Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (116 page)

The Rapiers had to tank on the way back, and didn’t use their supercruise ability, because wasting fuel was not purposeful. The weather was again crummy at Shemya, and the fighters rode down under positive ground-control to their safe landings, then taxied off to their hangars, which were more crowded now with the arrival of four F-15E Strike Eagles from Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. They also regarded the mission as a success.

42

Lightning Strikes

“Are you mad?” Scherenko asked.

“Think about it,” Clark said, again back in the Russian Embassy. “We want a political solution to this, don’t we? Then Koga’s our best chance. You told us the government didn’t put him in the bag. Who does that leave? He’s probably right there.” You could even see the building out Scherenko’s window, as luck would have it.

“Is it possible?” the Russian asked, worried that the Americans would ask for assistance that he was quite unsuited to provide.

“There’s a risk, but it’s unlikely he has an army up there. He wouldn’t be keeping the guy there unless he wanted to be covert about it. Figure five or six people, max.”

“And two of you!” Scherenko insisted.

“Like the man said,” Ding offered with a very showy smile, “no big deal.”

So the old KGB file was true. Clark was not a real intelligence officer, but a paramilitary type, and the same was true of his arrogant young partner who mostly just sat there, looking out the window.

“I can offer you nothing by way of assistance.”

“How about weapons?” Clark asked. “You going to tell me you don’t have anything here we can use? What kind of
rezidentura
is this?” Clark knew that the Russian would have to temporize. Too bad that these people weren’t trained to take much initiative.

“I need permission before I can do any of that.”

Clark nodded, congratulating himself on making a good guess. He opened his laptop computer. “So do we. You get yours. I’ll get mine.”

Jones stubbed out his cigarette in the Navy-style aluminum ashtray. The pack had been stuck away in a desk drawer, perhaps in anticipation of just such an occasion as this. When a war started, the peacetime rules went out the window. Old habits, especially bad ones, were easy to fall back into—but then that’s what war was, too, wasn’t it? He could also see that Admiral Mancuso was wavering on the edge of bumming one, and so he made sure the butt was all the way out.

“What do you have, Ron?”

“You take the time to work this gear and you get results. Boomer and me have been tweaking the data all week. We started on the surface ships.” Jones walked to the wall chart. “We’ve been plotting the position of the ’cans—”

“All the way from—” Captain Chambers interrupted, only to be cut off.

“Yes, sir, all the way from mid-Pac. I’ve been playing broadband and narrow-band, and checking weather, and I’ve plotted them.” Jones pointed at the silhouettes pinned to the map.

“That’s fine, Ron, but we have satellite overheads for that,” ComSubPac pointed out.

“So am I right?” the civilian asked.

“Pretty close,” Mancuso admitted. Then he pointed to the other shapes pinned to the wall.

“Yeah, that’s right, Bart. Once I figured how to track the ’cans, then we started working on the submarines. And guess what? I can still bag the fuckers when they snort. Here’s your picket line. We get them about a third of the time by my reckoning, and the bearings are fairly constant.”

The wall chart showed six firm contacts. Those silhouettes were within circles between twenty and thirty miles in diameter. Two more were overlaid with question marks.

“That still leaves a few unaccounted for,” Chambers noted.

Jones nodded. “True. But I got six for sure, maybe eight. We can’t get good cuts off the Japanese coast. Just too far. I’m plotting merchantmen shuttling back and forth to the islands, but that’s all,” he admitted. “I’m also tracking a big two-screw contact heading west toward the Marshalls, and I kinda noticed that there’s an empty dry dock across the way this morning.”

“That’s secret,” Mancuso pointed out with a quiet smile.

“Well, if I were you guys, I’d tell
Stennis
to watch out for this line of SSKs, gentlemen. You might want to let the subs head into the briarpatch first, to clean things out, like.”

“We can do that, but I’m worried about the others,” Chambers admitted.

“Conn, sonar.”

“Conn, aye.” Lieutenant Ken Shaw had the midwatch.

“Possible sonar contact bearing zero-six-zero ... probably a submerged contact ... very faint, sir,” the sonar chief reported.

The drill was automatic after all the practice they’d undergone on the trips from Bremerton and Pearl. The fire-control-tracking party immediately started a plot. A tech on the ray-path analyzer took data directly from the sonar instruments and from that tried to determine the probable range to the target. The computer required only a second.

“That’s a direct-path signal, sir. Range is under twenty thousand yards.”

Dutch Claggett hadn’t really been asleep. In the way of captains, he’d been lying in his bunk, eyes closed, even dreaming something meaningless and confusing about a day fishing on the beach with the fish behind him on the sand and creeping closer to his back, when the call had gone out from sonar. Somehow he’d come completely awake, and was now in the attack center, standing barefoot in his underwear. He checked the room to determine depth, course, and speed, then headed into sonar to get his own look at the instruments.

“Talk to me, Chief.”

“Right here on the sixty-hertz line.” The chief tapped the screen with his grease pencil. It came and went and came and went, but kept coming back, just a series of dots trickling down the screen, all on the same frequency line. The bearing was changing slowly right to left.

“They’ve been at sea for more than three weeks ...” Claggett thought aloud.

“Long time for a diesel boat,” the chief agreed. “Maybe heading back in for refueling?”

Claggett leaned in closer, as though proximity to the screen would make a difference. “Could be. Or maybe he’s just changing position. Makes sense that they’d have a patrol line offshore. Keep me posted.”

“Aye, Cap’n.”

“Well?” Claggett asked the tracking party.

“First cut on range is fourteen thousand yards, base course is westerly, speed about six knots.”

The contact was easily within range of his ADCAP torpedoes, Claggett saw. But the mission didn’t allow him to do anything about it. Wasn’t that just great?

“Let’s get two weapons warmed up,” the Captain said. “When we have a good track on our friend, we evade to the south. If he closes on us, we try to keep out of his way, and we can shoot only if there’s no choice.” He didn’t even have to look around to know what his crewmen thought of that. He could hear the change in how they breathed.

“What do you think?” Mary Pat Foley asked.

“Interesting,” Jack said after a moment’s contemplation of the fax from Langley.

“It’s a long-ball opportunity.” This was the voice of Ed Foley. “But it’s one hell of a gamble.”

“They’re not even sure he’s there,” Ryan said, rereading the signal. It bore all the marks of something from John Clark. Honest. Decisive. Positive. The man knew how to think on his feet, and though often a guy at the bottom of the food chain, he tended to see the big picture very clearly from down there. “I have to go upstairs with this one, guys.”

“Don’t trip on the way,” MP advised with a smile he could almost hear. She was still a cowgirl on field operations. “I recommend a
Go-Mission
on this one.”

“And you, Ed?” Jack asked.

“It’s a risk, but sometimes you go with what the guy in the field says. If we want a political resolution for this situation, well, then we have to have a tame political figure to lean on. We need the guy, and this might be our only way to get him out alive.” The National Security Advisor could hear the gritted teeth on the other end of the STU-6 circuit. Both the Foleys were true to form. More importantly, they were in agreement.

“I’ll be back to you in twenty minutes.” Ryan switched over to his regular phone. “I need to see the Boss right now,” he told the President’s executive secretary.

The sun was rising for yet another hot, windless day. Admiral Dubro realized that he was losing weight. The waistband on his khaki trousers was looser than usual, and he had to reef in his belt a little more. His two carriers were now in regular contact with the Indians. Sometimes they came close enough for a visual, though more often some Harrier’s look-down radar just took a snapshot from fifty or so miles away. Worse, his orders were to let them see his ships. Why the hell wasn’t he heading east for the Straits of Malacca? There was a real war to fight. He’d come to regard the possible Indian invasion of Sri Lanka as a personal insult, but Sri Lanka wasn’t U.S. territory, and the Marianas were, and his were the only carriers Dave Seaton had.

Okay, so the approach wouldn’t exactly be covert. He had to pass through one of several straits to reenter the Pacific Ocean, all of them about as busy as Times Square at noon. There was even the off-chance of a sub there, but he had ASW ships, and he could pounce on any submarine that tried to hinder his passage. But his orders were to remain in the IO, and to be
seen
doing so.

The word was out among the crew, of course. He hadn’t made even a token effort to keep things quiet. It would never have worked in any case, and his people had a right to know what was going on, in anticipation of entering the fray. They needed to know, to get their backs up, to generate an extra determination before shifting from a peacetime mentality to that of a shooting war——but once you were ready, you had to
do
it. And they weren’t.

The result was the same for him as for every other man or woman in the battle force: searing frustration, short temper, and a building rage. The day before, one of his Tomcat drivers had blown
between
two Indian Harriers, with perhaps ten feet of separation, just to show them who knew how to fly and who didn‘t, and while that had probably put the fear of God into the visitors, it wasn’t terribly professional ... even though Mike Dubro could remember what it was like to be a lieutenant, junior grade, and could also imagine himself doing the same thing. That hadn’t made the personal dressing-down any easier. He’d had to do it, and had also known afterward that the flight crew in question would go back to their quarters muttering about the dumb old fart on the flag bridge who didn’t know what it was like to drive fighter planes, ’cause the Spads he’d grown up with had probably used windup keys to get off the boat ...

“If they take the first shot, we’re going to get hurt,” Commander Harrison observed after announcing that
their
dawn patrol had shown up right on schedule.

“If they put an Exocet into us, we’ll pipe ‘Sweepers, man your brooms,’ Ed.” It was a lame attempt at humor, but Dubro didn’t feel very humorous at the moment.

“Not if they get lucky and catch a JP bunker.” Now his operations officer was turning pessimistic. Not
good,
the battle-force commander thought.

“Show ‘em we care,” Dubro ordered.

A few moments later the screening ships lit off their fire-control radars and locked on to the Indian intruders. Through his binoculars Dubro could see that the nearest Aegis cruiser had white missiles sitting in her launch rails, and then they trained out, as did the target-illumination radars. The message was clear:
Keep away.

He could have ordered another wrathful dispatch to Pearl Harbor, but Dave Seaton had enough on his plate, and the real decisions were being made in Washington by people who didn’t understand the problem.

“Is it worth doing?”

“Yes, sir,” Ryan replied, having come to his own conclusion on the walk to the President’s office. It meant putting two friends at additional risk, but that was their job, and making the decision was his—partly anyway. It was easy to say such things, even knowing that because of them he’d sleep badly if at all. “The reasons are obvious.”

“And if it fails?”

“Two of our people are in grave danger, but—”

“But that’s what they’re for?” Durling asked, not entirely kindly.

“They’re both friends of mine, Mr. President. If you think I like the idea of—”

“Settle down,” the President said. “We have a lot of people at risk, and you know what?
Not
knowing who they are makes it harder instead of easier. I’ve learned that one the hard way.” Roger Durling looked down at his desk, at all the administrative briefing papers and other matters that didn’t have the first connection to the crisis in the Pacific but had to be handled nonetheless. The government of the United States of America was a huge business, and he couldn’t ignore any of it, no matter how important some area might have suddenly become. Did Ryan understand that?

Jack saw the papers, too. He didn’t have to know what they were, exactly. None had classified cover sheets on them. They were the ordinary day-to-day crap that the man had to deal with. The Boss had to time-share his brain with so many tasks. It hardly seemed fair, especially for someone who hadn’t exactly gone looking for the job. But that was destiny at work, and Durling had voluntarily undertaken the Vice President’s office because his character required service to others, as, indeed, did Ryan’s. They really were two of a kind, Jack thought.

“Mr. President, I’m sorry I said that. Yes, sir, I have considered the risks, but also, yes, that is their job. Moreover, it’s John’s recommendation. His idea, I mean. He’s a good field officer, and he knows both the risks and the potential rewards. Mary Pat and Ed agree, and also recommend a Go on this one. The decision necessarily is yours to make, but those are the recommendations.”