Executive Orders

"Surely." The lady of the house backed away from the door.

It took only a single glance to tell Sissy Loomis that something was not quite right here. For one thing, there was no Persian rug to be seen in the living room—in her experience people didn't just buy one of the things. For another, this apartment was just too neat. "Excuse me, is your husband in?"

The response was immediate, and pained. "My husband passed away last September," she told the agent.

"Oh, I am sorry, Mrs. Sloan. We didn't know." And with that a fairly routine follow-up changed into something very different indeed.

"He was older than me. Joe was seventy-eight," she said, pointing to a picture on the coffee table of two people a long time ago, one about thirty and one in her late teens.

"Does the name Alahad mean anything to you, Mrs. Sloan?" Loomis asked after sitting down.

"No. Should it?"

"He deals in Persian and Oriental rugs."

"Oh, we don't have any of those. I'm allergic to wool, you see."

57 NIGHT PASSAGE

"JACK?" RYAN'S EYES clicked open to see that there was bright sunlight coming through the windows. His watch said it was just after eight in the morning.

"What the hell? Why didn't anybody—"

"You even slept through the alarm," Cathy told him. "Andrea said that Arnie said to let you sleep till about now. I guess I needed it, too," SURGEON added. She'd been in bed for over ten hours before waking at seven.

"Dave told me to take the day off," she added. Jack jolted up and moved at once into the bathroom. When he came back, Cathy, in her housecoat, handed over his briefing papers. The President stood in the center of the room, reading them. Reason told him that if anything serious had happened he would have been awakened—he had slept through the clock-radio alarm before, but he'd never failed to be aroused by a phone. The papers told him that all was, if not exactly well, then relatively stable. Ten minutes after that, he was dressed. He took the time to say hello to his kids, and kiss his wife. Then he headed out.

"SWORDSMAN is moving," Andrea said into her radio mike. "Sit Room?" she asked POTUS.

"Yeah. Whose idea was it to—"

"Mr. President, that was the chief of staff, but he was right, sir."

Ryan looked at her as she punched the elevator button for the ground floor. "I guess I'm outvoted, then."

The national-security team had clearly been up all night on his behalf. Ryan had coffee waiting at his place. They'd been living on it. "Okay, what's happening over there?"

"COMEDY is now one hundred thirty miles beyond the Indians—would you believe they resumed their patrol station behind us?" Admiral Jackson told his Commander-in-Chief.

"Playing both sides of the street," Ben Goodley concluded.

"It's a good way to get hit by traffic in both directions," Arnie put in.

"Go on."

"Operation CUSTER is just about done. The 366th is also in Saudi, less one broke fighter that diverted to England. The 11th Cav is rolling out of its storage site to an assembly area. So far," the J-3 said, "so good. The other side sortied some fighters to the border, but we and the Saudis had a blocking force, and nothing happened aside from some mean looks."

"Anybody think they're going to back down?" Ryan asked.

"No." This came from Ed Foley. "They can't, not now."

THE RENDEZVOUS TOOK place fifty miles off Cape Rass al Hadd, the far southeast corner of the Arabian Peninsula. Cruisers Normandy and Yorktown, destroyer John Paul Jones, and frigates Underwood, Doyle, and Nicholas took a trailing position so that Platte and Supply could take them alongside after their high-speed run down from Alexandria, to top off their bunkers. Helicopters ferried the captains to Anzio, whose captain was senior, for an hour's worth of discussion of the mission. Their destination was Dhahran. To get there they had to drive northwest into the Strait of Hormux. Getting there would take just over six hours, 2200 hours local time. The strait was twenty miles across and speckled with islands, plus it was one of the most heavily traveled waterways in the world— even now, despite the growing crisis. Supertankers, one of which displaced more water than all of the warships in the now-designated TF-61.1 combined, were merely the best-known vessels transiting the area. There were also massive container ships wearing the flags of ten nations, and even a multilevel sheep carrier which looked like a big-city parking garage, which was bringing in live mutton from Australia.

The smell of it was famous on all the oceans of the world. The strait was covered by radar to establish traffic control—the possibility of a ramming incident between two supertankers didn't bear thinking about— which meant that TF-61.1 would be unlikely to sneak in entirely u

MOHAMMED ALAHAD, THEY saw, was just as ordinary as hell. He'd come to America more than fifteen years earlier. He was said to be widowed and childless. He ran a decent and profitable business on one of Washington's nicer shopping streets. He was, in fact, in there right now.

Though the CLOSED sign was on the door, they supposed he had nothing better to do but sit in his shop and go over his bills.

One of Loomis's squad went up to the shop and knocked on the door. Alahad came to open it, and a brief conversation ensued, with the expected gestures, and they could figure what was being said. I'm sorry, but all businesses are closed because of the President's order—Yeah, sure, but I don't have anything to do, and neither do you, right? — Yes, but it is an order—Hey, who's go

"It's a rug shop," the agent told Loomis over the encrypted radio cha

The other half of her squad was in Alahad's apartment. There they found a photo of a woman and a child, probably his son, wearing something like a uniform—about fourteen, the agent thought, photographing them with a Polaroid. But again, everything was pure vanilla. It was exactly the way a businessman would live in the Washington area, or an intelligence officer. You just couldn't tell. They had the begi