Jack fought a bout of queasiness, waited for the signal from Country, and then leapt out.
3
Seven minutes later Jack bobbed in the water at the sea stairs at the stern of the Hail Caesar, a seventy-five-foot Nordhavn yacht owned by a friend of Gerry Hendley’s, director of The Campus. The yacht was anchored off Carpenter Point, at the northern aspects of the Chesapeake Bay, a few miles east of the mouth of the Susquehanna River.
Jack was tired from the swim, and he blamed the Susquehanna, as well as the North East River, which flowed south into the deeper water here, for messing with his stroke. He hadn’t been wearing diving gear, just the fins and a snorkel/dive mask rig, so he’d done the majority of his swim on the surface. The waves forced him to work for every yard, and they also caused him to drink a substantial amount of seawater down his snorkel, and now while he stowed his excess gear on the sea stairs and readied his silenced submachine gun, he gagged a little.
He checked his watch and saw he’d made it just in time. And then, as if on cue, his waterproof headset came alive with Ding Chavez’s whispering voice. “One is in position.”
Caruso then came over the net. “Two. On time. On target.”
Jack’s transmission wasn’t as macho as his cousin’s. “Three. I’m here. Headin’ up.”
“Roger that,” Chavez said. “We’re right above you.”
Jack climbed the sea stairs and saw Ding and Dom in their black gear. Their chutes had been rolled and stowed under a thick spool of line on the main aft deck, and just a few feet in front of them, Dale Henson, one of their security men and a member of the OPFOR, sat with his back against the starboard-side gunwale. A pair of red splotches adorned the breast of his khaki jumpsuit, and a submachine gun lay on the teak deck next to him.
Henson had taken a candy bar out of his pocket and was now eating it, looking up at the three assaulters with no pretense of playing dead for the duration of the exercise.
He winked at Jack, then rolled his eyes back, jokingly feigning taking two gunshots to the chest.
“Cute,” whispered Chavez. Then he said, “Fleming is on the flybridge. Dom stitched him in the back before he knew we were overhead.”
Jack nodded. Two OPFOR were down with minimal noise, and neither had had time to broadcast a warning on their radios.
Silently the three Campus operatives formed in a tactical train and moved up the starboard-side deck toward the door to the main saloon.
Ding was in front, Dominic right behind him, and while Jack brought up the rear, he saw Dom hold up his right hand and extend three fingers. It was Dom’s covert way of letting his cousin know there were only three more to deal with in the opposition, based on the theory he put forth in the Cessna.
At the hatch to the main saloon Ding stopped and waved Jack forward. He ducked below the little portal, pulled an HHIT2—a handheld inspection tool. It was a mini–video camera with thermal capability and a long, flexible neck that ran between the lens and the device itself. Jack bent the neck, then slowly raised the eye up to the portal while looking at the cell-phone-sized monitor. The half-inch-wide camera showed Jack the scene just inside. There, the other two training cadre, Pablo Gomez and Jason Gibson, sat on chairs, watching TV. Both men had eye protection on, pistols on their hips, and sub guns positioned within reach.
Jack held two fingers up for Chavez and Caruso.
While he watched, Gomez reached for the radio on the table next to him, spoke into it, and then adopted a look of concern. Jack assumed he hadn’t received a reply from Henson or Fleming on deck.
Gomez dropped the walkie-talkie, launched from his chair, and went for his SMG, and Gibson took the hint, doing the same just an instant behind.
Jack took his eye out of the device, stowed it in a drop bag hooked to his belt in the small of his back, and hefted his MPX. As he did this he turned to Chavez, and in an urgent whisper he said, “Compromised!”
Ding reached for the latch, Jack readied his SIG, flipping the selector lever to fully automatic fire, and then Ding turned the latch and pushed the door open with his foot.
Jack fired quick, controlled bursts at the two men, dropping Gibson first with three rounds to his well-padded chest rig, then taking Gomez in the same area just as his MP5 began to rise at the threat. Both men fell back into their chairs, put their guns in their laps, and raised their hands.
Jack moved quickly into the room, swung his weapon to cover the blind spots, and was immediately passed by Chavez and Caruso, both of whom began rushing for the ladder that led down to the lower deck.
Jack caught up to the others. They all hurried now, because while Jack’s weapon was suppressed, it still made significant noise, and there was a hostage on board this yacht who would be imperiled by the sounds of the thumping full-auto fire.
They cleared staterooms quickly and efficiently; all three men worked together for each room instead of splitting up. Then, at the third of the four rooms, Dom pushed down the latch silently and shoved open the door. Inside, Adara Sherman sat on a bed with a mug of coffee in her hand and a magazine in her lap.
She didn’t even look up from her magazine. “Yay, I’m saved.” The comment was said with playful sarcasm.
Adara was the transportation manager for The Campus, among other duties, but today Dom knew that she was here to play the role of the hostage. Still, no one knew if she’d been booby-trapped or armed with a pistol and ordered to fire on her rescuers in a mock Stockholm-syndrome scenario, so Dom approached her with his weapon shouldered and pointed at her chest. He did this with an apologetic look on his face, and it took him out of his game for a moment, just long enough to miss clearing the head off to Adara’s right.
His mistake came to him suddenly, but just as it did he heard his cousin’s voice from behind, back in the passageway. “Contact!”
—
The door to the remaining stateroom flew open, and John Clark stood there with an MP5 submachine gun at his shoulder and goggles over his eyes. He opened fire, but managed to squeeze off only a single round before Domingo Chavez shot him with a three-round burst to the chest. Ding knew his rounds would strike in the thick old canvas coat Clark wore over his three layers of thermal henleys, minimizing the pain from the impact of the Simunitions.
Clark had been shot by Sims many times before, and Chavez knew he was no fan.
In the stateroom with the hostage, Dom heard Chavez call out that he’d ended the threat in the passageway, and he lowered his weapon a little, feeling certain he and his team had eliminated all the shooters in the opposition force. Then he turned back to Adara to search her, just as he would any recovered hostage.
While he did this, Jack covered him from the doorway between the stateroom and the passageway, but Jack didn’t know the tiny head with the toilet, sink, and shower on the left had not yet been cleared by his cousin.
With his back to the head, Caruso did not see the pistol that emerged from behind the shower curtain there, and the shower was just out of Jack’s sightline, so he couldn’t see the threat.
Only when the crack of a pistol filled the room did both Dom and Jack know they’d screwed up. Dom took the shot straight between the shoulder blades, pitched forward onto Adara, and then caught a second round before he could raise his hands, signifying he was down.
Jack Ryan, Jr., burst into the little stateroom, dove past Dom and Adara on the bed, and fired a long, fully automatic burst into the head, desperate to end the threat before the hostage was also hit.
His rounds slammed into the shower curtain, shredding it just like they were real metal-jacketed bullets.
“Owww! Okay! Ya got me!” The voice had a distinctive Kentucky drawl, and instantly Jack’s blood went cold.
Gerry Hendley, former senator Gerry Hendley, director of The Campus Gerry Hendley, stepped out of the shower now, covered in red splotches and rubbing a viciou
s purple welt growing by the second on the side of his neck. “Holy hell, Clark was right. Those little bastards hurt!”
“Gerry?” Jack croaked. Hendley was in his late sixties, and other than maybe some quail hunting, he was not a shooter. He’d never even been present for any of the Campus training exercises, much less taken part in one.
Jack could not fathom why the hell he was here. “I am so sorry! I didn’t know—”
John Clark called out from the passageway, “Cease fire! Exercise complete! Make your weapons safe!”
Jack thumbed the fire selector switch down to safe, and let his weapon hang free on his chest.
Adara launched from the bed now, ripped off her safety glasses, and rushed over to Gerry. “Mr. Hendley, let me get you topside to my med kit. I’ll get the worst of those cleaned and bandaged.”
Jack tried to apologize again. “I’m sorry, Gerry. If I had any idea you were—”
Hendley was in obvious pain, but he waved the comment away. “If you had any idea I was in the OPFOR, this wouldn’t have been good training for you, would it? You were supposed to shoot me.”
“Uh . . . Yes, sir.”
Gerry added, “Of course I would have appreciated a little better marksmanship. I wore a padded vest because John assured me I’d catch a round or two right in the chest, and that would be that.”
Jack had tagged Gerry in both arms, his neck, chest, stomach, and right hand. The hand and the neck bled openly, and Gerry’s shirt was torn at the arm.
As Adara led him out of the stateroom and back to the ladder up to the main deck, Gerry Hendley looked at Clark in the small passageway. He said, “You certainly made your point in one hell of a dramatic fashion, John.”
Jack looked up at Clark now and saw the always unflappable sixty-seven-year-old looking utterly embarrassed.
“Sorry, Gerry. It shouldn’t have gone down like that, no matter what the circumstances.”
Jack sat next to Dom on the bed. Both young men looked like students in the principal’s office just after getting caught skipping class.
Chavez leaned against the wall in the stateroom. “Damn, Jack. You just sprayed your employer at close range with a dozen rounds of Sims traveling five hundred feet per second. He’s going to feel like he tripped into a hornets’ nest for the next week.”
“What the hell was he doing here in the first place?” Dom asked.
John Clark entered the master stateroom and stood by the door. “Gerry was here because I wanted him to see for himself. The Campus cannot operate safely in the field with only three men. We’ve been lucky lately, and that luck is not going to last. Either we get some new blood in the operational ranks to help us out or we severely curtail the types of missions we take on.”
Chavez nodded. “I’d say we illustrated the point. Dom’s dead, two in the back. You didn’t clear the head?”
Dom said, “I came into this expecting five bad guys. When the fifth went down, I dropped my guard.”
“Which means?” Chavez asked.
Dom looked at him. He didn’t try to excuse his error at all. “Which means I fucked up.”
Clark wasn’t happy about how things went today, and he didn’t hide his feelings. “That started well enough. Jack’s jump was good, I watched it with my binos. You all three hit the boat with authority, got down to the hostage quickly, and used your speed, surprise, and violence of action to take down five opposition. But the only thing that matters in combat is how you finish, and you lost one-third of your number in that drill. That’s a fail in anybody’s book.”
No one replied to this.
Clark added, “Clean all your gear, return it to the lockers at The Campus, then all three of you have the weekend off. But you have homework. I want to bring two new members into The Campus’s operational staff, and it’s your job to each come up with one candidate. Monday morning we’ll meet and discuss. I’ll vet the prospects, talk to Gerry, and make my recommendations.”
Caruso said, “One of the security staff might work.”
Clark shook his head. “All men with young families. All men who have served decades already. Ops is a twenty-four-seven, three-sixty-five job, and the guys up on deck aren’t the right fit.”
Jack agreed with Clark’s assessment—they needed new blood, and they had to look outside The Campus to find it. Clark had retired from operational status a couple years back, and Dominic Caruso’s brother, Brian, had been on the team before that, but he was killed on an op in Libya. He’d been replaced by Sam Driscoll, who then died in Mexico. Since then, it had been just the three operators.
Jack decided he’d think long and hard this weekend about who he would like to bring into the unit to help out, because the hot spots of the world weren’t getting any cooler, and it was clear that with the depleted numbers, The Campus wasn’t as strong as it needed to be.
Ten minutes later Jack was back on deck. He’d apologized to Gerry again, and again Gerry waved off the young man’s concern, except now he did it covered in bandages with a cold bottle of Heineken in his hand.
Jack wanted to throw up. Gerry Hendley had just recently allowed Jack to return to The Campus after spending six months on probation for disobeying orders.
And now this.
Jack knew this wasn’t exactly the best way to thank Gerry for showing his trust in him.
4
It should come as no great surprise to anyone that Tehran Imam Khomeini International isn’t the most welcoming airport in the world for foreigners, but after nearly five hours in the air, the passengers of Alitalia flight 756 were happy to deplane and stretch their legs. Sure, this wasn’t such a long hop for many of the business travelers walking down the jet bridge, but most of these people had been through the international arrivals terminal here before, and they knew the lengthy customs and immigration process ahead would ensure they weren’t getting out of this airport and to their hotels anytime soon.
With one exception. One man ambling out of the jet bridge and into the terminal was a regular guest of the Iranian government, and he knew his way through immigration would be easier than those of the other poor unfortunate travelers around him. He was a businessman working directly with various federal agencies of the Iranian government, and for this reason he was given his own minder the second he walked off the plane. His minder would be at his side the entire three days he was in country, serving as his translator and liaison with government agencies. In addition to this, the traveler knew a private driver would already be outside, parked in the tow-away zone in a government-flagged Mercedes, waiting to ferry the traveler and his minder wherever they wanted to go in the sprawling city for the length of his stay.
At the end of the jetway an Iranian man in his forties stood against the wall. The wide grin on the Iranian’s face grew when he recognized the tall, fair-haired man in his thirties stepping out of the line of passengers from Rome and waving to him.
The fair-haired man pulled along a roll-aboard and carried a briefcase. In English he said, “Faraj! Always great to see you, my friend.”
Faraj Ahmadi wore a bushy mustache, a head of thick black hair, and a dark blue suit with no tie. He touched his hand to his heart and bowed a little, then extended his hand for a strong handshake from the new arrival to his country. “Welcome back, Mr. Brooks. It is a pleasure to see you.”
The smile on the Westerner’s face turned into a mock frown. “Really? Are we gonna go through this again? Mr. Brooks was my dad. I’ve begged you to call me Ron.”
Faraj Ahmadi bowed politely again. The Iranian said, “Of course, Ron. I always forget. Your flights went smoothly?”
“Slept most of the way from Toronto to Rome. Worked all the way from Rome to here. Productive on both flights, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Excellent.” Faraj took the handle of the roll-aboard and motioned toward the immigration control
s area. “By now you are well aware of our routine here at the airport.”
Brooks said, “I could do this in my sleep. In fact, I probably have, once or twice.”
Faraj grinned even wider. “You have been coming here quite regularly, haven’t you?”
Brooks walked along with his briefcase while Ahmadi pulled his luggage. He said, “I was just looking at my calendar the other day. This is my sixteenth visit in the past three years. Works out to more than five trips a year.”
Again the wide smile grew under the thick mustache of the Iranian. Ahmadi was Iranian government, but he had one of the brightest, most pleasant faces Brooks had ever seen. “We are always happy to see you. I know my colleagues are hopeful you will always be able to travel here from Canada so easily.”
“No kidding. All that talk about a travel ban on the news has got me worried.”
They made a turn to the left, and the massive lines in front of the immigration booths came into view. There were easily three hundred people waiting to have their documents checked. But the two men walked on, veering to the left of the crowd and continuing on down an empty lane.
Faraj said, “We are all hopeful businessmen like yourself will be allowed by the United Nations to continue operating as always.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” Brooks said. And then, “At least we know who to blame for the new bad blood between certain countries of the West and your nation.”
Faraj’s grin remained constant, but he nodded. “Too true. I’m just a liaison, not a politician or a diplomat, but I watch the news. Clearly the American President is once again shaking his fist at my peaceful country.”
Brooks said, “You don’t want to say his name in public. I get it. Well, I’ll say it. It’s all the fault of that son of a bitch Jack freakin’ Ryan.”
Faraj laughed now. “I think, when you say it like that, nobody around here minds.”
They passed a restroom, and Faraj, always the empathetic host, said, “Immigration will only take a few seconds, but traffic is bad on the Tehran–Saveh Road this morning.” He motioned to the men’s room. “If you would like to—”