“There’s more to it,” Arnie said quietly.
“Oh, yeah. I had to report the operations to the Select Committee, but I didn’t want to rip the government apart. So I talked it over with Trent and Fellows, and I came in to see the President. We talked for a while, and then I stepped out of the room, and Sam and Al talked with him for a while. I’m not exactly sure what they agreed on, but–”
“But he threw the election. He dumped his campaign manager and his campaign was for crap the whole way. Christ, Jack, what did you do?” Arnie demanded. His face was pale now, but for political reasons. And all along van Damm had figured that he’d run a brilliant and successful campaign for Bob Fowler, unseating a popular sitting President. And so, a fix had been in? And he’d never found out?
Ryan closed his eyes. He’d just forced himself to relive a dreadful night. “I terminated an operation that was technically legal, but teetering right on the edge. I closed it down quietly. The Colombians never found out. I thought I prevented another Watergate, domestically–and a godawful international incident. Sam and Al signed off on it, the records are sealed until long after we’re all dead. Whoever leaked that must have picked up on a couple of rumors and made a few good guesses. What did /do? I think I obeyed the law as best I could–no, Arnie, I did not break the law. I followed the rules. It wasn’t easy, but I did.” The eyes opened. “So, Arnie, how will that play in Peoria?”
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“Why couldn’t you have just reported to Congress and–”
“Think back,” the President said. “It wasn’t just the one thing, okay? That’s when Eastern Europe was coming unglued, the Soviet Union was still there but teetering, some really big things were happening, and if our government had come apart, right then, with everything else happening, hell, it could have been a mess like nobody’s ever seen. America couldn’t–we would not have been able to help settle Europe down if we’d been pissing around with a domestic scandal. And I was the guy who had to make the call and take the action, right now, or those soldiers would have been killed. Think about the box I was in, will you?
“Arnie, I couldn’t go to anybody for guidance on that one, okay? Admiral Greer was dead. Moore and Ritter were compromised. The President was up to his eyeballs in it; at the time I thought he was running the show through Cutter– he wasn’t; he got finessed into it by that incompetent political bastard. I didn’t know where to go, so I went to the FBI for help. I couldn’t trust anybody but Dan Murray and Bill Shaw, and one of our people at Langley on the operational side. Bill–did you know he was a J.D.?–worked me through the law part of it, and Murray helped with the recovery operation. They had an investigation started on Cutter. It was a code-word op, I think they called it ODYSSEY, and they were about to go to a U.S. magistrate for criminal conspiracy, but Cutter killed himself. There was an FBI agent fifty yards behind him when he jumped in front of the bus. You’ve met him, Pat O’Day. Nobody ever broke the law except for Cutter. The operations themselves were within the Constitution– at least that’s what Shaw said.”
“But politically . . .”
“Yeah, even I’m not that ignorant. So here I am, Arnie. I didn’t break the law. I served my country’s interests as best I could under the circumstances, and look what good it’s done me.”
“Damn. How is it that Bob Fowler never was told?”
“That was Sam and Al. They thought it would have poisoned Fowler’s presidency. Besides, I don’t really know
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what the two of them said to the President, do I? I never wanted to know, I never found out, and all I have is speculation–pretty good speculation,” Ryan admitted, “but that’s all.”
“Jack, it’s not often I don’t know what to say.”
“Say it anyway,” the President ordered.
“It’s going to get out. The media has enough now to put some pieces together, and that will force Congress to launch an investigation. What about the other stuff?”
“It’s all true,” Ryan said. “Yeah, we got our hands on Red October, yeah, I got Gerasimov out myself. My idea, my operation, nearly got my ass killed, but there you go. If we hadn’t, then Gerasimov was poised to launch his own coup to topple Andrey Narmonov–and then there might still be a Warsaw Pact, and the bad old days might never have gone away. So we compromised the bastard, and he didn’t have any choices but to get on the airplane. He’s still pissed despite all we did to get him set up over here, but I understand his wife and daughter like America just fine.”
“Did you kill anybody?” Arnie asked.
“In Moscow, no. In the sub–he was trying to self-destruct the submarine. He killed one of the ship’s officers and shot up two others pretty bad, but I punched his ticket myself–and I had nightmares about it for years.”
In another reality, van Damm thought, his President would be a hero. But reality and public politics had little in common. He noted that Ryan hadn’t recounted his story about Bob Fowler and the aborted nuclear launch. The chief of staff had been around for that one, and he knew that three days later, J. Robert Fowler had come nearly apart at the realization at how he’d been saved from mass murder on a Hitlerian scale. There was a line in Hugo’s Les Miserables that had struck the older man when he’d first read the book in high school: “What evil good can be.” Here was another case. Ryan had served his country bravely and well more than once, but not one of the things he’d done would survive public scrutiny. Intelligence, love of country, and courage merely added up to a series of events which anyone could twist out of recog-
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nition into scandal. And Ed Kealty knew how to do just that.
“How do we spin-control all this?” the President asked.
“What else do I need to know?”
“The files on Red October and Gerasimov are at Lang-ley. The Colombian thing, well, you know what you need to know. I’m not sure even I have the legal right to unseal the records. On the other hand, you want to destabilize Russia? This will do it.”
RED OCTOBER, GOLOVKO thought, then he looked up at the high ceiling of his office. “Ivan Emmetovich. you clever bastard. Zvo tvoyu maht!”
The curse was spoken in quiet admiration. From the first moment he’d met Ryan, he’d underestimated him. and even with all the contacts, direct and indirect, that had followed, he had to admit, he’d never stopped doing it. So that was how he’d compromised Gerasimov! And in so doing, he’d saved Russia, perhaps–but a country was supposed to be saved from within, not without. Some secrets were supposed to be kept forever, because they protected everyone equally. This was such a secret. It would embarrass both countries now. For the Russians, it was the loss of a valuable national asset through high treason–worse still, something their intelligence organs had not discovered, which was quite incredible on reflection, but the cover stories had been good ones, and the loss of two hunter submarines in the same operation had made the affair something that the Soviet navy had every desire to forget–and so they hadn’t looked far beyond the cover story.
Sergey Nikolay’ch knew the second part better than the first. Ryan had forestalled a coup d’etat. Golovko supposed that Ryan might as easily have told him what was happening and left it to the Soviet Union’s internal organs–but, no. Intelligence services turned everything to their advantage, and Ryan would have been mad not to have done so here. Gerasimov must have sung like a canary–he knew the Western aphorism–and given up
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everything he’d known; Ames, for one, had been identified that way, he was sure, and Ames had been a virtual diamond mine for KGB.
And you always told yourself that Ivan Emmetovich was a gifted amateur, Golovko thought.
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.