Commander-In-Chief (33 page)

J
ohn Clark climbed into the dinghy tied off on his sailboat just after midnight, leaving Adara Sherman behind on the fifty-two-foot Irwin. He cut engine power when he was still a half-mile off Tarpon Island, which meant he had to paddle for nearly fifteen minutes, but the water in this bay was nearly as placid as a swimming pool, and he had the added benefit of being able to point himself directly at all the lights coming from the big villas on the hillside to guide him to just the right spot for his landing.

It had been a long while since the ex-SEAL had hit a beach in a small watercraft, but he was certain he’d never conducted a midnight raid on a five-star resort. He had a feeling he could have had Adara call ahead to arrange a piña colada and a grilled lobster under glass waiting for him once he landed on the shore, except for the obvious wrinkle that he was not a guest at the exclusive island retreat.

He pulled his boat up off the white sand and dragged it under some meticulously maintained foliage, alongside a pair of high-end wooden recliners. Then he passed a little copper bucket where he could dip his feet in water to wash off the beach sand, which he
declined to do. Quietly he headed up the pathway on the hill toward his target location.

When he was halfway up the path he heard a noise ahead of him. He stepped into the sandy area below the mangroves just to his left and ducked down behind a jacaranda. Other than the loud pops in both of his knees as he knelt, he didn’t make a sound.

Fifteen seconds later two young men passed, both holding rakes. One had a mesh bag over his shoulder, and Clark got the idea they were on their way down to the beach to comb it for any tiny bits of seaweed that might have washed ashore.

The guests of Tarpon Island didn’t want to wake up to a pristine paradise marred by nature.

Clark shook his head. As a member of Navy special warfare, he’d swum through swamps so green and gooey he could have written his name on the surface with his fingertip. He was cut from a very different cloth from the average patron of this swanky place.

When the two men were out of sight he pulled a night-vision monocular out of his pocket and used it to lead him the rest of the way up the winding stone path that led directly to the sliding back door of the immense villa.

There were lights shining on the second floor, he’d seen this from the bay, but the ground floor appeared to be completely dark. John looked for the telltale tiny red lights of a security system or motion detector anywhere on the ground floor, but he saw nothing.

He tried the glass door and, to his surprise, found it unlocked. He pulled it open a foot, then retreated back to a thick copse of bushes off the patio.

A few minutes later, when no one came to investigate the breach, he felt certain there had been no security system activated at the villa, so he returned to the back door and entered slowly.

It took him nearly five minutes of slow, steady movement to
make it from one end of the ground floor to the other. The space looked neat but well lived in, but there was no one here at present.

Eventually he doubled back to the stairs out of the living room, and he took these up, still moving at a near glacial pace. He had his night-vision device in his hands, but he’d taken the time to let his eyes adjust to the low light, so he didn’t use the monocular.

On the second floor he found a child’s room. Again, it looked like someone was living there now, but they weren’t in the bed or the adjoining bathroom. He’d been told Walker had a young son, and he found himself surprised the kid was out of his bed well past midnight.

He made his way into the master bedroom next, crept in complete silence, and moved to the bed. Here he did use his monocular to confirm it was empty.

Another minute to check the second floor more carefully and he was done.

It was on his second pass around the property that he noticed the shattered wineglass by the couch. That someone had just left it there along with the wine on the tile floor made no sense, unless they had to leave in a hurry.

Unless it was something bad.

As he headed back down the stairs, Clark spotted a security camera high on the wall. For a moment he was worried this camera linked with the resort’s security office, but that didn’t make much sense to Clark. He couldn’t imagine some millionaire checking into this chic place with the full understanding he or she would be watched like a research specimen.

He looked closer at the camera. It was attached to a small radio system. A tiny antenna stuck up a few inches.

Clark had seen these units before. They could broadcast only one hundred feet or so.

He realized this was a private system. Used for a guest’s own security detail that might travel with them to the resort.

Clark walked through the entire villa looking for the security station, finally finding it outside the building in a small one-room cottage on the far side of the driveway. The door to the cottage was locked, but he picked the lock quickly, then moved inside, careful to keep the lights off and his head below the level of the windows, just in case anyone was around.

He saw there were five cameras set up to run on the monitors, but the three inside the building had been shut off, obviously for the privacy of the guests. The other two feeds, one on the front drive and one at the rear of the property, including the path that led down to the beach, were up and running, and now they broadcast black-and-white images taken from the infrared low-light-capable camera.

Clark looked down at the security board. It didn’t look like anyone was using this room at all, so he didn’t know if the video recorders would be working, but to his surprise he found the attached computer made a digital recording in a loop that recorded over the file every eight hours.

Quickly he pulled up the front-of-the-house camera, backed it up to the beginning, and began to look through the video on the monitor. The timestamp said it was four-thirty that afternoon, and the image of the driveway and lush vegetation alongside it was in color and very clear. He began racing through it at sixteen-times speed, looking for any clues.

At six-thirty he brought it back to normal speed. A golf cart had pulled up in front of the house and a heavyset black woman was climbing out with several pots and pans and trays. She seemed to be a hired cook. She disappeared into the house, making a couple of trips to move all her equipment.

Clark raced through some more time, stopping again when the woman came back out at seven-thirty, talking on her cell phone. He watched her for a moment, then sped it up again.

At eight p.m. the woman packed up her kitchenware and left in the golf cart.

Clark went to sixteen speed again and watched the recording until the point where he saw himself lurking around the driveway and the security shack. He fumbled with the controls for a moment to erase the video, then he started with the back of the house.

On this feed he watched for a moment, then sped it up to eight-times speed. Nothing was happening, so he reached down to increase the speed again, but just as he did so he saw movement on the path. He rewound the recording, then hit play, watching it in regular time.

A young boy with black hair, Clark put him at about seven or eight years old, appeared on the path from the beach, then shot below the camera, heading toward the house. Behind him, two women, one with chestnut hair, the other with auburn hair and wearing a wide-brimmed hat and large sunglasses, came up from the beach, towels and drinks in hand.

Clark waited for a minute to see if Terry Walker would be following them, but there was no one else. He gave it another minute, then increased the speed, his finger idling above the key that would return the video to normal speed. He tapped it when a large auburn-haired man with sunglasses and a baseball cap walked purposefully up the path.

After less than a minute, the man appeared again. He held the shoulder of the boy. Behind them, the two women walked closely together.

This, Clark realized in an instant, was probably the strangest-looking kidnapping he’d ever witnessed, but he was sure that’s what
it was. The two tall Caucasians had taken Terry Walker’s wife and child, and rushed them down to the beach.

John Clark spent the next five precious minutes cussing under his breath as he tried to figure out how to save the video recording onto a DVR disc he found on a shelf. He finally gave up with more bitching about the technology, then used the camera of his own mobile phone to record the film. He could already hear Gavin Biery chastising him for his low-tech method to a high-tech problem, but Clark knew he couldn’t spend the entire night here.

He then erased the remaining video and left the cottage.

•   •   •

H
is exfiltration of the property and the island took more than twenty minutes. As soon as he was back on his sailboat he called Jack Junior, who was in Virginia.

Ryan had been ready for the late-night call, so Clark didn’t have to wait for him to wake up.

“Bad news, Jack. Walker’s family has been kidnapped.”

After a pause over the line, Jack blew out a sigh. “Well,
that
complicates things. I presume it was Limonov and Kozlov.”

“I have no doubt they are behind it, but they did it through proxies. I have video of the kidnappers, one male, one female. Their faces are obscured by hats and glasses.”

“Any idea where they went?”

“I suppose they used a boat to get them out of here, but the kidnapping took place around five-thirty, so they have a seven-hour head start.”

Jack said, “So they could be halfway to Moscow now if they wanted to be.”

Clark said, “If they left the country, they didn’t do it in Limonov’s aircraft. Adara has a man at the airport here who’s
watching Limonov’s plane for us, and it’s sitting right there. No way they would take the Walkers out of here on a commercial flight. Either they went across the open water to Puerto Rico and flew out on an exec jet there or else they are still here in the area. If that’s the case, they will be in a rented house or they’ll be on a boat.”

Jack thought about this. “I’ve been doing some research on Walker. If they are going to use BlackHole to launder money, they might need to keep Walker there at his office or close by. Depending on his security setup, it’s possible he has to make large clandestine trades from his own server. If that’s the case, they’ll probably do it tomorrow.” Jack added, “Maybe he refused to comply, so they just snatched his wife and kid to help convince him.”

Clark said, “Yeah, and when they don’t need Walker’s help anymore . . .”

Jack said, “Right. Do you have any ideas?”

“Yeah,” Clark said. “I’m going to take a look at his office setup. If Adara and I head back to Tortola now, I can be in position by early morning. Maybe I can get eyes on Walker and find a way to get him away from Limonov.”

“I can be on the first flight down.”

“No, Jack. You stay up there. Run the video I sent you, keep looking into Salvatore, and keep trying to find out what Limonov and Walker are up to.”

Jack said, “Okay, I’ll do that, but if you gain access to Walker, I have a funny feeling you’ll learn a lot more than I will up here.”

•   •   •

C
lark and Sherman motored west through the night from Tarpon Island toward Tortola, pushing the sailboat’s motors to full power. Clark sat at the helm at first, but after an hour or so Sherman asked if she could relieve him.

Clark said, “It wouldn’t hurt for me to get a couple hours’ sleep before I get there. Tomorrow might be a long day.”

Adara said, “You should go below. The bed in the master stateroom is made up. We’ll be in port by five a.m. It’s only a five-minute drive from the marina to Walker’s office building.”

“Thanks, Ms. Sherman,” Clark said.

Adara hesitated for a moment, then said, “Mr. Clark, I know you want me to return to D.C. in the morning, but I’m a little concerned that it might be dangerous down here for just one operative.”

John said, “Are you offering to stick around?”

She said, “This is a big boat, you could use the help.”

“I am sure you are right, but I don’t want to take you away from your other duties. Ding and Dom might need an extraction at any time. Even in D.C. you are five hours closer to them than you are here. Plus the Gulfstream can fly there direct. If you had to haul ass to Lithuania from here, you would need to stop for fuel, tacking on another ninety minutes, minimum.”

He could tell from her look that she was concerned. He said, “I need you to support them, not me. My work here won’t be nearly as taxing as what the others are doing.”

Adara said, “I hope you’re right about that.”

“Me, too.” Clark went below deck, and Adara Sherman took the wheel and looked out over the black water.

T
he tires of Air Force One touched the runway of Copenhagen Airport–Kastrup just after six p.m. A steady rain shower ensured the crowd around the airport was light, and the reception was minimal, but Ryan was met on the tarmac by the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, a few senior NATO staff, and a representative of the Danish prime minister.

The pleasantries out of the way, he folded into his motorcade and headed into the city.

The NATO summit would open at the Eigtveds Pakhus conference venue, in central Copenhagen, next door to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark. Ryan and his entourage would spend the night at his hotel. Tomorrow morning he would go to the Amalienborg Palace for a friendly breakfast with the Danish royal family, and then he’d be on his way to Eigtveds Pakhus, where the real work would kick off at noon.

The afternoon meeting would involve a short speech by the Lithuanian president, Eglė Banytė, requesting help from NATO in both the Baltic Sea and its border regions, to counter the threat of
invasion. After this, President Banytė had agreed to yield part of her time to Jack Ryan, so he could back her request for the NATO deployment.

The Lithuanian president would then immediately return to her threatened country; she insisted she had to be in Vilnius if the Russians came; it wouldn’t do for her to be any more safe than her citizens.

The real battle in Copenhagen would begin the next day. Ryan would reconvene with all the other leaders and discuss the emergency proposal. This would be conducted in a roundtable format, and Ryan fully expected a lot of pushback from a large number of the European member states.

There was, officially speaking, anyway, no voting in NATO. The organization bragged about its principle of consensus decision-making, meaning, essentially, that all members had to come to an agreement for anything to happen, except in the case of responding to actions that had been codified into the NATO charter. In theory, this meant that an Article Five violation such as an actual attack on Lithuania would be met with an automatic response from all twenty-eight member states, but the reality was a lot murkier.

Ryan wanted to move troops now, before hostilities began, but the truth of the matter was he wasn’t even convinced NATO would agree to move troops
after
an Article Five violation.

A final meeting would be held the following afternoon, and there a poll would be taken to see if all members agreed on the proposal. Usually, if a member state or two knew they were seriously outnumbered in their dissent, they would abstain for the good of the institution and allow the action to proceed, but the consensus decision-making principle had the effect of giving veto power over any proposal to twenty-eight out of the twenty-eight nations.

It might have been a great way to avoid war, Ryan acknowledged, but it was no way to fight one.

As soon as Ryan was secure in his suite at the Radisson Blu hotel, he began going over his speech with his staff, troubleshooting any rough spots. When he finished with this he tasked both his NATO ambassador, referred to officially as the United States’ permanent representative to NATO, and the deputy chief of mission, the number-two member of the U.S. embassy here in Denmark, to play the part of NATO members ready to shoot down every one of his proposals.

The three sat around a table in the dining room of the suite. Both the NATO ambassador and the DCM had folders and notebooks full of reference material, but President Ryan had only an empty pad and a pen in front of him.

After the first round of the mock discussion Ryan called a time-out, and lectured the two diplomats about their performance. “Ladies, we’re going to have to take this from the top. You are talking to me like I am the President and you are a couple of people I could fire at will.”

The deputy chief of mission cast a confused look at the NATO ambassador, and then one at Ryan. “Well, Mr. President. That
is
the case.”

Ryan said, “Nobody’s getting fired for being too tough on me. Take off the kid gloves and tell me what I’m going to hear tomorrow.”

The NATO ambassador said, “Yes, sir, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

They then spent another hour on the drill, and when they were finished Ryan felt like he’d been put through the ringer. His two faux-European leaders had brought up every possible protest Ryan could think of, and many he never would have considered.

Secretary of State Scott Adler had watched the entire affair in
silence while sitting on a nearby couch, ready to render judgment at the end.

Ryan turned to Adler and took a bottle of water off the table to wet his dry throat. He felt like he’d been talking nonstop. “How did I do, Scott?”

“You did well, Mr. President. You will make a good case for our cause.”

Ryan picked up a negative implication in the comment. “But you don’t think we’ll get the votes, do you?”

Adler said, “If I was a betting man, I’d bet on the Europeans moving with caution, not action, and telling you they would need to see an Article Five violation before deploying into Lithuania.”

Ryan said, “And if there
is
an Art Five violation? Will they move even then?”

Adler sighed a little. “I hope I’m wrong, but I wonder if they would excuse one event, write it off to hotheads in the military overstepping their bounds, and then demand evidence of a second Article Five.”

Ryan said, “Which will come when Russian Spetsnaz officers high-five each other over beers in the dining room of the Presidential Palace in Vilnius.”

Adler said, “Again, I hope I’m wrong, and I hope there is consensus.”

Ryan asked, “Anything I can do to up my chances?”

“Just give it your best shot, don’t make it personal between you and them, and be ready to roll with the punches.”

Ryan knew Adler was worried about his President losing his sense of decorum and becoming argumentative. Ryan found himself sharing his secretary of state’s concerns. He said, “And you be ready to deal with the diplomatic fallout if I screw up.”

Adler chuckled. “Trust me, Mr. President, I’m ready. Frankly, sir, if you didn’t have a mouth, I wouldn’t have a job.”

•   •   •

T
he meeting kicked off more or less on time, although the arrival of twenty-eight world leaders to a single place resulted in what Ryan considered to be a maddening amount of protocol, mostly unofficial, in the form of who had to shake whose hand first or which prime minister stepped up to greet which president in which order. There were cameras present as the principals entered the conference room and posed for a group photo, and Ryan knew media in each nation here would talk themselves silly if their leader was shown less deference by the behavior of other leaders.

The photographers in attendance were given fifteen minutes to chronicle the absurdity of it all, and then the cameras were shuffled out of the room and the twenty-eight men and women and their senior advisers got down to work.

The secretary general of NATO was the former prime minister of Norway, and well liked by everyone in the room. Ryan wasn’t a fan of the man’s policies, but got along well enough with the guy. After his short speech to kick off the emergency meeting, he recognized Lithuania’s president, and she read a prepared statement to the room.

Eglė Banytė was an eloquent speaker, her words were impassioned, and the English interpreter kept the running translation up in Ryan’s ear with incredible skill.

After ten minutes she ceded to Ryan, and the secretary general turned the floor over to the American President. He stood at the lectern and cleared his throat while the eyes of twenty-seven national leaders turned in his direction.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate the opportunity to speak before you today. My staff has placed a briefing booklet in front of you that covers what I am going to say here in more detail. I’d just like to ask for a few minutes of your time so I can make my case directly to you.

“When Russia’s president Valeri Volodin was the beneficiary of a strong energy sector, he was a dangerous man. He increased military spending by twenty percent, he adopted or restarted provocative and threatening initiatives involving his intelligence, military, and even his nuclear weapons programs. He brought his Navy to full combat readiness; he began overflying NATO nations from the border of his country all the way to the United States with strategic bombers. He threatened maritime commerce with his Navy, commercial airline routes with his air force. He harassed dissenters, he assassinated enemies, and he imprisoned those with whom he had business disagreements. He used his police, his spies, and his soldiers as blunt instruments to increase his power, both domestically and internationally.

“Again, he did all this at the height of his success. During the good times.

“Now Valeri Volodin is failing on all fronts, and for this reason, I submit to you, he has only become
more
dangerous.

“Back when things were good for him it appeared nothing could touch him. Certainly he felt he was invincible, and one of the consequences of this was the Ukrainian invasion.

“Ukraine looked toward the West to increase its economic and cultural ties, and Volodin panicked. Other former nations of the Soviet Union who have chosen freedom have found prosperity, and the Kremlin sees these nations as an existential threat to its backward and autocratic ways. The Kremlin cannot allow its subjects to
witness the success of its neighbors, because then they would demand change for themselves.

“Volodin calculated that we would do nothing when he attacked Ukraine, so he attacked Ukraine. We did not do nothing, so he doesn’t own all of Ukraine. But we did not do enough, so today a large swath of that country is nothing more than a Russian puppet state.

“We’ve lost eastern Ukraine, but its loss illustrates something important. In the eyes of Valeri Volodin, Russia’s security depends on the insecurity of its neighbors.

“Now he sees a new threat: a Baltic region allied with NATO, increasing their ability to meet their energy needs without dependence on Russia. He sees Lithuania specifically as a successful and independent nation that serves both as demonstration of the failures of his policy and a potential corridor to his province on the Baltic Sea. He needs a victory. It will help Russia’s economy, bolster the Kremlin’s power, and take the pressure off him after his string of losses.

“Russia’s hybrid warfare against Lithuania is purposefully ambiguous. As long as Russia’s aggression stays below a certain threshold, there will be enough pundits and pacifists in the West assuring everyone that the real threats are not in Russia, but in the West. They will continue saying this until the facts on the ground are so utterly different from what they assert that the world will have no choice but to come to the conclusion that the pacifists were wrong, but by then it will be too late to do anything about it.

“People speak of hybrid warfare like it is a new phenomenon. But there is nothing new about it. Valeri Volodin’s Kremlin is executing the time-tested battle plan of using the full spectrum of power. In the United States, we refer to this under the acronym DIME. Diplomacy, information, military, and economics.

“DIME starts with diplomacy. Volodin’s Russia is pulling away from all international norms, violating treaties, making pacts with our enemies to increase Russia’s power at the expense of democracies, world bodies, agreed-upon standards of behavior. They’ve left the European Court of Human Rights, and they have breached every agreement and security assurance they have given in the past twenty years.

“He is diplomatically isolated because of the hostility of his regime, but his diplomats continue to aggressively pursue Russia’s policy in whatever venues remain open to them.

“On the intelligence front, he is swinging for the fences. For one, I believe FSB has a worldwide operation to bolster energy prices. If he can get oil and gas prices to rise, this will augment his power, both at home and abroad. The assassination of the prosecutor in Venezuela going after corrupt oil officials, the killing of the Saudi deputy minister of petroleum and mineral resources, the oil rig attack in Nigeria. Plus the attack on the LNG facility in Lithuania. It is no coincidence that all these events have happened in the past few weeks, and it is also no coincidence that they all have the effect of benefiting Volodin. We’ve seen gas prices shoot up fourteen percent in the past month, and crude prices a shade over nine percent.

“On the military front . . . well, we all saw what happened yesterday with the crash of SA44. Volodin is blatantly positioning an invasion force near his neighbors, threatening ships in the Baltic and filling the skies with military aircraft, with catastrophic results. He’s doing all this because he is gambling that the West isn’t committed to the fight against him, that we will allow him to absorb the Baltic back into his sphere of influence.

“It is on the last letter of DIME—economics—where we have seen his greatest failure. He began with this, and it was all he needed
for a time. When oil and gas prices were high, Volodin used his energy companies, Gazprom and Gazprom Neft, as a weapon. But oil and gas prices have plummeted from last year’s highs, and Europe is an unfriendly market because Volodin has used Gazprom against you for so long that you found other sources of energy.