Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (302 page)

“YES?” THE ELDERLY woman wasn’t wearing a surgical mask. Sissy Loomis handed her one. It was the new form of greeting in America.

“Good morning, Mrs. Sloan. FBI,” the agent said, holding up her ID.

“Yes?” She wasn’t intimidated, but she was surprised.

“Mrs. Sloan, we’re conducting an investigation, and we’d like to ask you a few questions. We just need to clear something up. Could you help us, please?”

“I suppose.” Mrs. Joseph Sloan was over sixty, dressed neatly, and looked pleasant enough, if somewhat surprised by all this. Inside the apartment the TV was on, tuned to a local station by the sound of it. The weather forecast was running.

“May we come in? This is Agent Don Selig,” she said, nodding her head to the techno-weenie. As usual, her friendly smile won the day; Mrs. Sloan didn’t even put the mask on.

“Surely.” The lady of the house backed away from the door.

It took only a single glance to tell Sissy Loomis that something was not quite right here. For one thing, there was no Persian rug to be seen in the living room—in her experience people didn’t just buy one of the things. For another, this apartment was just too neat.

“Excuse me, is your husband in?” The response was immediate, and pained.

“My husband passed away last September,” she told the agent.

“Oh, I am sorry, Mrs. Sloan. We didn’t know.” And with that a fairly routine follow-up changed into something very different indeed.

“He was older than me. Joe was seventy-eight,” she said, pointing to a picture on the coffee table of two people a long time ago, one about thirty and one in her late teens.

“Does the name Alahad mean anything to you, Mrs. Sloan?” Loomis asked after sitting down.

“No. Should it?”

“He deals in Persian and Oriental rugs.”

“Oh, we don’t have any of those. I’m allergic to wool, you see.”

57

NIGHT PASSAGE

J
ACK?” RYAN’S EYES clicked open to see that there was bright sunlight coming through the windows. His watch said it was just after eight in the morning.

“What the hell? Why didn’t anybody—”

“You even slept through the alarm,” Cathy told him. “Andrea said that Arnie said to let you sleep till about now. I guess I needed it, too,” SURGEON added. She’d been in bed for over ten hours before waking at seven. “Dave told me to take the day off,” she added.

Jack jolted up and moved at once into the bathroom. When he came back, Cathy, in her housecoat, handed over his briefing papers. The President stood in the center of the room, reading them. Reason told him that if anything serious had happened he would have been awakened—he had slept through the clock-radio alarm before, but he’d never failed to be aroused by a phone. The papers told him that all was, if not exactly well, then relatively stable. Ten minutes after that, he was dressed. He took the time to say hello to his kids, and kiss his wife. Then he headed out.

“SWORDSMAN is moving,” Andrea said into her radio mike. “Sit Room?” she asked POTUS.

“Yeah. Whose idea was it to—”

“Mr. President, that was the chief of staff, but he was right, sir.”

Ryan looked at her as she punched the elevator button for the ground floor. “I guess I’m outvoted, then.”

The national-security team had clearly been up all night on his behalf. Ryan had coffee waiting at his place. They’d been living on it.

“Okay, what’s happening over there?”

“COMEDY is now one hundred thirty miles beyond the Indians—would you believe they resumed their patrol station
behind
us?” Admiral Jackson told his Commander-in-Chief.

“Playing both sides of the street,” Ben Goodley concluded.

“It’s a good way to get hit by traffic in both directions,” Arnie put in.

“Go on.”

“Operation CUSTER is just about done. The 366th is also in Saudi, less one broke fighter that diverted to England. The 11th Cav is rolling out of its storage site to an assembly area. So far,” the J-3 said, “so good. The other side sortied some fighters to the border, but we and the Saudis had a blocking force, and nothing happened aside from some mean looks.”

“Anybody think they’re going to back down?” Ryan asked.

“No.” This came from Ed Foley. “They can’t, not now.”

THE RENDEZVOUS TOOK place fifty miles off Cape Rass al Hadd, the far southeast corner of the Arabian Peninsula. Cruisers
Normandy
and
Yorktown,
destroyer
John Paul Jones,
and frigates
Underwood, Doyle,
and
Nicholas
took a trailing position so that
Platte
and
Supply
could take them alongside after their high-speed run down from Alexandria, to top off their bunkers. Helicopters ferried the captains to
Anzio,
whose captain was senior, for an hour’s worth of discussion of the mission. Their destination was Dhahran. To get there they had to drive northwest into the Strait of Hormuz. Getting there would take just over six hours, 2200 hours local time. The strait was twenty miles across and speckled with islands, plus it was one of the most heavily traveled waterways in the world—even now, despite the growing crisis. Supertankers, one of which displaced more water than all of the warships in the now-designated TF-61.1 combined, were merely the best-known vessels transiting the area. There were also massive container ships wearing the flags often nations, and even a multilevel sheep carrier which looked like a big-city parking garage, which was bringing in live mutton from Australia. The smell of it was famous on all the oceans of the world. The strait was covered by radar to establish traffic control—the possibility of a ramming incident between two supertankers didn’t bear thinking about—which meant that TF-61.1 would be unlikely to sneak in entirely unnoticed. But they could do a few things. At the narrowest point, the Navy ships would hold to the south, dodging between islands belonging to Oman, and hopefully somewhat obscured by the clutter. Next they’d move south of Abu Musa, past the crowd of oil platforms, again using them for radar cover, and then make a straight run for Dhahran, past the mini-states of Qatar and Bahrain. Opposition, the intelligence officers said, included ships of American, British, Chinese, Russian, and French origin, all of them armed with one sort of missile or another. The most important ships in the group, of course, were totally unarmed. Maintaining their box formation,
Anzio
would lead them, 2,000 yards in front.
Normandy
and
Yorktown
would take position 2,000 yards to starboard, with Jones in trail. The two under way-replenishment ships, with
O’Bannon
and all the frigates in close escort, would form a second, decoy group. Helicopters would be aloft, both to patrol and, with their radar transponders on, to simulate much larger targets. The various COs agreed on the plan and waited for their helicopters to return them to their commands. It was the first time in ages that an American naval formation had stood in harm’s way without a carrier in close support. Their bunkers full of fuel, the group formed up as planned, pointed their bows northwest, and bent on twenty-six knots. At 1800 local time, a flight of four F-16 fighters blazed overhead, both to give the Aegis ships a chance to practice fire-control against live targets and also to verify the IFF codes to be used for the night’s mission.

MOHAMMED ALAHAD, THEY saw, was just as ordinary as hell. He’d come to America more than fifteen years earlier. He was said to be widowed and childless. He ran a decent and profitable business on one of Washington’s nicer shopping streets. He was, in fact, in there right now. Though the CLOSED sign was on the door, they supposed he had nothing better to do but sit in his shop and go over his bills.

One of Loomis’s squad went up to the shop and knocked on the door. Alahad came to open it, and a brief conversation ensued, with the expected gestures, and they could figure what was being said.
I’m sorry, but all businesses are closed because of the President’s order—Yeah, sure, but I don’t have anything to do, and neither do you, right?—Yes, but it is an order—Hey, who’s gonna know, what’d’ya say?
Finally the agent went in, wearing a surgical mask. He stayed there for ten minutes before coming back out, walking around the corner, and making a radio call from his car.

“It’s a rug shop,” the agent told Loomis over the encrypted radio channel. “If we want to toss the place, we’ll have to wait.” There was already a tap on the phone line, but so far there had not been a single call in or out.

The other half of her squad was in Alahad’s apartment. There they found a photo of a woman and a child, probably his son, wearing something like a uniform—about fourteen, the agent thought, photographing them with a Polaroid. But again, everything was pure vanilla. It was exactly the way a businessman would live in the Washington area, or an intelligence officer. You just couldn’t tell. They had the beginning of a case, but not enough evidence to take to a judge, certainly not enough for a search warrant. Their probable-cause quotient was a little on the thin side. But this
was
a national-security investigation involving the personal safety of the President, and headquarters
had
told them that there were no rules. They’d already committed two technical violations of the law in invading two apartments without a warrant, and two more in tapping a couple of phone lines. With all that work accomplished, Loomis and Selig made their way into an apartment building across the street. From the manager, they learned that there was a vacant apartment facing Alahad’s storefront. They got the keys to that without any difficulty and set up their surveillance of the front, while two more agents watched the back door. Sissy Loomis then used her cellular phone to call headquarters. Maybe it wasn’t enough to take to a judge or a U.S. attorney, but it was enough to talk to another agent about.

ONE OTHER POTENTIAL subject wasn’t completely clear yet, O’Day noted. There was Raman, and a black agent whose wife was a Muslim and who was evidently trying to convert her husband—but the agent had discussed it with his comrades, and there was a notation in his file that this agent’s marriage, like others in the Service, was on shaky ground.

The phone rang.

“Inspector O’Day.”

“Pat? It’s Sissy.”

“How’s Raman looking?” He’d worked three cases with her, all involving Russian spies. The cheerleader had the jaw of a pit bull once she got onto something.

“The message on his phone, the wrong number?”

“Yeah?”

“Our rug merchant was calling a dead person whose wife is allergic to wool,” Loomis told him.

Click.

“Keep going, Sis.” She read off her notes and the information garnered by the people who’d entered the dealer’s apartment.

“This one feels real, Pat. The tradecraft is just too good. Right out of the book. It looks so normal that you don’t think about it. But why the pay phone, except that he’s worried somebody might have a tap on his phone? Why call a dead man by mistake? And why did the wrong number go to somebody on the Detail?”

“Well, Raman’s out of town.”

“Keep him there,” Loomis advised. They didn’t have a case. They were still struggling for probable cause. If they arrested Alahad, he’d have the sense to ask for a lawyer—and what did they have? He’d made a phone call. He wouldn’t have to defend the call. He just had to say nothing. His lawyer would say it was all some kind of mistake—Alahad might even have a plausible explanation already prepared; he’d keep that one in his pocket, of course—ask for evidence, and the FBI would have nothing to show.

“That tips our hand, too, doesn’t it?”

“Better safe than sorry, Pat.”

“I have to take this to Dan. When are you tossing the shop?”

“Tonight.”

THE TROOPERS OF the Blackhorse were thoroughly exhausted. Fit and desert-trained soldiers that they were, they’d spent two-thirds of a day in airplanes with dry air, sitting in cramped seats, their personal weapons in the overhead bins—that always got a curious reaction from the stewardesses—and then arrived eleven time zones away in blazing heat. But they did what they had to do.

First came gunnery. The Saudis had established a large shooting range for their own use, with pop-up steel targets as close as three hundred meters and as far as five thousand. Gunners bore-sighted their weapons, then tried them out, using real ammunition instead of practice, then learned that the war shots were far more accurate, the projectiles flying “right through the dot,” meaning the circular reticle in the center of their sighting systems. Once off the transport trailers, drivers exercised their mounts to make sure that everything worked properly, but the tanks and Bradleys were in the nearly mint condition promised on the flight over. Radio checks were made so that everyone could talk to everyone else. Then they verified the all-important IVIS data links. The more mundane tasks came last of all. The Saudi-deployed M1 A2s did not yet have the newest modification to the vehicle series, pallet-loaded ammunition racks. Instead there was a large steel-wire bustle for personal things, especially water. One by one, the crews cycled their vehicles through the course. The Bradley crews even got to fire a single TOW missile each. Then they entered the reloading area, taking on new ammunition to replace what had been expended on the range.

It was all quiet and businesslike. The Blackhorse, because they trained other soldiers so regularly in the fine art of mechanized death, were utterly desensitized to the routine tasks of soldiering. They had to remind themselves that this was not
their
desert—deserts all look pretty much alike; this one, however, didn’t have creosote bushes and coyotes. It did have camels and merchants. The Saudis honored their hospitality laws by providing food and soft drinks in abundance to the troopers, while their senior officers conferred over maps with the region’s bitter coffee.