by Tom Clancy
“Sir, there are no guarantees for operations of this kind. If something is said, it is likely that we’ll know what it is, but he might not even discuss the matter at all. The equipment has all been tested. It works. The field officer running this operation is well experienced. He’s done touchy ones before.”
“Like?” van Damm asked.
“Like getting Gerasimov’s wife and daughter out a few years ago.” Ryan explained on for a minute or so.
“Is the operation worth the risk?” Fowler asked.
That surprised Ryan quite a bit. “Sir, that decision is yours to make.”
“But I asked you for an opinion.”
“Yes, Mr. President, it is. The take we’ve been getting from NIITAKA shows a considerable degree of arrogance on their part. Something like this might have the net effect of shocking them into playing honest ball with us.”
“You approve of our policy of dealing with Japan?” van Damm asked, just as surprised as Ryan had been a moment earlier.
“My approval or disapproval is beside the point, but the answer to your question is, yes.”
The Chief of Staff was openly amazed. “But the previous administration—how come you never told us?”
“You never asked, Arnie. I don’t make government policy, remember? I’m a spook. I do what you tell me to do, as long as it’s legal.”
“You’re satisfied on the legality of the operation?” Fowler asked with a barely suppressed smile.
“Mr. President, you’re the lawyer, not me. If I do not know the legal technicalities—and I don’t—I must assume that you, as an officer of the court, are not ordering me to break the law.”
“That’s the best dance number I’ve seen since the Kirov Ballet was in Kennedy Center last summer,” van Damm observed with a laugh.
“Ryan, you know all the moves. You have my approval,” Fowler said after a brief pause. “If we get what we expect, then what?”
“We have to go over that with the State Department guys,” Liz Elliot announced.
“That is potentially dangerous,” Ryan observed. “The Japanese have been hiring a lot of the people from the trade-negotiation section. We have to assume that they have people inside.”
“Commercial espionage?” Fowler asked.
“Sure, why not? NIITAKA has never given us hard evidence of that, but if I were a bureaucrat looking to leave government service and make half a mill’ a year representing them—like a lot of them do—how would I present myself to them as a potentially valuable asset? I’d do it the same way a Soviet official or spook presents bonafides to us. You deliver something juicy up-front. That’s illegal, but we’re not devoting any assets to looking at the problem. For that reason, wide dissemination of the information from this operation is very dangerous. Obviously you’ll want the opinion of Secretary Talbot and a few others, but I’d be really careful how much farther you spread it. Also, remember that if you tell the PM that you know what he said—and if he knows he only said it in one place—you run the risk of compromising this intelligence-gathering technique.” The President accepted that without anything more than a raised eyebrow.
“Make it look like a leak in Mexico?” van Damm asked.
“That’s the obvious ploy,” Ryan agreed.
“And if I confront him with it directly?” Fowler asked.
“Kind of hard to beat a straight flush, Mr. President. And if this were ever to leak, Congress would go ballistic. That’s one of my problems. I’m required to discuss this operation with A1 Trent and Sam Fellows. Sam will play ball, but A1 has political reasons to dislike the Japanese.”
“I could order you not to tell him....”
“Sir, that’s one law I may not break for any reason.”
“I might have to give you that order,” Fowler observed.
Ryan was surprised again. Both he and the President knew what the consequences of that order would be. Just what Cathy had in mind. It might, in fact, be a fine excuse to leave government service.
“Well, maybe that won’t be necessary. I’m tired of playing patty-cake with these people. They made an agreement, and they’re going to keep it or have to deal with a very irate president. Worse than that, the idea that someone can suborn the president of a country in so venal a way is contemptible. Goddamn it! I hate corruption.”
“Right on, boss,” van Damm commented. “Besides, the voters will like it.”
“That bastard,” Fowler went on after a moment. Ryan couldn’t tell how much of this was real and how much feigned. “He tells me he’s coming over to work out a few details, get acquainted some more, and what he’s really planning is to welsh on a deal. Well, we’ll see about that. I guess it’s time he learned about hardball.” The discourse stopped. “Ryan, I missed you last night.”
“My wife got a headache, sir. Had to leave. Sorry.”
“Feeling all right now?”
“Yes, sir, thank you.”
“Turn your people loose.”
Ryan stood. “Will do, Mr. President.”
Van Damm followed him out and walked him to the West Entrance. “Nice job, Jack.”
“Gee, they going to start liking me?” Jack asked wryly. The meeting had gone much too well.
“I don’t know what happened last night, but Liz is really pissed at your wife.”
“They talked about something, but I don’t know what.”
“Jack, you want it straight?” van Damm asked.
Ryan knew that the friendly walk to the door was just too convenient, and the symbolism was explicit enough, wasn’t it? “When, Arnie?”
“I’d like to say it’s just business and not personal, but it is personal. I’m sorry, Jack, but it happens. The President will give you a glowing sendoff.”
“Nice of him,” Jack replied matter-of-factly.
“I tried, Jack. You know I like you. These things happen.”
“I’ll go quietly. But—”
“I know. No back-shots on the way out or after you’re gone. You’ll be asked in periodically, maybe draw some special missions, liaison stuff. You get an honorable discharge. On that, Jack, you have my word of honor, and the President’s. He’s not a bad guy, Jack, really he isn’t. He’s a tough-minded son of a bitch and a good politician, but he’s as honest as any man I know. It’s just that your way of thinking and his way of thinking are different—and he’s the President.”
Jack could have said that the mark of intellectual honesty is the solicitation of opposing points of view. Instead he said, “Like I said, I’ll go quietly. I’ve been doing this long enough. It’s time to relax a little, smell the roses and play with the kids.”
“Good man.” Van Damm patted his arm. “You bring this job off and your going-away statement from the Boss will sparkle. We’ll have Callie Weston write it, even.”
“You stroke like a pro, Arnie.” Ryan shook his hand and walked off to his car. Van Damm would have been surprised to see the smile on his face.
“Do you have to do it that way?”
“Elizabeth, ideological differences notwithstanding, he has served his country well. I disagree with him on a lot of things, but he’s never lied to me, and he’s always tried to give me good advice,” Fowler replied, looking at the plastic-stick microphone. He suddenly wondered if it was working.
“I told you what happened last night.”
“You got your wish. He’s on the way out. At this level you do not throw people out the door. You do it in a civilized and honorable way. Anything else is small-minded and decidedly stupid politically. I agree with you that he’s a dinosaur, but even dinosaurs get a nice spot in the museums.”
“But—”
“That’s all. Okay, you had words with his wife last night. I’m sorry about that, but what kind of person penalizes someone for what their wife did?”
“Bob, I have a right to expect your support!”
Fowler didn’t like that, but responded reasonably. “And you have it, Elizabeth. Now, thi
s is neither the time nor the place for this sort of discussion.”
Marcus Cabot arrived at Andrews Air Force Base just after lunch for his flight to Korea. The arrangements were more luxurious than they looked. The aircraft was a U.S. Air Force C-141B Starlifter, an aircraft with four engines and an oddly serpentlike fuselage. Loaded into the cargo area, he saw, was essentially a house trailer complete with kitchen, living and bed rooms. It was also heavily insulated—the C-141 is a noisy aircraft, especially aft. He went out the front door to meet the flight crew. The pilot, he saw, was a blond captain of thirty years. There were, in fact, two complete flight crews. The flight would be long, with a fueling stop at Travis Air Force Base in California, followed by three midair “tankings” over the Pacific. It would also be singularly boring, and he would sleep through it as much as possible. He wondered if government service was really worth it, and the knowledge that Ryan would soon be gone—Arnold van Damm had gotten the word to him—didn’t improve his outlook. The Director of Central Intelligence strapped himself in and started to read through his briefing documents. An Air Force noncom offered him a glass of wine, which he started on as the aircraft taxied off the ramp.
John Clark and Domingo Chavez boarded their own flight later that afternoon for Mexico City. It was better, the senior man thought, to get settled in and acclimated. Mexico City was yet another high-altitude metropolis whose thin air was made all the worse by air pollution. Their mission gear was carefully packed away, and they expected no trouble with customs clearance. Neither carried a weapon, of course, as this sort of mission did not require it.
The truck pulled off the Interstate exactly thirty-eight hours and forty minutes after leaving the cargo terminal at Norfolk. That was the easy part. It took fifteen minutes and all the driver’s skill to back his rig up to the concrete loading dock outside the barn. A warm sun had thawed the ground into a six-inch-deep layer of gooey mud that almost prevented him from completing the maneuver, but on the third try he made it. The driver jumped down and walked back toward the dock.
“How do you open this thing?” Russell asked.
“I’ll show you.” The driver paused to scrape the mud off his boots, then worked the latch on the container. “Need help unloading?”
“No, I’ll do it myself. There’s coffee over in the house.”
“Thank you, sir. I could use a cup.”
“Well, that was easy enough,” Russell said to Qati as they watched the man go away. Marvin opened the doors and saw a single large box with Sony printed on all four sides, along with arrows to show which side was up, and the image of a champagne glass to tell the illiterate it was delicate. It was also sitting on a wooden pallet. Marvin removed the fasteners that held it in place, then fired up the forklift. The task of removing the bomb and putting it inside the barn was completed in another minute. Russell shut the forklift down, then draped a tarp over the box. By the time the trucker came back, the cargo box was again closed.
“Well, you got your bonus,” Marvin told him, handing over the cash.
The driver riffled through the bills. Now he got to drive the box back to Norfolk, but first he’d hit the nearest truck stop for eight hours of sleep. “A pleasure doing business with you, sir. You said you might have another job for me in a month or so?”
“That’s right.”
“Here’s how you reach me.” The trucker handed over his card.
“Heading right back?”
“After I get some sack time. I just heard on the radio there’s snow coming tomorrow night. A big one, they say.”
“That time of year, isn’t it?”
“Sure is. You have a good one, sir.”
“Be careful, man,” Russell said, shaking his hand one more time.
“It’s a mistake to let him go,” Ghosn observed to the Commander in Arabic.
“I think not. The only face he has really seen is Marvin’s, after all.”
“True.”
“Have you checked it?” Qati asked.
“There is no damage to the packing box. I will do a more detailed check tomorrow. I would say that we are almost ready.”
“Yes.”
“You want the good news or the bad news?” Jack asked.
“Good first,” Cathy said.
“They’re asking me to resign my position.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“Well, you never really leave. They’ll want me to come back occasionally. To consult, stuff like that.”
“Is that what you want?”
“This work does get in your blood, Cathy. Would you like to leave Hopkins and just be a doc with an office and patients and glasses to prescribe?”
“How much?”
“Couple times a year, probably. Special areas I happen to know a lot about. Nothing regular.”
“Okay, that’s fair—and, no, I couldn’t give up teaching young docs. How soon?”
“Well, I have two things I have to finish up with. Then we have to pick someone for the job....” How about the Foleys, Jack thought. But which one ... ?
“Conn, sonar.”
“Conn, aye,” the navigator answered.
“Sir, I got a possible contact bearing two-nine-five, very faint, but it keeps coming back.”
“On the way.” It was a short five steps into the sonar room. “Show me.”
“Right here, sir.” The sonarman pointed to a line on the display. Though it looked fuzzy, it was in fact composed of discrete yellow dots in a specific frequency range, and as the time scale moved vertically upward, more dots kept appearing, regular only in that they seemed to form a vague and fuzzy line. The only change in the line was a slight drift in direction. “I can’t tell you what it is yet.”
“Tell me what it isn’t.”
“It ain’t no surface contact, and I don’t think it’s random noise either, sir.” The petty officer traced it all the way to the top of the tube with a grease pencil. “Right about here, I decided it might actually be something.”
“What else you got?”
“Sierra-15 over here is a merchant, heading southeast and way the hell away from us—that’s a third-CZ contact we been trackin’ since before turn of the last watch, and that’s about it, Mr. Pitney. I guess it’s too bumpy topside for the fishermen to be out this far.”
Lieutenant Pitney tapped the screen. “Call it Sierra-16, and I’ll get a track started. How’s the water?”
“Deep channel seems very good today, sir. Surface noise is a little tough, though. This one’s tough to hold.”
“Keep an eye on it.”
“Aye aye.” The sonarman turned back to his scope.
Lieutenant Jeff Pitney returned to the control room, lifted the growler phone, and punched the button for the Captain’s cabin. “Gator here, Cap’n. We have a possible sonar contact bearing two-nine-five, very faint. Our friend might be back, sir. ... Yes, sir.” Pitney hung up and hit the 1-MC speaker system. “Man the fire-control tracking party.”
Captain Ricks appeared a minute later, wearing sneakers and his blue coveralls. His first stop was to control, to check course, speed, and depth. Then he went into sonar.
“Let’s see it.”
“Damn thing just faded on me again, sir,” the sonarman said sheepishly. He used a piece of toilet paper—there was a roll over each scope—to erase the previous mark, and penciled in another. “I think we have something here, sir.”
“I hope you didn’t interrupt my sleep for nothing,” Ricks noted. Lieutenant Pitney caught the look the two other sonarmen exchanged at that.
“Coming back, sir. You know, if this is an Akula, we should be getting a little pump noise in this spectrum over here....”
“Intelligence says he’s coming out of overhaul. Ivan is learning how to make them quieter,” Ricks said.
“Guess so ... slow drift to the north, call the current bearing two-nine-seven.” Both men knew that figure could be off by ten degrees either way. Even with the enormously expe
nsive system on Maine, really long-distance bearings were pretty vague.
“Anybody else around?” Pitney asked.
“Omaha is supposed to be around somewhere south of Kodiak. Wrong direction. It’s not her. Sure it’s not a surface contact?”
“No way, Cap’n. If it was diesel, I’d know it, and if it was steam, I’d know that, too. There’s no pounding from surface noise. Has to be a submerged contact, Cap’n. Only thing makes sense.”
“Pitney, we’re on two-eight-one?”
“Yessir.”
“Come left to two-six-five. We’ll set up a better baseline for the target-motion analysis, try to get a range estimate before we turn in.”
Turn in, Pitney thought. Jesus, boomers aren’t supposed to do this stuff. He gave the order anyway, of course.
“Where’s the layer?”
“One-five-zero feet, sir. Judging by the surface noise, there’s twenty-five-footers up there,” the sonarman added.
“So he’s probably staying deep to smooth the ride out.”
“Damn, lost him again ... we’ll see what happens when the tail straightens back out....”
Ricks leaned his head out of the sonar room and spoke a single word: “Coffee.” It never occurred to him that the sonarmen might like some, too.
It took five more minutes of waiting before the dots started appearing again in the right place.
“Okay, he’s back. I think,” the sonarman added. “Bearing looks like three-zero-two now.”
Ricks walked out to the plotting table. Ensign Shaw was doing his calculations along with a quartermaster. “Has to be a hundred-thousand-plus yards. I’m assuming a northeasterly course from the bearing drift, speed of less than ten. Has to be a hundred-K yards or more.” That was good, fast work, Shaw and the petty officer thought.
