Jack Ryan 11 - Bear And The Dragon (59 page)

By 7:45, the kids were about ready for their drive to school, and Cathy was ready for her flight to Hopkins. Kyle Daniel went with her, with his own Secret Service detail, composed exclusively of women who would look after him at the Hopkins daycare center rather like a pack of she-wolves. Katie would head back to her daycare center, the rebuilt Giant Steps north of Annapolis. There were fewer kids there now, but a larger protective detail. The big kids went to St. Mary's. On cue, the Marine VH-60 Blackhawk helicopter eased down on the South Lawn helipad. The day was about to start for real. The entire Ryan family took the elevator downstairs. First Mom and Dad walked the kids to the west entrance of the West Wing, where, after hugs and kisses, three of the kids got into their cars to drive off. Then Jack walked Cathy to the helicopter for the kiss goodbye, and the big Sikorsky lifted off under the control of Colonel Dan Malloy for the hop to Johns Hopkins. With that done, Ryan walked back to the West Wing, and inside to the Oval Office. Ben Goodley was waiting for him.

“How bad?” Jack asked his national security adviser.

“Bad,” Goodley replied at once.

“What was it all about?”

“They were trying to stop an abortion. The Chinese do them late-term if the pregnancy is not government-approved. They wait until just before the baby pops out and zap it in the top of the head with a needle before it gets to take a breath. Evidently, the woman on the tape was having an unauthorized baby, and her minister -- that's the Chinese guy who gets it in the head, a Baptist preacher educated, evidently, at Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma, would you believe? Anyway, he came to the hospital to help. The Papal Nuncio, Renato Cardinal DiMilo, evidently knew the Baptist preacher pretty well and came to offer assistance. It's hard to tell exactly what went wrong, but it blew up real bad, as the tape shows.”

“Any statements?”

“The Vatican deplores the incident and has requested an explanation. But it gets worse. Cardinal DiMilo is from the DiMilo family. He has a brother, Vincenzo DiMilo, who's in the Italian parliament -- he was a cabinet minister a while back -- and so the Italian government has issued its own protest. Ditto the German government, because the Cardinal's aide is a German monsignor named Schepke, who's a Jesuit, and he got a little roughed up, and the Germans aren't very happy either. This Monsignor Schepke was arrested briefly, but he was released after a few hours when the Chinese remembered he had diplomatic status. The thinking at State is that the PRC might PNG the guy, just to get him the hell out of the country and make the whole thing all go away.”

“What time is it in Beijing?”

“Us minus eleven, so it's nine at night there,” CARDSHARP answered.

“The trade delegation will need instructions of some sort about this. I need to talk to Scott Adler as soon as he gets in this morning.”

“You need more than that, Jack.” It was the voice of Arnold van Damm, at the door to the office.

“What else?”

“The Chinese Baptist who got killed, I just heard he has friends over here.”

“Oral Roberts University,” Ryan said. “Ben told me.”

“The churchgoers are not going to like this one, Jack,” Arnie warned.

“Hey, guy, I don't goddamn like it,” the President pointed out. “Hell, I don't like abortion under the best of circumstances, remember?”

“I remember,” van Damm said, recalling all the trouble Ryan had gotten into with his first Presidential statement on the issue.

“And this kind of abortion is especially barbaric, and so, two guys go to the fucking hospital and try to save the baby's life, and they get killed for it! Jesus,” Ryan concluded, “and we have to do business with people like this.”

Then another face showed up at the door. “You've heard, I suppose,” Robby Jackson observed.

“Oh, yeah. Hell of a thing to see over breakfast.”

“My Pap knows the guy.”

“What?” Ryan asked.

“Remember at the reception last week? He told you about it. Pap and Gerry Patterson both support his congregation out of Mississippi -- some other congregations, too. It's a Baptist thing, Jack. Well-off churches look after ones that need help, and this Yu guy sure as hell needed help, looks like. I haven't talked to him yet, but Pap is going to raise pure fucking hell about this one, and you can bet on it,” the Vice President informed his Boss.

“Who's Patterson?” van Damm asked.

“White preacher, got a big air-conditioned church in the suburbs of Jackson. Pretty good guy, actually. He and Pap have known each other forever. Patterson went through school with this Yu guy, I think.”

“This is going to get ugly,” the Chief of Staff observed.

“Arnie, baby, it's already ugly,” Jackson pointed out. The CNN cameraman had been a little too good, or had just been standing in a good place, and had caught both shots in all their graphic majesty.

“What's your dad going to say?” Ryan asked.

TOMCAT made them wait for it. “He's going to call down the Wrath of Almighty God on those murdering cocksuckers. He's going to call Reverend Yu a martyr to the Christian faith, right up there with the Maccabees of the Old Testament, and those courageous bastards the Romans fed to the lions. Arnie, have you ever seen a Baptist preacher calling down the Vengeance of the Lord? It beats the hell out of the Super Bowl, boy,” Robby promised. “Reverend Yu is standing upright and proud before the Lord Jesus right now, and the guys who killed him have their rooms reserved in the Everlasting Fires of Hell. Wait till you hear him go at it. It's impressive, guys. I've seen him do it. And Gerry Patterson won't be far behind.”

“And the hell of it is, I can't disagree with any of it. Jesus,” Ryan breathed. “Those two men died to save the life of a baby. If you gotta die, that's not a bad reason for it.”

“They both died like men, Mr. C,” Chavez was saying in Moscow. “I wish I was there with a gun.” It had hit Ding especially hard. Fatherhood had changed his perspective on a lot of things, and this was just one of them. The life of a child was sacrosanct, and a threat against a child was an invitation to immediate death in his ethical universe. And in the real universe, he was known to have a gun a lot of the time, and the training to use it efficiently.

“Different people have different ways of looking at things,” Clark told his subordinate. But if he'd been there, he would have disarmed both of the Chinese cops. On the videotape, they hadn't looked all that formidable. And you didn't kill people to make a fashion statement. Domingo still had the Latin temperament, John reminded himself. And that wasn't so bad a thing, was it?

“What are you saying, John?” Ding asked in surprise.

“I'm saying two good men died yesterday, and I imagine God'll look after both of them.”

“Ever been to China?”

He shook his head. “Taiwan once, for R and R, long time ago. That was okay, but aside from that, no closer than North Vietnam. I don't speak the language and I can't blend in.” Both factors were distantly frightening to Clark. The ability to disappear into the surroundings was the sine qua non of being a field-intelligence officer.

They were in a hotel bar in Moscow after their first day of lecturing their Russian students. The beer on tap was acceptable. Neither of them was in a mood for vodka. Life in Britain had spoiled them. This bar, which catered to Americans, had CNN on a large-screen TV next to the bar, and this was CNN's lead story around the globe. The American government, the report concluded, hadn't reacted to the incident yet.

“So, what's Jack going to do?” Chavez wondered.

“I don't know. We have that negotiations team in Beijing right now for trade talks,” Clark reminded him.

“The diplomatic chatter might get a little sharp,” Domingo thought.

“Scott, we can't let this one slide,” Jack said. A call from the White House had brought Adler's official car here instead of Foggy Bottom.

“It is not, strictly speaking, pertinent to trade talks,” the Secretary of State pointed out.

“Maybe you want to do business with people like that,” Vice President Jackson responded, “but the people outside the Beltway might not.”

“We have to consider public opinion on this, Scott,” Ryan said. “And, you know, we have to damn well consider my opinion. The murder of a diplomat is not something we can ignore. Italy is a NATO member. So is Germany. And we have diplomatic relations with the Vatican and about seventy million Catholics in the country, plus millions more Baptists.”

“Okay, Jack,” EAGLE said, with raised, defensive hands. “I am not defending them, okay? I'm talking about the foreign policy of the United States of America here, and we're not supposed to manage that on the basis of emotions. The people out there pay us to use our heads, not our dicks.”

Ryan let out a long breath. “Okay, maybe I had that coming. Go on.”

“We issue a statement deploring this sorry incident in strong language. We have Ambassador Hitch make a call on their foreign ministry and say the same thing, maybe even stronger, but in more informal language. We give them a chance to think this mess through before they become an international pariah, maybe discipline those trigger-happy cops -- hell, maybe shoot them, given how the law works over there. We let common sense break out, okay?”

“And what do I say?”

Adler thought that one over for a few seconds. “Say whatever you want. We can always explain to them that we have a lot of churchgoers here and you have to assuage their sensibilities, that they have inflamed American public opinion, and in our country, public opinion counts for something. They know that on an intellectual level, but deep down in the gut they don't get it. That's okay,” SecState went on. “Just so they get it in the brain, because the brain talks to the gut occasionally. They have to understand that the world doesn't like this sort of thing.”

“And if they don't?” the Vice President asked.

“Well, then we have a trade delegation to show them the consequences of uncivilized behavior.” Adler looked around the room. “Are we okay on that?”

Ryan looked down at the coffee table. There were times when he wished he were a truck driver, able to scream out bloody murder when certain things happened, but that was just one more freedom the President of the United States didn't have. Okay, Jack, you have to be sensible and rational about all this. He looked up. “Yes, Scott, we're sort of okay on that.”

“Anything from our, uh, new source on this issue?”

Ryan shook his head. “No, MP hasn't sent anything over yet.”

“If she does...”

“You'll get a copy real fast,” the President promised. “Get me some talking points. I'll have to make a statement -- when, Arnie?”

“Eleven-ish ought to be okay,” van Damm decided. “I'll talk to some media guys about this.”

“Okay, if anybody has ideas later today, I want to hear them,” Ryan said, standing, and adjourning the meeting.

Fang Gan had worked late that day because of the incident that had Washington working early. As a result, Ming hadn't transcribed his discussion notes and her computer hadn't gotten them out on the 'Net as early as usual, but Mary Pat got her e-mail about 9:45. This she read over, copied to her husband, Ed, and then shot via secure fax line to the White House, where Ben Goodley walked it to the Oval Office. The cover letter didn't contain Mary Pat's initial comment on reading the transmission: “Oh, shit...”

“Those cocksuckers!” Ryan snarled, to the surprise of Andrea Price, who happened to be in the room just then.

“Anything I need to know about, sir?” she asked, his voice had been so furious.

“No, Andrea, just that thing on CNN this morning.” Ryan paused, blushing that she'd heard his temper let go again -- and in that way. “By the way, how's your husband doing?”

“Well, he bagged those three bank robbers up in Philadelphia, and they did it without firing a shot. I was a little worried about that.”

Ryan allowed himself a smile. “That's one guy I wouldn't want to have a shoot-out with. Tell me, you saw CNN this morning, right?”

“Yes, sir, and we replayed it at the command post.”

“Opinion?”

“If I'd've been there, my weapon would have come out. That was cold-blooded murder. Looks bad on TV when you do dumb stuff like that, sir.”

“Sure as hell does,” the President agreed. He nearly asked her opinion on what he ought to do about it. Ryan respected Mrs. O'Day's (she still went by Price on the job) judgment, but it wouldn't have been fair to ask her to delve into foreign affairs, and, besides, he already had his mind pretty well made up. But then he speed-dialed Adler's direct line on his phone.

“Yes, Jack?” Only one person had that direct line.

“What do you make of the SORGE stuff?”

“It's not surprising, unfortunately. You have to expect them to circle wagons.”

“What do we do about it?” SWORDSMAN demanded.

“We say what we think, but we try not to make it worse than it already is,” SecState replied, cautious as ever.

“Right,” Ryan growled, even though it was exactly the good advice he'd expected from his SecState. Then he hung up. He reminded himself that Arnie had told him a long time ago that a president wasn't allowed to have a temper, but that was asking a hell of a lot, and at what point was he allowed to react the way a man needed to react? When was he supposed to stop acting like a goddamned robot?

“You want Callie to work up something for you in a hurry?” Arnie asked over the phone.

“No,” Ryan replied, with a shake of the head. “I'll just wing it.”

“That's a mistake,” the Chief of Staff warned.

“Arnie, just let me be me once in a while, okay?”

“Okay, Jack,” van Damm replied, and it was just as well the President didn't see his expression.

Don't make things worse than they already are, Ryan told himself at his desk. Yeah, sure, like that's possible...

“Hi, Pap,” Robby Jackson was saying in his office at the northwest corner of the West Wing.

“Robert, have you seen -- ”