Clear and Present Danger (1989)

by Tom - Jack Ryan 02 Clancy

  Larson returned the car and drove Clark to the airport in his own BMW. He'd miss the car, he realized, as they walked to his aircraft. Clark was carrying all of his classified or sensitive equipment out with him, and nothing else. He hadn't stopped to pack, not even his razor, though his Beretta 92-F, with silencer, was again tucked into the small of his back. He walked coolly and normally, but Larson now knew what tension looked like in Mr. Clark. He appeared even more relaxed than usual, even more offhand, even more absentminded, all the more to appear harmless to the people around him. This, Larson told himself, was one very dangerous cat. The pilot played back the shooting at the truck, the way he'd put the two gunmen at ease, confused them, asked for their help. He'd never known that the Agency had people like this, not after the Church Committee hearings.

  Clark climbed up into the aircraft, tossing his gear in the back, and managed to look a little impatient as Larson ran through his preflight procedures. He didn't return to normal until the wheels were retracted.

  "How long to Panama?"

  "Two hours."

  "Take us out over the water as soon as you can."

  "You're nervous?"

  "Now--only about your flying," Clark said over his headset. He looked over and smiled. "What I'm worried about is thirty or so kids who may just be hung out to dry."

  Forty minutes later they left Colombian airspace. Once over the Bay of Panama, Clark reached back for his gear, then forced open the door and dumped it into the sea.

  "You mind if I ask ... ?"

  "Let's assume for the moment that this whole operation is coming apart. Just how much evidence do you want to be carrying into the Senate hearing room?" Clark paused. "Not much danger of that, of course, but what if people see us carrying stuff and wonder what it is and why we're carrying it?"

  "Oh. Okay."

  "Keep thinking, Larson. Henry Kissinger said it: Even paranoids have enemies. If they're willing to hang those soldiers out, what about us?"

  "But ... Mr. Ritter--"

  "I've known Bob Ritter for quite a while. I have a few questions for him. I want to see if he has good enough answers. It's for goddamned sure he didn't keep us informed of things we needed to know. Maybe that's just another example of D.C. perspective. Then again, maybe it's not."

  "You don't really think--"

  "I don't know what to think. Call in," Clark ordered. There was no sense getting Larson thinking about it. He hadn't been in the Agency long enough to understand the issues.

  The pilot nodded and did what he was told. He switched his radio over to a seldom-used frequency and began transmitting. "Howard Approach, this is special flight X-Ray Golf Whiskey Delta, requesting permission to land, over."

  "Whiskey Delta, this is Howard Approach, stand by," replied some faceless tower controller, who then checked his radio codes. He didn't know who XGWD was, but those letters were on his "hot" list. CIA, he thought, or some other agency that put people where they didn't belong, which was all he needed to know. "Whiskey Delta, squawk one-three-one-seven. You are cleared for a direct visual approach. Winds are one-nine-five at ten knots."

  "Roger, thank you. Out." At least one thing had gone well today, Larson thought. Ten minutes later he put the Beech on the ground and followed a jeep to a parking place on the ramp. Air Force Security Police were waiting for them there, and whisked both officers over to Base Operations. The base was on security-alert drill; everyone was wearing green and most had sidearms. This included the operations staff, most of whom were in flight suits to look militant.

  "Next flight stateside?" Clark asked a young female captain. Her uniform "poopy suit" bore the silver wings of a pilot, and Clark wondered what she flew.

  "We have a -141 inbound to Charleston," she replied. "But if you want to get on it--"

  "Young lady, check your ops orders for this." Clark handed over his "J. T. Williams" passport. "In the SI section," he added helpfully.

  The captain rose from her seat and pulled open the top drawer of her classified file cabinet, the one with the double combination lock. She extracted a red-bordered ring binder and flipped to the last divider. This was the "Special Intelligence" section, which identified certain things and people that were more closely guarded than mere "top" secrets. It took only a couple of seconds before she returned.

  "Thank you, Colonel Williams. The flight leaves in twenty minutes. Is there anything that you and your aide require, sir?"

  "Have Charleston arrange to have a puddle-jumper standing by to take us to D.C., if you would, please, Captain. Sorry to have to drop in on you so unexpectedly. Thank you for your assistance."

  "Any time, sir," she replied, smiling at this polite colonel.

  "Colonel?" Larson asked on the way out the door.

  "Special Ops, no less. Pretty good for a beat-up old chief bosun's mate, isn't it?" A jeep had them to the Lockheed Starlifter in five minutes. The tunnel-like cargo compartment was empty. This was an Air Force Reserve flight, the loadmaster explained. They dropped some cargo off but were deadheading back home. That was fine with Clark, who stretched out as soon as the bird lifted off. It was amazing, he thought as he dozed off, all the things his countrymen did well. You could transition from being in mortal danger to being totally safe in a matter of hours. The same country that put people into the field and failed to support them properly treated them like VIPs--so long as they had the right ID notification in the right book, as though that could make it all better. It was crazy, the things we could do, and the things we couldn't. A moment later he was snoring next to an amazed Carlos Larson. He didn't wake until just before the landing, five hours later.

  As with any other government agency, CIA had regular business hours. By 3:30, those who came in early on "flex-time" were already filing out to beat the traffic, and by 5:30 even the seventh floor was quiet. Outside Jack's office, Nancy Cummings put the cover over her IBM typewriter--she used a word processor, too, but Nancy still liked typewriters--and hit a button on her intercom.

  "Anything else you need me for, Dr. Ryan?"

  "No, thank you. See you in the morning."

  "Okay. Good night, Dr. Ryan."

  Jack turned in his chair, back to staring out at the trees that walled the complex off from outside view. He was trying to think, but his mind was a blank void. He didn't know what he'd find. Part of him hoped that he'd find nothing. He knew that what he would do was going to cost him his career at the Agency, but he didn't really give much of a damn anymore. If this was what his job required, then the job wasn't really worth having, was it?

  But what would the Admiral say about that?

  Jack didn't have that answer. He pulled a paperback out of his desk drawer and started reading. A few hundred pages later it was seven o'clock.

  Time. Ryan lifted his phone and called the floor security desk. When the secretaries were gone home, it was the security guys who ran errands.

  "This is Dr. Ryan. I need some documents from central files." He read off three numbers. "They're big ones," he warned the desk man. "Better take somebody else to help."

  "Yes, sir. We'll head down in a minute."

  "Not that much of a hurry," Ryan said as he hung up. He already had a reputation as an easygoing boss. As soon as the phone was back in its cradle, he jumped to his feet and switched on his personal Xerox machine. Then he walked out his door to Nancy's outer office space, listening for the diminishing sound of the two security officers walking out to the main corridor.

  They didn't lock office doors up here. There was no point. You had to pass through about ten security zones to get here, each guarded by armed officers, each supervised by a separate central security office on the first floor. There were also roving patrols. Security at CIA was tighter than at a federal prison, and about as oppressive. But it didn't really apply to the senior executives, and all Jack had to do was walk across the corridor and open the door to Bob Ritter's office.

  The DDO's office safe--vault was a better term--was set up th
e same way as Ryan's, behind a false panel in the wall. It was less for secrecy--any competent burglar would find it in under a minute--than for aesthetics. Jack opened the panel and dialed the combination for the safe. He wondered if Ritter knew that Greer had the combination. Perhaps he did, but certainly he didn't know that the Admiral had written it down. It was so odd a thing for the Agency, so odd that no one had ever considered the possibility. The smartest people in the world still had blind spots.

  The safe doors were all alarmed, of course. The alarm systems were foolproof, and worked the same way as the safety locks on nuclear weapons--and they were the best kind available, weren't they? You dialed in the right combination or the alarm went off. If you goofed doing it the first time, a light would go on above the dial, indicating that you had ten seconds to get it right or another light would go on at two separate security desks. A second goof would set off more alarms. A third would put the safe in lock-down for two hours. Several CIA executives had learned to curse the system and become the subject of jokes in the security department. But not Ryan, who was not intimidated by combination locks. The computer that kept track of such things decided that, well, it must be Mr. Ritter, and that was that.

  Jack's heart beat faster now. There were over twenty files in here, and his time was measured in minutes. But again Agency procedures came to his rescue. Inside the front cover of each file was a summary sheet telling what "Operation WHATEVER" was all about. He didn't really pay attention to what they said, but used the summary sheets only to identify items of interest. In less than two minutes, Jack had files labeled EAGLE EYE, SHOWBOAT-I and SHOWBOAT-II, CAPER, and RECIPROCITY. The total stack was nearly eighteen inches high. Jack made careful note of where the folders went, then closed the safe door without locking it. Next he returned to his office, setting the papers on the floor behind his desk. He started reading EAGLE EYE first of all.

  "Holy Christ!" "Detection and interdiction of incoming drug flight," he saw, meant ... shooting them down. Someone knocked on his door.

  "Come on in." It was the security guys with the files he'd requested. Ryan had them set the files on a chair and dismissed them.

  Jack figured he had an hour, two at most, to do what he had to do. That meant he had time to scan, not to read. Each operation had a more detailed summary of objectives and methods plus an event log and daily progress report. Jack's personal Xerox machine was a big, sophisticated one that organized and collated sheets, and most importantly, zipped them through very rapidly. He started feeding sheets into the hopper. The automatic feed allowed him to read and copy at the same time. Ninety minutes later he had copied over six hundred sheets, maybe a quarter of what he'd taken. It wasn't enough, but it would have to do. He summoned the security guards to return the files they'd brought up--he took the time to ruffle them up first. As soon as they were gone, he assembled the files he'd... ... stolen? Jack asked himself. It suddenly dawned on him that he'd just violated the law. He hadn't thought of that. He really hadn't. As he loaded the files back in the safe, Ryan told himself that really he hadn't violated anything. As a senior executive, he was entitled to know these things, and the rules didn't really apply to him ... but that, he remembered, was a dangerous way to think. He was serving a higher cause. He was doing What Was Right. He was--

  "Shit!" Ryan said aloud when he closed the safe door. "You don't know what the hell you're doing." He was back in his office a minute later.

  It was time to leave. First he made a notation on the Xerox count sheet. You didn't make Xerox copies anywhere in this building without signing off for them, but he'd thought ahead on that. Roughly the right number of sheets were assembled in a pile and placed in his safe, ostensibly a copy of the OSWR report that Nancy had retrieved. Making such copies was something that directorate chiefs were allowed to do fairly freely. Inside his safe, he found, was the manual for its operation. The copies he'd made went into his briefcase. The last thing Ryan did before leaving was to change his combination to something nobody would ever guess. He nodded to the security officer at the desk next to the elevator on his way out. The Agency Buick was waiting when he got to the basement garage.

  "Sorry to make you stay in so late, Fred," Jack said as he got in. Fred was his evening driver.

  "No problem, sir. Home?"

  "Right." It required all of his discipline not to start reading on the way. Instead he leaned back and commanded himself to take a nap. It would be the only sleep he would get tonight, he was sure.

  Clark got into Andrews just after eight. His first call was to Ritter's office, but it was shortstopped elsewhere and he learned that the DDO was unavailable until morning. With nothing better to do, Clark and Larson checked into a motel near the Pentagon. After picking up shaving gear and a toothbrush from the Marriott's gift shop, Clark again went to sleep, again surprising the younger officer, who was far too keyed up to do so.

  "How bad is it?" the President asked.

  "We've lost nine people," Cutter replied. "It was inevitable, sir. We knew going in that this was a dangerous operation. So did they. What we can do--"

  "What we can do is shut this operation down, and do it at once. And keep a nice tight lid on it forever. This one never happened. I didn't bargain for any of this, not for the civilian casualties, and sure as hell not for losing nine of our own people. Damn it, Admiral, you told me that these kids were so good--"

  "Mr. President, I never--"

  "The hell you didn't!" the President said loudly enough to startle the Secret Service agent outside his upstairs office. "How the hell did you get me into this mess?"

  Cutter's patrician face went pale as a corpse. Everything he'd worked for, the action he'd been proposing for three years.... Ritter was proclaiming success. That was the maddest part of all.

  "Sir, our objective was to hurt the Cartel. We have accomplished that. The CIA officer who's running RECIPROCITY, in Colombia, right now, said that he could start a gang war within the Cartel--and we have done just that! They just tried to assassinate one of their own people--Escobedo. Drug shipments coming in are down. We haven't announced it yet, but the papers are already talking about how prices are going up on the street. We're winning."

  "Fine. You tell Fowler that!" The President slammed a file folder down on his desk. His own private polls showed Fowler ahead by fourteen points.

  "Sir, after the convention, the opposition candidate always--"

  "Now you're giving me political advice? Mister, you haven't shown me a hell of a lot of competence in your supposed area of expertise."

  "Mr. President, I--"

  "I want this whole thing shut down. I want it kept quiet. I want you to do it, and I want you to do it fast. This is your mess and you will clean it up."

  Cutter hesitated. "Sir, how do you want me to go about it?"

  "I don't want to know. I just want to know when it's done."

  "Sir, that may mean that I'll have to disappear for a while."

  "Then disappear!"

  "People might notice."

  "Then you are on a special, classified mission for the President. Admiral, I want this thing closed out. I don't care what you have to do. Just do it!"

  Cutter came to attention. He still remembered how to do that. "Yes, Mr. President."

  "Reverse your rudder," Wegener said. USCGC Panache pivoted with the change of rudder and engine settings, pointing herself down the channel.

  "Midships."

  "Rudder amidships, aye. Sir, my rudder is amidships," the young helmsman announced under the watchful eye of Master Chief Quartermaster Oreza.

  "Very well. All ahead one-third, steady up on course one-nine-five." Wegener looked at the junior officer of the deck. "You have the conn. Take her out."

  "Aye aye, sir, I have the conn," the ensign acknowledged in some surprise. "Take her out" generally means that you start from the dock, but the skipper was unusually cautious today. The kid on the wheel could handle it from here. Wegener lit his pipe and headed out for t
he bridge wing. Portagee followed him there.

  "That's about as happy as I've ever been to head out to sea," Wegener said.

  "I know what you mean, Cap'n."

  It had been one scary day. Only one, but that had been enough. The FBI agent's warning had come as quite a shock. Wegener had grilled his people one by one--something that he'd found as distasteful as it had been unfruitful--to find out who had spilled the beans. Oreza thought he knew but wasn't sure. He was thankful that he'd never have to be. That danger had died with the pirates in Mobile jail. But both men had learned their lesson. From now on they'd abide by the rules.

  "Skipper, why d'ya suppose that FBI guy warned us?"

  "That's a good question, Portagee. It figures that what we choked out of the bastards turned that money seizure they pulled off. I guess they figured they owed us some. Besides, the local guy says that it was his boss in Washington who ordered him to warn us."

  "I think we owe him one," Oreza said.

  "I think you're right." Both men stayed out to savor yet another sunset at sea, and Panache took a heading of one-eight-one, heading for her patrol station in the Yucatan Channel.

  Chavez was down to his last set of batteries. The situation, if anything, had gotten worse. There was a group somewhere be hind them, necessitating a rear guard. It was something that he on point, couldn't concern himself about, but it was there a nagging concern as real as the sore muscles that had him popping Tylenol every few hours. Maybe they were being folowed Maybe it was just accidental--or maybe Ramirez had gotter predictable in his evasion tactics. Chavez didn't think so but he was becoming too tired to think coherently, and knew it. Maybe the captain had the same problem, he realized. That was especially worrisome. Sergeants were paid to fight Cantains were paid to think. But if Ramirez was too tired to do that then they might as well not have him.