Jack Ryan 11 - Bear And The Dragon (41 page)

“Ettore, where the hell did you learn to shoot?” RAINBOW SIX demanded.

“At the police academy, General Clark. I never fired a gun before that, but I had a good instructor, and I learned well,” the sergeant said, with a friendly smile. He wasn't the least bit arrogant about his talent, and somehow that just made it worse.

“Yeah, I suppose.” Clark zippered his pistol into the carrying case and walked away from the firing line.

“You, too, sir?” Dave Woods, the rangemaster, said, as Clark made for the door.

“So I'm not the only one?” RAINBOW SIX asked.

Woods looked up from his sandwich. “Bloody hell, that lad's got a fookin' letter of credit at the Green Dragon from besting me!” he announced. And Sergeant-Major Woods really had taught Wyatt Earp everything he knew. And at the SAS/RAINBOW pub he'd probably taught the new boy how to drink English bitter. Beating Falcone would not be easy. There just wasn't much room to take a guy who often as not shot a “possible,” or perfect score.

“Well, Sergeant-Major, then I guess I'm in good company.” Clark punched him on the shoulder as he headed out the door, shaking his head. Behind him, Falcone was firing another string. He evidently liked being Number One, and practiced hard to stay there. It had been a long time since anyone had bested him on a shooting range. John didn't like it, but fair was fair, and Falcone had won within the rules.

Was it just one more sign that he was slowing down? He wasn't running as fast as the younger troops at RAINBOW, of course, and that bothered him, too. John Clark wasn't ready to be old yet. He wasn't ready to be a grandfather either, but he had little choice in that. His daughter and Ding had presented him with a grandson, and he couldn't exactly ask that they take him back. He was keeping his weight down, though that often required, as it had today, skipping lunch in favor of losing five paper-pounds at the pistol range.

“Well, how did it go, John?” Alistair Stanley asked, as Clark entered the office building.

“The kid's real good, Al,” John replied, as he put his pistol in the desk drawer.

“Indeed. He won five pounds off me last week.”

A grunt. “I guess that makes it unanimous.” John settled in his swivel chair, like the “suit” he'd become. “Okay, anything come in while I was off losing money?”

“Just this from Moscow. Ought not to have come here anyway,” Stanley told his boss, as he handed over the fax.

“They want what?” Ed Foley asked in his seventh-floor office.

“They want us to help train some of their people,” Mary Pat repeated for her husband. The original message had been crazy enough to require repetition.

“Jesus, girl, how ecumenical are we supposed to get?” the DCI demanded.

“Sergey Nikolay'ch thinks we owe him one. And you know...”

He had to nod at that. “Yeah, well, maybe we do, I guess. This has to go up the line, though.”

“It ought to give Jack a chuckle,” the Deputy Director (Operations) thought.

“Shit,” Ryan said in the Oval Office, when Ellen Sumter handed him the fax from Langley. Then he looked up. “Oh, excuse me, Ellen.”

She smiled like a mother to a precocious son. “Yes, Mr. President.”

“Got one I can...”

Mrs. Sumter had taken to wearing dresses with large slash pockets. From the left one, she fished out a flip-top box of Virginia Slims and offered it to her President, who took one out and lit it from the butane lighter also tucked in the box.

“Well, ain't this something?”

“You know this man, don't you?” Mrs. Sumter asked.

“Golovko? Yeah.” Ryan smiled crookedly, again remembering the pistol in his face as the VC-137 thundered down the runway at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport all those years before. He could smile now. At the time, it hadn't seemed all that funny. “Oh, yeah, Sergey and I are old friends.”

As a Presidential secretary, Ellen Sumter was cleared for just about everything, even the fact that President Ryan bummed the occasional smoke, but there were some things she didn't and would never know. She was smart enough to have curiosity, but also smart enough not to ask.

“If you say so, Mr. President.”

“Thanks, Ellen.” Ryan sat back down in his chair and took a long puff on the slender cigarette. Why was it that stress of any sort made him gravitate back to these damned things that made him cough? The good news was that they also made him dizzy. So, that meant he wasn't a smoker not really, POTUS told himself. He read over the fax again. It had two pages. One was the original fax from Sergey Nikolay'ch to Langley -- unsurprisingly, he had Mary Pat's direct fax line, and wanted to show off that fact -- and the second was the recommendation from Edward Foley, his CIA director.

For all the official baggage, it was pretty simple stuff. Golovko didn't even have to explain why America had to accede to his request. The Foleys and Jack Ryan would know that KGB had assisted the CIA and the American government in two very sensitive and important missions, and the fact that both of them had also served Russian interests was beside the point. Thus Ryan had no alternative. He lifted the phone and punched a speed-dial button.

“Foley,” the male voice at the other end said.

“Ryan,” Jack said in turn. He then heard the guy at the other end sit up straighter in his chair. “Got the fax.”

“And?” the DCI asked.

“And what the hell else can we do?”

“I agree.” Foley could have said that he personally liked Sergey Golovko. Ryan did, too, as he knew. But this wasn't about like or don't-like. They were making government policy here, and that was bigger than personal factors. Russia had helped the United States of America, and now Russia was asking the United States of America for help in return. In the regular intercourse among nations, such requests, if they had precedents, had to be granted. The principle was the same as lending your neighbor a rake after he had lent you a hose the previous day, just that at this level, people occasionally got killed from such favors. “You handle it or do I?”

“The request came to Langley. You do the reply. Find out what the parameters are. We don't want to compromise RAINBOW, do we?”

“No, Jack, but there's not much chance of that. Europe's quieted down quite a bit. The RAINBOW troopers are mainly exercising and punching holes in paper. That news story that ran -- well, we might actually want to thank the putz who broke it.” The DCI rarely said anything favorable about the press. And in this case some government puke had talked far too much about something he knew, but the net effect of the story had had the desired effect, even though the press account had been replete with errors, which was hardly surprising. But some of the errors had made RAINBOW appear quite superhuman, which appealed to their egos and gave their potential enemies pause. And so, terrorism in Europe had slowed down to a crawl after its brief (and somewhat artificial, they knew now) rebirth. The Men of Black were just too scary to mess with. Muggers, after all, went after the little old ladies who'd just cashed their Social Security checks, not the armed cop on the corner. In this, criminals were just being rational. A little old lady can't resist a mugger very effectively, but a cop carries a gun.

“I expect our Russian friends will keep a lid on it.”

“I think we can depend on that, Jack,” Ed Foley agreed.

“Any reason not to do it?”

Ryan could hear the DCI shift in his seat. “I never have been keen on giving 'methods' away to anybody, but this isn't an intelligence operation per se, and most of it they could get from reading the right books. So, I guess we can allow it.”

“Approved,” the President said.

Ryan imagined he could see the nod at the other end. “Okay, the reply will go out today.”

With a copy to Hereford, of course. It arrived on John's desk before closing time. He summoned Al Stanley and handed it to him.

“I suppose we're becoming famous, John.”

“Makes you feel good, doesn't it?” Clark asked distastefully. Both were former clandestine operators, and if there had been a way to keep their own supervisors from knowing their names and activities, they would have found it long before.

“I presume you will go yourself. Whom will you take to Moscow with you?”

“Ding and Team-2. Ding and I have been there before. We've both met Sergey Nikolay'ch. At least this way he doesn't see all that many new faces.”

“Yes, and your Russian, as I recall, is first-rate.”

“The language school at Monterey is pretty good,” John said, with a nod.

“How long do you expect to be gone?”

Clark looked back down at the fax and thought it over for a few seconds. “Oh, not more than...three weeks,” he said aloud. “Their Spetsnaz people aren't bad. We'll set up a training group for them, and after a while, we can probably invite them here, can't we?”

Stanley didn't have to point out that the SAS in particular, and the British Ministry of Defense in general, would have a conniption fit over that one, but in the end they'd have to go along with it. It was called diplomacy, and its principles set policy for most of the governments in the world, whether they liked it or not.

“I suppose we'll have to, John,” Stanley said, already hearing the screams, shouts, and moans from the rest of the camp, and Whitehall.

Clark lifted his phone and hit the button for his secretary, Helen Montgomery. “Helen, could you please call Ding and ask him to come over? Thank you.”

“His Russian is also good, as I recall.”

“We had some good teachers. But his accent is a little southern.”

“And yours?”

“Leningrad -- well, St. Petersburg now, I guess. Al, do you believe all the changes?”

Stanley took a seat. “John, it is all rather mad, even today, and it's been well over ten years since they took down the red flag over the Spaskiy gate.”

Clark nodded. “I remember when I saw it on TV, man. Flipped me out.”

“Hey, John,” a familiar voice called from the door. “Hi, Al.”

“Come in and take a seat, my boy.”

Chavez, simulated major in the SAS, hesitated at the “my boy” part. Whenever John talked that way, something unusual was about to happen. But it could have been worse. “Kid” was usually the precursor to danger, and now that he was a husband and a father, Domingo no longer went too far out of his way to look for trouble. He walked to Clark's desk and took the offered sheets of paper.

“Moscow?” he asked.

“Looks like our Commander-in-Chief has approved it.”

“Super,” Chavez observed. “Well, it's been a while since we met Mr. Golovko. I suppose the vodka's still good.”

“It's one of the things they do well,” John agreed.

“And they want us to teach them to do some other things?”

“Looks that way.”

“Take the wives with us?”

“No.” Clark shook his head. “This one's all business.”

“When?”

“Have to work that out. Probably a week or so.”

“Fair enough.”

“How's the little guy?”

A grin. “Still crawling. Last night he started pulling himself up, standing, like. Imagine he'll start walking in a few days.”

“Domingo, you spend the first year getting them to walk and talk. The next twenty years you spend getting them to sit down and shut up,” Clark warned.

“Hey, pop, the little guy sleeps all the way through the night, and he wakes up with a smile. Damned sight better than I can say for myself, y'know?” Which made sense. When Domingo woke up, all he had to look forward to was the usual exercises and a five-mile run, which was both strenuous and, after a while, boring.

Clark had to nod at that. It was one of the great mysteries of life, how infants always woke up in a good mood. He wondered where, in the course of years, one lost that.

“The whole team?” Chavez asked.

“Yeah, probably. Including BIG BIRD,” RAINBOW SIX added.

“Did he clean your clock today, too?” Ding asked.

“Next time I shoot against that son of a bitch, I want it right after the morning run, when he's a little shaky,” Clark said crossly. He just didn't like to lose at much of anything, and certainly not something so much a part of his identity as shooting a handgun.

“Mr. C, Ettore just isn't human. With the MP, he's good, but not spectacular, but with that Beretta, he's like Tiger Woods with a pitching wedge. He just lays 'em dead.”

“I didn't believe it until today. I think maybe I ought to have eaten lunch over at the Green Dragon.”

“I hear you, John,” Chavez agreed, deciding not to comment on his father-in-law's waist. “Hey, I'm pretty good with a pistol, too, remember. Ettore blew my ass away by three whole points.”

“The bastard took me by one,” John told his Team-2 commander. “First man-on-man match I've lost since Third SOG.” And that was thirty years in the past, against his command-master-chief, for beers. He'd lost by two points, but beat the master-chief three straight after that, Clark remembered with pride.

“Is that him?” Provalov asked.

“We don't have a photograph,” his sergeant reminded him. “But he fits the general description.” And he was walking to the right car. Several cameras would be snapping now to provide the photos.

They were both in a van parked half a block from the apartment building they were surveilling. Both men were using binoculars, green, rubber-coated military-issue.

The guy looked about right. He'd come off the building's elevator, and had left the right floor. It had been established earlier in the evening that one Ivan Yurievich Koniev lived on the eighth floor of this upscale apartment building. There had not been time to question his neighbors, which had to be done carefully, in any case. There was more than the off-chance that this Koniev/Suvorov's neighbors were, as he was reputed to be, former KGB, and thus asking them questions could mean alerting the subject of their investigation. This was not an ordinary subject, Provalov kept reminding himself.

The car the man got into was a rental. There was a private automobile registered to one Koniev, Ian Yurievich, at this address, a Mercedes C-class, and who was to say what other cars he might own under another identity? Provalov was sure he'd have more of those, and they'd all be very carefully crafted. The Koniev ID certainly was. KGB had trained its people thoroughly.