Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (168 page)

All the nations around the Gulf were Islamic, most of them very strictly so. There were the exceptions of Bahrain and Iraq. In the former case, the oil had essentially run out, and that country—really a city-state separated from the Kingdom by a causeway—had evolved into the same function that Nevada exercised for the western United States, a place where the normal rules were set aside, where drinking, gambling, and other pleasures could be indulged a convenient distance from a more restrictive home. In the latter case, Iraq was a secular state which paid scant lip service to the state religion, which largely explained its President’s demise after a long and lively career.

But the key to the region was and would always be religion. The Saudi Kingdom was the living heart of Islam. The Prophet had been born there. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina were there, and from that point of origin had grown one of the world’s great religious movements. The issue was less about oil than about faith. Saudi Arabia was of the Sunni branch, and Iran of the Shi’a. Ryan had once been briefed on the differences, which had at the time seemed so marginal that he’d made no effort to remember them. That, the President told himself now, was foolish. The differences were large enough to make two important countries into enemies, and that was as large as any difference needed to be. It wasn’t about wealth per se. It was about a different sort of power, the sort that grew from the mind and the heart—and from there into something else. Oil and money just made the struggle more interesting to outsiders.

A lot more interesting. The industrial world depended on that oil. Every state on the Gulf feared Iran for its size, for its large population, and for the religious fervor of its citizens. For the Sunni religious, the fear was about a perceived departure from the true course of Islam. For everyone else, it was about what would happen to them when “heretics” assumed control of the region, because Islam is a comprehensive system of beliefs, spreading out into civil law and politics and every other form of human activity. For Muslims the Word of God was Law Itself. For the West it was continuing their economies. For the Arabs—Iran is not an Arab country—it was the most fundamental question of all, a man’s place before his God.

“Yes, Mr. President,” Prince Ali bin Sheik replied after a moment. “They will move.”

His voice was admirably calm, though Ryan knew that inwardly he must be anything but. The Saudis had never wanted Iraq’s President to fall. Enemy though he was, apostate though he was, aggressor though he was, he had fulfilled a useful strategic purpose for his neighbors. Iraq had long been a buffer between the Gulf states and Iran. It was a case in which religion played second fiddle to politics, which thereby served religious purposes. By rejecting the Word of Allah, Iraq’s majority Shi’a population was taken out of play, and the dual border with Kuwait and the Kingdom was one of mere politics, not religion. But if the Ba’ath Party fell along with its leader, then Iraq might revert to majority religious rule. That would put a Shi’a country on the two borders, and the leader of the Shi’a branch of Islam was Iran.

Iran would move, because Iran had been moving for years. The religion systematized by Mohammed had spread from the Arabian Peninsula to Morocco in the west and the Philippines in the east, and with the evolution of the modern world was represented in every nation on earth. Iran had used its wealth and its large population to become the world’s leading Islamic nation, by bringing in Muslim clergy to its own holy city of Qom to study, by financing political movements throughout the Islamic world, and by funneling weapons to Islamic peoples who needed help—the Bosnian Muslims were a case in point, and not the only one.

“Anschluss, ” Scott Adler thought aloud. Prince Ali just looked over and nodded.

“Do we have any sort of plan to help prevent it?” Jack asked. He knew the answer. No, nobody did. That was the reason the Persian Gulf War had been fought for limited military objectives, and not to overthrow the aggressor. The Saudis, who had from the beginning charted the war’s strategic objectives, had never allowed America or her allies even to consider a drive to Baghdad, and this despite the fact that with Iraq’s army deployed in and around Kuwait, the Iraqi capital had been as exposed as a nudist on a beach. Ryan had remarked at the time, watching the talking heads on various TV news shows, that not a single one of the commentators remarked that a textbook campaign would have totally ignored Kuwait, seized Baghdad, and then waited for the Iraqi army to stack arms and surrender. Well, not everyone could read a map.

“Your Highness, what influence can you exercise there?” Ryan inquired next.

“In practical terms? Very little. We will extend the hand of friendship, offer loans—by the end of the week we will ask America and the U.N. to lift sanctions with an eye to improving economic conditions, but ...”

“Yeah, but,” Ryan agreed. “Your Highness, please let us know what information you can develop. America’s commitment to the Kingdom’s security is unchanged.”

Ali nodded. “I will convey that to my government.”

“NICE, PROFESSIONAL JOB,” Ding observed, catching the enhanced instant replay. “ ’Cept for one little thing.”

“Yeah, it is nice to collect the paycheck before your will is probated.” Clark had once been young enough and angry enough to think in such terms as the shooter whose death he’d just seen repeated, but with age had come circumspection. Now, he’d heard, Mary Pat wanted him to try again for a White House appearance, and he was reading over a few documents. Trying to, anyway.

“John, ever read up on the Assassins?” Chavez asked, killing the TV with the remote.

“I saw the movie,” Clark replied without looking up.

“They were pretty serious boys. They had to be. Using swords and knives, well, you have to get pretty close to do the job. Decisively engaged, like we used to say in the 7th Light.” Chavez was still short of his master’s degree in international relations, but he blessed all the books that Professor Alpher had forced him to read. He waved at the TV. “This guy was like one of them, a two-legged smart bomb—you self-destruct, but you take out the target first. The Assassins were the first terrorist state. I guess the world wasn’t ready for the concept back then, but that one little city-state manipulated a whole region just ’cuz they could get one of their troops in close enough to do the job on anybody.”

“Thanks for the history lesson, Domingo, but—”

“Think, John. If they could get close to him, they can get close to anybody. Ain’t no pension plan in the dictator business, y’know? The security around him is, like, real, real tight—but somebody got a shooter in close and blew him into the next dimension. That’s scary, Mr. C.”

John Clark continually had to remind himself that Domingo Chavez was no dummy. He might still speak with an accent—not because he had to, but because it was natural for him to; Chavez, like Clark, had a gift for language—and he might still interlace his speech with terms and grammar remembered from his days as an Army sergeant, but God damn if he wasn’t the quickest learner John had ever met. He was even learning to control his temper and passion. When it suited him to, John corrected himself.

“So? Different culture, different motivation, different—”

“John, I’m talking about a capability. The political will to use it, ’mano. And patience. It must have taken years. Sleeper agents I know about. First time I saw a sleeper shooter.”

“Could have been a regular guy who just got pissed and—”

“Who was willing to die? I don’t think so, John. Why not pop the guy on the way to the latrine at midnight and try to get the hell out of Dodge? No way, Mr. C. Gomer there was making a statement. Wasn’t just his, either. He was delivering a message for his boss, too.”

Clark looked up from his briefing papers and thought about that one. Another government employee might have dismissed the observation as something out of his purview, but Clark had been suborned into government service as a result of his inability to see limits on his activities. Besides that, he could remember being in Iran, being part of a crowd shouting “Death to America!” at blindfolded captives from the U.S. embassy. More than that, he remembered what members of that crowd had said after Operation Blue Light had gone to shit, and how close it had been—how near the Khomeini government had been to taking out its wrath on Americans and turning an already nasty dispute into a shooting war. Even then, Iranian fingerprints were on all manner of terrorist operations worldwide, and America’s failure to address the fact hadn’t helped matters.

“Well, Domingo, that’s why we need more field officers.”

SURGEON HAD ONE more reason not to like her husband’s presidency. She couldn’t see him on the way out the door, for one thing. He was in with somebody—well, it had to do with what she’d seen on the morning news, and that was business, and sometimes she’d had to scoot out of the house unexpectedly for a case at Hopkins. But she didn’t like the precedent.

She looked at the motorcade. Nothing else to call it, a total of six Chevy Suburbans. Three were tasked to getting Sally (now code-named SHADOW) and Little Jack (SHORTSTOP) to school. The other three would conduct Katie (SANDBOX) to her day-care center. Partly, Cathy Ryan admitted, that was her fault. She didn’t want the children’s lives disrupted. She wouldn’t countenance changing their schools and friends because of the misfortune that had dropped on their lives. None of this was the kids’ fault. She’d been dumb enough to agree to Jack’s new post, which had lasted all of five minutes, and as with many things in life, you had to accept the consequences. One consequence was increased travel time to their classes and finger-painting, just to keep friends, but, damn it... there was no right answer.

“Good morning, Katie!” It was Don Russell, squatting down for a hug and a kiss from SANDBOX. Cathy had to smile at that. This agent was a godsend. A man with grandchildren of his own, he truly loved kids, especially little ones. He and Katie had hit it right off. Cathy kissed her youngest good-bye, and her bodyguard—it was just outrageous, a child needed a bodyguard! But Cathy remembered her own experiences with terrorists, and she had to accept that, too. Russell lifted SANDBOX into her car seat, strapped her in, and the first set of three vehicles pulled away.

“Bye, Mom.” Sally was going through a phase in which she and Mom were friends, and didn’t kiss. Cathy accepted that without liking it. It was the same with Little Jack: “See ya, Mom.” But John Patrick Ryan Jr. was boy enough to demand a front seat, which he’d get this one time. Both sub-details were augmented due to the manner in which the Ryan family had come to the White House, with a total of twenty agents assigned to protect the children for the time being. That number would come down in a month or so, they’d told her. The kids would ride in normal cars instead of the armored Suburbans. In the case of SURGEON, her helicopter was waiting.

Damn. It was all happening again. She’d been pregnant with Little Jack, then to learn that terrorists were... why the hell had she ever agreed to this? The greatest indignity of all, she was married to supposedly the world’s most powerful man, but he and his family both had to take orders from other people.

“I know, Doc.” It was the voice of Roy Altman, her principal agent. “Hell of a way to live, isn’t it?”

Cathy turned. “You read minds?”

“Part of the job, ma’am, I know—”

“Please, my name is Cathy. Jack and I are both ‘Doctor Ryan.’ ”

Altman nearly blushed. More than one First Lady had taken on royal airs with the accession of her husband to POTUS, and the children of politicians weren’t always fun to guard, but the Ryan family, the Detail members had already agreed, were not at all like the people they usually had to guard. In some ways that was bad news, but it was hard not to like them.

“Here.” He handed over a manila folder. It was her caseload for the day.

“Two procedures, then follow-ups,” she told him. Well, at least she could do paperwork on the flight. That was convenient, wasn’t it?

“I know. We’ve arranged with Professor Katz to keep us posted—so we can keep up with your schedule,” Altman explained.

“Do you do background checks on my patients, too?” Cathy asked, thinking it a joke.

It wasn’t. “Yes. Hospital records provide names, birthdays, and Social Security numbers. We run NCIC checks, and checks against our own file of—uh, of people we keep an eye on.”

The look that pronouncement generated wasn’t exactly friendly, but Altman didn’t take it personally. They walked back into the building, then back out a few minutes later to the waiting helicopter. There were news cameras, Cathy saw, to record the event, as Colonel Hank Goodman lit up his engines.

In the operations room for the U.S. Secret Service, a few blocks away, the status board changed. POTUS (President of the United States) was shown by the red LED display as in the White House. FLOTUS (First Lady of the United States) was shown as in transit. SHADOW, SHORTSTOP, and SANDBOX were covered on a different board. The same information was relayed by secure digital radio link to Andrea Price, sitting and reading the paper outside the Oval Office. Other agents were already at St. Mary’s Catholic School and the Giant Steps Day Care Center, both near Annapolis, and at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Maryland State Police knew that the Ryan children were rolling along U.S. Route 50, and had additional cars posted along the travel route for an obvious police presence. At the moment, yet another Marine helicopter was following SURGEON’S, and a third, with a team of heavily armed agents aboard, was pacing the three children. Were there a serious assassin out there, then he would see the overt display of force. The agents in the moving vehicles would be at their usual alert state, scanning for cars, filing them away for the chance that the same one would show up a little too much. Unmarked Secret Service cars would maneuver around independently, doing much the same thing while being disguised as ordinary commuters. The Ryans would never really know how much security was arrayed around them, unless they asked, and few ever wanted to know.