Jack Ryan 9 - Executive Orders (68 page)

“
America
isn't about envy.
America
isn't about class rivalry. We don't have a class system in
America
. Nobody tells an American citizen what they can do. Birth doesn't count for much. Look at the committee members. Son of a fanner, son of a teacher, son of a truck driver, son of a lawyer, you, Senator Nikolides, son of an immigrant. If
America
was a class-defined society, then how the heck did you people get here?” he demanded. His current questioner was a professional politician, son of another, not to mention an arrogant son of a bitch, Winston thought, and didn't get classified. Everyone he'd just pointed to kvelled a little at being singled out for the cameras. “Gentlemen, let's try and make it easier for people to do what we've all done. If we have to skew the system, then let's do it in such a way that it encourages our fellow citizens to help one another. If
America
has a structural economic problem, it's that we don't generate as many opportunities as we should and can do. The system isn't perfect. Fine, let's try to fix it some. That's why we're all here.”

“But the system must demand that everyone pay their fair share,” the senator said, trying to take the floor back.

“What does 'fair' mean? In the dictionary, it means that everyone has to do about the same. Ten percent of a million dollars is still ten times more than ten percent of a hundred thousand dollars, and twenty times more than ten percent of fifty thousand. But 'fairness' in the tax code has come to mean that we take all the money we can from successful people and dole it back—and, oh, by the way, those rich people hire lawyers and lobbyists who talk to people in the political arena and get a million special exceptions written into the system so that they don't get totally fleeced—and they don't, and we all know that—and what do we end up with?” Winston waved his hand at the pile of books on the floor of the committee room. “We end up with a jobs program for bureaucrats, and accountants, and lawyers, and lobbyists, and somewhere along the way the taxpaying citizens are just plain forgotten. We don't care that they can't make sense of the system that's supposed to serve them. It's not supposed to be that way.” Winston leaned into the microphone. “I'll tell you what I think 'fair' means. I think it means that we all bear the same burden in the same proportion. I think it means that the system not only allows but encourages us to participate in the economy. I think it means that we promulgate simple and comprehensible laws so that people know where they stand. I think 'fair' means that it's a level playing field, and everybody gets the same breaks, and that we don't punish Ken Griffey for hitting home runs. We admire him. We try to emulate him. We try to make more like him. And we keep out of his way.”

“Let 'em eat cake?” the chief of staff said.

“We can't say hot dogs, can we?” Kealty asked. Then he smiled broadly. “Finally.”

“Finally,” another aide agreed.

T
HE RESULTS WERE
all equivocal. The FBI polygrapher had been working all morning, and every single set of tracings on the fan-fold paper was iffy. It couldn't be helped. An all-night session, they'd all told him, looking into something important which he wasn't cleared for. That made it the Iran/Iraq situation, of course. He could watch CNN as well as anyone. The men he'd put on the box were all tired and irritable, and some had fluttered badly on telling him their proper names and job descriptions, and the whole exercise had been useless. Probably.

“Did I pass?” Rutledge asked, when he took off the pressurized armband in the manner of someone who'd done this all before.

“Well, I'm sure you've been told before—”

“It's not a pass-or-fail examination process,” the Under Secretary of State said tiredly. “Yeah, tell that to somebody who lost his clearance because of a session on the box. I hate the damned things, always have.”

It was right up—or down—there with being a dentist, the FBI agent thought, and though he was one of the best around at this particular black art, he'd learned nothing this day that would help the investigation. “The session you had last night—” Rutledge cut him off cold. “Can't discuss it, sorry.” “No, I mean, this sort of thing normal here?” “It will be for a while, probably. Look, you know what it's about, probably.” The agent nodded, and the Under Secretary did the same. “Fine. Then you know it's a big deal, and we're going to be burning a lot of
midnight
oil over it, especially my people. So, lots of coffee and long hours and short tempers.” He checked his watch. “My working group gets together in ten minutes. Anything else?”

“No, sir.”

“Thanks for a fun ninety minutes,” Rutledge said, heading for the door. It was so easy. You just had to know how the things worked. They wanted relaxed and peaceful subjects to get proper results—the polygraph essentially measured tension induced by awkward questions. So make everybody tense. That was simple enough. And really the Iranians were doing the work. All he had to do was stoke the fires a little. That was good for a smile as he entered the executive washroom.

T
HERE.
M
OVIE
S
TAR
checked his watch and made a further mental note. Two men walked out of the private dwelling. One of them turned to say something as he closed the door. They walked to the parking lot of Giant Steps, eyes scanning around in a way that identified them as positively as uniforms and rifles. The Chevy Suburban emerged from the private garage. A good hiding place, but a little too obvious to the skilled observer. Two children came out together, one led by a woman, the other by a man . . . yes, the one who'd been in the shadowed doorway when they'd gone out for their afternoon playtime. Large man, formidable one. Two women, one in front, one behind. All the heads turning and scanning. They took the child to a plain car. The Suburban halted in front of the driveway, and the other cars followed it down the highway, with a police car, he saw, fifteen seconds behind.

It would be a difficult task, but not an impossible one, and the mission had several different outcomes, all acceptable to his patrons. Just as well that he didn't get sentimental about children. He'd been involved in such missions before, and you simply couldn't look at them as children at all. The one who'd been led by the large hand of her bodyguard was what he'd decided before, a political statement to be made by someone else. Allah would not have approved. Movie Star knew that. There was not a religion in the world that sanctioned harm to a child, but religions were not instruments of statecraft, regardless of what Badrayn's current superior might believe. Religions were something for an ideal world, and the world wasn't ideal. And so one might use unusual means to serve religious goals, and that meant. . . something he simply didn't think about. It was business, his business, to see what could be done, rules or not, and Movie Star wasn't the least bit sanctimonious about it, which, he thought, was probably why he was still alive while others were not— and, if he read this properly, still others would not be.

. . . BUT A WHIMPER

P
OLITICIANS RARELY LIKE SURPRISES
. Much as they enjoy dropping them on others— mainly other politicians, usually in public, and invariably delivered with all the care and planning of a jungle ambush—they reciprocally detest being on the receiving end. And that was just the political sort, in countries where politics was a fairly civilized business.

In
Turkmenistan
, things had not gotten that far yet. The Premier—he had a wide variety of titles to choose from, and he liked this one better than “president”—enjoyed everything about his life and his office. As a chieftain of the semi-departed Communist Party, he would have lived under greater personal restrictions than were now the case, and would always be at the end of a telephone line to
Moscow
, like a brook fish at the end of a long leader. But not now.
Moscow
no longer had the reach, and he had become too large a fish. He was a vigorous man in his late fifties and, as he liked to joke, a man of the people. The “people” in this case had been an attractive clerk of twenty years who, after an evening of fine dining and a little ethnic dancing (at which he excelled), had entertained him as only a young woman could, and now he was driving back to his official residence under a clear, starry sky, sitting in the right-front seat of his black Mercedes with the sated smile of a man who'd just proven that that's what he was, in the best possible way. Perhaps he'd wangle a promotion for the girl . . . in a few weeks. His was the exercise of, if not absolute power, then surely enough for any man, and with that came near-utter contentment. Popular with his people as an earthy, common-folk sort of leader, he knew how to act, how to sit with the people, how to grasp a hand or a shoulder, always in front of TV cameras to show that he was one of them. “Cult of personality” was what the former regime had called it, and that's what it was, and that, he knew for sure, was what all politics had to be. His was a great responsibility, and he met that duty, and in return he was owed some things. One of them was this fine German automobile— smuggling that into the country had been an exercise in panache rather than corruption—and another was now returning to her bed with a smile and a sigh. And life was good. He didn't know he had less than sixty seconds of it left.

He didn't bother with a police escort. His people loved him. He was sure of that, too, and besides it was late. But there was a police car, he saw, at an intersection, its light turning and flashing, blocking the way, just beyond the cross street. A dismounted policeman raised his hand while talking into his radio, hardly even looking at them. The Premier wondered what the problem was. His driver/ bodyguard slowed the Mercedes with an annoyed snort, stopping it right in the intersection and making sure his pistol was readily accessible. Barely had the official car stopped when both of them heard a noise to their right. The Premier turned that way, and scarcely had time for his eyes to go wide before the Zil-157 truck hit him at forty kilometers per hour. The high military-style bumper hit just at the bottom of the door glass, and the official car was thrown ten meters to the left, stopping when it hit the stone walls of an office building. Then it was time for the policeman to walk over, assisted by two others who had appeared from the shadows. The driver was dead from a broken neck. The policemen could see that from the angle of his head, and one of them reached through the shattered windshield to shake it around, just to make sure. But the Premier, to everyone's astonishment, was still moaning, despite his injuries. Due to all the drink, they thought, his body limp and limber. Well, that was easily fixed. The senior cop walked to the truck, flipped open the tool box, took a tire iron, returned, and smashed it against the side of his Premier's head just forward of the ear. That task completed, he tossed the tool back to the truck driver, and the premier of
Turkmenistan
was dead as the result of an auto accident. Well, then, their country would have to have elections, wouldn't it? That would be something of a first, and it would call for a leader whom the people knew and respected.

“S
ENATOR, IT
'
S BEEN
a long day,” Tony Bretano agreed. “And it's been rather a long couple of weeks for me, learning the ropes and meeting the people, but, you know, management is management, and the Department of Defense has been without it for quite some time. I am especially concerned with the procurement system. It takes too long and costs too much. The problem isn't so much corruption as an attempt to impose a standard of fairness so exacting that—well, as a pedestrian example, if you bought food the way DOD is forced to buy weapons, you'd starve to death in the supermarket while trying to decide between Libby and DelMonte pears. TRW is an engineering company, and to my way of thinking, a very good one. There's no way I could run my company like this. My stockholders would lynch me. We can do better, and I intend to see that we do.”

“Mr. Secretary-designate,” the senator asked, “how much longer does this have to go on? We just won a war and—”

"
Senator
,
America
has the best medical care in the world, but people still die from cancer and heart disease. The best isn't always good enough, is it? But more than that, and more to the point, we can do better for less money. I am not going to come to you with a request for increased overall funding. Acquisition funding will have to be higher, yes. Training and readiness will be higher also. But the real money in defense goes out in personnel costs, and that is where we can make a difference. The whole department is overmanned in the wrong places. That wastes the taxpayers' money. I know. I pay a lot of taxes. We do not utilize our people effectively, and nothing, Senator, is more wasteful than that. I think I can promise you a net reduction of two or three percent. Maybe more if I can get a handle on the acquisition system. For the latter, I need statutory assistance. There's no reason why we have to wait eight to twelve years to field a new airplane. We study things to death. That was once meant to save money, and maybe once it was a good idea, but now we spend more money on studies than we do on real R and D. It's time to stop inventing the wheel every two years. Our citizens work for the money we spend, and we owe it to them to spend it intelligently.

“Most important of all, when
America
sends her sons and daughters into harm's way, they must be the best-trained, best-supported, best-equipped forces we can put into the field. The fact of the matter is that we can do that and save money also, by making the system work more efficiently.” The nice thing about this new crop of senators, Bretano reflected, was they didn't know what was impossible. He would never have gotten away with what he'd just said as recently as a year earlier. Efficiency was a concept foreign to most government agencies, not because there was anything wrong with the people, but because nobody had ever told them to do better. There was much to be said for working at the place that printed the money, but there was much to be said for eating eclairs, too, until your arteries clogged up. If the heart of
America
were its government, the nation would long since have fallen over dead. Fortunately, his country's heart was elsewhere, and surviving on healthier food.

“But why do we need so much defense in an age when—”

Bretano cut him off again. It was a habit he'd have to break, which he knew even as he did it—but this was too much. “Senator, have you checked the building across the street lately?”

It was amusing to see the way the man's head jerked back, even though the aide to Bretano's left flinched almost as badly. That senator had a vote, both on the committee and on the floor of the Senate chamber, which was still open for business now that they'd gotten the smoke out of the building. But the point got across to most of the others, and the SecDef was willing to settle for that. In due course, the chairman gaveled the session to a close, and scheduled a vote for the following morning. The senators had already made their votes clear with their praise for Bretano's forthright and positive statement, pledging their desire to work with him in words almost as naive as his own, and with that another day ended on one place, with a new one soon to begin in another.

N
O SOONER HAD
the UN resolution passed, than the first ship had sailed for the brief steam to the Iraqi
port
of
Bushire
, there to be unloaded by the huge vacuum cleaner-like structures, and from that point on, things had gone quickly. For the first morning in many years, there would be bread enough on the breakfast tables of
Iraq
for everyone. Morning television proclaimed the fact for all—with the predictable live shots of neighborhood bakeries selling off their wares to happy, smiling crowds—and then concluding with word that the new revolutionary government was meeting today to discuss other matters of national importance. These signals were duly copied down at P
ALM
B
OWL
and S
TORM
T
RACK
and passed along, but the real news that day came from another source.

Golovko told himself that the Turkoman Premier might well have died in an accident. His personal proclivities were well known to the RVS, and vehicle accidents were hardly unknown in his country or any other—in fact, auto mishaps had been hugely disproportionate in the
Soviet Union
, especially those associated with drink. But Golovko had never been one to believe in coincidences of any sort, most particularly those which happened in ways and at times inconvenient to his country. It didn't help that he had ample assets in place to diagnose the problem. The Premier was dead. There would be elections. The likely winner was obvious because the departed politician had been wonderfully effective stifling political opposition. And now also, he saw, Iranian military units were forming up for road marches to their west. Two dead chiefs of state, in such a short time, within such a short radius, both in countries bordering Iran . . . no, even if it had been a coincidence, he would not have believed it. With that, Golovko changed hats—the Western aphorism—and lifted his phone.

USS P
ASADENA
WAS
positioned between the two PRC surface-action groups, currently operating about nine miles apart. The submarine had a full load of weapons, war shots all, but for all that, it was rather like being the only cop in
Times Square
at
midnight
on New Year's, trying to keep track of everything at the same time. Having a loaded gun didn't amount to very much. Every few minutes he deployed his ESM mast to get a feel for the electronic signals being radiated about, and his sonar department also fed data to the tracking party in the after portion of the attack center—as many men as could fit around the chart table were busily keeping tabs on the various contacts. The skipper ordered his boat to go deep, to three hundred feet, just below the layer, so that he could take a few minutes to examine the plot, which had become far too complex for him to keep it all in his head. With the boat steadied up on her new depth, he took the three steps aft to look.

It was a FleetEx, but the type of FleetEx wasn't quite . . . ordinarily one group played the “good guys” against the theoretical “bad guys” in the other group, and you could tell what was what by the way the ships were arrayed. Instead of orienting toward each other, however, both groups were oriented to the east. This was called the “threat axis,” meaning the direction from which the enemy was expected to strike. To the east lay the Republic of China, which comprised mainly the
island
of
Taiwan
. The senior chief operations specialist supervising the plot was marking up the acetate overlay, and the picture was about as clear as it needed to be.

“
Conn
, sonar,” came the next call.

“Conn, aye,” the captain acknowledged, taking the microphone.

“Two new contacts, sir, designate Sierra Twenty and Twenty-one. Both appear to be submerged contacts. Sierra Twenty, bearing three-two-five, direct path and faint . . . stand by . . . okay, looks like a Han-class SSN, good cut on the fifty-Hertz line, plant noise also. Twenty-one, also submerged contact, at three-three-zero, starting to look like a Xia, sir.”

“A boomer in a FleetEx?” the senior chief wondered.

“How good's the cut on Twenty-one?”

“Improving now, sir,” the sonar chief replied. The entire sonar crew was in their compartment, just forward of the attack center on the starboard side. “Plant noise says Xia to me, Cap'n. The Han is maneuvering south, bearing now three-two-one, getting a blade rate . . . call its speed eighteen knots.”

“Sir?” The operations chief made a quick, notional plot. The SSN and the boomer would be behind the northern surface group.

“Anything else, sonar?” the captain asked.

“Sir, getting a little complicated with all these tracks.”

“Tell me about it,” someone breathed at the tracking table, while making another change.

“Anything to the east?” the CO persisted.

“Sir, easterly we have six contacts, all classified as merchant traffic.”

“We got 'em all here, sir,” the operations chief confirmed. “Nothing yet from the
Taiwan
navy.”

“That's gonna change,” the captain thought aloud.

G
ENERAL
B
ONDARENKO DIDN
'
T
believe in coincidences, either. More than that, the southern part of the country once known as the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
held little charm for him. His time in
Afghanistan
and a frantic night in
Tajikistan
had seen to that. In the abstract he would not have minded the total divorce of the
Russian
Republic
from the Muslim proto-nations arrayed on his country's southern border, but the real world wasn't abstract.

“So, what do you think is going on?” the general-lieutenant asked.

“Are you briefed in on
Iraq
?”

“Yes, I am, Comrade Chairman.”

“Then you tell me, Gennady Iosefovich,” Golovko commanded.

Bondarenko leaned across the map table, and spoke while moving a finger about. “I would say that what concerns you is the possibility that
Iran
is making a bid for superpower status. In uniting with
Iraq
, they increase their oil wealth by something like forty percent. Moreover, that would give them contiguous borders with
Kuwait
and the Saudi kingdom. The conquest of those nations would redouble their wealth—one may safely assume that the lesser nations would fall as well. The objective circumstances here are self-evident,” the general went on, speaking in the calm voice of a professional soldier analyzing disaster. "Combined,
Iran
and
Iraq
outnumber the combined populations of the other states by a considerable margin—five to one, Comrade Chairman? More? I do not recall exactly, but certainly the manpower advantage is decisive, which would make outright conquest or at least great political influence likely. That alone would give this new United Islamic Republic enormous economic power, the ability to choke off the energy supply to
Western Europe
and
Asia
at will.