Jack Ryan 6 - Clear and Present Danger Read Free Page A

killed another truck.” It was a wholly unnecessary observation.  Roughly a quarter of the truck's mass was pounded straight down into a shallow crater, perhaps a yard deep and twenty across.  The remainder was hurled laterally as shrapnel.  The gross effect was not terribly different, in fact, from a large car bomb of the sort delivered by terrorists, but a hell of a lot safer for the deliverymen, one of the civilians thought.
    “Damn—I didn't think it'd be that easy.  You were right, Ernie, we don't even have to reprogram the seeker,” a Navy commander observed.  They'd just saved the Navy over a million dollars, he thought.  He was wrong.
     
    And so began something that had not quite begun and would not soon end, with many people in many places moving off in directions and on missions which they all mistakenly thought they understood.  That was just as well.  The future was too fearful for contemplation, and beyond the expected, illusory finish lines were things fated by the decisions made this morning—and, once decided, best unseen.
     

Jack Ryan 6 - Clear and Present Danger
    1.
     
    The King of SAR
     
     
    Y
    OU COULDN'T LOOK
     at her and not be proud, Red Wegener told himself.  The Coast Guard cutter Panache was one of a kind, a design mistake of sorts, but she was his.  Her hull was painted the same gleaming white found on an iceberg—except for the orange stripe on the bow that designated the ship as part of the United States Coast Guard.  Two hundred eighty feet in length, Panache was not a large ship, but she was his ship, the largest he'd ever commanded, and certainly the last he would ever have.  Wegener was the oldest lieutenant-commander in the Coast Guard, but Wegener was The Man, the King of Search-and-Rescue missions.
    His career had begun the same way many Coast Guard careers had.  A young man from a
    
    
     Kansas
    
    
     wheat farm who'd never seen the sea, he'd walked into a Coast Guard recruiting station the day after graduating from high school.  He hadn't wanted to face a life driving tractors and combines, and he'd sought out something as different from
    
    
     Kansas
    
    
     as he could find.  The Coast Guard petty officer hadn't made much of a sales pitch, and a week later he'd begun his career with a bus ride that ended at
    
    
     Cape May
    
     ,
    
     New Jersey
    
    
    .  He could still remember the chief petty officer that first morning who'd told them of the Coast Guard creed. “You have to go out.  You don't have to come back.”
    What Wegener found at
    
     Cape May
    
     was the last and best true school of seamanship in the Western world.  He learned how to handle lines and tie sailor knots, how to extinguish fires, how to go into the water after a disabled or panicked boater, how to do it right the first time, every time—or risk not coming back.  On graduation he was assigned to the
    
    
     Pacific
    
    
    
    
     Coast
    
    
    .  Within a year he had his rate, Boatswain's Mate Third Class.
    Very early on it was recognized that Wegener had that rarest of natural gifts, the seaman's eye.  A catch-all term, it meant that his hands, eyes, and brain could act in unison to make his boat perform.  Guided along by a tough old chief quartermaster, he soon had “command” of his “own” thirty-foot harbor patrol boat.  For the really tricky jobs, the chief would come along to keep a close eye on the nineteen-year-old petty officer.  From the first Wegener had shown the promise of someone who only needed to be shown things once.  His first five years in uniform now seemed to have passed in the briefest instant as he learned his craft.  Nothing really dramatic, just a succession of jobs that he'd done as the book prescribed, quickly and smoothly.  By the time he'd considered and opted for re-enlistment, it was evident that when a tough job had to be done, his name was the one that came up first.  Before the end of his second hitch, officers routinely asked his