Power and Empire Read online

  ALSO BY TOM CLANCY

  FICTION

  The Hunt for Red October

  Red Storm Rising

  Patriot Games

  The Cardinal of the Kremlin

  Clear and Present Danger

  The Sum of All Fears

  Without Remorse

  Debt of Honor

  Executive Orders

  Rainbow Six

  The Bear and the Dragon

  Red Rabbit

  The Teeth of the Tiger

  Dead or Alive (with Grant Blackwood)

  Against All Enemies (with Peter Telep)

  Locked On (with Mark Greaney)

  Threat Vector (with Mark Greaney)

  Command Authority (with Mark Greaney)

  Tom Clancy Support and Defend (by Mark Greaney)

  Tom Clancy Full Force and Effect (by Mark Greaney)

  Tom Clancy Under Fire (by Grant Blackwood)

  Tom Clancy Commander in Chief (by Mark Greaney)

  Tom Clancy Duty and Honor (by Grant Blackwood)

  Tom Clancy True Faith and Allegiance (by Mark Greaney)

  Tom Clancy Point of Contact (by Mike Maden)

  NONFICTION

  Submarine: A Guided Tour Inside a Nuclear Warship

  Armored Cav: A Guided Tour Inside an Armored Cavalry Regiment

  Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing

  Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit

  Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force

  Carrier: A Guided Tour of an Aircraft Carrier

  Into the Storm: A Study in Command

  with General Fred Franks, Jr. (Ret.), and Tony Koltz

  Every Man a Tiger: The Gulf War Air Campaign

  with General Chuck Horner (Ret.) and Tony Koltz

  Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces

  with General Carl Stiner (Ret.) and Tony Koltz

  Battle Ready

  with General Tony Zinni (Ret.) and Tony Koltz

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by The Estate of Thomas L. Clancy, Jr.; Rubicon, Inc.; Jack Ryan Enterprises, Ltd.; and Jack Ryan Limited Partnership

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Cameron, Marc, author.

  Title: Tom Clancy power and empire / Marc Cameron.

  Description: New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017039098 | ISBN 9780735215894 (hardback) | ISBN 9780735215900 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Ryan, Jack, Jr. (Fictitious character)—Fiction. | Intelligence officers—United States—Fiction. | Terrorism—Prevention—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / War & Military. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3603.A4477 T66 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039098

  p. cm.

  MAPS BY JEFFREY L. WARD

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  CONTENTS

  Also by Tom Clancy

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Principal Characters

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  About the Author

  PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  Jack Ryan: President of the United States

  Scott Adler: Secretary of state

  Mary Pat Foley: Director of national intelligence

  Robert Burgess: Secretary of defense

  Jay Canfield: Director of the Central Intelligence Agency

  Arnold “Arnie” van Damm: President Ryan’s chief of staff

  Gary Montgomery: Special agent in charge of Presidential Protection Detail, U.S. Secret Service

  THE CAMPUS

  John Clark

  Domingo “Ding” Chavez

  Jack Ryan, Jr.

  Dominic Caruso

  Adara Sherman

  Bartosz “Midas” Jankowski

  Gavin Biery

  Lisanne Robertson: Campus director of transportation

  Monzaki Yukiko: Japanese intelligence operative

  U.S. COAST GUARD AIR STATION PORT ANGELES

  Lieutenant Commander Andrew Slaznik: MH-65 Dolphin helicopter pilot

  Petty Officer 2nd Class Lance Kitchen: Dolphin rescue swimmer

  CYCLONE-CLASS PATROL SHIP USS ROGUE

  Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Akana: Captain

  Petty Officer 2nd Class Raymond Cooper: RQ-20 Puma operator

  VBSS RHIB CREW USS ROGUE

  Lieutenant Junior Grade Steven Gitlin

  Chief Petty Officer Bill Knight

  Chief Petty Officer Bobby Rose

  Petty Officer Peavy

  Petty Officer Ridgeway

  USS MERIWETHER

  Dave Holloway: Captain

  PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINAr />
  Zhao Chengzhi: General secretary of the Chinese Communist Party

  Huang Ju: Colonel, Central Security Bureau; President Zhao’s principal protection officer

  Li Zhengsheng: Foreign minister

  Xu Jinlong: Lieutenant general, People’s Liberation Army; director of Central Security Bureau

  Ma Xiannian: General, People’s Liberation Army

  Long Yun: Colonel, Central Security Bureau; Foreign Minister Li’s principal protective officer

  TEXAS

  Eddie Feng: Taiwanese journalist

  Magdalena Rojas: Thirteen-year-old victim of sex trafficking

  Blanca Limón: Thirteen-year-old victim of sex trafficking

  Ernie Pacheco, aka Matarife (The Slaughterer)

  Lupe: “Bottom girl” who works for Matarife

  Emilio Zambrano: Upper boss in cartel

  Roy Calderon: Texas Department of Public Safety trooper

  Kelsey Callahan: FBI special agent, commander of the Dallas Crimes Against Children Task Force

  John Olson: Special Agent, FBI, on CAC Task Force

  That city is well fortified which has a wall of men instead of brick.

  —LYCURGUS

  I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

  —JACK LONDON

  PROLOGUE

  A dozen men clad in bright orange coveralls and white hardhats swarmed the decks of CGSL Orion, the 396-meter flagship of China Global Shipping Lines, like ants. The hollow thud of metal box against metal box rattled the air, adding a bass note to the scream of gears and the whine of spinning cable drums. Gargantuan orange gantry cranes towering fifty meters above dipped and rose, then dipped again, their noses swinging back and forth from dock to ship with payloads of white, green, blue, or red metal containers known as TEUs, or twenty-foot equivalent units.

  Gao Tian, chief of the ants, stood on the concrete docks of Dalian. This was one of the busiest container hubs in China, and the mountain of TEUs stacked beside the huge vessel made the man look and feel minuscule. He waved his good arm and spoke into the radio clipped to a loop on the chest of his coveralls. The broad smile across his face belied the frenetic pace of the activity around him. Far too busy with their own tasks, none of the other dockworkers looked up to pay any attention to his flailing arm, but they listened intently to his voice over their respective radios. His job was to coordinate and make certain the loading went quickly and safely; of all the people on the docks, Gao was intimately familiar with the dangers.

  Each year, almost three-quarters of a billion of these ubiquitous metal containers—roughly 24 trillion pounds of cargo—moved around the world via tractor-trailer, locomotive, and cargo ship. Roughly 180 million TEUs came from China, and well over 10 million of those came through the Port of Dalian—on ships much like Orion.

  The job of a dockworker was stressful enough, but Gao Tian found it difficult to concentrate, considering his recent upturn of fortune.

  Gao was forty-one years old, with thinning black hair and a round face that naturally relaxed into a smile—a coworker had remarked that he always looked as though he’d just relieved himself in the swimming pool. He was not a big man, nor was he particularly strong. In truth, Gao had many reasons to be unhappy. His right hand had been crushed in an accident three years earlier when a turnbuckle on a piece of lashing gear had snapped. The sudden loss of tension allowed the TEU to shift just a few inches—but those few inches were enough. Three fingers of his right hand had been sacrificed to the ship, his bone and flesh smeared between the steel bulkhead and the fifty-thousand-pound metal box, like so much red-currant jelly.

  Gao’s thumb and remaining finger were of little use. He could, at least, hook the antenna of his radio and depress the talk button, allowing him to direct the activity of the crane operators and the dozen orange-clad stevedores, ensuring that the stacks of TEUs were loaded correctly and efficiently. Gao earned no more pay as the chief coordinator, but, given his useless hand, he counted himself lucky that the dock manager gave him a job at all. And besides, it made sense that the men who did the hardest and most dangerous work received a few more yuan a day than someone who merely stood on the dock and talked into his radio.

  Other men in the crew might eventually move up and become true supervisors with offices of their own, but that was not to be for Gao. In all his years, he had never strayed farther than a hundred kilometers from his birthplace of Dalian—and then only to visit his wife’s mother, who lived on a small piece of cooperative land north of the city.

  He’d grown content enough with his lot—and then the man with the red eye had come to visit him. Three weeks ago, the man had offered a considerable sum of money to see that a certain TEU was loaded into a certain spot aboard a certain ship. To Gao’s astonishment, this arrangement happened twice more, and each time the man had given him an envelope of money along with verbal instructions. He made Gao repeat the number of the desired TEU and would not allow him to write it down.

  Today, the man with the red eye wanted two TEUs—PBCU-112128-1 and PBCU-112128-2—loaded together, well aft of the stacks, low and near the centerline of the ship.

  CGSL Orion was classified as an Ultra Large Container Vessel, or ULCV. Almost four hundred meters in length and with a draft of sixteen meters, the ship was deep enough to stack eighteen TEUs from the bottom of the hold to the topmost box above deck. Twenty-three TEUs could be arranged side by side across her fifty-three-meter beam. One TEU looked much like any other, so the chalky blue box with unobtrusive white X’s painted at each corner would soon blend with the 16,000 other boxes aboard the ship, all similarly muted in color, that were stacked over, under, and around it. PBCU-112128-1 and PBCU-112128-2 were not particularly difficult to remember, which was a good thing, because Gao was already thinking of how he was going to spend the extra money the man with the red eye had given him. Nine hundred yuan, roughly equivalent to a hundred fifty U.S. dollars, each time he helped arrange a spot for a container that was going on the ship anyway. It was a tidy sum for someone making seven thousand yuan per month.

  Gao suspected his benefactor worked for a triad and wanted his container of drugs or other illicit material stowed deep in the middle of the thousands of containers on the vessel, thus lessening the possibility of search by authorities. Gao was a moral man, opposed to narcotics, but nine hundred yuan was nine hundred yuan, and he rationalized that he did not know with any degree of certainty what was in the container. The man with the red eye had assured him that he wanted only to hasten the unloading process when his container reached its destination. So Gao took the man at his word and kept the money, with a conscience as cloudy as his benefactor’s eye. He was able to slightly assuage his guilt by thinking about how he might spend the newest installment of nine hundred yuan.

  Keeping well clear of the swinging cables and flying TEUs, Gao followed the man’s instructions and located PBCU-112128-1 and PBCU-112128-2 in the stacks. He located the barcode on each container and checked them with the scanner he kept secured to a lanyard at his waist. He then coordinated between the operator of the second gantry crane and the stevedores working aft of Orion’s exhaust stack and bridge house to guide the chalky blue TEUs into place. The entire process—from the time Gao first pressed the talk key on his radio with his surviving finger to the moment the locking cams on the lashing hardware were turned at each corner of the two containers, locking them together, seven layers from the bottom deck, ten rows aft of the raised white bridge castle and eleven across from the starboard rail—took just under six minutes.

  His task complete, Gao began to move his arm again. He spoke into the radio, directing the crane operators and stevedores as they continued to fill Orion, none the wiser to his deal with the red-eyed man. The chief of the ants smiled, nine hundred yuan richer, and thought about the pigs he could now purchase for his mother-in-law. He liked his mot
her-in-law. She was a good and gentle woman, well deserving of some new pigs.

  • • •

  Hands clasped behind the small of his back, General Xu Jinlong of the Central Security Bureau leaned in to peer through the tripod-mounted camera over the rooftops of the Chunhe residential district and industrial buildings situated along the Port of Dalian. A soldier at the core, Xu was thick across the shoulders, with the big hands and muscular forearms of a man who spent more time in the field than the office. Two other men flanked him, one close and relaxed, ready to take orders or give counsel. The other, a youthful man wearing a pair of black sunglasses, had positioned himself back a few steps. His hands were folded in front of him, his head slightly bowed, as he waited to be bidden forward.

  All three men stood in the shade of a small copse of walnut trees on a gravel apron off Zhongnan Road, just north of Haizhiyun Park and Laohutan Scenic Area. Many varieties of protected birds and plant life were abundant in these woods, so passersby paid little attention to the powerful eight-hundred-millimeter telephoto lens that protruded like a cannon from the front of the digital camera. The camera itself was superfluous; it was only there to give the lens credibility. The last thing the general wanted was a digital record of any of his activities. He had not come to capture the beauty of Laohutan’s numerous waterfalls or magnificent root carvings. His interest at the moment lay northward, down the hill toward the sea and the intense activity along the Dalian docks.

  Charged with protecting the highest political leaders in China, the duties of the Central Security Bureau were akin to those of the U.S. Secret Service. Operatives in the CSB, however, put much more emphasis on the word secret, particularly those operatives under the command of General Xu.

  Xu stood motionless, eye to the camera, studying the scene with rapt concentration. The dark suit the fifty-six-year-old man customarily wore allowed him to blend in among the hordes of similarly dressed businessmen and government officials around his offices in central Beijing. But Beijing was four hundred sixty kilometers away and a suit would have drawn unwanted attention as he stood on the side of the roadway on the coast of the Yellow Sea. He dressed instead in light khaki slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up against the unseasonably hot and muggy September. A beige photographer’s vest of lightweight nylon hid the Taurus semiautomatic pistol tucked inside the waist of the khakis. The men with him were similarly dressed. But the young CSB operative named Tan wore dark glasses to cover a severely bloodshot eye. All three men were tall and fit, as those tasked with the protection of other men needed to be.