Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (260 page)

“What’s the family background on Master Kenny again?” Price asked. Even she couldn’t remember everything.

“Father and mother both lawyers, tax stuff mainly.” “SHADOW needs better taste,” Brennan observed to general amusement around the counter. He was the joker on the crew. “There is a potential threat there, Wendy.”

“Huh? What?”

“If POTUS gets the new tax laws passed, they’re in the shitter.”

Andrea Price made another check mark on her morning list. “Don?”

“Today’s routine is the same as usual, Introductory Crayon. I’m still not happy with the setup, Andrea. I want some more people, one more inside, and two more for overwatch on the south side,” Don Russell announced. “We’re too exposed. We just don’t have enough defensive depth there. The outer perimeter is essentially the only one, and I am not comfortable with that.”

“SURGEON doesn’t want us to overpower the place. You have yourself and two agents inside, three for immediate backup, and one surveillance agent across the road,” Price reminded him.

“Andrea, I want three more. We’re too exposed there,” Russell repeated. His voice was reasonable and professional as ever. “The family has to listen to us on professional questions.”

“How about I come over tomorrow afternoon to look things over again?” Price asked. “If I agree, then I go to the Boss.”

“Fine.” Special Agent Russell nodded.

“Any more problems with Mrs. Walker?”

“Sheila tried to get a petition drive started with the other Giant Steps parents—get SANDBOX out of there, that sort of thing. It turns out that Mrs. Daggett gets a lot of repeat business, and more than half the parents know the Ryans and like ’em. So, that crapped out in a hurry. You know what the only real problem is?”

“What’s that, Don?”

He smiled. “At that age—sometimes I turn around and the kids move and when I turn back I can’t tell which one SANDBOX is. You know there’s only two kinds of haircuts for little girls, and half the mothers there think Oshkosh is the only brand of kid’s clothes.”

“Don, it’s a woman thing,” Wendy Merritt observed. “If the First Toddler wears it, it has to be fashionable.”

“Probably the same thing with the hair,” Andrea added. “By the way, I forgot to tell you, Pat O’Day wants a little match with you,” she told the Detail’s most senior member.

“The Bureau guy?” Russell’s eyes lit up. “Where? When? Tell him to bring money, Andrea.” It occurred to Russell that he was due to have some playtime of his own. He hadn’t lost a pistol match in seven years—his last bout with the flu.

“We all set?” Price asked her senior agents.

“How’s the Boss doing?” Altman asked.

“They’re keeping him pretty busy. Cutting into his sleep time.”

“Want me to talk to SURGEON about it? She keeps a good eye on him,” Roy told her.

“Well—”

“I know how. Gee, Dr. Ryan, is the Boss doing okay? He looked a little tired this morning ...,” Altman suggested.

The four agents exchanged looks. President-management was their most delicate duty. This President listened to his wife almost as though he were a normal husband. So why not make SURGEON into an ally? All four nodded at once.

“Go with it,” Price told him.

“SON OF A BITCH.” Colonel Hamm said inside his command track.

“Surprised you, did they?” General Diggs inquired delicately.

“They have a ringer in there?” the CO of the Blackhorse Cav wanted to know.

“No, but they sprung one on me, Al. They didn’t let anybody know they had IVIS training. Well, that is, I found out last night.”

“Nice guy, sir.”

“Surprises work both ways, Colonel,” Diggs reminded him.

“How the
hell
did they get the funding for that?”

“Their fairy god-senators, I suppose.”

Visiting units didn’t bring their own equipment to Fort Irwin, for the obvious reason that it was too expensive to transport it all back and forth. Instead they mated up with vehicle sets permanent to the base, and those were top-of-the-line. Included in all of them was IVIS, the Inter-Vehicle Information System, a battlefield data link that projected data onto a computer screen inside the tanks and Bradleys. It was something the 11th Cav had been issued for only its own vehicles (their real ones, not the simulated enemy sets) six months earlier. Seemingly a simple system for trading data—it even ordered spare parts automatically when something broke it presented the crew with a comprehensive overview of the battlefield, and converted hard-won reconnaissance information into general knowledge in a matter of seconds. No longer was data on a developing engagement limited to a harried and distracted unit commander. Now sergeants knew everything the colonel did, and information was still the most valuable commodity known to man. The visiting tankers from the Carolina Guard were fully trained up on its use. So were the troopers of the Blackhorse, but their pseudo-Soviet OpFor vehicles didn’t have it.

“Colonel, now we really know how good the system is. It beat you.”

The simulated engagement had been a bloody one. Hamm and his operations officer had contrived a devilish ambush, only to have the Weekend Warriors detect it, avoid it, and enter into a battle of maneuver which had caught the OpFor leaning the wrong way. A daring counterstroke by one of his squadron commanders had almost saved the day, and killed off half of the Blue Force, but it hadn’t been enough. The first night engagement had gone to the good guys, and the Guardsmen were whooping it up as if after an ACC basketball game.

“I’ll know better next time,” Hamm promised.

“Humility is good for the soul,” Marion Diggs said, enjoying the sunrise.

“Death is bad for the body, sir,” the colonel reminded him.

“Baaaaaaaaa,”
Diggs said, grinning on the way to his personal Hummer. Even Al Hamm needed the occasional lesson.

THEY TOOK THEIR time. Movie Star handled the car rentals. He had duplicate IDs, enough to rent four vehicles, three four-door private cars and a U-Haul van. The former had been selected to match vehicles owned by parents who had children at the nursery school. The latter was for their escape—an eventuality which he now thought likely and not merely possible. His men were smarter than he’d appreciated. Driving past the objective in their rented cars, they didn’t turn their heads to stare, but allowed their peripheral vision to take in the scene. They already had exact knowledge from the model they’d built, based on data from their leader’s photographs. Driving past the site gave them a better full-size, three-dimensional view, and added more substance to their mental image, and to their growing confidence. With that task done, they drove west, turned off Route 50 and proceeded to a lonely farmhouse in southern Anne Arundel County.

The house was owned by a man thought by his neighbors to be a Syrian-born Jew who’d lived in the area for eleven years, but who was a sleeper agent. Over the past few years, he’d made discreet purchases of arms and ammunition, all of them legal, and all made before restrictive laws on some of the weapons had been passed—he could have evaded them anyway. In his coat pocket were airline tickets under a different name and passport. This was the final rendezvous point. They would bring the child here. Then six of them would leave the country at once, all on separate flights, and the remaining three would enter the homeowner’s personal car and drive to yet another pre-determined location to await developments. America was a vast country, with many roads. Cellular telephones were difficult to track. They’d give a devil of a time to their pursuers, Movie Star thought. He knew how he’d do things, if it got that far. The team with the child would have one phone. He would have two, one to make brief calls to the American government, and another to call his friends. They would demand much for the life of the child, enough to throw this country into chaos. Perhaps the child might even be set free alive. He wasn’t sure about that, but he supposed it was possible.

42

PREDATOR/PREY

C
IA HAS ITS OWN PHOTO shop, of course. The film shot out the aircraft window by Field Officer Domingo Chavez was tagged by the technician in a manner little different from that used by commercial shops, and then processed on standard equipment. There the routine treatment stopped. The grainy ASA- 1200 film produced a poor-quality image, and one couldn’t give
that
to the people on the seventh floor. The employees in the photo shop knew about the RIF order, and the best way to avoid being laid off, in this or any other business, was to be indispensable. So the developed roll of film went into a computer-enhancement system. It took only three minutes per frame to convert the images into something that might have been shot by an expert with a Hasselblad under studio conditions. Less than an hour after the film’s arrival, the tech produced a set of eight-by-ten glossies that positively identified the airplane passenger as the Ayatollah Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, and provided a shot of his aircraft, so clear and dramatic that the manufacturer might have used it on a sales brochure. The film was put in an envelope and sent off to secure storage. The photos themselves were stored in digital form on tape, their precise identity—date, time of day, location, photographer, and subject—also coded into a computer register for extensive cross-referencing. It was standard procedure. The technician had long since stopped caring about what he developed, though he still did see the occasional frame showing someone on the news in a position that never made the TV screen ... but not this guy. From what he’d heard about Daryaei, the man probably didn’t have much interest in boys or girls, and the dour expression on his face seemed to confirm it. What the hell, he did have nice taste in airplanes, a G-IV, it looked like. Odd, wasn’t that a Swiss registration code on the tail, though ... ?

When the photos went upstairs, one complete set was also set aside for a different kind of analysis. A physician would examine them closely. Some diseases left visible signs, and the Agency always kept an eye on the health of foreign leaders.

“... SECRETARY ADLER will be leaving for Beijing this morning,” Ryan told
them.
Arnie had told
him
that, as unpleasant as these news appearances were, being seen on TV doing presidential things was good for him politically—and
that,
Arnie always went on, meant being more effective in the job. The President also remembered hearing from his mom how important it was to go to the dentist twice a year, too, and just as the antiseptic smells of that place were certain to frighten a child, so he had come to loathe the damp of this room. The walls leaked, some of the windows were cracked, and this part of the West Wing of the White House was about as neat and well kept as a high-school locker room, something the citizens couldn’t tell from watching TV. Though the area was only a few yards from his own office, nobody really cared much about tidying things up. Reporters were such slobs, the staff claimed, that it wouldn’t have mattered much anyway. What the hell, the reporters didn’t seem to worry about it.

“Mr. President, have we learned anything more about the airliner incident?”

“It’s been announced that the body count is complete. The flight-data recorders have been recovered and—”

“Will we have access to the black-box information?”

Why did they call it the
black
box when it was
orange?
Jack had always wondered about that, but knew he’d never get a sensible answer. “We’ve asked for that access, and the Republic of China government has promised its full cooperation. They don’t have to do that. The aircraft is registered in that country, and the aircraft is made in Europe. But they are being helpful. We acknowledge that with thanks. I should add that none of the Americans who survived the crash itself are in any medical danger—some of the injuries are severe, but not life-threatening.”

“Who shot it down?” another reporter asked.

“We’re still examining the data, and—”

“Mr. President, the Navy has two Aegis-class ships in that immediate area. You must have a good idea of what happened.” This guy had done his homework.

“I really can’t comment further on that. Secretary Adler will discuss the incident with the parties concerned. We want, first of all, to make sure that no further loss of life takes place.”

“Mr. President, a follow-up: you
must
know more than you’re saying. Fourteen Americans were killed in this incident. The American people have a right to know why.”

The hell of it was, the man was right. The hell of it also was that Ryan had to evade: “We really do not know exactly what happened yet. I cannot make a definitive statement until we do.” Which was philosophically true, anyway. He knew who’d taken the shot. He didn’t know why. Adler had made a good point yesterday on keeping that knowledge close.

“Mr. Adler returned from somewhere yesterday. Why is that a secret?” It was Plumber again, chasing down his question from the previous day.

I’m going
to kill
Arnie for exposing me this way all the
time. “John, the Secretary was engaged in some important consultations. That’s all I have to say on the issue.”

“He was in the Middle East, wasn’t he?”

“Next question?”

“Sir, the Pentagon has announced that the carrier
Eisenhower
is moving into the South China Sea. Did you order that?”

“Yes, I did. We feel that the situation warrants our close attention. We have vital interests in that region. I point out that we are not taking sides in this dispute, but we are going to look after our own interests.”

“Will moving the carrier cool things down or heat them up?”

“Obviously, we’re not trying to make things worse. We’re trying to make them better. It’s in the interests of both parties to take a step back and think about what they are doing. Lives have been lost,” the President reminded them. “Some of those were American lives. That gives us a direct interest in the matter. The reason we have a government and a military is to look after American interests and to protect the lives of our citizens. The naval forces heading for the region will observe what is happening and conduct routine training operations. That is all.”