Mark Greaney - Full Force and Effect

“Morning, Gav.”

“Welcome home, Ryan. You boys have a nice little vacay?”

Normally Biery supported Campus operations from his banks of computers here in Virginia, but the Vietnam op had come up quickly and Gavin hadn’t been involved. Even so, Gavin Biery was cleared for anything that happened to the Campus operators, so Ryan knew he didn’t need to keep quiet about the operation.

Jack said, “Oh, it was a blast. Our subject got murdered right in front of me. Ding and Sam got shot at, and Clark flattened a dude with a rental car. How was your weekend?”

The elevator dinged as it stopped, and the doors opened on Gavin’s floor. He stood there with his mouth half open, not sure if Ryan was serious.

Finally he said, “Sure am sorry I missed that op.”

Gavin had gone out with the team a few times in his career to provide computer support to their operations, and due to these limited forays into the field he considered himself something of a full-fledged spook. The rest of the team found this to be comical, although the computer geek had done an admirable job in the field.

“It’s your floor, Gav,” Jack said.

“Right,” Gavin replied as he stepped out into the third-floor hall, still not sure if Ryan was pulling his leg about what had happened overseas or not.

Jack headed to his fourth-floor office to drop his bag on his way to the kitchen, but as he walked up the hall he saw someone sitting on the edge of his desk. As he got closer he realized it was his cousin, Dominic Caruso. Jack hadn’t seen Dom in nearly three months. Dom was an operations officer here at The Campus, same as Jack, but the operators had all been off in different directions in specialized individual training, each on their own rotation around the world. Dom had stayed out on an evolution longer than the other men, and he and Jack hadn’t spoken or e-mailed each other in weeks.

The two men embraced. “Good to see you, cuz!” Caruso said.

After a post-embrace chest bump, a silly move they’d started doing as a joke, Ryan said, “You, too. Damn, Dom. You’ve been training a long time. Me and the other guys have actually been out working while you’ve been rolling around on a cushy judo mat somewhere.”

Caruso cocked his head. “Really? Gerry didn’t tell you?”

Now Ryan cocked his own head. “Tell me what?”

Caruso hesitated. Finally he said, “Never mind. If Gerry didn’t tell you, then you must not need to know.”

The truth was, Dom Caruso had been fighting his own battle in the past few weeks. A battle that had taken him from the Indian subcontinent to Central America and then to Europe, as he tried to stop a potentially devastating intelligence leak from falling into the hands of the Iranians. The rest of the team had been kept away from the situation, but Dom didn’t know until now that the others had not even been informed he’d been in harm’s way.

Hendley knew what Dom had been involved in, but apparently he’d kept the others in the dark. Operational security. He could already hear Hendley saying it as an explanation, and it did make sense, although it made Dom feel even more like he’d been swinging in the wind alone on his last operation.

Ryan said, “Tell me about it. You get into anything interesting?”

“Later,” Dom replied, not sure if he would say anything about it at all now. “I heard you guys were out on a job. Anything cool happen?”

Jack shrugged, then put his arm around Caruso’s shoulders. “Let’s grab a cup of coffee and I’ll fill you in.”

—

John Clark arrived in his fourth-floor office just after eight, and as soon as he put his briefcase down he picked up his phone and called Jack Ryan, Jr.’s office down the hall.

Jack answered on the second ring. “Hey, John.”

“I’m guessing Dom is in there shooting the shit with you.”

Jack chuckled. “We have a little catching up to do.”

“Right. Before you do that, send him down to me.”

“You got it.”

A minute later Caruso entered Clark’s office and shut the door behind him. The two men shook hands.

Clark said, “I meant to call you before you came in, but we had an in extremis situation come up last week.”

“Yeah, I heard. No details yet, but Jack was getting around to it. He doesn’t seem to be aware of what I’ve been up to.”

“Gerry and I have decided to keep some of the work we do here compartmentalized. You were working your last job as a singleton. When an operator is in the field as a singleton, there is no need to know among the other operators.”

Dom said, “I understand that.”

“Good.” The matter was settled, Caruso wouldn’t talk about his operation to the rest of the team. “How do you feel? Ready to get back to work?”

“Absolutely. I’m good to go.”

Clark said, “I need to fill you in on what went down in Vietnam. We have a nine a.m. meeting where we might get further marching orders on the subject.”

Dom pulled up a chair. “Let’s hear it.”

10

One year earlier

Amotorcade of five armored luxury vehicles rolled up to the same outer perimeter checkpoint that mining director Hwang passed an hour earlier. The lead car handed over some credentials to the uniformed guard and soon all five vehicles were moving again along the virtually empty blacktop road, much faster than the entourage from the Korea Natural Resources Trading Corporation. They sailed through the other checkpoints without even slowing down, rising through the wooded hills toward their destination.

The motorcade stopped at the entrance to Residence No. 55, and eighteen men in total disgorged from it, all wearing gray military uniforms signifying them as officers of the Korean People’s Army. Their credos were checked here again by a large unit of armed guards, but only briefly, and soon the entourage had passed through the doors of the palace.

At the nucleus of this group was Lieutenant General Ri Tae-jin, a fit fifty-two-year-old who wore a chest full of medals and walked pridefully, chin first and shoulders back. His face was blank, void of emotion, though in the stony gaze a perceptive person might well notice an air of sadness.

Six of his staff remained in the entry hall; they were just along as escort, but they were not needed for today’s meeting. And six more stopped off in an inner chamber for consultation with politburo members in concurrent talks at the residence. Five men followed Ri through another guarded doorway, heading for the personal residence of the Supreme Leader.

They ascended a flight of stairs and entered the long main gallery hall, and here Ri glanced at a clock on the wall and saw he was right on time for his meeting with the Dae Wonsu, which meant to him he would probably have to sit and wait for only an hour or so. Ji-hoon’s father hadn’t been punctual himself, really, but Ji-hoon seemed to take exceptional pleasure in making people wait for him.

Halfway down the main gallery hall Ri and his entourage encountered a smaller group of men in civilian dress approaching from the living quarters of the Supreme Leader. There were five men in this group, and they were led by one of the residence’s beautiful young attendants. The lieutenant general identified one man in the group as the senior member because the attendant spoke to him, and the others walked behind. As he passed the man their eyes met, and Ri saw he was a small man with a bald head, a few years older than himself.

It bothered General Ri greatly that he did not recognize the man, because he’d obviously just left an audience with the Supreme Leader. If this bald-headed fellow had the ear of the Dae Wonsu and he wasn’t, at least, a general, then he was most definitely an important person. And if he wasn’t even in the military, Ri felt he had no excuse for not knowing the man’s file backward and forward.