Chapter 54
The Kremlin
Moscow, Russia
Vasin stood at something near attention.
As a career GRU officer, he had undergone rudimentary military training on his initial induction into the service.
But that had been decades ago when he’d been young, fit, and marginally principled.
Rooted in place now before the president’s desk, he resembled an old tree after a storm.
His base was uneven, his limbs crooked, and his comb-over had gone askew in the parking lot.
The only thing more or less in regulation was his absolute stillness.
And that had nothing to do with military composure.
“How could you let him get away!” Yermilov shouted. He threw aside the message Vasin had placed on his desk. It fluttered to the floor.
“My people did their best,” Vasin insisted. “Klaus had help—men who were highly skilled.”
“And now I have an international incident to deal with!”
“My men were caught by surprise, and they paid a serious price. Four are dead—two of mine and two of Malenkov’s. Two others are in the hospital, one in critical condition with a brain bleed.”
“A shame,” Yermilov said.
Vasin silently questioned Yermilov’s meaning. Was he regretting that the two men had been injured? Or that they’d had the temerity to survive?
“I assume we are talking about the Americans?” the president said.
“We have no direct evidence…but I can’t imagine otherwise.”
“What are you doing to track them down?”
Vasin tried to find the right words. “We began a search after the final engagement, but it was difficult. The police and military were at every corner. Our efforts turned to containment. One team went to the airport and discovered that a private jet had recently departed. Our research suggests it was a CIA aircraft.”
Veins bulged at the president’s temples. He said venomously, “So not only did you fail to find Klaus, but you let the Americans spirit him away.”
Vasin said nothing.
“Get out of my sight!”
The head of Russian military intelligence spun and disappeared through the door.
Alone in his office, Yermilov’s mind succumbed to a swirl of conflicting thoughts. He half turned his chair to face the side wall. On the credenza beside his desk was a secure phone system. So far it had been silent…President Jack Ryan had not reached out.
Not yet.
Yermilov had been expecting a call from the American President for days, but now he was glad for the delay. Losing Klaus to the Americans was disastrous, and it changed how he would handle Ryan.
It would be a risk-laden phone call.
But that, in truth, was the least of his worries. A phone call he could control. What worried him more was now entirely outside his grasp.
The White House
“They’re airborne and they have Klaus,” Ryan announced, hanging up a handset after a secure call with the commander of Task Force 99. The Gulfstream wasn’t wired for videoconferencing, so the SITREP from Clark had come by way of an encrypted voice connection. The President himself had taken it.
“They should reach Sigonella in a few hours.”
A palpable sigh of relief swept across the Situation Room.
The operation in Tangier had been on a knife’s edge for hours.
As promised, Katie had called back with an update.
She gave an account, as best she could, of the rolling engagements that were taking place across the city.
She explained that Task Force 99 had made it back to the Gulfstream with the exception of Clark and Hyori, who’d inexplicably not shown.
Even more ominously, they had gone off comms.
Ding had assumed command in Clark’s absence, and in direct violation of the orders he’d been given, he decided to wait for them to show up. That was when things had truly gotten dicey.
Foggy Bottom received a call from a highly agitated Moroccan foreign minister.
He accused Clark’s team, who’d been allowed into the country as a diplomatic courtesy, of engaging in a running gunfight in the heart of the old medina.
SecState Adler, ever the diplomat, said he would investigate the allegations thoroughly, and also planted a seed of conspiracy for the Moroccans to chase down: he said that if violence had broken out, the instigators were almost certainly a small army of Russian GRU agents who had flooded into Tangier in the last twenty-four hours.
He suggested that a quick check of Moroccan immigration records would prove the point.
Adler never let on that, thanks to MAADN, he himself had those government records on a computer monitor in front of him.
As the diplomatic wrangling had played out, a Moroccan police contingent was rushed to the airport and used their cars to block the doors of the hangar.
Inside, the CIA Gulfstream was poised for departure.
Captain Hooper had told Chavez that if the blockade was removed, he could have the jet rolling in less than two minutes.
He even claimed, possibly in jest, that he could take off on a taxiway if necessary.
He said the tower controllers would be less than thrilled with such a maneuver, but there was little they could do to stop it.
Once airborne, a turn north would put them in Spanish airspace in less than five minutes.
Ding had put that plan in his operational back pocket.
He was determined to not leave without Clark and Hyori.
The impasse continued for nearly two hours.
As the NSC watched and waited, President Ryan reflected that the standoff wasn’t without benefits.
The Moroccan police were, however inadvertently, keeping the jet secure from an emboldened GRU.
It also bought time to find out what had happened to Clark and Hyori.
That mystery was solved when a taxi screeched to a stop outside the perimeter fence.
The two poured out of the back seat and reached the aircraft through a side hangar entrance.
Clark explained that they’d both lost comm, and that he’d elected to keep the GRU hurtling around the city to facilitate the jet’s escape.
He wasn’t happy that Chavez had stalled their departure, but that fence, everyone knew, would quickly be mended.
Clark then contacted the White House, reporting that Task Force 99 was reunited and ready to move.
To Ryan, it was classic John Clark: four kills, one recovered asset, zero apologies.
At the end of the call, he issued nothing short of a demand to the commander in chief: “I need to get my team out of here now, sir!”
The President knew the rest was up to him.
He had initiated a direct call to the king of Morocco.
The exchange was tense to begin, the monarch having been briefed on the situation, but Ryan laid on the charm—a skill he had not always possessed, but one he’d been trying to improve in this age of transactional global politics.
The king was eventually swayed—owed a favor by the leader of the free world—and the Gulfstream was released.
It took off on the active runway, Hooper seeming almost disappointed to not have gotten a shot at his taxiway trick.
That had been half an hour ago, and with the aircraft cruising safely in international airspace, Clark had initiated the call to the President.
“Did everyone make it out okay?” Mary Pat asked with a commander’s unease. Task Force 99 was her responsibility.
“One minor injury,” Ryan said. “The others are safe, including Fulcrum.”
“We need to interview him as soon as they arrive at Sig,” said SecDef Burgess.
“I don’t think we can wait that long. Klaus claims to have some time-critical intel. Clark is going to debrief him on the flight and call us back when he’s got the story.”
The members of the NSC nodded in assent. Then everyone got back to work. They cranked up phones and laptops to coordinate with their respective agencies.
Jack Ryan took a more thoughtful tack. He looked to his left and regarded the secure phone at the nearby comm station. A call to the Russian president seemed imminent. And something told him Nikita Yermilov would be expecting it.