Jack Ryan 6 - Clear and Present Danger (38 page)

The President had flown to
Camp David
for the weekend, and had barely showered himself when his junior military aide—a Marine lieutenant had the duty—brought him the cordless phone.

“Yes—what is it?”

The lieutenant's first reaction on seeing the President's expression was to wonder where his pistol was.

“I want the Attorney General, Admiral Cutter, Judge Moore, and Bob Ritter flown here immediately.  Tell the press secretary to call me in fifteen minutes to work on the statement.  I'll be staying here for the time being.  What about bringing them back home?  Okay—we have a couple of hours to think about that.  For now, the usual protocol.  That's right.  No, nothing from State.  I'll handle it from here, then the secretary can have his say.  Thank you.” The President pushed the kill button on the phone and handed it back to the Marine.

“Sir, is there anything that the guard detail needs—”

“No.” The President explained briefly what had happened. “Carry on, Lieutenant.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The Marine left.

The President put on his bathrobe and walked over to the mirror to comb his hair.  He had to use the terrycloth of his sleeve to wipe the condensation off the glass.  Had he noticed, he would have wondered why the look in his eyes didn't shatter it.

“Okay,” the President of the
United States
told the mirror. “So you bastards want to play . . .”

The flight from Andrews to
Camp David
was made in one of the new VH-60 Blackhawk helicopters that the 89th Military Airlift Wing had just acquired.  Plushly appointed to carry VIPs from place to place, it was still too noisy for anything approximating a normal conversation.  Each of the four passengers stared out the windows on the sliding doors, watching the western
Maryland
hills slide beneath the aircraft, each alone with his grief and his anger.  The trip took twenty minutes.  The pilot had been told to hurry.

On touching down, the four men were loaded into a car for the short drive to the President's cabin on the grounds.  They found him hanging up the phone.  It had taken half an hour to locate his press secretary, further exacerbating the President's already stormy mood.

Admiral Cutter started to say something about how sorry everyone was, but the President's expression cut him short.

The President sat down on a couch opposite the fireplace.  In front of him was what most people ordinarily took to be a coffee table, but now, with the top removed, it was a set of computer screens and quiet thermal printers that tapped into the major news wire services and other government information channels.  Four television sets were in the next room, tuned into CNN and the major networks.  The four visitors stared down at him, watching the anger come off the President like steam from a boiling pot.

“We will not let this one slip past with us standing by and deploring the event,” the President said quietly as he looked up. “They killed my friend.  They killed my ambassador.  They have directly challenged the sovereign power of the
United States of America
.  They want to play with the big boys,” the President went on in a voice that was grotesquely calm. “Well, they're going to have to play by the big boys' rules.  Peter,” he said to the AG, “there is now an informal Presidential Finding that the drug Cartel has initiated an undeclared war against the government of the
United States
.  They have chosen to act like a hostile nation-state.  We will treat them as we would treat a hostile nation-state.  As President, I am resolved to carry the fight to the enemy as we would carry it to any other originator of state-sponsored terrorism.”

The AG didn't like that, but nodded agreement anyway.  The President turned to Moore and Ritter.

“The gloves come off.  I just made the usual wimpy-ass statement for my press secretary to deliver, but the fucking gloves come off.  Come up with a plan.  I want these bastards hurt.  No more of this 'sending a message' crap.  I want them to get the message whether the phone rings or not.  Mr. Ritter, you have your hunting license, and there's no bag limit.  Is that sufficiently clear?”

“Yes, sir,” the DDO answered.  Actually, it wasn't.  The President hadn't said “kill” once, as the tape recorders that were surely somewhere in this room would show.  But there were some things that you didn't do, and one of them was that you did not force the President to speak clearly when clarity was something he wished to avoid.

“Find yourselves a cabin and come up with a plan.  Peter, I want you to stay here with me for a while.” The next message: the Attorney General, once having acceded to the President's desire to Do Something, didn't need to know exactly what was going to be done.  Admiral Cutter, who was more familiar with
Camp David
than the other two, led the way to one of the guest cabins.  Since he was in front, Moore and Ritter could not see the smile on his face.

Ryan was just getting to his office, having driven himself in, a habit which he had just unlearned.  The senior intelligence watch officer was waiting for him in the corridor as Jack got off the elevator.  The briefing took a whole four minutes, after which Ryan found himself sitting in the office with nothing at all to do.  It was strange.  He was now privy to everything the
U.S.
government knew about the assassination of its people—not much more than what he'd heard on the car radio coming in, actually, though he now had names to put on the “unnamed sources.” Sometimes that was important, but not this time.  The DCI and DDO, he learned at once, were up at
Camp David
with the President.

Why not me?
  Jack asked himself in surprise.

It should have occurred to him immediately, of course, but he was not yet used to being a senior executive.  With nothing to do, his mind went along that tangent for several minutes.  The conclusion was an obvious one.  He didn't need to know what was being talked about—but that had to mean that something was already happening, didn't it . . . ?  If so, what?  And for how long?

By
noon
the next day, an Air Force C-141B Starlifter transport had landed at El Dorado International, Security was like nothing anyone had seen since the funeral of Anwar Sadat.  Armed helicopters circled overhead.  Armored vehicles sat with their gun tubes trained outward.  A full battalion of paratroops ringed the airport, which was shut down for three hours.  That didn't count the honor guard, of course, all of whom felt as though they had no honor at all, that it had been stripped away from their army and their nation by . . . them.

Esteban Cardinal Valdéz prayed over the coffins, accompanied by the chief rabbi of Bogotá's small Jewish community.  The Vice President attended on behalf of the American government, and one by one the Colombian Army handed the caskets over to enlisted pallbearers from all of the American uniformed services.  The usual, predictable speeches were made, the most eloquent being a brief address by
Colombia
's Attorney General, who shed unashamed tears for his friend and college classmate.  The Vice President boarded his aircraft and left, followed by the big Lockheed transport.

The President's statement, already delivered, spoke of reaffirming the rule of law to which Emil Jacobs had dedicated his life.  But that statement seemed as thin as the air at El Dorado International even to those who didn't know better.

In the town of Eight Mile,
Alabama
, a suburb of
Mobile
, a police sergeant named Ernie Braden was cutting his front lawn with a riding mower.  A burglary investigator, he knew all the tricks of the people whose crimes he handled, including how to bypass complex alarm systems, even the sophisticated models used by wealthy investment bankers.  That skill, plus the information he picked up from office chatter—the narcs' bullpen was right next to the burglary section—enabled him to offer his services to people who had money with which to pay for the orthodonture and education of his children.  It wasn't so much that Braden was a corrupt cop as that he'd simply been on the job for over twenty years and no longer gave much of a damn.  If people wanted to use drugs, then the hell with them.  If druggies wanted to kill one another off, then so much the better for the rest of society.  And if some arrogant prick of a banker turned out to be a crook among crooks, then that also was too bad; all Braden had been asked to do was shake the man's house to make sure that he'd left no records behind.  It was a shame about the man's wife and kids, of course, but that was called playing with fire.

Braden rationalized the damage done to society simply by continuing to investigate his burglaries, and even catching a real hood from time to time, though that was rare enough.  Burglary was a pretty safe crime to commit.  It never got the attention it deserved.  Neither did the people whose job it was to track them down—probably the most unrewarded segment of the law-enforcement profession.  He'd been taking the lieutenant's exam for nine years, and never quite made it.  Braden needed or at least wanted the money that the promotion would bring, only to see the promotions go to the hotshots in Narcotics and Homicide while he slaved away . . . and why not take the goddamned money?  More than anything else, Ernie Braden was tired of it all.  Tired of the long hours.  Tired of the crime victims who took their frustration out on him when he was just trying to do his job.  Tired of being unappreciated within his own community of police officers.  Tired of being sent out to local schools for the pro forma anticrime lectures that nobody ever listened to.  He was even tired of coaching little-league baseball, though that had once been the single joy of his life.  Tired of just about everything.  But he couldn't afford to retire, either.  Not yet, anyway.

The noise from the Sears riding mower crackled through the hot, humid air of the quiet street on which he and his family lived.  He wiped a handkerchief across his sweaty brow and contemplated the cold beer he'd have as soon as he was finished.  It could have been worse.  Until three years ago he'd pushed a goddamned Lawn-Boy across the grass.  At least now he could sit down as he did his weekly chore, cutting the goddamned grass.  His wife had a real thing about the lawn and garden.  As if it mattered, Braden grumbled.

He concentrated on the job at hand, making sure that the spinning blades had at least two sweeps over every square inch of the green crap that, this early in the season, grew almost as fast as you cut it.  He didn't notice the
Plymouth
minivan coming down the street.  Nor did he know that the people who paid him his supplementary income were most unhappy with a recent clandestine effort he'd made on their behalf.

Braden had several eccentricities, as do many men and most police officers.  In his case, he never went anywhere unarmed.  Not even to cut the grass.  Under the back of his greasy shirt was a Smith & Wesson Chief's Special, a five-shot stainless steel revolver that was as close as he'd ever get to something with “chief” written on it.  When he finally noticed the minivan pull up behind his Chevy Citation, he took little note of it, except that there were two men in it, and they seemed to be looking at him.

His cop's instinct didn't entirely fail him, however.  They were looking real hard at him.  That made him look back, mainly in curiosity.  Who'd be interested in him on a Saturday afternoon?  When the passenger-side door opened and he saw the gun, that question faded away.

When Braden rolled off the mower, his foot came off the brake pedal, which had the opposite effect as in a car.  The mower stopped in two feet, its blades still churning away on the bluegrass-and-fescue mix of the policeman's front yard.  Braden came off just at the ejection port of the mower assembly, and felt tiny bits of grit and sand peppering his knees, but that, too, was not a matter of importance at the moment.  His revolver was already out when the man from the van fired his first round.

He was using an Ingram Mac-10, probably a 9-millimeter, and the man didn't know how to use it well.  His first round was roughly on target, but the next eight merely decorated the sky as the notoriously unstable weapon jerked out of control, not even hitting the mower.  Sergeant Braden fired two rounds back, but the range was over ten yards, and the Chief's Special had only a two-inch barrel, which gave it an effective combat range measured in feet, not yards.  With the instant and unexpected stress added to his poorly selected weapon, he managed to hit the van behind his target with only one round.

But machine-gun fire is a highly distinctive sound—not the least mistakable for firecrackers or any other normal noise—and the neighborhood immediately realized that something very unusual was happening.  At a house across the street a fifteen-year-old boy was cleaning his rifle.  It was an old Marlin .22 lever-action that had once belonged to his grandfather, and its proud owner had learned to play third base from Sergeant Braden, whom he thought to be a really neat guy.  The young man in question, Erik Sanderson, set down his cleaning gear and walked to the window just in time to see his former coach shooting from behind his mower at somebody.  In the clarity that comes in such moments, Erik Sanderson realized that people were trying to kill his coach, a police officer, that he had a rifle and cartridges ten feet away, and that it Would Be All Right for him to use the rifle to come to the aid of the policeman.  The fact that he'd spent the morning plinking away at tin cans merely meant that he was ready.  Erik Sanderson's main ambition in life was to become a U.S. Marine, and he seized the chance to get an early feel for what it was all about.

While the sound of gunfire continued to crackle around the wooded street, he grabbed the rifle and a handful of the small copper-colored rimfire cartridges and ran out to the front porch.  First he twisted the spring-loaded rod that pushed rounds down the magazine tube which hung under the barrel.  He pulled it out too far, dropping it, but the young man had the good sense to ignore that for the moment.  He fed the.22 rounds into the loading slot one at a time, surprised that his hands were already sweaty.  When he had fourteen rounds in, he bent down to get the rod, and two rounds fell out the front of the tube.  He took the time to reload them, reinserted the rod, twisting it shut, then slammed his hand down and up on the lever, loading the gun and cocking the exposed hammer.