Jack Ryan 11 - Bear And The Dragon (100 page)

“Great,” Ryan breathed. He stood and got his coat. “Well, let's go watch our new ally sign up, shall we?”

Ten minutes later, they were in the reception room of the Lazienski Palace. There was the usual off-camera time for the various chiefs of government to socialize over Perrier-and-a-twist before some nameless protocol official opened the double doors to the table, chairs, documents, and TV cameras.

The speech from President Grushavoy was predictable in every detail. The NATO alliance had been established to protect Western Europe against what his country had once been, and his former country had established its own mirror-image alliance called the Warsaw Pact right here in this very city. But the world had turned, and now Russia was pleased to join the rest of Europe in an alliance of friends whose only wish was peace and prosperity for all. Grushavoy was pleased indeed to be the first Russian in a very long time to be a real part of the European community, and promised to be a worthy friend and partner of his newly close neighbors. (The military ramifications of the North Atlantic Treaty were not mentioned at all.) And everyone present applauded. And Grushavoy pulled out an ancient fountain pen borrowed from the collection at The Hermitage in St. Petersburg to sign in the name of his country, and so bring membership in NATO up by one. And everyone applauded again as the various chiefs of state and government walked over to shake their new ally's hand. And the shape of the world changed yet again.

“Ivan Emmetovich,” Golovko said, as he approached the American President.

“Sergey Nikolay'ch,” Ryan said in quiet reply.

“What will Beijing think of this?” the chief of the Russian intelligence service asked.

“With luck, we'll know in twenty-four hours,” Ryan answered, knowing that this ceremony had gone out on CNN's live global feed, and positive that it was being watched in China.

“I expect the language will be profane.”

“They've said nasty things about me lately,” Jack assured him.

“That you should have carnal relations with your mother, no doubt.”

“Actually, that I should have oral sex with her,” the President confirmed distastefully. “I suppose everybody says things like that in private.”

“In person, it can get a man shot.”

Ryan grunted grim semi-amusement. “Bet your ass, Sergey.”

“Will this work?” Golovko asked.

“I was going to ask you that. You're closer to them than we are.”

“I do not know,” the Russian said, with a tiny sip of his vodka glass. “And if it does not...”

“In that case, you have some new allies.”

“And what of the precise wording of Articles five and six of the treaty?”

“Sergey, you may tell your president that the United States will regard an attack on any part of the territory of the Russian Federation as operative under the North Atlantic Treaty. On that, Sergey Nikolay'ch, you have the word and the commitment of the United States of America,” SWORDSMAN told his Russian acquaintance.

“Jack, if I may address you in this way, I have told my president more than once that you are a man of honor, and a man of your word.” The relief on his face was obvious.

“Sergey, from you those words are flattering. It's simple, really. It's your land, and a nation like ours cannot just stand by and watch a robbery of this scale taking place. It corrupts the foundations of international peace. It's our job to remake the world into a peaceful place. There's been enough war.”

“I fear there will be another,” Golovko said, with characteristic honesty.

“Then together your country and mine will make it the very last.”

“Plato said, 'Only the dead have seen the end of war.'”

“So, are we to be bound by the words of a Greek who lived twenty-five centuries ago? I prefer the words of a Jew who lived five centuries later. It's time, Sergey. It's fucking time,” Ryan said forcefully.

“I hope you are right. You Americans, always so madly optimistic...”

“There's a reason for that.”

“Oh? What would that be?” the Russian asked.

Jack fixed his eyes on his Russian colleague. “In my country, all things are possible. They will be in your country, too, if you just allow it. Embrace democracy, Sergey. Embrace freedom. Americans are not genetically different from the rest of the world. We're mongrels. We have the blood of every country on earth in our veins. The only thing different between us and the rest of the world is our Constitution. Just a set of rules. That's all, Sergey, but it has served us well. You've been studying us for how long?”

“Since I joined KGB? Over thirty-five years.”

“And what have you learned of America and how it works?” Ryan asked.

“Obviously not enough,” Golovko answered honestly. “The spirit of your country has always puzzled me.”

“Because it's too simple. You were looking for complexity. We allow people to pursue their dreams, and when the dreams succeed, we reward them. Others see that happen and chase after their own dreams.”

“But the class issues?”

“What class issues? Sergey, not everybody goes to Harvard. I didn't, remember? My father was a cop. I was the first guy in my family to finish college. Look how I turned out. Sergey, we do not have class distinctions in America. You can be what you choose to be, if you are willing to work at it. You can succeed or you can fail. Luck helps,” Ryan admitted, “but it comes down to work.”

“All Americans have stars in their eyes,” the Chairman of the SVR observed tersely.

“The better to see the heavens,” Ryan responded.

“Perhaps. Just so they don't come crashing down on us.”

“So, what does this mean for us?” Xu Kun Piao asked, in an entirely neutral voice.

Zhang Han San and his premiere had been watching the CNN feed in the latter's private office, complete with simultaneous translation through headphones now discarded. The senior Minister Without Portfolio made a dismissive wave of the hand.

“I've read the North Atlantic Treaty,” he said. “It does not apply to us at all. Articles Five and six limit its military application to events in Europe and North America only -- all right, it includes Turkey, and, as originally written, Algeria, which was part of France in 1949. For incidents at sea, it applies only to the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, and then only north of the Tropic of Cancer. Otherwise, the NATO countries would have been compelled to join in the Korean War and Vietnam on the American side. Those things did not happen because the treaty did not apply outside its defined area. Nor does it apply to us. Treaty documents have discrete language and discrete application,” he reminded his party chief. “They are not open-ended.”

“I am concerned even so,” Xu responded.

“Hostilities are not activities to be undertaken lightly,” Zhang admitted. “But the real danger to us is economic collapse and the resulting social chaos. That, comrade, could bring down our entire social order, and that is something we cannot risk. But, when we succeed in seizing the oil and gold, we need not worry about such things. With our own abundant oil supply, we will not face an energy crisis, and with gold we can buy anything we require from the rest of the world. My friend, you must understand the West. They worship money, and they base their economies on oil. With those two things they must do business with us. Why did America intervene in the Kuwait affair? Oil. Why did Britain, France, and all the other nations join in? Oil. He who has oil is their friend. We shall have oil. It is that simple,” Zhang concluded.

“You are very confident.”

The minister nodded. “Yes, Xu, I am, because I have studied the West for many years. The way they think is actually very predictable. The purpose of this treaty might be to frighten us, I suppose, but it is at most a paper tiger. Even if they wished to provide military assistance to Russia, they do not have the ability to do so. And I do not believe that they have that wish. They cannot know our plans, because if they did, they would have pressed their advantage over us in terms of currency reserves at the trade talks, but they did not, did they?” Zhang asked.

“Is there no way they could know?”

“It is most unlikely. Comrade Tan has no hint of foreign espionage in our country at anything approaching a high level, and his sources in Washington and elsewhere have not caught a sniff of such information being available to them.”

“Then why did they just broaden NATO?” Xu demanded.

“Is it not obvious? Russia is becoming rich with oil and gold, and the capitalist states wish to partake in the Russians' good fortune. That is what they said in the press, isn't it? It is fully in keeping with the capitalist ethos: mutual greed. Who can say, perhaps in five years they will invite us into NATO for the same reason,” Zhang observed with an ironic leer.

“You are confident that our plans have not been compromised?”

“As we come to a higher alert level and begin moving troops, we may expect some reaction from the Russians. But the rest of them? Bah! Tan and Marshal Luo are confident as well.”

“Very well,” Xu said, not entirely persuaded, but agreeing even so.

It was morning in Washington. Vice President Jackson was de facto boss of the crisis-management team, a place assured by his previous job, Director of Operations -- J-3 -- for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. One nice thing about the White House was the good security, made better still by bringing people in via helicopter and car, and by the fact that the Joint Chiefs could teleconference in from their meeting room -- “the Tank” -- over a secure fiber-optic link.

“Well?” Jackson asked, looking at the large television on the wall of the Situation Room.

“Mancuso has his people at work in Hawaii. The Navy can give the Chinese a bad time, and the Air Force can move a lot of assets to Russia if need be,” said Army General Mickey Moore, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “It's the land side of the equation that has me worried. We could theoretically move one heavy division -- First Armored -- from Germany east, along with some attachments, and maybe NATO will join in with some additional stuff, but the Russian army is in miserable shape at the moment, especially in the Far East, and there's also the additional problem that China has twelve CSS-4 intercontinental ballistic missiles. We figure eight or more of them are aimed at us.”

“Tell me more,” TOMCAT ordered.

“They're Titan-II clones. Hell,” Moore went on, “I just found out the background earlier today. They were designed by a CalTech educated Air Force colonel of Chinese ethnicity who defected over there in the 1950s. Some bonehead trumped up some security charges against him -- turned out they were all bullshit, would you believe -- and he bugged out with a few suitcases' worth of technical information right out of JPL, where he was working at the time. So, the ChiComms built what were virtually copies of the old Martin-Marietta missile, and, like I said, we figure eight of them are aimed back at us.”

“Warheads?”

“Five-megaton is our best guess. City-busters. The birds are bitches to maintain, just like ours were. We figure they're kept defueled most of the time, and they probably need two to four hours to bring them up to launch readiness. That's the good news. The bad news is that they upgraded the protection on the silos over the last decade, probably as a result of what we did in the Iraq bombing campaign and also the B-2 strikes into Japan on their SS-19 clones. The current estimate is that the covers are fifteen feet of rebarred concrete plus three feet of armor-class steel. We don't have a conventional bomb that'll penetrate that.”

“Why not?” Jackson demanded in considerable surprise.

“Because the GBU-29 we cobbled together to take out that deep bunker in Baghdad was designed to hang on the F-111. It's the wrong dimensions for the B-2's bomb bay, and the 111s are all at the boneyard in Arizona. So, we have the bombs, okay, but nothing to deliver them with. Best option to take those silos out would be air-launched cruise missiles with W-80 warheads, assuming the President will authorize a nuclear strike on them.”

“What warning will we have that the Chinese have prepared the missiles for launch?”

“Not much,” Moore admitted. “The new silo configuration pretty well prevents that. The silo covers are massive beasts. We figure they plan to blow them off with explosives, like we used to do.”

“Do we have nuke-tipped cruise missiles?”

“No, the President has to authorize that. The birds and the warheads are co-located at Whiteman Air Force Base along with the B-2s. It would take a day or so to mate them up. I'd recommend that the President authorize that if this Chinese situation goes any farther,” Moore concluded.

And the best way to deliver nuclear-tipped cruise missiles -- off Navy submarines or carrier-based strike aircraft -- was impossible because the Navy had been completely stripped of its nuclear weapons inventory, and fixing that would not be especially easy, Jackson knew. The fallout of the nuclear explosion in Denver, which had brought the world to the brink of a full-scale nuclear exchange, had caused Russia and America to take a deep breath and then to eliminate all of their ballistic launchers. Both sides still had nuclear weapons, of course. For America they were mostly B-61 and -83 gravity bombs and W-80 thermonuclear warheads that could be affixed to cruise missiles. Both systems could be delivered with a high degree of confidence and accuracy, and stealth. The B-2A bomber was invisible to radar (and hard enough to spot visually unless you were right next to it) and the cruise missiles smoked in so low that they merged not merely with ground clutter but with highway traffic as well. But they lacked the speed of ballistic weapons. That was the trouble with the fearsome weapons, but that was also their advantage. Twenty-five minutes from turning the “enable-launch” key to impact -- even less for the sea-launched sort, which usually flew shorter distances. But those were all gone, except for the ones kept for ABM tests, and those had been modified to make them difficult to fit with warheads.

“Well, we just try to keep this one conventional. How many nuclear weapons could we deliver if we had to?”

“First strike, with the B-2s?” Moore asked. “Oh, eighty or so. If you figure two per target, enough to turn every major city in the PRC into a parking lot. It would kill upwards of a hundred million people,” the Chairman added. He didn't have to say that he had no particular desire to do that. Even the most bloodthirsty soldiers were repelled by the idea of killing civilians in such numbers, and those who made four-star rank got there by being thoughtful, not psychotic.