise. His mind was a perfect balance of paranoia and confidence. He was a weapon of his country. That much he understood, and fearful though he was, fighting off boredom, struggling to keep alert, concerned for his comrades, Chavez was now a breathing, thinking machine whose single purpose was the destruction of his nation’s enemies. The job was hard, but he was the man for it.
But there was still nothing out here to be found this night. The trails were cold. The pro
cessing sites unoccupied. Chavez stopped at a preplanned rally point and waited for the rest of the squad to catch up. He switched off his night goggles—you only used them about a third of the time in any case—and had himself a drink of water. At least the water was good here, coming off clear mountain streams.
“Whole lot of nothin’, Captain,” he told Ramirez when the officer arrived at his side. “Ain’t seen nothing, ain’t heard nothing.”
“Tracks, trails?”
“Nothing less’n two, maybe three days old.”
Ramirez knew how to determine the age of a trail, but couldn’t do it as well as Sergeant Chavez. He breathed in a way that almost seemed relieved.
“Okay, we start heading back. Take a couple more minutes to relax, then lead off.”
“Right. Sir?”
“Yeah, Ding?”
“This area’s dryin’ up on us.”
“You may be right, but we’ll wait a few more days to be sure,” Ramirez said. Part of him was glad that there had been no contact since the death of Rocha, and that part was blanking out warning signals that he ought to have been getting. Emotion was telling him that something was good, while intelligence and analysis should have told him that something was bad.
Chavez didn’t quite catch that one either. There was a distant rumble at the edge of his consciousness, like the strangely noticeable quiet that precedes an earthquake, or the first hint of clouds on a clear horizon. Ding was too young and inexperienced to notice. He had the talents. He was the right man in the right place, but he hadn’t been there long enough. He didn’t know that, either.
But there was work to do. He led off five minutes later, climbing back up the mountainside, avoiding all trails, taking a path different from any path they had taken to this point, alert to any present danger but oblivious to a danger that was distant but just as clear.
The C-141B touched down hard, Robby thought, though the soldiers didn’t seem to notice. In fact, most of them were asleep and had to be roused. Jackson rarely slept on airplanes. It was, he thought, a bad habit for a pilot to acquire. The transport slowed and taxied around every bit as awkwardly as a fighter on the tight confines of a carrier’s deck until finally the clamshell cargo doors opened at the tail.
“You come along with me, Captain,” the major said. He stood and hefted his rucksack. It looked heavy. “I had the wife bring my personal car here.”
“How’d she get home?”
“Car pool,” the major explained. “This way the battalion commander and I can discuss the exercise some more on the way down to Ord. We’ll drop you off at Monterey.”
“Can you take me right into the Fort? I’ll kick my little brother’s door down.”
“Might be out in the field.”
“Friday night? I’ll take the chance.” Robby’s real reason was that his conversation with the major had been his first talk with an Army officer in years. Now that he was a captain, the next step was making flag. If he wanted to make that—Robby was as confident as any other fighter pilot, but the step from captain to rear admiral (lower half) is the most treacherous in the Navy—having a somewhat broader field of knowledge wouldn’t hurt. It would make him a better staff officer, and after his CAG job, if he got it, he’d go back to being a staff puke again.
“Okay.”
The two-hour drive down from Travis Air Force Base to Fort Ord—Ord has only a small airfield, not large enough for transports—was an interesting one, and Robby was in luck. After two hours of swapping sea stories for war stories and learning things that he’d never known about, he found that Tim was just arriving home from a long night on the town. The elder brother found that the couch was all he needed. It wasn’t what he was used to, of course, but he figured he could rough it.
Jack and his bodyguard arrived at the Governor’s suite right on time. He didn’t know any of the Secret Service detail, but they’d been told to expect him, and he still had his CIA security pass. A laminated plastic ID about the size of a playing card with a picture and a number, but no name, it ordinarily hung around his neck on a chain like some sort of religious talisman. This time he showed it to the agents and tucked it back into his coat pocket.
The briefing was set up as that most cherished of political institutions, the working breakfast. Not as socially important as a lunch, much less a dinner, breakfasts were for some reason or other perceived to be matters of great import. Breakfasts were serious.
The Honorable J. (for Jonathan, which he didn’t like) Robert (call me Bob) Fowler, Governor of Ohio, was a man in his middle fifties. Like the current President, Fowler was a former state’s attorney with an impressive record of law enforcement behind him. He’d ridden the reputation of the man who’d cleaned up Cleveland into six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, but you didn’t go from that House to the White House, and the Senate seats in his state were too secure. So he’d become Governor six years before, and by all reports an effective one. His ultimate political goal had been formed over twenty years before, and now he’d made it to the finals.
He was a trim five-eleven, with brown eyes and hair showing the first signs of gray over the ears. And he was weary. America demands much of her presidential candidates. Marine Corps boot camp was a tryst by comparison. Ryan looked at a man almost twenty years his senior who for the past six months had lived on too much coffee and bad political-dinner food, yet somehow managed to smile at all the bad jokes told by people he didn’t like and, most remarkably of all, to make a speech given no less than four times per day sound new and fresh and exciting to everyone who heard it. He also had about as much appreciation of foreign policy, Ryan thought, as Jack did of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which wasn’t a hell of a lot.
“You’re Dr. John Ryan, I take it.” Fowler looked up from his morning paper.
“Yes, sir.”
“Excuse me for not getting up. I sprained my ankle last week, and it hurts like a son of a bitch.” Fowler waved to the cane beside him. Jack hadn’t seen that on the morning news broadcasts. He’d given his acceptance speech, danced around the stage ... on a bum ankle. The man had sand. Jack walked over to shake hands with him.
“They tell me that you are the acting Deputy Director of Intelligence.”
“Excuse me, Governor, but the title is Deputy Director (Intelligence). That means I currently head one of the Agency’s principal directorates. The others are Operations, Science and Technology, and Administration. Admin is what it sounds like. The Ops guys gather data the old-fashioned way; they’re the real field spooks. The S and T guys run the satellite programs and other scientific stuff. The Intel guys try to figure out what Ops and S and T deliver to us. That’s what I try to do. The real DDI is Admiral James Greer, and he’s—”
“I’ve heard. Too bad. I hear he is a fine man. Even his enemies say he’s honest. That’s probably the best compliment any man can have. How about some breakfast?” Fowler fulfilled the first requirement of political life. He was pleasant. He was charming.
“Sounds okay to me, sir. Can I give you a hand?”
“No, I can manage.” Fowler used the cane to rise. “You are an ex-Marine, ex-broker, ex-history teacher. I know about the business with the terrorists a few years back. My people—my informants, I should say,” he added with a grin as he sat back down, “tell me that you’ve moved up the ladder at CIA very quickly, but they will not tell me why. It’s not in the press either. I find that puzzling.”
“We do keep some secrets, sir. I am not at liberty to discuss all the things you might like to know, and in any case you’d have to depend on others to tell you about me. I’m not objective.”
The Governor nodded pleasantly. “You and Al Trent had one pisser of a fight awhile back, but he says things about you that ought to make you blush. How come?”
“You’ll have to ask Mr. Trent that, sir.”
“I did. He won’t say. He doesn’t actually like you very much, either.”
“I am n
ot at liberty to discuss that at all. Sorry, sir. If you win in November, you can find that out.” How to explain that Al Trent had helped CIA arrange the defection of the head of KGB—to get even with the people who had put a very close Russian friend of his in a labor camp. Even if he could tell the story, who would ever believe it?
“And you really pissed Beth Elliot off last night.”
“Sir, do you want me to talk like a politician, which I am not, or like what I am?”
“Tell it straight, son. That’s one of the rarest pleasures a man in my position has.” Ryan missed that signal entirely.
“I found Dr. Elliot arrogant and abusive. I’m not used to being jacked around. I may owe her an apology, but maybe she owes me one, too.”
“She wants your ass, and the campaign hasn’t even started yet.” This observation was delivered with a laugh.
“It belongs to someone else, Governor. Maybe she can kick it, but she can’t have it.”
“Don’t ever run for public office, Dr. Ryan.”
“Don’t get me wrong, sir, but there is no way in hell that I would ever subject myself to what people like you have to put up with.”
“How do you like being a government employee? That’s a question, not a threat,” Fowler explained.
“Sir, I do what I do because I think it’s important, and because I think I’m good at it.”
“The country needs you?” the presidential candidate asked lightly. That one rocked the acting DDI back in his chair. “That’s a tough answer to have to make, isn’t it? If you say no, then you ought not to have the job because somebody can do it better. If you say yes, then you’re an arrogant son of a bitch who thinks he’s better than everybody else. Learn something from that, Dr. Ryan. That’s my lesson for the day. Now let me hear yours. Tell me about the world—your version of it, that is.”
Jack took out his notes and talked for just under an hour and just over two cups of coffee. Fowler was a good listener. The questions he asked were pointed ones.
