Jack Ryan 6 - Clear and Present Danger (14 page)

“All the time.  I just wish we had one of our own.”

“Could I see it before I leave?  I've never been aboard a cutter before.”

“Follow me.” In less than a minute,
Murray
was standing in the center of the deck, directly on the crossed yellow lines painted on the black no-skid deck coating.  Wegener was explaining how the lights at the control station worked, but
Murray
was looking at the mast, drawing an imaginary line from the yardarm to the deck.  Yeah, he decided, you could do it easy enough.

“Captain, for your sake I hope you never do anything this crazy again.”

Wegener turned in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“We both know what I mean.”

“You believe what those two—”

“Yes, I do.  A jury wouldn't—at least I don't think one would, though you can never really tell what a jury will believe.  But you did it.  I know—you can't say anything . . .”

“What makes you think—”

“Captain, I've been in the Bureau for twenty-six years.  I've heard lots of crazy stories, some real, some made up.  You gradually get a feel for what's real and what isn't.  The way it looks to me, you could run a piece of rope from that pulley up there, down to here pretty easy, and if you're taking the seas right, having a man swing wouldn't matter much.  It sure wouldn't hurt the radar antenna that Riley was so worried about.  Like I said, don't do it again.  This one's a freebie because we can prosecute the case without the evidence you got for us.  Don't push it.  Well, I'm sure you won't.  You found out that there was more to this one than you thought, didn't you?”

“I was surprised that the victim was—”

“Right.  You opened a great big can of worms without getting your hands too dirty.  You were lucky.  Don't push it,”
Murray
said again.

“Thank you, sir.”

One minute after that,
Murray
was back in the car.  Agent Bright was still unhappy.

“Once upon a time, when I was a brand-new agent fresh out of the Academy, I was assigned to
Mississippi
,”
Murray
said. “Three civil-rights workers disappeared, and I was a very junior member of the team that cleared the case.  I didn't do much of anything other than hold Inspector Fitzgerald's coat.  Ever hear about Big Joe?”

“My dad worked with him,” Bright answered.

"Then you know that Joe was a character, a real old-time cop.  Anyway, the word got to us that the local Klukkers were mouthing off about how they were gonna kill a few agents—you know the stories, how they were harassing some families and stuff like that.  Joe got a little pissed.  Anyway, I drove him out to see—forget the mutt's name, but he was the Grand Kleagle of the local Klavern and he was the one with the biggest mouth.  He was sitting under a shady tree in his front lawn when we pulled up.  He had a shotgun next to the chair, and he was half in the bag from booze already.  Joe walks up to him.  The mutt starts to pick up the shotgun, but Joe just stared him down.  Fitzgerald could do that; he put three guys in the ground and you could see in his face that he'd done it.  I got a little worried, had my hand on my revolver, but Joe just stared him down and told him if there was any more talk about offing an agent, or any more shitty phone calls to wives and kids, Big Joe was going to come back and kill him, right there in his front yard.  Didn't shout or anything, just said it like he was ordering breakfast.  The Kleagle believed him.  So did I.  Anyway, all that loose talk ended.

“What Joe did was illegal as hell,”
Murray
went on. “Sometimes the rules get bent.  I've done it.  So have you.”

“I've never—”

“Don't get your tits in a flutter, Mark.  I said 'bent,' not broken.  The rules do not anticipate all situations.  That's why we expect agents to exercise judgment.  That's how society works.  In this case, those Coasties broke loose some valuable information, and the only way we can use it is if we ignore how they got it.  No real harm was done, because the subjects will be handled as murderers, and all the evidence we need is physical.  Either they fry or they cop to the murders and cooperate by again giving us all the information that the good Captain Wegener scared out of 'em.  Anyway, that's what they decided in D.C.  It's too embarrassing to everyone to make an issue of what we discussed aboard the cutter.  Do you really think a local jury would—”

“No,” Bright admitted at once. “It wouldn't take much of a lawyer to blow it apart, and even if he didn't—”

“Exactly.  We'd just be spinning our wheels.  We live in an imperfect world, but I don't think that Wegener will ever make that mistake again.”

“Okay.” Bright didn't like it, but that was beside the point.

“So what we do now is figure out exactly why this poor bastard and his family got themselves murdered by a sicario and his spear-carrier.  You know, when I was chasing wise guys up in
New York
, nobody messed with families.  You didn't even kill a guy in front of his family except to make a special kind of point.”

“Not much in the way of rules for the druggies,” Bright pointed out.

“Yeah—and I used to think terrorists were bad.”

It was so much easier than his work with the Macheteros, Cortez thought.  Here he was, sitting in the corner booth of a fine, expensive restaurant with a ten-page wine list in his hands—Cortez thought himself an authority on wines—instead of a rat-infested barrio shack eating beans and mouthing revolutionary slogans with people whose idea of Marxism was robbing banks and making heroic taped pronouncements that the local radio stations played between the rock songs and commercials. 
America
had to be the only place in the world, he thought, where poor people drove their own cars to demonstrations and the longest lines they stood in were at the supermarket check-out.

He selected an obscure estate label from the
Loire
Valley
for dinner.  The wine steward clicked his ballpoint in approval as he retrieved the list.

Cortez had grown up in a place where the poor people—which category included nearly everyone—scrounged for shoes and bread.  In
America
, the poor areas were the ones where people indulged drug habits that required hundreds of cash dollars per week.  It was more than bizarre to the former colonel.  In
America
drugs spread from the slums to the suburbs, bringing prosperity to those who had what others wanted.

Which was essentially what happened on the international scale also, of course.  The yanquis, ever niggardly in their official aid to their less prosperous neighbors, now flooded them with money, but on what the Americans liked to call a people-to-people basis.  That was good for a laugh.  He didn't know or care how much the yanqui government gave to its friends, but he was sure that ordinary citizens—so bored with their comfortable lives that they needed chemical stimulation—gave far more, and did so without strings on “human rights.” He'd spent so many years as a professional intelligence officer, trying to find a way to demean
America
, to damage its stature, lessen its influence.  But he'd gone about it in the wrong way, Félix had come to realize.  He'd tried to use Marxism to fight capitalism despite all the evidence that showed what worked and what did not.  He could, however, use capitalism against itself, and fulfill his original mission while enjoying all the benefits of the very system that he was hurting.  And the oddest part of all: his former employers thought him a traitor because he had found a way that worked . . .

The man opposite him was a fairly typical American, Cortez thought.  Overweight from too much good food, careless about cleaning his expensive clothing.  Probably didn't polish his shoes either.  Cortez remembered going barefoot for much of his youth, and thinking himself fortunate to have three shirts to call his own.  This man drove an expensive car, lived in a comfortable flat, had a job that paid enough for ten DGI colonels—and it wasn't enough.  That was
America
right there—whatever one had, it was never enough.

“So what do you have for me?”

“Four possible prospects.  All the information is in my briefcase.”

“How good are they?” Cortez asked.

“They all meet your guidelines,” the man answered. “Haven't I always—”

“Yes, you are most reliable.  That is why we pay you so much.”

“Nice to be appreciated, Sam,” the man said with a trace of smugness.

Félix—Sam to his dinner partner—had always appreciated the people with whom he worked.  He appreciated what they could do.  He appreciated the information they provided.  But he despised them for the weaklings they were.  Still, an intelligence officer—and that remained the way he thought of himself—couldn't be too picky. 
America
abounded with people like this one.  Cortez did not reflect on the fact that he, too, had been bought.  He deemed himself a skilled professional, perhaps something of a mercenary, but that was in keeping with an honored tradition, wasn't it?  Besides, he was doing what his former masters had always wanted him to do, more effectively than had ever been possible with the DGI, and someone else was doing the paying.  In fact, ultimately the Americans themselves paid his salary.

Dinner passed without incident.  The wine was every bit as excellent as he'd expected, but the meat was overdone and the vegetables disappointing. 
Washington
, he thought, was overrated as a city of restaurants.  On his way out he simply picked up his companion's briefcase and walked to his car.  The drive back to his hotel took twenty leisurely minutes.  After that, he spent several hours going over the documents.  The man was reliable, Cortez reflected, and earned his appreciation.  Each of the four was a solid prospect.

His recruiting effort would begin tomorrow.

Knowns and

Unknowns

I
T HAD TAKEN
a week to get accustomed to the altitude, as Julio had promised.  Chavez eased out of the suspenders pack.  It wasn't a fully loaded one yet, only twenty-five pounds, but they were taking their time, almost easing people into the conditioning program instead of using a more violent approach.  That suited the sergeant, still breathing a little hard after the eight-mile run.  His shoulders hurt some, and his legs ached in the usual way, but around him there was no sound of retching, and there hadn't been any dropouts this time around.  Just the usual grumbles and curses.

“That wasn't so bad,” Julio said without gasping. “But I still say that getting laid is the best workout there is.”

“You got that one right,” Chavez agreed with a laugh. “All those unused muscle groups, as the free-weight guys say.”

The best thing about the training camp was the food.  For lunch in the field they had to eat MRE packs—“Meal Ready to Eat,” which was three lies for the price of one—but breakfast and supper selections were always well prepared in the camp's oversized kitchen.  Chavez invariably selected as large a bowl of fresh fruits as he could get away with, heavily laced with white sugar for energy, along with the usual Army coffee whose caffeine content always seemed augmented to give you that extra wake-up punch.  He laid into his bowl of diced grapefruit, oranges, and damned near everything else with gusto while his tablemates attacked their greasy eggs and bacon.  Chavez went back to the line for some hash-browns.  He'd heard that carbohydrates were also good for energy, and now that he was almost accustomed to the altitude, the thought of grease for breakfast didn't bother him that much.

Things were going well.  Work here was hard, but there was nothing in the way of Mickey Mouse bullshit.  Everyone here was an experienced pro, and they were being treated as such.  No energy was being wasted on bed-making; the sergeants all knew how, and if a blanket corner wasn't quite tucked in, peer pressure set things right without the need for shouting from a superior officer.  They were all young men, as serious about their work as they knew how to be, but there was a spirit of fun and adventure.  They still didn't know exactly what they were training for.  There was the inevitable speculation, whispering between bunks that gradually transformed to a symphony of snoring at night after agreement on some wildly speculative idea.

Though an uneducated man, Chavez was not a stupid one.  Somehow he knew that all of the theories were wrong. 
Afghanistan
was all over; they couldn't be going there.  Besides, everyone here spoke fluent Spanish.  He mulled over it again while chewing a mouthful of kiwi fruit—a treat he hadn't known to exist a week before.  High altitude—they weren't training them here for the fun of it.  That eliminated
Cuba
and
Panama
. 
Nicaragua
, perhaps.  How high were the mountains there? 
Mexico
and the other Central American nations had mountains, too.  Everyone here was a sergeant.  Everyone here had led a squad, and had done training at one level or other.  Everyone here was a light infantryman.  Probably they'd be dispatched on some special training mission, therefore, training other light-fighters.  That made it counterinsurgency.  Of course, every country south of the
Rio Grande
had one sort of guerrilla problem or other.  They resulted from the inequities of the individual governments and economies, but to Chavez the explanation was simpler and to the point—those countries were all fucked up.  He'd seen enough of that in his trips with his battalion to
Honduras
and
Panama
.  The local towns were dirty—they'd made his home barrio seem paradise on earth.  The police—well, he'd never thought that he would come to admire the LAPD.  But it was the local armies that had earned his especial contempt.  Bunch of lazy, incompetent bullies.  Not much different from street gangs, as a matter of fact, except that they all carried the same sort of guns (the
L.A.
gangs tended toward individualism).  Weapons skills were about the same.  It didn't require very much for a soldier to butt-stroke some poor bastard with his rifle.  The officers—well, he hadn't seen anyone to compare with Lieutenant Jackson, who loved to run with his men and didn't mind getting all dirty and smelly like a real soldier.  But inevitably it was the sergeants down there who earned his fullest contempt.  It had been that paddy Sergeant McDevitt in
Korea
who'd shown Ding Chavez the light—skill and professionalism equaled pride.  And, when you got down to it, pride truly earned was all there was to a man.  Pride was what kept you going, what kept you from caving in on those goddamned mountainside runs.  You couldn't let down your friends.  You couldn't let your friends see you for something less than you wanted to be.  That was the short version of everything he had learned in the Army, and he knew that the same could be said of all the men in this room.  What they were preparing for, therefore, was to train others to do the same.  So their mission was a fairly conventional Army mission.  For some reason or other—probably political, but Chavez didn't worry about political stuff; never made much sense anyway—it was a secret mission.  He was smart enough to know that this kind of hush-hush preparation meant CIA.  He was correct on that judgment.  It was the mission he was wrong on.

Breakfast ended at the normal time.  The men rose from their tables, taking their trays and dishes to the stacking table before proceeding outside.  Most made pit stops and many, including Chavez, changed into clean, dry T-shirts.  The sergeant wasn't overly fastidious, but he did prefer the crisp, clean smell of a newly washed shirt.  There was an honest-to-God laundry service here.  Chavez decided that he'd miss the camp, altitude and all.  The air, if thin, was clean and dry.  Each day they'd hear the lonely wail of diesel horns from the trains that entered the Moffat Tunnel, whose entrance they'd see on their twice-daily runs.  Often in the evening they'd catch the distant sight of the double-deck cars of an Amtrak train heading east to
Denver
.  He wondered what hunting was like here.  What did they hunt?  Deer, maybe?  They'd seen a bunch of them, big mule deer, but also the curious white shapes of mountain goats racing up sheer rock walls as the soldiers approached.  Now, those fuckers were really in shape, Julio had noted the previous day.  But Chavez dismissed the thought after a moment.  The animals he hunted had only two legs.  And shot back if you weren't careful.

The four squads formed up on time.  Captain Ramirez called them to attention and marched them off to their separate area, about half a mile east of the main camp at the far end of the flat bottom of the high valley.  Waiting for them was a black man dressed in T-shirt and dark shorts, both of which struggled to contain bulging muscles.

“Good morning, people,” the man said. “I am Mr. Johnson.  Today we will begin some real mission-oriented training.  All of you have had training in hand-to-hand combat.  My job is to see how good you are, and to teach you some new tricks that your earlier training may have left out.  Killing somebody silently isn't all that hard.  The tricky part is getting close enough to do it.  We all know that.” Johnson's hands slipped behind his back as he talked on for a moment. “This is another way to kill silently.”

His hands came into view holding a pistol with a large, canlike device affixed to the front.  Before Chavez had told himself that it was a silencer, Johnson brought it around in both hands and fired it three times.  It was a very good silencer, Ding noted immediately.  You could barely hear the metallic clack of the automatic's slide-quieter, in fact, than the tinkle of glass from the three bottles that disintegrated twenty feet away—and you couldn't hear the sound of the shot at all.  Impressive.

Johnson gave them all a mischievous grin. “You don't get your hands all bruised, either.  Like I said, you all know hand-to-hand, and we're going to work on that.  But I've been around the block a few times, just like you people, and let's not dick around the issue.  Armed combat beats unarmed any day of the week.  So today we're going to learn a whole new kind of fighting: silent armed combat.” He bent down and flipped the blanket off a submachine gun.  It, too, appeared to have a silencer on the muzzle.  Chavez reproached himself for his earlier speculation.  Whatever the mission was, it wasn't about training.

Vice Admiral James Cutter, USN, was a patrician.  At least he looked like one, Ryan thought—tall and spare, his hair going a regal silver, and a confident smile forever fixed on his pink-scrubbed face.  Certainly he acted like one—or thought he did, Jack corrected himself.  It was Ryan's view that truly important people didn't go out of their way to act like it.  It wasn't as though being the President's Special Assistant for National Security Affairs was the same as a peerage.  Ryan knew a few people who actually had them.  Cutter came from one of those old swamp-Yankee families which had grown rocks on their
New England
farmsteads for generations, then turned to the mercantile trade, and, in Cutter's case, sent its surplus sons to sea.  But Cutter was the sort of sailor for whom the sea was a means to an end.  More than half of his career had been spent in the Pentagon, and that, Ryan thought, was no place for a proper sailor.  He'd had all the necessary commands, Jack knew.  First a destroyer, then a cruiser.  Each time he'd done his job well—well enough to be noticed, which must have been the important part.  Plenty of outstanding officers' careers stopped cold at captain's rank because they'd failed to be noticed by a high-enough patron.  What had Cutter done to make him stick out from the crowd . . . ?

Polished up the knocker faithfully, perhaps?
  Jack wondered as he finished his briefing.

Not that it mattered now.  The President had noticed him on Jeff Pelt's staff, and on Pelt's return to academia—the International Relations chair at the
University
of
Virginia
—Cutter had slipped into the job as neatly as a destroyer coming alongside the pier.  He sat behind his desk in a neatly tailored suit, sipping his coffee from a mug with
USS
B
ELKNAP
engraved on it, the better to remind people that he'd commanded that cruiser once.  In case the casual visitor missed that one—there were few casual visitors to the National Security Adviser's office—the wall on the left was liberally covered with plaques of the ships he'd served on, and enough signed photographs for a
Hollywood
agent's office.  Naval officers call this phenomenon the I LOVE ME! wall, and while most of them have one, they usually keep it at home.

Ryan didn't like Cutter very much.  He hadn't liked Pelt either, but the difference was that Pelt was almost as smart as he thought he was.  Cutter was not even close.  The three-star Admiral was in over his head, but had not the sense to know it.  The bad news was that while Ryan was also a Special Assistant To, it was not To the President.  That meant he had to report to Cutter whether he liked it or not.  With his boss in the hospital, that task would be a frequent occurrence.

“How's Greer?” the man asked.  He spoke with a nasal
New England
accent that ought to have died a natural death long before, though it was one thing that Ryan didn't mind.  It reminded him of his undergraduate days at
Boston
College
.

“They're not through with the tests yet.” Ryan's voice betrayed his worries.  It looked like pancreatic cancer, the survival rate for which was just about zero.  He'd checked with Cathy about that, and had tried to get his boss to Johns Hopkins, but Greer was Navy, which meant going to
Bethesda
.  Though
Bethesda
Naval
Medical
Center
was the Navy's number-one hospital, it wasn't Johns Hopkins.

“And you're going to take over for him?” Cutter asked.

“That is in rather poor taste, Admiral,” Bob Ritter answered for his companion. “In Admiral Greer's absence, Dr. Ryan will represent him from time to time.”

“If you handle that as well as you've handled this briefing, we ought to get along just fine.  Shame about Greer.  Hope things work out.” There was about as much emotion in his voice as one needed to ask directions.

You're a warm person, aren't you?
  Ryan thought to himself as he closed his briefcase.  I bet the crew of the Belknap just loved you.  But Cutter wasn't paid to be warm.  He was paid to advise the President.  And Ryan was paid to brief him, not to love him.

Cutter wasn't a fool.  Ryan had to admit that also.  He was not an expert in the area of Ryan's own expertise, nor did he have Pelt's cardsharp's instinct for political wheeling and dealing behind the scene—and, unlike Pelt, Cutter liked to operate without consulting the State Department.  He sure as hell didn't understand how the
Soviet Union
worked.  The reason he was sitting in that high-back chair, behind that dark-oak desk, was that he was a reputed expert in other areas, and evidently those were the areas in which the President had most of his current interest.  Here Ryan's intellect failed him.  He came back to his brief on what KGB was up to in
Central Europe
instead of following that idea to its logical conclusion.  Jack's other mistake was more basic.  Cutter knew that he wasn't the man Jeff Pelt had been, and Cutter wanted to change all that.

“Nice to see you again, Dr. Ryan.  Good brief.  I'll bring that matter to the President's attention.  Now if you'll excuse us, the DDO and I have something to discuss.”

“See you back at Langley, Jack,” Ritter said.  Ryan nodded and left.  The other two waited for the door to close behind him.  Then the DDO presented his own brief on Operation S
HOWBOAT
.  It lasted twenty minutes.

“So how do we coordinate this?” the Admiral asked Ritter.

“The usual.  About the only good thing that came out of the Desert One fiasco was that it proved how secure satellite communications were.  Ever see the portable kind?” the DDO asked. “It's standard equipment for the light forces.”

“No, just the ones aboard ship.  They're not real portable.”

“Well, it has a couple of pieces, an X-shaped antenna and a little wire stand that looks like it's made out of a couple of used coat hangers.  There's a new backpack only weighs fifteen pounds, including the handset, and it even has a Morse key in case the sender doesn't want to talk too loud.  Single sideband, super-encrypted UHF.  That's as secure as communications get.”