Executive orders - Tom Clancy [446]
Who am I? SWORDSMAN asked himself. At that moment, one of his weaknesses asserted itself.
Come on. Ryan walked over to the west. He'd just seen a sudden flare of light, and thirty seconds later, at the corner of another cabin, he found a Navy cook smoking a cigarette. President or not, he wasn't going to be overly proud tonight. Hello.
Jesus! the sailor blurted, snapping to attention and dropping his smoke into the grass. I mean, hello, Mr. President.
Wrong the first time, right the second time. Got a smoke? POTUS asked, entirely without shame, Robby Jackson noted.
You bet, sir. The cook fished one out and lit it.
Sailor, if the First Lady sees you do that again, she'll have the Marines shoot you, Jackson warned.
Admiral Jackson! Those words made the kid brace again. I think the Marines work for me. How's dinner coming?
Sir, the pizza is being cut right now. Baked it myself, sir. They oughta like it, he promised.
Settle down. Thanks for the cigarette.
Anytime, sir. Ryan shook his hand and wandered off with his friend.
I needed that, Jack admitted, somewhat shamefully, taking a long drag.
If I had a place like this, I'd use it a lot. Almost like being at sea, Jackson went on. Sometimes you go outside, stand on one of the galleries off the flight deck, and just sort of enjoy the sea and the stars. The simple pleasures.
It's hard to turn it off, isn't it? Even when you went communing with the sea and the stars, you didn't turn it off, not really.
No, the admiral admitted. It makes thinking a little easier, makes the atmosphere a little less intense, but you're right. It doesn't really go away. And it didn't now, either.
Tony said India's navy's gone missing on us.
Both carriers at sea, with escorts and oilers. We're looking for them.
What if there's a connection? Ryan asked.
With what?
The Chinese make trouble in one place, the Indian navy goes to sea again, and this happens to me-am I being paranoid? SWORDSMAN asked.
Probably. Could be the Indians put out when they finished their repairs, and maybe to show us that we didn't teach them all that big a lesson. The China thing, well, it's happened before, and it's not going anywhere, especially after Mike Dubro gets there. I know Mike. He'll have fighters up and poking around. The attempt on Katie? Too early to say, and it's not my field. You have Murray and the rest for that. In any case, they failed, didn't they? Your family's in there, watching TV, and it'll be a long time before somebody tries anything else.
IT WAS BECOMING an all-nighter all over the world. In Tel Aviv, where it was now after four in the morning, Avi ben Jakob had called in his top terrorism experts. Together they went over the photos transmitted from Washington and were comparing them with their own surveillance photographs that had been taken over the years in Lebanon and elsewhere. The problem was that many of their photos showed young men with beards-the simplest method of disguise known to man-and the photos were not of high quality. By the same token, the American-transmitted images were not exactly graduation pictures, either.
Anything useful? the director of Mossad asked.
Eyes turned to one of the Mossad's experts, a fortyish woman named Sarah Peled. Behind her back, they called her the witch. She had some special gift for ID'ing people from photographs, and was right just over half the time in cases where other trained intelligence officers threw up their hands in frustration.
This one. She slid two photos across the table. This is a definite match.
Ben Jakob looked at the two side by side-and saw nothing to confirm her opinion. He'd asked her many times what keyed her in on such things. Sarah always said it was the eyes, and so Avi took another look, comparing the eyes of one with the eyes of the other photo. All he saw were eyes. He turned the Israeli photo over. The printed data on the back said that he was a suspected Hezbollah member, name unknown, age about twenty in their photo, which