Jack Ryan 7 - The Sum of All Fears (76 page)

USS Maine left the shed without incident. Tugs turned her around, pointing the submarine down the channel, and continued to stand by if assistance were required. Captain Ricks stood atop the sail, actually aft of the cockpit, leaning against rails set in the very top of the structure. Lieutenant Commander Claggett stood his watch in the control room. The navigator actually did the work, using the periscope to mark positions, which a quartermaster dutifully checked off on the chart, ensuring that the submarine was in the center of the channel and headed in the proper direction. The trip to sea was a fairly lengthy one. Throughout the boat, men continued to stow gear. Those not actually on watch settled into their bunks and tried to nap. Soon
Maine
would be on her regular six-hour watch cycle. The sailors all made the conscious effort to get their minds from land-mode into at-sea-mode. Families and friends might as well have been on another planet. For the next two months their entire world was contained within the steel hull of their submarine.

Mancuso watched the sailing as he always did for each of his boats. It was a shame, he decided, that there was no way to get Ricks off the boat. But there was no such way. He'd meet with Group in a few days to go over routine business. At that meeting, he'd express his misgivings about Ricks. He would not be able to go too far this first time, just to let Group know that he had his doubts about the “Gold” CO. The quasi-political nature of the exercise grated on Mancuso, who liked things in the open and above board, the
Navy Way
. But the
Navy Way
had its own rules of behavior, and in the absence of substantive cause for action, all he could do now was to express concern with Ricks and his way of running things. Besides, Group was headed by yet another hyper-engineering type who would probably have a little too much sympathy with Harry.

Mancuso tried to find an emotion for the moment, but failed. The slate-grey shape diminished in the distance, gliding across the oily-calm waters of the harbor, heading out for her fifth deterrence patrol, as U S Navy submarines had been doing for over thirty years. Business as usual, world changes and all, that's all it was.
Maine
sailed out to keep the peace through the threat of the most inhuman force known to man. The Commodore shook his head. What a hell of a way to run a railroad. That was why he'd always been a fast-attack man. But it worked, had worked, probably would continue to work for a lot more years, Bart told himself, and while not every boomer skipper was another Mush Morton, they'd all brought their boats back. He got into his navy-blue official car and told the driver to take him back to the office. Paperwork beckoned.

At least the kids didn't notice Jack took some comfort in that. Kids lived as spectators in a highly complex world which required years of schooling to appreciate, as a result of which they took note mainly of the parts that they understood, and that did not include a Mom and Dad who simply didn't talk. It wouldn't last forever, of course, but it might last long enough for things to be smoothed over. Probably would, Jack thought. Sure it would.

He didn't know what was wrong, nor did he know what to do about it. What he ought to have done, of course, was get home at a decent hour, maybe take her out to dinner at a nice place and—but that was not possible with two kids in school. Getting a sitter in the middle of the week and this far out of town was impractical. Another option was simply to get home and pay closer attention to his wife, leading to a—

But he couldn't depend on his ability to do that, and one more failure could only make things worse.

He looked up from his desk, out at the pines that lay beyond the CIA boundary fence. The symmetry was perfect. His work was messing up his family life, and now his family life was messing up his work. So, now, he had nothing at all that he could do properly. Wasn't that nice? Ryan got up from his desk and left the office, wandering to the nearest kiosk. Once there he purchased his first pack of cigarettes in . . . five years? Six? Whatever, he stripped off the cellophane top and tapped one out. One luxury of having a private office was that he could smoke without interference—CIA had become just like all government offices in that respect; for the most part, people could only smoke in the rest rooms. He pretended not to see the disapproving look on Nancy's face on his way back in, then went rooting in his desk for an ashtray before lighting up.

It was, he decided a minute later—just as the initial dizziness hit him—one of the dependable pleasures of life. Alcohol was another. You ingested these substances and you got the desired result, which explained their popularity, in spite of the dangers to health that everyone knew about. Alcohol and nicotine, the two things that make intolerable life into something else. While they shortened it.

Wasn't that just great? Ryan almost laughed at his incredible stupidity. Just what else of himself would he destroy? But did it matter?

His work mattered. That he was sure of. That was what had landed him in this mess, one way or another. That was the prime destructive factor in his life, but he could no more leave that than he could change anything else.

“
Nancy
, please ask Mr. Clark to come in.”

John appeared two minutes later. “Aw, hell, Doc!” he observed almost immediately. “Now, what's the wife gonna say?”

“Not a thing.”

“Bet you're wrong on that.”
Clark
turned to open a window for ventilation. He'd quit a long time before. It was the one vice that he feared. It had killed his father. “What do you want?”

“How's the hardware?”

“Waiting for your go-ahead to build it.”

“Go,” Jack said simply.

“You got a go-mission order?”

“No, but I don't need it. We'll call it part of the feasibility study. How long to slap things together?”

“Three days, they say. We'll need some cooperation from the Air Force.”

“What about the computer side?”

“That program has already been validated. They've taken tapes from six different aircraft, and smoothed out the noise. It's never taken them more than two or three hours to do an hour of tape.”

“
Mexico City
to D.C. is . . .”

“Depending on weather, just under four hours, max. Doing the full tape will be an overnighter,”
Clark
estimated. “The President's schedule is what?”

“Arrival ceremony is Monday afternoon. The first business session is the following morning. State dinner Tuesday night.”

“You going?”

Ryan shook his head. “No, we're going to the one a week earlier—geez, that's not too far off, is it? I'll call the 89th Wing at Andrews. They do training hops all the time. Getting your team aboard won't be hard.”

“I have three capture teams selected. They're all ex-Air Force and Navy elint spooks,”
Clark
said. They know the business."

“Okay, run with it.”

“You got it, Doc.”

Jack watched him leave and lit up another.

— 29 —

CROSSROADS

MV Carmen Vita cleared the Straits of Gibraltar right on schedule, her Pielstick diesels driving her at a constant nineteen knots. The crew of forty officers and men (this ship did not have any women in the crew, though three of the officers had their wives with them) settled down for the normal sailing routine of watch-keeping and maintenance. They were seven days out from the Virginia Capes. On her deck and stowed below were a goodly number of standard-sized container boxes. These actually came in two sizes, and they were all loaded with various types of cargo which the captain and crew neither knew nor cared very much about. The whole point of containerization was that the ship was used exclusively as a contract-hauler, much as a trucker was used by various businesses. All the ship's crew needed to worry about was the weight of the containers, and that always seemed to work out rather uniformly, since the containers themselves were always loaded to reflect what a commercial truck could legally pull along a public highway.

The ship's southerly routing also made for a fairly sedate and uneventful passage. The really bitter winter storms followed a more northerly track, and the ship's master, a native of
India
, was happy for it. A youngish man for such a substantial command—he was only thirty-seven—he knew that good weather made for a fast and fuel-efficient voyage. He aspired to a larger and more sumptuous ship, and by keeping Carmen Vita on schedule and under budget, he'd get that in due course.

It was the tenth day in a row that
Clark
hadn't seen Mrs. Ryan. John Clark had a good memory for such things, honed by years of field operations of one sort or another, in which one stayed alive by keeping track of everything, whether it seemed important or not. He'd never seen her more than twice in a row. Jack worked an inconvenient schedule—but so did she, with early-morning surgery at least twice a week . . . and she was awake this morning. He saw her head through the kitchen window, sitting at a table, probably drinking coffee and reading the paper or watching TV. But she hadn't even turned her head to look at her husband when he left, had she? Ordinarily she got up to kiss him goodbye like any wife. Ten days in a row.

Not a good sign, was it? What was the problem? Jack came out to the car, his face dark and looking down. There was the grimace again.

“Morning, Doc!”
Clark
greeted him cheerily.

“Hi, John,” was the subdued reply. He hadn't brought his paper again, either. He started reading from the dispatch box as usual, and by the time they reached the D.C. Beltway, he'd just be staring, a grim thousand-yard stare in his eyes as he lit a continuous chain of cigarettes.
Clark
decided that he just couldn't stand it anymore:

“Problem at home, Doc?” he asked quietly, watching the road.

“Yeah, but it's my problem.”

“Guess so. The kids are okay?”

“It's not the kids, John. Leave it, okay?”

“Right.”
Clark
concentrated on his driving while Ryan went through the message traffic.

What the hell is the problem. Be analytical
,
Clark
told himself, think it through.

His boss had been depressed for over a month now, but it had really gotten worse—the news article, that thing from Holtzman? A family problem, not involving the kids. That meant trouble with the wife. He made a mental note to recheck that piece and any subsequent pieces when he got into the office. Seventy minutes after picking Ryan up—traffic was light this morning—he headed for CIA's rather impressive library and got the staff there busy. It wasn't hard for them. The Agency kept a special file for all the pieces that concerned it, arranged in folders by the authors' by-lines. The problem,
Clark
thought, was immediately clear.

Holtzman had talked about financial and sexual misconduct. Right after that article came out . . .

“Aw, shit,”
Clark
whispered to himself. He made copies of the various recent pieces—there were four of them—and went for a walk to clear his head. One nice thing about being an SPO, especially an SPO assigned to Ryan, was that he had very little work to do. Ryan was a homebody while in
Langley
. He didn't really move around all that much. As he took a quick walking tour of the grounds, he reread the news articles and made another connection. The Sunday piece. Ryan had gone home early that day. He'd been upbeat, talking about getting away right after the Mexican job, taking John's advice for a trip to Florida—but the next morning he'd looked like a corpse. And he wasn't bringing the paper out with him. His wife must have been reading it, and something had gone very bad between Ryan and his wife. That seemed reasonably clear. Clear enough for
Clark
.

Clark
came back into the building, going through the normal routine of passing through the computer-controlled gates, then setting off to locate Chavez, who was in the
New
Headquarters
Building
. John found him in an office, going over schedules.

“Ding, get your coat.” Ten minutes later, they were on the D.C. Beltway. Chavez was checking a map.

“Okay,” Chavez said. “I have it. Broadway and Monument, up from the harbor.”

Russell was dressed in coveralls. The photos of the ABC vans in
Chicago
had turned out very well, and he'd had a lab in
Boulder
blow them up to poster size. These he compared to his van—it was exactly the same model of utility van—to make precise measurements. What came next wasn't easy. He'd purchased a dozen large sheets of semi-rigid plastic, and he began carving them to make an exact match of the ABC logo. As he finished each, he taped it to the side of his van and used a marker pencil to scribe in the letters. It required six attempts to get it right, and Russell next used the knife to make reference marks on the van. It seemed a pity to score the paint on the van, but he reminded himself that the van would be blown up anyway, and there was no sense in getting sentimental about a truck. On the whole, he was proud of his artistic talents. He hadn't had a chance to exercise them since he'd learned a trade in the prison shop, many years before. When the logo was painted on, black letters on the white-painted truck, nobody would be able to tell the difference.

The next job of the day was to drive to the local motor-vehicle agency to get commercial tags for the van. He explained that he would use it for his electronics business, installing and servicing commercial phone systems. He walked out with temporary tags, and they promised delivery of the real ones in four working days, which struck Russell as unnecessarily efficient. Getting the license was even easier. The international licensing documents that Ghosn had provided to go along with his passport were honored by the State of
Colorado
, after he passed a written test, and he had a photo-certified license card to go along with the tags. His only “mistake” was messing up one of the forms, but the clerk let him sign a fresh one while Russell dumped the first in the trash can. Or appeared to. The blank form slid into the pocket of his parka.

Johns
Hopkins
Hospital
is not located in the best of neighborhoods. As compensation for that fact the Baltimore City Police guarded it in a way that reminded
Clark
of his time in
Vietnam
. He found a parking place on Broadway, just across from the main entrance. Then he and Chavez went in, walking around the marble statue of Jesus which both found rather admirable in size and execution. The large complex—Hopkins is a vast facility—made finding the right part difficult, but ten minutes later they were sitting outside the Wilmer Eye Institute office of Associate Professor Caroline M. Ryan, M.D., F.A.C.S. Clark relaxed and read a magazine while Chavez cast his lecherous eyes on the receptionist whom Mrs. Ryan evidently rated. The other Dr. Ryan, as
Clark
thought of her, showed up at twelve-thirty-five with an armful of documents. She gave the two CIA officers a who-are-you look and breezed into her office without a word. It didn't take much of a look on his part either. She'd always appeared to him a very attractive and dignified female. Not now. Her face, if anything, was in worse shape than her husband's. This really was getting out of hand, John thought.
Clark
gave it a ten-count and just walked past the open-mouthed receptionist to begin his newest career, marriage counsellor.