Command Authority (52 page)

Present day

P
resident of the United States Jack Ryan realized he was squeezing the side of his desk with his free hand as he listened to the gravel-voiced Englishman tell a story that had turned out so well for Ryan and so poorly for him.

When the story stopped, Jack knew there must have been much, much more, but he recognized the Englishman was waiting to hear something from Ryan, just to know he was still there.

Jack said, “I don’t know what to say.”

“Did you call it in? Did you report what happened?”

“Did I call it in? I was with the German police five minutes after the fact, looking for you. An hour later, I had every U.S. intelligence asset in the city on the hunt. By the next day, I was in London in the office of the director of the SIS. Of course I looked for you. I did not know you were a British operative, but I had everyone hunting for you and Marta nonetheless.”

Oxley said, “Fair enough, Ryan. I’ve got reasons to believe you now, thanks to your boy here, but I spent thirty years under the impression you’d kept your mouth shut about the whole bloody affair. I’ve been holdin’ a bit of a grudge, to be honest. I didn’t know you from Adam at the time. But years later I was sitting in my pub when your face came up on the telly saying you were the American President.”

Jack Junior spoke up now: “Dad, Ox was the man who gave SIS the intel about Talanov being Zenith. He was in a gulag when Talanov was there. He didn’t meet him, but he picked up the story.”

“Is it credible?”

Oxley said, “Seemed so, but it was a long time ago. My memory is not what it once was.”

“I understand, Mr. Oxley.”

Jack Junior said, “We have to go. I’m going to get answers for you on Zenith, but I don’t have them yet.”

“Just tell me you are okay.” Jack Junior could hear the emotion in his father’s voice. He was lost in the past now, and had no idea what his son was involved in at present.

“I’m with Ding, Dom, and Sam in the Hendley jet.”

“The Hendley jet? You aren’t in London?”

“We’re going to check a lead or two on the continent. I’ll call you when I know something. You’ve got enough on your plate right now dealing with Ukraine.”

“It is a difficult situation,” Ryan said, “but as long as I know you aren’t in the middle of it, I’ll feel a little better.”

Jack Junior just said, “I’m a long way from Ukraine, Dad.”

—

R
yan, Chavez, Caruso, Oxley, and Driscoll arrived in Zurich in the early evening, rented a pair of Mercedes SUVs, and headed south toward Zug. There was heavy rain and fog, which Ryan hoped would work to their advantage, as they had no idea who was looking for them.

The four Americans were armed now. Before they left the G550, Adara had passed out pistols that had been hidden in an access panel on the flight deck. Jack and Ding both chose the Glock 19, and Driscoll and Caruso took SIG Sauer P229s. The men knew if Castor was protected by any sizable security force they would not be able to initiate any sort of real attack with handguns, but at least with the firearms hidden inside their jackets they would be able to defend themselves from most threats.

They had little information about the physical property of Castor’s place, other than some notes Galbraith made for Jack regarding the layout. From this and a careful search of online maps, the men decided their best chance to enter undetected was via the lake at the rear of the property.

They rented a boat and scuba gear in the marina, and by seven p.m. they were a quarter-mile offshore from Castor’s lake house, scanning the two-acre grounds through binoculars. They could see some activity inside through the huge floor-to-ceiling windows, as well as plainclothes security men patrolling with submachine guns around the building’s exterior and down a hill in the rear of the property at a pier and boathouse on the lake.

The security men looked like a professional group, and it gave Ryan confidence that Castor was, in fact, on the premises.

Ding said, “I see eight to ten guys. We are not getting through them undetected, and we aren’t shooting it out with Swiss rent-a-cops.”

Ryan agreed. “We’ll have to figure out another way in.”

The Americans sat on the boat, discussing some way to covertly gain access to Castor without being detected by his security.

Oxley had been silent, sitting alone up on the bow. Finally he said, “Gents, I don’t want to tell you your business, but I would like to offer a suggestion.”

Ding said, “By all means.”

“Why don’t we just walk up his bloody driveway and talk to him?”

“Talk to him?” Ryan asked.

“Of course. Castor believes in self-preservation. He believes in playing both sides. He’s not a madman. He is not going to kill the President’s son when others know you are with him. It is possible things won’t go the way we want them to, so maybe your friends can get as close as possible, but my vote is you and I just confront the sod and see what he has to say for himself.”

Ryan looked to Chavez. Ding said, “Your call, kid.”

Jack shrugged. “I don’t have anything better than that.”

Sam said, “We can drop you up the coast, then we can anchor a half-mile away and do a covert entry on the back of the grounds with the scuba gear. We might be able to parlay the distraction of your arrival into us getting a little closer to the house than we could otherwise.”

Chavez said, “I like it. But remember, Jack. They will search you before you see Castor. You can’t take a gun or any communications gear that shows them you brought company.”

“I understand.”

Jack wanted Oxley to stay on the boat. He knew the fifty-nine-year-old ex-spy had every reason in the world to want to confront Hugh Castor. He sensed there was more to the relationship than Ox had let on, but he’d not mentioned it. Jack saw nothing good coming from Oxley’s facing Castor right now. The threat of Oxley’s revealing Castor as a Russian spy, Jack reasoned, would be a lot more useful than actually having Oxley enter Castor’s grounds, where he would be vulnerable.

But Victor Oxley was having none of it. He made it clear that he would be involved in the meeting, and Jack and his mates would have to tie him to the rigging to keep him from going.

—

T
he Russians arrived in Zug in a Russian-built Mi-8, which was not an unusual occurrence at all, as there was a lot of offshore banking still done in Switzerland, and no one did more offshore banking these days than the Russians.

Anyone looking over the men who climbed off the chopper, however, might have noticed that most of their suits were brand-new and off-the-rack, and their average age was only thirty or so, which was young for the average Russian investment banker or white-collar criminal.

These were not Seven Strong Men henchmen. They were Spetsnaz, FSB Special Forces, but their leader straddled the line between both organizations. His name was Pavel Lechkov, he was Seven Strong Men and FSB, and he, like the rest of his unit, carried a small, collapsible, Brügger & Thomet MP9 submachine gun in a shoulder holster under his coat, and a hooked knife in a sheath in the small of his back.

The Russians had a schematic of the lakefront property of Hugh Castor, and they had gone over it in the helo, and by the time they arrived in Zug and climbed into a van to take them to a property on the west side of the lake, each man in the unit knew his part in the operation to come.

At a small lakeside chalet at the edge of the forest, the men changed clothes, removing the business suits they had worn for cover and putting on dark cotton pants and dark jackets that would help them blend into the night.

Although there were eight of them and they knew they might well be up against a slightly larger force, Pavel Lechkov also knew they would have skill and surprise on their side.

They moved down to the waterline, where an eight-man Zodiac rigid inflatable boat was waiting for them.

—

J
ust after eleven p.m. Jack Ryan, Jr., and Victor Oxley walked together up an unpaved winding street. It was almost perfectly quiet, the only noise coming from drips of condensation off the trees on either side of the road and, every few minutes, a passing vehicle, usually a Porsche or BMW or Audi.

They had to walk nearly a mile from the closest place Ding could land the boat, so they had plenty of time to talk about their plan to get Castor to reveal information. Jack knew his best option was to clearly and immediately let the man know that a lot of people knew he was there. He hoped Castor was desperate enough to talk to save himself, but not so desperate that he would just shoot Ryan and Oxley in the head and try to flee to some country with no extradition treaty with either the United States or Great Britain.

This all seemed like a long shot, but Jack was emboldened somewhat by the fact three very able men would be lurking in the darkness outside the lake house.

As they walked, Ryan asked Oxley about what had happened after he was taken out of East Berlin. Oxley said he spent days in a train car under guard, while outside the landscape of East Germany, Poland, and Belarus passed by. He passed into Russia, continued all the way to Moscow’s Leningradskaya station, where he was placed in the back of a truck. They drove him around the city, and he was able to see it all through a slit in the wall of the vehicle. Through the slit he saw a sign that made his heart sink. Energeticheskaya Street. He knew then they were taking him to Lefortovo Prison.

Oxley spent weeks in a small cell in Lefortovo with an asphalt floor and a single twenty-five-watt bulb that burned both day and night.

Every day he was taken into interrogations. He claimed he was nothing but a simple defector to the West who walked up on a fight among some plainclothes men, and he got involved. He said he thought one man was being attacked by West German police, and he’d gotten involved only because he was no fan of Western governments.

The KGB did not believe his story, but they’d caught him in no verifiable fabrication, either. After weeks of sleep deprivation, stress positions, torture, and the threat of execution, none of it made him change his simple yet doubtful story.

They were unable to break him.

Normally, the KGB would have made explicit threats involving his family, but this arrow had been removed from their quiver, because the KGB could not pin down any family.

It would have been an easy matter to take the twenty-nine-year-old Russian defector into a field and shoot him, but this was the mid-eighties. The KGB still killed people, the KGB would not execute its last prisoner until the final days of its existence in 1991, but by the eighties a termination required paperwork and signatures and a post-action review.

It was much easier and cleaner to lock him up and let nature take its course.

Ox was placed into the gulag system and shipped in a train into the Ural Mountains in the Komi Republic.

Ryan wanted more; he hadn’t yet gotten Oxley to explain how he’d made it home to Great Britain after leaving the gulag, but by now they had almost arrived at Hugh Castor’s lake house. They turned to head up the long driveway and made it less than a third of the way to the house before a man stepped out from the darkness and shone a flashlight on them.
“Halt!”

Jack shielded his eyes from the light. He said, “We are here to see Castor.”

“Name?”

“Ryan and Oxley.”

“
Ja.
We have been waiting for you.”

Ryan had not expected this. He was hoping Castor would be put on his heels with the surprise visit, but clearly that wasn’t going to happen.

The security man spoke into his walkie-talkie, and an SUV rolled down the drive. Men climbed out and searched the two visitors thoroughly up against the hood of the vehicle, then they all walked up to the front door as a group.

—

S
am Driscoll rose out of the cold black water of Lake Zug slowly, inch by inch, so the water on his insulated wetsuit would return to the lake without dripping and making noise. He’d already taken off his swim fins and his tank; he pulled them along with one hand as he held his pistol with the other, scanning the darkness to the north of the pier.

Soon Ding Chavez appeared from the black water on the south side of the pier, and he carried his equipment with him as well. He stowed it against a low retaining wall at the edge of the property, making certain it could not be seen from the house, as he did not want any beam cast from a flashlight to reflect off either the tank or the mask.

Dominic Caruso rose from the water under the pier itself, and he tied off his gear and climbed out onto the rocks behind the wooden boathouse.

A two-man security patrol passed the area less than a minute after Dom made it into position. He rolled under the raised boathouse, keeping his body off the sharp rocks by holding himself in a plank position till they passed.

After another minute, the patrol had finished its circuit of the rear of the property and disappeared around the side of the house up the hill. Ding, Dom, and Sam took their Bluetooth headsets out of waterproof boxes and attached them to their ears. They established comms with one another, and all three used binoculars from their packs to search the windows of the house itself to look for Ryan.

—

H
ugh Castor stood in front of a roaring fire in the living room of the lake house, and he greeted Ryan and Oxley as they were escorted in by the security officers. The sixty-eight-year-old man wore a black sweater and corduroys, and his eyeglasses and short silver hair shone in the light from the fire.

Oxley and Castor made some eye contact, but Ryan was surprised there were no real words between them. He halfway expected Ox to launch across the room and grab Castor by the throat, but nothing of the sort happened.

Instead, Castor just directed Oxley and Ryan to a sofa, and he sat down on a wingback chair facing them.

Two Swiss security men had been in the living room, but once Ryan and Oxley sat down they stepped into an adjacent kitchen. Ryan could hear them there, just around the corner, and he suspected that was their intention.