Tom Clancy Red Winter, page 12
“We’ll be fine,” Ryan said with the certitude of a thirty-four-year-old who’d seen bad things and made it out the other side. Not quite invincible, but nearly so.
“Of course you will.”
Greer’s phone intercom buzzed, and his secretary announced the arrival of Lane Buckley. The ADDO opened the door and poked his head in a half-second later.
“Admiral,” he acknowledged Greer and ignored Ryan.
Greer gave him a nod. “What can we do for you, Lane?”
“Helsinki team is getting set up as we speak. They should arrive in Berlin well ahead of Riley.”
“Ryan,” Greer said.
“Right. Sorry about that.” Buckley looked at Ryan, not sorry at all, but genuinely mistaken. Ryan pictured him as an elementary school bully tripping the new kid in the lunch line. Buckley changed gears and smirked at Ryan now. “You’re going to get a kick out of Mary Pat. She’s a real piece of work, if you know what I mean . . .”
“No idea,” Ryan said, deadpan.
“She’s got the assets.” He raised his eyebrows up and down, Groucho Marx-style. “She can shake a tail by shaking her tail. Comes in handy on a surveillance-detection run. The guys and I called her the Purple Peril,” he said. “You know, like the fishing fly.”
Ryan raised an eyebrow. “Okay . . .”
“No shit, one time she wore this lavender skirt on an op in Warsaw . . . That thing was something of beauty, let me tell you. So tight you could have bounced a quarter off that girl’s ass. Turned the KGB hit team into a bunch of hardened killers, if you know what I—”
Greer let his chair rock forward, both hands flat on his desk. “Anything else, Lane?”
“No,” Buckley said, failing to register the dyspeptic look on the admiral’s face. “Just letting you know our boy’s Helsinki team is good to go and en route.”
He gave Ryan a mischievous wink as he pulled the door closed behind him.
Greer leaned back with a low groan and rested his hands on his chest, interlacing his fingers. Ryan’s father had done that when he was about to impart some tidbit of wisdom.
“Listen here, Jack, I want you to be wary of that shithead.”
“I gathered that.”
Ryan almost chuckled. James Greer was normally an icon of civility, and Ryan found it refreshing to hear the man speak his mind.
“Not because he’s a skirt-chaser. Foley would turn him into a eunuch if he ever crossed the line with her. I’m talking about operationally. Bonn is a super-station, a springboard in the Agency career path, and that asshole leveraged the hell out of it. I’m certain he stepped none-too-gently on the heads and shoulders of many a subordinate to get here.”
Ryan gave an understanding nod. Government service was a noble endeavor, but unfortunately there were far too many ruthless self-promoters who clawed their way up through the ranks. “Assistant deputy director operations is a hell of a step.”
Greer sighed. “To hear him tell it, he single-handedly recruited an asset named Chernenko from KGB PR Line. The guy came over with a trove of information on strategy and active measures.”
“Single-handed, eh?”
“Hmmmf,” Greer scoffed. “RUMINT says one of Buckley’s case officers did the lion’s share of the development and recruiting.”
There was HUMINT (human-sourced intelligence), SIGINT (signals-sourced intelligence), etc. RUMINT was rumor intel—gossip—a mainstay of any organization.
“I’ll bet he’s pissed.”
“She,” Greer said. “Jennifer North, a unilateral stationed at West Berlin Base.”
A unilateral was a CIA officer under official cover, not declared to the host nation.
“They let her stay in Germany and go to Berlin after Bonn?” Ryan asked. “That’s rare.”
“Recompense for having to work with Lane Buckley,” Greer said. “And reward for developing Chernenko. She ran him in place as a volunteer for the better part of eighteen months. Buckley showed up at just enough meetings to ingratiate himself and make it look as though he was doing the big favor when they finally pulled Chernenko out.”
“I can see where she might be upset at the guy,” Ryan said. “But you’re the one running me. Buckley’s only setting up the Helsinki team and giving me the preliminary briefings.”
“There’s the rub,” Greer said. “The shadow of a mole hunt has fallen over USBER Base and East Berlin Station. Odds are every last one of our people over there are salt-of-the-earth patriots keeping heads down and doing their jobs, often at great personal sacrifice to them and their families. Now some faceless defector has made it loud and clear that he does not trust a single one of them. I’d imagine that’s a hell of a gut punch. In the midst of all this, the seventh floor is shoving you, an analyst, down their throats to do a job that would normally be handled up the ops side of the house. Lane Buckley works on the seventh floor, down the hall from your office.”
“Wait,” Ryan said. “My what?”
“We’ll talk about that after this is over. In the meantime, just remember, you’ll be tarnished by association before you even set foot in Berlin.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Ryan said. He yawned, apologized, then moved on. “You have a deckname assigned for me, sir?”
He pronounced it deck-nama.
“A what?”
Ryan gave an exhausted chuckle. “Sorry, sir, I’m a bit loopy. It’s German for pseudonym. It sounds like THE BAT is taken, damn it.”
“You are an interesting soul, Jack Ryan,” Greer said. “Most people speak fewer languages when they’re loopy . . . As you can see, for iden purposes, you are Peter Crane.” He slid a folder across his desk.
Ryan opened it to find an alias packet. While the pseudonym was only to announce his intention to visit, an alias was the name he would use on the street. His “legend.” A black diplomatic passport, Virginia driver’s license, and a Visa credit card (with a fourteen-hundred-dollar balance on the five-thousand-dollar limit) all under the name of Jack Avery. Hard experience had taught that, with aliases, it was preferable for operatives to use their actual given name if possible. It could save the mission in the event you bumped into someone you knew and they shouted your name from across the mall or parking lot.
A paperclip in the corner of the folder held a library card, a dry-cleaning ticket, and a well-worn receipt from a mechanic shop for a new transmission on a 1981 Plymouth Reliant. The dry-cleaning ticket had only a number, no name. The garage receipt was torn in half, bearing only the first few letters of the last name. When establishing a legend, trying too hard with pocket litter could be as bad as not trying at all.
“Seriously?” Ryan held up the garage receipt. “A Plymouth K car? Are you trying to make me the most boring man in the world?”
Greer ignored the jibe. “I’ll make the call to Andrews. They’ll be waiting for you.”
“So, not commercial travel?”
“No,” Greer said. “We need you across the pond sooner rather than later.”
“And this person you’re sending over to watch our backs?”
“You’ll never even know he’s there,” Greer said. “With any luck, neither will the Stasi.”
“And absent luck?”
“Let’s just say it would be better for the Stasi if he never has to introduce himself. The fact is, you’ll probably never get to meet or get to know him. He’s not really the ‘getting to know people’ kind of guy.”
18
KONA COAST, HAWAII
The fish ran, stripping a hundred feet of line in an instant. Gears screamed. A stolid grunt came from the man in the fighting chair as he snapped himself in for battle. Strong arms, heavily tattooed with carp and long-nosed demons and cherry blossoms, kept the thick graphite rod bowed. The size of a large grapefruit, the beefy PENN Senator 118 reel held one thousand yards of 130-pound test—and it was fast running out.
John Clark stood behind him, arms loose, watching, calculating.
The throb of the thirty-one-foot Innovator’s twin Cummins diesels dropped in pitch. Cursed orders from above on the flying bridge and the two deckhands reeled furiously to clear those lines from the spread.
A tall Asian woman poked her head out of the cabin, sleepily asking what all the fuss was about and earning a guttural rebuke in Japanese from the man in the chair.
Fish on!
At the other end of the Dacron line, a magnificent Pacific blue marlin shot from the indigo water like a sub-launched missile, dancing on the surface, thrashing, shaking her powerful head. The big ones—this one likely topped eight hundred pounds—were always female. They cruised the deep waters off the western shores of the Big Island to drop their enormous skein of eggs. But that didn’t happen until spring. Now, in November, the big fish was chasing mahi-mahi and yellowfin. Some of the tuna topped a hundred pounds, but in the fish hierarchy off the Kona coast there were only two types of fish—Pacific blue marlin . . . and bait.
Playing the part of deckhand for the moment, Clark encouraged the man to reel.
When it came to getting cooperation, the Agency preferred to play nice if at all possible. This trip to Hawaii, a cushy room at Mauna Kea Resort, the boat, the fishing charter, had all been meant as a carrot to entice Sato Ichiro into cooperating. The Yakuza underboss and sometimes spy was known to chop up his competitors and feed them to the fishes in Tokyo Bay. Tokyo Metropolitan Police had him on tape bragging about doing the same to his two previous wives, but so far they hadn’t been able to make a case their prosecutors would accept. They were the same the world over, Clark thought.
Here was a man who would probably respond more readily to a stick.
To that end, the powers that be decided to send John Clark.
By law, Agency personnel were not supposed to engage in operations within the United States. The FBI took the lead on American soil. But this event was more of a debriefing, a friendly chat so long as Sato kept up his end of the deal. And if he did not, well, the nearest FBI guy was on Oahu. It would take him a while to get here.
Sato had known from the outset he would be meeting with Agency folks at some point during this trip. He just hadn’t been aware it was today, now, on the boat, in more than three hundred fathoms of water and three miles offshore. Now that he understood, he continued to stall, explaining in great detail all the reasons he might lose his head, or worse, his reputation, when he gave them what they wanted to know. Oh, he would, he promised. He just needed to make a few adjustments to their agreement. Certain conditions he’d only recently considered needed to be met first. Then, in time, he could give them the information.
Clark had other plans for how this was going to play out. One way or another, Sato was spilling what he knew before he got off the boat. Whatever else he spilled depended on his attitude.
Like many of his former teammates with the Navy SEALs, John Clark had gone the commercial diver route after he separated from the service. That had been a lifetime ago, when he was something else . . . someone else. He was almost forty, the time Duffy Hugo called “the old age of youth.” He intended to meet it head-on. The year before he’d done the 1984 Ironman, finishing the 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride, and subsequent marathon in just under twelve hours. For someone over six foot with a fighting weight of 220, it was a hell of an accomplishment. It had impressed Sandy, which, in the end, was all that really mattered to Clark. His daughters remained unimpressed about pretty much everything.
The sea was in Clark’s blood, and he still enjoyed all things in and on the water. When he wasn’t working, he had one rule: Life was too short to get in a boat with an idiot. Today was a workday.
Sato had brought his mistress along—not uncommon for fishing charters on this leeward side of the island where the shadow of the Mauna Kea volcano blocked the lion’s share of storms, providing consistent sunny days and smooth seas. Hula Girl boasted a comfortable cabin, where Sato’s friend, Takako, a girl of nineteen, was able to stretch out and rest while the men fished and talked shop. In this case, that meant information on a Soviet electronics company stealing sensitive computer technology from a Japanese firm, which it had stolen from a defense contractor in Texas. In their infinite wisdom some political wizard in Washington had decided the names and methods the organized crime boss had in his head were worth a new life and identity in the United States.
There were two other men on Clark’s team.
The Hula Girl’s skipper for the day was a man named Greg Armstrong. Captain Greg was tall and lean, with shaggy blond hair and a silver goatee that contrasted with a deep mahogany tan. Like Clark, he wore a ball cap, board shorts, and a long-sleeve T-shirt for protection against the sun. A tattoo of a leaping blue marlin graced his left calf. It was as if central casting had found him for the part of marlin boat skipper.
In a way, that was exactly what had happened. Not an actual CIA operations officer, Captain Greg was an “agent,” a contractor chosen for his particular set of skills. In this case, that meant his exemplary time with Golf Company 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines, during the Battle of Hue City in Vietnam—and, of course, his ability to skipper a gamefish boat. He and Clark understood each other, and apart from the usual good-natured jibes between Navy man and Marine, they got along well.
Dave, the muscular twentysomething deckhand, was from Alabama. He was new to the Agency, with no field experience beyond the halls and cubicles of Langley. He’d been chosen for his offshore fishing experience. Young enough to be unconcerned by the idea of his own mortality, he wore no shirt, daring the sun to burn him.
“Reel! Reel! Reel!” he yelled.
They all wanted to make Sato comfortable, and though none of them were really there to catch fish, it was impossible not to get caught up in the moment. It went against Clark’s grain, but he had to admit, landing a big marlin might cajole the gangster into spilling more than he would with more aggressive methods.
And then Takako stepped up to get a better look at the dancing fish. Annoyed that she was crowding him when he’d ordered her to stay out of his way, Sato let go of the rod with his right hand and punched her square in the face.
Stunned, she swayed on deck for a moment, before a swell sent her staggering forward into a second wicked punch.
Dave shot a knowing look at Clark and forgot about the marlin, helping the bleeding woman to her feet.
Calmly, as if he were buttoning a shirt, Clark stepped in close to the fighting chair and deftly pierced the web of Sato Ichiro’s hand with a heavy-gauge stainless-steel hook attached to an eight-inch marlin lure—about the size of a can of frozen orange juice. The hook was almost as large as the palm of the man’s hand, nearly as thick as a number-two pencil. Clark moved quickly but took care to thread the barb between the bones of the thumb and the forefinger so it grabbed plenty of meat. Once in, it wasn’t going anywhere. A second hook, also attached to the molded resin lure, Clark fed through the bones of the startled man’s wrist. Five feet of heavy leader ran from the bug-eyed bullet lure, ending in a snap swivel. This Clark hooked to an eye on the heavy-duty PENN reel, effectively attaching the man to eight hundred pounds of blue marlin via the hooks through his flesh.
Sato let go of the rod, then grabbed it again, realizing almost too late that if the marlin took it, he was not far behind. He growled at Clark, cursing vehemently, but the growl soon faded to a shuddering whimper.
Clark stood by with his head canted to one side, not saying a word.
“Help me!” Sato yowled.
“Help me help you,” Clark said, calm, almost whispering.
“I will . . . I cannot give you what you want . . . if . . .”
Captain Greg kept Hula Girl’s speed slow but steady forward, helping the fish peel line. The drag whirred like an electric motor, ticking off the seconds Sato had before he was jerked over the side with the rig.
Clark thought of reminding him of the fifteen-foot tiger shark they’d seen departing the harbor, but saw in the man’s eyes that there was no need.
Deckhand Dave comforted a battered and bleeding Takako.
Clark pulled a black knife from his pocket and flicked it open with the push of a button.
“Please!” Sato said. “I will tell you what you want.”
“I know,” Clark said, and cut the leader near where it connected to the reel, leaving the hooks in, threaded between Sato San’s bones.
Dave gave the girl’s shoulder a comforting pat and sprang to grab the rod as a terrified Sato struggled to detach himself from it with his good hand.
“This goes against my grain,” the deckhand muttered as he gave the marlin slack and flicked the rod a few times, dislodging the lure. He shook his head sadly as he spun the crank, reeling in the excess line.
Sato held his mangled hand aloft. “What about this?” he screamed, spit flying from his lips, anger overtaking fear now that he wasn’t connected to the fleeing fish. He dabbed gingerly at the hooks with his free hand. Blood dripped from his elbow, spattering the deck. He threw back his head and bellowed.
“Get these things out of me!”
“In time,” Clark said. “After we’ve had our talk.”
Sato grimaced in disbelief. “All of this,” he stammered, his voice cracking with emotion. “Because I hit my own bitch?”
Clark gave a wry shake of his head and then sent a lightning-fast right crashing into the man’s jaw.
“No,” he said. “This was for hitting her. The hooks are for wasting my time . . .”
* * *
—
I didn’t want to bug you in the heat of the moment,” Greg Armstrong said when they were all inside the air-conditioned cabin and Sato was writing up his statement and nursing a tall tumbler of whiskey against the pain in his injured hand.
