“First time you've done a touchy-feely, right?”
“You mean, that's all?” Cabot could scarcely believe it.
“Director, this is a funny business. Crazy as it sounds, what you just did was very important,” Sam Yamata said. “Now he knows that we really care about him. Bringing up the President was a good move, by the way.”
“You say so.” Cabot opened the envelope and started reading. “Good Lord!”
“More on the Prime Minister's trip?”
“Yes, the details we didn't get before. Which bank, payoffs to other officials. We may not even need to bug the airplane…”
“Bug an airplane?” Yamata asked.
“You never heard me say that.”
The station chief nodded. “How could I? You were never here.”
“I need to get this off to Washington fast.”
Yamata checked his watch. “We'll never catch the direct flight in time.”
“Then we'll fax it secure.”
“We're not set up for that. Not on the Agency side, I mean.”
“How about the NSA guys?”
“They have it, Director, but we've been warned about the security of their systems.”
“The President needs this. It has to go out. Do it, my authority.”
“Yes, sir.”
33
PASSAGES
It was nice to wake up at a decent hour— eight o'clock — at home on a Saturday. Without a headache. That was something he hadn't done in months. He fully planned to spend the day at home doing precisely nothing more than shave, and he planned that only because he'd be going to Mass that evening. Ryan soon learned that on Saturday mornings his children were glued to the TV set, watching various cartoons, including something concerning turtles that he'd heard about but never seen. On reflection, he decided to pass on it this morning also.
“How are you this morning?” he asked Cathy, on his way into the kitchen.
“Not bad at all. I — oh, damn!”
The noise she heard was the distinctive trilling of the secure phone. Jack ran into the library to catch it.
“Yeah?”
“Dr. Ryan, this is the ops room. Swordsman,” the watch officer said.
“Okay.” Jack hung up. “Damn.”
“What's the matter?” Cathy asked from the doorway.
“I have to go in. By the way, I have to be in tomorrow, too.”
“Jack, come on—”
“Look, babe, there are a couple of things I have to do before I leave. One's happening right about now — and you can forget that, okay? — and I have to be in on it.”
“Where do you have to go this time?”
“Just into the office. I don't have any overseas stuff planned at all, as a matter of fact.”
“Supposed to snow tonight, maybe a big one.”
“Great. Well, I can always stay over.”
“I'm going to be so happy when you leave that goddamned place for good.”
“Can you stick with me just a couple of months more?”
“'Couple of months'?”
“April first, I'm out of there. Deal?”
“Jack, it's not that I don't like what you do, just that—”
“Yeah, the hours. Me, too. I'm used to the idea of leaving now, turning into a normal person again. I gotta change.”
Cathy bowed to the inevitable and went back to the kitchen. Jack dressed casually. On weekends you didn't have to wear a suit. He decided that he could even dispense with a tie, and also that he'd drive himself. Thirty minutes later, he was on the road.
It was a gloriously clear afternoon over the Straits of Gibraltar. Europe to the north, Africa to the south. The narrow passage had once been a mountain range, the geologists said, and the Mediterranean a dry basin until the Atlantic had broken in. This would have been the perfect place to watch from, too, thirty thousand feet up.
And best of all, he would not have bad to worry about commercial air traffic back then. Now he had to listen to the guard circuit make sure some airliner didn't blunder into his path. Or the other way around, which was actually more honest.
“There's our company,” Robby Jackson observed.
“Never seen her before, sir,” Lieutenant Walters said.
“Her” was the Soviet carrier Kuznetzov, the first real carrier in the Russian fleet. Sixty-five thousand tons, thirty fixed-wing aircraft, ten or so helicopters. Escorting her were the cruisers Slava and Marshal Ustinov, plus what looked like one Sovremenny- and two Udaloy-class destroyers. They were coming east in a compressed tactical formation, and were two hundred forty miles behind the TR battlegroup. Half a day back, Robby thought, or half an hour, depending on how you looked at it.
“We give 'em a fly-by?” Walters asked.
“Nope, why piss 'em off?”
“Looks like they're in a hurry…” the RIO said, looking through a pair of binoculars. I'd say about twenty-five knots.'
“Maybe they're just trying to clear the strait as quick as they can.”
“I doubt that, skipper. What do you suppose they're here for?”
“Same as us, according to intel. Train, show the flag, make friends and influence people.”
“Didn't you have a run-in once…?”
“Yeah, a Forger put a heat-seeker up my ass a few years back. Got my Tom back all right, though.” Robby paused for a moment. “They said it was an accident, supposedly the pilot was punished.”
“Believe it?”
Jackson gave the Russian battlegroup a last look. “Yeah, as a matter of fact.”
“First time I saw a picture of that thing I said to myself, there's a Navy Cross that hasn't happened yet.”
“Chill out, Shredder. Okay, we seen 'em. Let's head back.” Robby moved the stick to turn back east. This he did in a leisurely maneuver rather than the hard bank and pull a younger fighter jock might try. Why stress the airframe unnecessarily? Jackson would have thought if he'd bothered to think about it. In the back seat, Lieutenant Henry “Shredder” Walters thought the CAG was just turning into an old guy.
Not that old. Captain Jackson was as alert as ever. His seat was jacked up about as far as it would go, because Robby was on the short side. This gave him a good field of view. His eyes swept in a constant pattern left- right, up-down, and in to look at his instruments about once a minute. His main concern was commercial air traffic, and also private planes, since this was a weekend, and people liked to orbit the Rock to take pictures. A civilian in a Lear Jet, Robby thought, could be more dangerous than a loose Sidewinder…
“Jesus! Coming up at nine!”
Captain Jackson's head snapped to the left. Fifty feet away was a MiG-29 Fulcrum-N, the new naval variant of the Russian air-superiority fighter. The visored face of the pilot was staring at him. Robby saw that four missiles were hanging on the wings. The Tomcat only had two at the moment.
“Came up from underneath,” Shredder reported.
“Clever of him.” Robby took the news with equanimity. The Russian pilot waved. Robby returned the gesture.
“Damn, if he wanted to—”
