Command Authority Read online

  To the young Marines new to the scene, the neighborhood around this compound looked like a postapocalyptic ghost town. Bodies lay in the street, automobiles smoldered and burned, hundreds of windows in buildings all around had been shattered. Car alarms raged. The wreckage of the Mi-8 that had crashed in the center of the park was little more than a pile of ash now, but black smoke still billowed from it.

  The Marines knew there were still enemy forces in the area. The crack of a sniper rifle fired from a distance caused rifles in the Lighthouse to return fire, keeping enemy heads down.

  The Osprey above identified the sniper position on the balcony of a hotel, and the pilot turned away from the location so the ramp gunner could get a line of fire on the area. He fired several short bursts from his fifty, killing the sniper and causing the other armed men in the area to stand down.

  When the Marine riflemen were in position in a cordon around the Osprey, the men still alive in the Lighthouse came out. Every able-bodied man was either wielding a gun or tending to the wounded or dead.

  Ding and Dom carried the bagged body of CIA station chief Keith Bixby, and John Clark steadied the civilian contractor who had taken a ricochet through the back of the hand hours earlier. Clark passed the man off to the crew chief of the Osprey and then stopped at the bottom of the ramp.

  In his nearly half-century of military and intelligence service to the United States and NATO, John Clark had climbed aboard most every aircraft, from propeller-driven airplanes, to turboprops, to jets, and he’d ridden aboard more helicopters than he cared to count.

  But Clark approached the rear ramp of the Osprey with a tightness in his stomach.

  Tiltrotor aircraft made sense, but there was something about that moment of transition from helo to airplane that seemed aerodynamically unsound to John Clark.

  Nevertheless, as bad as the prospect of crashing into the ground in a craft with all the flight characteristics of a double-wide trailer sounded, the very certainty of getting sawed in half by a Russian mafia goon with a Kalashnikov if he stuck around helped him find the wherewithal to put one boot in front of the other and board the Osprey.

  Thirty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Barry Jankowski, call sign Midas, was the last of the Lighthouse survivors to board the aircraft. While a third of the Marines had boarded, he and another Delta man quickly set charges on the vehicles next to the building. Midas covered the Delta sergeant holding the remote trigger as he boarded Steadfast Four One, and then ran up the ramp, turned back around, and took a knee with his H&K rifle pointed out in front of him. The fifty-caliber machine-gunner next to him reached out with a tether line and hooked it to his body armor, and then the crew chief called over the intercom to the pilot. “All aboard and clear! Go!”

  The massive engines roared even louder, and the aircraft pulled itself up into the sky.

  Steadfast Four One slowly transitioned to airplane mode, then began circling the area to provide cover while Steadfast Four Two landed to pick up the rest of the Marines. Once the second Osprey was clear of the scene, the Delta sergeant pushed a button on the remote detonator in his hand, and the six SUVs went up in a fireball that morphed into a mushroom cloud.

  The two Thunder Chickens turned to the north and raced away.

  The entire extraction, from the arrival of the Ospreys to the relative quiet that enveloped the Lighthouse after the last vestiges of rotor noise left the neighborhood, took only five and a half minutes.

  46

  Thirty years earlier

  CIA analyst Jack Ryan was at his desk in the upstairs den of his home in Chatham, spending the evening coloring sailboats with crayons. In truth, he was doing very little of the coloring himself; his five-year-old daughter sat in his lap, Sally’s little head and shoulders hunched over her coloring book, attacking her art with more intensity than Jack himself could muster for his own work at this time of the evening. Jack had tried putting her on the floor more than once, but each time she protested, insisting on sitting at the desk with her daddy. Jack knew he had to pick his battles, and this was a battle Sally would win. The truth was he enjoyed her being up here with him, although he did try to sneak a few glances at a manuscript he was working on on his computer.

  This was another battle he was destined to lose. She seemed to be able to sense the moment her daddy took his attention away from her masterpiece-in-the-making.

  “Watch me,” she said, and Jack did so with a smile.

  While Sally colored her sailboats and while Jack tried and failed to get a few paragraphs written, he also turned his attention time and again to his phone. He had an STU, a Secure Telephone Unit, compliments of the CIA, and the telephone-looking part of the big contraption sat on his desk next to his prized possession, his Apple IIe computer. He was expecting a call at any time from Langley regarding the list of names of employees and clients of the Swiss bank that the British had given him the other day, and as much as he enjoyed playing with his daughter right before her bedtime, he could not help being stressed about the fact there was a man out in the field anxiously awaiting this crucial intelligence.

  Mercifully, Cathy soon came into Jack’s office, with a tired smile. “Give Daddy a good-night kiss, Sally.”

  “No!” Sally squealed. She was fighting sleep already; getting her in her room now was going to involve a little screaming and crying, but both Jack and Cathy knew things would only get much, much worse if she didn’t go to bed right this minute. Cathy persevered, scooped Sally up after she fussed a moment more in her father’s lap, and then took her off to bed.

  Her little fit was mercifully short-lived; Jack heard her chatting away happily with her mommy when she was still in the hallway.

  Jack put his fingers on the keyboard of his Apple, ready to work for a few minutes on his latest book, a biography of Admiral William F. Halsey. Jack’s new Apple computer was still a marvel to him. The move from the electric typewriter hadn’t been an easy one—there was something of an annoying plastic, springy feel to the keys instead of the satisfying crack of the electric typewriter—but knowing he could make large or universal changes to the text of his manuscript with just a few clicks and store the equivalent of a hundred or more pages of his writing on a single 5.25-inch floppy disk made the odd feel of the keyboard much less annoying.

  He’d typed only a few paragraphs when the STU trilled.

  Jack slipped his plastic key in the keyhole in the front of the unit and answered the phone.

  A computerized voice repeated the phrase “STAND BY, SYNCHRONIZING THE LINE” over and over while Ryan waited patiently.

  After fifteen seconds and the words “LINE IS SECURE,” Ryan answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Jack.” It was Admiral James Greer, director of intelligence for the CIA.

  “Good evening, Admiral. Sorry, I guess I should say good afternoon.”

  “Good evening to you. I’ve got some preliminary information back from the analysts on the employee and client lists for RPB.”

  “Terrific. I have to say, though, I didn’t expect you would be the one to call. Did they find something so earth-shattering that the DDI himself had to pick up the phone to deliver the news, or am I being too hopeful?”

  “Very much the latter, I’m afraid. The intel came to my desk, so I thought I’d give you a call. There’s nothing here that’s going to blow anybody’s skirt up over there. The employee list is a big zero. Those Swiss bankers are about as exciting as . . . Swiss bankers.”

  “That’s what I expected.”

  “I’m sure the Brits already know this, but Tobias Gabler, the man who was killed the other day, lived a monk’s existence. He wasn’t killed for anything going on in his personal life.”

  “What about the bank’s clients? Any red flags there?”

  “The client list isn’t as shady as what you might expect. As I said, this is all still prelim, but as far as the individual accounts set up with the actual account holders’ names, mostly it lo
oks like regular rich people stashing their money in Switzerland because they want a tax haven, not because they are necessarily hiding criminal proceeds. The clients are old money, mostly. Italian, Swiss, German, English, American.”

  “American?”

  “Afraid so. Of course, we haven’t had time to run down all the details on all the names, but we don’t see anything alarming. Mostly we think they are just doctors shielding their money from malpractice claims or ex-husbands hiding it from ex-wives, that sort of thing. Unethical, but no major criminality.”

  “Any East Bloc account holders?”

  “None, although you know how it is. The KGB wouldn’t be so obvious. Just because the Swiss verify the account holders’ identity doesn’t mean they know who the account holders actually are. They just check documents. The KGB has some terrific forgers.”

  “How are we doing searching the corporate accounts?”

  “It’s slow going, to tell you the truth. As you know, anyone who really wants to hide their affiliation with a bank account will hire a nominee, someone who will sign their name to the account. The nominee gets paid to provide the service, and they don’t know or care who is paying them. This can make tracking the actual account owner nearly impossible, but we do have some means at our disposal. We’ve determined one of the accounts belongs to a casino group, another to a popular hotel chain, and there’s an account for a diamond merchant. Also, a law firm in Singapore has an—”

  “Wait. Did you say ‘diamonds’?”

  “Yes. Argens Diamantaire. Based in Antwerp. It’s owned by Philippe Argens. His corporate account is with RPB. Does that mean something?”

  “Penright, the operations officer, said the KGB was asking about people who might be moving hard assets out of the bank.”

  “Argens Diamantaire is one of the largest precious gemstone operations in Europe. Mostly South African mines, but they buy and sell stones all over the world.”

  “Are they aboveboard?”

  “In general terms, yes. Precious gems is a business with a dirty underbelly, but as far as anyone knows, Philippe Argens runs a legitimate operation.”

  Ryan thought about it for a moment. The KGB men asked about hard assets, cash, gold, and the like. Diamonds were most definitely a hard asset. He’d run it by Penright, but it didn’t sound especially promising.

  Jack said, “Thanks for the information. If Penright was hoping some other bad actor involved with the bank killed Tobias Gabler, I think he will be disappointed.”

  Greer said, “No Cosa Nostra or Five Families or Medellín cartel linkage here. I’m afraid the Brits will have to entertain the notion that a KGB banker getting murdered in the middle of the street might have something to do with the KGB.”

  “Right.”

  “One more thing, Jack. Judge Moore and I had a conversation this morning. We’d like the Brits to involve us in this asset.”

  “I talked to Sir Basil about that the other day. He made it clear that they will share any product they get from this asset of theirs at the bank, but they have no intention of truly going bilateral.”

  “That’s all well and good, but I am concerned this source of theirs comes with an expiration date. If the KGB is onto him, either they will move their money or they will remove him. We might not have much of a time window here. Better we pool our resources so we can save this operation.”

  “That’s a fair point,” Ryan admitted.

  “What do we know about the asset?”

  “Not much, really. Penright gave up a little more information outside of Charleston’s presence. He made it clear the asset met directly with the KGB men who claimed to be Hungarian account holders, so the asset is likely some sort of bank exec. Penright is over in Switzerland now, setting up a meeting with him. Figures he needs to calm the guy down after the Gabler murder. The fact we weren’t able to ID any other potential culprits from the client list makes me think Penright has his work cut out for him.”

  Greer said, “A source in a family-owned Swiss bank has incredible potential. Arthur and I will call Basil tomorrow morning and press him a little.”

  “Well, okay. Obviously, that’s your call, but we are going to need to find something to offer the Brits in exchange. I don’t think us looking over the client list is enough for them to warrant their sharing operational control over their asset.”

  Greer said, “I agree. We’ll find something they want, and we’ll make a fair trade for access.”

  —

  As soon as Ryan got off the phone with Greer, he called Penright’s hotel in Zug. He gave the code they had set up between them, which sent the MI6 man to a secure phone somewhere else in the city.

  It took Penright thirty minutes to call Ryan back.

  “Good evening,” Ryan said.

  “Evening. What’s the latest from the cousins?”

  “We ran a check on the employee list. Came up with nothing.”

  “I expected that.”

  “As to the client list, the preliminary report shows no ties to any criminal organization.”

  “Nothing?”

  “I’m afraid not. We did find that one of the accounts is in the name of a front company owned by a large diamond merchant who has an account at RPB.” Ryan passed on the name of the Belgian company, though Penright didn’t seem terribly impressed with that information.

  “Okay, Ryan. I have a meeting with my agent tomorrow. My main objective is to allay any fears he has, but I will also try to get a little more out of him. He might be able to provide us with internal documents about the holder of the two-hundred-four-million-dollar account.”

  Ryan said, “I can guarantee the account will be held by a shell corporation. It’s going to be tough to dig into it.”

  “Have any ideas on something that might prove helpful?” Penright asked.

  “Yes. If he can provide you information about how the money was transferred into the bank, that might be more helpful than him giving us the account-holder information.”

  “Really? How so?”

  “Because different countries have different banking secrecy laws. If the money was transferred in from another Western bank, we might have more luck ID’ing the owner by looking into the account there.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  Jack added, “Obviously, I don’t know anything about your asset. It might be the case that he wouldn’t have access to account-transfer data. If he snoops around too much, it might be dangerous for him.”

  Penright said, “Understood, old boy. I’ll make sure he proceeds with caution.”

  “Is there anything else I can do?” Jack asked.

  “Just keep thinking. We men of action can always do with a more sedate brain behind us.”

  Ryan thought this to be some sort of an unintentional slight, but he let it go.

  47

  Present day

  Clark, Chavez, and Caruso had returned from the action in the Crimea to a capital city rife with protest marches and riots. Political infighting dominated the news, and criminal gangs shot it out with local police in the streets of Kiev.

  After reuniting with the rest of their team at the safe-house flat, Igor Kryvov drove Clark to the Fairmont Grand Hotel, where he expected to slip right back into his cover as a disaffected journalist who had decided to put the deluxe room at a five-star hotel on his expense account.

  But as soon as he arrived at the front door of the hotel, Clark realized there had been some changes made during his two-day absence.

  His first indication that all was not as before came when he was stopped outside the door to the lobby by a uniformed officer from Kiev’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and asked for his passport. Clark handed over his cover credos, and while the stern-faced officer looked at them Clark helpfully mentioned that he was a guest at the Fairmont.

  The officer passed back the passport and said, “Not anymore. The hotel is closed.”

  Before Clark could respond, a hotel employee appeared
, took Clark’s name and room number, and with profuse, embarrassed apologies explained that his luggage would be brought down, but Clark would have to find other arrangements in the city.

  Clark responded with confusion and insolence, but only because it fit his cover to do so. In truth, he’d had a look inside the lobby when the employee came out, and he could tell exactly what was going on now. The Seven Strong Men had taken over the entire hotel, and local police and even Ministry of Internal Affairs men were now protecting the building, keeping out anyone who did not belong.

  This was an interesting development. To Clark it meant that some portion of the Ukrainian government, at both the local and the state level, was blatantly supporting the actions of Gleb the Scar and the Seven Strong Men.

  Clark wondered if an actual coup would be the next step, or if all the supporters of the Russian criminals here in the city planned on just sitting tight and waiting for the Russians to invade and take over the country.

  Clark retrieved his luggage from the hotel and then returned to the safe house. He knew he would need to find a new safe house closer to the hotel so they could monitor the comings and goings. It was beginning to look like the Fairmont was ground zero for some sort of an insurrection here in Ukraine, and Clark wanted to be close enough to the action to understand the players and the game.

  They spent the evening tracking down potential places to move in the city center. While checking into this, the men dug into a dinner of steaks and salads picked up by Igor at a nearby restaurant. As always, the TV was on Ukraine’s ICTV channel and the volume was up disturbingly high to render any listening devices useless. The six men in the flat had spent the evening tuning out the sounds, but a news story at the top of the eleven p.m. news turned the head of Igor Kryvov first, and then, seconds later, John and Ding, because they understood Russian well enough to decipher the Ukrainian on TV.