Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (297 page)

“See ya.” Alexandre punched off the speakerphone. Around him were six Army physicians, three from Walter Reed, three from USAMRIID. “Comments?” he asked them.

“Crazy situation,” a major observed with an exhausted smile. “It’s a psychological weapon, all right. Scares the hell out of everybody. But that works for us, too. And somebody goofed on the other side. I wonder how ...?”

Alex thought about that for a moment. Then he lifted the phone and dialed Johns Hopkins. “This is Dr. Alexandre,” he told the desk nurse on the medical floor. “I need to talk to Dr. Ryan, it’s very important ... okay, I’ll hold.” It took a few minutes. “Cathy? Alex here. I need to talk to your husband, and it’s better if you’re there, too. ... It’s damned important,” he told her a moment later.

55

COMMENCEMENT

T
WO HUNDRED FILES meant two hundred birth certificates, two hundred driver’s licenses, houses or apartments, sets of credit cards, and all manner of other permutations to be checked out. It was inevitable that once such an investigation started, Special Agent Aref Raman would garner special attention from the three hundred FBI agents assigned to the case. But in fact every Secret Service employee who had regular access to the White House was on the immediate checklist. All across the country (the USSS draws personnel from as wide a field as any other government agency), agents did start with birth certificates and move on, also checking high-school yearbooks for graduation pictures to be compared with ID photos of all the agents. Three agents on the Detail turned out to be immigrants, some of whose exact personal details could not be easily checked. One was French-born, having come to America in his mother’s arms. Another hailed from Mexico, having actually come illegally with her parents; she’d later legitimatized her status and distinguished herself as a genius with the Technical Security Division—and a ferociously patriotic member of the team. That left “Jeff” Raman as an agent with some missing documentation, which was reasonably explained by his parents’ reported refugee status.

In many ways, it was too easy. It was on his record that he’d been born in Iran and had come to America when his parents had fled the country with the fall of the Shah’s regime. Every indicator since showed that he had fully adapted to his new country, even adopting a fanaticism for basketball that was a minor legend in the Service. He almost never lost a wager on a game, and it was a standing joke that professional gamblers consulted him on the line for an important game. He was always one to enjoy a beer with his colleagues. He’d developed an outstanding service reputation as a field agent. He was unmarried. That was not terribly unusual for a federal law enforcement officer. The Secret Service was especially tough on spouses who had to share their loved ones (mainly husbands) with a job far more unforgiving than the most demanding mistress which made divorce more common than marriage. He’d been seen around with female company, but didn’t talk about that much. Insofar as he had a private life, it was a quiet one. It was certain that he’d had no contacts at all with other Iranian-born citizens or aliens, that he was not the least bit religious, that he’d never once brought up Islam in a conversation, except to say, as he’d told the President once, that religion had caused his family so much grief that it was a subject he was just as happy to leave alone.

Inspector O’Day, back at work because Director Murray trusted him with the sensitive cases, was not the least bit impressed with this or any other story. He supervised the investigation. He assumed that the adversary, if he existed, would be an expert, and therefore the most plausible and consistent identity was to him only a potential cover to be examined. Better yet, there were no rules on this one. Agent Price had made that determination herself. He picked the local investigating team himself from Headquarters Division and the Washington Field Office. The best of them he assigned to Aref Raman, now, conveniently, in Pittsburgh.

His apartment in northwest D.C. was modest, but comfortable. It had a burglar alarm, but that was not a problem. The agents selected for the illegal breaking-and-entering included a technical wizard who, after defeating the locks in two minutes, recognized the control panel and punched in the maker’s emergency code—he had them all memorized—to deactivate the system. This procedure had once been called a “black bag job,” a term which had fallen by the wayside, though the function itself had not quite done so. Now the term “special operation” was used, which could mean anything one wanted it to.

The first two agents in the door called three more into the apartment after the break-in had been effected. They photographed the apartment first of all, looking for possible telltales: seemingly innocent or random objects which, if disturbed in any way, warned the occupant that someone had been inside. These could be devilishly hard things to detect and defeat, but all five of the agents were part of the FBI’s Foreign Counterintelligence Division, both trained against and trained by professional spooks. “Shaking” the apartment would take hours of exquisitely tedious effort. They knew that at least five other teams were doing the same thing to other potential subjects.

THE P-3C WAS hovering at the edge of the radar coverage for the Indian ships, keeping low and bumping through the roiled air over the warm surface of the Arabian Sea. They had tracks on thirty emitters from nineteen sources. The powerful, low-frequency search radars were the ones they worried about most, though the threat-receivers were getting traces of SAM radars as well. Supposedly, the Indians were running exercises, their fleet back at sea after a long stand-down for maintenance. The problem was that such workup exercises were quite indistinguishable from battle readiness. The data being analyzed by the onboard ELINT crew was downlinked to
Anzio
and the rest of the escorts for Task Group COMEDY, as the sailors had taken to calling the four
Bob Hopes
and their escorts.

The group commander was sitting in his cruiser’s combat information center. The three large billboard displays (actually rear-projection televisions linked to the Aegis radar-computer system) showed the location of the Indian battle group with a fair degree of precision. He even knew which of the blips were probably the carriers. His task was a complex one. COMEDY was now fully formed. Under way-replenishment ships
Platte
and
Supply
were now attached to the group, along with their escorts
Hawes
and
Carr,
and over the next few hours all of the escorts would take turns alongside to top off their fuel bunkers—for a Navy captain, having too much fuel was like having too much money: impossible. After that, the UNREP ships would be ordered to take position outboard of the leading tank carriers, and the frigates outboard of the trailers.
O’Bannon
would move forward to continue her ASW search—the Indians had two nuclear submarines, and nobody seemed to know where they were at the moment.
Kidd
and
Anzio,
both SAM ships, would back into the formation, providing close air defense. Ordinarily the Aegis cruiser would stand farther out, but not now.

The reason for that came not from his mission orders, but from TV. Every naval vessel in the group had its own satellite-TV receiver; in the modern Navy, the sailors wanted and got their own cable system, and while the crew spent most of their time watching the various movie channels—
Playboy
was always a favorite, sailors being sailors—the group commander was overdosing on CNN, because while his mission orders didn’t always give him all the background information he needed for his missions, very often commercial TV did. The crews were tense. The news of events at home could not have been concealed from them in any case, and the images of sick and dying people, blocked interstates, and empty city streets had initially shaken them badly, causing officers and chiefs to sit down with the men on the mess decks to talk things through. Then had come these orders. Things were happening in the Persian Gulf, things were happening at home, and all of a sudden the MPS ships, with their brigade set of combat vehicles, were heading for the Saudi port of Dhahran... and the Indian navy was in the way. The crew was quiet now, Captain Greg Kemper of USS Anzio saw. His chiefs reported that the “troops” were not laughing and cutting up in the mess rooms, and the constant simulations on the Aegis combat system in the past few days had conveyed their own message. COMEDY was sailing in harm’s way.

Each of the escorting ships had a helicopter. These coordinated with the crack ASW team on
O’Bannon,
name-sake of the Navy’s golden ship of World War II, a Fletcher-class destroyer which had fought in every major Pacific engagement without a casualty or a scratch; the new one had a gold A on her superstructure, the mark of a submarine-killer of note—at least in simulation.
Kidd’s
heritage was less lucky. Named for Admiral Isaac Kidd, who had died aboard USS
Arizona
on the morning of December 7, 1941, she was a member of the “dead-admiral class” of four missile destroyers originally built for the Iranian navy under the Shah, forced on a reluctant President Carter, and then perversely all named for admirals who’d died in losing battles. Anzio, in one of the Navy’s stranger traditions, was named for a land battle, part of the Italian campaign in 1943, in which a daring invasion had developed into a desperate struggle. Ships of war were actually made for that sort of business, but it was the business of their commanders to see that the desperate part applied to the other guy.

In a real war, that would have been easy.
Anzio
had fifteen Tomahawk missiles aboard, each with a thousand-pound warhead, and nearly in range of the Indian battle group. In an ideal world he’d loose them at just over two hundred miles, based on targeting information from the Orions—his helicopters could do that, too, but the P-3Cs were far more survivable.

“Captain!” It was a petty officer on the ESM board. “We’re getting airborne radars. The Orion has some company approaching, looks like two Harriers, distance unknown, constant bearing, signal strength increasing.”

“Thank you. It’s a free sky until somebody says different,” Kemper reminded everybody.

Maybe it was an exercise, but the Indian battle group hadn’t moved forty miles in the past day, instead traveling back and forth, east and west, crossing and recrossing its own course track. Exercises were supposed to be more free-form than that. What the situation told the captain of USS Anzio was that they’d staked out this piece of ocean as their own. And the Indians just happened to be between where COMEDY was and where it wanted to be.

Nothing was very secret about it, either. Everyone pretended that normal peacetime conditions were in effect.
Anzio
had her SPY-1 radar operating, pumping out millions of watts. The Indians were using theirs as well. It was almost like a game of chicken.

“Captain, we have bogies, we have unknown multiple air contacts bearing zero-seven-zero, range two-one-five miles. No squawk ident, they are not commercial. Designate Raid-One.” The symbols came up on the center screen.

“No emitters on that bearing,” ESM reported.

“Very well.” The captain crossed his legs in his command chair. In the movies this was where Gary Cooper lit up a smoke.

“Raid-One appears to be four aircraft in formation, speed four-five-zero knots, course two-four-five.” Which made them inbounds, though not quite directly at COMEDY.

“Projected CPA?” the captain asked.

“They will pass within twenty miles on their current course, sir,” a sailor responded crisply.

“Very well. Okay, people, listen up. I want this place cool and businesslike. You all know the job. When there’s reason to be excited, I will be the one to tell you,” he told the CIC crew. “Weapons tight.” Meaning that peacetime rules still applied, and nothing was actually ready to fire—a situation that could be remedied by turning a few keys.

“Anzio,
this is Gonzo-Four, over,” a voice called on the air-to-surface radio.

“Gonzo-Four,
Anzio,
over.”

“Anzio,”
the aviator reported, “we got two Harriers playing tag with us. One just zipped by at about fifty yards. He’s got white ones on the rails.” Real missiles hanging under the wings, not pretend ones.

“Doing anything?” the air-control officer asked.

“Negative, just like he’s playing a little.”

“Tell him to continue the mission,” the captain said. “And pretend he doesn’t care.”

“Aye, sir.” The message was relayed.

This sort of thing wasn’t all that unusual. Fighter pilots were fighter pilots, the captain knew. They never grew up past the stage of buzzing by girls on their bikes. He directed his attention to Raid-One. Course and speed were unchanged. This wasn’t a hostile act. The Indians were letting him know that they knew who was in their neighborhood. That was evident from the appearance of fighters in two places at the same time. It was definitely a game of chicken now.

What to do now?
he wondered.
Play tough? Play dumb? Play apathetic?
People so often overlooked the psychological aspect of military operations. Raid-One was now 150 miles out, rapidly approaching the range of his SM-2 MR SAMs.

“What d’ya think, Weps?” he asked his weapons officer.

“I think they’re just trying to piss us off.”

“Agreed.” The captain flipped a mental coin. “Well, they’re harassing the Orion. Let ’em know we see ’em,” he ordered.

Two seconds later, the SPY search radar jacked up its power to four million watts, sent all of it down one degree of bearing at the inbound fighters, and increased the “dwell” on the targets, which meant they were being hit almost continuously. It was enough to peg the threat-detection gear they had to have aboard. Inside of twenty miles, it could even start damaging such equipment, depending on how delicate it was. That was called a “zorch,” and the captain still had another two million watts of power up his sleeve. The joke was that if you really pissed off an Aegis, you might start producing two-headed kids.