by Tom Clancy
Foley agreed. “It’s pretty much like everything FSB director Roman Talanov has a hand in. He sacrifices people for his needs. His own people. He frames people and organizations he opposes to misplace blame.”
Canfield added, “Obviously we were involved in Sevastopol, though we weren’t involved in either the Donetsk bombing or the Zueva assassination or the killings of Biryukov or Golovko. Talanov can make all the claims he wants, but there is no proof whatsoever.”
Ryan said, “The men who survived the attack in Sevastopol laid responsibility on this Russian criminal organization that has been active in Ukraine. I’ve been reading up on the Seven Strong Men for the past half-hour.”
Foley nodded. “Yes, sir. The Russians have been arming and training the Seven Strong Men as well as pro-Russian Ukrainians in the eastern part of the nation. They have created a fifth column out of the Russian mob and these armed rebels.”
Ryan asked, “Is this verifiable?”
Canfield said, “Volodin’s enemies have been trying to tie him definitively to organized crime since he left FSB and started his meteoric rise to the top in the nineties. Everyone thinks he had a lot of help along the way. But he’s kept his nose clean. That said, he’s wiped out and exposed so many gangsters in Russia it’s hard to see how anyone known to us would benefit from supporting him, with the sole exception being Seven Strong Men.”
“It’s an amorphous outfit,” Ryan said, looking down at his notes. “No one knows the identity of the leader of the organization.” He looked up. “Why can’t we figure out who the godfather is?”
Canfield said, “We’ve identified one of their high-ranking capos, he’s working out of a hotel in Kiev. He might even be their number two, but Seven Strong Men’s command structure, as you say, is all but unknown to us. We do believe, and recent events make this even more certain, that Seven Strong Men is now working as a proxy force for FSB in Ukraine.”
“Why?” Ryan asked. “I mean, what’s in it for them?”
“Good question,” said Mary Pat. “I have to suspect there is some sort of quid pro quo with the Kremlin. As in, if the Seven Strong Men help Russia take Ukraine, then Russia will turn a blind eye to Seven Strong Men activities there.”
Jack rubbed his eyes under his glasses. The Russian military, the Russian intelligence services, the Russian mob. They were all after Ukraine, and he knew that if they took Ukraine, it would only encourage them to push farther to the west.
Secretary of Defense Bob Burgess said, “Mr. President, as far as I’m concerned, the quickening of events means one thing. Russia has done all the blackmailing with pipelines and bullying with threats of violence against Ukraine it can do without actually going forward on its threats. They have upped the ante, even made attempts to marginalize the U.S. and NATO in the region.”
Ryan said, “Nothing left for Russia to do but start rolling tanks over the border.”
“Correct. JSOC and CIA assets in the east report significant movements of troops on Russia’s side of the line. Our imagery analysis confirms all that’s needed for the Russians to start rolling is the go order from the Kremlin.”
“So… what do we do, Bob?”
Burgess had been expecting the question. “Mr. President. Douglas MacArthur said every military disaster can be explained in two words: ‘Too late.’ If we were going to stop the invasion with military power, I am afraid we are already too late.”
Ryan said, “I see no way to stop Russia from taking the Crimea. It’s a semiautonomous region already, there are tens of thousands of real Russians and tens of thousands more who were handed out passports in the past year. Volodin can make the case to his people that taking the Crimea is in Russia’s national interests. This is going to happen. With Ukraine’s weak military, there is no preventing it. But I don’t want them moving further west. The more successful Volodin is, the more energetic he will be about aiming for other targets in his region.” Ryan thought for a moment. “We have a few hundred military advisers in country. Most of them are special operations troops. How much impact can they make on this?”
“A great deal. The plans have been drawn up to use existing forces there to assist the Ukrainians. We have Delta teams and Green Berets positioned in forward locations, and some British SAS as well. They all have the capability to communicate directly with Ukrainian Air Force assets. The Brits are on board with us on this. If you give the word, we can institute an operation to begin linking our laser targeting equipment to Ukrainian MiG-29 multirole fighters and Mi-24 attack helicopters. We can serve as a significant force multiplier for their Air Force. With luck, this can blunt the Russian attack.”
“Covertly?”
Burgess nodded. “Our operational plan is structured with an eye toward covert action. Having said that…” Burgess struggled with how to finish the sentence.
President Ryan said, “‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.’”
“That’s right, sir.”
“Tell me about the readiness of Russian forces.”
“It’s not good, but it is better than when they attacked Georgia a few years ago. At that time the military was rife with corruption and waste, and it showed on the battlefield. They won the conflict handily, but they did so by virtue of the fact that the Georgian Army was unprepared, and poorly led by civilian leadership.
“When Volodin came into power, it was estimated that twenty percent of Russian military procurement was wasted by corruption, literally stolen by officials. That number is down to next to nothing now. With all the corruption in Russia, it is a significant thing that graft in the military is strictly off-limits.”
Ryan asked, “Can I assume he used some harsh measures to effect this improvement?”
Burgess nodded. “Some people got shot. Not many, but enough to make an impression.”
“So Russia’s military is bad, but they still have numbers.”
“More numbers than Ukraine, anyway. And there is one other thing Russia has.”
“Nukes,” Ryan said.
“Germane to any conversation involving a military conflict with the Russians.”
Ryan leaned forward on the conference table. “If we do manage to slow the Russian advance west, what are the chances they will threaten to go nuclear?”
Burgess said, “If you are asking about them using strategic nukes against us, I will be very clear. Admiral Jorgensen and I have been to several meetings about this recently at the Pentagon. Russia no longer has any ability whatsoever to execute a successful debilitating first strike on the United States. Two-thirds of their nuclear weapons are obsolete.”
Ryan had read all the reports of the meetings Burgess was talking about, so he knew this assessment by DIA and CIA.
Admiral Jorgensen said, “Can they still launch missiles that would get through any defense we have? Yes. Yes, they can. As you know, Russia has a fleet of strategic bombers permanently airborne, something that stopped with the fall of the Soviet Union but started again when Volodin decided it would make him look tough.”
Mary Pat said, “But beyond capability, there is the question of will. These aren’t Islamic fundamentalists looking to martyr themselves. Volodin and his inner circle know that any nuclear attack would mean their own deaths within hours, if not minutes.”
“And tactically?” Ryan asked.
Burgess said, “Volodin would never use a tactical nuke in Ukraine. It would destroy part of what he considers his home soil. He will fight for it tooth and nail, perhaps, but he’s not going to condemn it to nuclear winter.”
Ryan drummed his fingers on the table. “Tell me more about the plans in place for active cooperation between our Partnership for Peace forces in Ukraine and the Ukrainian Air Force.”
Burgess pulled a file out of a folio and held it up. “Operation Red Coal Carpet. It assumes a conventional air and ground attack by Russia into Ukraine for control of the Crimea and the eastern section of the nation. It provides a blueprint for
teams of American special operations forces to operate laser targeting equipment to aid Russian jets and helos, not for the purposes of defeating Russia’s invasion force, but rather to keep it occupied as it moves deeper into the interior of the nation. The objective is to stall the attack or slow it enough to where the Russians will suffer debilitating loses while they are still far east of the Dnieper River.”
“Do we have enough operators on the ground there?”
Burgess thought over his answer first, then said, “If we go live with Red Coal Carpet, the U.S. Army will move a company of scout helicopters already serving in NATO into Ukraine, again under the auspices of Partnership for Peace. These helos will be used for laser targeting. A small unit of Rangers will also be added for security at the Joint Operations Center. This will bring American and British forces in the country to somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred fifty troops.
“I do believe it will be enough for this conflict, for one key reason. We are only there to support the Ukrainian Air Force, and the Russians will, to put it bluntly, kill the Ukrainian Air Force. I’m sorry, I don’t see any other scenario. Our men with their laser designators will have a target-rich environment, but they won’t have enough birds in the sky flying around with air-to-ground ordnance. The Ukrainian helos and strike fighters will be destroyed. I’m afraid putting more men on the ground is not going to help the situation.”
Ryan said, “I’m going to have to let key members of Congress know about this. It’s not exactly within the scope of Partnership for Peace.”
“No, sir, it is not,” Burgess agreed.
Ryan looked at the clock on the wall. “Okay, I’m authorizing Operation Red Coal Carpet, so that if the Russian invasion begins, our forces on the ground will have the authorizations in place to begin operations. Bob, come to me with whatever you need, whenever you need it. Mary Pat and Jay will provide DoD with anything they can, as well.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ryan closed the meeting by saying, “There are four hundred fifty American and British troops in the field who are going to need our support and our prayers in the next few days. Let’s see that they get plenty of both.”
55
Thirty years earlier
CIA analyst Jack Ryan had spent much of the day on the frigid streets of Zug, Switzerland, following around SIS counterintelligence officer Nick Eastling as he went to each location visited by David Penright in the days before his death. They’d been to his hotel room, the car rental office where he’d picked up his Mercedes, and a pair of restaurants he’d visited.
At each location, Ryan prodded Eastling to ask whether Penright had been seen with anyone else. In most cases, other than the restaurant where he’d met with Morningstar on the night of Penright’s death and the bar where he’d apparently tried and failed to pick up the German woman, he’d been alone.
It was evening before they finally arrived at the MI6 safe house where David Penright had worked in Zug. It was a few minutes north of the town proper, set on a hill in a residential neighborhood of two-story half-timbered homes with small gardens in front and large fenced-in backyards. Ryan and Eastling came through the front door and greeted the rest of the counterintelligence team, who’d been working here much of the day.
“Anything, Joey?” Eastling asked the first man in the living room. Ryan saw the home had been all but disassembled. Floorboards had been prized up, wall paneling had been removed, sofa cushions looked as if they had been hacked apart.
“Nothing out in the open. He had some documents locked in the safe.”
“What sort of documents?”
“All in German, of course. Look like internal transfers at RPB. A printout from a dot-matrix printer. Numbered accounts, transfer amounts, that sort of thing. Pages and pages of the bloody things.”
Eastling said, “He hadn’t shared anything with Century House since he arrived. He met with Morningstar the evening he was killed. Might be that he received them from Morningstar, then brought them back here before going out again to the bar.”
Joey replied, “Well, if he did, he followed proper protocol. Good job he didn’t get caught with RPB documents on his body when the ambulance took him to the morgue.”
Eastling acknowledged this with a nod. “Keep looking.”
It was a nice enough house, with modern furnishings and a fifty-inch front-projection TV set in the living room. There was a VHS player next to it, with a library of cassettes on a bookshelf alongside the television. One of the counterintelligence officers was systematically going through each video, watching it in fast-forward.
Nick and Jack walked into the kitchen now, and here they found a man pouring cereal out of boxes into bowls, then running his hands through the muesli and corn flakes, searching for any hidden items. A third SIS man crawled on the kitchen floor with a flashlight in his hand, checking the seams in the tile for any sign they had been moved or prized up.
While all this was going on, Ryan asked Eastling, “Why didn’t Penright just stay here? Why did he go to a hotel?”
Eastling shrugged. “He wanted to be close to a lobby bar. He wanted a place where he could bring girls home.”
“Do you know that, or are you guessing that?”
“As I said, David Penright isn’t the first dead officer I’ve had to investigate. So far, everything I’ve seen and learned today goes along with my assumptions that this was an accident. Look, Jack. I guess you want this to be some sort of a KGB hit, but the KGB doesn’t rub out our officers in the streets of Western Europe.”
Before Jack could respond, the phone in the small home office rang. One of Eastling’s men took it and then handed it over to his boss.
While Nick Eastling took the call, Ryan wandered out onto the balcony over the backyard. There was a nice view here, looking down across the town and farther on, over Lake Zug itself. Beyond the black water, the far bank of the lake was visible as twinkling streetlights and glowing windows in buildings. The cold, clear air gave Jack the feeling he could reach out across the water and touch the distant shore, although it was surely miles away.
The British counterintelligence officer met Jack outside a few minutes later. In his hands were two bottles of Sonnenbräu beer from the fridge. It was too cold to drink beer outside, Ryan thought, but he took one of the bottles and sipped it as he turned his attention back to the lake below.
Eastling said, “Just got off the phone with London. A medical examiner, one of ours, examined Penright’s body this morning in Zurich. No puncture marks, like those made from a hypodermic needle. We know we’ll find alcohol in his blood, but toxicology on anything else will take weeks. From the ME, however, it certainly doesn’t look like he had been in any way drugged or poisoned.”
Ryan said nothing.
Eastling looked out over the yard. “He got himself drunk enough to trip and fall on the street. Bad show for a man in the field.”
“He took his job seriously, you know,” Ryan said. “You make him out to be some sort of a clown. I didn’t know him well, but he deserves better than this treatment you’re giving him.”
Eastling said, “He wasn’t a clown. He was a man walking on the fine edge for so long he turned to drink and casual encounters to distance himself from the danger. It happens to the best of them, the traveling officers. I am sympathetic to the stresses and strains of what they have to deal with, but at the end of the day, my job is to make sure I have answers.”
The two men looked out over Lake Zug and toward the lights on the far side of the bay. It was beautiful; Jack could imagine Penright sitting here just days earlier, planning his next move with Morningstar.
Ryan said, “So that’s it, then? We just go home?”
“That’s up to London. If Sir Basil is going to send someone else to town to make contact with Morningstar, then we might stick around another day or so to report our findings directly to—”
Ryan’s eyes were on the far shore of Lake Zug, and near where he was loo
king, a brilliant flash of light appeared, casting a glow all the way up to a patch of low clouds hanging over the shore. The light seemed like it was on the land, not over water, but it was hard to tell immediately. Five seconds after the flash, a low rumble reached the balcony where the two men were standing.
Eastling had been looking in the same direction. “That’s an explosion.”
Ryan peered into the distance. “I think I see a fire.” He ran back into the flat, asked the men working there if they had seen any binoculars in the safe house. One of the men pulled a decorative but functional brass telescope off a tripod in the office, and the others chuckled as he offered it to Ryan.
The American snatched it and ran back out to the balcony.
He struggled to bring the big telescope up to his eye. Eastling just stood there and watched him.
On the far shore, almost lost in the twinkling of lights from the buildings, he could definitely make out a fire. It was a few blocks from the shoreline, higher on a hill.
“What is that place over there?”
“That’s Rotkreuz,” Eastling said.
“The same place the banker Tobias Gabler was killed the other day.”
“As a matter of fact, yes. It is.”
Jack lowered the telescope. “Let’s go.”
“Go? Over there? Why?”
“Why? Are you serious?”
“Ryan, what is it you think just happened?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to get a closer look.”
“You are being ridiculous.”
“Then why don’t you hang out here at the safe house and help your men search through the corn flakes? I’m heading over there.” Ryan turned and left the balcony. He scooped up off the table a set of keys belonging to one of the rented cars and then shot out the door of the suite.
As he stuck the key in the lock, he heard someone hurrying down the gravel behind him. It was Eastling. “I’ll drive.”
