Command Authority

17

The Campus had been created by President Jack Ryan during his first term in office, as a small but hard-hitting outfit tasked with furthering the aims of the United States in an off-the-books fashion.

Jack Ryan put Gerry Hendley in charge. Hendley was a former senator from Kentucky who had retired from public life in disgrace in a staged case of financial impropriety, purely for the purpose of getting out of politics to begin the difficult and crucial work of establishing a sub-rosa spy shop.

To ensure the men and women of The Campus were protected in case any of their operations were revealed, before leaving office during his first elected term, President Ryan signed one hundred blank presidential pardons in secret, and he handed them over to Hendley.

With access to the intelligence feeds between the CIA and the NSA, but free of the bureaucracy and oversight of a government intelligence organization, The Campus had considerably more latitude to conduct their operations, and this had given them a power and a reach that had led to incredible successes in the past several years.

When President Ryan established The Campus, however, he had no way of knowing that one day the operational arm of the organization would be staffed by his longtime friends and associates John Clark and Domingo Chavez; his nephews Dominic and Brian Caruso; and even his own son, Jack Ryan, Jr.

Brian had been killed in action in Libya two years earlier, and he had been replaced by former Army Ranger Sam Driscoll.

Months earlier, Chinese computer hackers had broken into the Hendley Associates network, and a kill team of Chinese operatives had hit the West Odenton headquarters of Hendley Associates in the dead of night in an attempt to wipe out the organization. The Chinese attack had been thwarted, but Hendley and his team knew their operation could not continue in the same location now that the Chinese knew where they were, and perhaps even what they were.

Losing the West Odenton location created a bigger nuisance than just having to find a new building. The Campus had obtained much of its actionable intelligence by means of an antenna farm on the roof of the five-story building that intercepted classified intel traveling back and forth between the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, and the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia.

That method of pulling classified data was lost to them now that the Hendley Associates building was serving the white side only.

But there was hope for The Campus and its future by means of a fifty-five-year-old paunchy and pale computer geek named Gavin Biery. Biery had spent the months since the Chinese attack working on a method to obtain intelligence via the CIA’s Intelink-TS, its top-secret network. He had taken the advanced hacking code used by the Chinese against the CIA’s computers, and then, after making sure the CIA had patched their vulnerabilities, he began to search for new threat vectors into Intelink-TS.

So far his work held much promise but little payoff.

While Gavin worked the intelligence-collection angle and Gerry Hendley worked on obtaining a new base of operations, the Campus operators, minus Jack Ryan, Jr., had been using John Clark’s expansive farm in Emmitsburg, Maryland, as a training ground.

John Clark’s rustic farm was perhaps not the most suitable location on earth for a unit of covert paramilitary and clandestine services operators to train, but for the time being, at least, it served its purpose.

Until recently, the operators had trained in secret locations all over the country, but they were vulnerable now, so they retreated to the farm and ran drills to keep themselves sharp. They’d even taken over a guest bedroom and turned it into a small op center and mini-schoolhouse. The men spent an hour a day or more using foreign-language training software on their laptops and reading the latest open-source information about the world’s major trouble spots.

And to a man they hoped like hell their training and study would be put to use with the call to return to operational status.

Gerry Hendley took the afternoon off from his tour of the D.C. area’s hundreds of available office buildings to drive out to Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he now sat at the kitchen table in John Clark’s farmhouse. Around him were assembled the operators of The Campus, as well as Gavin Biery. They had been getting together here once a week, though these meetings had turned out to be non-affairs, really. Each week Gerry talked about his hunt for a suitable location for the organization, Clark and the operations arm discussed the training they had been undergoing, and Biery used highly technical jargon to let everyone know about the work he was doing to get the information stream from the CIA up and running again.

Though the meetings were polite enough, the truth was that everyone was eager to do something other than sit in Clark’s kitchen.

Gerry was prepared to start the meeting with a rundown of a couple of properties he’d been looking at near Bethesda, but Clark said he’d like to discuss something else.

“What’s up?” Gerry asked.

“A situation has presented itself.”

Clark told Hendley and the others about his call with Keith Bixby, CIA chief of station in Kiev, and how the CIA was interested in a Russian crime boss known as Gleb the Scar.

Domingo Chavez had spent the past few days making calls to some friends in both Russia and Ukraine, mostly men he had served with in Rainbow. Through them, he’d learned more about the Scar and his organization. No one knew what he was doing in Ukraine associating with Chechens, and both Chavez and Clark found this very suspicious, especially since it seemed war was on the horizon over there.

Hendley said, “So all you know is this guy is Russian mob, and he’s working in Kiev.”

Clark said, “I also know CIA doesn’t have the manpower to run a surveillance package on him. They are, quite reasonably, focusing on the professional intelligence officers in Kiev, and not organized crime.”

“What is it you want to do?”

“Keith Bixby is a good COS who’s in a tough situation. I thought we could go over to Kiev and check into this mob connection, just to see what Gleb the Scar is up to.”

Hendley looked at the rest of the group. Not surprisingly, they all looked ready to head to the airport right now.

“How big is this guy in their organization? Is he like a Mafia don?”

Chavez had become something of an expert on organized-crime groups in the past year; it was a topic that he’d focused on in his downtime with The Campus.

Ding said, “Russia doesn’t really have a mafia in the sense we know it, that’s just a convenient name we use to convey the fact it is a criminal organization. In Russia and the other eastern states, the top dogs of the criminal hierarchy are the vory v zakonye, which translates to ‘thief-in-law,’ but means something like a thief who follows the code. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the criminals running around with gold chains and ill-fitting suits want you to think they are big shots, but they are not true vory v zakonye. Having said that, there might be several vory at the top of each organization, and whoever the absolute top dog is will be vory for sure.”

Chavez added, “Gleb the Scar, we are certain, is the genuine article. He’s vory.”

Hendley next asked, “How big is the organized-crime problem in Russia these days?”

“Valeri Volodin’s Interior Ministry has chased almost all of the largest and most powerful criminal groups out of Russia proper.”

“How did they do that?”

“The FSB has a unit called URPO, the Directorate for the Analysis and Suppression of Criminal Organizations. They are basically a hit squad, taking out OC members throughout Moscow and Saint Petersburg. But interestingly, they only seem to target foreign gangsters.

“There is a group of Slavs that started back in the late eighties that is flourishing now because all the Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, and others have been so heavily pursued by the FSB. This group is known as the Seven Strong Men.”

Hendley said, “There are only seven of them?”

“No, they were named after an unusual rock formation in the Komi Republic by that name. It’s seven massive stone pillars that jut out of a flat field. The group was formed in a gulag there in Komi.

“These days in Russia, the Seven Strong Men controls money lending, kidnapping for ransom, human trafficking, prostitution, car theft, assassination for hire… you name it.”

“And Gleb is the head of the Seven Strong Men?” Hendley asked.

“Not the head — the leader of the organization is unknown. Not even most of the people in the group seem to know who’s running the show. But we do know that Gleb the Scar is the chief of Seven Strong Men’s Saint Petersburg operation. He very well might be the second in command.”

Caruso spoke up. “And nobody has a clue what he’s doing in Kiev associating with Chechen gangsters, right?”

“None whatsoever. He hasn’t been known to leave his turf, nor has he been known to be friendly with ethnic minorities.”

Hendley said, “Okay, I approve. But how will you get intel on the Seven Strong Men’s operation?”

Clark turned to Biery. “Gavin?”

Biery said, “I can’t get into Intelink-TS. Not yet, anyway. But I do have access to the SIPRNet. This is the confidential-level network used by the government. Certainly not as good as the TS-level data, but… you know how it is with intelligence. There’s a shit ton out there in open source, and twice as much is lightly classified.”

Clark said, “With Gavin providing confidential-level intel to aid our physical surveillance in Kiev, we should be able to get a good picture of the situation there.”

Gavin added, “Additionally, I’ve hacked into the servers of the Ukrainian SSU — that’s their national police. This is where they keep all the goods on organized crime. Should be helpful, but it’s not the same as having Intelink-TS access.”

Driscoll spoke up now. “We’ll just have to supplement it with old-fashioned shoe-leather spy shit.”

The others grinned, but Hendley still had questions. “Who will be going over?”

“Obviously Ryan is in the UK, but all the rest of us will head over,” Clark replied.

Hendley seemed mildly surprised by this. “I thought you told me you were done with fieldwork.”

“I did. But I speak Russian, and I can read Ukrainian. I’ll need to go back in the field for this one.”

“I guess you don’t get to hang up your fedora just yet, Mr. C,” Dom joked.

Clark gave Dom a hard look. “Screw you, kid. I’ve never worn a fedora in my life. I’m not that old.”

Dom said, “Don’t ruin the badass mental image I have of you back in the day, Mr. C.”

Chavez said, “Hey, Gavin. You’re coming along, too, right?”

Biery looked to Hendley, like he was a child pleading with his mom to go over to a friend’s house to play.

Hendley sighed. “I guess since you made it back from Hong Kong in one piece you consider yourself quite the international man of mystery now, don’t you, Gav?”

Biery shrugged, but Chavez came to his defense. “He pulled us out of a real jam over there, Gerry. It pains me to say it, but we might not have made it out of there without him.”

“All right,” Hendley said. “You can go into the field to support the operation.” Hendley turned his attention back to Clark. “Surely you can’t go over there with weapons.”

“No,” Clark said. “We’ll have to be ready to get picked up and questioned at any time by authorities. We can use a journalist cover. If our credos are good enough, we’ll be just fine.”

Hendley countered, “Good documents will help if you get picked up by the police, but they won’t help you if you get picked up by Seven Strong Men.”

John Clark acknowledged this point. “Very true. We’ll be careful not to get picked up by the Scar and his boys.”

Gerry added, “John, I don’t have to remind you that Kiev is going to be absolutely crawling with all manner of shady characters. Official and unofficial.”

John looked at the rest of the team. “I read you loud and clear, and we’ll do our best to keep our operation under wraps, from the official and unofficial.” He smiled. “But just for the record, I’ve got my own crew of shady characters.”