Jack Ryan 8 - Debt of Honor (14 page)

The harder part was the RV bodies. These were large, hollow, inverted cones, 120 centimeters in height and 50 across at the base, made of uranium-238, a darkly reddish and very hard metal. At just over four hundred kilograms each, the bulky cones had to be precisely machined for absolute dynamic symmetry. Intended to “fly” after a fashion, both through vacuum and, briefly, through air, they had to be perfectly balanced, lest they become unstable in flight. Ensuring that had to everyone's surprise turned out to be the most difficult production task of all. The casting process had been reordered twice, and even now the RV bodies were periodically rotated, similar to the procedure for balancing an automobile tire, but with far more stringent tolerances. The exterior of each of the ten was not as finely machined as the parts that went inside, though they were smooth to the ungloved touch. Inside was something else. Slight but symmetrical irregularities would allow the “physics package”—an American term—to fit in snugly, and, if the moment came—which everyone hoped it would not, of course—the enormous flux of high-energy “fast” neutrons would attack the RV bodies, causing a “fast-fission” reaction, and doubling the energy released by the plutonium, tritium, and lithium deuteride within.

That was the elegant part, the engineers thought, especially those unfamiliar with nuclear physics who had learned the process along the way. The U-238, so dense and hard and difficult to work, was a highly refractory metal. The Americans even used it to make armor for their tanks, it resisted external energy so well. Screeching through the atmosphere at 27,000 kilometers per hour, air friction would have destroyed most materials, but not this one, at least not in the few seconds it took, and at the end of the process, the material would form part of the bomb itself. Elegant, the engineers thought, using that most favored of words in their profession, and that made it worth the time and the trouble. When each body was complete, each was loaded onto a dolly and rolled off to the storage room. Only three remained to be worked on. This part of the project was two weeks behind schedule, much to everyone's chagrin.

RV Body #8 began the first machining process. If the bomb was detonated, the uranium-238 from which it was made would also create most of the fallout. Well, that was physics.

It was just another accident, perhaps occasioned by the early hour. Ryan arrived at the White House just after seven, about twenty minutes earlier than usual because traffic on U.S. Route 50 happened to be uncommonly smooth all the way in. As a result, he hadn't had time to read through all his early briefing documents, which he bundled under his arm at the west entrance. National Security Advisor or not, Jack still had to pass through the metal detector, and it was there that he bumped into somebody's back. The somebody in question was handing his service pistol to a uniformed Secret Service agent.

“You guys still don't trust the Bureau, eh?” a familiar voice asked the plainclothes supervisory agent.

“Especially the Bureau!” was the good-humored retort.

“And I don't blame them a bit,” Ryan added. “Check his ankle, too, Mike.”

Murray
turned after passing through the magnetic portal. “I don't need the backup piece anymore.” The Deputy Assistant Director pointed to the papers under Jack's arm. “Is that any way to treat classified documents?”

Murray
's humor was automatic. It was just the man's nature to needle an old friend. Then Ryan saw that the Attorney General had just passed through as well, and was looking back in some annoyance. Why was a cabinet member here so early? If it were a national-security matter, Ryan would have known, and criminal affairs were rarely so important as to get the President into his office before the accustomed
eight o'clock
. And why was
Murray
accompanying him? Helen D'Agustino was waiting beyond to provide personal escort through the upstairs corridors. Everything about the accidental confrontation lit off Ryan's curiosity.

“The Boss is waiting,”
Murray
said guardedly, reading the look in Jack's eyes.

“Could you stop by on the way out? I've been meaning to call you about something.”

“Sure.” And
Murray
walked off without even a friendly inquiry about Cathy and the kids.

Ryan passed through the detector, turned left, and headed up the stairs to his corner office for his morning briefs. They went quickly, and Ryan was settling into his morning routine when his secretary admitted
Murray
to his office. There was no point in beating around the bush.

“A little early for the A.G. to show up, Dan. Anything I need to know?”

Murray
shook his head. “Not yet, sorry.”

“Okay,” Ryan replied, shifting gears smoothly. “Is it something I ought to know?”

“Probably, but the Boss wants it on close-hold, and it doesn't have national-security implications. What did you want to see me about?”

Ryan took a second or two before answering, his mind going at its accustomed speed in such a case. Then he set it aside. He knew that he could trust
Murray
's word. Most of the time.

“This is code-word stuff,” Jack began, then elaborated on what he'd learned from Mary Pat the day before. The FBI agent nodded and listened with a neutral expression.

“It's not exactly new, Jack. Last few years we've been taking a quiet look at indications that young ladies have been—enticed? Hard to phrase this properly. Modeling contracts, that sort of thing. Whoever does the recruiting is very careful. Young women head over there to model, do commercials, that sort of thing, goes on all the time. Some got their American careers started over there. None of the checks we've run have turned up anything, but there are indications that some girls have disappeared. One in particular, as a matter of fact, she fits your man's description. Kimberly something, I don't recall the last name. Her father is a captain in the
Seattle
police department, and his next-door neighbor is SAC of our
Seattle
office. We've gone through our contacts in the Japanese police agencies, quietly. No luck.”

“What does your gut tell you?” Ryan asked.

“Look, Jack, people disappear all the time. Lots of young girls just pack up and leave home to make their way in the world. Call it part feminism, part just wanting to become an independent human being. It happens all the time. This Kimberly-something is twenty, wasn't doing well at school, and just disappeared. There's no evidence to suggest kidnapping, and at twenty you're a free citizen, okay? We have no right to launch a criminal investigation. All right, so her dad's a cop, and his neighbor is Bureau, and so we've sniffed around a little. But we haven't turned up anything at all, and that's as far as we can take it without something to indicate that a statute may have been violated. There are no such indicators.”

“You mean, a girl over eighteen disappears and you can't—”

“Without evidence of a crime, no, we can't. We don't have the manpower to track down every person who decides to make his or her own future without telling Mom and Dad about it.”

“You didn't answer my initial question, Dan,” Jack observed to his guest's discomfort.

“There are people over there who like their women with fair hair and round eyes. There's a disproportionate number of missing girls who're blonde. We had trouble figuring that out at first until an agent started asking their friends if they maybe had their hair color changed recently. Sure enough, the answer was yes, and then she started asking the question regularly. A 'yes' happened in enough cases that it's just unusual. So, yes, I think something may be happening, but we don't have enough to move on,”
Murray
concluded. After a moment he added, “If this case in question has national-security implications…well…”

“What?” Jack asked.

“Let the Agency check around?”

That was a first for Ryan, hearing from an FBI official that the CIA could investigate something. The Bureau guarded its turf as ferociously as a momma grizzly bear defended her cubs. “Keep going, Dan,” Ryan ordered.

“There's a lively sex industry over there. If you look at the porn they like to watch, it's largely American. The nude photos you see in their magazines are mainly of Caucasian females. The nearest country with a supply of such females happens to be us. Our suspicion is that some of these girls aren't just models, but, again, we haven't been able to turn anything solid enough to pursue it.” And the other problem,
Murray
didn't add, was twofold. If something really were going on, he wasn't sure how much cooperation he'd receive from local authorities, meaning that the girls might disappear forever. If it were not, the nature of the investigation would be leaked and the entire episode would appear in the press as another racist piece of Japan-bashing. “Anyway, it sounds to me like the Agency has an op running over there. My best advice: expand it some. If you want, I can brief some people in on what we know. It isn't much, but we do have some photographs.”

“How come you know so much?”

“SAC Seattle is Chuck O'Keefe. I worked under him once. He had me talk to Bill Shaw about it, and Bill okayed a quiet look, but it didn't lead anywhere, and Chuck has enough to keep his division busy as it is.”

“I'll talk to Mary Pat. And the other thing?”

“Sorry, pal, but you have to talk to the Boss about that.”

Goddamn it! Ryan thought as
Murray
walked out. Are there always secrets?

Looking In, Looking Out

In many ways operating in Japan was highly difficult. There was the racial part of it, of course.
Japan
was not strictly speaking a homogeneous society; the Ainu people were the original inhabitants of the islands but they mainly lived on
Hokkaido
, the northernmost of the
Home
Islands
. Still called an aboriginal people, they were also quite isolated from mainstream Japanese society in an explicitly racist way. Similarly
Japan
had an ethnic-Korean minority whose antecedents had been imported at the turn of the century as cheap labor, much as
America
had brought in immigrants on both the
Atlantic
and Pacific coasts. But unlike
America
,
Japan
denied citizenship rights to its immigrants unless they adopted a fully Japanese identity, a fact made all the more odd in that the Japanese people were themselves a mere offshoot of the Korean, a fact proven by DNA research but which was conveniently and somewhat indignantly denied by the better sections of Japanese society. All foreigners were gaijin, a word which like most words in the local language had many flavors. Usually translated benignly as meaning just “foreigners,” the word had other connotations—like “barbarian,” Chet Nomuri thought, with all of the implicit invective that the word had carried when first coined by the Greeks. The irony was that as an American citizen he was gaijin himself, despite 100 percent Japanese ethnicity, and while he had grown up quietly resenting the racist policies of the
U.S.
government that had once caused genuine harm to his family, it had required only a week in the land of his ancestors for him to yearn for a return to Southern
California
, where the living was smooth and easy.

It was for Chester Nomuri a strange experience, living and “working” here. He'd been carefully screened and interviewed before being assigned to Operation S
ANDALWOOD
. Having joined the Agency soon after graduating UCLA, not quite remembering why he'd done so except for a vague desire for adventure mixed with a family tradition of government service, he'd found somewhat to his surprise that he enjoyed the life. It was remarkably like police work, and Nomuri was a fan of police TV and novels. More than that, it was so damned interesting. He learned new things every day. It was like being in a living history classroom. Perhaps the most important lesson he'd learned, however, was that his great-grandfather had been a wise and insightful man. Nomuri wasn't blind to
America
's faults, but he preferred life there to life in any of the countries he'd visited, and with that knowledge had come pride in what he was doing, even though he still wasn't quite sure what the hell he was really up to. Of course, neither did his Agency, but Nomuri had never quite understood that, even when they'd told him so at the Farm. How could it be possible, after all? It must have been an inside-the-institution joke.

At the same time, in a dualism he was too young and inexperienced to appreciate fully,
Japan
could be an easy place in which to operate. That was especially true on the commuter train.

The degree of crowding here was enough to make his skin crawl. He had not been prepared for a country in which population density compelled close contact with all manner of strangers, and, indeed, he'd soon realized that the cultural mania with fastidious personal hygiene and mannerly behavior was simply a by-product of it. People so often rubbed, bumped, or otherwise crushed into contact with others that the absence of politeness would have resulted in street killings to shame the most violent neighborhood in
America
. A combination of smiling embarrassment at the touches and icy personal isolation made it tolerable to the local citizens, though it was something that still gave Nomuri trouble. “Give the guy some space” had been a catch-phrase at UCLA. Clearly it wasn't here, because there simply wasn't the space to give.

Then there was the way they treated women. Here, on the crowded trains, the standing and sitting salarymen read comic books, called manga, the local versions of novels, which were genuinely disturbing. Recently, a favorite of the eighties had been revived, called Rin-Tin-Tin. Not the friendly dog from 1950's American television, but a dog with a female mistress, to whom he talked, and with whom he had…sexual relations. It was not an idea that appealed to him, but there, sitting on his bench seat, was a middle-aged executive, eyes locked on the pages with rapt attention, while a Japanese woman stood right next to him and stared out the train's windows, maybe noticing, maybe not. The war between the sexes in this country certainly had rules different from the ones with which he'd been raised, Nomuri thought. He set it aside. It was not part of his mission, after all—an idea he would soon find to be wrong.

He never saw the cutout. As he stood there in the third car of the train, close to the rear door, hanging on to an overhead bar and reading a paper, he didn't even notice the insertion of the envelope into the pocket of his overcoat. It was always that way—at the usual place the coat got just a touch heavier. He'd turned once to look and seen nothing. Damn, he'd joined the right outfit.

Eighteen minutes later the train entered the terminal, and the people emerged from it like a horizontal avalanche, exploding outward into the capacious station. The salaryman ten feet away tucked his “illustrated novel” into his briefcase and walked off to his job, wearing his customarily impassive mien, doubtless concealing thoughts of his own. Nomuri headed his own way, buttoning his coat and wondering what his new instructions were.

“Does the President know?”

Ryan shook his head. “Not yet.”

“You think maybe he ought to?” Mary Pat Foley asked.

“At the proper time.”

“I don't like putting officers at risk for—”

“At risk?” Jack asked. “I want him to develop information, not to make a contact, and not to expose himself. I gather from the case notes I've seen so far that all he has to do is make a follow-up question, and unless their locker rooms are different from ours, it shouldn't expose him at all.”

“You know what I mean,” the Deputy Director (Operations) observed, rubbing her eyes. It had been a long day, and she worried about her field officers. Every good DDO did, and she was a mother who'd once been picked up by the KGB's Second Chief Directorate herself.

Operation S
ANDALWOOD
had started innocently enough, if an intelligence operation on foreign soil could ever be called innocent. The preceding operation had been a joint FBI/CIA show, and had gone very badly indeed: an American citizen had been apprehended by the Japanese police with burglar tools in his possession—along with a diplomatic passport, which in this particular case had been more of a hindrance than a help. It had made the papers in a small way. Fortunately the media hadn't quite grasped what the story was all about. People were buying information. People were selling information. It was often information with “secret” or higher classifications scrawled across the folders, and the net effect was to hurt American interests, such as they were.

“How good is he?” Jack asked.

Mary Pat's face relaxed at little. “Very. The kid's a natural. He's learning to fit in, developing a base of people he can hit for background information. We've set him up with his own office. He's even turning us a nice profit. His orders are to be very careful,” Mrs. Foley pointed out yet again.

“I hear you, MP,” Ryan said tiredly. “But if this is for-real—”

“I know, Jack. I didn't like what
Murray
sent over either.”

“You believe it?” Ryan asked, wondering about the reaction he'd get.

“Yes, I do, and so does
Murray
.” She paused. “If we develop information on this, then what?”

“Then I go to the President, and probably we extract anyone who wants to be extracted.”

“I will not risk Nomuri that way!” the DDO insisted, a little too loudly.

“Jesus, Mary Pat, I never expected that you would. Hey, I'm tired, too, okay?”

“So you want me to send in another team, let him just bird-dog it for them?” she asked.

“It's your operation to run, okay? I'll tell you what to do, but not how. Lighten up, MP.” That statement earned the National Security Advisor a crooked smile and a semi-apology.

“Sorry, Jack. I keep forgetting you're the new guy on this block.”

“The chemicals have various industrial uses,” the Russian colonel explained to the American colonel.

“Good for you. All we can do is burn ours, and the smoke'll kill you.” The rocket exhaust from the liquid propellants wasn't exactly the Breath of Spring either, of course, but when you got down to it, they were industrial chemicals with a variety of other uses.

As they watched, technicians snaked a hose from the standpipe next to the missile puskatel, the Russian word for “silo,” to a truck that would transport the last of the nitrogen tetroxide to a chemical plant. Below, another fitting on the missile body took another hose that pumped pressurized gas into the top of the oxidizer tank, the better to drive the corrosive chemical out. The top of the missile was blunt. The Americans could see where the warhead “bus” had been attached, but it had already been removed, and was now on another truck, preceded by a pair of BTR-70 infantry fighting vehicles and trailed by three more, on its way to a place where the warheads could be disarmed preparatory to complete disassembly.
America
was buying the plutonium. The tritium in the warheads would stay in
Russia
, probably to be sold eventually on the open market to end up on watch and instrument faces. Tritium had a market value of about $50,000 per gram, and the sale of it would turn a tidy profit for the Russians. Perhaps, the American thought, that was the reason that his Russian colleagues were moving so expeditiously.

This was the first SS-19 silo to be deactivated for the 53rd Strategic Rocket Regiment. It was both like and unlike the American silos being deactivated under Russian inspection. The same mass of reinforced concrete for both, though this one was sited in woods, and the American silos were all on open ground, reflecting different ideas about site security. The climate wasn't all that different. Windier in
North Dakota
, because of the open spaces. The base temperature was marginally colder in
Russia
, which balanced out the wind-chill factor on the prairie. In due course the valve wheel on the pipe was turned, the hose removed, and the truck started up.

“Mind if I look?” the USAF colonel asked.

“Please.” The Russian colonel of Strategic Rocket Forces waved to the open hole. He even handed over a large flashlight. Then it was his turn to laugh.

You son of a bitch, Colonel Andrew Malcolm wanted to exclaim. There was a pool of icy water at the bottom of the puskatel. The intelligence estimate had been wrong again. Who would have believed it?

“Backup?” Ding asked.

“You might end up just doing sightseeing,” Mrs. Foley told them, almost believing it.

“Fill us in on the mission?” John Clark asked, getting down to business. It was his own fault, after all, since he and Ding had turned into one of the Agency's best field teams. He looked over at Chavez. The kid had come a long way in five years. He had his college degree, and was close to his master's, in international relations no less. Ding's job would probably have put his instructors into cardiac arrest, since their idea of transnational intercourse didn't involve fucking other nations—a joke Domingo Chavez himself had coined on the dusty plains of
Africa
while reading a history book for one of his seminar groups. He still needed to learn about concealing his emotions. Chavez still retained some of the fiery nature of his background, though
Clark
wondered how much of it was for show around the Farm and elsewhere. In every organization the individual practitioners had to have a “service reputation.” John had his. People spoke about him in whispers, thinking, stupidly, that the nicknames and rumors would never get back to him. And Ding wanted one, too. Well, that was normal.

“Photos?” Chavez asked calmly, then took them from Mrs. Foley's hand. There were six of them. Ding examined each, handing them over one by one to his senior. The junior officer kept his voice even but allowed his face to show his distaste.

“So if Nomuri turns up a face and a location, then what?” Ding asked.

“You two make contact with her and ask if she would like a free plane ticket home,” the DDO replied without adding that there would be an extensive debriefing process. The CIA didn't give out free anythings, really.

“Cover?” John asked.

“We haven't decided yet. Before you head over, we need to work on your language skills.”

“
Monterey
?” Chavez smiled. It was about the most pleasant piece of country in
America
, especially this time of year.

“Two weeks, total immersion. You fly out this evening. Your teacher will be a guy named Lyalin, Oleg Yurievich. KGB major who came over a while back. He actually ran a network over there, called T
HISTLE
. He's the guy who turned the information that you and Ding used to bug the airliner—”

“Whoa!” Chavez observed. “Without him…”

Mrs. Foley nodded, pleased that Ding had made the complete connection that rapidly. “That's right. He's got a very nice house overlooking the water. It turns out he's one hell of a good language teacher, I guess because he had to learn it himself.” It had turned into a fine bargain for CIA. After the debriefing process, he'd taken a productive job at the Armed Forces Language School, where his salary was paid by DOD. “Anyway, by the time you're able to order lunch and find the bathroom in the native tongue, we'll have your cover IDs figured out.”

Clark
smiled and rose, taking the signal that it was time to leave. “Back to work, then.”

“Defending
America
,” Ding observed with a smile, leaving the photos on Mrs. Foley's desk and sure that actually having to defend his country was a thing of the past.
Clark
heard the remark and thought it a joke too, until memories came back that erased the look from his face.