Dead or Alive

by Grant Blackwood

  In the morning he’d go out to sea and watch the merchant traffic. There was a surprising amount of that. It made more economic sense than either trucks or the rail line into the new oil fields and the gold-mining complex at Yessey. And they were building an oil pipeline to transport the oil into European Russia, funded by mostly American oil concerns. Locals called it the “American invasion.”

  Call it a day, he thought. He took a last slug of vodka and settled down on the mattress he’d laid on the deck of the wheelhouse, anticipating five or six hours of sleep.

  Save some extra scrutiny at Dallas customs, which Shasif had been told to expect, given his name and face, the plane change had gone smoothly. As instructed, he’d booked a roundtrip flight and was carrying luggage commensurate with a week’s stay in the United States. Similarly, he had arranged a rental car, booked himself into a hotel, and was well armed with brochures to local attractions, as well as e-mails from friends in the area. Shasif assumed they were real people; either way, it was highly unlikely that the authorities would check.

  All the red-flag issues had been covered. Still, the inspection had been nerve-racking, but in the end, it was uneventful. He was waved through the checkpoint and beyond to the gate.

  Seven hours after leaving Toronto, he touched down at Los Angeles International Airport at 10:45 in the morning, a little more than two hours’ difference on his watch, having essentially traveled backward in time as he crossed the country.

  After clearing customs once again, this time under the even unfriendlier eyes of LAX’s TSA agents, Shasif made his way to the Alamo counter and waited patiently in line for fifteen minutes. Ten minutes after that he was in his Dodge Intrepid and heading east on Century Boulevard. The car came equipped with one of those navigation computers, so he pulled over at a gas station, punched the address into the computer, then pulled back out and started following the arrows on the computer’s screen.

  By the time he pulled onto the 405 heading north it was nearing the lunch hour, so the traffic was getting heavier. By the time he reached Highway 10, the Santa Monica Freeway, cars were moving at a sporadic thirty miles an hour. How people lived in such a place, Shasif couldn’t imagine. Certainly it was beautiful, but all the noise and commotion… How could anyone hope to hear the quiet voice of God? It was no wonder America was in such a state of moral confusion.

  The Santa Monica Freeway was moving at a steadier clip, so he reached his turn onto the Pacific Coast Highway within ten minutes. Another seven miles brought him to his destination, Topanga Beach. He pulled into the parking lot, which was three-quarters full, found a spot nearest the beach trail, and pulled in.

  He climbed out. The wind was brisk off the ocean, and in the distance he could hear the cawing of seabirds. Over the dunes he could see surfers, five or six of them, carving their way through the surf. Shasif walked through the parking lot and over a small rise covered with scrub brush and onto the service road. Fifty feet down the dirt tract a lone figure stood, staring out over the ocean. The man was of Arab descent. Shasif checked his watch. On time. He walked over to the man.

  “Excuse me,” Shasif said, “I’m looking for the Reel Inn. I think I may have missed it.”

  The man turned. His eyes were shielded by a pair of sunglasses. “You did,” he replied. “By about three hundred feet. If you are looking for chowder, though, I would try Gladstone’s. The prices are higher, but the food’s better.”

  “Thank you.”

  That done, Shasif didn’t know what else to say. Just hand him the package and leave? The man made the decision for him, holding out his hand. Shasif drew the CD-ROM case from his jacket pocket and gave it to the man, noticing as he did the scars on his contact’s hands.

  Fire, Shasif thought.

  “You’re staying for a while?” the man asked.

  “Yes. Three days.”

  “Which hotel?”

  “The Doubletree. City of Commerce.”

  “Stay by your phone. We may have something for you. You’ve done well. If you’re interested, we may ask you to play a larger role.”

  “Of course. Anything I can do.”

  “We’ll be in touch.”

  And then the man was gone, walking back down the road.

  29

  JACK RYAN SR.’S private phone rang, and he lifted it, hoping for a distraction from writing. “Jack Ryan.”

  “Mr. President?”

  “Well, yeah, I used to be,” Ryan said, leaning back in his chair. “Who’s this?”

  “Sir, this is Marion Diggs. They made me FORCECOM. I’m at Fort McPherson, Georgia-Atlanta, actually.”

  “Four stars now?” Ryan remembered that Diggs had made something of a name for himself a few years back in Saudi Arabia. Pretty good battlefield commander as Buford-Six.

  “Yes, sir, that’s right.”

  “How’s life in Atlanta?”

  “Not too bad. The command has its moments. Sir-” His voice became a little uneasy. “Sir, I need to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “I’d prefer to do it in person, sir, not over the phone.”

  “Okay. Can you come here?”

  “Yes, sir, I have a twin-engine aircraft at my disposal. I can be to BWI airport in, oh, two and a half hours or so. Then I can drive down to your home.”

  “Fair enough. Give me an ETA and I’ll have the Secret Service pick you up. Is that agreeable?”

  “Yes, sir, that would be fine. I can leave here in fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay, that puts you at BWI around, oh, one-thirty or so?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Make it so, General. You’ll be met at the airport.”

  “Thank you, sir. See you in a few hours.”

  Ryan hung up and buzzed Andrea Price-O’Day.

  “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “Got company coming, General Marion Diggs. He’s FORCECOM from Atlanta. Flying into BWI. Can you arrange to have him picked up and driven here?”

  “Certainly, sir. When’s he getting in?”

  “About one-thirty, at the general aviation terminal.”

  “We’ll have somebody right there.”

  The General’s twin-prop U-21 arrived and did the usual rollout, right up to a Ford Crown Victoria. The general was easy to spot in his green shirt with four silver stars on the epaulets. Andrea had driven up herself, and the two didn’t talk much on the ride south to Peregrine Cliff.

  For his part, Ryan had set up lunch himself, including a pound and a half of corned beef from Attman’s on Lombard Street in Baltimore. The drive down and the general’s arrival had been handled fairly stealthily. Less than forty minutes after deplaning, Diggs was at the door. Ryan got it himself.

  Ryan had met Diggs only once or twice before. A man of equal height, and black as a hunk of anthracite coal, everything about him said “soldier,” including, Jack saw, a little bit of unease.

  “Hey, General, welcome,” Ryan said, taking the man’s hand. “What can I do for you?”

  “Sir, I’m-well, I’m a little uneasy about this, but I have a problem I think you ought to know about.”

  “Okay, come on in and build a sandwich. Coke okay?”

  “Yes, thank you, sir.” Ryan led him into the kitchen. After both men had assembled their sandwiches, Ryan took his seat. Andrea floated around on the periphery. General or not, he wasn’t exactly a regular here, and Andrea’s job was to keep Ryan alive against all hazards. “So, what’s the problem?”

  “Sir, President Kealty is going to try and prosecute a U.S. Army sergeant for alleged murder in Afghanistan.”

  “Murder?”

  “That’s what the justice department is calling it. They sent down an Assistant Attorney General to my command yesterday, and he questioned me personally. “As commander in chief of Forces Command, I legally own all the operational forces of the U.S. Army-other branches, too, but this is really an Army matter. The soldier involved is a Company First Sergeant (E-8) named Sa
m Driscoll. He’s a special ops soldier, part of the 75th Ranger Regiment at Fort Benning. I pulled his personnel package. He’s a very serious soldier, combat record is excellent, a poster-boy soldier and a hell of a good Ranger.”

  “Okay.” Ryan thought about that addition. He’d been to Fort Benning and had gotten the standard VIP tour of the base. The Rangers, all spit and polish for that day, had impressed him as supremely fit kids for whom killing was at the top of their job description. Special operations types, the American counterpart to the British SAS regiment. “What’s the problem?”

  “Sir, a while back we got an intel blip that the Emir might be in one particular cave, and so we detailed a special operation to go in and try and bag him. It turned out he wasn’t there. The problem, sir, is that Driscoll killed nine bad guys, and some people are upset about how he did that.”

  Ryan was two bites into his sandwich. “And?”

  “And it came to the President’s attention, and he directed DOJ to prosecute him for-that is, to investigate this incident for-a possible murder investigation, since it may or may not have violated an executive order for battlefield conduct. Driscoll took down nine people, some of them asleep.”

  “Murder? Awake or asleep, they were enemy combatants, right?”

  “Yes, sir. Driscoll had an adverse tactical situation, and in his judgment as the senior NCO on the scene, he had to eliminate them before continuing the mission. And so he did. But the guys at Justice-all political appointees, if that matters-seem to think he should have arrested them instead of killing them.”

  “Where does Kealty come into this?” Jack asked, sipping some of his Coke.

  “He read the report, and he was upset by it. So he brought it to the AG’s attention, and then the AG sent one of his people down to me to commence the investigation.” Diggs set his sandwich down. “Sir, this is hard for me. I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, and the President is my commander in chief, but goddamn it, this is one of my soldiers, a good soldier, doing a tough job. I have a duty to be loyal to the President, but-”

  “But you have a responsibility to be loyal to your sergeants,” Ryan finished the statement.

  “Yes, sir. Driscoll might not be much in the great scheme of things, but he’s a fine soldier.”

  Ryan thought this one over. Driscoll was only a soldier to Kealty, a low form of life. Had he been a union bus driver it might be different, but the U.S. Army didn’t have unions yet. For Diggs it was a question of justice, and a question of morale, which would suffer throughout the armed forces if this soldier went to prison, or even to a general court-martial over this incident.

  “Where’s the law on this?” Jack asked.

  “Sir, it’s a bit of a muddle. The President did send out orders, but they were not terribly clear, and anyway, such orders do not generally apply to special operations. His mission was to locate and capture this Emir guy if they found him-or kill him if that’s how it worked out. Soldiers are not policemen. They’re not trained for it, and they’re crummy at it when they try. From where I sit, Driscoll didn’t do anything wrong at all. Under the rules of war, you don’t have to warn an enemy before you kill him. It’s his job to look out for his own safety, and if he screws up, well, that’s his tough luck. Shooting a guy in the back is perfectly all right on a battlefield. That’s how soldiers are trained. In this case, four bad guys were asleep in the racks, and Sergeant Driscoll saw to it that they didn’t wake up. End of story.”

  “Is this going to go any further?”

  “The Assistant AG seemed to be pretty worked up about it. I tried to explain the facts of life to him, but he just tried to explain the facts of life back to me. Sir, I’ve been a soldier for thirty-four years. I ain’t never heard anything like this.” He paused. “The President sent us there. Just like into Iraq, but he’s running this like-like Vietnam was once, I suppose. We’ve lost a lot of people, good people, to their micromanagement, but this one-Jesus, sir, I just don’t know what to do.”

  “Not much I can do about it, General, I’m not the President anymore.”

  “Yes, sir, but I had to go to somebody. Ordinarily I report directly to the SecDef, but that’s a waste of time.”

  “Have you spoken with President Kealty?”

  “Waste of time, sir. He’s not very interested in talking to people in uniform.”

  “And I am?”

  “Yes, sir. You were always somebody we could talk to.”

  “And what do you want me to do?”

  “Sir, Sergeant Driscoll deserves a fair shake. We sent him into the mountains with a mission. The mission was not accomplished, but that wasn’t his fault. We’ve drilled a lot of dry holes there. This turned out to be just one more, but goddamn it, sir, if we send any more troops into those hills, and if we clobber this guy for doing his job, every hole we drill will be dry.”

  “Okay, General, you’ve made your point. We have to support our people. Anything this guy should have done different?”

  “No, sir. He’s a by-the-book soldier. Everything he did was consistent with his training and experience. The Ranger Regiment-well, they’re paid killers, maybe, but sometimes that’s a useful sort of thing to have in your bag. War is about killing. We don’t send messages. We don’t try to educate our enemies. Once we go into the field, our job is to kill them. Some people don’t like that, but that’s what we’re paid for.”

  “Okay, I’ll look into this and maybe raise a little hell. What are the ground rules?”

  “I brought a copy of Sergeant Driscoll’s report for you to read, along with the name of the Assistant AG who tried to ram it up my ass. Goddamn it, sir, this is a good soldier.”

  “Fair enough, General. Anything else?”

  “No, sir. Thanks for lunch.”

  He’d had maybe one bite of his sandwich, Ryan saw. Diggs walked back out to the car.

  30

  THE FLIGHT was uneventful. The rollout ended, and they’d been on the aircraft for eight and a half hours when the transfer bus pulled up to the left-front door of the 777. Clark didn’t sit. He’d done enough of that to make his legs stiff. The same was true of his grandson, who looked excitedly out at his native land-he’d actually been born in the UK, but he already had a baseball and his first glove. He’d be playing T-ball in six months or so, and he’d be eating real hot dogs as an American boy was supposed to. On a roll, with mustard, and maybe some onions or relish.

  “Glad to be home, baby?” Ding asked Patsy.

  “I liked it over there, and I’ll miss my friends, but home is home.”

  Despite urging to go on ahead from both Clark and Chavez, their wives had gotten off the plane at Heathrow, and no amount of argument had changed their minds. “We’re going home together,” Sandy had declared, firmly bringing the discussion to an end.

  The Tripoli op had gone off without any significant hitches. Eight bad guys KIA with only minor injuries among the hostages. Within five minutes of Clark’s “go” to Masudi, local ambulances pulled up to the embassy to treat the hostages, most of whom were suffering from dehydration but little else. Minutes after that, the Swedish Säkerhetspolisen and Rikskriminalpolisen arrived and took charge of the embassy, and two hours after that, Rainbow was back aboard the same Piaggio P180 Avanti they’d flown in on, heading north for Taranto, then London.

  The official debrief of the operation with Stanley, Weber, and the others would come later, probably via secure webcam once Clark and Chavez had settled back into life in the United States. Including them in the debrief was as much a courtesy as it was a necessity, and probably a little more of the former. He and Ding were officially separated from Rainbow, and Stanley had been right there in Tripoli, so aside from the “lessons learned” postmortem they did for each mission, Clark had little to offer the official report.

  “How you feeling?” John Clark asked his wife now.

  “I’ll sleep it off.” Westbound jet lag was always easier to deal with. The eastbound kind could b
e a killer. She stretched. Even first-class seats on British Airways had their limitations. Air travel, while convenient, is rarely good for you. “Got the passports and stuff?”

  “Right here, babe,” Ding assured her, tapping his jacket pocket. J.C. must have been one of the youngest Americans ever to have a black diplomatic passport. But Ding also had his.45 Beretta automatic pistol, and the gold badge and ID card that said he was a deputy U.S. marshal, which was very useful indeed for an armed man in an international airport. He even still had his British carry permit-rare enough that the Queen practically had to sign it. The former allowed them to speed through customs and immigration.

  After customs, they found in the public reception area a nondescript man holding a cardboard card with CLARK written on it, and the party of five moved to where he was.

  “How was the flight?” The usual question.

  “Fine.” The usual answer.

  “I’m parked outside. Blue Plymouth Voyager with Virginia tags. You’ll be staying at the Key Bridge Marriott, two top-floor suites.” Which will have been fully swept, he didn’t have to add. The Marriott chain did a lot of government business, especially the one at the Key Bridge, overlooking Washington.

  “And tomorrow?” John asked.

  “You’re scheduled for eight-fifteen.”

  “Who are we seeing?” Clark asked.

  The man shrugged. “It’ll be on the seventh floor.”

  Clark and Chavez traded an oh, shit look, but for all that it wasn’t surprising, and both were ready for a lengthy night’s sleep that would probably end about 0530 at the latest, but this time without the three-mile run and the daily dozen setting-up exercises.

  “How was England?” The receptionist/driver asked on the way out.

  “Civilized. Some of it was pretty exciting,” Chavez told him, but then realized that the official greeter was a junior field officer who hadn’t a clue what they’d been doing in Old Blighty. Probably just as well. He didn’t have the look of former military, though you couldn’t always tell.