Jack Ryan 11 - Bear And The Dragon (7 page)

“You going to drive us home, sir?” the detail chief asked, suspecting the answer.

“Bet your ass, Sam” was the smiling reply.

That didn't please the USAF captain detailed to be co-pilot on the aircraft, and it wasn't all that great for the lieutenant colonel supposed to be the pilot-in-command of the modified Gulfstream III. The Vice President liked to have the stick -- in his case the yoke -- in his hands at all times, while the colonel worked the radio and monitored the instruments. The aircraft spent most of its time on autopilot, of course, but Jackson, right seat or not, was determined to be the command pilot on the flight, and you couldn't very well say no to him. As a result, the captain would sit in the back and the colonel would be in the left seat, but jerking off. What the hell, the latter thought, the Vice President told good stories, and was a fairly competent stick for a Navy puke.

“Clear right,” Jackson said, a few minutes later.

“Clear left,” the pilot replied, confirming the fact from the plane-walker in front of the Gulfstream.

“Starting One,” Jackson said next, followed thirty seconds later by “Starting Two.”

The ribbon gauges came up nicely. “Looking good, sir,” the USAF lieutenant colonel reported. The G had Rolls-Royce Spey engines, the same that had once been used on the U.K. versions of the F-4 Phantom fighter, but somewhat more reliable.

“Tower, this is Air Force Two, ready to taxi.”

“Air Force Two, Tower, cleared to taxiway three.”

“Roger, Tower AF-Two taxiing via three.” Jackson slipped the brakes and let the aircraft move, its fighter engines barely above idle, but guzzling a huge quantity of fuel for all that. On a carrier, Jackson thought, you had plane handlers in yellow shirts to point you around. Here you had to go according to the map/diagram -- clipped to the center of the yoke -- to the proper place, all the while looking around to make sure some idiot in a Cessna 172 didn't stray into your path like a stray car in the supermarket parking lot. Finally, they reached the end of the runway, and turned to face down it.

“Tower, this is Spade requesting permission to take off.” It just sort of came out on its own.

A laughing reply: “This ain't the Enterprise, Air Force Two, and we don't have cat shots here, but you are cleared to depart, sir.”

You could hear the grin in the reply: “Roger, Tower, AF-Two is rolling.”

“Your call sign was really 'Spade'?” the assigned command pilot asked as the VC-20B started rolling.

“Got hung on by my first CO, back when I was a new nugget. And it kinda stuck.” The Vice President shook his head. “Jesus, that seems like a long time ago.”

“V-One, sir,” the Air Force officer said next, followed by “V-R.”

At velocity-rotation, Jackson eased back on the yoke, bringing the aircraft off the ground and into the air. The colonel retracted the landing gear on command, while Jackson flipped the wheel half an inch left and right, rocking the wings a little as he always did to make sure the aircraft was willing to do what he told it. It was, and inside of three minutes, the G was on autopilot, programmed to turn, climb, and level out at thirty-nine thousand feet.

“Boring, isn't it?”

“Just another word for safe, sir,” the USAF officer replied.

Fucking trash-hauler, Jackson thought. No fighter pilot would say something like that out loud. Since when was flying supposed to be...well, Robby had to admit to himself, he always buckled his seat belt before starting his car, and never did anything reckless, even with a fighter plane. But it offended him that this aircraft, like almost all of the new ones, did so much of the work that he'd been trained to do himself. It would even land itself...well, the Navy had such systems aboard its carrier aircraft, but no proper naval aviator ever used it unless ordered to, something Robert Jefferson Jackson had always managed to avoid. This trip would go into his logbook as time in command, but it really wasn't. Instead it was a microchip in command, and his real function was to be there to take proper action in case something broke. But nothing ever did. Even the damned engines. Once turbojets had lasted a mere nine or ten hours before having to be replaced. Now there were Spey engines on the G fleet that had twelve thousand hours. There was one out there with over thirty thousand that Rolls-Royce wanted back, offering a free brand-new replacement because its engineers wanted to tear that one apart to learn what they'd done so right, but the owner, perversely and predictably, refused to part with it. The rest of the Gulfstream airframe was about that reliable, and the electronics were utterly state-of-the-art, Jackson knew, looking down at the color display from the weather-radar. It was a clear and friendly black at the moment, showing what was probably smooth air all the way to Andrews. There was as yet no instrument that detected turbulence, but up here at flight level three-niner-zero, that was a pretty rare occurrence, and Jackson wasn't often susceptible to airsickness, and his hand was inches from the yoke in case something unexpected happened. Jackson occasionally hoped that something would happen, since it would allow him to show just how good an aviator he was...but it never did. Flying had become too routine since his childhood in the F-4N Phantom and his emerging manhood in the F-14A TOMCAT. And maybe it was better that way. Yeah, he thought, sure.

“Mr. Vice President?” It was the voice of the USAF communications sergeant aboard the VC-20. Robby turned to see her with a sheaf of papers.

“Yeah, Sarge?”

“Flash traffic just came in on the printer.” She extended her hand, and Robby took the paper.

“Colonel, your airplane for a while,” the VP told the lieutenant colonel in the left seat.

“Pilot's airplane,” the colonel agreed, while Robby started reading.

It was always the same, even though it was also always different. The cover sheet had the usual classification formatting. It had once impressed Jackson that the act of showing a sheet of paper to the wrong person could land him in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary -- at the time, actually, the since-closed Portsmouth Naval Prison in New Hampshire -- but now as a senior government official in Washington, D.C., he knew he could show damned near anything to a reporter from The Washington Post and not be touched for it. It wasn't so much that he was above the law as he was one of the people who decided what the law meant. What was so damned secret and sensitive in this case was that CIA didn't know shit about the possible attempt on the life of Russia's chief spymaster...which meant nobody else in Washington did, either...

The issue was trade, not exactly the President's favorite, but then, at this level, every issue took on sufficient twists that even the ones you thought you knew about became strange at best, unknown and alien at worst.

“George?” Ryan said to his Secretary of the Treasury, George Winston.

“Mr. Pres -- ”

“Goddammit, George!” The President nearly spilled his coffee with the outburst.

“Okay.” SecTreas nodded submission. “It's hard to make the adjustment...Jack.” Ryan was getting tired of the Presidential trappings, and his rule was that here, in the Oval Office, his name was Jack, at least for his inner circle, of which Winston was one. After all, Ryan had joked a few times, after leaving this marble prison, he might be working for TRADER, as the Secret Service knew him, back in New York on The Street, instead of the other way 'round. After leaving the Presidency, something for which Jack prostrated himself before God every night -- or so the stories went -- he'd have to find gainful employment somewhere, and the trading business beckoned. Ryan had shown a rare gift for it, Winston reminded himself. His last such effort had been a California company called Silicon Alchemy, just one of many computer outfits, but the only one in which Ryan had taken an interest. So skillfully had he brought that firm to IPO that his own stock holdings in SALC -- its symbol on the big board -- were now valued at just over eighty million dollars, making Ryan by far the wealthiest American President in history. It was something his politically astute Chief of Staff, Arnold van Damm, did not advertise to the news media, who typically regarded every wealthy man as a robber baron, excepting, of course, the owners of the papers and TV stations themselves, who were, of course, the best of public-spirited citizens. None of this was widely known, even in the tight community of Wall Street big-hitters, which was remarkable enough. Should he ever return to The Street, Ryan's prestige would be sufficient to earn money while he slept in his bed at home And that, Winston freely admitted, was something well and truly earned, and be damned to whatever the media hounds thought of it.

“It's China?” Jack asked.

“That's right, Boss,” Winston confirmed with a nod. “Boss” was a term Ryan could stomach, as it was also the in-house term the Secret Service -- which was part of Winston's Department of the Treasury -- used to identify the man they were sworn to protect. “They're having a little cash-shortfall problem, and they're looking to make it up with us.”

“How little?” POTUS asked.

“It looks as though it will annualize out to, oh, seventy billion or so.”

“That is, as we say, real money.”

George Winston nodded. “Anything that starts with a 'B' is real enough, and this is a little better than six 'Bs' a month.”

“Spending it for what?”

“Not entirely sure, but a lot of it has to be military-related. The French arms industries are tight with them now, since the Brits kiboshed the jet-engine deal from Rolls-Royce.”

The President nodded, looking down at the briefing papers. “Yeah, Basil talked the PM out of it.” That was Sir Basil Charleston, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service, sometimes called (erroneously) MI6. Basil was an old friend of Ryan's, going back to his CIA days. “It was a remarkably stand-up thing to do.”

“Well, our friends in Paris don't seem to think the same way.”

“They usually don't,” Ryan agreed. The odd thing was the dichotomy inherent in dealing with the French. In some things, they weren't so much allies as blood brothers, but in others they were less than mere associates, and Ryan had trouble figuring out the logic by which the French changed their minds. Well, the President thought, that's what I have a State Department for... “So, you think the PRC is building up its military again?”

“Big time, but not so much their navy, which makes our friends in Taiwan feel a little better.”

That had been one of President Ryan's foreign-policy initiatives after concluding hostilities with the defunct United Islamic Republic, now restored to the separate nations of Iran and Iraq, which were at least at peace with each other. The real reasons for the recognition of Taiwan had never been made known to the public. It looked pretty clear to Ryan and his Secretary of State, Scott Adler, that the People's Republic of China had played a role in the Second Persian Gulf War, and probably in the preceding conflict with Japan, as well. Exactly why? Well, some in CIA thought that China lusted after the mineral riches in eastern Siberia -- this was suggested by intercepts and other access to the electronic mail of the Japanese industrialists who'd twisted their nation's path into a not-quite-open clash with America. They'd referred to Siberia as the “Northern Resource Area,” harkening back to when an earlier generation of Japanese strategists had called South Asia the “Southern Resource Area.” That had been part of another conflict, one known to history as the Second World War. In any case, the complicity of the PRC with America's enemies had merited a countermove, Ryan and Adler had agreed, and besides, the Republic of China on Taiwan was a democracy, with government officials elected by the people of that nation island -- and that was something America was supposed to respect.

“You know, it would be better if they started working their navy and threatening Taiwan. We are in a better position to forestall that than -- ”

“You really think so?” SecTreas asked, cutting his President off.

“The Russians do,” Jack confirmed.

“Then why are the Russians selling the Chinese so much hardware?” Winston demanded. “That doesn't make sense!”

“George, there is no rule demanding that the world has to make sense.” That was one of Ryan's favorite aphorisms. “That's one of the things you learn in the intelligence business. In 1938, guess who was Germany's number one trading partner?”

SecTreas saw that sandbag coming before it struck. “France?”

“You got it.” Ryan nodded. “Then, in '40 and '41, they did a lot of trade with the Russians. That didn't work out so well either, did it?”

“And everyone always told me that trade was a moderating influence,” the Secretary observed.

“Maybe it is among people, but remember that governments don't have principles so much as interests -- at least the primitive ones, the ones who haven't figured it all out yet...”

“Like the PRC?”

It was Ryan's turn to nod. “Yeah, George, like those little bastards in Beijing. They rule a nation of a billion people, but they do it as though they were the new coming of Caligula. Nobody ever told them that they have a positive duty to look after the interests of the people they rule -- well, maybe that's not true,” Ryan allowed, feeling a little generous. “They have this big, perfect theoretical model, promulgated by Karl Marx, refined by Lenin, then applied in their country by a pudgy sexual pervert named Mao.”

“Oh? Pervert?”

“Yeah.” Ryan looked up. “We had the data over at Langley. Mao liked virgins, the younger the better. Maybe he liked to see the fear in their cute little virginal eyes -- that's what one of our pshrink consultants thought, kinda like rape, not so much sex as power. Well, I guess it could have been worse -- at least they were girls,” Jack observed rather dryly, “and their culture is historically a little more liberal than ours on that sort of thing.” A shake of the head. “You should see the briefs I get whenever a major foreign dignitary comes over, the stuff we know about their personal habits.”