Dead or Alive Read online

  “Is this going to go any further?”

  “The Assistant AG seemed to be pretty worked up about it. I tried to explain the facts of life to him, but he just tried to explain the facts of life back to me. Sir, I’ve been a soldier for thirty-four years. I ain’t never heard anything like this.” He paused. “The President sent us there. Just like into Iraq, but he’s running this like—like Vietnam was once, I suppose. We’ve lost a lot of people, good people, to their micromanagement, but this one—Jesus, sir, I just don’t know what to do.”

  “Not much I can do about it, General, I’m not the President anymore.”

  “Yes, sir, but I had to go to somebody. Ordinarily I report directly to the SecDef, but that’s a waste of time.”

  “Have you spoken with President Kealty?”

  “Waste of time, sir. He’s not very interested in talking to people in uniform.”

  “And I am?”

  “Yes, sir. You were always somebody we could talk to.”

  “And what do you want me to do?”

  “Sir, Sergeant Driscoll deserves a fair shake. We sent him into the mountains with a mission. The mission was not accomplished, but that wasn’t his fault. We’ve drilled a lot of dry holes there. This turned out to be just one more, but goddamn it, sir, if we send any more troops into those hills, and if we clobber this guy for doing his job, every hole we drill will be dry.”

  “Okay, General, you’ve made your point. We have to support our people. Anything this guy should have done different?”

  “No, sir. He’s a by-the-book soldier. Everything he did was consistent with his training and experience. The Ranger Regiment—well, they’re paid killers, maybe, but sometimes that’s a useful sort of thing to have in your bag. War is about killing. We don’t send messages. We don’t try to educate our enemies. Once we go into the field, our job is to kill them. Some people don’t like that, but that’s what we’re paid for.”

  “Okay, I’ll look into this and maybe raise a little hell. What are the ground rules?”

  “I brought a copy of Sergeant Driscoll’s report for you to read, along with the name of the Assistant AG who tried to ram it up my ass. Goddamn it, sir, this is a good soldier.”

  “Fair enough, General. Anything else?”

  “No, sir. Thanks for lunch.”

  He’d had maybe one bite of his sandwich, Ryan saw. Diggs walked back out to the car.

  30

  THE FLIGHT was uneventful. The rollout ended, and they’d been on the aircraft for eight and a half hours when the transfer bus pulled up to the left-front door of the 777. Clark didn’t sit. He’d done enough of that to make his legs stiff. The same was true of his grandson, who looked excitedly out at his native land—he’d actually been born in the UK, but he already had a baseball and his first glove. He’d be playing T-ball in six months or so, and he’d be eating real hot dogs as an American boy was supposed to. On a roll, with mustard, and maybe some onions or relish.

  “Glad to be home, baby?” Ding asked Patsy.

  “I liked it over there, and I’ll miss my friends, but home is home.”

  Despite urging to go on ahead from both Clark and Chavez, their wives had gotten off the plane at Heathrow, and no amount of argument had changed their minds. “We’re going home together,” Sandy had declared, firmly bringing the discussion to an end.

  The Tripoli op had gone off without any significant hitches. Eight bad guys KIA with only minor injuries among the hostages. Within five minutes of Clark’s “go” to Masudi, local ambulances pulled up to the embassy to treat the hostages, most of whom were suffering from dehydration but little else. Minutes after that, the Swedish Säkerhetspolisen and Rikskriminalpolisen arrived and took charge of the embassy, and two hours after that, Rainbow was back aboard the same Piaggio P180 Avanti they’d flown in on, heading north for Taranto, then London.

  The official debrief of the operation with Stanley, Weber, and the others would come later, probably via secure webcam once Clark and Chavez had settled back into life in the United States. Including them in the debrief was as much a courtesy as it was a necessity, and probably a little more of the former. He and Ding were officially separated from Rainbow, and Stanley had been right there in Tripoli, so aside from the “lessons learned” postmortem they did for each mission, Clark had little to offer the official report.

  “How you feeling?” John Clark asked his wife now.

  “I’ll sleep it off.” Westbound jet lag was always easier to deal with. The eastbound kind could be a killer. She stretched. Even first-class seats on British Airways had their limitations. Air travel, while convenient, is rarely good for you. “Got the passports and stuff?”

  “Right here, babe,” Ding assured her, tapping his jacket pocket. J.C. must have been one of the youngest Americans ever to have a black diplomatic passport. But Ding also had his .45 Beretta automatic pistol, and the gold badge and ID card that said he was a deputy U.S. marshal, which was very useful indeed for an armed man in an international airport. He even still had his British carry permit—rare enough that the Queen practically had to sign it. The former allowed them to speed through customs and immigration.

  After customs, they found in the public reception area a nondescript man holding a cardboard card with CLARK written on it, and the party of five moved to where he was.

  “How was the flight?” The usual question.

  “Fine.” The usual answer.

  “I’m parked outside. Blue Plymouth Voyager with Virginia tags. You’ll be staying at the Key Bridge Marriott, two top-floor suites.” Which will have been fully swept, he didn’t have to add. The Marriott chain did a lot of government business, especially the one at the Key Bridge, overlooking Washington.

  “And tomorrow?” John asked.

  “You’re scheduled for eight-fifteen.”

  “Who are we seeing?” Clark asked.

  The man shrugged. “It’ll be on the seventh floor.”

  Clark and Chavez traded an oh, shit look, but for all that it wasn’t surprising, and both were ready for a lengthy night’s sleep that would probably end about 0530 at the latest, but this time without the three-mile run and the daily dozen setting-up exercises.

  “How was England?” The receptionist/driver asked on the way out.

  “Civilized. Some of it was pretty exciting,” Chavez told him, but then realized that the official greeter was a junior field officer who hadn’t a clue what they’d been doing in Old Blighty. Probably just as well. He didn’t have the look of former military, though you couldn’t always tell.

  “You catch any rugby while you were over there?” their escort asked.

  “A little. You have to be nuts to play that without pads,” Clark offered. “But they are a little peculiar over there.”

  “Maybe they’re just tougher than we are.”

  The ride toward D.C. was uneventful, helped by the fact that they were just ahead of the evening rush hour and not going all the way into the city. The effects of jet lag struck even these experienced travelers, and by the time they got to the hotel, the presence of bellmen seemed a very good idea. Inside five minutes they were on the top floor in adjoining suites, and J.C. was already looking at the king-size bed he’d have to himself. Patsy gave the same sort of look to the bathtub—it was smaller than the monsters the Brits built, but there was room to sit down, and a limitless supply of hot water just on the other side of the tap. Ding picked a chair and got the remote, and settled in to get reacquainted with American television.

  Next door, John Clark left the unpacking to Sandy and raided the minibar for a miniature of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7. The Brits didn’t understand bourbon or its Tennessee cousin, and the first stiff shot, even without ice, was a rare delight.

  “What’s tomorrow?” Sandy asked.

  “Have to have a meeting on the seventh floor.”

  “Who with?”

  “He didn’t say. Probably a deputy assistant director of operations. I haven’
t kept track of the lineup at Langley. Whoever he is, he’ll tell me about the great retirement package they have set up for me. Sandy, I think it’s about time for me to hang it up.”

  He couldn’t add that he’d never really considered the possibility of living this long. So his luck hadn’t quite run out? Remarkable. He’d have to buy himself a laptop and get serious about an autobiography. But for the moment: stand up, stretch, pick up his suit jacket and hang it in the closet before Sandy yelled at him for being a slob again. On the lapel was the sky-blue ribbon and five white stars that denoted the Medal of Honor. Jack Ryan had arranged that for him, after looking into his Navy service record and a lengthy document written by Vice Admiral Dutch Maxwell, God rest his soul. He’d been away when Maxwell had checked out at eighty-three—he’d been in Iran, of all places, trying to see if a network of agents had been completely rolled up by Iranian security. That process had begun, but John had managed to get five of them out of the country alive, via the UAE, along with their families. Sonny Maxwell was still flying, a senior captain for Delta, father of four. The medal was for getting Sonny out of North Vietnam. It now seemed like something that had happened during the last ice age. But he had this little ribbon to show for it, and that beat a kick in the balls. Somewhere packed away were the mess jacket and black shoes of a chief bosun’s mate, along with the gold Budweiser badge of a Navy SEAL. In most Navy NCO clubs he wouldn’t have been allowed to buy his own beers, but Jesus, today the chiefs looked so damned young. Once they’d seemed like Noah himself.

  But the good news was that he wasn’t dead yet. And he could look forward to honorable retirement, and maybe doing that autobiography, if Langley ever let him publish it. Not very likely. He knew a lot of things that ought not to be known, and he’d done one or two things that probably ought not to have been done, though at the time his life had ridden on that particular horse. Things like that didn’t always make sense to the people who sat at desks in the Old Headquarters Building, but for them the big part of the day was finding a good parking place and whether or not the cafeteria had spice cake on the dessert stack.

  He could see Washington, D.C., out the window. The Capitol Building, the Lincoln Memorial, and George’s marble obelisk, plus the surpassingly ugly buildings that housed various government departments.

  To John Terrence Clark it was just a whole city composed of headquarters pukes for whom reality was a file folder in which the papers were supposed to be properly filled out, and if a man had to shed blood to make it that way, well, that was a matter of only distant interest. Hundreds of thousands of them. Most of them had wives—or husbands—and kids, but even so it was hard not to regard them with distaste—and, on occasion, with outright hatred. But they had their world, and he had his. They might overlap, but they never really met.

  “Glad to be back, John?” Sandy asked.

  “Yeah, sorta.” Change was hard but inevitable. As far as where his life would go from here . . . time would tell.

  The next morning Clark turned right off the George Washington Parkway, looping to the left and through the gatehouse, whose armed guard had his tag number on his list of “okay to admit” strangers. John was allowed to park in the visitors’ area just in front and to the left of the big canopy.

  “So how long before they tell us to find new employment, John?” Domingo asked.

  “I give it maybe forty minutes. They’ll be polite about it, I’m sure.”

  And with that assessment, they exited his rented Chevy and walked to the front door, there to be met by an SPO, or security and protective officer, whom they didn’t know.

  “Mr. Clark, Mr. Chavez. I’m Pete Simmons. Welcome home.”

  “Good to be back,” John responded. “You are . . . ?”

  “I’m an SPO, waiting for a field assignment. Got out of The Farm two months ago.”

  “Who was your training officer?”

  “Max DuPont.”

  “Max hasn’t retired yet? Good man.”

  “Good teacher. He told us a few stories about you two, and we saw the training film you did back in ’02.”

  “I remember that,” Chavez observed. “Shaken, not stirred.” He had himself a brief laugh.

  “I don’t drink martinis, Domingo, remember?”

  “Not as good-looking as Sean Connery, either. What did you learn from the film, Simmons?”

  “Keep your options open, and don’t walk in the middle of the street.” Those were, in fact, two good lessons for a field spook.

  “So who’re we meeting?” Clark asked.

  “Assistant Deputy Director Charles Sumner Alden, ADDO.”

  “Political appointment?”

  “Correct. Kennedy School, Harvard, yeah. He’s friendly enough, but sometimes I wonder if he really approves of what we do here.”

  “I wonder what Ed and Mary Pat are doing now.”

  “Ed’s retired,” Simmons told him. “Working on a book, I hear. Mary Pat’s over at NCTC. She’s a pistol.”

  “Best instincts in a field spook I ever encountered,” Clark said. “What she says, you can take to the bank.”

  “Makes you wonder why President Kealty didn’t keep her and Ed on the payroll,” Chavez observed.

  Unclean, unclean, Clark thought. “How’s morale?” Clark asked on the way through the security card readers. Simmons handled that for them with a wave to the armed guard at the end of the gate line.

  “Could be better. We have a lot of people running around in circles. They’re punching up the intelligence directorate, but mine was the last class through The Farm for a while, and none of us have field assignments yet.”

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “Cop, Boston city police. I was hired under Plan Blue. My degree is from Boston University, not Harvard. Languages.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Serbian, some Arabic, and a little Pashtun. I was supposed to go out to Monterey to polish them up, but that got shelved.”

  “You’re going to need the last two,” John advised. “And work on the jogging. Afghanistan—I spent some time there back in the mid-’80s, and it’ll wear out a mountain goat.”

  “That bad?”

  “The people there fight wars for fun, and there ain’t no good guys. I found myself feeling sorry for the Russians. The Afghans are tough people. I guess in that environment you have to be, but Islam is just an overlay on a tribal culture that goes back three-thousand-plus years.”

  “Thanks for the tip. I’ll cross it off my list of preferences,” Simmons said as the elevator reached the seventh floor.

  He dropped them off at the secretary’s desk. The plush carpet told them that the office was an important one—it looked fairly new. Clark took a magazine and paged through it while Domingo stared placidly at the wall. His former life as a soldier allowed him to tolerate boredom fairly well.

  31

  AFTER FORTY MINUTES, Charles Alden came to the anteroom, smiling like a used-car salesman. Tall and thin like a runner, old enough to seem important to himself, whatever he’d done to earn this post. Clark was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the doubts were piling up rapidly.

  “So you’re the famous Mr. Clark,” Alden said in greeting—and without an apology for keeping them waiting, Clark noted.

  “Not too famous,” Clark replied.

  “Well, at least in this community.” Alden led his guest into his office, not inviting Chavez to join them. “I just read through your file.”

  In fifteen minutes? Clark wondered. Maybe a speed-reader. “I hope it was illuminating.”

  “Colorful. Getting the Gerasimov family out of Russia was quite a job. And the mission in Tokyo, with a Russian cover . . . impressive. Ex-SEAL . . . I see President Ryan got you your Medal of Honor. Twenty-nine years with the Agency. Quite a record,” Alden said, waving Clark to a chair; it was smaller than Alden’s own chair and designed to be uncomfortable. Power game, Clark thought.

  “I just did the job
s they gave me, best I could, and I managed to survive them all.”

  “Your missions tended to get somewhat physical.”

  Clark shrugged this off.

  “We try to avoid that now,” Alden observed.

  “I tried to avoid it back then. Best-laid plans.”

  “You know, Jim Greer left behind a lengthy document about how you came to the Agency’s attention.”

  “Admiral Greer was a particularly fine and honorable gentleman,” John observed, instantly on guard for what that file might say. James Greer had liked his written records. Even he’d had his weaknesses. Well, everybody did.

  “He discovered Jack Ryan, too, correct?”

  “And a lot of others.”

  “So I have learned.”

  “Excuse me, sir, doing research, are we?”

  “Not really, but I like to know who I’m talking to. You’ve done some recruiting, too. Chavez, for example.”

  “He’s a good officer. Even if you discount the stuff we did in England, Ding has been there when our country needed him. Got himself educated, too.”

  “Oh, yeah, he did get that master’s degree at George Mason, didn’t he?”

  “Right.”

  “A little physical, though, like you. Not really a field officer, as most people understand the term.”

  “We can’t all be Ed Foley or Mary Pat.”

  “They also have colorful files, but we’re trying to get away from that as the world evolves.”