Page 135 of Tom Clancy Line of Sight
“You’ve got five.”
“On it, boss.”
Ryan stood in the kitchen in a pair of faded Levi’s, a threadbare USMC sweatshirt, and a battered pair of Saucony running shoes, calling on the landline to the overnight White House operator.
“Get me Admiral Dean, Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa, head of the Sixth Fleet, based in Naples, Italy. I don’t care if he’s on the crapper reading Marcus Aurelius, I need him on the phone now. And patch it through to my personal cell. Understood?”
“Understood, sir.”
“And then get me General Colgan, 31st Fighter Wing in Aviano, Italy. Same drill.”
“Right away, sir.”
Two options, maybe,he thought, as Cathy handed him a sealed thermal cup of steaming black coffee and a kiss on the cheek. He bolted for the door, shoving his Bluetooth into his ear, searching his mind for more options, trying to remember distances and maps and borders in a part of the world he hadn’t thought about in a long time.
Some men panicked when a crisis hit, but Ryan’s mind cleared and focused like a sniper’s scope drawing a bead on a distant target. That ability made him a good marine officer and a first-rate CIA analyst when he was younger, but it served him best now that he was commander in chief. He stood on the edge of a perfect storm of bad actors, bad intentions, and bad timing.
Everything hung on his next decision, but he didn’t want to make it until he heard back from his son, racing into the eye of that same perfect storm. As President, he was grateful a man like Jack was on the scene.
As a father, he was scared to death.
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The bleary-eyed communications tech working the video teleconferencing (VTC) cameras and audio in the Situation Room yawned violently behind the control room glass.
Ryan thought she looked like she had just graduated from high school, but she must have been in her early twenties. She was damn good, patching in the live video feed from Aida’s laptop onto one of the big wall monitors, as well as video teleconferencing with Arnie Van Damm, DNI Foley, and SecDef Burgess, all scattered across the country. She also patched in Jack on his phone, along with Gerry and Gavin, who were at the Hendley Associates office in Alexandria, before the first tray of coffee had arrived.
The countdown clock from the laptop displayed on the main monitor. Just twenty-five minutes until the rocket strike at the soccer stadium.
President Ryan stood at the head of the long table, leaning on it, his eyes fixed on one of the wall monitors.
“According to Gavin’s brief, our best guess is that the launch platform is a BM-21 Grad MRLS like the one playing on your screens from the Brkic video. It’s mobile as hell, and we don’t know where it is at the moment.
“That box launcher holds forty 122-millimeter thermobaric missiles, with a maximum operational range of twenty-four miles. Let’s assume half that distance, because these jokers don’t want to push their luck. That means there’s over four hundred and fifty miles of territory to search, much of it tree-covered mountains. How in the hell do we find it in the next twenty-five minutes?”
“USA-224 isn’t due over that area for another eighteen minutes,” Foley said. She was referring to the NRO’s KH-11 Keyhole orbiting optical satellite. “Not that it would do much good in that terrain, if they’re trying to hide it. SBIRS is geostationary, but that’s only going to tell us when the rockets are launched.”
“Assuming we do find it, our options for taking it out are limited, to put it mildly,” Ryan said.
“F-16s out of Aviano would be my choice,” Burgess said.
Ryan shook his head. “General Colgan says it will take thirty-two minutes before his Falcons can scramble and deliver a payload. That’s seven minutes too late if I give him the go order right now. And the nearest carrier is currently on a NATO training exercise off the coast of Portugal, so naval aviation is out of the question. But according to Admiral Dean, we have a guided missile destroyer steaming approximately twenty miles off the coast of Croatia at this very moment.”
“Tomahawks,” Mary Pat Foley said.
“Precisely. From the destroyer’s position to Sarajevo, the Tomahawk flight time is just under fifteen minutes.”
“But we still don’t have a target location,” Arnie said. “We’ll have to get it within the next ten—check that—nine minutes if we hope to prevent the attack.”
Ryan’s eyes narrowed. “There is one other option.”
ON BOARD THE USSGARZA(DDG-116), ADRIATIC SEA, TWENTY MILES SOUTHWEST OF DUBROVNIK, CROATIA
TheArleigh Burke–class guided missile destroyer sat in the choppy waters of the blue Adriatic, its launch alarm klaxon blaring like an ambulance siren, warning sailors to clear the foredeck where the thirty-two cells of the vertical launch system (VLS) were located behind the five-inch gun.
One of the cell hatches burst open in a gush of blinding orange fire as the solid-fuel rocket booster of a GM/UGM-109E (TLAM-Block IV) Tomahawk cruise missile roared from beneath the deck. When it reached its cruising altitude of one thousand feet seconds later, the rocket booster fell away and the eighteen-foot cruise missile dipped perpendicular to the water’s surface as its turbofan engine fired.
The Tomahawk—essentially a pilotless airplane—veered northeast, trailing white smoke in its 550-mile-per-hour flight toward the Croatian coastline.
