Dead or Alive

  God save us from the shortsighted politicalization of intelligence.

  “Then let’s think out of the box,” Mary Pat said. “We’ve got tappable assets there—just not ours. Let’s reach out for some good old-fashioned ally-generated intelligence.”

  “The Brits?” Turnbull asked.

  “Yep. They’ve got more experience in Central Asia than anyone else, including the Russians. Couldn’t hurt to ask. Have somebody check the dead drops, see if they’re still viable.”

  “And then?”

  “We cross that bridge when we get there.”

  At the end of the conference table, Margolin tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling for a moment. “The problem isn’t the asking; the problem is getting permission to ask.”

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Cummings said.

  He wasn’t, Mary Pat knew. While Kilborn’s deputies in intelligence and Clandestine hadn’t guzzled the Kool-Aid like the DCI had, they were certainly imbibing. In choosing Kilborn, President Kealty had ensured that the CIA’s upper echelons would toe the executive branch’s new line, regardless of the consequences to the agency or to the intelligence community at large.

  “So don’t ask,” Mary Pat said simply.

  “What?” replied Margolin.

  “If we don’t ask, we can’t get a no. We’re still spitballing here, right? Nothing’s operational, nothing’s funded. We’re just fishing. It’s what we do; it’s what they pay us to do. Since when do we have to ask anyone about a little chat with an ally?”

  Margolin looked hard at her for a few moments, then shrugged. The gesture said nothing and everything. She knew her boss well enough to know she’d struck a chord. Like her, Margolin loved his career but not at the expense of doing his job.

  “We never talked about this,” Margolin said. “Let me run it up the flagpole. If we’re flamed, we’ll do it your way.”

  This was the real Russia, Vitaliy thought, with the harshest winters in a nation famous for bitter weather. The polar bears here were fat now, covered in a thick layer stored up for insulation, enough to allow them to sleep the months away in caves hollowed out amid the pressure ridges and seracs on the ice, waking occasionally to snatch a seal that ventured too close to a breathing hole.

  Vitaliy stood up and shook himself awake, then shuffled into the galley to get the water started for his morning tea. The temperature was just above freezing—what passed for a warm fall day. No new ice had formed overnight, at least nothing his boat couldn’t crush or bypass, but the decks were coated in an inch-thick layer of frozen spindrift, something he and Vanya would have to chop free, lest the boat grow top-heavy. Capsizing in these waters meant almost certain death; without immersion suits, a man could expect to be unconscious within four minutes and dead within fifteen, and while he had enough suits aboard for everyone, his passengers had shown little interest in his explanation of their use.

  His charter party was awake, struggling to stamp their feet and fling their arms across their chests. They all lit their cigarettes and moved aft to the boat’s primitive head facilities. All ate the bread and ice-hard butter set out for breakfast.

  Vitaliy gave it an hour to get the day started, then he fired up his diesels and backed off the gravel beach on which they’d spent the night. His charts were already laid out, and he headed east at ten knots. Vanya spelled him at the wheel. They listened to an old but serviceable AM radio, mostly classical music beamed out from Archangel. It helped pass the time. There were ten hours of steaming remaining to their destination. About 160 kilometers. Ten hours at ten knots, so said the chart.

  “That doesn’t look good,” Vanya said, pointing off the starboard bow.

  On the eastern horizon was a line of swollen black clouds, so low they almost seemed to merge with the ocean’s surface.

  “Not good at all,” Vitaliy agreed. And it would get worse, he knew. To reach their destination they would have to pass through the storm—either that or go far out of their way, or even ground the boat and wait it out.

  “Ask Fred to come up, will you?” Vitaliy said.

  Vanya went below and returned a minute later with the leader of the charter group. “A problem, Captain?”

  Vitaliy pointed through the window at the squall line. “That.”

  “Rain?”

  “It doesn’t rain here, Fred. It storms. The only question is, to what degree? And that mess there, I’m afraid, is going to be bad.” Worse still for a T-4 slab-sided landing craft with one meter of draft, he didn’t add.

  “How long until we reach it?”

  “Three hours—a little longer, maybe.”

  “Can we weather it?”

  “Probably, but nothing is certain out here. Either way, it’s going to be rough going.”

  “What are our alternatives?” asked Fred.

  “Return to where we just overnighted or head south and try to get around the edge of the storm. Either option will cost us a day or two of travel time.”

  “Unacceptable,” Fred replied.

  “It will be dicey, going through that—and you and your men are going to be miserable.”

  “We will manage. Perhaps a bonus for your trouble will make the inconvenience more palatable?”

  Vitaliy shrugged. “I’m game if you are.”

  “Proceed.”

  Two hours later he saw a ship on the horizon, heading west. Probably a supply ship, coming back from delivering her cargo of oil-drilling equipment to the new oil field discovered farther east, up the Lena River, south of Tiksi. Judging by the ship’s wake, she was making her best speed, obviously trying to outpace the very storm into which they were headed.

  Vanya appeared at his side. “Engines are fine. We’re locked down tight.” Vitaliy had asked him to prepare the boat for the impending weather. What they couldn’t do was either prepare their guests for what was to come or prepare for what the sea might do to the boat. Mother Nature was fickle and cruel.

  Earlier, Vitaliy had asked Fred to have his men lend a hand in de-icing the boat, something they did despite their unsteady legs and seasick green pallor. While half of them chopped at the ice with sledgehammers and axes, the other half, under the supervision of Vanya, had used grain shovels to scoop the loosened chunks of ice overboard.

  “How about after this we move to Sochi and run a boat there?” Vanya asked his captain after releasing the passengers to go below and rest.

  “Too hot there. That’s no place for a man to live.” The usual arctic mentality. Real men lived and worked in the cold, and boasted how tough they were. And besides, it made the vodka taste better.

  Ten miles off their bow the storm loomed, a roiling gray-black wall that seemed to visibly surge forward before Vitaliy’s eyes. “Vanya, go below and give our guests a refresher course on the immersion suits.”

  Vanya turned toward the ladder.

  “And make sure they pay attention this time,” Vitaliy added.

  As a captain, he had a professional responsibility to ensure the safety of his passengers, but more important, he doubted whoever his party worked for would be forgiving, should he get them all killed.

  An idiotic exercise, Musa Merdasan thought, watching the gnomelike Russian man unfold the orange survival suit on the deck. First, no rescue ships would reach them in time, suit or no suit; second, none of his men would be donning the suits in any event. If Allah saw fit to give them over to the sea, they would accept their fate. Moreover, Merdasan didn’t want any of them being fished from the sea at all; if they were, he prayed it would be in an unidentifiable state. That was something to consider, how to ensure neither the captain and his deckhand survived any such catastrophe, lest the nature of the trip and their passengers be scrutinized. He couldn’t count on a gun if they went into the water. Knife, then, preferably before they abandoned ship. And perhaps slit open their bellies to make sure they sank.

  “First you lay the suit flat on the deck, unzipped, and then you sit down
with your rear end just above the lowermost point of the zipper,” the Russian was saying.

  Merdasan and his men were, of course, following along, doing their best to appear attentive. None of them appeared well, though, the building seas having leached the color from their faces. The cabin stank of vomit and sweat and overcooked vegetables.

  “Legs go in first, followed by each arm in turn, followed by the hood. Once that’s done, you roll to your knees, pull the zipper fully closed, and close the Velcro flaps over the lower half of your face.”

  The Russian went from man to man, making sure each one of them was following his instructions. Satisfied, he looked around and said, “Any questions?”

  There were none.

  “If you go overboard, your EPIRB—”

  “Our what?” asked one of the men.

  “Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon—the thing attached to your collar—will activate automatically as soon as it is submerged.”

  “Any questions about that part?”

  There were none.

  “Okay, I suggest you get in your bunks and hold on.”

  Though Vitaliy knew what to expect, the speed and ferocity with which the storm hit was jarring nevertheless. The sky went night-black around them, and within five minutes the sea went from relative calmness, with six- to eight-foot swells, to a roiling surface and twenty-foot waves that crashed into the bow ramp like the hand of God itself.

  Great plumes of spray and foam billowed over the slab sides and pelted the wheelhouse windows like handfuls of hurled gravel, obliterating Vitaliy’s vision for ten seconds before the wipers could compensate, only to clear in time to give him a glimpse of the next wave. Every few seconds, tons of seawater broke over the starboard rail and surged knee-deep across the deck, overloading the scuppers, which couldn’t keep up with the volume. Hands clenched tightly around the wheel, Vitaliy could feel the helm growing sluggish as the trapped water crashed from beam to beam against the gunwales.

  “Get below and mind the engines and the pumps,” Vitaliy told Vanya, who lurched to the ladder.

  Joggling the dual throttles, Vitaliy struggled to keep the bow pointed into the oncoming waves. To let the boat swing broadside into the surge was to invite a fatal roll that would capsize them. The flat-bottomed T-4 had virtually no ability to snap itself upright beyond anything more than a fifteen-degree roll. Capsized in a trough, the boat would go under within a minute or two.

  On the other hand, Vitaliy was too aware of the bow ramp’s structural limitations. Though he and Vanya had worked hard to ensure that the ramp was secure and water-resistant, there was no way around its design: It was meant to drop flat on a beach to disgorge soldiers. With each crashing wave, the ramp shuddered, and even over the roar of the storm, Vitaliy could hear the metal-on-metal hammering of the inch-thick securing pins.

  Another wave loomed over the rail and broke, half of it shearing off and cascading over the deck, the other half slamming into the wheelhouse windows. The boat lurched to port. Vitaliy lost his footing and pitched forward, his forehead slamming into the console. He regained his feet and blinked rapidly, vaguely aware of something wet and warm running down his temple. He took his hand from the wheel and touched his forehead; his fingers came back bloody. Not too bad, though, he decided. A couple stitches.

  From the intercom, Vanya’s muffled voice: “Pump . . . failed . . . trying restart ...”

  Damn. One pump they could do without, but Vitaliy knew most boats sank not from a single catastrophic incident but from a domino effect of them, one after the other, until the boat’s vital functions were overwhelmed. And if that happened out here . . . It didn’t bear thinking about.

  Sixty seconds passed, then Vanya again: “Pump restarted!”

  “Understood!” Vitaliy replied.

  From below he heard a voice shout, “No, don’t! Come back!”

  Vitaliy scooted to his right and pressed his face to the side window. Aft he saw a figure stumble through the cabin door and onto the pitching deck. It was one of Fred’s men.

  “What the devil ...”

  The man stumbled, fell to his knees. Vomit spewed from his mouth. He was panicked, Vitaliy now saw. Trapped belowdecks, the man’s instinct to escape had overwhelmed the logical part of his brain.

  Vitaliy reached for the engine-room intercom. “Vanya, there’s a man on the afterdeck—”

  The boat’s stern was tossed up in the air. As it dropped back down, a rogue wave struck the starboard quarter. The man, already airborne, was tossed sideways and slammed into the gunwale. He hung there for a moment, draped over the side like a rag doll, legs on deck, torso hanging in space, then tipped over and disappeared.

  “Man overboard, man overboard!” Vitaliy shouted over the boatwide intercom. He peered through the windows, looking for a gap in the crests so he could come about.

  “Don’t,” he heard a voice say behind him.

  He turned to see Fred standing at the top of the ladder, both hands clenching the safety railing. The front of his shirt was vomit-stained.

  “What?” Vitaliy asked.

  “He’s gone; forget him.”

  “Are you insane? We can’t—”

  “If you turn the boat around, we risk being capsized, yes?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “He knew the risks, Captain. I’m not going to let his mistake jeopardize the rest of us.”

  Vitaliy knew Fred was logically correct, but to abandon a man to the sea without even trying to recover him seemed inhuman. And to do it without the slightest trace of emotion on one’s face . . .

  As if sensing Vitaliy’s indecision, the man known as Fred said, “My men are my responsibility; yours is the safety of the boat and its passengers, true?”

  “True.”

  “Then we continue.”

  39

  HELLO?” former President Jack Ryan said. He still liked to answer his own phone, at least this one.

  “Mr. President?”

  “Yeah, who’s this?” Whoever it was, he had access to Jack’s private line. There weren’t many of those.

  “John Clark. Just got back from the UK day before yesterday.”

  “John, how’re you doing? So they did it, huh? Sent the Yankee packing.”

  “Afraid so. Anyway, Ding and I are home. Reason I called, well, maybe we both owe you a courtesy call. Is it okay?”

  “Hell, yes. Come on over for lunch. Tell me when.”

  “Maybe an hour and a half?”

  “Okay, lunch is fine. See you about eleven?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The name’s still Jack, remember?”

  Clark chuckled. “I’ll try to remember.”

  And the phone went dead. Ryan switched lines and beeped Andrea.

  “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “Two friends coming over about eleven. John Clark and Domingo Chavez. Remember ’em?”

  “Yes, sir. Okay, I’ll put them on the list,” she replied in a studiously neutral voice. These two people, she remembered, were of the dangerous sort, though they seemed loyal enough. As a special agent of the United States Secret Service, she trusted nobody at all. “For lunch?”

  “Probably.”

  It was a pleasant drive east on U.S. Route 50, then south before reaching Annapolis. Clark found that re-adapting to driving on the right side of the road after several years driving on the left was almost automatic. Evidently the programming of a lifetime easily overcame the adjustments he’d made in the UK, though he occasionally had to think about it. The green signs helped. The corresponding signs in England and Wales had been blue, and had been a convenient reminder that he’d been in a foreign land, albeit one with better beer.

  “So what’s the plan?” Chavez asked.

  “We tell him we’ve signed on.”

  “And about Junior?”

  “What you decide is up to you, Ding, but here’s how I see it: What father and son tell one another is their business, not ours.
Jack Junior is an adult. What he does with his life is his business, and who he includes in that loop is his business, too.”

  “Yeah, I hear you, but man, if he got hurt . . . Christ almighty, I wouldn’t want to be around for that shit storm.”

  Neither would I, Clark thought.

  “But then again, what could you have said?” Ding continued. “The man asks you to train him, you can’t hardly say no.”

  “You got that right.” The truth was, Clark felt bad about not telling Ryan Senior—they went back a long way, after all, and he owed the former President a lot—but he’d built a big part of his life on keeping other people’s secrets. This was personal, of course, but Jack was a big boy with a decent head on his shoulders. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try to convince Jack to tell his father about working at The Campus.

  After forty minutes they turned right onto Peregrine Cliff Road, doubtless under TV surveillance from this point on, and Secret Service agents would be on their computers to check out his license plate numbers, then to determine that he was driving a rental car, and they couldn’t access Hertz’s computer quickly enough to identify the renter. That would get them slightly worried, though only in an institutional sense, something the USSS did well. Finally came the stone pillar that marked the entrance to Ryan’s quarter-mile driveway.

  “Please identify,” said the remote-control voice in the pillar’s speaker.

  “Rainbow Six inbound to see SWORDSMAN.”

  “Proceed,” the voice replied, followed by an electronic tone and the hydraulic sound of the gate controls being told to open.

  “You didn’t tell them about me,” Chavez objected.

  “Just keep your hands in the open.” Clark chuckled.

  Andrea Price-O’Day stood on the porch as they drove up. The detail chief herself, Clark noted. Maybe they thought he was important. Being a friend of the boss had its uses.

  “Hello, Chief,” she said in greeting.

  She likes me? Clark thought. Only his friends called him Chief.