Without Remorse (John Clark, #1; Jack Ryan Universe, #1)

by Tom Clancy

It was all so clear. War was a bad thing and had to be avoided entirely, or when that wasn’t possible, ended as rapidly as one could bring it about; because war ended lives, and that was a very bad thing, and with war out of the way, people could learn to solve their disagreements peacefully. It was so obvious both stood in wonder that so many people failed to grasp the simple clarity of the Truth that both men had discovered in high school.

even prayers had limits to a mind as intelligent as his. He was afraid to pray for deliverance—a thought he was unable even to admit, for it would be an internal admission that his faith had somehow been shaken, and that was something he could not allow, but part of him knew that in not praying for deliverance, he was admitting something by omission; that if he prayed, and after a time deliverance didn’t come, then his faith might start to die, and with that his soul. For Robin Zacharias, that was how despair began, not with a thought, but with the unwillingness to entreat his God for something that might not come.

Grishanov made a mental note to refill his flask for the next one on his schedule. It had taken a few months, but he’d finally found something that worked. A pity that these little brown savages didn’t have the wit to understand that in hurting a man you most often made his courage grow.

he had his bottle of wine. What foul stuff that was, Kelly thought. Sweet and heavy, strangely colored. Kelly was not a wine connoisseur, but he did know that a decent table wine wasn’t supposed to be the color of urine.

“Bodies sure do bleed a lot,” Douglas observed. It wasn’t a statement of any significance, just words to fill the silence as the cameras flashed for one last roll of color film. It looked as if two full-size cans of red paint had been poured in one spot.

“Good eye spotting them, patrolman. Anything else?” Sergeant Douglas asked. Monroe shook his head. “No, sir. Nothing at all. Pretty quiet night in the district, as a matter of fact. I came through this area maybe four times on my shift, and I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The usual pushers doing the usual business.” The implied criticism of the situation that everyone had to acknowledge as normal went unanswered.

Kelly told himself that he had to control his thinking, stay to the easy stuff, just remember that he was hunting people, just as he had before. He wasn’t going to change the whole world, just clean up one little corner.

Ritter sat back, looking at the photos and diagrams. He was putting his career on the line, as was Greer and everyone else. But the alternative to doing something was doing nothing. Doing nothing meant that at least one good man, and perhaps twenty more, would never come home again. That wasn’t the real reason, though, Ritter admitted to himself. The real reason was that others had decided that the lives of those men didn’t matter, and those others might make the same decision again. That kind of thinking would someday destroy his Agency. You couldn’t recruit agents if the word got out that America didn’t protect those who worked for her. Keeping faith was more than the right thing. It was also good business.

Maybe that brownstone had been the upscale home of a merchant or a sea captain. Maybe it had resonated to the sound of a piano on the weekends, from a daughter who’d studied at the Peabody Conservatory. But they’d all moved on to places where there was grass, and this house, too, was now vacant, a brown, three-story ghost of a different time. He was surprised at how wide the streets were, perhaps because when they’d been laid out the principal mode of transport had been horse-powered wagons.

Recon Marines, they’d all volunteered to become Marines first—there were no draftees here—then done so again to join the elite within the elite. There was a slightly disproportionate representation of minorities, but that was only a matter of interest to sociologists. These men were Marines first, last, always, as alike as their green suits could make them.

Such thoughts were like minefields. You wandered into them, innocent, expecting nothing, then found out too late that there was danger. It would be better not to remember, Kelly thought. I’d really be better off that way. But if without memories, good and bad, what was life, and if you forgot those who mattered to you, then what did you become? And if you didn’t act on those memories, what value did life have?

Every woman in his life had been taken away by force of one kind or another: his mother, his wife, and his lover. How much rage he must feel, she told herself. It explained so much.

People killed other family members, or close friends, over the most trivial disputes. The previous Thanksgiving a father had killed his son over a turkey leg. Ryan’s personal “favorite” was a homicide over a crab cake—not so much a matter of amusement as hyperbole. In all such cases the contributing factors were usually alcohol and a bleak life that transformed ordinarily petty disputes into matters of great import. I didn’t mean it was the phrase most often heard afterwards, followed by some variation of why didn’t he just back off a little? The sadness of such events was like a slow-acting acid on Ryan’s soul. The sameness of those murders was the worst part of all.

When in doubt, a Marine would call a lightpole “Sir.”

“Don’t you Marines know how to play fair?” Maxwell objected with an unseen smile. Irvin handled the answer. “Sir, ‘fair’ means all my Marines get back home alive. Fuck the others, beg your pardon, sir.”

In combat operations, safety lay in not giving the other guy a chance, to be ready to kill him two, three, a dozen times over in as little time as possible. Combat wasn’t supposed to be fair.

Was he a robber? Was he, as Farber had suggested, a man on some sort of mission? Ryan leaned heavily to the latter model, but he could not afford to discount the other two. Psychiatrists, and detectives, had been wrong before. The most elegant theories could be shattered by a single inconvenient fact. Damn. No, he told himself, this one was exactly what Farber said he was. This wasn’t a criminal. This was a killer, something else entirely.

this killer was a clever one, much too clever for his own good. A suspect like this who eliminated a single target could well go forever undetected, but this one was not satisfied with killing one person, was he? Motivated neither by passion nor by financial gain, he was committed to a process, every step of which involved complex dangers.

We should have been there twenty minutes after your call. If’n we got there on time, maybe one or two of those little girls might have made it. Anyway, reason we didn’t was a bad seal on the engine, just a little goddamn piece of rubber that cracked.” Kelly grunted. On such events the fates of nations turned.

It would work, Grishanov thought with an eerie chill. The right time of year, the right time of day… the bomber comes in on a regularly scheduled airliner route. Even in a crisis, the very illusion of something normal would be like a touchstone while people looked for the unusual.

Eyes narrowed at that, all of them, Kelly saw. It was a quiet, determined kind of anger, highly disciplined, but that was the deadliest kind of all, Kelly thought, suppressing a smile that only he would have understood. And so it was for the young Marines in the audience. It wasn’t a time for smiles. Each of the people in the room knew about the dangers. Each had survived a minimum of thirteen months of combat operations.

While no man in the room would willingly give his life away, every one of them would run the risk, trusting to God or luck or fate in the knowledge that each of the others would do the same. The men in these pictures were unknown to the Marines, but they were comrades—more than friends—to whom loyalty was owed. And so they would risk their lives for them. “I don’t have to tell you how dangerous the mission is,” the Admiral concluded. “The fact of the matter is, you know those dangers better than I do, but these people are Americans, and they have the right to expect us to come for them.”

She and Sandy had reached into the grave and pulled this girl back from grasping earth. Three more months, Sarah had estimated, maybe not that long, and her body would have been so weakened that the most trivial outside influence would have ended her life in a matter of hours. But not now. Now this girl would live, and the two medics shared without words the feeling that God must have known when He had breathed life into Adam. They had defeated Death, redeeming the gift that only God could give. For this reason both had entered their shared profession, and moments like this one pushed back the rage and sorrow and grief for those patients whom they couldn’t save.

The worst part of air travel was the boredom, Kelly thought, made worse by the sound-induced isolation. You could only sleep so much. Some of the men were honing knives which they would never really use, but it gave you something to do, and a warrior had to have a knife for some reason.

It was all vaguely sad. Kelly didn’t think that the Vietnamese people were any more innately warlike than any other, but there was a war here, and their behavior, as he had seen, fell short of exemplary.

Time stopped again. It seemed to split into many pieces. Kelly closed his eyes, in pain at first, and in that instant he was back on his hilltop overlooking SENDER GREEN, watching the NVA troops arrive; he was in his hospital bed looking at a photograph; he was outside some nameless village listening to the screams of children. He’d come home, all right, but to the same thing he’d left. No, he realized, to the thing that he had never left, which followed him everywhere he went. Held never get away from it because he’d never really finished it, not even once. Not even once.

“Some guy went way out of his way to murder them. We don’t see many like this. I don’t like it very much,” the detective added. It was a puerile conclusion, but Ryan fully understood. How else did you say it, after all?

Jack would be returning to Boston College in another week or so, Ryan thought, and he missed time with his son.

His time with Kolya had become an addiction more dangerous than his dalliance with alcohol, Robin saw now. It was loneliness that was his real enemy, not pain, not fear. From a family and a religious community that fostered fellowship, he’d entered a profession that lived on the same, and being denied it his mind had fed on itself. Then add a little pain and fear, and what did you have? It was something far more easily seen from without than from within.

“Good Lord,” Ritter observed. He actually wanted to smile. There was talk, actually, of getting CIA involved in antidrug operations. He opposed that policy—it wasn’t important enough to divert the time of people who should be protecting their country against genuine national-security threats. But he couldn’t smile. This was far too serious for that.