Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (259 page)

“That fast?” Adler allowed himself to be impressed.

“The miracle of modern communications, and we already had alert orders to Admiral Dubro. This won’t be a covert move. The battle group will head through several narrows, and people will notice,” he warned.

“Press release won’t hurt,” Adler said. “We’ve done it before.”

“Well, there’s your card to play in Beijing and Taipei,” Ryan said, having exercised yet another executive order, but distantly concerned that Robby was unhappy about it. The really difficult matter was fuel. A fleet-replenishment group would have to move as well, to refill the bunkers of
Eisenhower’s
non-nuclear escort ships.

“Will you let on that we know about the shoot-down?”

Adler shook his head. “No, definitely not. It will be more unsettling to them if they think we don’t know.”

“Oh?” This came from a somewhat surprised President.

“Then I can decide
when
we ‘find out,’ Boss, and when that happens, I have another card to play—that way I can make it a big card.” He turned. “Admiral, don’t overestimate the intelligence of your enemy. Diplomats like me aren’t all that savvy on the technical aspects of what you do. That applies to people in foreign countries, too. A lot of our capabilities are unknown to them.”

“They have spooks to keep them informed,” Jackson objected.

“You think they always listen? Do we?”

The J-3 blinked at that lesson and filed it away for future use.

IT HAPPENED IN a large shopping mall, an American invention that seemed designed for covert operations, with its many entrances, bustling people, and near-perfect anonymity. The first rendezvous wasn’t really a meeting at all. Nothing more than eye contact was made, and that not at a distance closer than ten meters, as the groups strolled past one another. Instead, each of the sub-groups performed a count, confirmed identity visually, and then each checked to be sure that there was no surveillance on the others. With that done, they all returned to their hotel accommodations. The real rendezvous would take place tomorrow.

Movie Star was pleased. The sheer audacity of this was very exciting indeed. This wasn’t the relatively simple task of getting one bomb-clad fool—
heroic martyr,
he corrected himself—into Israel, and the beauty of it was that had one of his teams been spotted, the enemy couldn’t possibly risk ignoring them. You could force the opposition into showing its hand, and so much the better to do it at a point in time when none of your people had done anything more than enter the country with false travel documents.

Doubts be damned, the leader of the operation told himself. There was the sheer beauty of being ready to do something right in the lion’s own den, and
that
was what kept him in the business of terrorism. In the lion’s own den? He smiled at the cars as he walked across the parking lot. The lion’s own
cubs.

“SO WHAT ARE you doing?” Cathy asked in the dark.

“Scott leaves for China tomorrow morning,” Jack answered, lying next to his wife. People said that the President of the United States was the world’s most powerful man, but at the end of every day the exercise of that power surely seemed to exhaust him. Even his time at Langley, with an auto commute each way every day, hadn’t worn him out as this job did.

“To say what?”

“Try to get them calmed down, defuse the situation.”

“You’re really sure that they deliberately—”

“Yes. Robby is positive, about as much as you are with a diagnosis,” her husband confirmed, staring up at the ceiling.

“And we’re going to negotiate with them?” SURGEON asked.

“Have to.”

“But—”

“Honey, sometimes—hell, most of the time a nation-state commits murder, they get away with it. I’m supposed to think about ‘the big picture,’ ‘the larger issues,’ and all that stuff.”

“That’s awful,” Cathy told him.

“Yes, it sure is. This game you have to play by its own rules. If you mess up, more people suffer. You can’t talk to a nation-state the way you talk to a criminal. There are thousands of Americans over there, businessmen and like that. If I get too far out of line, then things might happen to some of them, and then things escalate and get worse,” POTUS explained to her.

“What’s worse than killing people?” his physician-wife asked.

Jack didn’t have an answer. He’d come to accept the fact that he didn’t have all the answers for press conferences, or for all the people out there, or even for his own staff sometimes. Now he didn’t even have a single answer for his wife’s simple and logical question. Most powerful man in the world? Sure. With that thought, another day ended at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

EVEN IMPORTANT PEOPLE got careless, an eventuality made easier by a little creativity on the part of more careful folk. The National Reconnaissance Office was working hard to keep track of two places. Every pass of the reconsats over the Middle East and now the Formosa Strait resulted in copious numbers of download pictures, literally thousands of images which photo-interpretation specialists had to examine one by one in their new building close to Dulles Airport. It was just one more task that couldn’t be done by computer. The readiness state of the UIR military had become the number-one priority item for the American government, as part of the Special National Intelligence Estimate now in preparation on White House orders. That meant the entire attention of the team fell that way, and for the other things, more people were called in to work overtime. These looked continuously at the photos downloaded from over China. If the PRC was going to make a real military move, then it would show in many ways. People’s Liberation Army troops would be out training and maintaining their equipment, or loading their tanks onto trains and the parking areas would look different. Aircraft would have weapons hanging from their wings. These were things a satellite photo would reveal. More care was taken to spot ships at sea—that was far harder, since they were not in fixed locations. America still had three photographic satellites aloft, each making two passes per day over the areas of interest, and they were spaced so that there was little “sad time.” That made the technicians feel pretty good about things. They had a continuous feed of data with which to firm up their estimates and so do their duty for their President and their country.

But they couldn’t watch everything everywhere, and one place they didn’t watch was Bombay, western headquarters of the Indian navy. The orbits of the American KH-11 satellites were well defined, as were their schedules. Just after the newest satelite swept over the area, with the other new one on the far side of the world, came a four-hour window, which would end with the overhead passage of the oldest and least reliable of the trio. Happily, it also coincided with a high tide.

Two carriers, their repairs recently completed, and their escorts, slipped their mooring lines and stood out to sea. They would be conducting training exercises in the Arabian Sea, in case anyone noticed and asked about it.

DAMN. THE COBRA representative woke up, feeling a little feverish. It took him a few seconds to orient himself. Different motel, different city, different room lights. He fumbled for the proper switch, then put on his glasses, squinting in the uncomfortable light, and spotted his bag. Yeah. Shaving kit. He took that into the bathroom, pulled the paper cover off the glass, and half filled it with water. Then he worked the childproof top on the aspirin bottle, tipped two tablets into his hand and washed them down. He ought not to have had all those beers after dinner, the sales rep told himself, but he’d made a fairly decent deal with a couple of club pros, and beer was always a good lubricant for the golf business. He’d feel better in the morning. A former touring professional who hadn’t been quite good enough to make it big, he was now a very successful manufacturer’s representative. What the hell, he thought, heading back to his bed. He still had a minus handicap, the pace was easier, and he was making a pretty good living—plus being able to play a new course practically every week, the better to demonstrate his wares. He hoped the aspirin would work. He had an eight-thirty tee time.

STORM TRACK AND PALM BOWL were connected by a fiber-optic communications cable, the better to share information. Another training exercise was under way in the former Iraq and this one wasn’t a CPX. The three heavy corps of integrated Iraqi and Iranian units were in the field. Direction-finding radios placed them well away from the Saudi and Kuwaiti borders, and so no special danger was attached to their activities, but the ELINT troops were listening closely to get a feel for the skill level of the commanders who were moving tanks and infantry fighting vehicles across the broad, dry plains southeast of Baghdad.

“Here’s good news, Major,” the American lieutenant said, handing over a telex. The UIR SNIE had generated something positive for a change.

Two hundred miles northwest of Kuwait, at a spot five miles south of the “berm”—actually a man-made dune—that marked the border between the Kingdom and the UIR, a deuce-and-a-half truck stopped. The crew got out, attached the extension to the launch ramp and fired up their Predator drone. But “drone” was an obsolete term. This mini-aircraft was an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAV, a blue-gray-colored, propeller-driven spy. It took about twenty minutes to attach the wings, run diagnostics on the electronics, and spin up the engine, and then it was launched, the annoying buzz of its engine fading rapidly as it climbed to its operating altitude and headed north.

The product of three decades of research, Predator was fairly stealthy, difficult to detect on radar due to its small size, the inclusion of radar-absorbing material in its design, and the fact that its operating speed was so slow that modern computer-controlled radars, if they caught it at all, classified it as a bird and erased it from the operator’s scope. The paint covering the airframe was the same IR-suppressive product the Navy had taken to using. It was both ugly and prone to provide a sticky home to anything that touched it—the technicians had to brush sand off their baby all the time—but that was balanced by the fact that the color blended in with the sky exceedingly well. Armed only with a TV camera, this one soared up to ten thousand feet, and cruised north under the control of another team at STORM TRACK, the better to keep an eye on the UIR exercises. It was a technical violation of the new country’s sovereignty, but two pounds of explosive in the UAV would ensure that if it hit the ground in the wrong place, no one would be able to tell what it was. A directional antenna beamed the “take” from the camera to receivers in the Kingdom.

The fiber-optic data link crossloaded the same signal to PALM BOWL, and when a USAF enlisted woman switched on the room’s monitor, they were looking down at a nearly featureless landscape while the Predator was guided to its destination by its operators.

“It’ll be good to see if they know what they’re doing,” the lieutenant observed to Major Sabah.

“Better if we see that they don’t,” the Kuwaiti officer replied thoughtfully. Other members of his extended family were increasingly concerned. Enough so, the major thought, that their country’s military was quietly ramping up to a very high state of readiness. Like the Saudis, the Kuwaiti citizens who’d flocked enthusiastically to man the best equipment that their small but wealthy country could obtain felt that maintenance of their tanks was a task for lesser men, but, unlike their Saudi cousins, they had experience with being on the bottom side of conquest. Many of them had lost family members, and a long memory was characteristic of this part of the world. For that reason, they trained with a will. They weren’t yet near the level of the Americans who taught them or the Israelis who held them in distant contempt, Major Sabah knew. His countrymen had first of all learned how to shoot. They’d burned out at least one gun tube per tank in the pure joy of learning that skill, and they had been firing real rounds, not just practice—war shots fly straighter and farther—as they combined a diverting hobby with a national survival skill. Able now to hit their targets, their current task was to learn to maneuver and fight on the move. Again, they couldn’t do it well, not yet, but they were learning. The developing crisis put emphasis on their training, and even now his countrymen were leaving their banking, oil, and trading offices to mount their vehicles. An American advisory team would take them into the field again, give them a battle problem, and watch their performance. While it pained the major that his countrymen, many of them relatives, were not yet ready, it was a source of pride to him that they were making a real effort. Bright as he was, however, it never occurred to him how close his military was to the Israeli model: citizen soldiers learning to fight after the harsh lesson of not having known.

“SWORDSMAN IS AWAKE,” Andrea Price heard in her earpiece. They were in the kitchen, the Detail commander with her sub-detail chiefs, standing and sipping coffee around one of the stainless-steel countertops used for preparing food. “Roy?”

“Another routine day,” Special Agent Altman said. “She’s got three procedures scheduled for the morning, then a lecture to some Spanish docs in the afternoon—University of Barcelona, ten of them, eight males, two females. We checked the names with the Spanish police. They’re all clean. No special threats reported against SURGEON. Looks like a normal day at the office.”

“Mike?” she asked Special Agent Michael Brennan, principal agent to Little Jack.

“Well, SHORTSTOP has a first-period biology test today and baseball practice after school. Pretty good with a glove, but his batting needs help,” the agent added. “Otherwise, same-o same-o.”

“Wendy?” Special Agent Gwendolyn Merritt was principal agent for Sally Ryan.

“Chemistry exam for SHADOW in third period today. She’s getting very interested in Kenny. Nice kid, needs a haircut and a new tie. She’s thinking about going out for the girls’ lacrosse team.” A few faces winced at that revelation. How do you protect someone being chased by teenagers with sticks?