by Tom Clancy
It could hardly have been a better portent of spring for the store. Planting season was coming (there were a lot of wheat farmers around), and here was the first major customer for the virtual mountain of fertilizer just trucked in from the distributor’s warehouse in Helena. The men bought four tons, not an unusual quantity, which a propane-powered forklift deposited on the flatbed of the truck, and they paid cash for it, then drove off with a handshake and a smile.
“This is going to be hard work,” Holbrook observed, halfway back.
“That’s right, and we’re going to do it all ourselves.” Brown turned. “Or do you want to bring in somebody who might be an informer?”
“I hear you, Ernie,” Pete replied, as a state police car went the other way. The cop didn’t even turn his head, chilling though the moment was for the two Mountain Men. “How much more?”
Brown had done the calculations a dozen times. “One more truckload. It’s a shame this stuff is so bulky.” They’d make the second purchase tomorrow, at a store thirty miles southwest of the ranch. This evening would be busy enough, unloading all this crap inside the barn. A good workout. Why didn’t the goddamn farm have a forklift? Holbrook wondered. At least when they refilled the fuel tank, the local oil company would do it. That was some consolation.
IT WAS COLD on the Chinese coast, and that made things easier for the satellites to see a series of thermal blooms at two naval bases. Actually, the “Chinese navy” was the naval service of the People’s Liberation Army, so gross a disregard for tradition that Western navies ignored the correct name in favor of custom. The imagery was recorded and cross-linked to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon, where the senior watch of ficer turned to his intelligence specialist.
“Do the Chinese have an exercise laid on?”
“Not that we know of.” The photos showed that twelve ships, all of them alongside, had their engines running, instead of the normal procedure by which they drew electrical power from the dock. A closer look at the photo showed a half-dozen tugboats moving around the harbor, as well. The intel specialist for this watch was Army. He called a naval officer over.
“Sailing some ships,” was the obvious analysis.
“Not just doing an engineering exam or something?”
“They wouldn’t need tugboats for that. When’s the next pass?” the Navy commander asked, meaning a satellite pass, checking the time reference on the photo. It was thirty minutes old.
“Fifty minutes.”
“Then it ought to show three or maybe four ships standing out to sea at both bases. That’ll make it certain. For right now, two chances out of three, they’re laying on a major exercise.” He paused. “Any political hoo-rah going on?”
The senior watch officer shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Then it’s a FlectEx. Maybe somebody decided to check out their readiness.” They would learn more with a press release from Beijing, but that was thirty minutes into a future they couldn’t see, paid though they were to do so.
THE DIRECTOR WAS a religious man, as was to be expected, what with the sensitivity of his post. Gifted physician that he had been, and scientist-virologist that he still was, he lived in a country where political reliability was measured by devotion to the Shi’a branch of Islam, and in this there was no doubt. His prayers were always on time, and he scheduled his laboratory work around them. He required the same of his people, for such was his devotion that he went beyond the teachings of Islam without even knowing it, bending such rules as stood in his way as though they were made of rubber, and at the same time telling himself that, no, he never violated the Prophet’s Holy Word, or Allah’s Will. How could he be doing that? He was helping to bring the world back to the Faith.
The prisoners, the experimental subjects, were all condemned men in one way or another. Even the thieves, lesser criminals, had four times violated the Holy Koran, and they had probably committed other crimes as well, perhaps—probably, he told himself—those worthy of death. Every day they were informed of the time for prayer, and though they knelt and bowed and mouthed the prayers, you could tell by watching them on the TV monitor that they were merely going through the ritual, not truly praying to Allah in the manner prescribed. That made them all apostates and apostasy was a capital crime in their country—even though only one had been convicted of that crime.
That one was of the Baha‘i religion, a minority almost stamped out, a belief structure that had evolved after Islam. Christians and Jews were at least People of the Book; however misguided their religions, at least they acknowledged the same God of the Universe, of whom Mohammed was the final messenger. The Baha’i had come later, inventing something both new and false that relegated them to the status of pagans, denying the True Faith, and earning the wrath of their government. It was fitting that this man was the first to show that the experiment was successful.
It was remarkable that the prisoners were so brain-dulled by their conditions that the onset of flu symptoms caused no special reaction at first. The medical corpsmen went in, as always in full protective gear, to take blood samples, and one additional benefit of the prisoners’ condition was that they were far too cowed to make trouble. All of them had been in prison for some time, subject to a deficient diet which had its own effects on their energy levels, plus a discipline regime so harsh that they didn’t dare resist. Even the condemned prisoners who knew they faced death had no wish to accelerate the process. All meekly submitted to having their blood drawn by exquisitely careful medics. The test tubes were carefully labeled in accordance with the numbers on the beds, and the medics withdrew.
In the lab, it was Patient Three’s blood which went under the microscope first. The antibody test was prone to give some false positive readings, and this was too important to risk error. So slides were prepared and placed under the electron microscopes, first set at magnification 20,000 for area search. The fine adjustments for the instruments were handled by exquisitely machined gears, as the slide was moved left and right, up and down, until ...
“Ah,” the director said. He centered the target in the viewing field and increased the magnification to 112,000 ... and there it was, projected onto the computer monitor in black-and-white display. His culture knew much of shepherding, and the aphorism “Shepherd’s Crook” seemed to him a perfect description. Centered was the RNA strand, thin and curved at the bottom, with the protein loops at the top. These were the key to the action of the virus, or so everyone thought. Their precise function was not understood, and that also pleased the director’s identity as a bio-war technician. “Moudi,” he called.
“Yes, I see it,” the younger doctor said, with a slow nod, as he walked to that side of the room. Ebola Zaire Mayinga was in the apostate’s blood. He’d just run the antibody test as well, and watched the tiny sample change color. This one was not a false positive.
“Airborne transmission is confirmed.”
“Agreed.” Moudi’s face didn’t change. He was not surprised.
“We will wait another day—no, two days for the second phase. And then we will know.” For now, he had a report to make.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT IN Beijing caught the American embassy by surprise. It was couched in routine terms. The Chinese navy would be holding a major exercise in the Taiwan Strait. There would be some live firings of surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missiles on dates yet unspecified (weather considerations had yet to be resolved, the release said). The People’s Republic of China government was issuing Notice to Airmen and Notice to Mariner alerts, so that both airlines and shipping companies would be able to adjust their routings accordingly. Other than that, the release said nothing at all, and that was somewhat disturbing to the deputy chief of mission in Beijing. The DCM immediately conferred with his military attaches and the CIA chief of station, none of whom had any insights to offer, except that the release had nothing at all to say about the Republic of China government on Taiwan. On the one hand, that was good news—there w
as no complaint about the continued political independence of what Beijing deemed a rebel province. On the other hand, it was bad news—the release did not say that this was a routine exercise and not intended to disturb anyone. The notice was just that, with no explanation at all attached to it. The information was dispatched to the NMCC in the Pentagon, to the State Department, and to CIA headquarters at Langley.
DARYAEI HAD TO search his memory for the face that went with the name, and the face he remembered was the wrong one, really, for it was that of a boy from Qom, and the message came from a grown man half a world away. Raman ... oh, yes, Aref Raman, what a bright lad he’d been. His father had been a dealer in automobiles, Mercedes cars, and had sold them in Tehran to the powerful, a man whose faith had wavered. But his son’s had not. His son had not even blinked on learning of the death of his parents, killed by accident, really, at the hands of the Shah’s army, for having been on the wrong street at the wrong time, caught up in a civil disturbance in which they’d had no part at all. Together, he and his teacher had prayed for them. Dead by the hands of those they trusted was the lesson from that event, but the lesson had not been a necessary one. Raman had already been a lad of deep faith, offended by the fact that his elder sister had taken up with an American officer, and so disgraced her family and his own name. She, too, had disappeared in the revolution, condemned by an Islamic court for adultery, which left only the son. They could have used him in many ways, but the chosen one had been Daryaei’s own doing. Linked up with two elderly people, the new “family” had fled the country with the Raman family wealth and gone first to Europe and then almost immediately thereafter to America. There they had done nothing more than live quietly; Daryaei imagined they were dead by now. The son, selected for the mission because of his early mastery of English, had continued his education and entered government service, performing his duties with all the excellence he’d displayed in the revolution’s earliest phases, during which he’d killed two senior officers in the Shah’s air force while they drank whiskey in a hotel bar.
Since then, he’d done as he’d been told. Nothing. Blend in. Disappear. Remember your mission, but do nothing. It was gratifying for the Ayatollah that he’d judged the boy well, for now he knew from the brief message that the mission was almost fully accomplished.
The word assassin is itself derived from hashshash, the Arabic word for the narcotic hashish, the tool once used by members of the Nizari subsect of Islam to give themselves a drug-induced vision of Paradise prior to setting out on missions of murder. In fact, they’d been heretics to Daryaei’s way of thinking—and the use of drugs was an abomination. They’d been weak-minded but effective servants of a series of master terrorists such as Hasan and Rashid ad-Din, and, for a time that stretched between two centuries, had served the political balance of power in a region stretching from Syria to Persia. But there was a brilliance in the concept which had fascinated the cleric since learning of it as a boy. To get one faithful agent inside the enemy’s camp. It was the task of years, and for that reason a task of faith. Where the Nizaris had failed was that they were heretics, separate from the True Faith, able to recruit a few extremists into their cult, but not the multitude, and so they served a single man and not Allah, and so they needed drugs to fortify themselves, as an unbeliever did with liquor. A brilliant idea flawed. But a brilliant idea nonetheless. Daryaei had merely perfected it, and so now he had a man close, something he’d hoped for but not known. Better yet, he had a man close and waiting for instructions, at the far end of an unknown message path that had never been used, all composed of people who’d gone abroad no more recently than fifteen years ago, an altogether better state of affairs than that which he’d set in place in Iraq, for in America people who might be scrutinized were either arrested or cleared, or if they were watched, only for a little while, until the watchers became bored and went on to other tasks. In some countries when that happened, the watchers became bored, picked up those whom they watched, and frequently killed them.
So it was just timing before Raman completed his mission, and after all these years, he still used his head, unaddled by drugs and trained by the Great Satan himself. The news was too sublime even to occasion a smile.
Then the phone rang. The private one. “Yes?”
“I have good news,” the director said, “from the Monkey Farm.”
“YOU KNOW, ARNIE, you were right,” Jack said, in the breezeway to the West Wing. “It was great to get the hell out of here.”
The chief of staff noted the spring in his step, but didn’t get overly excited about it. Air Force One had brought the President back in time for a quiet dinner with his family instead of the usual rigors of three or four such speeches, endless hours of schmoozing with major contributors, and the usual four-hour night that resulted and that, often enough, in the aircraft—followed by a quick shower and a working day artificially extended by the revelries in the hustings. It was remarkable, he thought, that any President was able to do any work at all. The real duties of the office were difficult enough, and those were almost always subordinated to what was little more than public relations, albeit a necessary function in a democracy, in which the people needed to see the President doing more than sitting at his desk and doing ... his work. The presidency was a job which one could love without liking it, a phrase seemingly contradictory until you came here and saw it.
“You did just fine,” van Damm said. “The stuff on TV was perfect, and the segment NBC ran with your wife was okay, too.”
“She didn’t like it. She didn’t think they used her best line,” Ryan reported lightly.
“Could have been a lot worse.” They didn’t ask her about abortion, Arnie thought. To keep that from happening, he’d used up a few large markers with NBC, and made sure that Tom Donner had been treated at least as well as a senator, maybe even a Cabinet member, on the flight the previous day, including a rare taped segment in flight. The following week, Donner would be the first network anchor to have a one-on-one with the President in the upstairs sitting room, and for that there was no agreement on the scope of the questions, meaning that Ryan would have to be briefed for hours to make sure he didn’t step on the presidential crank. But for now the chief of staff allowed his President to bask in the afterglow of what had been a pretty good day in the Midwest, whose real mission, aside from getting Ryan out of Washington and so get a feel for what the presidency really was, was to have him look like a President, and further marginalize that bastard Kealty.
The Secret Service people were as upbeat as their President, as they so often drew their mood from POTUS, returning his smiles and nods with spoken greetings of their own: “Good morning, Mr. President!” repeated by four of them as Ryan passed, finding his way to the Oval Office.
“Good morning, Ben,” Ryan said cheerily, heading to his desk and falling into the comfortable swivel chair. “Tell me how the world looks.”
“We may have a problem. The PRC navy’s putting to sea,” the acting National Security Advisor said. The Secret Service had just assigned him a code name, CARDSHARP.
“And?” Ryan asked, annoyed that the morning might be spoiled.
“And it looks like a major fleet exercise, and they’re saying there will be live-fire missile shoots. No reaction from Taipei yet.”
“They don’t have elections or anything coming up, do they?” Jack asked.
Goodley shook his head. “No, not for another year. The ROC has continued to spend money with the UN, and they’re quietly lobbying a lot of countries in case they go through with a request for representation, but nothing remarkable about that, either. Taipei is playing its cards close to the vest, and not making any noise to offend the mainland. Their commercial relationship is stable. In short, we have no explanation for the exercise.”
“What do we have in the area?”
“One submarine in the Formosa Strait, keeping an eye on a Chinese SSN.”
“Carriers?”
“No
thing closer than the Indian Ocean. Stennis is back in Pearl for engine repairs, along with Enterprise, and they’ll be there for a while. The cupboard is still pretty bare.” CARDSHARP reminded the President what he had himself said to his President only months before.
“What about their army?” the President asked next.
“Again, nothing new. We have higher-than-usual levels of activity, like the Russians said, but that’s been going on for a while.”
Ryan leaned back in his chair and contemplated a cup of decaf. He’d found on his speechifying trip that his stomach really did feel better that way, and remarked on it to Cathy, who’d merely smiled and said I told you so! “Okay, Ben, speculate.”
“I talked it over with some China people at State and the Agency,” Goodley replied. “Maybe their military is making a political move, interior politics, I mean, increasing their readiness state to let the other people on the Beijing Politburo know that they’re still around and still matter. Aside from that, anything else is pure speculation, and I’m not supposed to do that here, boss, remember?”
“And ‘don’t know’ means don’t know, doesn’t it?” It was a rhetorical question, and one of Ryan’s favored aphorisms.
“You taught me that on the other side of the river, Mr. President,” Goodley agreed, but without the expected smile. “You also taught me not to like things I can’t explain.” The national intelligence officer paused. “They know we’ll know, and they know we’ll be interested, and they know you’re new here, and they know you don’t need a hassle. So, why do it?” Goodley asked, also rhetorically.
“Yeah,” the President agreed quietly. “Andrea?” he said. Price, as usual, was in the room, pretending not to pay attention.
“Yes, sir?”
“Where’s the nearest smoker?” Ryan said it entirely without shame.
