Commander-in-Chief

59

Clark dreamt of the pain before he woke to feel it. In his dream he had been at home in bed; Sandy might have been next to him but he could not turn to look. A truck had driven into his bedroom, slowly and without seeming to care, and it had driven onto his bed, pinning him down. His legs were crossed, one on top of the other, so they hurt the worst, but his back was twisted by the big tires, and the heat from the exhaust pipe burned the side of his head, just behind his right ear.

This was an awful dream, to be sure, but he preferred it to how he felt when he woke. His mind took in the feeling, his body alive with the pain, and his arms and legs were just as slow to operate as they had been when he’d been dreaming.

He was looking up through the companionway, so he saw a bit of the faint glow from a mostly moonless night, but other than that he was still shrouded in darkness.

He had no idea how long he’d been lying here, and he also had no idea how badly he’d been hurt, but the worst of it was the side of his head behind his right ear, so he forced his right hand up to touch it, praying the swelling would be on the outside of his skull, and not inside, where he ran the real risk of death, even hours after the injury occurred.

He touched his fingers to the center of the pain and he did, indeed, feel a massive knot there, which would have been good news, but Clark wasn’t feeling any better about it, because as he’d moved his hand to his head he’d managed to splash himself in the face with seawater.

If he hadn’t just suffered a concussion, if he hadn’t just woken up from an unconscious state brought on by a violent blow to the head, then Clark would have recognized much more quickly that he was lying in pain in the bowels of a sinking boat. As it happened, it took him several seconds to work this out; only the taste of the water on his lips and the sense his ears were now filling with the wetness and blocking out the noises around him impressed on him how bad his situation had become.

Now the pain in his head and his back and his legs was all of minor importance. No matter how bad he hurt, no matter what condition he found himself in when he began to move, he had only one objective.

John Clark was a Navy man, true, but he found himself under no obligation whatsoever to go down with his ship.

His legs were probably just bruised; his right shin and his left knee had caught the stairs in the companionway. Clark didn’t need a slow-mo replay of the event to know this. His back was killing him, it had seized in spasm, and he didn’t know how the hell he was going to swim when one of the largest chains of muscles in his body refused to cooperate with the orders sent from his brain, but that was a problem he’d have to sort out in a minute or two. For now it was about getting out of the saloon, then out of the cockpit, and finally off the deck before this fifty-two-foot Irwin rolled over and took him down with it.

He pulled himself out of the water and up the companionway stairs in the darkness. To his right, circuits blew on his radio and weather center with pops and snaps and flashes of light as the seawater reached thigh-high.

John had watched boats sink before, and he knew the speed of the descent was unpredictable. A boat filling with a foot of water a minute could double or triple this rate instantly as the water found more non-waterproof openings, more ways to fill the air below the waterline. This very phenomenon was happening now, in fact. He’d been conscious no more than two minutes, and already the water had risen from a few inches over the deck of the saloon to three feet.

He made it up to the cockpit; here he put weight on both his legs and stood up for the first time. He felt weak and unsteady, his head was heavy like he’d been drugged, but he knew this was due to the blow to the head.

But not entirely. As he wobbled through the cockpit trying to find his gun and his mobile phone he realized the sailboat had begun a heavy list to port. He fought against it for a moment while he kept looking for the two items he did not want to leave the boat without, but quickly he came to his depleted senses and decided his luck of late had been far too bad for him to push it one second more.

Wearing only a pair of linen pants and boat shoes, he made his way out onto the main deck and leapt into the black water, fought against the agony in his back as he tried to swim away from the boat, at least far enough to avoid being slammed in the head by one of the masts as it came down.

He gave up on a breaststroke or a crawl, settled for a one-arm sidestroke because of his back pain, and was glad to see his faculties hadn’t been damaged so much he could not still cover water rapidly and efficiently.

He took a break from his swim to shore, just long enough to watch a few more pops of electrical circuits blow on the deck, then the mast light flashed on and off in a shower of sparks.

Then the boat rolled over like a dying animal, revealing its keel in the low light of the moon.

Beyond the sad display a hundred yards away from him, he saw something that excited him for a moment. The lights of a boat in the distance. It was moving, but with no other reference points it was hard to tell if it was coming or going.

Quickly he told himself to curb his enthusiasm. The lights in the distance weren’t going to be his salvation. He recognized the configuration of the masts from the masthead lights, and he realized he was watching the Spinnaker II round the northern tip of West Seal Dog Island. From the fact he could only make out the white light on the stern, he felt sure it was departing, motoring away to the northeast, perhaps for Anegada Island.

Not a sound made its way across the water to Clark’s position as the catamaran left his view.

The lights disappearing in the dark took with them a mother and a child held against their will, their lives the key to unlocking a puzzle with global ramifications.

Clark started up his sidestroke again, telling himself to keep his mind on his personal situation. It occurred to him that he had no way to prove anything untoward had happened here. His wounds would just make him look like some aging boat renter who slipped on his companionway as he rushed down to see about a leak. The fact that his bilge alarm had not gone off, screaming at 140 decibels, would mean nothing to most investigators, because for all they knew, the old renter of the Irwin probably hadn’t tested it before setting out.

Well before first light, the battered and bruised body of a man — alive but too exhausted and broken to swim — floated the last two hundred yards through the gentle surf, washing ashore like trash in the water.

Clark crawled up the sand, through the morning coral and shell deposits, catching seaweed on his arms and knees as he did so.

He was exhausted and he was injured, and at the moment he was bereft of a plan. But as he sat there spitting sand out of his mouth, he told himself he’d get back in the fight. He didn’t need a hospital. He just needed the three most important things he’d lost tonight — his phone, his target, and his motherfucking gun.

Jack Ryan, Jr., sat quietly, his body as still as a statue, his eyes locked on Salvatore as he sat at the lobby bar in the Stanhope Hotel. The Italian paparazzo had a drink on the bar in front of him and his mobile in his hand.

Jack stared intently at the man’s face and did his best to gauge his mood, his intentions. Was he bored, intense, excited, scared? Was this just another day at the office for him, or was he being sent on some mission?

Jack leaned in, getting as close to the man’s face as he could while still focusing.

Nothing. It was too hard to tell anything, looking at a man on a computer monitor.

Jack was sitting at his cubicle, and the security camera feed from the hotel was running on his center monitor in real time, pulled in by Gavin Biery’s IT team.

This wasn’t surveillance, what Jack was doing. In fact, he thought it was a joke. Unless and until Salvatore got up and did something obvious, Jack knew he’d have no idea what the hell was going on.

Jack had spent most of the workday looking into Salvatore in one form or another. He started with the man’s history. In his career Salvatore had gone many places, taken and sold thousands of photographs all over Europe, almost all of them of famous people who were just trying to go about their day. It was typical celebrity smash-mouth paparazzo work. But in all these travels, Jack had not found one example of Salvatore working in Brussels.

Jack had also looked into the current status of dozens of other European-based paparazzi, using social media to determine their locations. Of the fifty or so he’d been able to pin down, not one of them had gone to Brussels, and this gave him the strong suspicion there was nothing going on there at the moment that would interest the paparazzi.

The Italian seemed to be on the world’s most boring vacation, mostly just sitting around in the lobby bar at night and venturing out during the day, but not in some specific pattern like he was here for a nine-to-five job. No, he’d leave for an hour or two in the afternoon, then return to his hotel.

Jack had no idea what was going on, but he felt strongly that Salvatore wouldn’t be here at all if he wasn’t working in some capacity for the Russians, as he’d obviously been doing in Rome.

He had taken this information back to Gerry, framing it just as an FYI, an update on his progress about the Salvatore case. When Gerry didn’t react to Jack’s hints that perhaps it would be worthwhile for Jack to go over to Belgium after all, Jack went for broke, and point-blank requested approval again.

And as before, Gerry denied the request.

Jack went back to his desk and spent the rest of the day watching camera feeds at Salvatore’s hotel, and that’s where he finally found him, in the lobby, at ten p.m. Brussels time. The Italian was alone, he drank vodka on ice, and he played with his phone, either waiting for a message or just goofing off — Jack couldn’t tell which through the security camera.

Jack couldn’t tell much of anything through the security camera.

He realized then and there that he had to know what the man was up to, and there was just one way to find out. He couldn’t wait for Ding and Dom to finish their work in Lithuania, or for Clark to finish his work in the BVIs. Whatever Salvatore was doing in Brussels was time-sensitive.

Jack decided he would defy Gerry Hendley’s direct order to stand down, to wait for support from his fellow operators.

He would lose his job for his decision; he had no doubt in his mind. Gerry had allowed some indiscretions from Jack in the past. The younger Ryan had called audibles on missions that weren’t exactly in the spirit of Gerry’s orders, but he’d always done them in the heat of the moment, for the undeniable greater good of the mission.

But this was very different. He’d been expressly ordered out of the European theater and back to Campus HQ, he’d then requested to travel back to Europe to run a solo surveillance package on Salvatore, and Gerry Hendley, director of The Campus, had unequivocally denied this request.

There’d be no getting around it: When Jack climbed aboard a plane to Belgium, he would be AWOL from The Campus and insubordinate.

He’d be gone.

But Jack knew he was going to do it anyway.