by Tom Clancy
“I do not know.”
It took half an hour. Fromm explained to his wife that he was going to be away for a few days for further business discussions. She gave him a hopeful kiss. Argentina might be nice, and nicer still to be able to live well somewhere. Perhaps this old friend had been able to talk sense into him. He drove a Mercedes, after all. Perhaps he knew what the future really held.
Three hours later Bock and Fromm boarded a flight to Rome. After an hour’s layover, their next stop was Turkey, and from there to Damascus, where they checked into a hotel to get some needed rest.
If anything, Ghosn told himself, Marvin Russell was even more formidable-looking than he’d been before. What little excess weight he’d carried had sweated off, and his daily fitness exercises with the soldiers of the movement had only added to an already muscular physique, while the sun had bronzed him until he might almost have been mistaken for an Arab. The one discordant note was his religion. His comrades reported that he was a true pagan, an unbeliever, who prayed to the sun, of all things. It disquieted the Muslims, but people were working, gently, to show him the true faith of Islam, and it was reported that he listened respectfully. It was also reported that he was a dead shot with any weapon to any range; that he was the most lethal hand-to-hand fighter they’d ever encountered—he’d nearly crippled an instructor—and that he had field-craft skills that would impress a fox. A clever, cunning, natural warrior was the overall assessment. Aside from his religious eccentricities, the others liked and admired him.
“Marvin, if you get any tougher you will frighten me!” Ghosn chuckled at his American friend.
“Ibrahim, this is the best thing I’ve ever done, coming here. I never knew that there were other folks who been fucked over like my people, man—but you guys are better at fighting back. You guys got real balls.” Ghosn blinked at that—this from a man who’d snapped a policeman’s neck like a twig. “I really want to help, man, any way I can.”
“There is always a place for a true warrior.” If his language skills improved, he’d make a fine instructor, Ghosn thought. “Well, I must be off.”
“Where you going?”
“A place we have east of here.” It was to the north. “Some special work I must do.”
“That thing we dug up?” Russell asked casually. Almost too casually, Ghosn thought, but that was not possible, was it? Caution was one thing. Paranoia was another.
“Something else. Sorry, my friend, but we must take our security seriously.”
Marvin nodded. “It’s cool, man. That’s what killed my brother, fucking up security. See ya when you get back.”
Ghosn left for his car and drove out of the camp. He took the Damascus road for an hour. Foreigners so often failed to appreciate how small the Middle East was—the important parts, at least. The drive from Jerusalem to Damascus, for example, would have been a mere two hours on decent roads, though the two cities were the proverbial worlds apart politically ... or had been, Ghosn reminded himself. He’d heard of some ominous rumblings from Syria of late. Was even that government tiring of the struggle? It was easy to call that an impossibility, but that word no longer had its prior meaning.
Five kilometers outside Damascus he spotted the other car waiting at the prescribed place. He drove past it for two thousand meters, scanning for surveillance before he decided it was safe to turn around. A minute later he pulled over close to it. The two men got out as they’d been directed to do, and their driver, a member of the Organization, simply drove away.
“Good morning, Günther.”
“And to you, Ibrahim. This is my friend Manfred.” Both men got into the back of the car, and the engineer drove off at once.
Ghosn eyed the newcomer in the mirror. Older than Bock, thinner, with deep-sunk eyes. He was poorly dressed for the environment and sweating like a pig. Ibrahim handed back a plastic water bottle. The newcomer wiped off the top with his handkerchief before drinking. Arabs not sanitary enough for you? Ghosn wondered. Well, that was not his concern, was it?
The drive to the new location took two hours. Ghosn deliberately took a circuitous route despite the fact that the sun would keep a careful observer informed of their direction. He didn’t know what sort of training this Manfred fellow had, and while it was prudent to assume he knew every skill there was, it was also prudent to employ every trick in the book. By the time they arrived at their destination, only a trained reconnaissance soldier would have been able to duplicate the route.
Qati had chosen well. Until a few months earlier it had been a command center for Hezbollah. Dug into the side of a steep hillside, the corrugated-iron roof was covered with earth and planted with the sparse local shrubbery. Only a skilled man who knew exactly what he was looking for could ever have spotted it, and that was unlikely. Hezbollah was particularly adept at routing out informers in its midst. A dirt track ran right past it to an abandoned farm whose land was too played-out even for opium and hashish production, which was the major cash crop in the area. Inside the structure was about a hundred square meters of concrete-floored shade, even with room to park a few vehicles. The only bad news was that this place would be a deathtrap in case of an earthquake, Ghosn told himself, not an unknown occurrence in the region. He pulled the car in between two posts, out of sight. On leaving the car, he dropped camouflage netting behind it. Yes, Qati had chosen well.
The hardest balance, as always, was choosing between the two aspects of security. On the one hand, the more people who knew anything was happening, the worse it was. On the other, some people were necessary just to provide a guard force. Qati had brought most of his personal guard, ten men of known loyalty and skill. They knew Ghosn and Bock by sight, and their leader came forward to meet Manfred.
“This is our new friend,” Ghosn told the man, who looked closely at the German’s face and walked away.
“Was gibt’s hier?” Fromm asked in tense German.
“What we have here,” Ghosn answered in English, “is very interesting.”
Manfred took his lesson from that.
“Kommen Sie mit, bitte. ” Ghosn led them to a wall with a door in it. A man with a rifle stood outside of it, which made much better sense than a lock. The engineer nodded to the guard, who nodded curtly back. Ghosn led them into the room and pulled a cord to turn on the fluorescent lighting. There was a large metal worktable covered with a tarp. Ghosn removed the tarp without further comment. He was tiring of the drama in any case. It was time for real work.
“Gott im Himmel!”
“I’ve never seen it myself,” Bock admitted. “So that is what it looks like?”
Fromm put on some glasses and peered over the mechanism for perhaps a minute before looking up. “American design, but not American manufacture.” He pointed. “Wrong sort of wiring. Crude device, thirty years—no, older than that in design, but not in fabrication. These circuit boards are ... 1960s, perhaps early ’70s. Soviet? From the cache in Azerbaijan, perhaps?”
Ghosn merely shook his head.
“Israeli? Ist das möglich?” That question got a nod.
“More than possible, my friend. It is here.”
“Gravity bomb. Tritium injection into the pit to boost yield—fifty to seventy kilotons, I’d guess—radar and impact fusing. It has actually been dropped, but did not go off. Why?”
“Apparently it was never armed. Everything we recovered is before you,” Ghosn answered. He was already impressed with Manfred.
Fromm ran his fingers inside the bombcase, searching for connectors. “You’re correct. How interesting.” There was a long pause. “You know that it can probably be repaired ... and even ...”
“Even what?” Ghosn asked, knowing the answer.
“This design can be converted into a triggering device.”
“For what?” Bock asked.
“For a hydrogen bomb,” Ghosn answered. “I suspected that.”
“Awfully heavy, nothing like the efficiency of a modern design. As they
say, crude but effective....” Fromm looked up. “You want my help to repair it, then?”
“Will you help?” Ghosn asked.
“Ten years—more, twenty years I have studied and thought. ... How will it be used?”
“Does that trouble you?”
“It will not be used in Germany?”
“Of course not,” Ghosn answered almost in annoyance. What quarrel did the Organization really have with the Germans, after all?
Something in Bock’s mind, however, went click. He closed his eyes for a moment to engrave the thought in his memory.
“Yes, I will help.”
“You will be well paid,” Ghosn promised him. He saw a moment later that this was a mistake. But that didn’t matter, did it?
“I do not do such things for money! You think I am a mercenary?” Fromm asked indignantly.
“Excuse me. I meant no insult. A skilled worker is someone to be rewarded for his time. We are not beggars, you know.”
Neither am I, Fromm almost said before his good sense intervened. These were not the Argentines, were they? They were not fascists, not capitalists, they were revolutionary comrades who had also fallen upon bad political times ... though he was sure their fiscal situation was highly favorable indeed. The Soviets had never given arms to the Arabs. It had all been sold for hard currency, even under Brezhnev and Andropov, and if that had been good enough for the Soviets when they still held the true faith ... then ...
“Forgive me. I merely stated a fact, and I did not mean to insult you, either. I know you are not beggars. You are revolutionary soldiers, freedom fighters, and I will be honored to assist you in any way I can.” He waved his hand. “You may feel free to pay me whatever you think fair”—it would be plenty, more than a mere million D-Mark!—“but please understand that I do not sell myself for money.”
“It is a pleasure to meet an honorable man,” Ghosn said with a satisfied look.
Bock thought they had both laid it on rather thick, but kept his peace. He already suspected how Fromm would be paid.
“So,” Ghosn said next. “Where do we begin?”
“First, we think. I need paper and a pencil.”
“And who might you be?” Ryan asked.
“Ben Goodley, sir.”
“Boston?” Ryan asked. The accent was quite distinctive.
“Yes, sir. Kennedy School. I’m a postdoctoral Fellow and, well, now I’m a White House Fellow also.”
“Nancy?” Ryan turned to his secretary.
“The Director has him on your calendar, Dr. Ryan.”
“Okay, Dr. Goodley,” Ryan said with a smile, “come on in.” Clark took his seat after sizing the new guy up.
“Want some coffee?”
“You have decaf?” Goodley asked.
“You want to work here, boy, you’d better get used to the real stuff. Grab a seat. Sure you don’t want any?”
“I’ll pass, sir.”
“Okay.” Ryan poured his customary mug and sat down behind his desk. “So what are you doing in this puzzle palace?”
“The short version is, looking for a job. I did my dissertation on intelligence operations, their history and prospects. I need to see some things to finish my work at Kennedy, then I want to find out if I can do the real thing.”
Jack nodded. That sounded familiar enough. “Clearances?”
“TS, SAP/SAR. Those are new. I already had a ‘secret’ because some of my work at Kennedy involved going into some presidential archives, mainly in D.C., but some of the stuff in Boston is still sensitive. I even was part of the team that FOI’d a lot of stuff from the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
“Dr. Nicholas Bledsoe, his work?”
“That’s right.”
“I didn’t buy all of Nick’s conclusions, but that was a hell of a piece of research.” Jack raised his mug in salute.
Goodley had written nearly half of that monograph, including the conclusions. “What did you take issue with—if I may ask?”
“Khrushchev’s action was fundamentally irrational. I think—and the record bears this out—that his placing the missiles there was impulsive rather than reasoned.”
“I disagree. The paper pointed out that the principal Soviet concern was our IRBMs in Europe, especially the ones in Turkey. It seems logical to conclude that it was all a ploy to reach a stable situation regarding theater forces.”
“Your paper didn’t report on everything,” Jack said.
“Such as?” Goodley asked, hiding his annoyance.
“Such as the intel we were getting from Penkovskiy and others. Those documents are still classified and will remain so for another twenty years.”
“Isn’t fifty years a long time?”
“Sure is,” Ryan agreed. “But there’s a reason. Some of that information is still ... well, not exactly current, but it would reveal some tricks we don’t want revealed.”
“Isn’t that just a little extreme?” Goodley asked as dispassionately as he could manage.
“Let’s say we had Agent BANANA operating back then. Okay, he’s dead now—died of old age, say—but maybe Agent PEAR was recruited by him, and he’s still working. If the Sovs find out who BANANA was, that might give them a clue. Also you have to think about certain methods of message-transfer. People have been playing baseball for a hundred fifty years, but a change-up is still a change-up. I used to think the same way you do, Ben. You learn that most of the things that are done here are done for a reason.”
Captured by the system, Goodley thought.
“By the way, you did notice that Khrushchev’s last batch of tapes pretty much proved Nick Bledsoe wrong on some of his points—one other thing.”
“Yes?”
“Let’s say that John Kennedy had hard intel in the spring of 1961, really good stuff that Khrushchev wanted to change the system. In ‘58 he’d effectively gutted the Red Army, and he was trying to reform the Party. Let’s say that Kennedy had hard stuff on that, and he was told by a little bird that if he cut the Russkies a little slack, maybe we could have had a rapprochement in the ’60s. Glasnost, say, thirty years early. Let’s say all that happened, and the President blew the call, decided for political reasons that it was disadvantageous to cut Nikita a little slack.... That would mean that the 1960s were all a great big mistake. Vietnam, everything, all a gigantic screwup.”
“I don’t believe it. I’ve been through the archives. It’s not consistent with everything we know about—”
“Consistency in a politician?” Ryan interrupted. “There’s a revolutionary concept.”
“If you’re saying that really happened—”
“It was a hypothetical,” Jack said with a raised eyebrow. Hell, he thought, the information was all out there for anyone who wanted to pull it together. That it had never been done was just another manifestation of a wider and more troubling problem. But the part that worried him was right in this building. He’d leave history to historians ... until, someday, he decided to rejoin their professional ranks. And when will that be, Jack?
“Nobody’d ever believe it.”
“Most people believe that Lyndon Johnson lost the New Hampshire primary to Eugene McCarthy because of the Tet Offensive, too. Welcome to the world of intelligence, Dr. Goodley. You know what’s the hard part of recognizing the truth?” Jack asked.
“What’s that?”
“Knowing that something just bit you on the ass. It’s not as easy as you think.”
“And the breakup of the Warsaw Pact?”
“Case in point,” Ryan agreed. “We had all kinds of indicators, and we all blew the call. Well, that’s not true, exactly. A lot of the youngsters in the DI—Directorate of Intelligence,” Jack explained unnecessarily, which struck Goodley as patronizing, “were making noise, but the section chiefs pooh-poohed it.”
“And you, sir?”
“If the Director’s agreeable, we can let you see some of that. Most of it, in fact. The majority of our agents and field officers
got faked out of their jockstraps, too. We all could have done better, and that’s as true of me as it is of anybody else. If I have a weakness, it’s that I have too tactical a focus.”
“Trees instead of the forest?”
“Yep,” Ryan admitted. “That’s the big trap here, but knowing about it doesn’t always help a whole hell of a lot.”
“I guess that’s why they sent me over,” Goodley observed.
Jack grinned. “Hell, that’s not terribly different from how I got started here. Welcome aboard. Where do you want to start, Dr. Goodley?”
Ben already had a good idea on that, of course. If Ryan could not see it coming, that was not his problem, was it?
“So where do you get the computers?” Bock asked. Fromm was closeted away with his paper and pencils.
“Israel for a start, maybe Jordan or Turkey,” Ghosn replied.
“This will be rather expensive,” Bock warned.
“I have already checked out the computer-controlled machine tools. Yes, they are expensive.” But not that expensive. It occurred to Ghosn that he had access to hard-currency assets that might boggle the mind of this unbeliever. “We will see what your friend requires. Whatever it is, we will get it.”
13
PROCESS
Why did I ever accept this job?
Roger Durling was a proud man. The upset winner of what was supposed to have been a secure Senate seat, then the youngest governor in the history of California, he knew pride to be a weakness, but he also knew that there was much to justify his.
I could have waited a few years, maybe returned to the Senate and earned my way into the White House instead of cutting a deal and delivering the election to Fowler ... in return for this.
“This” was Air Force Two, the radio call sign for whatever aircraft the Vice President rode on. The implicit contrast with “Air Force One” made just one more joke that attached to what was putatively the second most important political post in the United States, though not as earthily apt as John Nance Garner’s observation: “A pitcher of warm spit.” The whole office of Vice President, Durling judged, was one of the few mistakes made by the Founding Fathers. It had once been worse. Originally the Vice President was supposed to have been the losing candidate who, after losing, would patriotically take his place in a government not his and preside over the Senate, setting aside petty political differences to serve the country. How James Madison had ever been that foolish was something scholars had never really examined, but the mistake had been corrected quickly enough by the 12th Amendment in 1803. Even in an age when gentlemen preparing for a duel referred to each other as “sir,” that was something that pressed selflessness too far. And so the law had been changed, and the Vice President was now an appendage instead of a defeated enemy. That so many Vice Presidents had succeeded to the top job was less a matter of design than happenstance. That so many had done well—Andrew Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman—was miraculous.
