Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 1-6

by Tom Clancy

  What made the deaths of the Americans inevitable was something as prosaic as a traffic light. A technician was working on a balky signal—people had been complaining about it for a week—and while checking the timing mechanism, he flipped it to red. Everyone stopped on the street, almost within sight of the embassy. From third-floor windows on both sides of the street, four separate RPG-7D projectiles streaked straight down. Three hit the car, two of them on the roof.

  The flash was enough. Morales was moving even before the noise reached the embassy gates, and he ran with full knowledge of the futility of the gesture. His right hand wrenched his Smith & Wesson automatic from the waist holster, and he carried it as training prescribed, pointed straight up. It took just over two minutes.

  The driver was still alive, thrown from the car and bleeding to death from holes that no doctor could ever patch in time. The soldiers in the lead jeep were nowhere to be seen, though there was blood on a rear seat. The trail jeep’s driver was still at the wheel, his hands clutching at a face shredded with broken glass, and the man next to him was dead, but again the other two were gone—

  Then Morales knew why. Automatic weapons fire erupted in a building to his left. It started, stopped, then began again. A scream came from a window, and that also stopped. Morales wanted to race into the building, but he had no jurisdiction, and was too much a professional to risk his life so foolishly. He moved up to the smashed limousine. He knew that this, too, was futile.

  They’d all died instantly, or as quickly as any man might die. The Director’s two bodyguards had worn Kevlar armor. That would stop bullets, but not fragments from a high-explosive warhead, and had proven no more effective than the armor in the Tank. Morales knew what had hit the car—weapons designed to destroy tanks. Real ones. For those inside, the only remarkable thing was that you could tell that they had once been human. There was nothing anyone could do, except a priest ... or rabbi. Morales turned away after a few seconds.

  He stood alone in the street, still operating on his professional training, not letting his humanity affect his judgment. The one living soldier in view was too injured to move—probably had no idea where he was or what had happened to him. None of the people on the sidewalk had come to help ... but some of them, he saw, were hurt, too, and their injuries occupied the attention of the others. Morales realized that the damage to the car told everyone else in view where they might best spend their efforts. The agent turned to scan up and down the street. He didn’t see the technician at the light-control box. The man was already gone.

  Two soldiers came out of a building, one carrying what looked like an RPG-7 launcher unit. Morales recognized one of them, Captain Edmundo Garza. There was blood on his khaki shirt and pants, and in his eyes the wild look that Morales hadn’t seen since his time in the Marine Corps. Behind him, two more men dragged yet another who’d been shot in the arms and the groin. Morales holstered his automatic before going over, slowly, his hands visible until he was sure he’d been recognized.

  “Capitán ... ” Morales said.

  “One more dead upstairs, and one of mine. Four teams. Get-away cars in the alleys.” Garza looked at the blood on his upper arm with annoyance that was rapidly changing to appreciation of his wounds. But there was something more than shock to postpone the pain. The captain looked at the car for the first time in several minutes, hoping that his immediate impression might have been wrong and knowing that it could not be. His handsome, bloody face looked at the American and received a shake by way of reply. Garza was a proud man, a professional soldier dedicated to his country as thoroughly as any man could be, and he’d been chosen for this assignment for his combination of skill and integrity. A man who did not fear death, he had just suffered the thing all soldiers fear more. He had failed in his mission. Not knowing why only made it worse.

  Garza continued to ignore his wounds, turning to their one prisoner. “We will talk,” the captain promised him just before he collapsed into Morales’ arms.

  “Hi, Jack!” Dan and Liz Murray had just arrived at the Ryan house. Dan had to remove his automatic and holster, which he set on the shelf in the closet with something of a sheepish look.

  “I figured you for a revolver,” Jack said with a grin. It was the first time that they’d had the Murrays over.

  “I miss my Python, but the Bureau’s switching over to automatics. Besides, I don’t chase bad guys anymore. I chase memos, and position papers, and budget estimates.” A rueful shake of the head. “What fun.”

  “I know the feeling,” Ryan agreed, leading Murray to the kitchen. “Beer?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  They’d first met in London, at St. Thomas’s Hospital to be precise, some years earlier when Murray had been legal attaché to the American Embassy, and Ryan had been a shooting victim. Still tall and spare, his hair a little thinner but not yet gray, Murray was an affable, free-spirited man whom one would never pick for a cop, much less one of the best around. A gifted investigator, he’d hunted down every sort of criminal there was, and though he now chafed at his absence from hands-on police work, he was handling his administrative job as skillfully as all his others.

  “What’s this sting I heard about?” Jack asked.

  “TARPON? The Cartel murdered a guy who was laundering money for them on a very big scale—and doing some major-league skimming, too. He left records behind. We found them. It’s been a busy couple of weeks running all the leads down.”

  “I heard six-hundred-plus-million bucks.”

  “It’ll go higher. The Swiss cracked open a new account this afternoon.”

  “Ouch.” Ryan popped open a couple of beers. “That’s a real sting, isn’t it?”

  “I think they’ll notice this one,” Murray agreed. “What’s this I hear about your new job?”

  “You probably heard right. It’s just that you don’t want to get a promotion this way.”

  “Yeah. I’ve never met Admiral Greer, but the Director thinks a lot of him.”

  “Two of a kind. Old-fashioned honorable gentlemen,” Jack observed. “Endangered species.”

  “Hello, Mr. Murray,” Sally Ryan said from the door.

  “Mister Murray?”

  “Uncle Dan!” Sally raced up and delivered a ferocious hug. “Aunt Liz says that you and Daddy better get out there,” she said with a giggle.

  “Why do we let them push us warriors around, Jack?”

  “ ’Cause they’re tougher than we are?” Ryan wondered.

  Dan laughed. “Yeah, that explains it. I—” Then his beeper went off. Murray pulled the small plastic box from his belt. In a moment the LCD panel showed the number he was supposed to call. “You know, I’d like to waste the bastard who invented these things.”

  “He’s already dead,” Jack replied deadpan. “He came into a hospital emergency room with chest pains, and after the doc figured out who he was, they were a little slow getting around to treating him. The doc explained later that he had had an important phone call come in, and ... oh, well....” Ryan’s demeanor changed. “You need a secure line? I have one in the library.”

  “Color me important,” Murray observed. “No. Can I use this one?”

  “Sure, the bottom button’s a D.C. line.”

  Murray punched in the number without referring to his beeper. It was Shaw’s office. “Murray here. You rang, Alice? Okay ... Hi, Bill, what gives?”

  It was as though the room took a sudden chill. Ryan felt it before he understood the change in Murray’s face.

  “No chance that—oh, yeah, I know Pete.” Murray checked his watch. “Be there in forty minutes.” He hung up.

  “What happened?”

  “Somebody killed the Director,” Dan answered simply.

  “What—where?”

  “Bogotá. He was down for a quiet meeting, along with the head of DEA. Flew down this afternoon. They kept it real quiet.”

  “No chance that—”

  Murray shook his head. “T
he attaché down there’s Pete Morales. Good agent, I worked OC with him once. He said they were all killed instantly. Emil, Harry Jefferson, the ambassador, all the security guys.” He stopped and read the look on Jack’s face. “Yeah, somebody had some pretty good intel on this.”

  Ryan nodded. “This is where I came in....”

  “I don’t think there’s a street agent in the Bureau who doesn’t love that man.” Murray set his beer down on the counter.

  “Sorry, pal.”

  “What was it you said? Endangered species?” Murray shook his head and went to collect his wife. Ryan hadn’t even closed the door behind them when his secure phone started ringing.

  The Hideaway, located only a few miles from the Luray Caverns, was a modern building despite its deliberate lack of some modern amenities. While there was no in-room cable television, no pay-for-view satellite service, no complimentary paper outside the door every morning, there was air conditioning, running water, and the room-service menu was six pages long, supplemented by ten full pages of wine listings. The hotel catered to newlyweds who needed few distractions and to others trying to save their marriages from distractions. Service was on the European model. The guest wasn’t expected to do anything but eat, drink, and rumple the linen, though there were saddle horses, tennis courts, and a swimming pool for those few whose suite didn’t include a bathtub large enough for the purpose. Moira watched her lover tip the bellman ten dollars—far more than he ever tipped anyone—before she thought to ask the most obvious question.

  “How did you register?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Juan Díaz.” Another embarrassed look. “Forgive me, but I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t think”— he lied haltingly. “And I didn’t want—what could I say without embarrassing myself?” he finally asked with a frustrated gesture.

  “Well, I need a shower. Since we are husband and wife, you may join me. It looks big enough for two.” She walked from the room, dropping her silk blouse on the bed as she went.

  Five minutes later, Cortez decided that the shower was easily big enough for four. But as things turned out, that was just as well.

  The President had flown to Camp David for the weekend, and had barely showered himself when his junior military aide—a Marine lieutenant had the duty—brought him the cordless phone.

  “Yes—what is it?”

  The lieutenant’s first reaction on seeing the President’s expression was to wonder where his pistol was.

  “I want the Attorney General, Admiral Cutter, Judge Moore, and Bob Ritter flown here immediately. Tell the press secretary to call me in fifteen minutes to work on the statement. I’ll be staying here for the time being. What about bringing them back home? Okay—we have a couple of hours to think about that. For now, the usual protocol. That’s right. No, nothing from State. I’ll handle it from here, then the secretary can have his say. Thank you.” The President pushed the kill button on the phone and handed it back to the Marine.

  “Sir, is there anything that the guard detail needs—”

  “No.” The President explained briefly what had happened. “Carry on, Lieutenant.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” The Marine left.

  The President put on his bathrobe and walked over to the mirror to comb his hair. He had to use the terrycloth of his sleeve to wipe the condensation off the glass. Had he noticed, he would have wondered why the look in his eyes didn’t shatter it.

  “Okay,” the President of the United States told the mirror. “So you bastards want to play....”

  The flight from Andrews to Camp David was made in one of the new VH-60 Blackhawk helicopters that the 89th Military Airlift Wing had just acquired. Plushly appointed to carry VIPs from place to place, it was still too noisy for anything approximating a normal conversation. Each of the four passengers stared out the windows on the sliding doors, watching the western Maryland hills slide beneath the aircraft, each alone with his grief and his anger. The trip took twenty minutes. The pilot had been told to hurry.

  On touching down, the four men were loaded into a car for the short drive to the President’s cabin on the grounds. They found him hanging up the phone. It had taken half an hour to locate his press secretary, further exacerbating the President’s already stormy mood.

  Admiral Cutter started to say something about how sorry everyone was, but the President’s expression cut him short.

  The President sat down on a couch opposite the fireplace. In front of him was what most people ordinarily took to be a coffee table, but now, with the top removed, it was a set of computer screens and quiet thermal printers that tapped into the major news wire services and other government information channels. Four television sets were in the next room, tuned into CNN and the major networks. The four visitors stared down at him, watching the anger come off the President like steam from a boiling pot.

  “We will not let this one slip past with us standing by and deploring the event,” the President said quietly as he looked up. “They killed my friend. They killed my ambassador. They have directly challenged the sovereign power of the United States of America. They want to play with the big boys,” the President went on in a voice that was grotesquely calm. “Well, they’re going to have to play by the big boys’ rules. Peter,” he said to the AG, “there is now an informal Presidential Finding that the drug Cartel has initiated an undeclared war against the government of the United States. They have chosen to act like a hostile nation-state. We will treat them as we would treat a hostile nation-state. As President, I am resolved to carry the fight to the enemy as we would carry it to any other originator of state-sponsored terrorism.”

  The AG didn’t like that, but nodded agreement anyway. The President turned to Moore and Ritter.

  “The gloves come off. I just made the usual wimpy-ass statement for my press secretary to deliver, but the fucking gloves come off. Come up with a plan. I want these bastards hurt. No more of this ‘sending a message’ crap. I want them to get the message whether the phone rings or not. Mr. Ritter, you have your hunting license, and there’s no bag limit. Is that sufficiently clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” the DDO answered. Actually, it wasn’t. The President hadn’t said “kill” once, as the tape recorders that were surely somewhere in this room would show. But there were some things that you didn’t do, and one of them was that you did not force the President to speak clearly when clarity was something he wished to avoid.

  “Find yourselves a cabin and come up with a plan. Peter, I want you to stay here with me for a while.” The next message: the Attorney General, once having acceded to the President’s desire to Do Something, didn’t need to know exactly what was going to be done. Admiral Cutter, who was more familiar with Camp David than the other two, led the way to one of the guest cabins. Since he was in front, Moore and Ritter could not see the smile on his face.

  Ryan was just getting to his office, having driven himself in, a habit which he had just unlearned. The senior intelligence watch officer was waiting for him in the corridor as Jack got off the elevator. The briefing took a whole four minutes, after which Ryan found himself sitting in the office with nothing at all to do. It was strange. He was now privy to everything the U.S. government knew about the assassination of its people—not much more than what he’d heard on the car radio coming in, actually, though he now had names to put on the “unnamed sources.” Sometimes that was important, but not this time. The DCI and DDO, he learned at once, were up at Camp David with the President.

  Why not me? Jack asked himself in surprise.

  It should have occurred to him immediately, of course, but he was not yet used to being a senior executive. With nothing to do, his mind went along that tangent for several minutes. The conclusion was an obvious one. He didn’t need to know what was being talked about—but that had to mean that something was already happening, didn’t it ... ? If so, what? And for how long?

  By noon the next day, an Air Force C-141B Starlifter transport had landed at El Dor
ado International. Security was like nothing anyone had seen since the funeral of Anwar Sadat. Armed helicopters circled overhead. Armored vehicles sat with their gun tubes trained outward. A full battalion of paratroops ringed the airport, which was shut down for three hours. That didn’t count the honor guard, of course, all of whom felt as though they had no honor at all, that it had been stripped away from their army and their nation by ... them.

  Esteban Cardinal Valdéz prayed over the coffins, accompanied by the chief rabbi of Bogotá’s small Jewish community. The Vice President attended on behalf of the American government, and one by one the Colombian Army handed the caskets over to enlisted pallbearers from all of the American uniformed services. The usual, predictable speeches were made, the most eloquent being a brief address by Colombia’s Attorney General, who shed unashamed tears for his friend and college classmate. The Vice President boarded his aircraft and left, followed by the big Lockheed transport.

  The President’s statement, already delivered, spoke of reaffirming the rule of law to which Emil Jacobs had dedicated his life. But that statement seemed as thin as the air at El Dorado International even to those who didn’t know better.

  In the town of Eight Mile, Alabama, a suburb of Mobile, a police sergeant named Ernie Braden was cutting his front lawn with a riding mower. A burglary investigator, he knew all the tricks of the people whose crimes he handled, including how to bypass complex alarm systems, even the sophisticated models used by wealthy investment bankers. That skill, plus the information he picked up from office chatter—the narcs’ bullpen was right next to the burglary section—enabled him to offer his services to people who had money with which to pay for the orthodonture and education of his children. It wasn’t so much that Braden was a corrupt cop as that he’d simply been on the job for over twenty years and no longer gave much of a damn. If people wanted to use drugs, then the hell with them. If druggies wanted to kill one another off, then so much the better for the rest of society. And if some arrogant prick of a banker turned out to be a crook among crooks, then that also was too bad; all Braden had been asked to do was shake the man’s house to make sure that he’d left no records behind. It was a shame about the man’s wife and kids, of course, but that was called playing with fire.