Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Burgess said, “Volodin would never use a tactical nuke in Ukraine. It would destroy part of what he considers his home soil. He will fight for it tooth and nail, perhaps, but he’s not going to condemn it to nuclear winter.”

Ryan drummed his fingers on the table. “Tell me more about the plans in place for active cooperation between our Partnership for Peace forces in Ukraine and the Ukrainian Air Force.”

Burgess pulled a file out of a folio and held it up. “Operation Red Coal Carpet. It assumes a conventional air and ground attack by Russia into Ukraine for control of the Crimea and the eastern section of the nation. It provides a blueprint for teams of American special operations forces to operate laser targeting equipment to aid Russian jets and helos, not for the purposes of defeating Russia’s invasion force, but rather to keep it occupied as it moves deeper into the interior of the nation. The objective is to stall the attack or slow it enough to where the Russians will suffer debilitating loses while they are still far east of the Dnieper River.”

“Do we have enough operators on the ground there?”

Burgess thought over his answer first, then said, “If we go live with Red Coal Carpet, the U.S. Army will move a company of scout helicopters already serving in NATO into Ukraine, again under the auspices of Partnership for Peace. These helos will be used for laser targeting. A small unit of Rangers will also be added for security at the Joint Operations Center. This will bring American and British forces in the country to somewhere in the neighborhood of four hundred fifty troops.

“I do believe it will be enough for this conflict, for one key reason. We are only there to support the Ukrainian Air Force, and the Russians will, to put it bluntly, kill the Ukrainian Air Force. I’m sorry, I don’t see any other scenario. Our men with their laser designators will have a target-rich environment, but they won’t have enough birds in the sky flying around with air-to-ground ordnance. The Ukrainian helos and strike fighters will be destroyed. I’m afraid putting more men on the ground is not going to help the situation.”

Ryan said, “I’m going to have to let key members of Congress know about this. It’s not exactly within the scope of Partnership for Peace.”

“No, sir, it is not,” Burgess agreed.

Ryan looked at the clock on the wall. “Okay, I’m authorizing Operation Red Coal Carpet, so that if the Russian invasion begins, our forces on the ground will have the authorizations in place to begin operations. Bob, come to me with whatever you need, whenever you need it. Mary Pat and Jay will provide DoD with anything they can, as well.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ryan closed the meeting by saying, “There are four hundred fifty American and British troops in the field who are going to need our support and our prayers in the next few days. Let’s see that they get plenty of both.”

CIA analyst Jack Ryan had spent much of the day on the frigid streets of Zug, Switzerland, following around SIS counterintelligence officer Nick Eastling as he went to each location visited by David Penright in the days before his death. They’d been to his hotel room, the car rental office where he’d picked up his Mercedes, and a pair of restaurants he’d visited.

At each location, Ryan prodded Eastling to ask whether Penright had been seen with anyone else. In most cases, other than the restaurant where he’d met with Morningstar on the night of Penright’s death and the bar where he’d apparently tried and failed to pick up the German woman, he’d been alone.

It was evening before they finally arrived at the MI6 safe house where David Penright had worked in Zug. It was a few minutes north of the town proper, set on a hill in a residential neighborhood of two-story half-timbered homes with small gardens in front and large fenced-in backyards. Ryan and Eastling came through the front door and greeted the rest of the counterintelligence team, who’d been working here much of the day.

“Anything, Joey?” Eastling asked the first man in the living room. Ryan saw the home had been all but disassembled. Floorboards had been prized up, wall paneling had been removed, sofa cushions looked as if they had been hacked apart.

“Nothing out in the open. He had some documents locked in the safe.”

“What sort of documents?”

“All in German, of course. Look like internal transfers at RPB. A printout from a dot-matrix printer. Numbered accounts, transfer amounts, that sort of thing. Pages and pages of the bloody things.”

Eastling said, “He hadn’t shared anything with Century House since he arrived. He met with Morningstar the evening he was killed. Might be that he received them from Morningstar, then brought them back here before going out again to the bar.”

Joey replied, “Well, if he did, he followed proper protocol. Good job he didn’t get caught with RPB documents on his body when the ambulance took him to the morgue.”

Eastling acknowledged this with a nod. “Keep looking.”

It was a nice enough house, with modern furnishings and a fifty-inch front-projection TV set in the living room. There was a VHS player next to it, with a library of cassettes on a bookshelf alongside the television. One of the counterintelligence officers was systematically going through each video, watching it in fast-forward.

Nick and Jack walked into the kitchen now, and here they found a man pouring cereal out of boxes into bowls, then running his hands through the muesli and corn flakes, searching for any hidden items. A third SIS man crawled on the kitchen floor with a flashlight in his hand, checking the seams in the tile for any sign they had been moved or prized up.

While all this was going on, Ryan asked Eastling, “Why didn’t Penright just stay here? Why did he go to a hotel?”

Eastling shrugged. “He wanted to be close to a lobby bar. He wanted a place where he could bring girls home.”

“Do you know that, or are you guessing that?”

“As I said, David Penright isn’t the first dead officer I’ve had to investigate. So far, everything I’ve seen and learned today goes along with my assumptions that this was an accident. Look, Jack. I guess you want this to be some sort of a KGB hit, but the KGB doesn’t rub out our officers in the streets of Western Europe.”

Before Jack could respond, the phone in the small home office rang. One of Eastling’s men took it and then handed it over to his boss.

While Nick Eastling took the call, Ryan wandered out onto the balcony over the backyard. There was a nice view here, looking down across the town and farther on, over Lake Zug itself. Beyond the black water, the far bank of the lake was visible as twinkling streetlights and glowing windows in buildings. The cold, clear air gave Jack the feeling he could reach out across the water and touch the distant shore, although it was surely miles away.

The British counterintelligence officer met Jack outside a few minutes later. In his hands were two bottles of Sonnenbräu beer from the fridge. It was too cold to drink beer outside, Ryan thought, but he took one of the bottles and sipped it as he turned his attention back to the lake below.

Eastling said, “Just got off the phone with London. A medical examiner, one of ours, examined Penright’s body this morning in Zurich. No puncture marks, like those made from a hypodermic needle. We know we’ll find alcohol in his blood, but toxicology on anything else will take weeks. From the ME, however, it certainly doesn’t look like he had been in any way drugged or poisoned.”

Ryan said nothing.

Eastling looked out over the yard. “He got himself drunk enough to trip and fall on the street. Bad show for a man in the field.”