Line of Sight, Page 2

  Grechko stared greedily at his monitor displaying a live video feed from the Israeli-designed Forpost-M aerial drone circling high over Idlib, which also provided the laser guidance beam for the missiles.

  “Any second now,” Grechko said, grinning. “Time to burn out those cockroaches.”

  But Walib didn’t want to see it. He was already outside, barking orders to his men, who were scrambling to prep for rapid “shoot and scoot” redeployment, the only defense against counter-battery fire, real or imagined.

  Walib marched through the billowing clouds of exhaust and debris still swirling in the air, rage and shame welling in his eyes.

  Lieutenant Dzhabrailov stood outside the command vehicle, studying the Syrian captain with keen interest.

  IDLIB, SYRIA

  The laser-guided TOS-2 Starfire rockets struck inside a kill box two hundred eighty meters square—about eight densely populated city blocks. A much tighter pattern was possible with the new guidance system, but it would have resulted in far fewer casualties.

  The cascade of crashing warheads released clouds of combustible fuel mixed with finely powdered aluminum, PETN high-explosive, and ethylene oxide gas into the open streets. The incendiary clouds also penetrated through the cracks and crevices of nearly every mosque, apartment building, and shop in the eight-block area. Basements, attics, kitchens, toilets, and bedrooms filled with the toxic mixture in nanoseconds, leaving nowhere to hide.

  Timed scatter charges of conventional explosives within the warheads detonated next, igniting the explosive fog into a blazing plasma cloud. The few people standing outside and nearest to the points of impact were instantly incinerated.

  They were the lucky ones.

  The shock wave produced by the explosion caused the first surge of destruction, producing thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch—enough to crush the hull of a World War II submarine. Those who weren’t initially killed by the striking force of the overpressure waves suffered terribly. Limbs were torn away or broken; alveoli and bronchioles ruptured in the lungs; emboli formed in coronary and cerebral arteries; bowels perforated; inner ear structures were crushed; eyes were ripped from their sockets.

  The crushing force of the expanding overpressure waves smashed walls, broke windows, shattered doors. The city itself became a form of shrapnel, hurling shards of burning brick, glass, wood, and iron through the fiery winds, lacerating soft tissues and exposed flesh.

  Yet this still wasn’t the worst of it.

  The powdered aluminum in the expanding plasma cloud slowed its burn rate, resulting in the total consumption of the atmospheric oxygen. This created both a massive vacuum and a fireball of nearly 3,000 degrees Celsius—twice the melting point of steel. But it was the vacuum that caused the most destruction.

  The buildings and other structures still standing held no protections against the fast-forming negative pressure, equal to its opposite in energy and violence, generating fiery, hurricane-force winds. Shrieking survivors were crushed beneath tons of crumbling debris, buried alive in basements, crucified on shattered timbers, impaled on twisted metal. Anyone still alive in the rubble spent their last few minutes suffocating to death, gasping like carp for oxygen that no longer existed.

  There were no more laughing children in the streets.

  The last of the thermobaric munitions burned out just as the explosions of gas mains, petrol tanks, and other urban flammables began, stoking the burning rubble and the still-living bodies beneath into an inferno of unquenchable fire.

  Within seconds, thousands had died, and thousands more suffered. Within a few hours, many of the wounded survivors would perish as well.

  It was the explosive equivalent of a tactical nuclear device, but entirely conventional, and perfectly legal, according to international treaties.

  It was also Hell on Earth.

  3

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Jack Ryan, Jr., spooned up the last of the Burgundy beef stew, earthy and rich, scraping the bowl as he fished out the last piece of savory meat.

  “More, son?” Dr. Cathy Ryan asked.

  “Always, but two helpings are enough,” Jack Junior said. This was his favorite meal, and his mother made it better than anybody. It was just Jack and his parents tonight—the twins were on an ecological field trip to the Virginia wetlands for the next three days and his older sister was on ER duty at the hospital, so she couldn’t join them.

  Jack and his parents were seated at the round table in the First Family’s private dining room, formerly known as the Prince of Wales guest room, before Jacqueline Kennedy converted it to its current function for her own young family. Cathy Ryan had redecorated it in a transitional Craftsman style, favoring the clean lines and sturdy functionality of an original American art form.

  “I hope you saved room for the apple pie,” she said, standing.

  “Are you kidding me?” Jack said. His mother’s apple pie was his all-time favorite dessert. His suspicions grew. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Does a mother need a special reason to cook for her son?” she said.

  “When a mother is as busy as you are, yes, she does need a special reason.”

  “I haven’t had a chance to see you in forever, and you’re off to Europe soon. I knew the only way I could get you over here was to bribe you with a home-cooked meal. Besides, it’s something I love to do.” She glanced at her husband, a pair of reading glasses perched on the end of his nose, his mind buried in a file folder on the dining room table. “Isn’t that right, honey?”

  Senior grunted. “What? Yeah. Dinner was great.”

  Cathy fake-frowned. “Hey, bub. What’s more interesting than us?”

  Senior kept staring at the file. “I’d tell you, but you don’t have the clearance.”

  Cathy Ryan leaped out of her chair and plopped into her husband’s lap, wrapping her arms around his neck. She leaned in close to his ear, whispering heavily. “Vee hav vays of making you talk, Mr. President.”

  Senior laughed, shut his file, and pulled off his glasses, wrapping his arms around his wife’s slender waist. The two exchanged a glance. He whispered in her ear. She giggled and swatted him. A lot of years, a lot of love. They were as steady and solid as the Stickley oak table they all sat around.

  Junior watched them canoodling like a pair of frisky teenagers. The most famous power couple in the world. His father was arguably the greatest president of his generation, exercising selfless leadership on behalf of the national interest through every crisis in a town notorious for ruthless, self-aggrandizing ambition. His mother was a brilliant physician in her own right, and bore the responsibilities of being First Lady with dignity and grace. She was his father’s rock.

  But to Jack, they were just Mom and Dad.

  He felt like a little kid again sitting around the familiar table, but in a good way. Hard as they worked, family always came first for them. Whatever strength or honor or virtue he possessed, Jack knew, he got it from these two. He envied them. He and Yuki had to put a hold on their budding romance; their schedules and careers were both too demanding, and Skype just wasn’t cutting it. It was becoming a painfully familiar pattern in his personal life. He already felt the void of Yuki’s absence, brief though their affair had been. His mother and father were married by the time they were Jack’s age. Hell, John Clark, the eternal warrior, was married and had been for many years, and one of his daughters was married to Ding. Even Jack’s cousin Dom and Adara were together. Nobody on The Campus seemed to suffer performance-wise by being in a stable relationship.

  So what was wrong with him?

  All three Ryans stood and cleared the table, hauling the dishes to the kitchen. Senior made a pot of decaf coffee while Cathy served up the pie and Jack fetched the vanilla-bean ice cream out of the freezer. It was a small kitchen but perfectly adequate for the First Family
on the few occasions they cooked for themselves. With some of the finest chefs in the country available around the clock, and the two senior Ryans working more than full-time jobs, cooking at home was a rare luxury.

  Ten minutes later, Junior scraped up the last piece of Granny Smith apple from his plate and forked it into his mouth, savoring the sweet and tangy bite—just the way he remembered it.

  “I wish you’d shave that awful beard,” his mother said. “I miss your face.”

  “Just keeping it real,” Jack said. He didn’t tell her that he changed his looks just to keep people guessing. He was, after all, the son of these two famous people, and because they had worked hard to keep their kids out of the limelight, he wasn’t nearly as well known as some might think.

  But he wasn’t completely anonymous, either, so he took the extra step every six months or so to comb his hair in another direction or grow it out long, or let a beard or mustache do the camouflage work. Sometimes he even wore contacts to change the color of his eyes.

  After the last ragged op, he thought about going for the clean-cut look of a stockbroker, which he sort of was. But no facial hair made him feel a little exposed, even if it was sometimes safest to hide in plain sight. He decided to keep the beard, but trimmed it close.

  Senior’s attention was buried back in his classified file folder.

  “Another piece of pie?” Cathy asked her son.

  “No, thanks. I’m stuffed.” Junior smiled. “It was perfect. Thank you.” He sipped the last of his coffee and set his cup down. “Well, I need to get going. Got a plane to catch tomorrow.”

  “You’re off to the former Yugoslavia, right?” Cathy asked.

  “London first, then to Ljubljana, Slovenia.”

  “I’ve heard it’s beautiful over there.”

  “It’s on the southern border of Austria, near the Adriatic coast. You get the Alps and the ocean for one low price.”

  “Send pictures, for sure. I’m curious, though. What financial interest does Hendley Associates have over there?”

  Senior again glanced up over the glasses perched on his nose. His wife didn’t know about The Campus—the “black side” special ops team that Jack also served with. All she knew was that Jack was an analyst with the “white side” financial firm Hendley Associates, which funded The Campus special operations through its highly successful investments and fiduciary services.

  “There’s a company over there that wants to offer an IPO on the NASDAQ, and they hired us to do the preliminary financials.”

  “Sounds . . . boring,” Cathy said.

  “Numbers tell a story, if you know how to read them,” Senior offered. He looked at Jack. “Financial analysis has its own particular rewards in that regard . . . and risks.”

  Junior smiled at the double entendre. Gerry Hendley was in charge of the personnel decisions, and he didn’t always inform the President when his son was deployed on a dangerous op. Neither did Jack.

  “The only risk in Slovenia, from what I hear, is eating too much cream cake.”

  Jack’s father smiled. “Good to know.” He returned to his reading.

  Only a handful of people knew that it was the President’s idea to create the firm, or that it was his friend, the former senator Gerry Hendley, who ran both sides of the company. The Campus was a private intelligence organization created to carry out black ops missions that regular government agencies couldn’t or wouldn’t do, serving at the President’s discretion.

  In a perfect world, The Campus shouldn’t have to exist, but the dysfunctional swamp of unscrupulous self-interest known as Washington, D.C., was considerably less than perfect, even in the estimation of its slimiest inhabitants. In the President’s mind, D.C. was one giant Hungarian cluster dance, with occasional interruptions of clarity and purpose, but only when the national interest was properly communicated to and understood by the preening peacocks on the Hill.

  “So, I was wondering if you might do me a favor while you were over there,” Cathy said.

  “Sure. Name it.”

  Cathy stepped over to a chair in the corner, where a brown leather folder was perched. She picked it up and carried it back to the table. She pulled out a file folder and set it down in front of Junior before sitting down herself.

  “I was cleaning out some of my old medical files from Johns Hopkins and came across this.”

  Jack opened the file dated 1992. Inside the stiff green cover was a picture of his mother, twenty-six years younger, in her white doctor’s coat, holding in her arms a little girl with luminous blue eyes and blond hair, grinning at the camera. Well, one blue eye. The other was heavily bandaged.

  “Her name is, or was, Aida Curić. She was just three years old at the time, when they brought her to me for eye surgery for a shrapnel wound. It was during the war.”

  “Which war?” Jack asked. “From what I remember reading, Yugoslavia had several after the breakup in 1991.”

  Senior closed his file. “Your mother is referring to the Bosnian civil war, when Serbs, Croats, and Muslims fought one another for independence—and survival. You know the term ‘ethnic cleansing’?”

  Jack nodded. “Sure. One group of people trying to exterminate another one. Evil stuff.”

  “Well, Bosnia is where the term was invented. Civil wars are the worst. It was the bloodiest conflict on European soil since World War Two—even worse than the Ukraine invasion a few years ago. By some estimates, one hundred and forty thousand Yugoslavians perished because the UN and the Europeans dragged their feet. It took NATO airstrikes to finally end it.”

  “If my two history wonks can spare a moment, I’d like to finish my story about Aida, if that’s okay.”

  “Sorry,” both Jacks said.

  “Anyway, by some miracle I managed to save her eye and her vision. After the war her parents took her back home to Bosnia, but they stopped writing to me shortly afterward.” Cathy began to tear up. “I’ve seen those blue eyes of hers in my dreams a thousand times, and I can’t tell you how many candles I’ve lit for her over the years. Sometimes when I stared into your sister Sally’s eyes, I saw hers. I don’t know why Aida had such an effect on me, but she did, and I finally had to let her go. But seeing this file again yesterday stirred something up in me and I can’t stop thinking about her.”

  Cathy opened up her leather folio again and produced a sealed envelope. “I was wondering if you had any spare time while you were over there, if you could find a way to get down to Sarajevo and look for her and give her this for me.”

  She handed it to Jack. Only Aida’s name, written in his mother’s graceful and meticulous hand, was on the otherwise blank envelope.

  “Did you try Googling her for an address?” Jack asked.

  Cathy shrugged. “Sure, but Curić is a common name, and it wasn’t very helpful. Facebook wasn’t any better—or Twitter, for that matter.”

  “The FBI is the world’s greatest detective agency, and you’re married to the boss. Why not call them?”

  “This is personal business. I’m not going to ask my husband to deploy public resources for my personal benefit.”

  “Well, I’m not on the government payroll, so I’m happy to do it. I’ve always wanted to visit Sarajevo. I hear it’s an amazing city with a lot of history.”

  Senior nodded. “Yeah, a lot of history, for sure.”

  As President Durling’s national security adviser, Senior had seen the photos and read the firsthand accounts of the atrocities on all sides when the wars broke out in 1991. He’d urged Durling into action, but the Europeans told the Americans to back off, promising to handle things on their end. Three years later, a suicidal Japanese pilot slammed into the U.S. Capitol building during a joint session of Congress, killing hundreds, including President Durling, the justices of the Supreme Court, and many others, soon followed by a new Middle East war breaking
out. By then, there wasn’t anything the newly sworn President Ryan could do about the Yugoslavia situation. Still, many had suffered and died needlessly, and Senior still felt guilty that the United States hadn’t tried to stop it unilaterally when it first began.

  Senior repeated himself, almost in a whisper. “A lot of history.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mind, dear?” Cathy asked her son. “I hate to be a bother.”

  “It’s not a bother at all, Mom. It’s going to be a lot of fun.”

  4

  HAMA, SYRIA

  Lieutenant Dzhabrailov trailed Captain Walib as he circled the TOS-2 Starfire vehicle parked in a courtyard next to the mosque, shielded from prying American eyes orbiting in space overhead by computer-designed camouflage netting. The netting broke up the searing sunlight pouring out of the sky as well, a welcome respite. The big Chechen stood a head taller than the slight Syrian. Both carried holstered pistols. Walib dismissed the three Russian enlisted men for lunch break while the two of them conducted a security inspection of the vehicle.

  “I’ve reviewed your proposal, Lieutenant.”

  “And?” the Chechen asked.

  Walib knelt in the dust, checking one of the track plates on the tread. Or pretending to.

  “Your . . . commander. He’s reliable?”

  “As reliable as you.”

  Walib stood back up, facing Dzhabrailov. “Meaning?”

  The big Chechen glanced around. They were alone. He lowered his voice anyway, and shrugged. “Meaning, I haven’t been put up against a wall and shot since we last spoke. So I trust you. And I assume that means you trust me. I’ll vouch for my commander with my life.”

  Walib’s eyes narrowed, taking the measure of the man again. “You’re vouching with both of our lives.”