Dead or Alive Read online

  “There’s not much of that,” his father responded. “At least, not outside Hollywood.”

  “Not what it says in the papers.”

  “They still report Elvis sightings, too,” Arnie replied.

  “Heck, maybe it would be good if James Bond were real, but he isn’t,” the former President observed. It might have been the undoing of the Kennedy administration, which had started to buy in to the 007 fiction, except for an idiot named Oswald. So did history take its major turns at accidents, assassins, and bad luck? Maybe a decent conspiracy was possible once, but not anymore. Too many lawyers, too many reporters, too many bloggers and Handycams and digital cameras.

  “How do we fix it?”

  That caused Jack Senior’s head to look up—rather sadly, his son thought. “I tried once, remember?”

  “So then why is Arnie here?”

  “Since when did you become so curious?”

  “It’s my job to look into stuff and figure it all out.”

  “The family curse,” van Damm observed.

  That’s when Sally walked in. “Well, look who showed up.”

  “Finished dissecting your cadaver yet?” Junior asked.

  “The hard part’s putting it back together and having it walk back out the door,” Olivia Barbara Ryan shot back. “It beats handling money—dirty stuff, money, full of germs.”

  “Not when you do it by computer. Nice and clean that way.”

  “How’s my number-one girl?” the former President asked.

  “Well, I got the lettuce. Organic. The only way to go. Mom told me to tell you it’s time for you to grill the steaks.”

  Sally didn’t approve of steak, but it remained the one thing her father knew how to cook, along with burgers. Since it wasn’t summer, he had to do it on a gas grill in the kitchen instead of outside over charcoal. It was enough to get her father to stand up and head toward the kitchen, leaving Junior and Arnie together.

  “So, Mr. van Damm, is he going to do it?”

  “I think he has to, whether he accepts it yet or not. The country needs him to do it. And it’s Arnie now, Jack.”

  Jack sighed. “That’s one family business in which I have no interest. It doesn’t pay enough for all the heartbreak that comes along with it.”

  “Maybe so, but how do you say no to your country?”

  “I’ve never been asked,” Jack responded, lying to a minor degree.

  “The question is always internal. And your father is hearing it now. What’s he going to do? Hell, you’re his son. You know him better than I ever will.”

  “The hard part for Dad is us—Mom and the kids. I think his first loyalty is to us.”

  “As it should be. Tell me: Any nice girl in your life?” van Damm asked.

  “Not yet.”

  This wasn’t entirely true. He and Brenda had been dating for a month or so, and she was special, but Jack wasn’t sure she was that kind of special. Bring-home-to-the-parents special.

  “She’s out there, waiting to be found. The good news is that she’s looking for you right now, too.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. Question is, will I be old and gray before it happens?”

  “You in a hurry?”

  “Not especially.”

  Sally appeared in the doorway. “Dinner, for those who want to devour the flesh of some harmless and inoffensive creature, murdered in Omaha, probably.”

  “Well, he had a fulfilling life,” Jack observed.

  Arnie chimed in, “Oh, yeah, they brought the food right to him, lots of friends, all his own age, never had to walk too far, no wolves to worry about, good medical care to handle any diseases he might have had to worry about ...”

  “Just one thing,” Sally shot back, leading them down the steps. “They made him climb up a steep ramp into a one-critter cage and zapped his brains with an air hammer.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you, young lady, that a head of lettuce might scream when it’s cut off the stem?”

  “It’s hard to hear them,” Jack chimed in. “They have small vocal cords. We’re carnivores, Sally. That’s why we have so little enamel on our teeth.”

  “In that case, we are maladapted. Cholesterol kills us as soon as we’re past reproductive age.”

  “Christ, Sally, you want to run around the woods naked with a stone knife to live? What about your Ford Explorer?” Jack demanded. “And the steer that made our dinner also made the leather for your designer shoes. You can push the eco-freak stuff too far, remember?”

  “It becomes religion, Jack,” Arnie warned, “and you can’t hassle a person over religion.”

  “A lot of that going around. And not all of it’s expressed in words.”

  “True,” Arnie conceded. “But no sense in our adding to it.”

  “Okay, fine. Sally, tell us about the ozone hole,” Jack invited. He’d win that one. Sally liked having a tan too much.

  28

  AS VITALIY HAD PREDICTED, his charters didn’t drink vodka. He’d purchased four full liters to stock his own cupboard, but though they all smoked, they didn’t drink. It only confirmed what he suspected about them. Not that it mattered one way or another. Their money spent the same as anyone else’s.

  He’d beached his landing craft on a gentle gravel sloping shore, what passed for a beach here. The landing ramp he kept in the up position, lest a bear wander aboard. They were even heading toward prime hunting country, though the hunting season was now closed. While his charters had firearms, they were not of the type fit for big game. He’d thought about shooting one for his own purposes. It would make a good decoration for his wheelhouse, something for clients to remember him by. But he’d never found the time.

  The charter party was camped out in the cargo area. Vitaliy had set out plastic mattresses and some folding chairs. They sat there and smoked and talked quietly among themselves, not bothering him much at all. They’d even brought their own food. Not a bad idea. Vanya was not a gourmet cook by any means, and mainly fed himself on Russian Army rations, which he bought for cash from a supply sergeant at Arkhangel’sk.

  It was eerily quiet here. Airplanes flew too high to hear them, and even seeing their anticollision lights was difficult and rare enough, so remote from civilization was this part of Russia, home to the occasional adventurer or naturalist, as well as the local fishermen trying to wrest a meager living from the sea. To call this part of Russia an economic backwater was generous. Except for the moribund Russian Navy, there was nothing here for men to do, and half of that was cleaning up a mess or disaster that had gotten sailors killed, the poor sods.

  But that, he remembered, was what had brought him here, and for some reason he liked it. The air was always fresh, and the winters were beyond brisk, something a true Russian had in his blood, what made him different from the lesser European breeds.

  He checked his watch. The sun would rise at an early hour. He’d shake his charter party loose in five hours or so, let them drink their wake-up tea and eat their buttered bread for breakfast. He had bacon to supplement it but no eggs.

  In the morning he’d go out to sea and watch the merchant traffic. There was a surprising amount of that. It made more economic sense than either trucks or the rail line into the new oil fields and the gold-mining complex at Yessey. And they were building an oil pipeline to transport the oil into European Russia, funded by mostly American oil concerns. Locals called it the “American invasion.”

  Call it a day, he thought. He took a last slug of vodka and settled down on the mattress he’d laid on the deck of the wheelhouse, anticipating five or six hours of sleep.

  Save some extra scrutiny at Dallas customs, which Shasif had been told to expect, given his name and face, the plane change had gone smoothly. As instructed, he’d booked a roundtrip flight and was carrying luggage commensurate with a week’s stay in the United States. Similarly, he had arranged a rental car, booked himself into a hotel, and was well armed with brochures to local attractions,
as well as e-mails from friends in the area. Shasif assumed they were real people; either way, it was highly unlikely that the authorities would check.

  All the red-flag issues had been covered. Still, the inspection had been nerve-racking, but in the end, it was uneventful. He was waved through the checkpoint and beyond to the gate.

  Seven hours after leaving Toronto, he touched down at Los Angeles International Airport at 10:45 in the morning, a little more than two hours’ difference on his watch, having essentially traveled backward in time as he crossed the country.

  After clearing customs once again, this time under the even unfriendlier eyes of LAX’s TSA agents, Shasif made his way to the Alamo counter and waited patiently in line for fifteen minutes. Ten minutes after that he was in his Dodge Intrepid and heading east on Century Boulevard. The car came equipped with one of those navigation computers, so he pulled over at a gas station, punched the address into the computer, then pulled back out and started following the arrows on the computer’s screen.

  By the time he pulled onto the 405 heading north it was nearing the lunch hour, so the traffic was getting heavier. By the time he reached Highway 10, the Santa Monica Freeway, cars were moving at a sporadic thirty miles an hour. How people lived in such a place, Shasif couldn’t imagine. Certainly it was beautiful, but all the noise and commotion . . . How could anyone hope to hear the quiet voice of God? It was no wonder America was in such a state of moral confusion.

  The Santa Monica Freeway was moving at a steadier clip, so he reached his turn onto the Pacific Coast Highway within ten minutes. Another seven miles brought him to his destination, Topanga Beach. He pulled into the parking lot, which was three-quarters full, found a spot nearest the beach trail, and pulled in.

  He climbed out. The wind was brisk off the ocean, and in the distance he could hear the cawing of seabirds. Over the dunes he could see surfers, five or six of them, carving their way through the surf. Shasif walked through the parking lot and over a small rise covered with scrub brush and onto the service road. Fifty feet down the dirt tract a lone figure stood, staring out over the ocean. The man was of Arab descent. Shasif checked his watch. On time. He walked over to the man.

  “Excuse me,” Shasif said, “I’m looking for the Reel Inn. I think I may have missed it.”

  The man turned. His eyes were shielded by a pair of sunglasses. “You did,” he replied. “By about three hundred feet. If you are looking for chowder, though, I would try Gladstone’s. The prices are higher, but the food’s better.”

  “Thank you.”

  That done, Shasif didn’t know what else to say. Just hand him the package and leave? The man made the decision for him, holding out his hand. Shasif drew the CD-ROM case from his jacket pocket and gave it to the man, noticing as he did the scars on his contact’s hands.

  Fire, Shasif thought.

  “You’re staying for a while?” the man asked.

  “Yes. Three days.”

  “Which hotel?”

  “The Doubletree. City of Commerce.”

  “Stay by your phone. We may have something for you. You’ve done well. If you’re interested, we may ask you to play a larger role.”

  “Of course. Anything I can do.”

  “We’ll be in touch.”

  And then the man was gone, walking back down the road.

  29

  JACK RYAN SR.’S private phone rang, and he lifted it, hoping for a distraction from writing. “Jack Ryan.”

  “Mr. President?”

  “Well, yeah, I used to be,” Ryan said, leaning back in his chair. “Who’s this?”

  “Sir, this is Marion Diggs. They made me FORCECOM. I’m at Fort McPherson, Georgia—Atlanta, actually.”

  “Four stars now?” Ryan remembered that Diggs had made something of a name for himself a few years back in Saudi Arabia. Pretty good battlefield commander as Buford-Six.

  “Yes, sir, that’s right.”

  “How’s life in Atlanta?”

  “Not too bad. The command has its moments. Sir—” His voice became a little uneasy. “Sir, I need to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “I’d prefer to do it in person, sir, not over the phone.”

  “Okay. Can you come here?”

  “Yes, sir, I have a twin-engine aircraft at my disposal. I can be to BWI airport in, oh, two and a half hours or so. Then I can drive down to your home.”

  “Fair enough. Give me an ETA and I’ll have the Secret Service pick you up. Is that agreeable?”

  “Yes, sir, that would be fine. I can leave here in fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay, that puts you at BWI around, oh, one-thirty or so?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Make it so, General. You’ll be met at the airport.”

  “Thank you, sir. See you in a few hours.”

  Ryan hung up and buzzed Andrea Price-O’Day.

  “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “Got company coming, General Marion Diggs. He’s FORCECOM from Atlanta. Flying into BWI. Can you arrange to have him picked up and driven here?”

  “Certainly, sir. When’s he getting in?”

  “About one-thirty, at the general aviation terminal.”

  “We’ll have somebody right there.”

  The General’s twin-prop U-21 arrived and did the usual rollout, right up to a Ford Crown Victoria. The general was easy to spot in his green shirt with four silver stars on the epaulets. Andrea had driven up herself, and the two didn’t talk much on the ride south to Peregrine Cliff.

  For his part, Ryan had set up lunch himself, including a pound and a half of corned beef from Attman’s on Lombard Street in Baltimore. The drive down and the general’s arrival had been handled fairly stealthily. Less than forty minutes after deplaning, Diggs was at the door. Ryan got it himself.

  Ryan had met Diggs only once or twice before. A man of equal height, and black as a hunk of anthracite coal, everything about him said “soldier,” including, Jack saw, a little bit of unease.

  “Hey, General, welcome,” Ryan said, taking the man’s hand. “What can I do for you?”

  “Sir, I’m—well, I’m a little uneasy about this, but I have a problem I think you ought to know about.”

  “Okay, come on in and build a sandwich. Coke okay?”

  “Yes, thank you, sir.” Ryan led him into the kitchen. After both men had assembled their sandwiches, Ryan took his seat. Andrea floated around on the periphery. General or not, he wasn’t exactly a regular here, and Andrea’s job was to keep Ryan alive against all hazards. “So, what’s the problem?”

  “Sir, President Kealty is going to try and prosecute a U.S. Army sergeant for alleged murder in Afghanistan.”

  “Murder?”

  “That’s what the justice department is calling it. They sent down an Assistant Attorney General to my command yesterday, and he questioned me personally. “As commander in chief of Forces Command, I legally own all the operational forces of the U.S. Army—other branches, too, but this is really an Army matter. The soldier involved is a Company First Sergeant (E-8) named Sam Driscoll. He’s a special ops soldier, part of the 75th Ranger Regiment at Fort Benning. I pulled his personnel package. He’s a very serious soldier, combat record is excellent, a poster-boy soldier and a hell of a good Ranger.”

  “Okay.” Ryan thought about that addition. He’d been to Fort Benning and had gotten the standard VIP tour of the base. The Rangers, all spit and polish for that day, had impressed him as supremely fit kids for whom killing was at the top of their job description. Special operations types, the American counterpart to the British SAS regiment. “What’s the problem?”

  “Sir, a while back we got an intel blip that the Emir might be in one particular cave, and so we detailed a special operation to go in and try and bag him. It turned out he wasn’t there. The problem, sir, is that Driscoll killed nine bad guys, and some people are upset about how he did that.”

  Ryan was two bites into his sandwich. “And?”<
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  “And it came to the President’s attention, and he directed DOJ to prosecute him for—that is, to investigate this incident for—a possible murder investigation, since it may or may not have violated an executive order for battlefield conduct. Driscoll took down nine people, some of them asleep.”

  “Murder? Awake or asleep, they were enemy combatants, right?”

  “Yes, sir. Driscoll had an adverse tactical situation, and in his judgment as the senior NCO on the scene, he had to eliminate them before continuing the mission. And so he did. But the guys at Justice—all political appointees, if that matters—seem to think he should have arrested them instead of killing them.”

  “Where does Kealty come into this?” Jack asked, sipping some of his Coke.

  “He read the report, and he was upset by it. So he brought it to the AG’s attention, and then the AG sent one of his people down to me to commence the investigation.” Diggs set his sandwich down. “Sir, this is hard for me. I swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, and the President is my commander in chief, but goddamn it, this is one of my soldiers, a good soldier, doing a tough job. I have a duty to be loyal to the President, but—”

  “But you have a responsibility to be loyal to your sergeants,” Ryan finished the statement.

  “Yes, sir. Driscoll might not be much in the great scheme of things, but he’s a fine soldier.”

  Ryan thought this one over. Driscoll was only a soldier to Kealty, a low form of life. Had he been a union bus driver it might be different, but the U.S. Army didn’t have unions yet. For Diggs it was a question of justice, and a question of morale, which would suffer throughout the armed forces if this soldier went to prison, or even to a general court-martial over this incident.

  “Where’s the law on this?” Jack asked.

  “Sir, it’s a bit of a muddle. The President did send out orders, but they were not terribly clear, and anyway, such orders do not generally apply to special operations. His mission was to locate and capture this Emir guy if they found him—or kill him if that’s how it worked out. Soldiers are not policemen. They’re not trained for it, and they’re crummy at it when they try. From where I sit, Driscoll didn’t do anything wrong at all. Under the rules of war, you don’t have to warn an enemy before you kill him. It’s his job to look out for his own safety, and if he screws up, well, that’s his tough luck. Shooting a guy in the back is perfectly all right on a battlefield. That’s how soldiers are trained. In this case, four bad guys were asleep in the racks, and Sergeant Driscoll saw to it that they didn’t wake up. End of story.”