by Tom Clancy
“Where do you get lunch around here?” Kelly asked.
“I’d show you myself, but I have a conference in about ten minutes. Sandy?”
She checked her watch. “About time for mine. You want to risk hospital food or something outside?”
“You’re the tour guide, Ma’am.”
She guided him to the cafeteria, where the food was hospital-bland, but you could add salt and other spices if you wanted. Kelly selected something that might be filling, even healthy, to compensate for the lack of taste.
“Have you been keeping busy?” he asked after they selected a table.
“Always,” Sandy assured him.
“Where do you live?”
“Off Loch Raven Boulevard, just in the County.” She hadn’t changed, Kelly saw. Sandy O’Toole was functioning, quite well in fact, but the emptiness in her life wasn’t qualitatively different from his. The real difference was that he could do something; she could not. She was reaching out, she had a capacity for good humor, but her grief overcame it at every turn. A powerful force, grief. There were advantages in having enemies you could seek out and eliminate. Fighting a shadow was far more difficult.
“Row house, like they have around here?”
“No, it’s an old bungalow, whatever you call it, big square two-story house. Half an acre. That reminds me,” she added. “I have to cut the grass this weekend.” Then she remembered that Tim had liked cutting grass, had decided to leave the Army after his second Vietnam tour and get his law degree and live a normal kind of life, all of that taken away from her by little people in a distant place.
Kelly didn’t know what she was thinking, exactly, but he didn’t have to. The change in her expression, the way her voice trailed off, said it all. How to cheer her up? It was a strange question for him, considering his plans for the next few weeks.
“You were very kind to me while I was upstairs. Thanks.”
“We try to take care of our patients,” she said with a friendly and unaccustomed expression.
“A face as pretty as yours should do that more,” Kelly told her.
“Do what?”
“Smile.”
“It’s hard,” she said, serious again.
“I know, Ma’am. But I did have you laughing before,” Kelly told her.
“You surprised me.”
“It’s Tim, isn’t it?” he asked, jolting her. People weren’t supposed to talk about that, were they?
She stared into Kelly’s eyes for perhaps five seconds. “I just don’t understand.”
“In some ways it’s easy. In some ways it’s hard. The hard part,” Kelly said, thinking it through himself as he did so, “is understanding why people make it necessary, why people do things like that. What it comes down to is, there are bad people out there, and somebody has to deal with them, ‘cuz if you don’t, then someday they’ll deal with you. You can try ignoring them, but that doesn’t ever work, really. And sometimes you see things you just can’t ignore.” Kelly leaned back, searching for more words. “You see lots of bad things here, Sandy. I’ve seen worse. I’ve watched people doing things—”
“Your nightmare?”
Kelly nodded. “That’s right. I almost got myself killed that night.”
“What was—”
“You don’t want to know, honest. I mean, I don’t understand that part either, how people can do things like that. Maybe they believe in something so much that they stop remembering that it’s important to be human. Maybe they want something so much that they don’t care. Maybe there’s just something wrong with them, how they think, how they feel. I don’t know. But what they do is real. Somebody has to try and stop it.” Even when you know it’s not going to work, Kelly didn’t have the heart to add. How could he tell her that her husband had died for a failure?
“My husband was a knight in shiny armor on a white horse? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“You’re the one wearing white, Sandy. You fight against one kind of enemy. There’s other kinds. Somebody has to fight against them, too.”
“I’ll never understand why Tim had to die.”
It really came down to that, Kelly thought. It wasn’t about great political or social issues. Everyone had a life, which was supposed to have a natural end after an amount of time determined by God or Fate or something men weren’t supposed to control. He’d seen young men die, and caused his share of deaths, each life something of value to its owner and others, and how did you explain to the others what it was all about? For that matter, how did you explain it to yourself? But that was from the outside. From the inside it was something else. Maybe that was the answer.
“You do some pretty hard work, right?”
“Yes,” Sandy said, nodding a little.
“Why not do something easier? I mean, work a department where it’s different, I don’t know—the nursery, maybe? That’s a happy place, right?”
“Pretty much,” the nurse admitted.
“It’s still important, too, right? Taking care of little babies, it’s routine, yeah, but it still has to be done the right way, doesn’t it?”
“Of course.”
“But you don’t do that. You work Neuro. You do the hard stuff.”
“Somebody has to—” Bingo! Kelly thought, cutting her off.
“It’s hard—hard to do the work, hard on you—it hurts you some, right?”
“Sometimes.”
“But you do it anyway,” Kelly pointed out.
“Yes,” Sandy said, not as an admission, but something stronger.
“That’s why Tim did what he did.” He saw the understanding there, or perhaps the beginnings of it, just for a moment before her lingering grief pushed the argument aside.
“It still doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe the thing doesn’t make sense, but the people do,” Kelly suggested. That was about as far as his mind stretched. “Sorry, I’m not a priest, just a broken-down Navy chief.”
“Not too broken down,” O’Toole said, finishing her lunch.
“And part of that is your doing, Ma’am. Thank you.” That earned him another smile.
“Not all our patients get better. We’re kind of proud of those who do.”
“Maybe we’re all trying to save the world, Sandy, one little bit at a time,” Kelly said. He rose and insisted on walking her back to the unit. It took the whole five minutes to say what he wanted to say.
“You know, I’d like to have dinner with you, maybe? Not now, but, well—”
“I’ll think about it,” she allowed, half dismissing the idea, half wondering about it, knowing as Kelly did that it was too soon for both of them, though probably not as much for her. What sort of man was this? she asked herself. What were the dangers of knowing him?
13
Agendas
It was his first-ever visit to the Pentagon. Kelly felt ill at ease, wondering if he should have worn his khaki chief’s uniform, but his time for wearing that had passed. Instead he wore a blue lightweight suit, with a miniature of the Navy Cross ribbon on the lapel. Arriving in the bus and car tunnel, he walked up a ramp and searched for a map of the vast building, which he quickly scanned and memorized. Five minutes later he entered the proper office.
“Yes?” a petty officer asked.
“John Kelly, I have an appointment with Admiral Maxwell.” He was invited to take a seat. On the coffee table was a copy of Navy Times, which he hadn’t read since leaving the service. But Kelly was able to control his nostalgia. The bitches and gripes he read about hadn’t changed very much.
“Mr. Kelly?” a voice called. He rose and walked through the open door. After it closed, a red do-not-disturb light blinked on to warn people off.
“How are you feeling, John?” Maxwell asked first of all.
“Fine, sir, thank you.” Civilian now or not, Kelly could not help feeling uneasy in the presence of a flag officer. That got worse at once when another door opened to admit two more men, one in civilian clothes,
the other a rear admiral—another aviator, Kelly saw, with the medal of honor, which was even more intimidating. Maxwell did the introductions.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Podulski said, shaking the younger man’s hand.
“Thank you, sir.” Kelly didn’t know what else to say.
“Cas and I go back a ways,” Maxwell observed, handling the introductions. “I got fifteen”—he pointed to the aircraft panel hanging on the wall—“Cas got eighteen.”
“All on film, too,” Podulski assured him.
“I didn’t get any,” Greer said, “but I didn’t let the oxygen rot my brain either.” In addition to wearing soft clothes, this admiral had the map case. He took one out, the same panel he had back at his home, but more marked up. Then came the photographs, and Kelly got another look at the face of Colonel Zacharias, this time enhanced somehow or other, and recognizably similar to the ID photo Greer put next to it.
“I was within three miles of the place,” Kelly noted. “Nobody ever told me about—”
“It wasn’t there yet. This place is new, less than two years old,” Greer explained.
“Any more pictures, James?” Maxwell asked.
“Just some SR-71 overheads, high-obliques, nothing new in them. I have a guy checking every frame of this place, a good guy, ex-Air Force. He reports to me only.”
“You’re going to be a good spy,” Podulski noted with a chuckle.
“They need me there,” Greer replied in a lighthearted voice bordered with serious meaning. Kelly just looked at the other three. The banter wasn’t unlike that in a chief’s mess, but the language was cleaner. He looked over at Kelly again. “Tell me about the valley.”
“A good place to stay away from—”
“First, tell me how you got little Dutch back. Every step of the way,” Greer ordered.
Kelly needed fifteen minutes for that, from the time he left USS Skate to the moment the helicopter had lifted him and Lieutenant Maxwell from the river’s estuary for the flight to Kitty Hawk. It was an easy story to tell. What surprised him were the looks the admirals passed back and forth.
Kelly wasn’t equipped to understand the looks yet. He didn’t really think of the admirals as old or even as totally human. They were admirals, godlike, ageless beings who made important decisions and looked as they should look, even the one out of uniform. Nor did Kelly think of himself as young. He’d seen combat, after which every man is forever changed. But their perspective was different. To Maxwell, Podulski, and Greer, this young man was not terribly unlike what they had been thirty years earlier. It was instantly clear that Kelly was a warrior, and in seeing him they saw themselves. The furtive looks they traded were not unlike those of a grandfather watching his grandson take his first tentative step on the living-room rug. But these were larger and more serious steps.
“That was some job,” Greer said when Kelly finished. “So this area is densely populated?”
“Yes and no, sir. I mean, it’s not a city or like that, but some farms and stuff. I heard and saw traffic on this road. Only a few trucks, but lots of bicycles, oxcarts, that sort of thing.”
“Not much military traffic?” Podulski asked.
“Admiral, that stuff would be on this road here.” Kelly tapped the map. He saw the notations for the NVA units. “How are you planning to get in here?”
“There’s nothing easy, John. We’ve looked at a helicopter insertion, maybe even trying an amphibious assault and racing up this road.”
Kelly shook his head. “Too far. That road is too easy to defend. Gentlemen, you have to understand, Vietnam is a real nation in arms, okay? Practically everybody there has been in uniform, and giving people guns makes them feel like part of the team. There are enough people with guns there to give you a real pain coming up this way. You’d never make it.”
“The people really support the communist government?” Podulski asked. It was just too much for him to believe. But not for Kelly.
“Jesus, Admiral, why do you think we’ve been fighting there so long? Why do you think nobody helps pilots who get shot down? They’re not like us over there. That’s something we’ve never understood. Anyway, if you put Marines on the beach, nobody’s going to welcome them. Forget racing up this road, sir. I’ve been there. It ain’t much of a road, not even as good as it looks on these pictures. Drop a few trees and it’s closed.” Kelly looked up. “Has to be choppers.”
He could see the news was not welcome, and it wasn’t hard to understand why. This part of the country was dotted with antiaircraft batteries. Getting a strike force in wasn’t going to be easy. At least two of these men were pilots, and if a ground assault had looked promising to them, then the triple-A problem must have been worse than Kelly appreciated.
“We can suppress the flak,” Maxwell thought.
“You’re not talking about -52s again, are you?” Greer asked.
“Newport News goes back on the gunline in a few weeks. John, ever see her shoot?”
Kelly nodded. “Sure did. She supported us twice when we were working close to the coast. It’s impressive what those eight-inchers can do. Sir, the problem is, how many things do you need to go right for the mission to succeed? The more complicated things get, the easier it is for things to go wrong, and even one thing can be real complicated.” Kelly leaned back on the couch, and reminded himself that what he had just said wasn’t only for the admirals to consider.
“Dutch, we have a meeting in five minutes,” Podulski said reluctantly. This meeting had not been a successful one, he thought. Greer and Maxwell weren’t so sure of that. They had learned a few things. That counted for something.
“Can I ask why you’re keeping this so tight?” Kelly asked.
“You guessed it before.” Maxwell looked over at the junior flag officer and nodded.
“The Song Tay job was compromised,” Greer said. “We don’t know how, but we found out later through one of our sources that they knew—at least suspected—something was coming. They expected it later, and we ended up hitting the place right after they evacuated the prisoners, but before they had their ambush set up. Good luck, bad luck. They didn’t expect Operation KINGPIN for another month.”
“Dear God,” Kelly breathed. “Somebody over here deliberately betrayed them?”
“Welcome to the real world of intelligence operations, Chief,” Greer said with a grim smile.
“But why?”
“If I ever meet the gentleman, I will be sure to ask.” Greer looked at the others. “That’s a good hook for us to use. Check the records of the operation, real low-key like?”
“Where are they?”
“Eglin Air Force base, where the KINGPIN people trained.”
“Whom do we send?” Podulski asked.
Kelly could feel the eyes turn in his direction. “Gentlemen, I was just a chief, remember?”
“Mr. Kelly, where’s your car parked?”
“In the city, sir. I took the bus over here.”
“Come with me. There’s a shuttle bus you can take back later.”
They walked out of the building in silence. Greer’s car, a Mercury, was parked in a visitor slot by the river entrance. He waved for Kelly to get in and headed towards the George Washington Parkway.
“Dutch pulled your package. I got to read it. I’m impressed, son.” What Greer didn’t say was that on his battery of enlistment tests, Kelly had scored an average of 147 on three separately formatted IQ tests. “Every commander you had sang your praises.”
“I worked for some good ones, sir.”
“So it appears, and three of them tried to get you into OCS, but Dutch asked you about that. I also want to know why you didn’t take the college scholarship.”
“I was tired of schools. And the scholarship was for swimming, Admiral.”
“That’s a big deal at Indira, I know, but your marks were plenty good to get an academic scholarship. You attended a pretty nice prep school—”
“That w
as a scholarship, too.” Kelly shrugged. “Nobody in my family ever went to college. Dad served a hitch in the Navy during the war. I guess it just seemed like something to do.” That it had been a major disappointment to his father was something he’d never told anyone.
Greer pondered that. It still didn’t answer things. “The last ship I commanded was a submarine, Daniel Webster. My chief of the boat, senior chief sonarman, the guy had a doctorate in physics. Good man, knew his job better than I knew mine, but not a leader, shied away from it some. You didn’t, Kelly. You tried to, but you didn’t.”
“Look, sir, when you’re out there and things happen, somebody has to get it done.”
“Not everybody sees things that way. Kelly, there’s two kinds of people in the world, the ones who need to be told and the ones who figure it out all by themselves,” Greer pronounced.
The highway sign said something that Kelly didn’t catch, but it wasn’t anything about CIA. He didn’t tumble to it until he saw the oversized guardhouse.
“Did you ever interact with Agency people while you were over there?”
Kelly nodded. “Some. We were—well, you know about it, Project PHOENIX, right? We were part of that, a small part.”
“What did you think of them?”
“Two or three of them were pretty good. The rest—you want it straight?”
“That’s exactly what I want,” Greer assured him.
“The rest are probably real good mixing martinis, shaken not stirred,” Kelly said evenly. That earned him a rueful laugh.
“Yeah, people here do like to watch the movies!” Greer found his parking place and popped his door open. “Come with me, Chief.” The out-of-uniform admiral led Kelly in the front door and got him a special visitor’s pass, the kind that required an escort.
For his part, Kelly felt like a tourist in a strange and foreign land. The very normality of the building gave it a sinister edge. Though an ordinary, and rather new, government office building, CIA headquarters had some sort of aura. It wasn’t like the real world somehow. Greer caught the look and chuckled, leading Kelly to an elevator, then to his sixth-floor office. Only when they were behind the closed wooden door did he speak.
