by Tom Clancy
“Shh,” the corporal said to SANDBOX. He held binoculars to her eyes.
“Neat!” Jack Junior thought.
“Will she be scared of us?” Sally asked.
“No, nobody hunts them here, and they’re used to the vehicles,” Overton told them. “That’s Elvira, she’s the second-oldest doe here.”
She’d given birth only minutes before. Elvira was getting up now, licking the newborn fawn whose eyes were confused by a new world it had no reason to expect.
“Bambi!” Katie Ryan observed, being an expert on the Disney film. It only took minutes, and then the fawn wobbled to its—they couldn’t tell the gender yet—feet.
“Okay. Katie?”
“Yes?” she asked, not looking away.
“You get to give her her name,” Captain Overton told the toddler. It was a tradition here.
“Miss Marlene,” SANDBOX said without hesitation.
45
CONFIRMATION
AS THE SAYING WENT, miles and miles of miles and miles. The road was about as boring as any civil engineer could make, but it hadn’t been anyone’s fault. So was the land. Brown and Holbrook now knew why the Mountain Men had become Mountain Men. At least there was scenery there. They could have driven faster, but it took time to learn the handling characteristics of this beast, and so they rarely got above fifty. That earned them the poisonous looks of every other driver on I-90, especially the cowboy-hatted K-Whopper owner-operators who thought the unlimited speed limit in eastern Montana was just great, plus the occasional lawyer—they had to be lawyers—in German muscle cars who blazed by their truck as though it were a cattle-feeder.
They also found it was hard work. Both men were pretty tired from all the preparation. All the weeks of effort to set up the truck, mix the explosives, cast the bullets, and then embed them. It had all made for little sleep, and there was nothing like driving a western interstate highway to put a man to sleep. Their first overnight was at a motel in Sheridan, just over the line into Wyoming. Getting that far, their first day driving the damned thing, had almost been their undoing, especially negotiating the split of I-90 and I-94 in Billings. They’d known that the cement truck would corner about as well as a hog on ice, but actually experiencing it had exceeded their worst fears. They ended up sleeping past eight that morning.
The motel was actually a truck stop of sorts that catered both to private cars and to interstate freight carriers. The dining room served a hearty breakfast, wolfed down by a lot of rugged-looking independent men, and a few similarly minded women. Breakfast conversation was predictable.
“Gotta be rag-head sunzabitches,” opined a big-bellied trucker with tattoos on his beefy forearms.
“Think so?” Ernie Brown asked from down the counter, hoping to get a feel for how these kindred souls felt about things.
“Who else would go after younguns? Sunzabitches.” The driver returned to his blueberry pancakes.
“If the TV has it right, those two cops got it done,” a milk hauler announced. “Five head shots. Whoa!”
“What about the one guy who went down hard, standing up like that against six riflemen! With a pistol. Dropped three of them, maybe four. There died a real American lawman.” He looked up from his pancakes again. This one had a load of cattle. “He’s earned his place in Valhalla, and that’s for damn sure.”
“Hey, they were feds, man,” Holbrook said, chewing on his toast. “They ain’t heroes. What about—”
“You can stick that one, good buddy,” the milk hauler warned. “I don’t wanna hear it. There was twenty, thirty children in that place.”
Another driver chimed in. “And that black kid, rollin’ on in with his -16. Damn, like when I was in the Cav for the Second of Happy Valley. I wouldn’t mind buying that boy a beer, maybe shake his hand.”
“You were AirCav?” the cattle hauler asked, turning away from his breakfast.
“Charlie, First of the Seventh.” He turned to show the oversized patch of the First Air Cavalry Division on his leather jacket.
“Gary Owen, bro’! Delta, Second/Seventh.” He stood up from the counter and walked over to take the man’s hand. “Where you outa?”
“Seattle. That’s mine out there with the machine parts. Heading for St. Louis. Gary Owen. Jesus, nice to hear that one again.”
“Every time I drive through here ...”
“You bet. We got brothers buried out yonder at Little Big Horn. Always say a little prayer for ’em when I come through.”
“Shit.” The two men shook hands again. “Mike Fallon.”
“Tim Yeager.”
The two Mountain Men had not just come into the room for breakfast. These were their kind of people. Supposed to be, anyway. Rugged individualists. Federal cops as heroes? What the hell was that all about?
“Boy, we find out who bankrolled this job, I hope that Ryan fella knows what to do ’bout it,” machine parts said.
“Ex-Marine,” cattle replied. “He ain’t one of them. He’s one of us. Finally.”
“You may be right. Somebody’s gotta pay for this one, and I hope we get the right people to do the collectin’.”
“Damn right,” the milk hauler agreed from his spot on the counter.
“Well.” Ernie Brown stood. “Time for us to boogie on down the road.”
The others nearby took a cursory look, and that was all, as the truckers returned to their informal opinion poll.
“IF YOU DON’T feel better by tomorrow, you’re going to the doctor, and that’s final!” she said.
“Oh, I’ll be all right.” But that protestation came out as a groan. He wondered if this was Hong Kong flu or something else. Not that he knew the difference. Few people did, and in a real sense that included docs and he did know that. What would they tell him? Rest, liquids, aspirin, which he was already doing. He felt as though he’d been placed in a bag and beaten with baseball bats, and all the traveling didn’t help. Nobody liked traveling. Everyone liked being somewhere else, but getting there was always a pain in the ... everywhere, he grumped. He allowed himself to fade back off to sleep, hoping his wife wouldn’t worry too much. He’d feel better by tomorrow. These things always went away. He had a comfortable bed, and a TV controller. As long as he didn’t move around it didn’t hurt ... much. It couldn’t get any worse. Then it would get better. It always did.
WHEN PEOPLE GOT to a certain point, their work never really stopped. They could go away, but then the work came to them, found them wherever they might be, and the only issue, really, was how expensive it was to bring the work to them. That was a problem for both Jack Ryan and Robby Jackson.
For Jack it was the speeches Callie Weston had prepared for him—he’d be flying tomorrow, to Tennessee, then to Kansas, then to Colorado, then to California, and finally back to Washington, arriving at three in the morning on what was going to be the biggest special-election day in American history. Just over a third of the House seats vacated by that Sato guy would be selected, with the remainder to be done over the following two weeks. Then he’d have a full Congress to work with, and maybe, just maybe, he could get some real work done. Pure politics loomed in his immediate future. This coming week he’d be going over the detailed plans to streamline two of the government’s most powerful bureaucracies, Defense and Treasury. The rest were in the works, too.
Since he was here with the President, Admiral Jackson was also getting everything developed by the office of J- 2, the Pentagon’s chief of intelligence, so that he could conduct the daily around-the-world brief. It took him an hour just to go over the materials.
“What’s happening, Rob?” Jack asked, and instead of a friendly inquiry into how a guy’s week was going, the President was asking the state of the entire planet. The J- 3’s eyebrows jerked up.
“Where do you want me to start?”
“Pick a spot,” the President suggested.
“Okay, Mike Dubro and the Ike group arestill heading north to China, making good time. Good
weather and calm seas, they’re averaging twenty-five knots. That advances their ETA by a few hours. Exercises continue on the Formosa Strait, but both sides are hugging their coasts now. Looks like maybe the shoot-downs got everybody to calm down a bit. Secretary Adler is supposed to be in there right now, talking to them about things.
“Middle East. We’re watching the UIR military run exercises, too. Six heavy divisions, plus attachments and tactical air. Our people on the scene have Predators up and watching pretty closely—”
“Who authorized that?” the President asked.
“I did,” Jackson replied.
“Invading another country’s airspace?”
“J-2 and I are running this. You want us to know what they’re up to and what their capabilities are, don’t you?”
“Yes, I need that.”
“Good, you tell me what to do, and let me worry about how, all right? It’s a stealthy platform. It self-destructs if it goes out of control or the guys directing it don’t like something, and it gives us very good real-time data we can’t get from satellites, or even from J-STARS, and we don’t have one of those over there at the moment. Any other questions, Mr. President?”
“Touché, Admiral. What’s the take look like?”
“They’re looking better than our initial intelligence assessment led us to expect. Nobody’s panicking yet, but this is starting to get our attention.”
“What about Turkestan?” Ryan asked.
“They’re evidently trying to get elections going, but that’s old information, and that’s all we know on the political side. The overall situation there is quiet at the moment. Satellites show increased cross-border traffic—mainly trade, the overhead-intelligence guys think, nothing more than that.”
“Anybody looking at Iranian—damn, UIR—troop dispositions on the border?”
“I don’t know. I can check.” Jackson made a note. “Next, we’ve spotted the Indian navy.”
“How?”
“They’re not making a secret of anything. I had ’em send a pair of Orions off from Diego Garcia. They spotted our friends from three hundred miles out, electronic emissions. They are about four hundred miles offshore from their base. And, by the way, that places them directly between Diego and the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Our defense attaché will drop in tomorrow to ask what they’re up to. They probably won’t tell him very much.”
“If they don’t, I think maybe Ambassador Williams will have to make a call of his own.”
“Good idea. And that’s the summary of today’s news, unless you want the trivia.” Robby tucked his documents away. “What do your speeches look like?”
“The theme is common sense,” the President reported.
“In Washington?”
ADLER WAS NOT overly pleased. On arriving in Beijing, he’d learned that the timing wasn’t good. His aircraft had gotten in on what had turned out to be a Saturday evening—the date line again, he realized—then he learned that the important ministers were out of town, studiously downplaying the significance of the air battle over the strait, and giving him a chance to recover from jet lag so that he would be up to a serious meeting. Or so they’d said.
“What a pleasure to have you here,” the Foreign Minister said, taking the American’s hand and guiding him into his private office. Another man was waiting in there. “Do you know Zhang Han San?”
“No, how do you do, Minister?” Adler asked, taking his hand as well. So, this was what he looked like.
People took their seats. Adler was alone. In addition to the two PRC ministers, there was an interpreter, a woman in her early thirties.
“Your flight was a pleasant one?” the Foreign Minister inquired.
“Coming to your country is always pleasant, but I do wish the flight were faster,” Adler admitted.
“The effects of travel on the body are often difficult, and the body does affect the mind. I trust you have had some time to recover. It is important,” the Foreign Minister went on, “that high-level discussions, especially in times of unpleasantness, are not clouded by extraneous complications.”
“I am well rested,” Adler assured them. He’d gotten plenty of sleep. It was just that he wasn’t sure what time it was in whatever location his body thought itself to be. “And the interests of peace and stability compel us to make the occasional sacrifice.”
“That is so true.”
“Minister, the unfortunate events of the last week have troubled my country,” SecState told his hosts.
“Why do those bandits seek to provoke us?” the Foreign Minister asked. “Our forces are conducting exercises, that is all. And they shot down two of our aircraft. The crewmen are all dead. They have families. This is very sad, but I hope you have noted that the People’s Republic has not retaliated.”
“We have noted this with gratitude.”
“The bandits shot first. You also know that.”
“We are unclear on that issue. One of the reasons for my coming here is to ascertain the facts,” Adler replied.
“Ah.”
Had he surprised them? SecState wondered. It was like a card game, though the difference was that you never really knew the value of the cards in your own hand. A flush still beat a straight, but the hole card was always down, even for its owner. In this case, he had lied, but while the other side might suspect the lie, they didn’t know for sure, and that affected the game. If they thought he knew, they would say one thing. If they thought he didn’t know, they’d say another. In this case, they thought he knew, but they weren’t sure. He’d just told them otherwise, which could be a lie or the truth. Advantage, America. Adler had thought about this all the way over.
“You have said publicly that the first shot was taken by the other side. Are you sure of this?”
“Completely,” the Foreign Minister assured him.
“Excuse me, but what if the shot were taken by one of your lost pilots? How would we ever know?”
“Our pilots were under strict orders not to fire except in self-defense.”
“That is both a reasonable and prudent guide for your personnel. But in the heat of battle—or if not battle, a somewhat tense situation, mistakes do happen. We have the problem ourselves. I find aviators to be impulsive, especially the young, proud ones.”
“Is not the same true of the other side as well?” the Foreign Minister asked.
“Certainly,” Adler admitted. “That is the problem, isn’t it? Which is why,” he went on, “it is the business of people like ourselves to ensure that such situations do not arise.”
“But they always provoke us. They hope to garner your favor, and we find it troubling that this may have succeeded.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your President Ryan spoke of two Chinas. There is only one China, Secretary Adler. I’d thought that issue settled a long time ago.”
“That was a semantic error on the President’s part, a linguistic nuance,” Adler replied, dismissing the observation. “The President has many qualities, but he has yet to learn the niceties of diplomatic exchange, and then a foolish reporter seized on the issue. Nothing more than that. There have been no changes in our policies toward this region.” But Adler had deliberately not said “our policies,” and “have been” instead of “are.” There were times when he thought that he might have made a fortune for himself by drafting insurance policies.
“Such linguistic errors can be seen as things other than errors,” the Foreign Minister replied.
“Have I not made our position clear on this issue? You will recall that he was responding to a most unfortunate incident in which American lives were lost, and in searching for words to use, he selected words which have one meaning in our language, and another in yours.” This was going a lot easier than he’d expected.
“Chinese lives were lost as well.”
Zhang, Adler saw, was doing a lot of listening but wasn’t uttering a single word. In the Western context, that made him an aide, a te
chnical assistant, there to assist his minister on an issue of law or interpretation. He wasn’t so sure that rule applied in this case. More likely, the reverse applied. If Zhang were what the American thought him to be, and if Zhang were smart enough to suspect that the American would be thinking along those lines—then why the hell was he here?
“Yes, and various others, to little purpose and great sorrow. I hope you will understand that our President takes such things seriously.”
“Indeed, and I am remiss in not saying sooner that we view with horror the attack on his daughter. I trust you will convey to President Ryan our heartfelt sympathy at this inhuman act, and our pleasure that no harm has come to his child.”
“I thank you on his behalf, and I will pass your good wishes along.” Twice in a row now the Foreign Minister had temporized. He had an opening. He reminded himself that his interlocutors thought themselves smarter and shrewder than everybody else. “My President is a sentimental man,” the Secretary admitted. “It is an American trait. Moreover, he feels strongly about his duty to protect all of our citizens.”
“Then you need to speak to the rebels on Taiwan. We believe that it is they who destroyed the airliner.”
“But why do such a thing?” Adler asked, ignoring the really surprising part. Was it a slip? Talk to Taiwan. The PRC was asking him to do that?
“To foment this incident, obviously. To play upon your President’s personal feelings. To cloud the real issues between the People’s Republic and our wayward province.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Yes, we do,” the Foreign Minister assured him. “We do not wish to have hostilities. Such things are so wasteful of people and resources, and we have greater concerns for our country. The Taiwan issue will be decided in due course. So long as America does not interfere,” he added.
“As I have already told you, Minister, we have made no policy changes. All we wish is the restoration of peace and stability,” Adler said, the obvious import being the indeterminate maintenance of the status quo, which was decidedly not part of the People’s Republic game plan.
