Jack Ryan 9 - Executive Orders (90 page)

Behind him in space and time, most of the nineteen others were still in the air. Some were just landing—Boston first, then more in New York, and one at Dulles—to make their own way through customs, testing their knowledge and their luck against the Great Satan, or whatever rubbish Daryaei termed their collective enemy. Satan, after all, had great powers and was worthy of respect. Satan could look in a man's eyes and see his thoughts, almost as Allah could. No, these Americans were functionaries, only dangerous to them if given warning.

“Y
OU HAVE TO
know how to read people,”
Clark
told them. It was a good class. Unlike people in a conventional school, they all wanted to learn. It almost took him back to his own days here at the Farm, at the height of the Cold War, when everyone had wanted to be James Bond and actually believed a little in it despite everything the instructors had said. Most of his classmates had been recent college grads, well educated from books but not yet from life. Most had learned pretty well. Some hadn't, and the flunking grade out in the field could be more than a red mark on a blue book, but mainly it had been less dramatic than what they showed in the movies. Just the realization that it was time for a career change.
Clark
had higher hopes for this bunch. Maybe they hadn't arrived with degrees in history from
Dartmouth
or Brown, but they had studied something, somewhere, then learned more on the streets of some big cities. Maybe they even knew that everything they learned would be important to them someday.

“Will they lie to us—our agents, I mean?”

“You're from
Pittsburgh
, Mr. Stone, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You worked confidential informants on the street. They ever lie to you?”

“Sometimes,” Stone admitted.

“There's your answer. They will lie about their importance, the danger they're in, damned near anything, depending on how they feel today. You have to know them and know their moods. Stone, did you know when your informants were telling sea stories?”

“Most of the time.”

“How did you tell?”
Clark
asked.

“Whenever they know a little too much, whenever it doesn't fit—”

“You know.” their instructor observed with a grin, “you people are so smart that sometimes I wonder what I'm doing here. It's about knowing people. In your careers at the Agency, you will always be running into folks who think they can tell it all from overheads—the satellite knows all and tells all. Not exactly,”
Clark
went on. “Satellites can be fooled, and it's easier than people like to admit. People have their weaknesses, too, ego foremost among them, and there is never a substitute for looking them in the eyes. But the nice thing about working agents in the field is, even their lies will reveal some of the truth to you. Case in point,
Moscow
, Kutuzovkiy Prospyekt, 1983. This agent we brought out, and he'll be here next week for you to meet. He was having a hard time with his boss and—”

Chavez appeared at the back door and held up a phone-message form.
Clark
hurried through the rest of the lesson and handed the class over to his assistant.

“What is it, Ding?” John asked.

“Mary Pat wants us up in D.C. in a hurry, something about an SNIE.”

“The United Islamic Republic, I bet.”

“Hardly worth taking the message down, Mr. C,” Chavez observed. “They want us up in time for dinner. Want me to drive?”

T
HERE WERE FOUR
Maritime Pre-Positioning Ships at Diego Garcia. They were relatively new ships, built for their purpose, which was to be floating parking garages for military vehicles. A third of those were tanks, mobile artillery, and armored personnel carriers, and the rest were the less dramatic “trains,” vehicles pre-loaded with everything from ammunition to rations to water. The ships were painted Navy gray, but with colored bands around their funnels to designate them as part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet, crewed by merchant sailors whose job was to maintain them. That wasn't overly difficult. Every few months they'd light off the huge diesel engines and sail around for a few hours, just to be absolutely sure everything worked. This evening they got a new message to increase their alert status.

One by one, the engine-room crews went below and fired up the engines. Fuel quantities were verified against written records, and various benchmark tests made to ensure that the ship was ready to sail—which was why they were maintained so lovingly. Testing the engines was not abnormal. Testing all at the same time was, and the collection of monster engines made for a thermal bloom that was obvious to infrared detectors overhead, especially at night.

That came to the attention of Sergey Golovko within thirty minutes of its detection, and like intelligence chiefs all over the world, he assembled a team of specialists to discuss it.

“Where is the American carrier battle group?” he asked first of all.
America
loved to throw them around the oceans of the world.

“They left the atoll yesterday, heading east.”

“Away from the
Persian Gulf
?”

“Correct. They have exercises scheduled with
Australia
. It's called S
OUTHERN
C
UP
. We have no information to suggest that the exercise is being canceled.”

“Then why exercise their troopships?”

The analyst gestured. “It could be an exercise, but the turmoil in the
Persian Gulf
suggests otherwise.”

“Nothing in
Washington
?” Golovko asked.

“Our friend Ryan continues to navigate the political rapids,” the chief of the American political section reported. “Badly.”

“Will he survive?”

“Our ambassador believes so, and the rezident concurs, but neither thinks he is firmly in command. It's a classic muddle.
America
has always prided herself on the smooth transition of government power, but their laws did not anticipate such events as we have seen. He cannot move decisively against his political enemy—”

“What Kealty's doing is state treason,” Golovko observed, the penalty for which in
Russia
had always been severe. Even the phrase was enough to lower the temperature of a room.

“Not according to their law, but my legal experts tell me that the issue is sufficiently confused that there will be no clear winner, and in such a case Ryan remains in command because of his position—he got there first.”

Golovko nodded, but his expression was decidedly unhappy. Red October and the Gerasimov business should never have become public knowledge. He and his government had known the latter, but only suspected the former. On the submarine business, American security had been superb—so that was the card Ryan had played to make Kolya defect. It had to be. It all made sense from the distance of time, and a fine play it had been. Except for one thing: it had become public knowledge in
Russia
as well, and he was now forbidden to contact Ryan directly until the diplomatic fallout had been determined.
America
was doing something. He did not yet know what that was, and instead of calling to ask, and perhaps even getting a truthful answer, he'd have to wait for his field officers to discern it on their own. The problem lay in the harm that had been done to the American government, and in Ryan's own habit, learned at CIA, of working with a small number of people instead of playing the entire bureaucracy like a symphony orchestra. Instinct told him that Ryan would be cooperative, he'd trust former enemies to act in collective self-interest, but one thing the traitor Kealty had accomplished—who else could have told the American press those stories!—was to create a political impasse. Politics!

Politics had once been the center of Golovko's life. A party member since the age of eighteen, he'd studied his Lenin and Marx with all the fervor of a theology student, and though the fervor had changed over time to something else, those logical but foolish theories had shaped his adult life, until they'd evaporated, leaving him, at least, a profession at which he excelled. He'd been able to rationalize his previous antipathy to
America
in historical terms, two great powers, two great alliances, two differing philosophies acting in perverse unison to create the last great world conflict. National pride still wished that his nation had won, but the Rodina hadn't, and that was that. The important part was that the Cold War was over, and with it the deadly confrontation between
America
and his country. Now they could actually recognize their common interests, and at times act in cooperation. It had actually happened already. Ivan Emmetovich Ryan had come to him for help in the American conflict with
Japan
, and together the two countries had accomplished a vital goal—something still secret. Why the hell, Golovko thought, couldn't the traitor Kealty have revealed that secret instead of the others? But, no, now his country was embarrassed, and while the newly freed media had as great a field day with this story as the Americans were having—or even more—he was unable to make a simple phone call.

Those ships were turning their engines for a reason. Ryan was doing something or thinking about doing something, and instead of merely asking, he had to be a spy again, working against another spy instead of working with an ally. Well, he had no choice.

“Form a special study group for the
Persian Gulf
. Everything we have, bring it together as quickly as possible.
America
will have to react somehow to the developing situation. First, we must determine what is happening. Second, what
America
probably knows. Third, what
America
will do. That general, G. I. Bondarenko, get him involved. He just spent time with their military.”

“Immediately, Comrade Chairman,” his principal deputy replied for the rest of the meeting. At least that hadn't changed!

C
ONDITIONS. HE THOUGHT
, were excellent. Not too hot, not too cold. The
Javits
Center
was right on the river, and that made for relatively high local humidity, and that was good also. He'd be inside, and so there was no concern about ultraviolet radiation harming the contents of his container. For the rest, the theory of what he was doing was not his concern; he'd been briefed on it and would do exactly what he'd been told. Whether or not it worked, well, that was in Allah's hands, wasn't it? The traveler got out of his cab and walked in.

He'd never been in so capacious a building, and there was a little disorientation after he got his visitor's badge and program book, which showed a map of the interior. With that came an index that allowed him to see the location of various exhibits, and with a muted smile he decided that he had hours to accomplish his goal, and would spend the time looking at cars, just like everybody else.

There were lots of them, sparkling like jewels, some on turntables for those too lazy to walk around them, many with scantily clad women gesturing at them as though one might have sexual relations with them—the cars, that is, though some of the women might be possibilities, he thought, watching their faces with concealed amusement. He'd known intellectually that
America
made millions of cars, and in almost that many shapes and colors. It seemed hugely wasteful—what was a car, after all, except for a method of moving from one place to another, and in the course of use they got damaged and dirty, and the show here was a lie in that it showed them as they would be for less time than it took to drive one home—even in America, as he'd seen in the drive here from his hotel—

But it was a pleasant experience even so. He would have thought of it as shopping, but this was not the souk which he connected with the process, not an alley full of small shops operated by merchants for whom bargaining was as important as the air. No,
America
was different. Here they prostituted women to sell things for a predetermined price. It wasn't that he was personally against such use of women; the traveler was not married and had the usual carnal desires, but to proclaim it in this way attacked the puritanical modesty of his culture, and so while he never once looked away from the women standing by the cars, he was glad that none of them was from his part of the world.

All the makes and models. Cadillac had a huge display in the General Motors section. Ford had another area of its own for all of its trademark products. He wandered through the Chrysler section, and then off to the foreign makers. The Japanese section, he saw, was being avoided, doubtless as a result of the American conflict with that country—though above many of the displays were signs proclaiming MADE IN AMERICA BY AMERICANS! in three-meter letters to those few who seemed to care.
Toyota
, Nissan, and the rest would have a bad year, even the sporty Cressida, regardless of where they might be assembled. You could tell that by the lack of people in the area, and with that realization, his interest in Asian cars died. No, he decided, not around here.

European cars were profiting from
Japan
's misfortune, he saw. Mercedes especially was drawing a huge crowd, especially a new model of their most expensive sports car, painted a glossy midnight black that reflected the overhead lighting like a piece of the clear desert sky. Along the way, the traveler picked up a brochure at every booth from a friendly manufacturer's representative. These he tucked into his carry-on bag so as to make himself look like every other visitor. He found a food booth and got something to eat—it was a hot dog, and he didn't worry if it had pork in it or not;
America
wasn't an Islamic country, after all, and he didn't have to worry about such things. He spent a good deal of time looking at all-terrain vehicles, first wondering if they'd survive the primitive roads of Lebanon and Iran, and deciding that they probably would. One was based on a military type he'd seen before, and if he'd had a choice, it would have been that one, wide and powerful. He got the entire publicity package for that one, then leaned against a post so that he might read it. Sports cars were for the effete. This was something of substance. What a pity he'd never own one. He checked his watch. Early evening. More visitors were crowding in as work let out and people took the evening to indulge their fantasies. Perfect.