Shadow Watch (1999) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  ONE - KENNEDY SPACE CENTER CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA APRIL 15, 2001

  TWO - VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 17, 2001

  THREE - VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 17, 2001

  FOUR - MATO GROSSO DO SUL SOUTHERN BRAZIL APRIL 17, 2001

  FIVE - VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 17, 2001

  SIX - CHAPARE REGION WESTERN BOLIVIA APRIL 18, 2001

  SEVEN - PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA APRIL 18, 2001

  EIGHT - NORTHERN ALBANIA APRIL 18, 2001

  NINE - HOUSTON, TEXAS APRIL 18, 2001

  TEN - QUIJARRO, BOLIVIA APRIL 19, 2001

  ELEVEN - SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA APRIL 19, 2001

  TWELVE - CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA APRIL 21, 2001

  THIRTEEN - SOUTHEASTERN BRAZIL APRIL 21, 2001

  FOURTEEN - EASTERN MAINE APRIL 22, 2001

  FIFTEEN - VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 22, 2001

  SIXTEEN - COASTAL MAINE APRIL 22, 2001

  SEVENTEEN - VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 22, 2001

  EIGHTEEN - FLORIDA APRIL 23, 2001

  NINETEEN - VARIOUS LOCALES APRIL 23/24, 2001

  TWENTY - WESTERN BRAZIL APRIL 23, 2001

  TWENTY-ONE - KAZAKHSTAN APRIL 26, 2001

  Epilogue

  ACCLAIM FOR THE BESTSELLING NOVELS OF

  TOM CLANCY

  “Action-packed.”—The New York Times Book Review

  “Undoubtedly Clancy’s best yet.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Breathlessly exciting.”—The Washington Post

  “The ultimate war game ... Brilliant.”—Newsweek

  “Not to be missed.”—The Dallas Morning News

  “A high pitch of excitement.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Tom Clancy is the best there is.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Clancy’s writing is so strong that readers feel they

  are there.”

  —Boston Sunday Herald

  “No one can equal his talent.”—Houston Chronicle

  NOVELS BY TOM CLANCY

  The Huntfor 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

  SSN: Strategies of Submarine Warfare

  NONFICTION

  Submarine: A Guided Tour Inside a Nuclear Warship

  Armored Cav: A Guided Tour of 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

  Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces

  Into the Storm: A Study in Command

  (written with General Fred Franks, Jr., Ret.)

  Every Man a Tiger

  (written with General Charles Horner, Ret.)

  Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces

  (written with General Carl Stiner, Ret., and Tony Koltz)

  CREATED BY TOM CLANCY

  Splinter Cell

  CREATED BY TOM CLANCY AND STEVE PIECZENIK

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Games of State

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Acts of War

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Balance of Power

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: State of Siege

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Divide and Conquer

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Line of Control

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mission of Honor

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Sea of Fire

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Call to Treason

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Hidden Agendas

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Night Moves

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Breaking Point

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Point of Impact

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: CyberNation

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: State of War

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Changing of the Guard

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Springboard

  CREATED BY TOM CLANCY AND MARTIN GREENBERG

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Politika

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: ruthless.com

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Shadow Watch

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Bio-Strike

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Cold War

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Cutting Edge

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Zero Hour

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Wild Card

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are

  either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously,

  and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

  establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  TOM CLANCY’S POWER PLAYS: SHADOW WATCH

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with

  RSE Holdings, Inc.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley edition / November 1999

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1999 by RSE Holdings, Inc.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole

  or in part, by mimeograph or any other means,

  without permission. For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

  http://www.penguinputnam.com

  eISBN : 978-1-101-00255-1

  BERKLEY®

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY and the “B” logo are trademarks belonging to

  Penguin Putnam Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Jerome Preisler for his creative ideas and his invaluable contributions to the preparation of the manuscript. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Marc Cerasini, Larry Segriff, Denise Little, John Helfers, Robert Youdelman, Esq., Tom Mallon, Esq.; the wonderful people at Penguin Putnam, including Phyllis Grann, David Shanks, and Tom Colgan; and Doug Littlejohns, Kevin Perry, the rest of the Shadow Watch team, and the other fine folks at Red Storm Entertainment. As always, I would like to thank Robert Gottlieb of the William Morris Agency, my agent and friend. But most important, it is for you, my readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.

  —Tom Clancy

  ONE

  KENNEDY SPACE CENTER CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA APRIL 15, 2001

  LATER, WHEN IT BECAME BOTH HER JOB AND OBSESSION to determine what happened at the pad, she would remember how everything had gone just right until it all went terribly wrong, turning excitement and anticipation into horror, and forever changing the course of her life. Astronaut, media celebrity, role model, mother—the world’s easy reference tags for her would remain the same. But she knew herself well. There was the Annie Caulfield who had existed before the disaster, and the Annie
Caulfield who eventually arose from its ashes. They were two very different women.

  The morning had promised ideal conditions for the launch: calm winds, moderate temperatures, a clear blue spread of sky running off toward the eastern rim of Merritt Island, where the sun was shining brightly over Pad 39A at the ocean’s edge. Annie would never forget that gorgeous sky, never forget looking out a window in the Launch Control Center and thinking it was like something from a Florida postcard or tourist brochure, the sort of roof NASA mission planners frequently wished for and rarely got.

  Indeed, the preparations for Orion’s launch had gone without a hitch from the beginning. There had been no false starts, none of the frustrating last-minute technical snags that often caused countdowns to slip, and sometimes even forced missions to be scrubbed entirely.

  Everything, everything, had seemed just right.

  At T minus two hours, thirty minutes, Annie had joined members of the Mission Management Team and other NASA officials in accompanying the flight crew—her crew, as she’d called it, as she referred to all of the teams under her supervision—to the transport vehicle that would ferry them to the pad. While this was typically staged as a photo op by NASA’s Public Affairs people, she was still a little surprised by the number of newsies waiting outside headquarters, their microphones covered with those furry wind baffles that looked like oversized caterpillars. There had even been a host from one of the network morning shows, Gary Somebody-or-other, who’d dragged her before the cameras for a comment.

  In hindsight, Annie supposed she should have been prepared for the attention. NASA was intent on working the media, and she was aware that her strongly requested presence at the Center on the launch date, and to some extent even her appointment as Chief of Astronauts—a position very much at the upper level of the agency’s organizational hierarchy—were calculated to draw a larger-than-normal press contingent. But she accepted her value as a PR tool, and sincerely believed the mission warranted its hype.

  Long delayed due to funding problems, and of major importance to the International Space Station, the facility’s first laboratory module was at last being sent into orbit, where it would be connected to the building-block segments already in place just two weeks before another research module was to launch from a Russian cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Far beyond their political merits as concrete examples of East-West cooperation, the two missions were at the very heart of ISS’s future scientific endeavors, opening up a new era in space exploration, and Annie was sure this was why she’d been so focused on their nuts and bolts and uncharacteristically oblivious to the surrounding hoopla. Together, they represented the largest step ever toward realizing a dream that had held her in its grip since childhood, and cost her dearly as an adult. With success for the ISS program within reach, Annie was hoping the pride she felt over her contribution might finally eradicate the guilt and pain that had been its lasting by-product.

  But such thoughts had their proper time and place, and Annie’s personal trials had been the furthest thing from her mind as she stood there outside the restricted-access buildings of Launch Complex 39, watching Colonel Jim Rowland lead Orion’s crew into the buslike silver transport with the circular blue-and-white NASA insignia on its side. Those five men and women had been scheduled to make history, and while her job required that she remain physically earthbound, Annie had felt as if a part of her would be going with them nonetheless.

  They were her training group, her extended family.

  Her responsibility.

  She would always remember how Jim paused before entering the vehicle, his eyes scanning the crowd, seeking out her face amid the many others turned in his direction. The mission commander, and a fellow graduate of the astronaut class of ’94, Jim was a strapping, vigorous man who seemed to pulsate with confidence and enthusiasm ... and, at that particular moment, an impatience that only another astronaut who’d seen the Earth from 250 miles up could fully understand.

  “Turnips, first and always,” he said, knowing she’d be unable to hear him in the commotion, moving his lips slowly so she could read them without trouble. Grinning at her, then, he cocked a thumb at one of the breast patches on his carrot-orange launch/reentry suit.

  Annie chuckled. Her mind flashed back to Houston, and the old training school motto they’d cooked up together, and the missions on which they’d flown as teammates. Ah, mercy, she thought. Once you’d been in space, it never stopped calling to you. Never.

  “Terra nos respuet, ” she mouthed in Latin.

  The earth spits us up and out.

  Jim’s grin widened, his eyes showing wry good humor. Then he tipped her a rakish little salute, turned, and entered the transport, the rest of the crew following him aboard in orderly procession.

  Soon afterward, her functions as window dressing concluded, Annie broke free of the gathered reporters, ate a light breakfast in the commissary, and then headed for the mission’s designated firing room, one of four expansive areas in the Center capable of directing a shuttle flight from prelaunch testing to takeoff, at which point operations would be shifted over to Mission Control in the Johnson Space Center, Houston. Filled with aisles of semicircular computer consoles, its enormous windows looking out toward the pad, the room was an impressive sight even while unoccupied. On launch days, when it bustled with ground controllers, technicians, assorted NASA bigwigs, and a smattering of guest VIPs from outside the program, it was something else again. For Annie, the atmosphere never ceased to be electrifying.

  As she took her place in the Operations Management Room section of the firing room—which situated both the invitees and high-ranking personnel whose roles were nonessential to the countdown—Annie noticed the man seated to her right flick her an interested glance, instantly categorized it as the sort of I’ve-seen-your-picture-on-a-cereal-box look to which fame had made her accustomed, and then just as suddenly realized she was studying him in an almost identical manner. Not many businessmen were also household names, but only somebody who’d been sleepwalking for the past decade could have failed to recognize the founder and CEO of UpLink International, one of the world’s leading tech firms and, most notably insofar as Annie was concerned, prime contractor of the ISS.

  He extended his hand. “Sorry for staring, but it’s a great thrill to meet you, Ms. Caulfield,” he said. “I’m—”

  “Roger Gordian.” She smiled. “Our program’s foremost civilian standard bearer. And just ’Annie’ would be fine.”

  “First names all around then.” He nodded toward the woman on his opposite side, a striking auburn brunette in a crisp business suit. “Let me introduce you to my Vice President of Special Projects, Megan Breen. One way or another, she’s generally behind whatever good things our company manages to accomplish.”

  Megan reached over to shake Annie’s hand.

  “I hope you’ll attest to hearing Roger say that when it’s time for me to renegotiate my salary,” she said.

  Gordian gave Annie a wink. “Poor Megan’s still got a lot to learn about the unshakeable loyalties between former warbird pilots.”

  All at once, Annie’s smile became overlaid by something other than humor.

  “You were downed over Vietnam, weren’t you?” she said.

  Gordian nodded. “By a Soviet SA-3 while on a lowalt sortie over Khe Sanh.” He paused. “I’d been flying with the 355th out of Laos for about a year, and spent the next five on the ground at Hoa Lo Prison.”

  “The Hanoi Hilton. My God, that’s right. I’ve read how its inmates were treated. About its star chambers ...”

  She let her voice trail off. These had been rooms eighteen and nineteen of what American POWs called the Heartbreak Area, known as the Meathook and Knobby Rooms, the former for reasons that were self-explanatory, the latter because of the clumps of plaster that covered the walls to dampen the screams of the tortured. Say what you wished about the French, who had left Hoa Lo as a legacy of their colonization of the region—just as the noto
rious penal colony on Devil’s Island was a historic testament to their rule of Guiana in South America—they had to be respected for having built escape-proof prisons that could impose behavioral modifications on the most hardened incorrigibles, the brutal inhumanity of those facilities notwithstanding. And quick studies that they were, the North Vietnamese had made full practical use of their inheritance.

  “I’ve likewise heard about your exploits,” Gordian said. “Six days evading enemy soldiers in the Bosnian countryside after an E&E from an F-16 at twenty-seven thousand feet.” He shook his head. “Thank heaven you were rescued.”

  “Heaven, my survival manual, my radio beacon, and an iron stomach I’ve been razzed about my whole life, but that’s uniquely suited to the consumption of grubs and insects,” she said. “These days, with the GAPSFREE recon and guidance systems you designed available on almost every fighter plane, it’s less likely a pilot’s going to be blindsided the way I was.”

  Gordian looked a bit uncomfortable.

  “You give me too much credit, and yourself too little,” he said, and then gestured around the room. “Though I’d bet we agree that this is really remarkable.”

  Annie nodded. Unless her judgment had gone totally awry, she’d just gotten a flash of genuine modesty from Gordian—a rare trait for someone of his stature, as working around powerful men had taught her, often through lessons of a highly unpleasant nature.