Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Still, the man said, “Leave your number. I’ll pass it to him next time he’s in, and if he’s interested in speaking with you… he’ll let you know.”

Jack shrugged. It wasn’t how he’d planned it, but it was Friday; he could get a room in a hotel in town and wait a night, because he didn’t have to be in the office in the morning. He pulled his Castor and Boyle business card out of his wallet and handed it to the bartender. Then he said, “There’s another twenty for you when I talk to him.”

The bartender raised his bushy eyebrows and put the card into his breast pocket without looking at it.

Jack turned his attention to his beer and started thumbing through his phone, looking for the closest inn that looked decent enough for one night.

As he did this, the bartender began talking with an old-timer at the end of the bar. Jack paid little attention to them as he concentrated on his phone.

A minute later the bartender returned and dropped Jack’s business card next to the glass of John Courage. “Sorry, lad. Vick isn’t interested in chatting.”

Ryan looked over to the man at the end of the bar, who was lost in his own beer. At first he thought there was no way this man was only fifty-nine. He was wrinkled and heavy; he looked like a slightly thinner version of Santa Claus. But upon closer inspection Ryan thought it possible the man could be younger than he first guessed, and when the man looked up and noticed Ryan looking at him, he gave the bartender a look like he wanted to wring his neck.

This is the guy.

Jack pulled out a twenty-pound note and put it on the bar, then grabbed his beer and headed over.

Oxley shifted his eyes back down to his beer. He had thick, wavy, and slightly long white hair and a full white beard. His bloodshot eyes gave Jack the impression the man had been sitting right here downing pints since whenever this bar opened for business that day.

Jack spoke softly to keep the conversation between the two of them. “Good afternoon, Mr. Oxley. I apologize for coming unannounced, but I would very much appreciate a few moments of your time.”

The older man did not look up from his pint. In a voice as low as a locomotive’s rumble, he said, “Bugger off.”

Great, Jack thought.

He tried a bribe. It had worked with the bartender, after all. “How about you let me pay your tab, and we go find a booth and talk for a few minutes?”

“I said bugger off.”

Basil had said the man might be trouble.

Jack thought he’d try one more avenue. “My name is—”

Now the bearded man looked up from his pint for the first time. “I know who you are.” And then, “Your dad’s a bloody wanker.”

Ryan gritted his teeth. He noticed the bartender had come around from behind the bar and was talking to a couple of men in a booth. They were all looking his way.

Jack wasn’t worried, just frustrated. His only real concern was that he would feel bad if he had to beat up a dozen or so old geezers.

He stood up from the bar, looking at Oxley. “It was really a small thing I needed from you. You might have been able to do some good, at no cost to yourself.”

“Fuck off.”

Jack said, “You were SAS? I find that very hard to believe. You really let yourself go, didn’t you?”

Oxley looked back down to his beer. He squeezed it with a meaty hand, and Jack saw the sinewy muscles in the man’s hand ripple with the squeeze.

“No response?”

Oxley said nothing.

“I thought Brits were supposed to have manners.” Jack Ryan turned and walked out the door without a look back.

The rally in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk drew more than ten thousand this weekend, triple the attendance of the week before. Even though it was a cold, rainy Saturday afternoon, Pushkin Boulevard was packed tight with pro-Russian Ukrainians, all out to make their voices heard.

There was nothing spontaneous about this rally. Today’s event, like all the others, had the backing of the FSB, who were all over the place here in eastern Ukraine. This was the largest of the weekly rallies this year, and it was no mystery as to why. The assassination of Oksana Zueva and the NATO action in Sevastopol—there were accusations that the CIA had been involved as well—brought the pro-Russian eastern Ukrainians out in droves.

While the men and women in the crowd held their new Russian passports high over their heads and marched behind banners expressing their allegiance to Moscow, and not Ukraine, a van moved slowly behind the last of the stragglers, south on Pushkin. Then it turned onto Hurova Avenue so that it could maneuver to get in front of the action.

Minutes later, the van rolled back onto Pushkin south of the red banners at the front of the march, and it parked along an open square adjacent to the National Academic Ukrainian Musical and Drama Theater. The square in front of the massive theater served as the midpoint of the march, and here the civilian organizers would make speeches through bullhorns and incite the crowd against the pro-nationalists in power in Kiev, before everyone set off again to march east toward the river.

The two men in the van did not get out when they parked. Instead, they sat there smoking cigarettes with stone faces and watched the crowd in the distance walk up Pushkin in their direction.

The two occupants of the van were members of the Seven Strong Men. They were both Russians by birth, but they had been living in Kiev recently and working under the orders of the FSB.

Behind them, in their van, was a single fifty-five-gallon oil drum under a canvas tarp. The drum had been filled by others the evening before, but the two mafia enforcers knew what was inside.

The explosive was RDX, Research Department Explosive, also known as hexogen. It was not a new or high-tech explosive, it had been around forever, but it was suitable for this operation.

Through the hole in the top of the drum, a shock-tube detonator had been inserted into the granular material, and the detonator was, in turn, attached to a simple timing device. The timer was set for three minutes; it needed only the flip of a switch to start the countdown, so the two men in the front of the van sat in silence, watching the crowd carefully, trying to pick just the right moment to set the bomb in motion.

Local police were out, of course, but they weren’t searching parked cars along the route. They had enough to worry about with trying to stop the protesters from breaking windows of the few known nationalist shopkeepers along the route, as well as dealing with a surprising counterprotest that had materialized a few blocks farther south on Pushkin Boulevard. Though the counterprotest was small, it had the effect of pulling police patrols away from the path of the march.

The pro-nationalists who stood along the road waving Ukrainian flags and yelling at the marchers had been set up by the FSB the evening before, meaning Russian intelligence had a hand in organizing both sides of the conflict here in Donetsk today.

When the red banner was just one block away from the van with the fifty-five-gallon bomb in the back, the two Seven Strong Men operatives opened their doors. Then the passenger flipped the switch on the timer, calmly stepped out, and joined his partner as they walked away to the east.

Two minutes later, they were picked up by a confederate driving a car with stolen license plates.

And a minute after this, when the protest marchers were still forming in the square next to the National Academic Ukrainian Musical and Drama Theater, the shock-tube detonator sent a percussive wave into the RDX, and the entire van exploded in a flash with a blast radius of eighty feet.

A few close by were spared death because the van had been parked in a lot with vehicles on both sides and this stifled some of the bomb’s potential carnage, but those in front of and behind the vehicle were torn apart instantly. Those who did not take the full force of the blast but were still within the radius of the major shock wave had their eardrums and internal organs assaulted, and several people in a second ring of victims, just outside the range of the shock wave, were killed by shrapnel from the blast.