True Faith and Allegiance

19

The Hendley Associates Gulfstream G550 took off from Soekarno-Hatta International Airport just fifty-one minutes after Jack Ryan crashed into the Jakarta police department patrol car.

Helen and Country were still in the process of climbing out to the northeast, barely a thousand feet off the ground, when Chavez, Ryan, and Caruso moved close around the zip-tied American prisoner. He was bandaged and stable, but his gag remained in place.

They’d searched him on the way to the airport, and he had no identification with him whatsoever. Certainly he’d left his wallet at the embassy or his home to make the pass with the North Koreans in case something went wrong.

In his backpack they had found three binders full of papers, all of which were clearly marked classified, although the ones Jack had thumbed through briefly were all under the classification Confidential, the lowest level.

Jack and the other Campus men were surprised to find that all this was over documents that were less than Top Secret.

The three men took a few minutes to go through the papers, then Chavez ripped the electrical tape off the man’s mouth. Before the prisoner could even speak, Chavez asked, “What’s your name?”

The man looked confused. He said, “Ben. Ben Kincaid. Benjamin Terrance Kincaid. Did you—”

Chavez started to tape the man’s mouth back up. “All I need to know. It’s going to be a long flight, so take a nap,” he said, but before he could push the tape tight, Kincaid managed to push it away with his tongue, long enough to say one thing.

“Jennifer! Let me talk to—”

Chavez stopped. More curious than anything else, he lowered the tape.

“Jennifer?”

Kincaid said, “Please, sir. I just need to know she’s safe.”

Chavez looked at Jack and Dom, then back to Kincaid. “Who the hell is Jennifer?”

Kincaid stared wide-eyed at the three men. “Who is Jennifer? Who? She’s my wife!”

Chavez rolled his eyes. “Dude, nobody even knew who you were until you just told us. We just knew the DPRK was meeting some embassy shithead passing secrets.”

Kincaid’s face morphed into a look of abject terror. “But that means… you’ve… you’ve pulled her out, right? You got Jennifer out of there. Tell me you pulled her out. Tell me she’s safe!”

Again the Campus men looked at one another in confusion.

Chavez said, “Calm down! Out of… out of where?”

Kincaid screamed, pulled at his bindings like a maniac. “Fuck! You don’t even know what’s going on here! Jennifer is CIA. On nonofficial cover. She’s in danger!”

Chavez blinked hard. “Your wife is CIA?”

“Damn it! Damn you all! She’s somewhere in Belarus, and they will kill her now that this has happened!”

This didn’t make any sense to Jack. “If your wife is a NOC, how do you even know where she is? She isn’t supposed to tell you any of that.”

“Are you guys fucking idiots? She didn’t tell me! I haven’t heard from her in three months. She told me it would be a six-month assignment.”

“Then how—”

“Because those fuckers in Jakarta, the men you said were North Korean, they showed me pictures of her in the field. They said they could make one phone call and she’d be killed by the group she infiltrated. According to them, she was working as an accountant for some shady Mafia outfit out of Belarus. If the pass didn’t go off as planned this morning, then they would call the Belarusians, and they would—”

Chavez leapt to his feet. “I’ll be right back!”

Up at the front near the galley, he called Mary Pat Foley. She answered in seconds with “I hear there was a shoot-out in Jakarta. Are you guys okay?”

Chavez spoke quickly, “Listen carefully. This man is Ben Kincaid. His wife is—”

Mary Pat gasped. “Jen Kincaid. God Almighty. She’s one of Jay Canfield’s top officers.”

“Yeah, well the DPRK guys told Ben they knew her identity and where she’s working right now. They said if he didn’t play ball today, they’d drop a dime on her to the goons around her and get her killed. Don’t know if that’s all BS or if it’s true.”

Mary Pat said, “Where did they say she was?”

“Somewhere in Belarus, working for a—”

Mary Pat interrupted hastily. “I’ll put you on hold and check with Jay.” The phone clicked, and Chavez could tell Mary Pat was crystal clear on the gravity of this situation.

Chavez put the phone down, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. In the back of the cabin he could hear Kincaid going back and forth between openly weeping and cussing out Jack and Dominic.

The two Campus men just looked up at Chavez, hoping like hell they hadn’t just made a bad situation worse.

A minute later Mary Pat was back on the line. “Canfield confirmed it. Jennifer Kincaid is in Minsk right now, working deep cover in a legitimate company owned by a very dangerous criminal organization.”

“Shit. How the hell could the North Koreans know any of that?”

“I have no idea, but we’ve run into some similar breaches of undefined origin in the past couple weeks. There is a wide-ranging and ongoing compromise we don’t understand.”

“What about Jennifer?”

“We aren’t going through any normal processes. Canfield has men racing to her right this second to get her out of there. To hell with her cover, her future in clandestine service. We’ll get teams around her and pull her out before anyone has time to do anything to her.”

Chavez looked at his watch. “Damn, Mary Pat. We’ve had this guy in our hands for over an hour. He was noncompliant, and we were just trying to get out of the country safely without him compromising us. So we gagged him. The North Koreans have an hour head start.”

“You couldn’t have known,” she said softly. Then, “Look, you know how these things go. The operatives you ran into aren’t going to be the ones to expose Jen in Minsk. They would call their handlers, who themselves would have to kick it upstairs. The contact with the Belarusian group couldn’t possibly take place in under an hour.”

Chavez said, “I wish you sounded as confident as the words you’re saying.”

Mary Pat paused, then said, “Yeah. Well, all you and I can do right now is pray Jay’s men get to her in time.”

Chavez hung up, put on a confident face, and returned to the group.

Kincaid looked at him, tears streaming down his face. “What’s happening?”

“It’s getting taken care of.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means Langley is in the process of pulling your wife out right now.”

Kincaid nodded slowly, not quite believing, and then he looked out the window for a moment. He said, “That intelligence that you protected. The stuff I was handing over. Do you even know what it was?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Dom said.

“The hell it doesn’t! I wasn’t handing out launch codes. I wasn’t passing off the travel routes of the ambassador. No… It was a media list. A fucking list of the names of the reporters and producers we go to here in Indonesia to speak on background about issues. Most all of those names and organizations in that binder can be assumed by the press that comes out from them. This was nothing. Nothing! Plus, the men who contacted me said they were South Koreans.”

Dom was incredulous. “Why would South Koreans threaten to kill your wife?”

“They claimed they had business contacts here in Jakarta who were making a play for political office. I knew they were dangerous men, but I didn’t know they were from the DPRK.”

Jack said, “It doesn’t matter. You shared classified material.”

“About nothing consequential, and to save my wife’s life.”

Jack said, “They were getting their hooks into you. That’s all. Once you’d passed over intel, any intel, doesn’t matter what, they could come back to you, hold your previous treason over your head, and turn up the heat on you to get more and more.”

Chavez nodded. “That’s how it works, Ben. Now, just sit there and chill out. As soon as we hear that your wife is safe, I’ll let you know.”

They had just taken off from a refueling stop in Tokyo when the secure phone rang at the front of the cabin. Chavez went to it, took a call, and sat down.

In the middle of the cabin Jack, Dom, and Ben all stared at him, searching his body language for any good news.

Instead, they all got a read on the phone call at the same time. Chavez lowered his head, rubbed his eyes slowly. He nodded, hung up the phone, and just sat there at the bulkhead.

All eyes in the back of the aircraft remained locked on him.

Finally Chavez said, “Dom, will you do me a favor and untie him? Mr. Kincaid, can you come up here, please?”

Ben Kincaid’s face reddened, his eyes misted, but he said nothing. Dom cut off the zip ties securing him to his chair, and the Department of State employee walked slowly to the front of the plane, like a man walking to the electric chair.

Dom and Jack didn’t even look at each other. They sat there quietly, until Jack said, “Shit.”

Dom nodded. “Yeah. Hell of a thing.”

Ten minutes later Chavez headed to the rear, leaving Kincaid at the front of the plane, doubled over in a cabin chair and sobbing softly. He sat down with Jack and Dom; the look in his face was as if he’d lost a loved one. “Jennifer Kincaid’s body was kicked out of a car at the front gate of the U.S. embassy in Minsk. Her throat was slashed so badly her head was barely attached.”

“God rest her soul,” Dominic said softly.

Jack looked out the window at the cloud layer below. “That’s on us. Our fault. They killed her because we got involved.”

Chavez sighed. “Incomplete intelligence, Jack. We were the tip of the spear, but the shaft of the spear let us down. If we knew more, if we had more time, we could have done something that—”

Jack replied flatly, “Yeah, but the shaft of the spear didn’t get her killed. We did.”

Chavez said, “Mary Pat said there is some kind of breach they can’t wrap their heads around. This looks like part of that. That woman was dead the second CIA found out the DPRK was going to get documents from the USA.”

“Fuck!” Jack said, slamming the table in front of him.

Chavez left the younger men with their thoughts, and went back up to Kincaid. The man was still their prisoner, and he was just distraught enough to try something crazy if a very sympathetic, but also very capable, man was not standing close by for the rest of the long flight back to D.C.

They had another thirteen hours of this flight, and he doubted there would be much talk out of any one of them the entire way.

After a refueling stop in Mexico City that turned into a twenty-four-hour delay due to bad weather, the old Antonov carrying Abu Musa al-Matari, his two subordinates, and a massive supply of ordnance landed at Ardmore Downtown Executive Airport, in Ardmore, Oklahoma, at two-twenty a.m. A single customs agent had been waiting for the aircraft, and only a single controller in the tower was working to bring this NAFTA flight in from South America.

The paperwork and forms had been filed in advance, the cargo had been listed as a return of defective farming machinery, and all there was for the customs agent to do was board the aircraft, check over the documentation of the crew, along with their personal passports, and conduct a quick inspection of the cargo.

The controller in the tower, the customs inspector, a refueling team at the fixed-base operator, and a single security guard in a patrol car far on the other side of the tarmac were the only people on airport grounds other than two vehicles here to meet the plane.

The An-32 did not have enough fuel to make it back to South America, but the refuelers were pumping gas before the stairs dropped from the hatch of the aircraft.

A twenty-six-foot U-Haul truck waiting for the arrival of the turboprop pulled forward, just aft of the aircraft. A Ford Explorer stopped right next to the U-Haul. One woman and five men climbed out of the vehicles and headed for the cargo hatch.

The customs inspector climbed aboard and immediately encountered the pilot and copilot standing in the front galley. He shook hands with the men, handed over their signed paperwork, verifying the cargo was indeed as represented on the manifest, and that the documentation of the two pilots was in order.

He never looked at the cargo, so he saw no rocket launchers or rifles or suicide vests, and he never looked inside the rear galley, so he did not see the three Islamic State operatives sitting there fingering Glock 17s on their hips.

An envelope containing $25,000 was handed over to the customs inspector, and he took it before quickly descending the stairs. He did not even look at the half-dozen or so people unloading fifty-pound crates from the cargo hold into a U-Haul truck.

He really did not want to know what was going on.

By four a.m. the Russian-built and Bolivian-owned Antonov was on its takeoff roll back into the morning sky; the entire Chicago cell, plus Tripoli, Algiers, and Musa al-Matari, was leaving the city of Ardmore in the two vehicles, and two tons of deadly equipment had made its way safely into the United States.

The vehicles weren’t heading for Chicago. No, now they began a long cross-country road trip that would take them several days. They had to distribute equipment to the other four teams, and it was determined this could be most safely done by driving the goods to cities within a few hours’ drive of each cell, renting storage units, and simply dropping off the crates. Then the keys would be FedExed to the leaders of the cells.

By midafternoon the truck had dropped a dozen crates in Alpharetta, Georgia, and by noon of the following day, a ten-by-ten-foot storage unit in Richmond, Virginia, had a dozen black plastic crates stacked inside. They delivered more crates to Ann Arbor, dropped their own crates in Naperville, Illinois, and here al-Matari, Algiers, and Tripoli left the group and set off for a safe house rented in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago.

The Chicago cell continued on to San Francisco to deliver the last of the weaponry to the Santa Clara cell.

Al-Matari had been given a driver’s license owned by a bearded and bespectacled thirty-eight-year-old American citizen of Palestinian descent, and he had to agree that when he grew his facial hair out this man could be his doppelgänger. With this and credit cards in the man’s name, he could go where he liked, and his two Islamic State operatives could do the same with their own documentation, not that they actually expected the American police to pull them over.

They had worked behind the lines many times in their careers, and they had lived in Europe long enough to pass themselves off as Westerners, in attitude, if not in looks. They’d do their best to stay away from the authorities, but if they were questioned, their legends were backstopped and there were others here in the country who could vouch for them.

Al-Matari had worked too hard to leave anything to chance. When it became time for his men and women to begin their attacks, he would be prepared, and no random encounter by a cop was going to derail his plan.