Tom Clancy's Power Plays 1 - 4

by Tom Clancy

  The pirate rose to his feet, dragged Chien’s body to the edge of the deck, and kicked it overboard. In the vastness of the open sea it seemed there was hardly a splash as it hit the water and was swallowed up.

  When the pirate returned to where he’d tied the ladder to the handrail, he found that the second pirate had managed to haul himself aboard. The rest of their team and five of the men in the other raiding party were also on deck, waiting for the last pirate to complete his climb.

  A moment later he was up and they were all racing toward the forward part of the ship.

  The pilot sank beneath the wheel in a lifeless heap, his blood pattering from his maps and Playboy pin-ups like falling rain. His killer had made fast work of him after entering the bridge, stealing up from behind, and slicing open his throat just as the first man aboard had done to Chien Lo. Caught completely by surprise, he hadn’t even known what hit him, let alone gotten a chance to hail for assistance.

  Now a second pirate came in, sidestepped the corpse, and took the wheel. His eyes roaming over the instrument panel in front of him, he nodded to the first man, who clapped him on the back, sheathed his dripping blade, and then rushed outside to give the others the good news.

  They had taken full control of the vessel. Next they would deal with its remaining crew.

  “Get on you knees, hands behind you heads!” the Iban shouted from the stairwell. Although every one of the ship’s hands looked like Malays, he’d barked his orders through his bandanna in a serviceable if unpolished English. The national language had many variations in dialect, and he wanted to avoid confusion.

  The crewmen gaped up at him from the card table, faces stunned, playing cards spilling from their fingers in a fluttery welter. Footsteps clattered behind the pirate leader as the rest of his band followed him down the metal risers from the deck.

  “Do it now or I kill you all! the Iban grunted, noting the crew’s frozen hesitation and motioning them away from the table with the snout of his Beretta 70/90.

  The four men complied, making no attempt at resistance, getting up in such a rush they clumsily knocked over several chairs.

  They knelt in the middle of the cramped little hold and looked at the raiders in silence.

  The Iban noticed that one of the captives had slipped off his wristwatch and was holding it out in his hand, offering up the timepiece as if to get done with the affair as quickly as possible. He knew what the man was thinking, and almost pitied him. None of the recent anti-piracy operations by Malaysia, Indonesia, the Phillippines, and China had done anything to decrease the high incidence of attacks in local waters. With thousands of jungled islands and vast stretches of ocean to patrol, the naval authorities could not hope to keep pace with their quarry, let alone ferret out their hidden land bases. Regional shipping companies were well aware of this, and simply figured losses to theft and hijacking into the overall cost of their operations.

  The pirate chief’s eyes moved over the faces of the sailors. While they looked tense and anxious in the cast of an overhead light fixture, none of those faces seemed especially fearful. And why should they be? The men were seasoned hands. They would have been through hijacks before, and expected to be robbed and sent off safely in dinghies and lifeboats. That was how it usually went.

  The poor, stupid bastards hadn’t any idea what had happened to their mates up above.

  The Iban waved over one of the pirates who had come rushing down the stairs at his heels. The man stepped up to him and leaned in close for his orders.

  “I don’t want their papers messed up, Juara,” the Iban warned in a coarse whisper, this time speaking his native tongue, Behasa Malayu. “That happens, all this is for shit, you understand?”

  Juara’s affirmative grunt was muffled by the dirty white towel shrouding his mouth and chin. A blockish, thick-necked man with a shaved head and lot of surplus weight around the middle, he gestured briskly to a couple of the other hijackers, who moved toward the kneeling seamen and ordered them to toss everything in their pockets onto the floor.

  The ship’s hands again did as they were told without challenge. Juara covered them with his rifle while his two companions went and gathered up their surrendered possessions, depositing them in a small heap on the table. When the hands had finished emptying their pockets, the pirates frisked them down to make sure they hadn’t withheld anything.

  Satisfied they’d gotten what they wanted, they nodded to Juara.

  Juara motioned the pair back to his side, then turned to look at the Iban headman.

  “Get it over with,” the Iban said.

  He tried to keep his voice hushed, but it was deep enough to seem almost booming in the constricted silence of the hold. A terrible understanding dawned on the crewmen’s features as their captors swung up their rifle barrels.

  Now they finally know, the pirate thought. And they fear.

  One of the ship’s hands opened his mouth to scream and started to his feet, but then the raiders triggered their weapons and he fell backwards, his clothes riddled with bullet holes, most of his head blown away. Swept by the hail of gunfire, the rest of the Kuan Yin’s crew also went down in a cloud of blood, bone, and tissue, their arms and legs sprawling out wildly in their final throes.

  The big Iban waited for the guns to stop their racket, then stepped over to the card table and randomly lifted a wallet from the pile of items that had been taken from the crewmen. He was eager to finish this last bit of business and return to the open deck; his ears rang from the shooting, and the air down here stank of burnt primer, blood, and the voided bowels of the dead.

  He opened the wallet and found a driver’s license in a transparent plastic sleeve. There was more identification in the other compartments. The slain crewman to whom the wallet had belonged was named Sang Ye.

  The Iban made a low, pleased sound in his throat. He hoped the sailor had lived his life fully and spent his money well. At any rate, his wallet and identity now belonged to someone who would make good use of them.

  There were big things in the works, very big, and the Iban was eager to reach Singapore and get cracking.

  He thought of the sheet of paper folded in his breast pocket, thought of the instructions that were written on it, thought of everything they were worth to him. Surely more than he’d made in any dozen hijacks.

  The American, Max Blackburn, didn’t stand a chance.

  No more than the crew of the ship had stood one....

  Not the slightest chance in the world.

  TWO

  PALO ALTO,

  CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 15, 2000

  WHEN ROGER GORDIAN WAS THIRTEEN YEARS OLD, he built a tree house in a scrub lot where he’d often gone to play with his friends. As originally conceived, it was to have been a lookout against adults who came within homing range, and a refuge from older children who were potential troublemakers. He’d sketched out the blueprint for it himself, and realized those plans with the help of his two best pals: Steve Padaetz, his next-door neighbor, and Johnny Cowans, a fidgety little kid who’d been nicknamed “Clip” for no reason anybody could remember. At one point, Roger had considered fortifying their tree house against marauders with a ring of elaborate booby traps, but none of the dozen or so he devised ever got beyond the planning stage. Truth be known, the boys hadn’t really expected a raid of any kind—that had just been a fanciful notion, something to enhance their frolics with a tingly edge of secrecy and adventure. There were very few kids in the neighborhood whom they considered enemies, and even fewer who were interested enough in their whereabouts or activities to hassle them.

  Or so the boys thought, anyway.

  The ladder and tools they’d used to construct the tree house had come from Roger’s parents’ garage. Steve had gotten the actual building materials from the hardware store/lumberyard owned by his dad, although Roger never really got around to asking whether they were obtained with Mr. Padaetz’s knowledge or consent. Somehow it didn’t
seem important at the time; the boys had needed little to complete their hideaway besides some two-by-fours, a few sheets of wood siding, and a box of nails, the unexplained absence of which would hardly have been enough to put Padaetz Home Improvements, the biggest family-owned business in Waterford, Wisconsin, on the financial skids.

  The Sentry Box, as the tree house came to be called, had been at the center of the three boys’ lives for an entire summer, beginning shortly after they got their final-quarter sixth-grade report cards, and ending a couple of weeks before the opening bells of junior high rang out. During the two hot, dreamy months that stretched between, they had idled away the daylight hours in and around it, swapping baseball cards and comic books and bad dirty jokes, poking around the woods, and conducting fruitless searches for the Indian arrowheads that, at least as schoolyard mythology had it, littered the undeveloped fields of Racine County.

  Sometime in late August, the boys had started fashioning what was to have been an outdoor gymnasium in the patch of grass directly below the tree house, using some additional lumber they’d managed to scavenge together over the long season. There were still two weeks to go before classes resumed, and they figured they had over a month beyond that until the weather got too cold for them to mess around outdoors after completing their homework and chores. They had built horizontal and parallel bars, and begun work on an exercise horse … but their expansion was abruptly aborted when the raid they’d once half-worried about became a devastating reality.

  The kids—teenagers, really—responsible for marring that idyllic period were Ed Kozinski, Kenny Whitman, and Anthony Piatt, who was Kenny’s third cousin and bore an attitude of perpetual, surly belligerence that marked him as someone to avoid at all costs. Perhaps two years older than Roger and his friends, this ghastly trio had never before taken the slightest notice of them, concentrating instead on acts of petty vandalism, finding ways to filch beer and cigarettes from local groceries, and making crude advances to girls who, by and large, pretended they didn’t exist. Somehow Anthony had learned about the tree house, and had gotten the idea that those girls might be more accepting of him and his cohorts if they had a nice, private, tucked-away spot where they could all go to get drunk and make out.

  The moment that thought reared itself from the bottom sludge of Anthony’s mind, the Sentry Box was effectively lost to the younger boys; they had wandered out to the tree house one morning and found Kenny and company occupying it like counterparts from some science-fictional negative universe. Their outdoor gym-in-the-making had been ruined, the pieces of wood they’d used to build their apparatus scattered about the field. The words ‘ ‘Jive Palase” were spray-painted across two sides of the tree house in huge, bright red letters, the second half of its new name unintentionally misspelled in what would have been a comical twist had the circumstances surrounding it not been so painful. To Roger Gordian, it felt almost like a desecration.

  Watching Roger and his companions from the entrance, Anthony sat with his legs swung out over the side of the box, a Parliament in his hand and a contemptuous grin on his face. The comics, trading cards, and everything else Roger’s group had hoarded inside it had been unceremoniously dumped, and lay among the welter of beer bottles, empty potato chip bags, candy wrappers, and crumpled cigarette packs on the ground beneath it.

  Roger and company barely had time to register what had happened before they were pelted with a fusillade of stones from their own lookout post. They had briefly considered taking a desperate stand against the invaders, but then one of those whizzing rocks had struck Clip dead center in his forehead and he’d dropped into the dirt, howling at the top of his lungs, blood streaming into his eyes from a wound that would later require four stitches and a tetanus shot. Roger had known then that he’d been beaten; worse, he had known it was no contest, and felt crushingly ashamed of his defenselessness. The other boys were bigger, meaner, and tougher than anybody in his little group. And they had been ready and waiting for a fight.

  As Kenny’s gang had begun climbing down the tree after them, Roger and Johnny had helped Clip to his feet and fled the scene.

  It had been Gordian’s first experience with a hostile takeover, and four decades and change later, the memory still stung.

  That the sting seemed especially acute tonight was quite understandable, given the distressing little bulletin his visitor had just delivered from the Wall Street front.

  “We went back there maybe two, three months later,” he said now, finishing his story. “By then Kenny and his parents had moved out of town, and his cousin was, I don’t know, just sort of neutralized without him. Anyway, we returned and found the tree house destroyed, same way the gym had been. Boards sticking out of the snow, nothing intact. I don’t know if it had been deliberately trashed, or if the numbskulls that moved in on us brought it down out of carelessness and stupidity. Doesn’t matter, I suppose. What does matter, and what still bugs me whenever I remember this sorry little episode, is that I surrendered the tree house to those punks in the first place. Let them take something that was mine, something I’d built from scratch, without a fight.”

  Charles Kirby looked at Gordian a while, and then drank some of his scotch and soda. It was nine o’clock at night and he was exhausted and jet-lagged after a long flight from New York. Still, he had joined Roger in the book-lined study of his Palo Alto home because he’d felt the news he was carrying was too important to wait until morning.

  Gord not only paid the law firm of Fisk, Kirby, and Towland a handsome retainer for their advice and representation in corporate affairs, he was also a close personal friend. When Kirby had learned that the Spartus consortium, UpLink International’s largest shareholder, intended to sell off its twenty-percent interest in the company, he’d immediately known what it augured, and had decided to fly out and tell Gordian about it face-to-face.

  Studying Gordian’s troubled features, he knew he’d made the right decision. A lean, graying man of forty-five with intelligent blue eyes, jutting cheekbones, and lips so thin that even his broadest smiles seemed wan, Kirby was wearing a dark-blue worsted suit over a white dress shirt that had lost its necktie, and been unbuttoned at the collar, somewhere around cruising altitude … a sartorial anomaly Gord had remarked upon the moment

  Kirby arrived at his house. Chuck, you’re the most fastidious dresser Fve ever met. The guy who sent me illustrated instructions on making a Windsor knot, and taught me that it was traditional for the bottom of a sport jacket to line up with the knuckle when your hands are straight down against your legs. The tieless look gives me an idea something’s wrong. Big-time.

  Accurate enough, Kirby thought, sipping his scotch.

  “Well, at least the creeps didn’t get to enjoy the place for long,” he said from the plump leather chair opposite Roger. “Bet you ten to one they never got any girls up there with them either.”

  “Nice try, Chuck. But let’s not skirt the issue,” Gordian said. “I’m a grown man, for godsakes. You’d think I could do better than to make the same mistakes that I did when I was still looking ahead to peach fuzz and my first kiss.”

  “Gord, listen to me—”

  “I want to know how I could have been blindsided. How I could leave myself open to having somebody try and grab UpLink right out from under my nose.”

  Kirby drained his scotch, lowered the glass, and rattled the melting ice cubes inside it.

  “You want me to sit here watching you bash away at yourself?” he said. “I wasn’t aware that was part of our professional arrangement, though I can check with my partners to be absolutely certain.”

  “Could you really?”

  Kirby frowned at his sarcasm.

  “Look,” Gordian said. “I’ve established my organization in dozens of countries, placed my employees at extreme risk in some of them, lost good people in others. If I can’t learn my lessons, can’t compete when the stakes are high, I shouldn’t be fooling around in the big leagues.”


  Kirby sighed. Granted, they were looking at a very serious problem, but Gordian ordinarily wasn’t the sort of man to let self-pity and defeatism through the door no matter how hard they tried shoving their way in. What the hell was wrong with him? Could this be a kind of delayed reaction to the encryption-tech controversy … a case of the psychological bends after finally coming up from leagues underneath it?

  Kirby thought about it a moment, and supposed that might be the case, considering how long it had dragged on and the flak Gordian had taken because of his public stance against the new government export policies. Maybe the operative factor here was exhaustion, and Gord was simply tapped out from waging too many battles on too many fronts at once. Maybe. And yet he couldn’t help but feel that something else was eating away at him, as well.

  “I won’t deny you were vulnerable, but why blame it on recklessness?” he said. “You’ve had a lot of strains on your financial resources lately, ranging from some outlays that were merely unavoidable, to others that you couldn’t have anticipated without a crystal ball.”

  Gordian’s peremptory look told Kirby he didn’t need to be further reminded. In that way the two men were alike: They made their points with a minimum of words. And besides, both of them had done the arithmetic many times over. There had been the huge price tag of manufacturing, launching, and insuring the constellation of low-earth-orbit, Ka-band satellites needed for UpLink’s orbital telecommunications network, the multimillion dollar cost of rebuilding the Russian ground station after it was nearly leveled by a terrorist attack the previous January, and the simultaneous expenses of getting the ground stations in Africa and Malaysia fully operational.

  An ambitious program of corporate initiatives, to be sure. But Gordian’s diversification from the defense technology that had earned him his fortune, while to some extent spurred by military downsizing, was not essentially profit-motivated—and that had always impressed the hell out of Kirby. Gord was not an ego-driven person. Nor was he an acquisitive one. Having made enough money to last him ten lifetimes, he could have done what a lot of fabulously rich men did and rested on his laurels, gone on long cruises to warm places, turned to breaking Guinness world records, whatever.