Tom Clancy Full Force and Effect

by Mark Greaney

  As soon as he headed over to the clean and newly poured concrete eastern wall of the site, he smelled the rotten stench of something dead. The other men smelled it, too, and it took less than thirty seconds for a Mexican Federal District officer to shine his flashlight in the sealed drain on the floor of the garage.

  “Gato,” he said. Cat.

  Herbers looked himself. “Poor kitty must have gone down there before they covered the drain and got caught.”

  He didn’t give it another thought.

  Herbers looked at the wall next. One of his men had a flashlight of his own and he walked the length of the wall, tapping it both at waist height and a little higher than his head, just to confirm there was no false compartment built into it.

  A bomb-sniffing dog was led along the wall; she sniffed in the edges and immediately pulled her head back and sneezed. She kept walking, kept trying to sniff the area, and sneezed again.

  Herbers glanced up to the dog handler for an explanation.

  The handler just said, “Construction dust. Masonry and loose grout.” He kept going. Within seconds they were moving into the next concrete staircase.

  Herbers kept scanning the area for a few minutes. He saw a radio on a bucket, and he lifted the device and kicked over the bucket to make sure it wasn’t wired to anything. He turned the radio on and heard a scratchy accordion-heavy tune. He flipped it off and replaced it on the bucket.

  Herbers addressed both the Secret Service agents with him and the Federal District police detectives. “I’ll need this place sealed off with tape, and officers outside on the corner during the transit.”

  One of the Mexican detectives said, “I will have two cars behind the barricade outside on José J. Herrera. Four men watching the people at the market and the crowd that will form at the barricades so they can see the limo. I’ll task two more men just to make sure no one tries to slip under the tarp to get into the construction site.”

  “That’s fine,” Herbers said, then he addressed his number two. “Rick, I want a pair of our guys here as well.”

  “You got it.”

  “Let’s put a long gun at the top of the stairs. It will give us a good view of the entire length of the street.”

  Rick made a note.

  They climbed out of the construction site and moved on to the next choke point, a turn to the west that would take them deep into the Centro Histórico toward the Palacio Nacional.

  Herbers and his team had dozens of problem areas to check before the President arrived in less than forty-eight hours.

  53

  After waiting for two days in Las Vegas for instructions from the home office, Veronika Martel finally received orders from Edward Riley to fly to New York. She didn’t even check into a hotel; instead, she drove right to the Sharps Global Intelligence Partners building, and there she was led into Sharps’s fifth-floor office.

  Riley was there, but he said surprisingly little. Sharps did most of the talking as he grilled her about her actions over her two weeks at Valley Floor.

  Martel had made the decision early on not to mention her contact with Jack Ryan, Jr. Had she done so from the start she would be in the clear, but now she saw no way she could explain that he had been around her at the time she was operational at Valley Floor and that she had simply neglected to mention it. If she revealed his actions, actions she thought at the time were born from his interest in her, then she would look either incompetent or complicit.

  And Veronika did not think for a moment Riley would believe she was incompetent.

  She didn’t see herself as such, either, but she wholly admitted she had been greedy. Her desire to turn a mundane corporate intelligence operation into a one-woman attempt to recruit an important contact and in so doing leave her corporate work behind had been foolish, and she had been grossly overconfident.

  Now all she could do was mitigate the damage. Bury any evidence of her attempt to recruit Ryan and leave Sharps behind, and portray herself as the unjust victim of a Sharps op that had been compromised somewhere else.

  This worked surprisingly well. Sharps had allowed that an unknown actor had showed up during the New World Metals operation first in Vietnam, then during a phase that occurred here in New York, and finally in Las Vegas. Sharps said that while Veronika had been involved in Vietnam and Vegas, she had no knowledge of the operation in New York, so he was of the opinion she was not to blame for whatever leak had allowed the theft of the mobile phone and the compromise of the operation.

  Martel gave a full-throated defense of her actions; she was careful not to cast any aspersions on Riley, because he was (a) her supervisor and someone she would have to continue working with, and (b) right here in the room.

  She wondered later if she should have gone ahead and beat up on the Englishman anyway, because Riley had maintained his uncomfortable silence throughout the entire meeting, and Veronika took this as either some sort of culpability, or even weakness.

  When it was over, Duke told Veronika that she would be required to stay in town, perhaps for just a few days, but perhaps for longer.

  That afternoon she found a vacation rental on the Lower East Side. She wasn’t operational, so she rented the property in her own name, but in a nod to her personal security she performed the transaction on the Internet and picked the key card up from a drop box so she wouldn’t have to deal with anyone face-to-face.

  The place wasn’t home, and her unit was a small third-floor walk-up, but on the inside anyway it felt a little like Paris. It was better than a shoebox New York City hotel, and it was much better than a gaudy Vegas faux-wonderland casino hotel.

  —

  Sam Driscoll had spent a week and a half watching, filming, and reviewing every person who entered the offices of Sharps Global Intelligence Partners. He was across the street at an angle, north of Duke Sharps’s building on Columbus, and sometimes he couldn’t get great pictures of people entering. But virtually every person who exited the building got their picture taken, and these went into the facial-recognition program.

  His boring work paid off on day ten, when the woman going by the name Élise Legrande entered the building. Ryan had made special mention of her, and he told Sam that anything he could do to track the woman after she left would be appreciated.

  Sam had barely left his rented studio flat in a week and a half, so he was more than happy to take the opportunity to go off in hot pursuit. When she left the building an hour later Sam was seated on a park bench on the sidewalk next to the American Museum of Natural History, with a twelve-speed bike and a backpack next to him. The woman climbed into a cab and he took off after her, then easily tailed her a few blocks south to a coffee shop, where he saw her working on a tablet computer.

  After an hour over a tea and her iPad, she climbed into another taxi. This time Sam had a difficult time tracking her, because she went all the way through Midtown, finally ending up on the Lower East Side. If he had been in a car or even on a motorcycle he would have lost her, but with his bike he was able to skirt traffic, and traffic laws, so he managed to keep her cab in sight until she climbed out on Clinton Street, put a code into a key box hanging from a railing in front of an apartment building, removed an electronic key card, and then carried her luggage up to the door.

  Sam waited to see a light turn on on the third floor, and then he pedaled his bike all the way back up to 77th and Columbus.

  —

  The next morning Veronika rose early, dressed, and headed out on foot to a café for breakfast, and then she walked to a local market. She told herself she’d be here for a while, so she filled a grocery cart with food and drinks, and even flowers, and took it all back to her place.

  It was a struggle to get everything up the three flights of stairs, but she managed, and she unlocked her door with her key card and struggled some more getting everything in and on the counter. After
she had done this, she turned around and headed into her living room, and then she stopped cold.

  She felt the expression of panic on her face, so she fought against it, and did her best to appear nonchalant.

  She asked, “How did you find me?”

  Jack Ryan, Jr., sat on the sofa, his legs crossed. He wore a dark gray pin-striped suit and a burgundy tie, and he appeared utterly calm.

  “Sometimes the old-fashioned ways work best.”

  “You’ve been watching Sharps’s office?”

  “A colleague has.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Sit down, Veronika.”

  Hearing her own name brought the panic back, but she did as instructed, and she tried again to feign an air of detachment. “How did you get into the apartment?” When Ryan did not immediately speak, she said, “Let me guess. You used the same site-code hack your people used to get into my hotel room in Las Vegas.”

  Ryan replied, “Sometimes the new ways work best.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  Ryan did not reply.

  “Like father, like son? You are CIA?”

  He shook his head. “I know people. That’s all. No law against that. Sometimes they need help. You are the one who has to explain herself.”

  “Corporate intelligence is as old as corporations themselves. I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Ryan chuckled, and it angered her.

  “What is it you think you have on me?”

  “Veronika Aimée Martel, age thirty-eight. Born Rambouillet, France. You served in the DGSE for seven years, received high marks, very high. Then you had an affair with a deputy of the French National Assembly.” Ryan wasn’t reading this, he had it memorized. “Not a big deal in France, I don’t guess, unless his wife happens to be the vice secretary of the Socialist Party.”

  Veronika crossed her arms. A reflexive action to guard herself from danger.

  “A bad decision on your part, but it shouldn’t have affected your career as a spy. Still, you got banished from the service, scooped up by Duke Sharps, and put back to work.”

  “Very good, Jack. You have sources. That doesn’t give you the right to break into my flat.”

  Now Ryan uncrossed his legs and looked forward. “My friends were there, in Ho Chi Minh City, the evening Colin Hazelton was murdered.”

  Martel made no reaction. She didn’t know the name, but she could guess who Hazelton was. Still, she gave nothing away.

  “They got a good picture of you that night, and they have the ability to put faces with names, but nothing came up on you. My guess is either DGSE or Sharps had all files with your image erased.”

  “Not all, obviously—otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”

  “You used your real name to rent this place. My friends searched for Veronika Martel, and they found some references to you. No image, but they didn’t need the image once they had the name.”

  “What do you want? I didn’t kill this man in Ho Chi Minh City. I don’t even know what you are talking about.”

  “North Korean assassins were in Vietnam, in the Czech Republic, in Vegas, and right here in New York. People are dying to keep your mission up and running.”

  “It’s not my mission.”

  “No. It’s Edward Riley’s mission. But you are his foot soldier, and now you are going to help my friends tie him directly to North Korea.”

  She laughed now. “Ridiculous. He isn’t working with North Korea.”

  “DPRK goons seem to turn up conveniently wherever he needs them. That’s good enough for me.”

  “If that was true, they would be here now, wouldn’t they?”

  “Believe me, there were concerns they would be. But I have friends all over your block, ready for them, and they swept your place for bugs. The North Koreans seem to have forgotten about you for the time being. My guess is you are sidelined, out of the operation after what happened in Las Vegas.”

  “I hope that is true. If I am done, then I will return to Brussels and this will all be behind me.”

  “You don’t understand the stakes, Veronika. You are in danger as long as you are working with Sharps. If the North Koreans think for a second you failed them, they will do to you what they did to Colin Hazelton.”

  Ryan crossed over to her side of the sitting area and knelt in front of her. He moved so close she thought he was going to kiss her.

  “Help us, and we will protect you.”

  “I need no protection. I do need you to leave.” Ryan didn’t move back. “You tricked me once, in Las Vegas. You won’t trick me again.”

  “This is no trick. I—”

  “Are you going to arrest me? No? That is not the job of the CIA.” She smiled now. She had been off kilter for a while, but she felt like she had regained her ground. And now the man in front of her, so smug and sure of himself, did not know what to say. “Get out.”

  “Please, Veronika.”

  “Out!”

  Jack Ryan sighed, then he pulled out a pen and wrote his phone number on a magazine. “My friends will keep someone in town. If you change your mind, or if you are in any trouble and need us, call me, and someone will be here in minutes.”

  Veronika stood and pointed to the door. “Get out.”

  Ryan left the apartment, certain that the woman behind him had no idea how far the North Koreans were willing to go to see this to the end.

  54

  Presidential Directive or no, there was neither legal nor justifiable reason—as far as international law was concerned—for the boarding and inspection of the San Fernando Chieftain, an Indonesian-flagged container ship making fifteen knots in a roiling Yellow Sea.

  True, it was on its way to the North Korean port of Nampo, southwest of Pyongyang. But the ship’s stated destination was North Korea, so it had already been inspected by international proliferation experts, just before setting sail at Manila Terminal six days earlier. The cargo was confirmed to match the manifests; it was food aid and car parts and machinery for the nation’s large coal-mining industry. The ship also broadcast its automatic identification system for its entire voyage, and there were absolutely no irregularities with its movements.

  In short, the San Fernando Chieftain played by the rules, so the captain was furious now, standing in his wheelhouse, his binoculars to his eyes and fixed on a point three miles off his bow. Though it was late morning, a heavy squall darkened the skies and obscured his view slightly, but there was no mistaking the image in his optics. It was the massive American warship USS Freedom, and it had positioned itself in the path of the San Fernando Chieftain, blocking the way ahead.

  The radio call left the captain even more confused and angry. The Americans demanded to board, the captain asked them on what grounds they thought they had the right to do so, and the Americans cited UN Resolution 1874.

  The Indonesian captain responded with outrage. The paperwork was on file and his transit had been documented. But the Americans were not listening to his reason. They informed him an armed boarding party was on the way, and for the safety of the captain, his crew, and his cargo, he needed to come full stop and comply with all demands.

  The captain immediately called his home office. At this point there was nothing he could do but complain, because even though he was in the right, he wasn’t about to fight the United States Navy.

  —

  At ten fifty-six Chief Daryl Ricks of Echo Platoon, SEAL Team 5, stood up in the Zodiac boat, spun his HK416 rifle over his back, and climbed up the pilot ladder that had been lowered by the crew of the San Fernando Chieftain.

  Just like the interdiction his platoon had made that uncovered the rocket parts from France, his boarding today would be “bottom up,” meaning from the water. Also as in that raid, this time his counterpart, Bones Hackworth of Bravo team, would be hittin
g “top down,” from a helo already on station an eighth of a mile off the bow and closing.

  This was not a typical sanctions enforcement. Normally he and his mates spot-checked cargo containers or cargo holds, with no specific intelligence on where to look or what, exactly, they were looking for. But for today’s interdiction he had received specific intelligence about what he was looking for and where he could find it. From his understanding, the intel came from the Defense Intelligence Agency, although it had been filtered through channels and was delivered to him via sat phone contact with the intelligence officer of Team 5 in Seoul.

  The IO had directed him to open and inspect four forty-five-foot high-cube shipping containers; he even had the hold number and location on the boat for where to find them.

  There had been no information, oddly, on just what it was they were supposed to find inside the containers, but Ricks figured it didn’t take much imagination to conclude he and his mates had hit this ship to grab another load of missile parts.

  The last time there had been resistance, and Ricks knew he couldn’t count on things going any easier for this interdiction, but so far, they’d seen no evidence that the crew was trying to hide anything or slow the SEALs down from taking a look for themselves.

  Weird. This seems too damn easy, he thought, as he climbed onto the deck. But he kept his rifle up high, scanning for threats.

  But there was no resistance from the crew. Ricks and his men took the wheelhouse while Hackworth and his team went for the engine room. In ten minutes the entire fourteen-member crew was covered on the deck by four men, and the rest of the SEALs headed for cargo hold two.

  The containers were there, just as the IO had said; the numbers on the doors matched the report.

  Greaser and Hendriks stepped forward and broke the seal on the first container. They opened the doors, and Ricks looked in with the flashlight on the end of his rifle. He scanned the beam up and down, and then left and right.