The admiral handed him something to drink. Not coffee, Wild Turkey bourbon whiskey. All three senior executives took his hand.
“Sit down, boy,” Moore said.
“Damned well done.” Greer smiled.
“Thank you.” Ryan took a long pull on the drink. “Now what?”
“Now we debrief you,” Greer answered.
“No, sir. Now I fly the hell home.”
Greer’s eyes twinkled as he pulled a folder from a coat pocket and tossed it in Ryan’s lap. “You’re booked out of Dulles at 7:05 A.M. First flight to London. And you really should wash up, change your clothes, and collect your Skiing Barbie.”
Ryan tossed the rest of the drink off. The sudden slug of whiskey made his eyes water, but he was able to refrain from coughing,
“Looks like that uniform got some hard use,” Ritter observed.
“So did the rest of me.” Jack reached inside the jacket and pulled out the automatic pistol. “This got some use, too.”
“The GRU agent? He wasn’t taken off with the rest of the crew?” Moore asked.
“You knew about him? You knew and you didn’t get word to me, for Christ’s sake!”
“Settle down, son,” Moore said. “We missed connections by half an hour. Bad luck, but you made it. That’s what counts.”
Ryan was too tired to scream, too tired to do much of anything. Greer took out a tape recorder and a yellow pad full of questions.
“Williams, the British officer, is in a bad way,” Ryan said, two hours later. “The doc says he’ll make it, though. The sub isn’t going anywhere. Bow’s all crunched in, and there’s a pretty nice hole where the torpedo got us. They were right about the Typhoon, Admiral, the Russians built that baby strong, thank God. You know, there may be people left alive on that Alfa…”
“Too bad,” Moore said.
Ryan nodded slowly. “I figured that. I don’t know that I like it, sir, leaving men to die like that.”
“Nor do we,” Judge Moore said, “nor do we, but if we were to rescue someone from her, well, then everything we’ve — everything you’ve been through would be for nothing. Would you want that?”
“It’s a chance in a thousand anyway,” Greer said.
“I don’t know,” Ryan said, finishing off his third drink and feeling it. He had expected Moore to be uninterested in checking the Alfa for signs of life. Greer had surprised him. So, the old seaman had been corrupted by this affair — or just by being at the CIA — into forgetting the seaman’s code. And what did this say about Ryan? “I just don’t know.”
“It’s a war, Jack,” Ritter said, more kindly than usual, “a real war. You did well, boy.”
“In a war you do well to come home alive,” Ryan stood, “and that, gentlemen, is what I plan to do, right now.”
“Your things are in the head.” Greer checked his watch. “You have time to shave if you want.”
“Oh, almost forgot.” Ryan reached inside his collar to pull out the key. He handed it to Greer. “Doesn’t look like much, does it? You can kill fifty million people with that. ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings! Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’“ Ryan headed for the washroom, knowing he had to be drunk to quote Shelley.
They watched him disappear. Greer switched off the tape machine, looking at the key in his hand. “Still want to take him to see the president?”
“No, not a good idea,” Moore said. “Boy’s half smashed, not that I blame him a bit. Get him on the plane, James. We’ll send a team to London tomorrow or the next day to finish the debriefing.”
“Good.” Greer looked into his empty glass. “Kind of early in the day for this, isn’t it?”
Moore finished off his third. “I suppose. But then it’s been a fairly good day, and the sun’s not even up yet. Let’s go, Bob. We have an operation of sorts to run.”
Norfolk Naval Shipyard
Mancuso and his men boarded the Paducah before dawn and were ferried back to the Dallas. The 688-class attack submarine sailed immediately and was back underwater before the sun rose. The Pogy, which had never entered port, would complete her deployment without her corpsman aboard. Both submarines had orders to stay out thirty more days, during which their crewmen would be encouraged to forget everything they had seen, heard, or wondered about.
The Red October sat alone with the dry dock draining around her, guarded by twenty armed marines. This was not unusual in the Eight-Ten Dock. Already a select group of engineers and technicians was inspecting her. The first items taken off were her cipher books and machines. They would be in National Security Agency headquarters at Fort Meade before noon.
Ramius, his officers, and their personal gear were taken by bus to the same airfield Ryan had used. An hour later they were in a CIA safe house in the rolling hills south of Charlottesville, Virginia. They went immediately to bed except for two men, who stayed awake watching cable television, already amazed at what they saw of life in the United States.
Dulles International Airport
Ryan missed the dawn. He boarded a TWA 747 that left Dulles on time, at 7:05 A.M. The sky was overcast, and when the aircraft burst through the cloud layer into sunlight, Ryan did something he had never done before. For the first time in his life, Jack Ryan fell asleep on an airplane.