stomach. Then he clamped one of the tools to the line running from the landing gear cylinder and, holding it steady by the handle, loosened the cylinder's hydraulic fitting with the other wrench. He held the jar underneath the fitting as the fluid bled out, and kept it there until it was full. Then he twisted the lid back onto the jar, put the tools back in his pocket, and wriggled out from beneath the aircraft.
Less than fifteen minutes after they had entered the hangar, the two men were back in the van. The driver placed the jar of drained-off hydraulic fluid in the glove compartment, and then turned on the ignition and pulled out onto the access road.
When they rode by the guard station it was dark and empty.
The watchman was still out enjoying himself, and would no doubt remember his hours of stolen pleasure with a smile, never realizing they had all but guaranteed Roger Gordian's fiery death.
Chapter Sixteen
'I'm telling you, if those people in the Press Office don't start doing their jobs, I'm going to give every one of them the boot myself, and Terskoff is the first guy whose ass gets to meet my foot,' said President Richard Ballard, referring in his momentary pique to White House Press Secretary Brian Terskoff.
'Quite frankly, I don't think they're to blame,' said Stu Encardi, whose official job title was Special Aide to the President, and who was now just waiting for the breeze to stir. 'You know how it is with reporters. They cover what they want to cover.'
Ballard pulled a disgusted face. 'Oh, come on. We're about to enter into a genuinely world-changing treaty with Japan and other Far Eastern countries, we've got three regional leaders and yours truly participating in a signing ceremony aboard a nuclear sub, and you're trying to say the crypto issue is sexier? That's absurd.'
'You think so?' Encardi said. 'Granted, the numbers tell us people were hardly paying attention to crypto until this week, and they still don't get what the whole damn thing's about. But from my perspective, it's this escalating Gordian-Caine spat that's the hook for reporters. The treaty represents cooperation and harmony, and, well, conflict being the essence of drama—'
'Spare me,' Ballard said. 'What the hell should we do as an attention grabber, get Diver Dan and Baron Barracuda down there underwater with us?'
'Excuse me, sir?'
'Never mind, you're twenty years too young,' Ballard said, cocking an ear skyward. 'By the way, doesn't the breeze sound pretty moving through those leaves?'
'Yes, sir, it does.'
They were standing under a willow oak that a former First Lady had planted on the South Lawn as an everlasting reminder of her tenure at the White House, much as Encardi himself had been planted among the President's circle of confidants by his lovely missus, who had taken a shine to the thirty-year-old Yale man when he'd been one of the coordinators of Ballard's re-election campaign, sensing in him a kindred soul of similar outlook and attitude, and later finagling her husband into making him a member of his post-election advisory staff, feeling he would be the ideal surrogate to carry her approximate viewpoint to Ballard — be it on matters political or personal — whenever she wasn't physically present to do so herself.
Generally speaking, Ballard considered Encardi an insightful, practical, and dedicated pup, and liked having him around as the personification of his wife's weltanshauung. Still, he was occasionally bothered by the fact that the aide boasted a profusion of hair to rival a Hungarian puli, while only a miracle of artful combing concealed his own advancing, Rogaine-resistant baldness.
He also became annoyed when Encardi borrowed his wife's verbal tics, such as following every Presidential statement with a 'You think so?' and beginning his replies with a pedagogic 'Quite frankly,' or 'From my standpoint,' both hearkening back to Mrs. Ballard's decades-long career as a college teacher. These were the sort of things that would make borderline days turn bad, and bad days a little worse, except when the gorgeous weather and the sound of the breeze rustling through Ballard's favorite tree made everything under God's blue sky appreciably better.
'Stu, let me give you some instant perspective,' Ballard said. 'Two days from now I'll be signing the crypto legislation while Roger Gordian makes a fuss down the Hill. Two months from now everyone will have forgotten all about it, and think Morrison-Fiore is the name of some Vegas animal-training act. But in the interim I'll have closed a deal that establishes the guidelines for America's security role in Asia over the next twenty years, and probably much longer. There's my posterity, or a decent chunk of it. We just have to make sure people notice.'
Encardi regarded him in the light shade of the tree as the wind brushed through the drooping canopy overhead. There were gnats or something swirling around them. In fact, there were always bugs under this tree. For some reason he didn't quite get, they seemed particularly attracted to the vicinity of the goddamned willow.
He swished a squadron of tiny winged harriers away from his face, convinced he would be a much happier man if just once the POTUS would elect to stroll under a dogwood, elm, or alder while seeking to restore his inner calm.
'I'm thinking we need to make sure Nordstrum from the New York Times is given the red-carpet treatment,' he said.
'And / thought we were already doing that,' the President said.
'Well, we are, but we can always roll out more rug,' Encardi said. 'Nordstrum's the biggest proponent of our Asia-Pacific policy in the national media. Why not assist him in gaining interviews with the Japanese Prime Minister, as well as the Malaysian and Indonesian heads of state? Invite him to the dinner you'll be having aboard the Seawolf? Anything to give him a steady stream of material to write about.'
Ballard stretched broadly and inhaled the fragrant air of the White House grounds, sunlight striping his face as it filtered through the long bushy willow leaves.
'Ahhhhh, I'm feeling almost relaxed,' he said. 'Isn't it a spectacular morning?'
'Spectacular,' Encardi said listlessly, swatting away an insect.
Ballard looked at him.
'Your idea about Nordstrum sounds fine to me, but only for starters,' he said, his brow creasing in thought. 'You know, now that you mention him, it's kind of odd Roger Gordian hasn't convinced Nordstrum to write more about the encryption issue in his columns. He's a paid consultant for UpLink International, did you know?'
Encardi considered that a moment and shrugged.
'Could be he disagrees with Gordian on that one,' he said.
'Or just finds the crypto stuff as dull and relatively inconsequential as anybody else,' the President added.
Swathed in virgin wilderness, the atoll was one of hundreds speckling the Celebes Sea west of the Sabah coast and bordering on the Philippines' territorial waters. A circular reef formed a breakwater around its shoreline, where a dense band of mangroves buttressed it against tropical storms and enclosed the rain forest that lay further inland, itself a protective horseshoe surrounding the lagoon at the island's center on three sides.
The same terrain characteristics that sheltered the atoll from the ravages of sea and weather had made it an undetected — and virtually undetectable — site for the pirate enclave. Few outside their brotherhood had ever located it, fewer still had penetrated its natural lines of defense, and none who did so without invitation had left it alive.
Zhiu Sheng had been there but once before, and then only for a quick pass around the island's rim at the request of General Kersik, who'd wanted him to have a firsthand acquaintance with the logistics of the planned Sandakan invasion. Today, however, he was headed for the interior. An hour ago, the Chinese fishing trawler that had brought him from the port city of Xiamen in Fujian province had steered slowly through the narrow inlet to the lagoon, and then dropped anchor near the sand belt. The timing of its arrival had been propitious; minutes afterward, the stacked, charcoal-gray clouds of an anvil thunderhead had burst open with a flash of lightning that illuminated the sky for several seconds, ushering in a fierce tropical downpour. Had the boat still been in open
