Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (359 page)

“Yes, General, I know,” Clark said into the phone at 1:05 the next afternoon, damning time zones as he did so.

“That comes out of
my
budget, too,” General Wilson pointed out. First, CINC-SNAKE thought, they ask for a man, then they ask for hardware, and
now,
they are asking for funding, too.

“I can try to help with that through Ed Foley, sir, but the fact of the matter is that we need the asset to train with. You did send us a pretty good man,” Clark added, hoping to assuage Wilson’s renowned temper.

It didn’t help much. “Yes, I know he’s good. That’s why he was working for me in the first goddamned place.”

This guy’s getting ecumenical in his old age,
John told himself.
Now he’s praising a Marine—
rather unusual for an
Army
snake-eater and former commander of XVIII Airborne Corps.

“General—sir, you know we’ve had a couple of jobs already, and with all due modesty, my people handled them both pretty damned well. I have to fight for my people, don’t I?”

And
that
calmed Wilson down. They were both commanders, they both had jobs to do, and people to command—and defend.

“Clark, I understand your position. I really do. But I can’t train my people on assets that you’ve taken away.”

“How about we call it time-sharing?” John offered, as a further olive branch.

“It still wears out a perfectly good Night Hawk.”

“It also trains up the crews for you. At the end of this, you may just have a primo helicopter crew to bring down to Bragg to work with your people—and the training expense for your operation is just about nothing, sir.” And that, he thought, was a pretty good play.

At MacDill Air Force Base, Wilson told himself that this was a losing proposition. Rainbow was a bulletproof operation, and everyone knew it. This Clark guy had sold it first of all to CIA, then to the President himself—and sure enough, they’d had two deployments, and both had worked out, though the second one had been pretty dicey. But Clark, clever as he was, and good commander that he seemed to be, hadn’t learned how to run a unit in the modern military world, where half the time was spent managing money like some goddamned white-socked accountant, instead of leading from the front and training with the troops. That’s what really rankled Sam Wilson, young for a four-star, a professional
soldier
who wanted to
soldier,
something that high command pretty well precluded, despite his fitness and desire. Most annoying of all, this Rainbow unit promised to steal a lot of his own business. The Special Operations Command had commitments all over the world, but the international nature of Rainbow meant that there was now somebody else in the same line of work, whose politically neutral nature was supposed to make their use a lot more palatable to countries that might need special services. Clark might just put him out of business in a real sense, and Wilson didn’t like that at all.

But, really, he had no choice in the matter, did he?

“Okay, Clark, you can use the aircraft
so long as
the parent unit is able to part with it, and
so long as
its use by you does not interfere with training and readiness with that parent unit. Clear?”

“Yes, sir, that is clear,” John Clark acknowledged.

“I need to come over to see your little circus,” Wilson said next.

“I’d like that a lot, General.”

“We’ll see,” Wilson grumbled, breaking the connection.

“Tough son of a bitch,” John breathed.

“Quite,” Stanley agreed. “We are poaching on his patch, after all.”

“It’s our patch now, Al.”

“Yes, it is, but you mustn’t expect him to like that fact.”

“And he’s younger and tougher than me?”

“A few years younger, and I personally would not wish to cross swords with the gentleman.” Stanley smiled. “The war appears to be over, John, and you appear to have won.”

Clark managed a smile and a chuckle. “Yeah, Al, but it’s easier to go into the field and kill people.”

“Quite.”

“What’s Peter’s team doing?”

“Long-line practice.”

“Let’s go and watch,” John said, glad to have an excuse to leave his desk.

“I want to get out of this place,” he told his attorney.

“I understand that, my friend,” the lawyer replied, with a look around the room. It was the law in France, as in America, that conversations between clients and attorneys were privileged, and could not be recorded or used in any way by the state, but neither man really trusted the French to abide by that law, especially since DGSE, the French intelligence service, had been so instrumental in bringing Il’ych to justice. The DGSE was not known for its willingness to abide by the rules of civilized international behavior, as people as diverse as international terrorists and Greenpeace had learned to their sorrow.

Well, there were other people talking in this room, and there were no obvious shotgun microphones here—and the two had not taken the seats offered by the prison guards, opting instead for one closer to the windows because, they’d said, they wanted the natural light. Of course, every booth could easily be wired.

“I must tell you that the circumstances of your conviction do not lend themselves to an easy appeal,” the lawyer advised. This wasn’t exactly news to his client.

“I am aware of that. I need you to make a telephone call.”

“To whom?”

The Jackal gave him a name and a number. “Tell him that it is my wish to be released.”

“I cannot be part of a criminal act.”

“I am aware of that as well,” Sanchez observed coldly. “Tell him also that the rewards will be great.”

It was suspected, but not widely known for certain, that Il’ych Ramirez Sanchez had a goodly sum of money squirreled away as a result of his operations while a free man. This had come mainly as a result of his attack on the OPEC ministers in Austria almost twenty years earlier, which explained why he and his group had been so careful not to kill anyone really important, despite the political flap that would have caused—all the better for him to gain notice and acclaim at the time. Business was business, even for his sort of people. And
someone
had paid his own legal bills, the attorney thought.

“What else do you expect me to tell him?”

“That is all. If he has an immediate reply, you will convey it to me,” the Jackal told him. There was still an intensity to his eyes, something cold and distant—but even so, right there looking deep into his interlocutor and telling him what must be.

For his part, the attorney asked himself again why he’d taken on this client. He had a long history of championing radical causes, from which notoriety he’d gained a wide and lucrative criminal practice. There was an attendant element of danger involved, of course. He’d recently handled three major drug cases, and lost all three, and those clients hadn’t liked the idea of spending twenty or more years in prison and had expressed their displeasure to him recently. Might they arrange to have him killed? It had happened a few times in America and elsewhere. It was a more distant possibility here, the lawyer thought, though he’d made no promises to those clients except to do his best for them. It was the same with Carlos the Jackal. After his conviction, the lawyer had come into the case to look at the possibilities of an appeal, and made it, and lost—predictably. The French high courts held little clemency for a man who’d done murder on the soil of France, then essentially boasted of it. Now the man had changed his mind and decided petulantly that he didn’t enjoy prison life. The lawyer knew that he’d pass along the message, as he had to, but did that make him part of a criminal act?

No, he decided. Telling an acquaintance of his client that the latter wanted out of prison—well, who would not wish to be liberated? And the message was equivocal, it held many possible meanings. Help on another appeal, revelation of new, exculpatory evidence, anything at all. And besides, whatever Sanchez asked him to do here was privileged information, wasn’t it?

“I will pass along your message,” he promised his client.

“Merci.”

It was a beautiful thing to watch, even in the dark. The MH-60K Night Hawk helicopter came in at about thirty miles per hour, almost two hundred feet over the ground, approaching the range building from the south, into the wind, traveling smoothly, not at all like a tactical deployment maneuver. But under the helicopter was a dark nylon rope, about one hundred fifty feet long, barely visible with the best of NVGs, and at the end of it were Peter Covington, Mike Chin, and another Team-1 member, dangling free below the black Sikorsky in their black ninja suits. The helicopter proceeded in so evenly and smoothly, as though on tracks, until the nose of the aircraft crossed the building’s wall. Then the nose came up, and the aircraft flared, slowing rapidly. Below the aircraft, the people attached to the rope swept forward, as though on a child’s swing, and then, at the limit of the arc, they swung backward. The backward swing froze them still in the air, their rearward velocity almost exactly matching the remaining forward motion of the helicopter, and then they were on the roof, almost as though they’d stepped off a stationary object. Instantly, Covington and his men unclipped their quick-release attachments and dropped down. The negligible speed difference between their feet and the stationary roof made for no noise at all. Scarcely had this been done when the helicopter nosed down, resuming its forward flight, and anyone on the ground would scarcely have known that the aircraft had done anything but fly at a steady pace over the building. And at night, it was nearly invisible, even with night-vision goggles.

“Bloody good,” Al Stanley breathed. “Not a bloody sound.”

“He is as good as he says,” Clark observed.

As though hearing the remarks, Malloy brought the helicopter around, flashing a thumbs-up out the window to the men on the ground as he headed off to orbit the area for the remainder of the simulation. In a real situation, the orbit would be in case he was needed to do an emergency evacuation—and even more so, to get the people on the ground used to having a helicopter overhead, to make his presence as much a part of the landscape as the trees, so he’d disappear into the normal background of the night, no more remarkable than the song of nightingales despite the danger inherent from his presence. It surprised everyone in the business that you could get away with this, but it was just an application of human nature to the world of special operations. If a tank had driven into the parking lot, after a day or two it would be just another car. Covington’s trio of shooters circulated about the roof for a few minutes, then disappeared down ladders into the interior and emerged a few seconds later from the front door.

“Okay, Bear, this is Six, exercise concluded. Back to the bird farm, Colonel, over.”

“Roger, Six, Bear is RTB. Out” was the terse reply, and the Night Hawk broke off from the orbit and headed down to the helo pad.

“What do you think?” Stanley asked Major Covington.

“Bloody good. Like stepping off the train to the platform. Malloy knows what he’s about. Master Chief?”

“Put him on the payroll, sir,” Master Chief Chin confirmed. “That’s a guy we can work with.”

“The aircraft is nicely set up,” Malloy said twenty minutes later, in the club. He was wearing his green Nomex flight suit, with a yellow scarf around his neck, like a good aviator, though it struck Clark as odd.

“What’s with the necktie?”

“Oh, this? It’s the A-10 scarf. One of the guys I rescued in Kuwait gave it to me. I figure it’s lucky, and I’ve always kinda liked the Warthog as an airplane. So, I wear it on missions.”

“How hard is it to do that transition maneuver?” Covington asked.

“Your timing has to be pretty good, and you have to read the wind. You know what helps me prepare for it?”

“Tell me,” Clark said.

“Piano playing.” Malloy sipped at his pint of bitter and grinned. “Don’t ask me why, but I always fly better after I’ve played some. Maybe something to do with getting the fingers loose. Anyway, that chopper they lent us is set up just right. Control cables have the right tension, throttles are just so. That Air Force ground crew—well, I have to meet ’em and buy ’em all a round. They really know how to prepare a chopper. Good team of mechanics.”

“They are that,” First Lieutenant Harrison agreed. He belonged to 1st Special Operations Wing, and technically, therefore, he was responsible for the helicopter, though now he was very pleased to have so fine a teacher as Malloy.

“That’s half the battle of flying helos, getting the bird dialed in just so,” Malloy went on. “That one, you can just sweet talk to her, and she listens real nice.”

“Like a good rifle,” Chin observed.

“Roger that, Master Chief,” Malloy said, saluting with his beer. “So, what can you guys tell me about your first two missions?”

“Christians 10, Lions 1,” Stanley replied.

“Who’d you lose?”

“That was the Bern job. The hostage was killed before we were on the scene.”

“Eager beavers?”

“Something like that.” Clark nodded. “They weren’t real swift, crossing the line like that. I sorta thought they were just bank robbers, but later investigation turned up the terrorist connection. Of course, maybe they just wanted some cash. Dr. Bellow never really decided what they were all about.”

“Any way you look at it, they’re just hoods, murderers, whatever you want to call ’em,” Malloy said. “I helped train the FBI chopper pilots, spent a few weeks at Quantico with the Hostage Rescue Team. They kinda indoctrinated me on the psychological side. It can be pretty interesting. This Dr. Bellow, is it Paul Bellow, the guy who wrote the three books?”

“Same guy.”

“He’s pretty smart.”

“That’s the idea, Colonel Malloy,” Stanley said, waving for another round.

“But the thing is, you know, there’s only one thing you really need to know about them,” Malloy said, reverting back to identity as a colonel of the United States Marine Corps.