Executive orders - Tom Clancy [336]
But even his professional admiration was tempered. Russia might soon need help. How could she go for that help to someone who, it would now be known, had tampered with his country's internal politics like a puppeteer? That realization was worth another oath, not spoken in admiration of anything.
PUBLIC WATERWAYS ARE free for the passage of all, and so the Navy couldn't do anything more than prevent the charter boat from getting too close to the Eight-Ten Dock. Soon it was joined by another, then more still, until a total of eleven cameras were pointing at the covered graving dock, now empty with the demise of most of America's missile submarines, and also empty of another which had briefly lived there, not American, or so the story went.
It was possible to access the Navy's personnel records via computer, and some were doing that right now, checking for former crewmen of USS Dallas. An early-morning call to COMSUBPAC concerning his tenure as commanding officer of Dallas got no farther than his public affairs officer, who was well-schooled in no-commenting sensitive inquiries. Today he'd get more than his fair share. So would others.
THIS IS RON Jones.
This is Tom Donner at NBC News.
That's nice, Jonesy said diffidently. I watch CNN myself.
Well, maybe you want to watch our show tonight. I'd like to talk to you about-
I read the Times this morning. It's delivered up here. No comment, he added.
But-
But, yes, I used to be a submariner, and they call us the Silent Service. Besides, that was a long time ago. I run my own business now. Married, kids, the whole nine yards, y'know?
You were lead sonar man aboard USS Dallas when-
Mr. Donner, I signed a secrecy agreement when I left the Navy. I don't talk about the things we did, okay? It was his first encounter with a reporter, and it was living up to everything he'd ever been told to expect.
Then all you have to do is tell us that it never happened.
That what never happened? Jones asked.
The defection of a Russian sub named Red October.
You know the craziest thing I ever heard as a sonar man?
What's that?
Elvis. He hung up. Then he called Pearl Harbor.
WITH DAYLIGHT, THE TV trucks rolled through Winchester, Virginia, rather like the Civil War armies that had exchanged possession of the town over forty times.
He didn't actually own the house. It could not even be said that CIA did. The land title was in the name of a paper corporation, in turn owned by a foundation whose directors were obscure, but since real-property ownership in America is a matter of public record, and since all corporations and foundations were also, that data would be run down in less than two days, despite the tag on the files which told the clerks in the county courthouse to be creatively incompetent in finding the documents.
The reporters who showed up had still photos and taped file footage of Nikolay Gerasimov, and long lenses were set up on tripods to aim at the windows, a quarter mile away, past a few grazing horses which made for a nice touch on the story: CIA TREATS RUSSIAN SPYMASTER LIKE VISITING KING.
The two security guards at the house were going ape, calling Langley for instructions, but the CIA's public affairs office-itself rather an odd institution-didn't have a clue on this one, other than falling back on the stance that this was private property (whether or not that was legally correct under the circumstances was something CIA's lawyers were checking out) and that, therefore, the reporters couldn't trespass.
It had been years since he'd had much to laugh about. Sure, there had been the occasional light moment, but this was something so special that he'd never even considered its possibility. He'd always thought himself an expert on America. Gerasimov had run numerous spy operations against the Main Enemy, as the United States had once been called in the nonexistent country he'd once served, but he admitted to himself that you had to come here and live here for a few years to understand how incomprehensible America was, how nothing made