Vice Admiral James Cutter, USN, was a patrician. At least he looked like one, Ryan thought – tall and spare, his hair going a regal silver, and a confident smile forever fixed on his pink-scrubbed face. Certainly he acted like one – or thought he did, Jack corrected himself. It was Ryan’s view that truly important people didn’t go out of their way to act like it. It wasn’t as though being the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs was the same as a peerage. Ryan knew a few people who actually had them. Cutter came from one of those old swamp-Yankee families which had grown rocks on their New England farmsteads for generations, then turned to the mercantile trade, and, in Cutter’s case, sent its surplus sons to sea. But Cutter was the sort of sailor for whom the sea was a means to an end. More than half of his career had been spent in the Pentagon, and that, Ryan thought, was no place for a proper sailor. He’d had all the necessary commands, Jack knew. First a destroyer, then a cruiser. Each time he’d done his job well – well enough to be noticed, which must have been the important part. Plenty of outstanding officers’ careers stopped cold at captain’s rank because they’d failed to be noticed by a high-enough patron. What had Cutter done to make him stick out from the crowd… ?
Polished up the knocker faithfully, perhaps? Jack wondered as he finished his briefing.
Not that it mattered now. The President had noticed him on Jeff Pelt’s staff, and on Pelt’s return to academia – the International Relations chair at the University of Virginia – Cutter had slipped into the job as neatly as a destroyer coming alongside the pier. He sat behind his desk in a neatly tailored suit, sipping his coffee from a mug with USS BELKNAP engraved on it, the better to remind people that he’d commanded that cruiser once. In case the casual visitor missed that one – there were few casual visitors to the National Security Adviser’s office – the wall on the left was liberally covered with plaques of the ships he’d served on, and enough signed photographs for a Hollywood agent’s office. Naval officers call this phenomenon the I LOVE ME! wall, and while most of them have one, they usually keep it at home.
Ryan didn’t like Cutter very much. He hadn’t liked Pelt either, but the difference was that Pelt was almost as smart as he thought he was. Cutter was not even close. The three-star Admiral was in over his head, but had not the sense to know it. The bad news was that while Ryan was also a Special Assistant To, it was not To the President. That meant he had to report to Cutter whether he liked it or not. With his boss in the hospital, that task would be a frequent occurrence.
“How’s Greer?” the man asked. He spoke with a nasal New England accent that ought to have died a natural death long before, though it was one thing that Ryan didn’t mind. It reminded him of his undergraduate days at Boston College.
“They’re not through with the tests yet.” Ryan’s voice betrayed his worries. It looked like pancreatic cancer, the survival rate for which was just about zero. He’d checked with Cathy about that, and had tried to get his boss to Johns Hopkins, but Greer was Navy, which meant going to Bethesda. Though Bethesda Naval Medical Center was the Navy’s number-one hospital, it wasn’t Johns Hopkins.
“And you’re going to take over for him?” Cutter asked.
“That is in rather poor taste, Admiral,” Bob Ritter answered for his companion. “In Admiral Greer’s absence, Dr. Ryan will represent him from time to time.”
“If you handle that as well as you’ve handled this briefing, we ought to get along just fine. Shame about Greer. Hope things work out.” There was about as much emotion in his voice as one needed to ask directions.
You’re a warm person, aren’t you? Ryan thought to himself as he closed his briefcase. I bet the crew of the Belknap just loved you. But Cutter wasn’t paid to be warm. He was paid to advise the President. And Ryan was paid to brief him, not to love him.
Cutter wasn’t a fool. Ryan had to admit that also. He was not an expert in the area of Ryan’s own expertise, nor did he have Pelt’s cardsharp’s instinct for political wheeling and dealing behind the scene – and, unlike Pelt, Cutter liked to operate without consulting the State Department. He sure as hell didn’t understand how the Soviet Union worked. The reason he was sitting in that high-back chair, behind that dark-oak desk, was that he was a reputed expert in other areas, and evidently those were the areas in which the President had most of his current interest. Here Ryan’s intellect failed him. He came back to his brief on what KGB was up to in Central Europe instead of following that idea to its logical conclusion. Jack’s other mistake was more basic. Cutter knew that he wasn’t the man Jeff Pelt had been, and Cutter wanted to change all that.
“Nice to see you again, Dr. Ryan. Good brief. I’ll bring that matter to the President’s attention. Now if you’ll excuse us, the DDO and I have something to discuss.”
“See you back at Langley, Jack,” Ritter said. Ryan nodded and left. The other two waited for the door to close behind him. Then the DDO presented his own brief on Operation SHOWBOAT. It lasted twenty minutes.
“So how do we coordinate this?” the Admiral asked Ritter.
“The usual. About the only good thing that came out of the Desert One fiasco was that it proved how secure satellite communications were. Ever see the portable kind?” the DDO asked. “It’s standard equipment for the light forces.”
“No, just the ones aboard ship. They’re not real portable.”
“Well, it has a couple of pieces, an X-shaped antenna and a little wire stand that looks like it’s made out of a couple of used coat hangers. There’s a new backpack only weighs fifteen pounds, including the handset, and it even has a Morse key in case the sender doesn’t want to talk too loud. Single sideband, super-encrypted UHF. That’s as secure as communications get.”
“But what about keeping them covert?” Cutter was worried about that.
“If the region was heavily populated,” Ritter explained tiredly, “the opposition wouldn’t be using it. Moreover, they operate mainly at night for the obvious reason. So our people will belly-up during the day and only move around at night. They are trained and equipped for that. Look, we’ve been thinking about this for some time. These people are very well trained already, and we’re -”
“Resupply?”
“Helicopter,” Ritter said. “Special-ops people down in Florida.”
“I still think we should use Marines.”
“The Marines have a different mission. We’ve been over this, Admiral. These kids are better trained, they’re better equipped, most of them have been into areas like this one, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to get them into the program without anybody noticing,” Ritter explained for what must have been the twentieth time. Cutter wasn’t one to listen to the words of others. His own opinions were evidently too loud. The DDO wondered how the President fared, but that question needed no answer. A presidential whisper carried more weight than a scream from anyone else. The problem was, the President so often depended on idiots to make his wishes a reality. Ritter would not have been surprised to learn that his opinion of the National Security Adviser matched that of Jack Ryan; it was just that Ryan could not know why.
“Well, it’s your operation,” Cutter said after a moment. “When does it start?”
“Three weeks. Just had a report last night. Things are going along just fine. They already had all the basic skills we needed. It’s only a matter of honing a few special ones and adding a few refinements. We’ve been lucky so far. Haven’t even had anybody hurt up there.”
“How long have you had that place, anyway?”
“Thirty years. It was supposed to have been an air-defense radar installation, but the funding got cut off for some reason or other. The Air Force turned it over to us, and we’ve been using it to train agents ever since. It doesn’t show up on any of the OMB site lists. It belongs to an offshore corporation that we use for various things. During the fall we occasionally lease it out as a hunting camp, would you believe? It even shows a profit for us, which is another reason why it doesn’t show on the OMB list. Is that covert enough? Came in real useful during Afghanistan, though, doing the same thing we’re doing now, and nobody ever found out about it…”
“Three weeks.”