Tom Clancy - Command Authority

“Thank you so much for your time,” she said.

“It is always a pleasure to see you.”

He did not immediately let go of her hand, so the thirty-three-year-old newscaster decided to take the opportunity to press her luck. “Mr. President, your news today was very exciting, and I am sure it will be received well. I wonder if it might not be a good idea for Director Talanov to also come on my show sometime. We have not seen him in the news at all to this point. In light of his new promotion, this might be a perfect opportunity for him to introduce himself to the citizenry of Russia.”

Volodin’s smile did not waver, his deep, lustful look into Tatiana’s eyes did not diminish, but his words seemed darker somehow. “My dear lady, Roman Romanovich will not be appearing on television. He is very much a man of the shadows. That is why he does what he does, that is where he works best, and, just between you and me… that is where I want to keep him.”

Volodin winked.

For virtually the first time in her professional life, Tatiana Molchanova found herself unable to respond. She merely nodded meekly.

The Campus had been created by President Jack Ryan during his first term in office, as a small but hard-hitting outfit tasked with furthering the aims of the United States in an off-the-books fashion.

Jack Ryan put Gerry Hendley in charge. Hendley was a former senator from Kentucky who had retired from public life in disgrace in a staged case of financial impropriety, purely for the purpose of getting out of politics to begin the difficult and crucial work of establishing a sub-rosa spy shop.

To ensure the men and women of The Campus were protected in case any of their operations were revealed, before leaving office during his first elected term, President Ryan signed one hundred blank presidential pardons in secret, and he handed them over to Hendley.

With access to the intelligence feeds between the CIA and the NSA, but free of the bureaucracy and oversight of a government intelligence organization, The Campus had considerably more latitude to conduct their operations, and this had given them a power and a reach that had led to incredible successes in the past several years.

When President Ryan established The Campus, however, he had no way of knowing that one day the operational arm of the organization would be staffed by his longtime friends and associates John Clark and Domingo Chavez; his nephews Dominic and Brian Caruso; and even his own son, Jack Ryan, Jr.

Brian had been killed in action in Libya two years earlier, and he had been replaced by former Army Ranger Sam Driscoll.

Months earlier, Chinese computer hackers had broken into the Hendley Associates network, and a kill team of Chinese operatives had hit the West Odenton headquarters of Hendley Associates in the dead of night in an attempt to wipe out the organization. The Chinese attack had been thwarted, but Hendley and his team knew their operation could not continue in the same location now that the Chinese knew where they were, and perhaps even what they were.

Losing the West Odenton location created a bigger nuisance than just having to find a new building. The Campus had obtained much of its actionable intelligence by means of an antenna farm on the roof of the five-story building that intercepted classified intel traveling back and forth between the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, and the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.

That method of pulling classified data was lost to them now that the Hendley Associates building was serving the white side only.

But there was hope for The Campus and its future by means of a fifty-five-year-old paunchy and pale computer geek named Gavin Biery. Biery had spent the months since the Chinese attack working on a method to obtain intelligence via the CIA’s Intelink-TS, its top-secret network. He had taken the advanced hacking code used by the Chinese against the CIA’s computers, and then, after making sure the CIA had patched their vulnerabilities, he began to search for new threat vectors into Intelink-TS.

So far his work held much promise but little payoff.

While Gavin worked the intelligence-collection angle and Gerry Hendley worked on obtaining a new base of operations, the Campus operators, minus Jack Ryan, Jr., had been using John Clark’s expansive farm in Emmitsburg, Maryland, as a training ground.

John Clark’s rustic farm was perhaps not the most suitable location on earth for a unit of covert paramilitary and clandestine services operators to train, but for the time being, at least, it served its purpose.

Until recently, the operators had trained in secret locations all over the country, but they were vulnerable now, so they retreated to the farm and ran drills to keep themselves sharp. They’d even taken over a guest bedroom and turned it into a small op center and mini-schoolhouse. The men spent an hour a day or more using foreign-language training software on their laptops and reading the latest open-source information about the world’s major trouble spots.

And to a man they hoped like hell their training and study would be put to use with the call to return to operational status.

Gerry Hendley took the afternoon off from his tour of the D.C. area’s hundreds of available office buildings to drive out to Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he now sat at the kitchen table in John Clark’s farmhouse. Around him were assembled the operators of The Campus, as well as Gavin Biery. They had been getting together here once a week, though these meetings had turned out to be non-affairs, really. Each week Gerry talked about his hunt for a suitable location for the organization, Clark and the operations arm discussed the training they had been undergoing, and Biery used highly technical jargon to let everyone know about the work he was doing to get the information stream from the CIA up and running again.

Though the meetings were polite enough, the truth was that everyone was eager to do something other than sit in Clark’s kitchen.

Gerry was prepared to start the meeting with a rundown of a couple of properties he’d been looking at near Bethesda, but Clark said he’d like to discuss something else.

“What’s up?” Gerry asked.

“A situation has presented itself.”

Clark told Hendley and the others about his call with Keith Bixby, CIA chief of station in Kiev, and how the CIA was interested in a Russian crime boss known as Gleb the Scar.

Domingo Chavez had spent the past few days making calls to some friends in both Russia and Ukraine, mostly men he had served with in Rainbow. Through them, he’d learned more about the Scar and his organization. No one knew what he was doing in Ukraine associating with Chechens, and both Chavez and Clark found this very suspicious, especially since it seemed war was on the horizon over there.

Hendley said, “So all you know is this guy is Russian mob, and he’s working in Kiev.”

Clark said, “I also know CIA doesn’t have the manpower to run a surveillance package on him. They are, quite reasonably, focusing on the professional intelligence officers in Kiev, and not organized crime.”

“What is it you want to do?”

“Keith Bixby is a good COS who’s in a tough situation. I thought we could go over to Kiev and check into this mob connection, just to see what Gleb the Scar is up to.”

Hendley looked at the rest of the group. Not surprisingly, they all looked ready to head to the airport right now.

“How big is this guy in their organization? Is he like a Mafia don?”

Chavez had become something of an expert on organized-crime groups in the past year; it was a topic that he’d focused on in his downtime with The Campus.