by Tom Clancy
The reason for that came not from his mission orders, but from TV. Every naval vessel in the group had its own satellite-TV receiver; in the modern Navy, the sailors wanted and got their own cable system, and while the crew spent most of their time watching the various movie channels—Playboy was always a favorite, sailors being sailors—the group commander was overdosing on CNN, because while his mission orders didn’t always give him all the background information he needed for his missions, very often commercial TV did. The crews were tense. The news of events at home could not have been concealed from them in any case, and the images of sick and dying people, blocked interstates, and empty city streets had initially shaken them badly, causing officers and chiefs to sit down with the men on the mess decks to talk things through. Then had come these orders. Things were happening in the Persian Gulf, things were happening at home, and all of a sudden the MPS ships, with their brigade set of combat vehicles, were heading for the Saudi port of Dhahran... and the Indian navy was in the way. The crew was quiet now, Captain Greg Kemper of USS Anzio saw. His chiefs reported that the “troops” were not laughing and cutting up in the mess rooms, and the constant simulations on the Aegis combat system in the past few days had conveyed their own message. COMEDY was sailing in harm’s way.
Each of the escorting ships had a helicopter. These coordinated with the crack ASW team on O’Bannon, name-sake of the Navy’s golden ship of World War II, a Fletcher-class destroyer which had fought in every major Pacific engagement without a casualty or a scratch; the new one had a gold A on her superstructure, the mark of a submarine-killer of note—at least in simulation. Kidd’s heritage was less lucky. Named for Admiral Isaac Kidd, who had died aboard USS Arizona on the morning of December 7, 1941, she was a member of the “dead-admiral class” of four missile destroyers originally built for the Iranian navy under the Shah, forced on a reluctant President Carter, and then perversely all named for admirals who’d died in losing battles. Anzio, in one of the Navy’s stranger traditions, was named for a land battle, part of the Italian campaign in 1943, in which a daring invasion had developed into a desperate struggle. Ships of war were actually made for that sort of business, but it was the business of their commanders to see that the desperate part applied to the other guy.
In a real war, that would have been easy. Anzio had fifteen Tomahawk missiles aboard, each with a thousand-pound warhead, and nearly in range of the Indian battle group. In an ideal world he’d loose them at just over two hundred miles, based on targeting information from the Orions—his helicopters could do that, too, but the P-3Cs were far more survivable.
“Captain!” It was a petty officer on the ESM board. “We’re getting airborne radars. The Orion has some company approaching, looks like two Harriers, distance unknown, constant bearing, signal strength increasing.”
“Thank you. It’s a free sky until somebody says different,” Kemper reminded everybody.
Maybe it was an exercise, but the Indian battle group hadn’t moved forty miles in the past day, instead traveling back and forth, east and west, crossing and recrossing its own course track. Exercises were supposed to be more free-form than that. What the situation told the captain of USS Anzio was that they’d staked out this piece of ocean as their own. And the Indians just happened to be between where COMEDY was and where it wanted to be.
Nothing was very secret about it, either. Everyone pretended that normal peacetime conditions were in effect. Anzio had her SPY-1 radar operating, pumping out millions of watts. The Indians were using theirs as well. It was almost like a game of chicken.
“Captain, we have bogies, we have unknown multiple air contacts bearing zero-seven-zero, range two-one-five miles. No squawk ident, they are not commercial. Designate Raid-One.” The symbols came up on the center screen.
“No emitters on that bearing,” ESM reported.
“Very well.” The captain crossed his legs in his command chair. In the movies this was where Gary Cooper lit up a smoke.
“Raid-One appears to be four aircraft in formation, speed four-five-zero knots, course two-four-five.” Which made them inbounds, though not quite directly at COMEDY.
“Projected CPA?” the captain asked.
“They will pass within twenty miles on their current course, sir,” a sailor responded crisply.
“Very well. Okay, people, listen up. I want this place cool and businesslike. You all know the job. When there’s reason to be excited, I will be the one to tell you,” he told the CIC crew. “Weapons tight.” Meaning that peacetime rules still applied, and nothing was actually ready to fire—a situation that could be remedied by turning a few keys.
“Anzio, this is Gonzo-Four, over,” a voice called on the air-to-surface radio.
“Gonzo-Four, Anzio, over.”
“Anzio,” the aviator reported, “we got two Harriers playing tag with us. One just zipped by at about fifty yards. He’s got white ones on the rails.” Real missiles hanging under the wings, not pretend ones.
“Doing anything?” the air-control officer asked.
“Negative, just like he’s playing a little.”
“Tell him to continue the mission,” the captain said. “And pretend he doesn’t care.”
“Aye, sir.” The message was relayed.
This sort of thing wasn’t all that unusual. Fighter pilots were fighter pilots, the captain knew. They never grew up past the stage of buzzing by girls on their bikes. He directed his attention to Raid-One. Course and speed were unchanged. This wasn’t a hostile act. The Indians were letting him know that they knew who was in their neighborhood. That was evident from the appearance of fighters in two places at the same time. It was definitely a game of chicken now.
What to do now? he wondered. Play tough? Play dumb? Play apathetic? People so often overlooked the psychological aspect of military operations. Raid-One was now 150 miles out, rapidly approaching the range of his SM-2 MR SAMs.
“What d’ya think, Weps?” he asked his weapons officer.
“I think they’re just trying to piss us off.”
“Agreed.” The captain flipped a mental coin. “Well, they’re harassing the Orion. Let ’em know we see ’em,” he ordered.
Two seconds later, the SPY search radar jacked up its power to four million watts, sent all of it down one degree of bearing at the inbound fighters, and increased the “dwell” on the targets, which meant they were being hit almost continuously. It was enough to peg the threat-detection gear they had to have aboard. Inside of twenty miles, it could even start damaging such equipment, depending on how delicate it was. That was called a “zorch,” and the captain still had another two million watts of power up his sleeve. The joke was that if you really pissed off an Aegis, you might start producing two-headed kids.
“Kidd just went to battle stations, sir,” the officer of the deck reported.
“Good training time, isn’t it?” Range to Raid-One was just over one hundred miles now. “Weps, light ’em up.”
With that command, the ship’s four SPG-51 target-illumination radars turned, sending pencil beams of X-band energy at the inbound fighters. These radars told the missiles how to find their targets. The Indian threat gear would pick that up, too. The fighters didn’t change course or speed.
“Okay, that means we’re not playing rough today. If they were of a mind to do something, they’d be maneuvering now,” the captain told his crew. “You know, like turning the corner when you see a cop.” Or they had ice water in their veins, which didn’t seem likely.
“Going to eyeball the formation?” Weps asked.
“That’s what I’d do. Take some pictures, see what’s here,” Kemper thought.
“A lot of things happening at once, sir.”
“Yep,” the captain agreed, watching the display. He lifted the growler phone.
“Bridge,” the OOD answered.
“Tell your lookouts I want to know what they are. Photos, if possible. How’s visibility topside?”
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p; “Surface haze, not bad aloft, sir. I’ve got men on the Big Eyes now.”
“Very well.”
“They’ll go past us to the north, turn left, and come down our port side,” the captain predicted.
“Sir, Gonzo-Four reports a very close pass a few seconds ago,” air control said.
“Tell him to stay cool.”
“Aye, Cap’n.” The situation developed quickly after that. The fighters circled COMEDY twice, never closer than five nautical miles. The Indian Harriers spent another fifteen minutes around the patrolling Orion, then had to return back to their carrier to refuel, and another day at sea continued with no shots fired and no overtly hostile acts, unless you counted the fighter play, and that was pretty routine. When all was settled down, the captain of USS Anzio turned to his communications officer.
“I need to talk to CINCLANT. Oh, Weps?” Kemper added.
“Yes, sir?”
“I want every combat system on this ship fully checked out.”
“Sir, we just ran a full check twelve hours—”
“Right now, Weps,” he emphasized quietly.
“AND THAT’S GOOD news?” Cathy asked.
“Doctor, that’s real simple,” Alexandre said in reply. “You watched some people die this morning. You will watch more die tomorrow, and that stinks. But thousands is better than millions, isn’t it? I think this epidemic is going to burn out.” He didn’t add that it was somewhat easier for him. Cathy was an eye cutter. She wasn’t used to dealing with death. He was infectious diseases, and he was used to it. Easier? Was that the word? “We’ll know in a couple of days from statistical analysis of the cases.”
The President nodded silently. Van Damm spoke for him: “What’s the count going to be?”
“Less than ten thousand, according to the computer models at Reed and Detrick. Sir, I am not being cavalier about this. I’m saying that ten thousand is better than ten million.”
“One death is a tragedy, and a million is a statistic,” Ryan said finally.
“Yes, sir. I know that one.” The good news didn’t make Alexandre all that happy. But how else to tell people that a disaster was better than a catastrophe?
“Iosef Vissarionovich Stalin,” SWORDSMAN told them. “He did have a way with words.”
“You know who did it,” Alex observed.
“What makes you say that?” Jack asked.
“You didn’t react normally to what I told you, Mr. President.”
“Doctor, I haven’t done much of anything normally over the past few months. What does this mean about the no-travel order?”
“It means we leave it in place for at least another week. Our prediction is not carved in stone. The incubation period for the disease is somewhat variable. You don’t send the fire trucks home as soon as the last flame disappears. You sit there and watch for another possible flare-up. That will happen here, too. What’s worked to this point is that people are frightened to death. Because of that, personal interactions are minimized, and that’s how you stop one of these things. We keep ’em that way. The new cases will be very circumscribed. We attack those like we did with smallpox. Identify the cases, test everyone with whom they’ve had contact, isolate the ones with antibodies, and see how they do. It’s working, okay? Whoever did this miscalculated. The disease isn’t anywhere near as contagious as they thought—or maybe the whole thing was just a psychological exercise. That’s what bio-war is. The great plagues of the past really happened because people didn’t know how diseases spread. They didn’t know about microbes and fleas and contaminated water. We do. Everybody does, you learn it in health class in school. Hell, that’s why we haven’t had any medics infected. We’ve had lots of practice dealing with AIDS and hepatitis. The same precautions that work with those also work with this.”
“How do we keep it from happening again?” van Damm asked.
“I told you that already. Funding. Basic research on the genetic side, and more focused work on the diseases we know about. There’s no particular reason why we can’t develop safe vaccines for Ebola and a lot of others.”
“AIDS?” Ryan asked.
“That’s a toughie. That virus is an agile little bastard. No attempt for a vaccine has even come close yet. No, on that side, basic genetic research to determine how the biologic mechanism works, and from that to get the immune system to recognize it and kill it—some sort of vaccine; that’s what a vaccine is. But how to make it work, well, we haven’t figured that one yet. We’d better. In twenty years, we might have to write Africa off. Hey,” the Creole said, “I got kin over there, y’know?
“That’s one way to keep it from happening again. You, Mr. President, are already working on the other way. Who was it?”
He didn’t have to tell anybody how secret it was: “Iran. The Ayatollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei and his merry men.”
Alexandre reverted to officer in the United States Army: “Sir, you can kill all of them you want, as far as I’m concerned.”
IT WAS INTERESTING to see Mehrabad International Airport in daylight. Clark had never experienced Iran as a friendly country. Supposedly, before the fall of the Shah, the people had been friendly enough, but he hadn’t made the trip soon enough for that. He’d come in covertly in 1979 and again in 1980, first to develop information for, and then to participate in, the attempt to rescue the hostages. There were no words to describe what it was like to be in a country in a revolutionary condition. His time on the ground in the Soviet Union had been far more comfortable. Enemy or not, Russia had always been a civilized country with lots of rules and citizens who broke them. But Iran had ignited like a dry forest in a lightning storm. “Death to America” had been a chant on everyone’s lips, and that, he remembered, was about as scary as things got when you were in the middle of the mob singing that song. One little mistake, just contacting an agent who’d been turned, would have been his death, rather a frightening thought to a man with young children, spook or no spook. Locally they shot some criminals, but spies they mostly hanged. It seemed a gratuitously cruel way to take a man’s life.
Some things had changed in the intervening years. Some had not. There was still a suspicion of foreigners here at the customs post. The clerk was backed up by armed men, and their job was to prevent the entry of people like him. For the new UIR, as for the previous country, every new face was a potential spy.
“Klerk,” he said, handing over his passport, “Ivan Sergeyevich.” What the hell, the Russian cover identity had worked before, and he already had it memorized. Better yet, his Russian was letter-perfect. He’d passed as a Soviet citizen before a uniformed official more than once.
“Chekov, Yevgeniy Pavlovich,” Chavez told the next clerk over.
They were, again, news correspondents. Rules prohibited CIA officers from covering themselves as American reporters, but that didn’t apply to the foreign media.
“The purpose of your visit?” the first clerk asked.
“To learn about your new country,” Ivan Sergeyevich replied. “It must be very exciting for everyone.” For their work in Japan, they’d brought camera gear, and a useful little gadget that looked like, and indeed was, a bright light. Not this time.
“He and I are together,” Yevgeniy Pavlovich told his clerk.
The passports were brand-new, though one could not have told it from casual inspection. It was one of the few things Clark and Chavez didn’t have to worry about. RVS tradecraft was every bit as good as the former KGB’s had been. They made some of the best fake documents in the world. The pages were covered with stamps, many overlapping, and were creased and dog-eared from years of apparent use. An inspector grabbed their bags and opened them. He found clothing, clearly much used, two books, which he flipped through to see if they were pornographic, two cameras of medium quality, their black enamel well-chipped but the lenses new. Each had a carry-on bag with note pads and mini-tape recorders. The inspectors took their time, even after the clerks had done their work, finally pas
sing their country’s visitors through with a palpable reluctance.
“Spasiba,” John said pleasantly, getting his bags and moving off. Over the years, he’d learned not to conceal his relief completely. Normal travelers were intimidated. He had to be, too, lest he stand apart from them. The two CIA officers went outside to catch a cab, standing together in line silently as the rank of taxis ate up the new arrivals. When they were two back, Chavez dropped his travel bag, and the contents spilled out. He and Clark let two people jump ahead of them in line while he repacked the bag. That almost certainly guaranteed a random cab, unless they were all being driven by spooks.
The trick was to look normal in all respects. Not too stupid. Never too smart. To get disoriented and ask for directions, but not too often. To stay in cheap hotels. And in their particular case, to pray that none of the people who’d seen them during their brief visit to this city crossed their path. The mission was supposed to be a simple one. That was usually the idea. You rarely sent intelligence officers out on complex missions—they’d have the good sense to refuse. The simple ones were hairy enough once you got out there.
