Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (106 page)

Nomuri turned south, and climbed a smooth part of the slope to the crest of the southern ridge. He wanted a further look and listen, and, while he spotted a single half-built dwelling a few miles below, he saw no column of smoke from a wood fire, nor the rising steam from someone’s hot tub, and he heard nothing at all that was not of nature. Nomuri spent thirty minutes scanning the area with a pair of compact binoculars, taking his time and making sure, then turned to look north and west, finding the same remarkable absence of human presence. Finally satisfied, he headed back down to the Taki, following the path back to the town.

“We never see anyone now,” the rental agent said when Nomuri finally got back, just after sunset. “May I offer you some tea?”

“Dozo,”
the CIA officer said. He took his tea with a friendly nod. “It’s wonderful here.”

“You were wise to come this time of year.” The man wanted conversation more than anything else. “In the summer the trees are full and beautiful, but the noise from these things”—he gestured at the ranks of cycles—“well, it ruins the peace of the mountain. But it supports me well,” the man allowed.

“I must come back again. Things are so hectic at my office. To come here and feel the silence.”

“Perhaps you will tell some friends,” the man suggested. Clearly he needed the money to sustain him in the off-season.

“Yes, I will certainly do that,” Nomuri assured him. A friendly bow sent him on his way, and the CIA officer started his car for the three-hour drive back to Tokyo, still wondering why the Agency had given him an assignment calculated to make him feel better about his mission.

“Are you guys really comfortable with this?” Jackson asked the people from SOCOM.

“Funny time for second thoughts, Robby,” the senior officer observed. “If they’re dumb enough to let American civilians roam around their country, well, let’s take advantage of it.”

“The insertion still worries me,” the Air Force representative noted, looking by turns at the air-navigation charts and the satellite photos. “We have a good IP—hell, the navigational references are pretty good—but somebody’s gotta take care of those AWACS birds for this to work.”

“It’s covered,” the colonel from Air Combat Command assured him. “We’re going to light up the sky for them, and you do have that gap to use.” He tapped his pointer on the third chart.

“The helo crews?” Robby asked next.

“They’re working on their sims now. If they’re lucky they’ll get to sleep on the flight over.”

The mission-planning simulator was real enough to fool Sandy Richter’s inner ears. The device was halfway between his youngest son’s new Nintendo VR System and a full-up aircraft simulator, the oversized helmet he wore identical with the one he used in his Comanche, but infinitely more sophisticated. What had begun with a monocle display on the AH-64 Apache was now like an I-MAX-theater view of the world that you wore on your head. It needed to be more sophisticated yet, but it did give him a view of the computer-generated terrain along with all his flight information, and his hands were on the stick and throttle of another virtual-helicopter as he navigated across the water toward approaching bluffs.

“Coming right for the notch,” he told his backseater, who was actually sitting beside him, because the simulator didn’t require that sort of fidelity. In this artificial world, they saw what they saw regardless of where they were, though the backseater sitting next to him had two additional instruments.

What they saw was the product of six hours of supercomputer time. A set of satellite photographs taken over the last three days had been analyzed, folded, spindled, and mutilated into a three-dimensional display that looked like a somewhat grainy video.

“Population center to the left.”

“Roger, I see it.” What he saw was a patch of fluorescent blue which in reality would have been yellow-orange quartz lighting, and out of deference to it he increased altitude from the fifty feet he’d followed for the past two hours. He eased the sidestick over, and the others in the darkened room, who were observing the flight crew, were struck by the way both bodies tilted to deal with the g-forces of a turn that existed only in the computer running the simulation. They might have laughed except that Sandy Richter was not somebody you laughed at.

From the moment he crossed the virtual coast, he climbed up to a crest and ran along it. That was Richter’s idea. There were roads and houses in the river valleys that ended at the Sea of Japan. Better, the pilot thought, to stay acoustically covert as much as possible and take his chances with the look-down capability. In a just world he’d be able to deal with that threat on the inbound leg, but this was not exactly a just world.

“Fighters overhead,” a female voice warned, just as it would on the real mission.

“Coming down some,” Richter replied to the computer voice, slipping down below the ridgeline to the right. “If you can find me fifty feet off the ground, then I lose, honey.”

“I hope this stealth shit really works.” The initial intelligence reports were very concerned with the radar in the Japanese F-15s. Somehow it had taken down one B-1 and crippled another, and nobody was quite sure how it had happened.

“We’re gonna find that one out.” What else could the pilot say? In this case the computer decided that the stealth shit really did work. The last hour of the virtual flight was routine terrain-dodging, but strenuous enough that when he landed his Comanche, Richter needed a shower which, he was sure, would not be available where they were going. Though a pair of skis might be useful.

“What if the other guys—”

“Then I suppose we learn to like rice.” You couldn’t worry about everything. The lights came on, the helmets came off, and Richter found himself sitting in a medium-sized room.

“Successful insertion,” the major grading the exercise decided. “You gents ready for a little trip?”

Richter picked up a glass of ice water from the table in the back of the room. “You know, I never really thought I’d drive a snake that far.”

“What about the rest of the stuff?” his weapons-operator wanted to know.

“It’ll be uploaded when you get there.”

“And the way out?” Richter asked. It would have been better had they briefed him in on that one.

“You have a choice of two. Maybe three. We haven’t decided that one yet. It’s being looked at,” the SOCOM officer assured them.

The good news was that they all seemed to have penthouse apartments. That was to be expected, Chavez thought. Rich dudes like these bastards would have the whole top floor of whatever building they picked. It made people like that feel big, he supposed, to be able to look down on everyone else, like people in the L.A. high-rises had looked down on the barrios of his youth. None of them had ever been soldiers, though. You never wanted to skyline yourself that way. Better to be down in the weeds with the mice and the peons. Well, everybody had their limitations, Ding told himself.

It was just a matter, then, of finding a tall spot. That proved easy. Again the pacific nature of the city worked in their favor. They merely picked the proper building, walked in, took the elevator to the top floor, and from there walked to the roof. Chavez set up his camera on a tripod, selected his longest lens, and started shooting. Even doing it all in daylight was no hardship, the instructions had told them, and the weather gods cooperated, giving them a gray, overcast afternoon. He shot ten frames of each building, rewinding and ejecting the film cassettes, which went back into their boxes for labeling. The entire operation took half an hour.

“You get used to trusting the guy?” Chavez asked after they made the pass.

“Ding, I just got used to trusting you,” Clark replied quietly, easing the tension of the moment.

38

The River Rubicon

“So?”

Ryan took his time considering the answer. Adler deserved to know something. There was supposed to be honor in negotiations. You never really told the whole truth, but you weren’t supposed to lie either.

“So continue as before,” the National Security Advisor said.

“We’re doing something.” It was not a question.

“We’re not sitting on our hands, Scott. They’re not going to cave in, are they?”

Adler shook his head. “Probably not.”

“Encourage them to rethink their position,” Jack suggested. It wasn’t very helpful, but it was something to say.

“Cook thinks there are political forces working over there to moderate matters. His counterpart on the other side is giving him encouraging information.”

“Scott, we have a couple of CIA officers working over there, covered as Russian journalists. They’ve been in contact with Koga. He’s not very happy with developments. We’ve told him to act normally. There’s no sense in harming the guy, but if ... best move, have Cook feel the guy out on what the opposition elements in their government really are, and what power they might have. He must
not
reveal who we’re in contact with.”

“Okay, I’ll pass that one along. Otherwise keep the same line?” Adler asked.

“Don’t give them anything of substance. Can you dance some?”

“I think so.” Adler checked his watch. “It’s at our place today. 1 have to sit down with Brett before it starts.”

“Keep me posted.”

“Will do,” Adler promised.

It was still before dawn at Groom Lake. A pair of C-5B transports taxied to the end of the runway and lifted off. The load was light, only three helicopters each and other equipment, not much for aircraft designed to carry two tanks. But it would be a long flight for one of them, over five thousand miles, and adverse winds would require two midair refuelings, in turn necessitating a full relief crew for each transport. The additional flight crewmen relegated the passengers to the space aft of the wing box, where the seats were less comfortable.

Richter removed the dividers from the three-seat set and put his earplugs in. As soon as the aircraft lifted off, his hand moved automatically for the pocket of his flight suit where he kept his cigarettes—or had until he’d quit a few months earlier. Damn. How could you go into combat without a smoke? he asked himself, then leaned against a pillow and faded off to sleep. He didn’t even feel the buffet of the aircraft as it climbed into the jetstream over the Nevada mountains.

Forward, the flight crew turned north. The sky was dark and would remain so for almost all of the flight. Their most important task would be to stay alert and awake. Automated equipment would handle the navigation, and the hour was such that the red-eye commercial flights were already out of the way and the regular day’s business hops had hardly begun. The sky was theirs, such as it was, with broken clouds and bitterly cold air outside the aluminum skin of the aircraft, on their way to the goddamnedest destination the reserve crew had ever considered. The second Galaxy’s crew was luckier. It turned southwest, and in less than an hour was over the Pacific Ocean for their shorter flight to Hickam Air Force Base.

USS
Tennessee
entered Pearl Harbor an hour early and proceeded under her own power to an outlying berth, dispensing with the harbor pilot and depending on a single Navy tugboat to bring her alongside. There were no lights, and the evolution was accomplished by the glow of the other lit-up piers of the harbor. The one surprising thing was the presence of a large fuel truck on the quay. The official car and the admiral standing next to it were to be expected, Commander Claggett thought. The gangway was rigged quickly, and ComSubPac hustled across even before the ensign was rigged on the after part of the sail. He saluted that way anyway.

“Welcome aboard, Admiral,” the CO called from his control station, then headed down the ladder to meet Admiral Mancuso in his own cabin.

“Dutch, I’m glad you managed to get her under way,” Mancuso said with a smile tempered by the situation.

“Glad I finally got to dance with the girl,” Claggett allowed. “I have all the diesel I need, sir,” he added.

“We have to pump out one of your tanks.” Large as she was,
Tennessee
had more than one fuel bunker for her auxiliary diesel.

“What for, sir?”

“Some JP-5.” Mancuso opened his briefcase and pulled out the mission orders. The ink was hardly dry on them. “You’re going to start off in the special-ops business.” The automatic tendency was for Claggett to ask Why
me?
but he restrained himself. Instead he flipped over the cover page of the orders and started checking his programmed position.

“I might get a little business there, sir,” the Captain observed.

“The idea is to stay covert, but the usual rule applies.” The usual rule meant that Claggett would always be free to exercise his command judgment.

“Now hear this,” the 1-MC announcing system told everyone. “The smoking lamp is out throughout the ship. The smoking lamp is out throughout the ship.”

“You let people smoke aboard?” ComSubPac asked. Quite a few of his skippers did not.

“Command judgment, remember?”

Thirty feet away, Ron Jones was in the sonar room, pulling a computer disk out of his pocket.

“We’ve had the upgrade,” the chief told him.

“This one’s brand-new.” The contractor slipped it into the slot on the backup computer. “I got a hit on you first night out when you ran over the Oregon SOSUS array. Something loose aft?”

“Toolbox. It’s gone now. We ran over two more later,” the chief pointed out.

“How fast?” Jones asked.

“The second one was just under flank, and we curlicued overtop the thing.”

“I got a twitch, nothing more, and that one had the same software I just uploaded for you. You got a quiet boat here, Chief. Walk down?”

“Yeah, the Cap’n tore a few strips off, but there ain’t no loose gear aboard now.” He paused. “Less’n you count the ends on the toilet-paper rolls.”