The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

'You look like you're ready to drop. How long have you been up?'
'Since yesterday, I guess.'
'Must be nice to be still in your twenties. Grab a piece of the couch outside,'
Ryan ordered.
'What about you?'
'I want to read over this stuff again.' Jack tapped the file on his desk.
'You're not into this one yet. Go get some Z's.'
'See you in the morning.'
The door closed behind Goodley. Jack started to read through the NIITAKA
documents, but soon lost concentration. He locked the file in his desk and found
a piece of his own couch, but sleep wouldn't come. After a few minutes of
staring at the ceiling, Ryan decided that he might as well stare at something
less boring. He switched on the TV. Jack worked the controller to catch a news
broadcast, but he hit the wrong button and found himself staring at the tail end
of a commercial on Channel 20, an independent Washington station. He almost
corrected the mistake when the movie came back. It took a moment. Gregory Peck
and Ava Gardner . . . black and white . . . Australia.
'Oh yeah,' Ryan said to himself. It was On the Beach. He hadn't seen that in
years, a Cold War classic from . . . Nevil Shute, wasn't it? A Gregory Peck
movie was always worth the trouble. Fred Astaire, too.
The aftermath of a nuclear war. Jack was surprised at how tired he was. He'd
been getting his rest lately, and . . .
. . . he went to sleep, but not all the way. As sometimes happened to him, the
movie entered his mind, though the dream was in color, and that was better than
the black-and-white print on the TV, his mind decided, then decided further to
watch the movie in its entirety. From the inside. Jack Ryan began to take over
various roles. He drove Fred Astaire's Ferrari in the bloody and last Australian
Grand Prix. He sailed to San Francisco in the USS Sawfish, SSN-623 (except, part
of his mind objected, that 623 was the number of a different submarine, USS
Nathan Hale, wasn't it?). And the Morse signal, the Coke bottle on the
windowshade, that wasn't very funny at all, because it meant that he and his
wife would have to have that cup of tea, and he really didn't want to do that
because it meant he had to put the pill in the baby's formula so that he could
be sure that the baby would die and his wife wasn't up to it – understandable,
his doctor was a wife – and he had to take the responsibility because he was the
one who always did and wasn't it a shame that he had to leave Ava Gardner on the
beach watching him sail so that he and his men could die at home if they made it
which they probably wouldn't and the streets were so empty now. Cathy and Sally
and Little Jack were all dead and it was all his fault because he made them take
their pills so that they wouldn't die of something else that was even worse but
that was still dumb and wrong even though there wasn't much of a choice was
there so instead why not use a gun to do it and –
'What the fuck!' Jack snapped upright as though driven by a steel spring. He
looked at his hands, which were shaking rather badly, until they realized that
his mind was under conscious control now. 'You just had a nightmare, boy, and
this one wasn't the helicopter with Buck and John.
'It was worse.'