Tom Clancy - Executive Orders

Something very simple had gone wrong, Badrayn was certain, though he wouldn't know for sure until his colleague got back to Tehran from London, via Brussels and Vienna, on several different sets of travel documents.

"The President and his family are at the Presidential Retreat at Camp David," the reporter concluded, "to recover from the shock of this dreadful event just north of peaceful Annapolis, Maryland. This is…"

"Retreat?" Daryaei asked.

"It means many things in English, first among them is to run away," Badrayn answered, mainly because he was sure that's what his employer would like to hear.

"If he thinks he can run away from me, he is mistaken," the cleric observed in dark amusement, the spirit of the moment getting the better of his discretion.

Badrayn didn't react to the revelation. It was easy at the instant of his realization, since he was looking at the TV and not at his host, but things then became more clear. There was not all that much risk at all, was there? Mah-moud Ilaji had a way to kill this man, perhaps whenever he wished to do so, and it was all being orchestrated. Could he really do it? But, of course, he already had.

IVIS MADE LIFE hard on the OpFor. Not all that hard! Colonel Hamm and the Blackhorse had won this one, but what only a year before would have been a wipeout of cosmic proportions—Fort Irwin was in California, and some linguistic peculiarities were inevitable—had been a narrow victory. War was about information. It was always the lesson of the National Training Center: Find the enemy. Don't let the enemy find you. Reconnaissance. Reconnaissance. Reconnaissance. The IVIS system, operated by halfway competent people, shot the information out to everyone so fast that the soldiers were leaning in the right direction even before the orders came down. That had nearly negated a maneuver on the OpFor's part, which would have been worthy of Erwin Rommel on his best day, and as he watched the fast-play of the exercise on the big screen in the Star Wars Room, Hamm saw just how close it had been. If one of those Blue Force tank companies had moved just five minutes faster, he would have lost this one, too. The NTC would surely lose its effectiveness if the Good Guys won regularly.

"That was a beautiful move, Hamm," the colonel of the Carolina Guard admitted, reaching in his pocket for a cigar and handing it over. "But we'll whip your ass tomorrow."

Ordinarily, he would have smiled and said, Sure you will. But the cracker son of a bitch just might pull it off, and that would take a lot of the fun out of Hamm's life. The colonel of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment would now have to come up with ways of spoofing IVIS. It was something he'd thought about, and had been the subject of a few discussions over beers with his operations officer, but so far they had only agreed that it was no small feat, probably involving dummy vehicles… like Rommel had used. He'd have to get funding for those. He walked outside to smoke his cigar. It had been honorably won. He found the Guard colonel there, too.

"For Guardsmen, you're pretty damned good," Hamm had to admit. He'd never said such a thing to a Guard formation before. He rarely said it to anyone at all. Except for one deployment error, the Blue Force plan had been a thing of beauty.

"Thank you for saying that, Colonel. IVIS came as a rude surprise, didn't it?"

"You might say that."

"My people love it. A lot come in on their own time to play on the simulators. Hell, I'm surprised you took us on this one."

"Your reserve was too close in," Hamm told him. "You thought you knew what to exploit. Instead, I caught you out of position to meet my counterattack." It wasn't a revelation. The senior observer/controller had made that lesson clear to the momentarily contrite tank commander.

"I'll try to remember that. Catch the news?"

"Yeah, that sucks," Hamm thought aloud.

"Little kids. I wonder if they award medals to the Secret Service?"

"They have something, I imagine. I can think of worse things to die for." And that's what it was all about. Those five agents had died doing their jobs, running to the sound of the guns. They must have made some mistakes, but sometimes you didn't have a choice in the matter. All soldiers knew that.

"God rest their brave souls." The man sounded like Robert Edward Lee. It triggered something in Hamm.

"What's the story on you guys? You, Colonel Edding-ton, you're not supposed—what the hell do you do in real life?" The guy was over fifty, very marginal for an officer in command of a brigade, even in the Guard.

"I'm professor of military history at the University of North Carolina. What's the story? This brigade was supposed to be the round-out for 24th Mech back in 1991, and we came here for workups and got our ass handed to us. Never got to deploy. I was a battalion XO then, Hamm. We wanted to go. Our regimental standards go back to the Revolution. It hurt our pride. We've been waiting to come back here near on ten years, boy, and this IVIS box gives us a fair chance." He was a tall, thin man, and when he turned, he was looking down at the regular officer. "We are going to make use of that chance, son. I know the theory. I been readin' and studyin' on it for over thirty years, and my men ain't'a'gonna roll over and die for you, you he'ah?" When aroused, Nicholas Eddington tended to adopt an accent.

" 'Specially not for Yankees?"

"Damn right!" Then it was time for a laugh. Nick Ed-dington was a teacher, with a flair for the impromptu dramatic. The voice softened. "I know, if we didn't have IVIS, you'd murder us—"

"Ain't technology wonderful?"

"It almost makes us your equal, and your men are the best. Everybody knows that," Eddington conceded. It was a worthy peace gesture.

"With the hours we keep, kinda hard to get a beer at the club when you need one. Can I offer you one at my home, sir?"

"Lead on, Colonel Hamm."

"What's your area of specialty?" BLACKHORSE Six asked on the way to his car.

"My dissertation was on the operational art of Nathan Bedford Forrest."

"Oh? I've always admired Buford, myself."

"He only had a couple of days, but they were all good days. He might have won the war for Lincoln at Gettysburg."

"The Spencer carbines gave his troopers the technical edge," Hamm announced. "People overlook that factor."

"Choosing the best ground didn't hurt, and the Spencers helped, but what he did best was to remember his mission," Eddington replied.

"As opposed to Stuart. Jeb definitely had a bad day. I suppose he was due for one." Hamm opened the car door for his colleague. It would be a few hours before they had to prepare for the next exercise, and Hamm was a serious student of history, especially of the cavalry. This would be an interesting breakfast: beer, eggs, and the Civil War.

THEY BUMPED INTO each other in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, which was doing a great business in coffee and donuts at the moment.

"Hi, John," Holtzman said, looking at the crime scene from across the street.

"Bob," Plumber acknowledged with a nod. The area was alive with cameras, TV and still, recording the scene for history.

"You're up early for a Saturday—TV guy, too," the Post reporter noted with a friendly smile. "What do you make of it?"

"This really is a terrible thing." Plumber was himself a grandfather many times over. "Was it Ma'alot, the one in Israel, back—what? 1975, something like that?" They all seemed to blend together, these terrorist incidents.

Holtzman wasn't sure, either. "I think so. I have somebody checking it back at the office."

"Terrorists make for good stories, but, dear God, we'd be better off without them."

The crime scene was almost pristine. The bodies were gone. The autopsies were complete by now, they both imagined. But everything else was intact, or nearly so. The cars were there, and as the reporters watched, ballistics experts were running strings to simulate shots at mannequins brought in from a local department store, trying to re-create every detail of the event. The black guy in the Secret Service windbreaker was Norman Jeffers, one of the heroes of the day, now demonstrating how he'd come down from the house across the street. Inside was Inspector Patrick O'Day. Some agents were simulating the movements of the terrorists. One man lay on the ground by the front door, aiming a red plastic "play gun" around. In criminal investigations, the dress rehearsals always came after the play.