by Tom Clancy
Whoa!” Jack Ryan Jr. said from his cubicle.
“What?” Dominic called from the conference room, where the daily skull session had just started.
“Hang on, I’m coming in.” He tapped a few keys, sending the file to the conference room’s AV node, then walked in and picked up the remote from the table.
“You look like a teenager who’s seen his first boob,” Brian said. “What’s up?”
“I was trolling one of the URC websites when I came across this.” He aimed the remote at the forty-two-inch monitor on the wall. After a few seconds, three side-by-side images appeared on the flat screen, the first showing a man hanging from the neck in a featureless room; the second showing the same man lying on the floor, his severed head sitting beside him; in the third, the man’s severed head was bracketed by his severed feet.
“Jesus Christ, that’s some serious shit,” Brian said.
“Which website, Jack?” Rounds asked.
He recited the URL, then said, “It’s a URC hub, but up until now it’s been all propaganda—‘rah-rah, stick it to the infidel, we’ve got them on the run’ kind of stuff.”
“Well, this sure as hell ain’t a pep talk,” Ding Chavez said.
“It’s punishment,” Clark said, staring at the screen.
“What’re you thinking?”
“Hanging is a pretty standard execution technique for them, and the beheading is a little extra humiliation—something out of the Koran, as I recall—but the feet . . . That’s the real message?”
“What, he tried to run?” Dominic asked. “Leave the URC?”
“No, he made a move and the higher-ups weren’t happy about it. Saw this in Lebanon in ’82. Some offshoot of Hamas, I can’t remember the name, blew up a bus in Haifa. A week later the leaders were found the same way: hanged, beheaded, their feet chopped off.”
“Hell of a way to make your point,” Chavez said.
Rounds asked, “Jack, where’s the site run out of ?”
“That’s the kicker,” he responded. “It’s Benghazi.”
“Bingo,” said Dominic. “This thing coming so close on top of the Tripoli embassy . . . How much you wanna bet we’re looking at the fallout from an unsanctioned mission?”
There were no takers at the table.
“What if it’s more than punishment?” Jack offered.
“Explain,” Rounds said.
Clark answered, “It’s a warning. That Lebanon thing . . . Two weeks later, Hamas tried to ram a car bomb into the British embassy about a block from the bus explosion. It fell through because their intel people were still cranking away on the bus bombing.”
“Same principle could be at work here,” Jack said. “They’re telling the other cells to mind their manners.”
“Yeah, but in favor of what?” Chavez asked.
53
THE GRAVEL ROADWAY leading away from the beach looked almost pristine, probably because there was little, if any, traffic on it, and not even much in the way of animals to trample on it, and the harsh weather either killed or stunted anything that tried to grow.
Musa gave their captain, Vitaliy, a final wave, then nodded solemnly at Idris, whom he’d ordered to stay behind. However unlikely, if the captain tried to leave before they returned, Idris would kill the two Russians. Piloting the boat back to port without them would be a challenge, but Allah would show them the way.
Musa climbed into the cab’s passenger seat. Fawwaz, already behind the wheel, started the engine while Numair and Thabit climbed into the bed.
“Go,” Musa ordered. “The sooner we finish what we came to do, the sooner we can leave this cursed place.”
Fawwaz shoved the gearshift into drive and started up the hill.
The lighthouse and its neighboring hut were only a kilometer away, maybe five hundred meters uphill. Vitaliy and Vanya sat in the wheelhouse swivel chairs and watched their progress through binoculars, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, and wishing for more food, while the music on the radio got worse. Fred’s watchdog stood at the rail, watching them both. To the east was kelly-green tundra, and the view was as featureless as what a mouse might see when contemplating a green carpet.
Vitaliy watched as two of the charter party stepped out of the truck, then used hand signals to direct the driver to back up to the steel shed.
Vitaliy had never seen one of the generators that ran the lighthouses. He’d heard they contained radioactive material, though how they worked was beyond his knowledge. He’d heard also that some had disappeared, but if so, it hadn’t happened to an important lighthouse on his part of the coast. As far as he knew, they might well be small diesel generators. The lightbulb on the house was usually a small one, hardly ever more than one hundred watts, a fact that surprised—indeed, amazed—those who didn’t know about it. The Fresnel lenses focused the light into a small, pencil-thin beam whose effective range was determined by the height of the house, and any light showed up brightly on a dark night. Lighthouses, he told himself, were an obsolete leftover from earlier times, hardly necessary anymore in the age of electronic aids. So what damage might he be doing, really? His charter party would themselves finance his acquisition of a modern GPS system, probably one of the new Japanese ones that sold for five or six hundred euros, cheaper than the new car he coveted. And what the hell did it matter?
That this could kill thousands of people never occurred to him for a moment.
It took four hours, far less than Fred had suggested. It might have gone faster still if they’d simply demolished the corrugated shed, but evidently they didn’t want to do that. The lighthouse would look entirely normal in daylight (with the sun fully up and out, it was difficult to tell if the light was on or off), and at night, few came into this gulf to notice. And even if they did, so many things in Russia didn’t operate as designed that one more would hardly be seen as headline news. Two cups of tea and five cigarettes after they’d started, the truck rumbled back to life and started driving down the gravel driveway to the boat. It wasn’t until they reversed direction to back in that Vitaliy saw something dangling from the crane, about a meter, roughly rectangular, but with curved edges that suggested a cylinder inside, maybe the size of an oil drum. So that was a lighthouse battery? He’d wondered what they looked like, and wondered how they worked. It seemed awfully large to power such a small lightbulb. That made it typically Soviet, of course: large, clunky, but generally functional.
One of the party walked backward behind the crane truck, guiding it back onto the boat, and after three hours, when the tide was again right, it was time to raise the ramp and depart. The man in the truck’s cab worked the crane controls to lower the generator to the deck. The colleagues didn’t secure it in place. They were not seamen, but they had a lot of euros.
Vitaliy set the engines in reverse and backed away into deeper water, then spun the wheel to head back northwest for the Kara Strait. So he’d earned his two thousand or so euros. In the process he’d burn perhaps a thousand of that in diesel fuel—actually less, but his charter party didn’t know that—and the rest was wear and tear on his T-4 landing craft, and his own valuable time, of course. So a task halfway completed. On getting back to port, he’d unload them and let them go wherever it was they wanted to go. He didn’t even wonder where that might be. He didn’t care enough to want to know. He checked his chronometer. Fourteen hours exactly. So he’d not make port before the end of the day, one more day to bill them for, and that was fine with him.
Unaware that there was a complementary mission under way three hundred miles away, Adnan and his men were preparing to leave the relative comfort of the boat. The captain, Salychev, was maneuvering the Halmatic into a cove on the island’s western coast. Adnan stood on the afterdeck, watching the snow-encrusted arms of the inlet close in around them until the passage was no wider than a kilometer. The fog continued to build over the water’s surface until Adnan could catch only fleeting glimpses of the cliffs, erosion-slashed brown e
scarpments studded with scree and boulders.
The Halmatic’s diesel engine chugged softly while in the wheelhouse Salychev whistled to himself. Adnan walked forward and stepped inside.
“How far are we from the settlement—”
“Belushya Guba,” Salychev finished for him. “Not far. Just up the coast—a hundred, hundred-fifty kilometers. Don’t worry yourself. The patrols don’t come into the coves; they stick to the shoreline. Might hear them if the wind is right, but this close to land, their navigation radars get jumbled. Couldn’t see us unless they bumped into us.”
“Were there detonations in this area?”
“Some, but that was back in ’60 or ’61. Small ones, too. No more than fifteen kilotons. Just babies, nothing to worry about. Now, up the coast, maybe three hundred kilometers north of Belushya Guba, is Mityushev. That’s where they did a lot of them. Dozens upon dozens, all in the hundreds of kilotons, a couple of megatons, too. If you want to see what the moon looks like, that’s the place to go.”
“You’ve been there?”
“Offshore I have. Not enough money in the world could get me into those bays and channels. No, this place we’re headed is paradise compared to Mityushev.”
“It’s a wonder anything lives here.”
“Everything is relative. You’ve heard of the Pak Mozg, yes?”
“No.”
“The English translation is ‘brain crab.’ It’s supposed to be about half a meter tall, with a shell that’s split along the bottom and its nervous system exposed, sort of hanging out the gap in the shell.”
“You’re joking with me.”
Salychev shrugged. “No. I’ve never seen one, but I’ve got a friend who swears he did.”
Adnan waved his hand dismissively. “Nonsense. How long until we reach the shipyard?”
“Two hours, give or take. Going to be dark not long after that, so you’ll have to wait until morning. Don’t want to be stomping around in the dark.”
“No.”
“You never did say exactly what you’re after. Samples, right?”
“Excuse me?”
“Soil and rock samples. That’s what most of you types come here for: dirt. Testing it for whatever.”
“That’s right,” Adnan replied. “Dirt.”
54
THE ONE DRAWBACK might be that people would notice the cars coming in and out.
Arnie came in first. Former President Ryan met him and walked him into the living room.
“Ready?” the former Chief of Staff asked.
“Not sure,” Jack admitted.
“Well, Jack, if you have any doubts, you’d better exorcise them today. Do you want four more years of Ed Kealty in the White House?”
“Hell, no,” Jack replied almost automatically. Then he thought it over again. Was he so arrogant that he thought he was the projected savior of the United States of America? Such moments of introspection came quickly to him. He wasn’t one to measure his ego on the Richter scale or power-of-ten notation. The campaign to come would not be fun in any respect. “Here’s the problem: My strength is national security matters,” Ryan said. “I’m not an expert on domestic affairs.”
“Kealty is—or at least that’s the image he projects. He’s got chinks in his armor, Jack, and we’ll find them. And all you have to do is to persuade two hundred million American voters that you’re a better man than he is.”
“You’re not asking much,” Ryan groused. “A lot of things to fix.” A hell of a lot of things to fix, he added to himself. “Okay, who’s first?”
“George Winston and some of his Wall Street friends. George’ll be your finance chairman.”
“What will this cost?”
“North of a hundred million dollars. More than you can afford, Jack.”
“Do these people know what they’re buying?” Ryan asked.
“I’m sure George explained it to them. You’ll have to back that up, of course. Hey, look on the bright side. Your administration didn’t have much in the way of corruption. Reporters sniffed around plenty looking, but nobody ever found much.”
Jack, this guy’s a loser,” George Winston announced, to general agreement around the dining room table. “The country needs somebody different. You, for example.”
“Question is, will you come back in?” Ryan asked.
“I’ve served my time,” the former Secretary of the Treasury replied.
“I tried saying that, too, but Arnie isn’t buying.”
“Goddamn it, we got the tax system all fixed until that dickhead went and fucked it all up again—and he chopped revenue doing it!” Winston emphasized in some disgust. Raising tax rates invariably decreased revenues as soon as accountants got to work on the new code. The new and “fair” tax code was a godsend to the tax-avoidance community.
“What about Iraq?” Tony Bretano asked, changing directions. The former CEO of TRW had been Ryan’s chosen Secretary of Defense.
“Well, like it or not, we’re stuck with it,” Ryan admitted. “Question is, can we smart our way out of it? Smarter than Kealty’s being, at least.”
“When Mary Diggs gave his speech two years back, he damned near got himself shot.” General Marion Diggs had clobbered the military of the United Islamic Republic during his tour as Army chief of staff, but his observations about more recent conflicts had been totally ignored by the new administration. Diggs’s successors in the Pentagon had bowed to White House orders and done what they’d been told to do. It was a common-enough failing of senior military officers and wasn’t the least bit new. The price for many of the fourth star was to have your balls removed. Most of them were not old enough to have served in Vietnam. They hadn’t seen friends and class-mates die for political misjudgment, and the lessons inflicted on the previous class of officers had been lost in the process of something called “progress.” That Ed Kealty had dissolved two complete light-infantry divisions, then walked into a conflict that cried aloud for light-infantry formations, was something the news media had almost totally ignored. Besides, tanks were pretty things to photograph.
“I’ll say this for you, Tony. You always listened to advice,” Ryan told him.
“Helps to know what you don’t know. I’m a good engineer, but I don’t know it all yet. This guy who took my old office is occasionally wrong, but he’s never in doubt.” Former Secretary Bretano had just described the most dangerous person on the planet. “Jack, I have to tell you now, I won’t be coming back. My wife’s sick. Breast cancer. We’re hoping they caught it early enough, but the jury’s still out on that.”
“Who’s your doc?” Ryan asked.
“Charlie Dean. UCLA. He’s pretty good, they tell me,” Bretano answered.
“Wish you luck, pal. If Cathy can help, let us know, okay?” Ryan had used his wife for numerous medical referrals over the years, and unlike most political figures, he didn’t figure that everybody with an M.D. after his name was the same, at least in treating other people.
“I will, thanks.” The news had a sobering effect on the meeting, in any case. Valerie Bretano, a vivacious mother of three, was well liked by just about everyone.
“What about the announcement?” van Damm asked.
“Yeah, gotta do that, don’t I?”
“Unless you want a stealth campaign. Kinda hard to win that way,” Arnie observed. “Want me to get Callie Weston to gin up a speech for you?”
“She’s good with words,” Ryan acknowledged. “When will I have to do it?”
“Sooner the better. Start framing the issues.”
“I agree,” Winston said. “He doesn’t know how to hit above the belt. Any bad baggage, Jack?”
“Nothing I know of—and that doesn’t mean nothing I remember. If I’ve ever broken the law, they’ll have to prove it to me, and a jury.”
“Good to hear that,” Winston observed. “I believe you, Jack, but remember the devil’s advocate. Lots of them in Washington.”
“What about Ke
alty? What dirty laundry does he have around?”
“A lot,” Arnie answered. “But you can only use that weapon with care. Remember, he has the ear of the press. Unless you have a videotape, they’ll apply a hellacious reality test to it, and they’ll try to ricochet it back on you. I can help a little with that. Leave the leaks to me, Jack, and the less you know about the process, the better.”
Not for the first time, Ryan found himself wondering why van Damm was so faithful a vassal to him. He was so far into the political system that he did and said things Jack would never really understand. If he were the babe in the woods, then Arnie van Damm was his nanny. Useful things, nannies.
55
THE DIESELS chugged monotonously away as the landing craft headed back west. Vitaliy stood at the wheel, keeping a loose eye on the gyrocompass, watching the water slide by the blunt bow and down the sides. Not another ship or even a fishing boat in sight. It was mid-afternoon. The truck was back in its place. The beige-colored gadget they’d taken—stolen? he wondered. Well, probably yes—sat on the rusted steel deck. He’d have to scrape and paint it before the weather got too cold for that. Painting in freezing air was time wasted. Even if it dried, it would just flake off. Have to paint soon, he told himself. Vanya would bitch about it. As a former seaman in the Soviet Navy, he regarded such maintenance as an insult to his manhood. But Vanya didn’t own the boat, and Vitaliy did, and that was that. The charter party was relaxing, smoking their cigarettes and sipping at their tea. Strange that they didn’t drink vodka. He troubled himself to get the good stuff, not the bootleg trash made from potatoes. Vitaliy indulged himself in his drinking. Only proper vodka, made from grain. Sometimes he went overboard and drank Starka, the brown vodka once drunk only by the Politburo and local party bosses. But that time was gone—forever gone? Only time would tell, and for now he would not trouble his insides with bootleg liquor. Vodka remained the one thing his country still did well—better than any other country in the world. Nasha lusche, he told himself—Ours is best—an ancient Russian prejudice, though this one was factual. What these barbarians didn’t drink, he’d account for by himself soon enough.
