Jack Ryan 9 - Executive Orders (152 page)

“He said that it was an infidel lie—what do you expect?” The official paused. “He was not entirely persuasive. Whatever you said to the man, he is neutralized. India has betrayed us—I learned about that, too. China does not yet know.”

“If you expect them to stand with you, you have violated your religion's laws on the consumption of alcohol. Of course, my government stands with America as well. You are quite alone,” the Russian told him. “I need some information.”

“What information?”

“The location of the germ factory. I need that today.”

“The experimental farm north of the airport.”

That
easy? the Russian thought. “How can you be sure?”

“The equipment was bought from the Germans and the French. I was in the commercial section then. If you wish to confirm, it should be easy. How many farms have guards in uniform?” the man asked helplessly.

The Russian nodded. “I will see about that. There are other problems. Your country will soon be fully—by which I mean completely—at war with America. My country may be able to offer her good offices to negotiate a settlement of some kind. If you whisper the right word into the right ear, our ambassador is at your disposal, and then you will have done the world a service.”

“That is simple. By noon we will be looking for a way out of this.”

“There is no way out for your government. None,” the RVS officer emphasized.

THE RYAN DOCTRINE

W
ARS USUALLY BEGIN AT EXACT
moments in time, but most often end neither cleanly nor precisely. Daylight found the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in command of yet another battlefield, having completed the destruction of one of UIR II Corps's divisions. The other division was now facing the Saudi 2nd Brigade, which was attacking from the rising sun while the American unit halted again to refuel and rearm in preparation for the continued attack on III Corps, still not decisively engaged.

But that was already changing. Those two divisions now had the full and undivided attention of all tactical aircraft in theater. First their air defense assets were targeted. Every radar which switched on drew the attention of HARM—High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile—equipped F-16s, and in two hours the skies were friendly to American and Saudi pilots. UIR fighters made an effort to strike down from their home bases to defend their beleaguered ground forces, but none made it past the radar-fighter screen set up well beyond the location of the forces they had been dispatched to support. They lost over sixty aircraft in the futile attempt. It was easier for them to lash out at the Kuwaiti brigades which had so impudently invaded their vastly larger and more powerful neighbor. The small air force of that country was on its own for most of the day, and the battle had little strategic relevance. The routes across the swamps were cut and would take days to repair. The resulting air battle was more a display of mutual anger than anything else, and here, too, the Kuwaiti forces held the day, not spectacularly so, but giving three kills for every one they absorbed. For a small country learning the martial arts, it was a battle that men would talk of for years, the magnitude of their deeds growing with every recounting. Yet all the deaths on this day would be useless, lives wasted in mere punctuation of a decision already reached.

Over III Corps, with the SAMs taken out, attention turned to more structured murder. There were over six hundred tanks on the ground, another eight hundred infantry carriers, more than two hundred pieces of towed and self-propelled artillery, several thousand trucks, and thirty thousand men, all of them well inside a foreign nation and trying to escape. The F-15E Strike Eagles circled at about 15,000 feet, almost loitering on low power settings, while the weapons-systems operators selected targets one by one for laser-guided bombs. The air was clear, the sun was bright, and the battlefield was flat. It was far easier than any exercise in the Nellis bombing range. Lower down in different hunting patches, F-16s joined in with Maverick and conventional bombs. Before noon, III Corps's three-star commander, correctly thinking himself the senior ground officer, ordered a general retreat, gathered up the support trucks laagered in KKMC, and tried to get his units out in something resembling order. Bombs falling on him from above, the Saudi 5th Brigade approaching from the east, and an American force closing on his rear, he turned northwest, hoping to cross back into friendly territory at the same point he had entered. On the ground, his vehicles used smoke to obscure themselves as best they could, which somewhat frustrated the allied aviators, who did not, however, come down low to press their attacks, since the UIR forces might have shot back with some effect. That gave the commander hope that he might make it back with something like two-thirds of his strength. Fuel was not a concern. The combined fuel trucks for the entire Army of God were with his corps now.

D
IGGS STOPPED OFF
first to see Eddington's brigade. He'd seen the sights and smelled the smells before. Tanks could burn for a surprisingly long time, as much as two days, from all the fuel and ammunition they carried, and the stink of diesel oil and chemical propellants served to mask the revolting stench of burning human flesh. Armed enemies were always things to be killed, but dead ones soon enough became objects of pity, especially slaughtered as they had been. But only a few, in relative terms, had died by the guns of the men from Carolina. Many more had surrendered. Those had to be gathered, disarmed, counted, and set to work, mainly in disposing of the bodies of their fallen comrades. It was a fact as old as warfare, and the lesson for the defeated was always the same: This is why you don't want to mess with us again.

“Now what?” Eddington asked, a cigar in his teeth. The victors suffered through many mood swings on the battlefield. Arriving in confusion and haste, facing the unknown with concealed fear, entering battle with determination—and, in their case, with such wrath as they had never felt—winning with exhilaration, and then feeling horror at the carnage and pity for the vanquished. The cycle changed anew. Most of the mechanized units had reorganized over the last few hours, and were ready to move again, while their own MPs and arriving Saudi units took possession of the prisoners gathered by the line units.

“Just sit tight,” Diggs replied, to Eddington's disappointment and relief. “The remains are running hard. You'd never catch them, and we don't have orders to invade.”

“They just came at us in the same old way,” the Guard colonel said, remembering Wellington. “And we stopped them in the same old way. What a terrible business.”

“Bobby Lee, remember, Chancellorsville?”

“Oh, yeah. He was right, too. Those couple of hours, Diggs, getting things set up, maneuvering my battalions, getting the information, acting on it.” He shook his head. “I never knew anything could feel like that . . . but now . . .”

“ 'It is good that war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it.' Funny thing is, you forget sometimes. Those poor bastards,” the general said, watching fifty men being herded off to trucks for the ride back to the rear. “Clean up, Colonel. Get your units put back together. There may be orders to move, but I don't think so.”

“Three Corps?”

“Ain't goin' far, Nick. We're 'keepin' up the skeer' and we're running them right into the 10th.”

“So you know Bedford Forrest after all.” It was one of the Confederate officer's most important aphorisms. Keep up the skeer: never give a fleeing enemy the chance to rest; harry him, punish him, force him into additional errors, run him into the ground. Even if it really didn't matter anymore.

“My doctoral dissertation was on Hitler as a political manipulator. I didn't much like him, either.” Diggs smiled and saluted. “You and your people did just fine, Nick. Glad to have you on this trip.”

“Wouldn't have missed it, sir.”

T
HE VEHICLE HAD
diplomatic tags, but the driver and passenger knew that such things had not always been respected in Tehran. Things changed in a country at war, and you could often spot previously clandestine facilities by the fact that they got more guards in time of trouble instead of remaining the same. The latter would have been far smarter, but everyone did it. The car halted. The driver lifted binoculars. The passenger lifted a camera. Sure enough, the experimental farm had armed men around the research building, and that wasn't the normal sort of thing, was it? It was just that easy. The car turned in the road and headed back to the embassy.

T
HEY WERE GETTING
only stragglers. The Blackhorse was in full pursuit now, and this tail chase was proving to be a long one. American vehicles were better and generally faster than those they were pursuing, but it was easier to run than to chase. Pursuers had to be a little careful about possible ambushes, and the lust to kill more of the enemy was muted by the concern at dying in a war already won. Enemy disorder had allowed the 11th to pull in tight, and the right-flank units were now in radio contact with the advancing Saudis, who were just now finishing off the last few battalions of II Corps and thinking about engaging III in a final decisive battle.

“Target tank,” one TC said. “Ten o'clock, forty-one hundred.”

“Identified,” the gunner said as the Abrams halted to make the shot easier.

“Hold fire,” the TC said suddenly. “They're bailing out. Give 'em a few seconds.”

“Right.” The gunner could see it, too. The T-80's main gun was pointed away, in any case. They waited for the crew to make a hundred meters or so.

“Okay, take it.”

“On the way.” The breech recoiled, the tank jolted, and the round flew. Three seconds later, one more tank turret blew straight up. “Jack-in-the-box.”

“Target. Cease fire. Driver, move out,” the TC ordered. That made the twelfth kill for their tank. The crew wondered what the unit record would be, while the TC made a position notation for the three-man enemy crew on his IVIS box, which automatically told the regimental security detail where to pick them up. The advancing cavalrymen gave them a wide berth. Unlikely though it was, one of them might shoot or do something stupid, and they had neither the time nor the inclination to waste ammunition. One more battle to fight, unless the other side got some brains and just called it a day.

“C
OMMENTS
?” POTUS
ASKED
.

“Sir, it sets a precedent,” Cliff Rutledge replied.

“That's the idea,” Ryan said. They were getting the battlefield video first, unedited. It included the usual horrors, body parts of those ripped to shreds by high explosives, whole bodies of those whose deaths had come from some mysterious cause, a hand reaching out of a personnel carrier whose interior still smoked, some poor bastard who'd almost gotten out, but not quite. There had to be something about carrying a mini-cam that just drew people to that sort of thing. The dead were dead, and the dead were all victims in one way or another—more than one way, Ryan thought. These soldiers of two previously separate countries and one overlapping culture had died at the hands of armed Americans, but they'd been sent to death by a man whose orders they'd had to follow, who had miscalculated, and who had been willing to use their lives as tokens, gambling chips, quarters in a big slot machine whose arm he'd yanked to see what would result. It wasn't supposed to be that way. Power carried responsibility. Jack knew that he would hand-write a letter to the family of every dead American, just as George Bush had done in 1991. The letters would serve two purposes. They would, perhaps, be some measure of comfort to the families of the lost. They would, certainly, remind the man who had ordered them to the field that the dead had once been living. He wondered what their faces had been like. Probably no different from the Guardsmen who'd formed that honor guard at Indianapolis, the day of his first public appearance. They looked the same, but each human life was individual, the most valuable possession of its owner, and Ryan had played a part in stripping it away, and though he knew it had been necessary, it was also necessary for him, now and for as long as he sat in this building, to remember that they were more than just faces. And that, he told himself, is the difference. I know about my responsibility. He doesn't know about his. He still lived with the illusion that people were responsible to him, and not the reverse.

“It's political dynamite, Mr. President,” van Damm said.

“So?”

“There is a legal problem,” Pat Martin told them. “It violates the executive order that President Ford put in place.”

“I know about that one,” Ryan responded. “But who decides the executive orders?”

“The Chief Executive, sir,” Martin answered.

“Draft me a new one.”

“W
HAT IS THAT
smell?” Back at the Indiana motel, the truck drivers were out for the morning dance of moving the trucks around to protect the tires. They were sick of this place by now, and heartily wished the travel ban would be lifted soon. One driver had just exercised his Mack, and parked it back next to the cement truck. Spring was turning warm, and the metal bodies of the trucks turned the interiors into ovens. In the case of the cement truck, it was having an effect its owners hadn't thought about. “You got a fuel leak?” he asked Holbrook, then bent down to look. “No, your tank's okay.”

“Maybe somebody had a little spill over at the pumps,” the Mountain Man suggested.

“Don't think so. They just hosed it down a while ago. We better find this. I seen a KW burn once 'cuz some mechanic fucked up. Killed the driver, that was on I-40 back in '85. Hell of a mess.” He continued to walk around. “You got a leak somewhere, ol' buddy. Let's check your fuel pump,” he said next, turning the locks on the hood panels.

“Hey, uh, wait a minute—I mean—”

“Don't sweat it, pard, I know how to fix the things. I save a good five grand a year doing my own work.” The hood went up, and the trucker looked inside, reached to shake a few hoses, then felt the fuel-line connectors. “Okay, they're all right.” Next he looked at the line to the injectors. One nut was a little loose, but that was just the lock, and he twisted that back in place. There wasn't anything unusual. He bent down again to look underneath. “Nothin' drippin'. Damn,” he concluded, standing back up. Next he checked the wind. Maybe the smell was coming from . . . no. He could smell breakfast cooking in the restaurant, his next stop of the day. The smell was coming from right here . . . something else, too, not just diesel, now that he thought about it.

“What's the problem, Coots?” another driver asked, walking over.

“Smell that?” And both men stood there, sniffing the air like woodchucks.

“Somebody got a bad tank?”

“Not that I can see.” The first one looked at Holbrook. “Look, I don't want to be unneighborly, but I'm an owner-operator, and I get nervous about my rig, y'know? Would you mind moving your truck over there? And I'd have somebody give the engine a look, okay?”

“Hey, sure, no problem, don't mind a bit.” Holbrook remounted his truck, started it, and drove it slowly off, turning to park in a fairly vacant part of the lot. The other two watched him do it.

“The goddamned smell went away, didn't it, Coots?”

“That is a sick truck.”

“Fuck 'im. About time for the news. Come on.” The other driver waved.

“Whoa!” they heard on entering the restaurant. The TV was tuned to CNN. The scene looked like something from the special-effects department of a major studio. Nothing like that ever was real. But this was.