True Faith and Allegiance

2

Unlike his famous father, Jack Ryan, Jr., did not have any fear of flying. In fact, he rather trusted airplanes — certainly he trusted them much more than he trusted his own ability to fly through the air without one.

His relative comfort with aviation was at the forefront of his mind now, chiefly because in mere moments he planned on throwing himself out the side door of a perfectly functioning aircraft, into the open blue sky, 1,200 feet above the Chesapeake Bay.

Jack had packed his own parachute, following the instructions and oversight of Domingo Chavez, the senior operative in his clandestine unit, and he felt certain he’d packed it exactly right. But his mind wasn’t working in his best interests now. While he needed his brain to reinforce his certainty that everything would go off without a hitch, he couldn’t get out of his head the fact that on his last trip out of town, he’d forgotten to throw his favorite pair of running socks into his carry-on.

He thought he’d done a fine job packing that day, too.

Not the same thing, Jack. Packing a carry-on has no relationship to packing a damn parachute.

His imagination seemed intent on giving him an ulcer this morning.

Jack was in the middle of skydiving training, not as part of a military or even a normal civilian-based course, but a course developed by the cadre at Jack’s employer. Jack worked for The Campus, a small but important off-the-books intelligence organization; it was populated with former military and intelligence types, a few of whom were seasoned free-fall experts.

And it was decided that Jack Ryan, Jr., needed to pick up this critical skill, because although he had begun his work at The Campus in the position of intelligence analyst, in the past few years his job had morphed into an operational role. Now he wore two hats; he might spend weeks or months at a time working in his cubicle unraveling the accounting practices of a corrupt world leader or a terrorist organization, or he might find himself kicking in a door at a target location and engaging in close-quarters combat.

Jack’s life did not go wanting for diversity.

But he didn’t have time to think about the ironic course of his life right now. No, now he began quietly reciting his checklist once he stepped out of the aircraft in exactly—

Someone at the front of the plane shouted now. “Ryan! Four minutes!”

In exactly four minutes: “Step out, head forward, arms away, body flat, knees slightly bent. Arch back, pull the rip cord, ready yourself for the snap, and check for good canopy.”

He mumbled his extraordinarily important to-do list softly as he sat in the side-facing seat that ran along the fuselage of the plane.

This wasn’t his first solo jump. He’d started out with ground school two weeks earlier, then moved outside the classroom to begin leaping off a slow-moving pickup with his gear, and tumbling onto a grass strip. After this he jumped tandems for a couple of days, riding through the sky attached to Domingo Chavez or strapped to his cousin and the third member of the Campus operational team, Dominic Caruso. Chavez and Caruso were both free-fall experts, trained in both HALO (high altitude, low opening) and HAHO (high altitude, high opening), and they put him through his paces in the beginner portion of his training.

Jack did what was asked of him, so he moved quickly on to static line jumps — Ding Chavez referred to these as “dope on a rope” — where the chute was pulled open automatically as soon as he left the aircraft.

The next stage in his skydiving course involved low-level jumps into water, where he pulled his own rip cord, but did so immediately upon exiting the aircraft — these Chavez called “hop-and-pops.”

He’d been through five hop-and-pops so far; they all had gone according to plan, as evidenced by the fact Jack was not lying face-first, dead in some field in Maryland. And while he was by no means a natural, nor had he even graduated to his first free fall yet, he’d earned a few attaboys from John Clark, director of operations for the small unit.

This in itself was quite an accomplishment, because John Clark knew his stuff — before The Campus, Clark had been a Navy SEAL, a CIA paramilitary officer, and the leader of a NATO special operations antiterrorism force, and he had performed more covert and combat jumps than all but a few men on earth.

Even though Jack had been doing hop-and-pops for the past two days, this morning’s jump would be very different from the others, because as soon as he hit the water he would swim to a nearby anchored yacht and join up with the other two men on the team, already on board. Together they would perform a training assault on the vessel, which was filled with Campus cadre performing the role of an opposition force.

With just a few minutes before his jump, Jack looked across the cabin of the Cessna Grand Caravan at the two other men who would be involved in today’s exercise. Dominic Caruso was head to toe in black — even his parachute harness, his goggles, and helmet. His chest rig was filled with thirty-round nine-millimeter magazines, and he wore a SIG Sauer MPX submachine gun with a silencer strapped behind his right shoulder.

Jack knew that the mags for Dom’s sub gun and for the Glock pistol on his hip were filled with Simunitions — bullets that fired a capsule full of paint instead of lead, but bullets nonetheless, which meant they still hurt like hell.

Clark and Chavez’s mantra was “The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle.” Jack understood the saying, but the truth was he’d bled in training many times, and he’d bled in real fights as well.

Jack was decked out in much the same gear that Caruso and Chavez wore, with a couple of notable exceptions. First, Jack wore swim fins strapped tight on his chest. He would put them on his feet when he hit the water. And second, the two men sitting across from Jack wore MC-6 parachute systems, special rigs outfitted with the SF-10A canopy designed for U.S. Special Forces that would allow them to fly great distances and land with precision, even giving them the ability to back up in the air.

Jack’s parachute, on the other hand, was a much more basic T-11 model, giving him very limited mobility. He’d fall at nineteen feet per second and land pretty much where the aircraft’s velocity, the wind, and gravity sent him.

The other two guys were going to hit right on the deck of the boat, while Jack simply had to hop and pop and make sure he didn’t miss the vast waters of the Chesapeake Bay directly below the aircraft. Jack was still in the “training wheels” stage, so he’d have to swim to meet up with the other men to take down the boat. It was a little embarrassing having to swim to the target, but he knew exactly zero other beginners to the world of skydiving ever incorporated mock combat assaults into their jumps on their second week of training, so he didn’t feel too much like a lightweight.

Ding Chavez sat next to Caruso, facing Jack, and right now he wore a cabin headset so he could communicate with the flight crew, the regular pilot and copilot of The Campus’s Gulfstream G550 jet. Helen Reid and Chester Hicks were slumming, flying the much less powerful and much less high-tech Cessna Caravan, but they both enjoyed today’s change of pace.

Dom Caruso noticed that Chavez was in communication with the cockpit via the headset, so he leaned over to talk confidentially with Jack, speaking into his ear. “You good, cuz?”

“Hell, yeah, man.” They pumped gloved fists, Jack doing his best not to show his unease.

Jack felt he pulled it off, because Caruso said nothing about Jack having a pasty white face or jittering hands. Instead, Caruso double-checked to make sure Chavez had his headphones on and couldn’t hear any conversation between Jack and Dom. Then he leaned forward again.

“Ding says we are facing an unknown number of opposition at the target, but between you, me, and the lamppost, there are going to be five bad guys on that yacht.”

Jack cocked his head. “How do you know that?”

“Process of elimination. Look at the people we have in The Campus who could possibly be drafted into shooting it out against us. Adara will play the role of the kidnap victim, she let that slip yesterday. Clark, obviously, will lead the OPFOR. He’ll be down there with a gun. That leaves our four security guys: Gomez, Fleming, Gibson, and Henson.” The Campus contracted well-vetted former military and intelligence assets to serve as facility security personnel. They were all ex — Green Berets or ex-SEALs. Additionally, Gibson and Henson had served with the CIA’s Global Response Staff, a tier-one security service that protected Agency installations around the world. All four men were in their fifties but as fit as Olympic athletes and tough as nails, and they had been friends of Chavez’s and Clark’s going back many years.

In addition to site security, the four also helped out with training from time to time, as they were all experts with firearms, edged weapons, and even unarmed combat.

Jack said, “You could be right, but Clark has thrown curveballs at us in the past. A couple guys from the Campus analytics shop who used to be shooters might be down there helping out. Mike and Rudy, for example? They were both Army infantry.”

Caruso smiled. “They were Rangers, I’ll grant you that. But Rudy called me first thing this morning from the office. He’s thinking about buying my truck, and he asked me to leave the keys under the seat so he could go by my place and take it for a spin on his lunch break. He said Mike would come along with him.”

Jack tried to think of others involved in their organization who might have driven the two and a half hours from the office in Alexandria, Virginia, to play the role of bad guys this morning. “Donna Lee was FBI. She knows her way around a submachine gun.”

Dom said, “Adara told me Donna tweaked her knee at CrossFit on Wednesday. She’s on crutches for the next couple weeks.”

Jack smiled now. “You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you?”

“You and I run into enough assholes who want to shoot us out there in the real world. I’m not looking to take a Sim burst to the junk today. I’ve got plans this weekend. I’ll game the system if I have to.”

Jack laughed now, glad for the diversion that kept him from thinking about his parachute-packing skills and the jump to come. “What do you have planned for the weekend?”

Dom looked like he was considering whether or not to answer the question, but just then Ding pulled off his headset and Dominic leaned back away from Ryan.

“What are you two knuckleheads conspiring about over here?”

Both men smiled but made no reply.

Chavez raised an eyebrow. “Two minutes out, Jack. You’ll be dropped three hundred yards or so from the boat, at the stern, to avoid detection. Obviously it’s daytime, and any sentry in the real world looking aft would see you, but this is training. The OPFOR on deck knows to keep their eyes in the boat. You get a free pass to swim up, as long as you don’t make it too obvious.”

Dominic said, “Yeah, don’t dog-paddle up in a big yellow rubber ducky.”

Jack gave Chavez a thumbs-up.

“Once you’re out the hatch, Helen will take us up to six thousand and we’ll jump from there, sail right onto the deck. We’ll spot targets on the way down and try to take them out on landing. By the time we hit the deck and strip away our harnesses, I want you climbing up the sea stairs ready to stack up with us.”

“You got it,” Jack said. This was going to be an arduous swim. The waters of the bay looked choppy from the window behind him.

Just then, Chester “Country” Hicks climbed out of the copilot’s seat and moved back to the cabin door. He flipped the lever and slid the big hatch open, filling the already noisy cabin with the locomotive-like drone that came along with the air rushing by the aircraft moving at ninety knots.

Hicks held up a single finger, indicating one minute till jump, and Jack pulled himself to his feet, along with Chavez. Jack and Dom pounded fists again, and then Jack walked closer to the open hatch.

Chavez leaned close into Jack’s ear as he moved up the cabin with him. “Remember… Don’t forget.”

Now Jack cocked his head, leaned into Chavez’s ear. “Don’t forget what?”

“Don’t forget anything.” Chavez smiled, slapped the younger man on the back, and pointed toward the open door. “You’re up, Jack. Time to fly like a piano!”

Jack fought a bout of queasiness, waited for the signal from Country, and then leapt out.