Tom Clancy - Command Authority

“He took his job seriously, you know,” Ryan said. “You make him out to be some sort of a clown. I didn’t know him well, but he deserves better than this treatment you’re giving him.”

Eastling said, “He wasn’t a clown. He was a man walking on the fine edge for so long he turned to drink and casual encounters to distance himself from the danger. It happens to the best of them, the traveling officers. I am sympathetic to the stresses and strains of what they have to deal with, but at the end of the day, my job is to make sure I have answers.”

The two men looked out over Lake Zug and toward the lights on the far side of the bay. It was beautiful; Jack could imagine Penright sitting here just days earlier, planning his next move with Morningstar.

Ryan said, “So that’s it, then? We just go home?”

“That’s up to London. If Sir Basil is going to send someone else to town to make contact with Morningstar, then we might stick around another day or so to report our findings directly to—”

Ryan’s eyes were on the far shore of Lake Zug, and near where he was looking, a brilliant flash of light appeared, casting a glow all the way up to a patch of low clouds hanging over the shore. The light seemed like it was on the land, not over water, but it was hard to tell immediately. Five seconds after the flash, a low rumble reached the balcony where the two men were standing.

Eastling had been looking in the same direction. “That’s an explosion.”

Ryan peered into the distance. “I think I see a fire.” He ran back into the flat, asked the men working there if they had seen any binoculars in the safe house. One of the men pulled a decorative but functional brass telescope off a tripod in the office, and the others chuckled as he offered it to Ryan.

The American snatched it and ran back out to the balcony.

He struggled to bring the big telescope up to his eye. Eastling just stood there and watched him.

On the far shore, almost lost in the twinkling of lights from the buildings, he could definitely make out a fire. It was a few blocks from the shoreline, higher on a hill.

“What is that place over there?”

“That’s Rotkreuz,” Eastling said.

“The same place the banker Tobias Gabler was killed the other day.”

“As a matter of fact, yes. It is.”

Jack lowered the telescope. “Let’s go.”

“Go? Over there? Why?”

“ Why? Are you serious?”

“Ryan, what is it you think just happened?”

“I don’t know, but I’m going to get a closer look.”

“You are being ridiculous.”

“Then why don’t you hang out here at the safe house and help your men search through the corn flakes? I’m heading over there.” Ryan turned and left the balcony. He scooped up off the table a set of keys belonging to one of the rented cars and then shot out the door of the suite.

As he stuck the key in the lock, he heard someone hurrying down the gravel behind him. It was Eastling. “I’ll drive.”

It took them nearly a half-hour to get around the lake to Rotkreuz. As they entered the little village, there was no mistaking which way to go. A structural fire raged fifty feet in the air. Eastling merely had to keep his car pointed toward the glow and, despite being rerouted by hastily erected roadblocks designed to clear the way for emergency vehicles, he managed to park near enough to the scene so that he and Ryan had to walk only a few blocks.

Jack and Nick worked their way forward through a large crowd of onlookers across the parking lot from the blaze. Jack could feel the heat on his face as he neared the fire.

The building looked like it must have been a beautiful restaurant; there was an open seating area with fire pits to keep the patrons warm on chilly nights, and behind this sat a long structure with floor-to-ceiling windows that afforded the patrons of the restaurant amazing views of Lake Zug. A sign high above the parking lot read “Restaurant Meisser.” But now the building was fully engulfed in flames, the windows were broken, and the wrought-iron tables and chairs around the fire pits had all been knocked aside so firefighters and other first responders could pull victims from the carnage.

There were bodies under black plastic sheets in the parking lot. Jack counted at least ten, but it was hard to tell in the wildly flickering firelight and the multicolored strobes of the emergency vehicles.

Dozens of firefighters still worked on the fire, hoses attacked it from a dozen directions, and police kept the crowd back with tape, shouts, and the occasional shove. Someone in the crowd said gas lines were feeding the fire, and then, minutes after Ryan and Eastling arrived, the entire tapeline was moved back to the opposite side of the street, in fear of a larger explosion.

While Jack and Nick stood there on the edge of the light from the roaring flames, Jack noticed a cluster of Swiss police cars on a street corner on the opposite side of the taped-off parking lot. Two police officers had a bearded man in handcuffs, and they walked him to one of the vehicles and placed him in the back. He looked to be a few years younger than Jack, but from this distance Jack couldn’t be sure.

Jack said, “Wonder what that’s all about.”

Nick started walking that way. “I suppose we could go find out.”

By the time they made it around the parking lot, the police car with the man in back had raced out of the parking lot and down the hill, out of view.

Two officers stood by another car at the edge of the police line. Nick Eastling walked up to them and said, “Entschuldigung. Sprechen Sie Englisch?”

In German, one of the officers replied, “Yes, but we are busy.”

“I understand. I was only wondering why that man was arrested.”

“He wasn’t arrested. He was detained for questioning. He had been in the building, but he left right before the explosion. He wasn’t a patron, he just walked through, then exited through the back. After the explosion, one of the waiters saw him in the crowd and pointed him out.”

“I see.”

“Were you a witness to the explosion?”

“No, I’m sorry, I didn’t see a thing.”

Eastling and Ryan turned away and pushed back into the crowd. They left the area a few minutes later, returning to the SIS safe house so Eastling could contact Century House via the STU phone. MI6 would need to pressure the Swiss for information on the crime, the detainment of the bearded young man, and any other information that could be more readily obtained at a higher level.

Eastling dropped Ryan back at the hotel on his way to the safe house. Once again the American CIA analyst felt as though he was being pushed aside by the counterintelligence officer, but he knew he wouldn’t have anything meaningful to do at the safe house, so he didn’t press the issue.

Delta Force officer Barry Jankowski, call sign Midas, had survived the battle for the Lighthouse in Sevastopol, Ukraine, along with two of his operators and eleven other Americans. But unlike most of the security officers and CIA men who’d made it out of the Lighthouse alive, Midas and his boys were still in country.

For the past three days Midas had been in Cherkasy, a midsized city in Ukraine’s heartland, and the location of a large Ukrainian Army base that was home to the nation’s 25th Airborne Brigade.

Midas had lost friends at the Lighthouse, but like most military special operations personnel, he was not given time to grieve for them in the field. Yesterday afternoon, Jankowski had been a lieutenant colonel. But a call from Fort Bragg last night informed him he had been promoted to colonel, and not only was he the highest-ranking member of Joint Special Operations Command here in Ukraine, he was now the senior command authority of all U.S. and British forces in Ukraine for Operation Red Coal Carpet.