Clark said, “Yeah, and when they don’t need Walker’s help anymore…”
Jack said, “Right. Do you have any ideas?”
“Yeah,” Clark said. “I’m going to take a look at his office setup. If Adara and I head back to Tortola now, I can be in position by early morning. Maybe I can get eyes on Walker and find a way to get him away from Limonov.”
“I can be on the first flight down.”
“No, Jack. You stay up there. Run the video I sent you, keep looking into Salvatore, and keep trying to find out what Limonov and Walker are up to.”
Jack said, “Okay, I’ll do that, but if you gain access to Walker, I have a funny feeling you’ll learn a lot more than I will up here.”
Clark and Sherman motored west through the night from Tarpon Island toward Tortola, pushing the sailboat’s motors to full power. Clark sat at the helm at first, but after an hour or so Sherman asked if she could relieve him.
Clark said, “It wouldn’t hurt for me to get a couple hours’ sleep before I get there. Tomorrow might be a long day.”
Adara said, “You should go below. The bed in the master stateroom is made up. We’ll be in port by five a.m. It’s only a five-minute drive from the marina to Walker’s office building.”
“Thanks, Ms. Sherman,” Clark said.
Adara hesitated for a moment, then said, “Mr. Clark, I know you want me to return to D.C. in the morning, but I’m a little concerned that it might be dangerous down here for just one operative.”
John said, “Are you offering to stick around?”
She said, “This is a big boat, you could use the help.”
“I am sure you are right, but I don’t want to take you away from your other duties. Ding and Dom might need an extraction at any time. Even in D.C. you are five hours closer to them than you are here. Plus the Gulfstream can fly there direct. If you had to haul ass to Lithuania from here, you would need to stop for fuel, tacking on another ninety minutes, minimum.”
He could tell from her look that she was concerned. He said, “I need you to support them, not me. My work here won’t be nearly as taxing as what the others are doing.”
Adara said, “I hope you’re right about that.”
“Me, too.” Clark went below deck, and Adara Sherman took the wheel and looked out over the black water.
45
The tires of Air Force One touched the runway of Copenhagen Airport — Kastrup just after six p.m. A steady rain shower ensured the crowd around the airport was light, and the reception was minimal, but Ryan was met on the tarmac by the U.S. ambassador to Denmark, a few senior NATO staff, and a representative of the Danish prime minister.
The pleasantries out of the way, he folded into his motorcade and headed into the city.
The NATO summit would open at the Eigtveds Pakhus conference venue, in central Copenhagen, next door to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark. Ryan and his entourage would spend the night at his hotel. Tomorrow morning he would go to the Amalienborg Palace for a friendly breakfast with the Danish royal family, and then he’d be on his way to Eigtveds Pakhus, where the real work would kick off at noon.
The afternoon meeting would involve a short speech by the Lithuanian president, Eglė Banytė, requesting help from NATO in both the Baltic Sea and its border regions, to counter the threat of invasion. After this, President Banytė had agreed to yield part of her time to Jack Ryan, so he could back her request for the NATO deployment.
The Lithuanian president would then immediately return to her threatened country; she insisted she had to be in Vilnius if the Russians came; it wouldn’t do for her to be any more safe than her citizens.
The real battle in Copenhagen would begin the next day. Ryan would reconvene with all the other leaders and discuss the emergency proposal. This would be conducted in a roundtable format, and Ryan fully expected a lot of pushback from a large number of the European member states.
There was, officially speaking, anyway, no voting in NATO. The organization bragged about its principle of consensus decision-making, meaning, essentially, that all members had to come to an agreement for anything to happen, except in the case of responding to actions that had been codified into the NATO charter. In theory, this meant that an Article Five violation such as an actual attack on Lithuania would be met with an automatic response from all twenty-eight member states, but the reality was a lot murkier.
Ryan wanted to move troops now, before hostilities began, but the truth of the matter was he wasn’t even convinced NATO would agree to move troops after an Article Five violation.
A final meeting would be held the following afternoon, and there a poll would be taken to see if all members agreed on the proposal. Usually, if a member state or two knew they were seriously outnumbered in their dissent, they would abstain for the good of the institution and allow the action to proceed, but the consensus decision-making principle had the effect of giving veto power over any proposal to twenty-eight out of the twenty-eight nations.
It might have been a great way to avoid war, Ryan acknowledged, but it was no way to fight one.
As soon as Ryan was secure in his suite at the Radisson Blu hotel, he began going over his speech with his staff, troubleshooting any rough spots. When he finished with this he tasked both his NATO ambassador, referred to officially as the United States’ permanent representative to NATO, and the deputy chief of mission, the number-two member of the U.S. embassy here in Denmark, to play the part of NATO members ready to shoot down every one of his proposals.
The three sat around a table in the dining room of the suite. Both the NATO ambassador and the DCM had folders and notebooks full of reference material, but President Ryan had only an empty pad and a pen in front of him.
After the first round of the mock discussion Ryan called a time-out, and lectured the two diplomats about their performance. “Ladies, we’re going to have to take this from the top. You are talking to me like I am the President and you are a couple of people I could fire at will.”
The deputy chief of mission cast a confused look at the NATO ambassador, and then one at Ryan. “Well, Mr. President. That is the case.”
Ryan said, “Nobody’s getting fired for being too tough on me. Take off the kid gloves and tell me what I’m going to hear tomorrow.”
The NATO ambassador said, “Yes, sir, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.”
They then spent another hour on the drill, and when they were finished Ryan felt like he’d been put through the ringer. His two faux-European leaders had brought up every possible protest Ryan could think of, and many he never would have considered.
Secretary of State Scott Adler had watched the entire affair in silence while sitting on a nearby couch, ready to render judgment at the end.
Ryan turned to Adler and took a bottle of water off the table to wet his dry throat. He felt like he’d been talking nonstop. “How did I do, Scott?”
“You did well, Mr. President. You will make a good case for our cause.”
Ryan picked up a negative implication in the comment. “But you don’t think we’ll get the votes, do you?”
Adler said, “If I was a betting man, I’d bet on the Europeans moving with caution, not action, and telling you they would need to see an Article Five violation before deploying into Lithuania.”
Ryan said, “And if there is an Art Five violation? Will they move even then?”
Adler sighed a little. “I hope I’m wrong, but I wonder if they would excuse one event, write it off to hotheads in the military overstepping their bounds, and then demand evidence of a second Article Five.”