Jack Ryan 7 - The Sum of All Fears (67 page)

“Detection?” Ryan asked.

Clark
grinned like a teenager who'd just snookered a teacher. “We build the system exclusively from Japanese components, and we place a receiver tuned to the right freqs in the aircraft. He'll be traveling with the usual mob of newsies. I'll set a receiver in the waste bin of one of the downstairs heads. If the op gets burned, they'll think it was one of their own. it'll even look like a journalist did it.”

Ryan nodded. “Nice touch, John.”

“I thought you'd like that. When the bird lands, we have a guy recover the bottle. We'll fix it—I mean, we'll see to it that you can't get the cork out. Superglue, maybe.”

“Getting aboard m
Mexico City
?”

“I have Ding looking at that. Time he got a taste of planning operations, and this is the soft side. My Spanish is good enough to fool a Mexican national”

“Back to the bugging equipment We won't be reading this in real-time?”

“No way.”
Clark
shook his head. “What'll come across will be garbled, but we'll use high-speed tape machines to record, then we can wash it through the 'puters downstairs to get clean copy. It's an additional operational safeguard. The guys in the chase birds won't know what they're listening to, and only the drivers need to know who they're shadowing . . . maybe not even that, as a matter of fact I have to check on that.”

“How long to produce clean copy?”

“Have to do it at this end . . . say a couple of hours. That's what the S&.T guys say, anyway. You know the real beauty of this?”

“Tell me ”

“Airplanes are about the last place you can't bug Our S&T guys have been playing with it for a long time What made the breakthrough came from the Navy—very black project. Nobody knows we can do this. The computer codes are very complex Lots of people are playing with it, but the actual breakthrough is on the theoretical side of the math. Came from a guy at NSA. I repeat, Sir John, nobody knows this is possible. Their security guys will be asleep. If they find the bug, they'll think it's an amateur attempt to do something. The receiver I put aboard won't actually recover anything usable to anyone but us—”

“And we'll have a guy recover that also, to back up the aerial transmissions.”

“That's right. So we have double-redundancy—or triple, I never have figured what the right terminology is. Three separate channels for the information, one in the plane, and two being beamed out from it.”

Ryan raised his coffee mug in salute. “Okay, now that the technical side looks possible, I want an operational feasibility evaluation.”

“You got it, Jack. Goddamn! It's good to be a real spy again. With all due respect, watching out for your ass does not test my abilities all that much.”

“I love you, too, John.” Ryan laughed. It was his first in too long a time. If they could pull this one off, maybe that Elliot bitch would get off his back for once. Maybe the President would understand that field operations with real live field officers were still useful. It would be a small victory.

— 25 —

RESOLUTION

“So, what's the story on the things?” the Second Officer asked, looking down at the cargo deck.

“Supposed to be the roof beams for a temple. Small one, I guess,” the First Officer noted. “How much more will these seas build . . . ?”

“I wish we could slow down, Pete.”

“I've talked to him twice about it. Captain says he has a schedule to meet.”

“Tell that to the fuckin' ocean.”

“Haven't tried that. Who do you call?”

The Second Officer, who had the watch, snorted. The First Officer—the ship's second in command—was on the bridge to keep an eye on things. That was actually the Captain's job, but the ship's Master was asleep in his bed.

MV George McReady was pounding through thirty-foot waves, trying to maintain twenty knots, but failing, despite full cruising power on her engines. The sky was overcast, with occasional breaks in the clouds for the full moon to peek through. The storm was actually breaking up, but the wind was holding steady at sixty knots and the seas were still increasing somewhat. It was a typical North Pacific storm, both officers had already decided. Nothing about it made any sense. The air temperature was a balmy 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and the flying spray was freezing to ice that impacted the bridge windows like birdshot in duck season. The only good news was that the seas were right on the bow. George M was a freighter, not a cruise liner, and lacked antiroll stabilizers. In fact, the ride wasn't bad at all. The superstructure was set on the after portion of the ship, and that damped out most of the pitching motion associated with heavy seas. It also had the effect of reducing the officers' awareness of events at the forward end of the ship, a fact further accentuated by the reduced visibility from flying spray.

The ride also had a few interesting characteristics. When the bow plowed into an especially high wave, the ship slowed down. But the size of the ship meant that the bow slowed quicker than the stern, and as the deceleration forces fought to reduce the ship's speed, the hull rebelled by shuddering. In fact, the hull actually bent a few inches, something difficult to believe until it was seen.

“I served on a carrier once. They flex more than a foot in the middle. Once we were—”

“Look dead ahead, sir!” the helmsman called.

“Oh shit!” the Second Officer shouted. “Rogue wave!”

Suddenly there it was, a fifty footer just a hundred yards from the George M's blunt bow. The event was not unexpected. Two waves would meet and add their heights for a few moments, then diverge . . . The bow rose on the medium-size crest, then dropped before the onrushing green wall.

“Here we go!”

There wasn't time for the bow to climb over this one. The green water simply stepped over the bow as though it had never been there and kept rolling aft the five hundred feet to the superstructure. Both officers watched in detached fascination. There was no real danger to the ship—at least, they both told themselves, no immediate danger. The solid green mass came past the heavy cargo-handling masts and equipment, advancing at a speed of thirty miles per hour. The ship was already shuddering again, the bow having hit the lower portion of the wave, slowing the ship. In fact, the bow was still under water, since this wave was far broader than it was high, but the top portion was about to hit a white-painted steel cliff that was perpendicular to its axis of advance.

“Brace!” the Second Officer told the helmsman.

The crest of the wave didn't quite make the level of the bridge, but it did hit the windows of the senior officers' cabins. Instantly, there was a white vertical curtain of spray that blotted out the entire world. The single second it lasted seemed to stretch into a minute, then it cleared, and the ship's deck was exactly where it was supposed to be, though covered with seawater that was struggling to drain out the scuppers. George M took a 15-degree roll, then settled back down.

“Drop speed to sixteen knots, my authority,” the First Officer said.

“Aye,” the helmsman acknowledged.

“We're not going to break this ship while I'm on the bridge,” the senior officer announced.

“Makes sense to me, Pete.” The Second Officer was on his way to the trouble board, looking for an indicator light for flooding or other problems. The board was clear. The ship was designed to handle seas far worse than this, but safety at sea demanded vigilance. “Okay here, Pete.”

The growler phone rang. “Bridge, First Officer here.”

“What the hell was that?” the Chief Engineer demanded.

“Well, it was sorta a big wave, ChEng,” Pete answered laconically. “Any problems?”

“No kidding. It really clobbered the forward bulkhead. I thought I was gonna eat my window—looks like a porthole is cracked. I really think we might want to slow down some. I hate getting wet in bed, y'know?”

“I already ordered that.”

“Good.” The line clicked off.

“What gives?” It was the Captain in pajamas and bathrobe. He managed to see the last of the seawater draining off the main deck.

“Fifty-sixty-footer. I've dropped speed to sixteen. Twenty's too much for the conditions.”

“Guess you're right,” the Captain grumbled. Every extra hour alongside the dock meant fifteen thousand dollars, and the owners did not like extra expenses. “Build it back up soon as you can.” The captain withdrew before his bare feet got too cold.

“Will do,” Pete told the empty doorway.

“Speed fifteen point eight,” the helmsman reported.

“Very well.” Both officers settled back down and sipped at their coffee. It wasn't really frightening, just somewhat exciting, and the moonlit spray flying off the bow was actually rather beautiful to see. The First Officer looked down at the deck. It took a moment for him to realize.

“Hit the lights.”

“What's the problem?” The Second Officer moved two steps to the panel and flipped on the deck floods.

“Well, we still have one of them.”

“One of—” the junior officer looked down. “Oh. The other three . . .”

The First Officer shook his head. How could you describe the power of mere water? That's strong chain, too, the wave snapped it like yarn. Impressive."

The Second Officer picked up the phone and punched a button. “Bosun, our deck cargo just got swept over the side. I need a damage check on the front of the superstructure.” He didn't have to say that the check should be done from inside the structure.

An hour later, it was clear that they'd been lucky. The single strike from the deck cargo had landed right on a portion of the superstructure backed by sturdy steel beams. Damage was minor, some welding and painting to be done. That didn't change the fact that someone would have to cut down a new tree. Three of the four logs were gone, and that Japanese temple would have to wait.

The three logs, still chained together, were already well aft of the George M. They were still green, and started soaking up sea water, making them heavier still.

Cathy Ryan watched her husband's car pull out of the driveway. She was now past the stage of feeling bad for him. Now she was hurt. He wouldn't talk about it—that is, he didn't try to explain himself, didn't apologize, tried to pretend that . . . what? And then part of the time he said he didn't feel well, was too tired. Cathy wanted to talk it over, but didn't know how to begin. The male ego was a fragile thing, Dr. Caroline Ryan knew, and this had to be its most fragile spot. It had to be a combination of stress and fatigue and booze. Jack wasn't a machine. He was wearing down. She'd seen the symptoms months earlier. As much the commute as anything else. Two and a half, sometimes three hours every day in the car. The fact that he had a driver was something, but not much. Three more hours a day that he was away, thinking, working, not home where he belonged.

Am I helping or hurting?
she asked herself. Is part of it my fault?

Cathy walked into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Okay, she wasn't a pink-cheeked kid anymore. There were worry lines around her mouth and squint lines around her eyes. She should have her spectacle prescription looked at. She was starting to get headaches during procedures, and she knew it could be a problem with her eyes—she was, after all, an ophthalmic surgeon—but like everyone else she was short of time and was putting off having her eyes looked at by another member of the Wilmer Eye Institute staff. Which was pretty dumb, she admitted to herself. She still had rather pretty eyes. At least the color didn't change, even though their refractive error might suffer from all the close work that her job mandated.

She was still quite slim. Wouldn't hurt to sweat off three or four pounds—better yet, to transfer that weight into her breasts. She was a small-breasted woman from a small-breasted family in a world that rewarded women for having udders to rival Elsie the Borden cow. Her usual joke that bust size was inversely proportional to brain size was a defense mechanism. She craved larger ones as a man always wanted a larger penis, but God or the gene pool had not chosen to give her those, and she would not submit to the vain ignominy of surgery—besides which she didn't like the numbers on that kind of surgery. Too many silicon implant cases developed complications.

The rest of her . . . her hair, of course, was always a mess, but surgical discipline absolutely prevented her from paying great attention to that. It was still blonde and short and very fine, and when Jack took the time to notice, he liked her hair. Her face was still pretty, despite the squint lines and worry lines. Her legs had always been pretty nice, and with all the walking she did at Hopkins/Wilmer, they had actually firmed up slightly. Cathy concluded that her looks were not the sort to make dogs bark when she passed. She was, in fact, still rather attractive. At least the other docs at the hospital thought so. Some of her senior medical students positively swooned over her, she liked to think. Certainly no one fought to escape her rounds.

She was also a good mother. Though Sally and Little Jack were still asleep, she never failed to look after them. Especially with Jack gone so much, Cathy filled in, even to the point of playing catch with her son during T-ball season (that was something that made her husband uncomfortably guilty whenever he learned of it). She cooked good meals when she had the time. Whatever the house needed, she either did herself or “contracted out”—Jack's phrase—to others.

She still loved her husband, and she let him know it. She had a good sense of humor, Cathy thought. She didn't let most things bother her. She never failed to touch Jack whenever the opportunity presented itself; she was a doctor, with a delicate touch. She talked to him, asked what he thought of something or other, let him know that she cared about him, cared about his opinions on things. There could be no doubt in his mind that he was still her man in every way. In fact, she loved him in every way a wife could. Cathy concluded that she wasn't doing anything wrong.

So, why didn't he—couldn't he . . . ?

The face in the mirror was more puzzled than hurt, she thought. What else can I do? she asked it.