“But what about keeping them covert?” Cutter was worried about that.
“If the region was heavily populated,” Ritter explained tiredly, “the opposition wouldn’t be using it. Moreover, they operate mainly at night for the obvious reason. So our people will belly-up during the day and only move around at night. They are trained and equipped for that. Look, we’ve been thinking about this for some time. These people are very well trained already, and we’re—”
“Resupply?”
“Helicopter,” Ritter said. “Special-ops people down in Florida.”
“I still think we should use Marines.”
“The Marines have a different mission. We’ve been over this, Admiral. These kids are better trained, they’re better equipped, most of them have been into areas like this one, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to get them into the program without anybody noticing,” Ritter explained for what must have been the twentieth time. Cutter wasn’t one to listen to the words of others. His own opinions were evidently too loud. The DDO wondered how the President fared, but that question needed no answer. A presidential whisper carried more weight than a scream from anyone else. The problem was, the President so often depended on idiots to make his wishes a reality. Ritter would not have been surprised to learn that his opinion of the National Security Adviser matched that of Jack Ryan; it was just that Ryan could not know why.
“Well, it’s your operation,” Cutter said after a moment. “When does it start?”
“Three weeks. Just had a report last night. Things are going along just fine. They already had all the basic skills we needed. It’s only a matter of honing a few special ones and adding a few refinements. We’ve been lucky so far. Haven’t even had anybody hurt up there.”
“How long have you had that place, anyway?”
“Thirty years. It was supposed to have been an air-defense radar installation, but the funding got cut off for some reason or other. The Air Force turned it over to us, and we’ve been using it to train agents ever since. It doesn’t show up on any of the OMB site lists. It belongs to an offshore corporation that we use for various things. During the fall we occasionally lease it out as a hunting camp, would you believe? It even shows a profit for us, which is another reason why it doesn’t show on the OMB list. Is that covert enough? Came in real useful during Afghanistan, though, doing the same thing we’re doing now, and nobody ever found out about it....”
“Three weeks.”
Ritter nodded. “Maybe a touch longer. We’re still working on coordinating the satellite intelligence, and our assets on the ground.”
“Will it all work?” Cutter asked rhetorically.
“Look, Admiral, I’ve told you about that. If you want some magical solution to give to the President, we don’t have it. What we can do is sting them some. The results will look good in the papers, and, hell, maybe we’ll end up saving a life or two. Personally, I think it’s worth doing even if we don’t get much of a return.”
The nice thing about Ritter, Cutter thought, was that he didn’t state the obvious. There would be a return. Everyone knew what that was all about. The mission was not an exercise in cynicism, though some might see it as such.
“What about the radar coverage?”
“There are only two aircraft coming on line. They’re testing a new system called LPI—Low Probability of Intercept—radar. I don’t know all the details, but because of a combination of frequency agility, reduced side-lobes, and relatively low power output, it’s damned hard to detect the emissions from the set. That will invalidate the ESM equipment that the opposition has started using. So we can use our assets on the ground to stake out between four and six of the covert airfields, and let us know when a shipment is en route. The modified E-2s will establish contact with them south of Cuba and pace them all the way in till they’re intercepted by the F-15 driver I told you about. He’s a black kid—hell of a fighter jock, they say. Comes from New York. His mother got mugged by a druggie up there. It was a bad one. She got all torn up, and eventually died. She was one of those ghetto success stories that you never hear about. Three kids, all of them turned out pretty well. The fighter pilot is a very angry kid at the moment. He’ll work for us, and he won’t talk.”
“Right,” Cutter said skeptically. “What about if he develops a conscience later on and—”
“The boy told me that he’d shoot all the bastards down if we wanted him to. A druggie killed his mother. He wants to get even, and he sees this as a good way. There are a lot of sensitive projects underway at Eglin. His fighter is cut loose from the rest as part of the LPI Radar project. It’s two Navy airplanes carrying the radar, and we’ve picked the flight crews—pretty much the same story on them. And remember—after we have lock-on from the F-15, the radar aircraft shuts down and leaves. So if Bronco—that’s the kid’s name—does have to splash the inbound druggie, nobody’ll know about it. Once we get them on the ground, the flight crews will have the living shit scared out of them. I worked out the details on that part myself. If some people have to disappear—I don’t expect it—that can be arranged, too. The Marines there are all special-ops types. One of my people will pretend he’s a fed, and the judge we take them to is the one the President—”
“I know that part.” It was odd, Cutter thought, how ideas grow. First the President had made an intemperate remark after learning that the cousin of a close friend had died of a drug overdose. He’d talked about it with Ritter, gotten an idea, and mentioned it to the President. A month after that, a plan had started to grow. Two months more and it was finalized. A secret Presidential Finding was written and in the files—there were only four copies of it, each of which was locked up tight. Now things were starting to move. It was past the time for second thoughts, Cutter told himself weakly. He’d been involved in all the planning discussions, and still the operation had somehow leaped unexpectedly to full flower....
“What can go wrong?” he asked Ritter.
“Look, in field operations anything can go wrong. Just a few months ago a crash operation went bad because of an illegal turn—”
“That was KGB,” Cutter said. “Jeff Pelt told me about that one.”
“We are not immune. Shit happens, as they say. What we can do, we’ve done. Every aspect of the operation is compartmentalized. On the air part, for example, the fighter pilot doesn’t know the radar aircraft or its people—for both sides it’s just call signs and voices. The people on the ground don’t know what aircraft are involved. The people we’re putting in-country will get instructions from satellite radios—they won’t even know where from. The people who insert them won’t know why they’re going or where the orders come from. Only a handful of people will know everything. The total number of people who know anything at all is less than a hundred, and only ten know the whole story. I can’t make it any tighter than that. Now, either it’s a Go-Mission or it’s not. That’s your call, Admiral Cutter. I presume,” Ritter added for effect, “that you’ve fully briefed the President.”
Cutter had to smile. It was not often, even in Washington, that a man could speak the truth and lie at the same time: “Of course, Mr. Ritter.”
“In writing,” Ritter said next.
“No.”
“Then I call the operation off,” the DDO said quietly. “I won’t be left hanging on this one.”
“But I will?” Cutter observed. He didn’t allow anger to creep into his voice, but his face conveyed the message clearly enough. Ritter made the obvious maneuver.
“Judge Moore requires it. Would you prefer that he ask the President himself?”
Cutter was caught short. His job, after all, was to insulate the President. He’d tried to pass that onus to Ritter and/or Judge Moore, but found himself outmaneuvered in his own office. Someone had to be responsible for everything; bureaucracy or not, it always came down to one person. It was rather like a game of musical chairs. Someone was always left standing. That person was called the loser. For all
his skills, Vice Admiral Cutter had found himself without a seat on that last chair. His naval training, of course, had taught him to take responsibilities, but though Cutter called himself a naval officer, and thought of himself as one—without wearing the uniform, of course—responsibility was something he’d managed to avoid for years. Pentagon duty was good for that, and White House duty was better still. Now responsibility was his again. He hadn’t been this vulnerable since his cruiser had nearly rammed a tanker during replenishment operations—his executive officer had saved him with a timely command to the helmsman, Cutter remembered. A pity that his career had ended at captain’s rank, but Ed just hadn’t had the right stuff to make Flag....
Cutter opened a drawer to his desk and pulled out a sheet of paper whose letterhead proclaimed “The White House.” He took a gold Cross pen from his pocket and wrote a clear authorization for Ritter in his best Palmer Method penmanship. You are authorized by the President... The Admiral folded the sheet, tucked it into an envelope, and handed it across.
“Thank you, Admiral.” Ritter tucked the envelope into his coat pocket. “I’ll keep you posted.”
“You be careful who sees that,” Cutter said coldly.
“I do know how to keep secrets, sir. It’s my job, remember?” Ritter rose and left the room, finally with a warm feeling around his backside. His ass was covered. It was a feeling craved by many people in Washington. It was one he didn’t share with the President’s National Security Adviser, but Ritter figured it wasn’t his fault that Cutter hadn’t thought this one through.
Five miles away, the DDI’s office seemed a cold and lonely place to Ryan. There was the credenza and the coffee machine where James Greer made his Navy brew, there the high-backed judge’s chair in which the old man leaned back before making his professorial statements of fact and theory, and his jokes, Jack remembered. His boss had one hell of a sense of humor. What a fine teacher he might have made—but then he really was a teacher to Jack. What was it? Only six years since he’d started with the Agency. He’d known Greer for less than seven, and the Admiral had in large part become the father he’d lost in that airplane crash at Chicago. It was here he had come for advice, for guidance. How many times?
The trees outside the seventh-floor windows were green with the leaves of summer, blocking the view of the Potomac Valley. The really crazy things had all happened when there were no leaves, Ryan thought. He remembered pacing around on the lush carpet, looking down at the piles of snow left by the plows while trying to find answers to hard questions, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not.
Vice Admiral James Greer would not live to see another winter. He’d seen his last snow, his last Christmas. Ryan’s boss lay in a VIP suite at Bethesda Naval Medical Center, still alert, still thinking, still telling jokes. But his weight was down by fifteen pounds in the last three weeks, and the chemotherapy denied him any sort of food other than what came through tubes stuck in his arms. And the pain. There was nothing worse, Ryan knew, than to watch the pain of others. He’d seen his wife and daughter in pain, and it had been far worse than his own hospital stays. It was hard to go and see the Admiral, to see the tightness around the face, the occasional stiffening of limbs as the spasms came and went, some from the cancer, some from the medications. But Greer was as much a part of his family as—God, Ryan thought, I am thinking of him like my father. And so he would, until the end.
“Shit,” Jack said quietly, without knowing it.
“I know what you mean, Dr. Ryan.”
“Hmph?” Jack turned. The Admiral’s driver (and security guard) stood quietly by the door while Jack retrieved some documents. Even though Ryan was the DDI’s special assistant and de facto deputy, he had to be watched when going over documents cleared DDI-eyes-only. CIA’s security rules were tough, logical, and inviolable.
“I know what you mean, sir. I’ve been with him eleven years. He’s as much a friend as a boss. Every Christmas he has something for the kids. Never forgets a birthday, either. You think there’s any hope at all?”
“Cathy had one of her friends come down. Professor Gold-man. Russ is as good as they come, professor of oncology at Hopkins, consultant to NIH, and a bunch of other things. He says one chance in thirty. It’s spread too far, too fast, Mickey. Two months, tops. Anything else would be a miracle.” Ryan almost smiled. “I got a priest working on that.”
Murdock nodded. “I know he’s tight with Father Tim over at Georgetown. He was just at the hospital for some chess last night. The Admiral took him in forty-eight moves. You ever play chess with him?”
“I’m not in his class. Probably never will be.”
“Yes, sir, you are,” Murdock said after a moment or two. “Leastways, that’s what he says.”
“He would.” Ryan shook his head. Damn it, Greer wouldn’t want either of them to talk like this. There was work to be done. Jack took the key and unlocked the file drawer in the desk. He set the key chain on the desk blotter for Mickey to retrieve and reached down to pull the drawer, but goofed. Instead he pulled out the sliding board you could use as a writing surface, though this one was marked with brown rings from the DDI’s coffee mug. Near the inside end of it, Ryan saw, was a file card, taped in place. Written on the card, in Greer’s distinctive hand, were two safe combinations. Greer had a special office safe and so did Bob Ritter. Jack remembered that his boss had always been clumsy with combination locks, and he probably needed the combination written down so he wouldn’t forget it. He found it odd that the Admiral should have combinations for both his and Ritter’s, but decided after a moment that it made sense. If somebody had to get into the DDO’s safe in a hurry—for example, if Ritter were kidnapped, and someone had to see what really classified material was in the current file—it had to be someone very senior, like the DDI. Probably Ritter had the combination to the DDI’s personal safe, as well. Jack wondered who else did. Shrugging off the thought, he slid the board back into place and opened the drawer. There were six files there. All related to long-term intelligence evaluations that the Admiral wanted to see. None were especially critical. In fact, they weren’t all that sensitive, but it would give the Admiral something to occupy his mind. A rotating team of CIA security personnel guarded his room, with two on duty at all times, and he could still do work in the time he had left.
Damn! Jack snarled at himself. Get your mind off of it. Hell, he does have a chance. Some chance is better than none at all.
Chavez had never handled a submachine gun. His personal weapon had always been the M-16 rifle, often with an M-203 grenade launcher slung under the barrel. He also knew how to use the SAW—the Belgian-made squad automatic weapon that had recently been added to the Army’s inventory—and had shot expert with pistol once. But submachine guns had long since gone out of favor in the Army. They just weren’t serious weapons of the sort a soldier would need.
Which was not to say that he didn’t like it. It was a German gun, the MP-5 SD2 made by Heckler & Koch. It was decidedly unattractive. The matte-black finish was slightly rough to the touch, and it lacked the sexy compactness of the Israeli Uzi. On the other hand, it wasn’t made to look good, he thought, it was made to shoot good. It was made to be reliable. It was made to be accurate. Whoever had designed this baby, Chavez decided as he brought it up for the first time, knew what shooting was all about. Unusually for a German-made weapon, it didn’t have a huge number of small parts. It broke down easily and quickly for cleaning, and reassembly took less than a minute. The weapon nestled snugly against his shoulder, and his head dropped automatically into the right place to peer through the ring-aperture sight.
“Commence firing,” Mr. Johnson commanded.
Chavez had the weapon on single-shot. He squeezed off the first round, just to get a feel for the trigger. It broke cleanly at about eleven pounds, the recoil was straight back and gentle, and the gun didn’t jump off the target the way some weapons did. The shot, of course, went straight through the center of the target’s silhou
etted head. He squeezed off another, and the same thing happened, then five in rapid fire. The repeated shots rocked him back an inch or two, but the recoil spring ate up most of the kick. He looked up to see seven holes in a nice, tight group, like the nose carved into a jack-o’-lantern. Okay. Next he flipped the selector switch to the burst position—it was time for a little rock and roll. He put three rounds at the target’s chest. This group was larger, but any of the three would have been fatal. After another one Chavez decided that he could hold a three-round burst dead on target. He didn’t need full-automatic fire. Anything more than three rounds just wasted ammunition. His attitude might have seemed strange for a soldier, but as a light infantryman he understood that ammunition was something that had to be carried. To finish off his thirty-round magazine he aimed bursts at unmarked portions of the target card, and was rewarded with hits exactly where he’d wanted them.
“Baby, where have you been all my life?” Best of all, it wasn’t much noisier than the rustle of dry leaves. It wasn’t that it had a silencer; the barrel was a silencer. You heard the muted clack of the action, and the swish of the bullet. They were using a subsonic round, the instructor told them. Chavez picked one out of the box. The bullet was a hollow-point design; it looked like you could mix a drink in it, and on striking a man it probably spread out to the diameter of a dime. Instant death from a head shot, nearly as quick in the chest—but if they were training him to use a silencer, he’d be expected to go for the head. He figured that he could take head shots reliably from fifty or sixty feet—maybe farther under ideal circumstances, but soldiers don’t expect ideal circumstances. On the face of it, he’d be expected to creep within fifteen or twenty yards of his target and drop him without a sound.
Whatever they were preparing for, he thought again, it sure as hell wasn’t a training mission.
“Nice groups, Chavez,” the instructor observed. Only three other men were on the firing line. There would be two submachine gunners per squad. Two SAWs—Julio had one of those—and the rest had M-16s, two of them with grenade launchers attached. Everyone had pistols, too. That seemed strange, but despite the weight Chavez didn’t mind.