Jack Ryan 11 - Bear And The Dragon (64 page)

Ryan told himself that this was a particularly smart critique. Like the people at Langley, he'd allowed himself to wax a little too euphoric about a source they'd never even approached before. SONGBIRD was good, but not without limitations. Big ones.

“Yeah, Rob, that's probably just what it is. This Fang guy probably keeps the diary just to have something to pull out of the drawer if one of his colleagues on the Chinese Politburo tries to butt-fuck him.”

“So, it isn't Sir Thomas More whose words we're reading,” TOMCAT observed.

“Not hardly,” Ryan conceded. “But it's a good source. All the people who've looked at this for us say it feels very real.”

“I'm not saying it isn't true, Jack, I'm saying it isn't all,” the Vice President persisted.

“Message received, Admiral.” Ryan held up his hands in surrender. “What do you recommend?”

“SecDef for starters, and the Chiefs, and J-3 and J-5, and probably CINCPAC, your boy Bart Mancuso,” Jackson added, with a hint of distaste.

“Why don't you like the guy?” SWORDSMAN asked.

“He's a bubble-head,” the career fighter pilot answered. “Submariners don't get around all that much...but I grant you he's a pretty good operator.” The submarine operation he'd run on the Japs using old boomers had been pretty swift, Jackson admitted to himself.

“Specific recommendations?”

“Rutledge tells us that the ChiComms are talking like they're real torqued over the Taiwan thing. What if they act on that? Like a missile strike into the island. Christ knows they have enough missiles to toss, and we have ships in harbor there all the time.”

“You really think they'd be dumb enough to launch an attack on a city with one of our ships tied alongside?” Ryan asked. Nasty or not, this Zhang guy wasn't going to risk war with America quite that foolishly, was he?

“What if they don't know the ship's there? What if they get bad intel? Jack, the shooters don't always get good data from the guys in the back room. Trust me. Been there, done that, got the fucking scars, y'know?”

“The ships can take care of themselves, can't they?”

“Not if they don't have all their systems turned on, and can a Navy SAM stop a ballistic inbound?” Robby wondered aloud. “I don't know. How about we have Tony Bretano check it out for us?”

“Okay, give him a call.” Ryan paused. “Robby, I have somebody coming in a few minutes. We need to talk some more about this. With Adler and Bretano,” the President added.

“Tony's very good on hardware and management stuff, but he needs a little educating on operations.”

“So, educate him,” Ryan told Jackson.

“Aye, aye, sir.” The Vice President headed out the door.

They got the container back to its magnetic home less than two hours after removing it, thanking God -- Russians were allowed to do that now -- that the lock mechanism wasn't one of the new electronic ones. Those could be very difficult to break. But the problem with all such security measures was that they all too often ran the chance of going wrong and destroying that which they were supposed to protect, which only added complexity to a job with too much complexity already. The world of espionage was one in which everything that could go wrong invariably did, and so over the years, every way of simplifying operations had been adopted by all the players. The result was that since what worked for one man worked for all, when you saw someone following the same procedures as your own intelligence officers and agents, you knew you had a player in your sights.

And so the stakeout on the bench was renewed -- of course it had never been withdrawn, in case Suvorov/Koniev should appear unexpectedly while the transfer case was gone off to the lab -- with an ever-changing set of cars and trucks, plus coverage in a building with a line-of-sight to the bench. The Chinese subject was being watched, but no one saw him set a telltale for the dead-drop. But that could be as simple as calling a number for Suvorov/Koniev's beeper...but probably no, since they'd assume that every phone line out of the Chinese embassy was bugged, and the number would be captured and perhaps traced to its owner. Spies had to be careful, because those who chased after them were both resourceful and unrelenting. That fact made them the most conservative of people. But difficult to spot though they might be, once spotted they were usually doomed. And that, the FSS men all hoped, would be the case with Suvorov/Koniev.

In this case, it took until after nightfall. The subject left his apartment building and drove around for forty minutes, following a path identical to one driven two days before -- probably checking to see if he had a shadow, and also to check for some telltale alert the FSS people hadn't spotted yet. But this time, instead of driving back to his flat, he came by the park, parked his car two blocks from the bench, and walked there by an indirect route, pausing on the way twice to light a cigarette, which gave him ample opportunity to turn and check his back. Everything was right out of the playbook. He saw nothing, though three men and a woman were following him on foot. The woman was pushing a baby carriage, which gave her the excuse to stop every so often to adjust the infant's blanket. The men just walked, not looking at the subject or, so it seemed, anything else.

“There!” one of the FSS people said. Suvorov/Koniev didn't sit on the bench this time. Instead he rested his left foot on it, tied his shoelace, and adjusted his pants cuff. The pickup of the holder was accomplished so skillfully that no one actually saw it, but it seemed rather a far-fetched coincidence that he would pick that particular spot to tie his shoes -- and besides, one of the FSS men would soon be there to see if he'd replaced one holder with another. With that done, the subject walked back to his car, taking a different circuitous route and lighting two more American Marlboros on the way.

The amusing part, Lieutenant Provalov thought, was how obvious it was once you knew whom to look at. What had once been anonymous was now as plain as an advertising billboard.

“So, now what do we do?” the militia lieutenant asked his FSS counterpart.

“Not a thing,” the FSS supervisor replied. “We wait until he places another message under the bench, and then we get it, decode it, and find out what exactly he's up to. Then we make a further decision.”

“What about my murder case?” Provalov demanded.

“What about it? This is an espionage case now, Comrade Lieutenant, and that takes precedence.”

Which was true, Oleg Gregoriyevich had to admit to himself. The murder of a pimp, a whore, and a driver was a small thing compared to state treason.

His naval career might never end, Admiral Joshua Painter, USN (Ret.), thought to himself. And that wasn't so bad a thing, was it? A farm boy from Vermont, he'd graduated the Naval Academy almost forty years earlier, made it through Pensacola, then gotten his life's ambition, flying jets off aircraft carriers. He'd done it for the next twenty years, plus a stint as a test pilot, commanded a carrier air wing, then a carrier, then a group, and finally topped out as SACLANT/CINCLANT/CINCLANTFLT, three very weighty hats that he'd worn comfortably enough for just over three years before removing the uniform forever. Retirement had meant a civilian job paying about four times what the government had, mainly consulting with admirals he'd watched on the way up and telling them how he would have done it. In fact, it was something he would have done for free in any officers' club on any Navy base in America, maybe for the cost of dinner and a few beers and a chance to smell the salt air.

But now he was in the Pentagon, back on the government payroll, this time as a civilian supergrade and special assistant to the Secretary of Defense. Tony Bretano, Josh Painter thought, was smart enough, a downright brilliant engineer and manager of engineers. He was prone to look for mathematical solutions to problems rather than human ones, and he tended to drive people a little hard. All in all, Bretano might have made a decent naval officer, Painter thought, especially a nuc.

His Pentagon office was smaller than the one he'd occupied as OP-05 -- Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for Air -- ten years earlier, a job since de-established. He had his own secretary and a smart young commander to look after him. He was an entry-port to the SecDef's office for a lot of people, one of whom, oddly enough, was the Vice President.

“Hold for the Vice President,” a White House operator told him on his private line.

“You bet,” Painter replied.

“Josh, Robby.”

“Good morning, sir,” Painter replied. This annoyed Jackson, who'd served under Painter more than once, but Josh Painter wasn't a man able to call an elected official by his Christian name. “What can I do for you?”

“Got a question. The President and I were going over something this morning, and I didn't have the answer to his question. Can an Aegis intercept and kill a ballistic inbound?”

“I don't know, but I don't think so. We looked at that during the Gulf War and -- oh, okay, yeah, I remember now. We decided they could probably stop one of those Scuds because of its relatively slow speed, but that's the top end of their ability. It's a software problem, software on the SAM itself.” Which was the same story for the Patriot missiles as well, both men then remembered. “Why did that one come up?”

“The President's worried that if the Chinese toss one at Taiwan and we have a ship alongside, well, he'd prefer that the ship could look after herself, y'know?”

“I can look into that,” Painter promised. “Want me to bring it up with Tony today?”

“That's affirmative,” TOMCAT confirmed.

“Roger that, sir. I'll get back to you later today.”

“Thanks, Josh,” Jackson replied, hanging up.

Painter checked his watch. It was about time for him to head in anyway. The walk took him out into the busy E-Ring corridor, then right again into the SecDef's office, past the security people and the various private secretaries and aides. He was right on time, and the door to the inner office was open.

“Morning, Josh,” Bretano greeted.

“Good morning, Mr. Secretary.”

“Okay, what's new and interesting in the world today?”

“Well, sir, we have an inquiry from the White House that just came in.”

“And what might that be?” THUNDER asked. Painter explained. “Good question. Why is the answer so hard to figure out?”

“It's something we've looked at on and off, but really Aegis was set up to deal with cruise-missile threats, and they top out at about Mach Three or so.”

“But the Aegis radar is practically ideal for that sort of threat, isn't it?” The Secretary of Defense was fully briefed in on how the radar-computer system worked.

“It's a hell of a radar system, sir, yes,” Painter agreed.

“And making it capable for this mission is just a question of software?”

“Essentially yes. Certainly it involves software in the missile's seekerhead, maybe also for the SPY and SPG radars as well. That's not exactly my field, sir.”

“Software isn't all that difficult to write, and it isn't that expensive either. Hell, I had a world-class guy at TRW who's an expert on this stuff, used to work in SDIO downstairs. Alan Gregory, retired from the Army as a half-colonel, Ph.D. from Stony Brook, I think. Why not have him come in to check it out?”

It amazed Painter that Bretano, who'd run one major corporation and had almost been headhunted away to head Lockheed-Martin before President Ryan had intercepted him, had so little appreciation for procedure.

“Mr. Secretary, to do that, we have to -- ”

“My ass,” THUNDER interrupted. “I have discretionary authority over small amounts of money, don't I?”

“Yes, Mr. Secretary,” Painter confirmed.

“And I've sold all my stock in TRW, remember?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So, I am not in violation of any of those fucking ethics laws.”

“No, sir,” Painter had to agree.

“Good, so call TRW in Sunnyvale, get Alan Gregory, I think he's a junior vice president now, and tell him we need him to fly here right away and look into this, to see how easy it would be to upgrade Aegis to providing a limited ballistic-missile-defense capability.”

“Sir, it won't make some of the other contractors happy.” Including, Painter did not add, TRW.

“I'm not here to make them happy, Admiral. Somebody told me I was here to defend the country efficiently.”

“Yes, sir.” It was hard not to like the guy, even if he did have the bureaucratic sensibilities of a pissed-off rhinoceros.

“So let's find out if Aegis has the technical capabilities to do this particular job.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“What time do I have to drive up to the Hill?” the SecDef asked next.

“About thirty minutes, sir.”

Bretano grumbled. Half his working time seemed to be spent explaining things to Congress, talking to people who'd already made up their minds and who only asked questions to look good on C-SPAN. For Tony Bretano, an engineer's engineer, it seemed like a hellishly unproductive way to spend his time. But they called it public service, didn't they? In a slightly different context, it was called slavery, but Ryan was even more trapped than he was, leaving THUNDER with little room to complain. And besides, he'd volunteered, too.

They were eager enough, these Spetsnaz junior officers, and Clark remembered that what makes elite troops is often the simple act of telling them that they are elite -- then waiting for them to live up to their own self-image. There was a little more to it, of course. The Spetsnaz were special in terms of their mission. Essentially they'd been copies of the British Special Air Service. As so often happened in military life, what one country invented, other countries tended to copy, and so the Soviet Army had selected troops for unusually good fitness tests and a high degree of political reliability -- Clark never learned exactly how one tested for that characteristic -- and then assigned them a different training regimen, turning them into commandos. The initial concept had failed for a reason predictable to anyone but the political leadership of the Soviet Union: The great majority of Soviet soldiers were drafted, served two years, then went back home. The average member of the British SAS wasn't even considered for membership until he'd served four years and had corporal's stripes, for the simple reason that it takes more than two years to learn to be a competent soldier in ordinary duties, much less the sort that required thinking under fire -- yet another problem for the Soviets, who didn't encourage independent thought for any of those in uniform, much less conscripted non-officers. To compensate for this, some clever weapons had been thought up. The spring-loaded knife was one with which Chavez had played earlier in the day. At the push of a button, it shot off the blade of a serious combat knife with a fair degree of accuracy over a range of five or six meters. But the Soviet engineer who'd come up with this idea must have been a movie watcher, because only in the movies do men fall silently and instantly dead from a knife in the chest. Most people find this experience painful, and most people respond to pain by making noise. As an instructor at The Farm, Clark had always warned, “Never cut a man's throat with a knife. They flop around and make noise when you do that.”