Jack Ryan 11 - Bear And The Dragon (65 page)

By contrast, after all the thought and good engineering that had gone into the spring-knife, their pistol silencers were garbage, cans loaded with steel wool that self-destructed after less than ten shots, when manufacturing a decent suppressor required only about fifteen minutes of work from a semi-skilled machinist. John sighed to himself. There was no understanding these people.

But the individual troopers were just fine. He'd watched them run with Ding's Team-2, and not one of the Russians fell out of the formation. Part of that had been pride, of course, but most of it had been ability. The shoot-house experience had been less impressive. They weren't as carefully trained as the boys from Hereford, and not nearly so well equipped. Their supposedly suppressed weapons were sufficiently noisy to make John and Ding both jump...but for all that, the eagerness of these kids was impressive. Every one of the Russians was a senior lieutenant in rank, and each was airborne-qualified. They all were pretty good with light weapons -- and the Russian snipers were as good as Homer Johnston and Dieter Weber, much to the surprise of the latter. The Russian sniper rifles looked a little clunky, but they shot pretty well -- at least out to eight hundred meters.

“Mr. C, they have a ways to go, but they got spirit. Two weeks, and they'll be right on line,” Chavez pronounced, looking skeptically at the vodka. They were in a Russian officers' club, and there was plenty of the stuff about.

“Only two?” John asked.

“In two weeks, they'll have all their skills down pat, and they'll master the new weapons.” RAINBOW was transferring five complete team-sets of weapons to the Russian Spetsnaz team: MP-10 submachine guns, Beretta .45 pistols, and most important, the radio gear that allowed the team to communicate even when under fire. The Russians were keeping their own Dragunov long-rifles, which was partly pride, but the things could shoot, and that was sufficient to the mission. “The rest is just experience, John, and we can't really give 'em that. All we can really do is set up a good training system for 'em, and the rest they'll do for themselves.”

“Well, nobody ever said Ivan couldn't fight.” Clark downed a shot. The working day was over, and everybody else was doing it.

“Shame their country's in such a mess,” Chavez observed.

“It's their mess to clean up, Domingo. They'll do it if we keep out of their way.” Probably, John didn't add. The hard part for him was thinking of them as something other than the enemy. He'd been here in the Bad Old Days, operating briefly on several occasions in Moscow as an “illegal” field officer, which in retrospect seemed like parading around Fifth Avenue in New York stark naked holding up a sign saying he hated Jews, blacks, and NYPD cops. At the time, it had just seemed like part of the job, John remembered. But now he was older, a grandfather, and evidently a lot more chicken than he'd been back in the '70s and '80s. Jesus, the chances he'd taken back then! More recently, he'd been in KGB -- to him it would always be KGB -- headquarters at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square as a guest of the Chairman. Sure, Wilbur, and soon he'd hop in the alien spacecraft that landed every month in his backyard and accept their invitation for a luncheon flight to Mars. It felt about that crazy, John thought.

“Ivan Sergeyevich!” a voice called. It was Lieutenant General Yuriy Kirillin, the newly selected chief of Russian special forces -- a man defining his own job as he went along, which was not the usual thing in this part of the world.

“Yuriy Andreyevich,” Clark responded. He'd kept his given name and patronymic from his CIA cover as a convenience that, he was sure, the Russians knew all about anyway. So, no harm was done. He lifted a vodka bottle. It was apple vodka, flavored by some apple skins at the bottom of the bottle, and not bad to the taste. In any case, vodka was the fuel for any sort of business meeting in Russia, and since he was in Rome it was time to act Italian.

Kirillin gunned down his first shot as though he'd been waiting all week for it. He refilled and toasted John's companion: “Domingo Stepanovich,” which was close enough. Chavez reciprocated the gesture. “Your men are excellent, comrades. We will learn much from them.”

Comrades, John thought. Son of a bitch! “Your boys are eager, Yuriy, and hard workers.”

“How long?” Kirillin asked. His eyes didn't show the vodka one little bit. Perhaps they were immune, Ding thought. He had to go easy on the stuff, lest John have to guide him home.

“Two weeks,” Clark answered. “That's what Domingo tells me.”

“That fast?” Kirillin asked, not displeased by the estimate.

“They're good troops, General,” Ding said. “Their basic skills are there. They're in superb physical condition, and they're smart. All they need is familiarization with their new weapons, and some more directed training that we'll set up for them. And after that, they'll be training the rest of your forces, right?”

“Correct, Major. We will be establishing regional special-operations and counterterror forces throughout the country. The men you train this week will be training others in a few months. The problem with the Chechens came as a surprise to us, and we need to pay serious attention to terrorism as a security threat.”

Clark didn't envy Kirillin the mission. Russia was a big country containing too many leftover nationalities from the Soviet Union -- and for that matter from the time of the czars -- many of whom had never particularly liked the idea of being part of Russia. America had had the problem once, but never to the extent that the Russians did, and here it wouldn't be getting better anytime soon. Economic prosperity was the only sure cure -- prosperous people don't squabble; it's too rough on the china and the silverware -- but prosperity was a way off in the future yet.

“Well, sir,” Chavez went on, “in a year you'll have a serious and credible force, assuming you have the funding support you're going to need.”

Kirillin grunted. “That is the question here, and probably in your country as well, yes?”

“Yeah.” Clark had himself a laugh. “It helps if Congress loves you.”

“You have many nationalities on your team,” the Russian general observed.

“Yeah, well, we're mainly a NATO service, but we're used to working together. Our best shooter now is Italian.”

“Really? I saw him, but -- ”

Chavez cut him off. “General, in a previous life, Ettore was James Butler Hickock. Excuse me, Wild Bill Hickock to you. That son of a bitch can sign his name with a handgun.”

Clark refilled the vodka glasses. “Yuriy, he's won money off all of us at the pistol range. Even me.”

“Is that a fact?” Kirillin mused, with the same look in his eyes that Clark had had a few weeks earlier. John punched him on the arm.

“I know what you're thinking. Bring money when you have your match with him, Comrade General,” John advised. “You'll need it to pay off his winnings.”

“This I must see,” the Russian announced.

“Hey, Eddie!” Chavez waved his number-two over.

“Yes, sir?”

“Tell the general here how good Ettore is with a pistol.”

“That fucking Eyetalian!” Sergeant Major Price swore. “He's even taken twenty pounds off Dave Woods.”

“Dave's the range-master at Hereford, and he's pretty good, too,” Ding explained. “Ettore really ought to be in the Olympics or something -- maybe Camp Perry, John?”

“I thought of that, maybe enter him in the President's Cup match next year...” Clark mused. Then he turned. “Go ahead, Yuriy. Take him on. Maybe you will succeed where all of us failed.”

“All of you, eh?”

“Every bloody one of us,” Eddie Price confirmed. “I wonder why the Italian government gave him to us. If the Mafia want to go after him, I wish the bastards luck.”

“This I must see,” Kirillin persisted, leading his visitors to wonder how smart he was.

“Then you will see it, Tovarisch General, ”Clark promised.

Kirillin, who'd been on the Red Army pistol team as a lieutenant and a captain, couldn't conceive of being beaten in a pistol match. He figured these NATO people were just having fun with him, as he might do if the situation were reversed. He waved to the bartender and ordered pepper vodka for his own next round. But all that said, he liked these NATO visitors, and their reputation spoke forcefully for itself. This Chavez, a major -- he was really CIA, Kirillin knew, and evidently a good spy at that, according to his briefing from the SVR -- had the look of a good soldier, with confidence won in the field, the way a soldier ought to win his confidence. Clark was much the same -- and also very capable, so the book on him read -- with his own ample experience both as a soldier and a spy. And his spoken Russian was superb and very literate, his accent of St. Petersburg, where he probably could -- and probably once or twice had, Kirillin reflected -- pass for a native. It was so strange that such men as these had once been his sworn enemies. Had battle happened, it would have been bloody, and its outcome very sad. Kirillin had spent three years in Afghanistan, and had learned firsthand just how horrid a thing combat was. He'd heard the stories from his father, a much-decorated infantry general, but hearing them wasn't the same as seeing, and besides, you never told the really awful parts because you tended to edit them out of your memory. One did not discuss seeing a friend's face turn to liquid from a rifle bullet over a few drinks in a bar, because it was just not the sort of thing you could describe to one who didn't understand, and you didn't need to describe it to one who did. You just lifted your glass to toast the memory of Grisha or Mirka, or one of the others, and in the community of arms, that was enough. Did these men do it? Probably. They'd lost men once, when Irish terrorists had attacked their own home station, to their ultimate cost, but not without inflicting their own harm on highly trained men.

And that was the essence of the profession of arms right there. You trained to skew the odds your way, but you could never quite turn them all the way in the direction you wished.

Yu Chun had experienced a thoroughly vile day. In the city of Taipei to look after her aged and seriously ill mother, she'd had a neighbor call urgently, telling her to switch on her TV, then seen her husband shot dead before her blinking eyes. And that had just been the first hammer blow of the day.

The next one involved getting to Beijing. The first two flights to Hong Kong were fully booked, and that cost her fourteen lonely and miserable hours sitting in the terminal as an anonymous face in a sea of such faces, alone with her horror and additional loneliness, until she finally boarded a flight to the PRC capital. That flight had been bumpy, and she had cowered in her last-row window seat, hoping that no one could see the anguish on her face, but hiding it as well as she might conceal an earthquake. In due course, that trial had ended, and she managed to leave the aircraft, and actually made it through immigration and customs fairly easily because she carried virtually nothing that could conceal contraband. Then it started all over again with the taxi to her home.

Her home was hidden behind a wall of policemen. She tried to pass through their line as one might wiggle through a market checkout, but the police had orders to admit no one into the house, and those orders did not include an exception for anyone who might actually live there. That took twenty minutes and three policemen of gradually increasing rank to determine. By this time, she'd been awake for twenty-six hours and traveling for twenty-two of them. Tears did not avail her in the situation, and she staggered her way to the nearby home of a member of her husband's congregation, Wen Zhong, a man who operated a small restaurant right in his home, a tall and rotund man, ordinarily jolly, liked by all who met him. Seeing Chun, he embraced her and took her into his home, at once giving her a room in which to sleep and a few drinks to help her relax. Yu Chin was asleep in minutes, and would remain that way for some hours, while Wen figured he had his own things to do. About the only thing Chun had managed to say before collapsing from exhaustion was that she wanted to bring Fa An's body home for proper burial. That Wen couldn't do all by himself, but he called a number of his fellow parishioners to let them know that their pastor's widow was in town. He understood that the burial would be on the island of Taiwan, which was where Yu had been born, but his congregation could hardly bid their beloved spiritual leader farewell without a ceremony of its own, and so he called around to arrange a memorial service at their small place of worship. He had no way of knowing that one of the parishioners he called reported directly to the Ministry of State Security.

Barry Wise was feeling pretty good about himself. While he didn't make as much money as his colleagues at the other so-called “major” networks -- CNN didn't have an entertainment division to dump money into news -- he figured that he was every bit as well known as their (white) talking heads, and he stood out from them by being a serious newsie who went into the field, found his own stories, and wrote his own copy. Barry Wise did the news, and that was all. He had a pass to the White House press room, and was considered in just about every capital city in the world not only as a reporter with whom you didn't trifle, but also as an honest conveyor of information. He was by turns respected and hated, depending on the government and the culture. This government, he figured, had little reason to love him. To Barry Wise, they were fucking barbarians. The police here had delusions of god-hood that evidently devolved from the big shots downtown who must have thought their dicks were pretty big because they could make so many people dance to their tune. To Wise, that was the sign of a little one, instead, but you didn't tell them that out loud, because, small or not, they had cops with guns, and the guns were certainly big enough.

But these people had huge weaknesses, Wise also knew. They saw the world in a distorted way, like people with astigmatism, and assumed that was its real shape. They were like scientists in a lab who couldn't see past their own theories and kept trying to twist the experimental data into the proper result -- or ended up ignoring the data which their theory couldn't explain.