Zero Hour

Tom Clancy, Martin Greenberg, Jerome Preisler Zero Hour

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Marc Cerasini, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, John Helfers, Brittiany Koren, Robert Youdelman, Esq., Danielle Forte, Esq., Dianne Jude, and the wonderful people at Penguin Group (USA) Inc., including David Shanks and Tom Colgan. But most important, it is for you, my readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.

— Tom Clancy

PART 1 Blue Fire

ONE

NEW YORK CITY

The predicted January snowstorm had arrived as a sloppy mix of rain and sleet, sending local weathermen into a scramble to revise their outlooks. But while Sullivan was glad they’d finally reported what anyone with two good eyes could see, he hadn’t heard a word about the treacherous roadway icing over the Jaguar’s radio.

It never changed in this city, he thought. Whether the commotion was about a blizzard, a terrorist threat, or some hot-ticket Broadway opening. You got the obligatory buildup, countless gasbag media experts, and in the end nothing was what they claimed it would be. Unless you were a complete greenhorn, fresh off a bus from Kansas or wherever it was the deer and antelope played, you realized their chatter was so much white noise, hardly different from the everyday racket on a midtown street.

You knew, you damned well did. And if you were smart you learned to check your expectations, use common sense, and hope that the next corner you turned didn’t lead under a falling metal construction beam.

As he struggled to maintain his traction on the northbound FDR Drive, heading toward upper Manhattan from East 23rd Street, Sullivan was trying hard to apply that perspective to the deal he was about to clinch. Despite his better instincts, it wasn’t easy. He was chasing again, and he knew it. Chasing the perfect deal that would put him in a position where money wasn’t a constant squeeze. Call it an obsession and he wouldn’t argue. But his latest number was special. Unique merchandise, a fat cash earning, and excellent value for his buyer, who stood to make a huge bundle of his own on turnaround.

If that didn’t translate into perfection, it very definitely came close.

The Jag’s powerful heater had been blasting away for a while now, and Sullivan took one hand off the steering wheel long enough to unzip his Altair ski jacket, a sharp-looking piece of outerwear he’d ordered from Switzerland for a small fortune. Although he wondered if maybe it wasn’t the torrent of warm air making him perspire. Maybe he was just kind of giddy. He could imagine the tremendous profits that would be generated down the line — or lines, plural, since his different goods would eventually wind up in different places. Spreading the wealth, sharing his success… Patrick Sullivan supposed he’d helped create a whole alternative economy in the past few months; call him an enterprising capitalist. And his latest commodity, well, unlike the storm, it would live up to its advance billing. He couldn’t downplay its unique worth if he tried.

Tonight was about breaking ties, Sullivan thought. About personal expansion, and taking a giant step to secure his future. And he incidentally might be doing the world a favor in the process. When all was said and done, Hasul the Vampire stood to become the major loser in this whole thing — and that freakish bastard and his night stalkers couldn’t very well go looking for help or sympathy from anyone.

But Sullivan refused to be troubled with the broad view. If that qualified him as selfish, so it went. He took pride in being a stand-up businessman, a solid provider. All his customers came away satisfied. The people who depended on him for support were happy and comfortable. He met his financial commitments, looked out for his own, and made sure he lived a little, too. A man ought to keep something on the side, no punishable offense there. Sullivan was doing okay in his mind, maybe better than okay, though he knew some would judge him by a hypocritical and unrealistic standard they would never dream of applying to themselves.

Now Sullivan checked the road sign just ahead and was a bit surprised to see he’d almost reached the East 96th Street exit. With the evening rush hour long past and the weather bad as it was, traffic had been light, and his trip uptown shorter than usual in spite of the slippery conditions that had forced him to stay below the forty-five mph speed limit. Most of the other vehicles on the Drive with him were taxicabs going out to La Guardia for inbound fares, but the airport was certain to be a mess of delays and cancellations, and those poor tired hacks wouldn’t have much to show for the fuel they burned.

Approaching 103rd Street, Sullivan glanced up at the footbridge to Randalls Island on the chance he’d see a solitary figure moving across from the esplanade, but its stairs and walkway were deserted. This noted for the record, he went on for maybe a quarter mile, then bore left before the road split and diverted him onto the great beyond of Harlem River Drive. The factories and commercial warehouses of Queens to his right over the river, he swung onto the entrance ramp for the Triboro Bridge, tapping the brake pedal, slowing to a crawl as he took its long ascending curve to the span.

Sullivan found the deck of the bridge spur crossing the river as clear of traffic as the highway. At the toll plaza he pulled up to the cash-only booth and stopped to pay the transit cop, whose subtle eyeballing gave him a reflexive twinge of paranoia. He could remember a time when the city’s tollbooths were manned by ordinary clerks, and hadn’t quite grown accustomed to the heightened security that had turned the approaches to New York bridges and tunnels into fortified checkpoints. Nowadays it seemed as if you couldn’t go from one borough to the next without passing an armed police guard, welcome to the new millennium.

The barrier lifted and Sullivan went on to merge across several lanes to the Randalls/Wards Island down ramp, pausing briefly to flick on his high beams in the pitch darkness at its bottom. Sleet battered the idling Jaguar’s roof and windshield. Rubbish blew over the narrow strip of blacktop, the strong winds pushing it into small, loose mounds against the pylons of the Hell Gate railroad trestle and viaducts to his left.

Sullivan drove slowly forward past old Downing Stadium, his brights glancing off reflectorized signs for the FDNY training school, a drug rehab clinic, a men’s homeless shelter, and a high-security state psychiatric center, its grim sprawl of buildings recessed behind a forbidding forty-foot cyclone fence topped with razor wire. A quick left put him onto an access road that led past the Department of Sanitation sewage-treatment plant at the island’s eastern fringe, where parked garbage trucks, industrial trailers, and enormous steel Dumpsters jostled together inside another tall, ugly chain-link enclosure.

After a few minutes the access road took him across a murky channel of inlet water and dead-ended on Wards Island. Here a third fence, this one only ten or twelve feet high, measured the boundary of a neglected waterfront park. The entrance gate had been completely torn from its hinges and lay on the ground beside an opening easily wide enough for the Jag.

Sullivan ignored the NO CARS ALLOWED BY ORDER OF POLICE DEPARTMENT sign on the toppled gate and rolled through into the park.

He steered across the paved footpaths snaking down a series of gradual slopes to the riverbank, his headlights slipping over dead winter grass, disclosing fresh scabs of ice at the bases of trees and wooden benches. Directly ahead of him in the shadows, a concrete utility building with public restrooms on one side stood just about where the descending paths became too narrow for his tires. He nosed to a halt a few yards uphill of the small, squat structure, and then sat back in his seat, keeping the Jag’s lights and wipers switched on, running its engine