Jack Ryan 3 - Red Rabbit (81 page)

This had once been the site of the original Roman Circus Maximus. The big racetrack for chariots, like those in the movie Ben-Hur, had then been torn down and a church built here, the original St. Peter's, but over time that church had deteriorated, and so a century-plus-long project to build this one had been undertaken and was finished in the sixteenth century, Ryan remembered. He went back outside to survey the area once again. Much as he looked for alternatives, it seemed that his first impression had been the correct one. The Pope got in his car there, drove around that way, and the place of greatest vulnerability was… right about there. The problem was that there was a semicircular space perhaps two hundred yards long.

 Okay,
he thought, time to do some analysis. The shooter would be a pro. A pro would have two considerations: one, getting a good shot off; and two, getting the hell out of here alive.

So Ryan turned to see potential exit routes. To the left, closest to the facade of the church, people would really pile up there in their desire to get the first look at the Pope as he came out. Farther down, the open vehicle path widened somewhat, increasing the range of the shot—something to be avoided. But the shooter still needed to get his ass out of Dodge City, and the best way to do that was toward the side street where Sharp had parked the day before. You could stash a car there, probably, and if you made it that far, you'd go pedal-to-the-metal and race the hell off to wherever you had a backup car parked—a backup, because the cops would sure as hell be looking for the first one, and Rome had a goodly supply of police officers who'd run through fire to catch whoever had popped a cap on the Pope.

Back to the shooting place. He wouldn't want to be in the thickest part of the crowd, so he wouldn't want to be too close to the church. But he'd want to boogie out through that arch. Maybe sixty or seventy yards. Ten seconds, maybe? With a clear path, yeah, about that. Double it, just to be sure. He'd probably yell something like “There he goes!” as a distraction. It might make him easier to identify later, but Colonel Strokov will be figuring to sleep Wednesday night in Sofia. Check flight times, Jack told himself. If he takes the shot and gets away, he won't be swimming home, will he? No, he'll opt for the fastest way out — unless he has a really deep hidey-hole here in Rome.

That was a possibility. The problem was that he was dealing with an experienced field spook, and he could have a lot of things planned. But this was reality, not a movie, and professionals kept things simple, because even the simplest things could go to shit in the real world.

 He'll have at least one backup plan. Maybe more, but sure as hell he'll have one.

 Dress up like a priest, maybe?
There were a lot of them in evidence. Nuns, too—more than Ryan had ever seen. How tall is Strokov? Anything over five-eight and he'd be too tall for a nun. But if he dressed as a priest, you could hide a fucking RPG in a cassock. That was a pleasant thought. But how fast could one run in a cassock? That was a possible downside.

 You have to assume a pistol, probably a suppressed pistol.
A rifle—no, its dangers lay in its virtues. It was so long that the guy standing next to him could bat the barrel off target, and he'd never get a good round off. An AK-47, maybe, able to go rock-and-roll? But, no, it was only in the movies that people fired machine guns from the hip. Ryan had tried it with his M-16 at Quantico. It felt real John Wayne, but you just couldn't hit shit that way. The sights, the gunnery sergeants had all told his class at the Basic School, are there for a reason. Like Wyatt Earp shooting on TV—draw and fire from the hip. It just didn't work unless your other hand was on the fucker's shoulder. The sights are there for a reason, to tell you where the weapon is pointed, because the bullet you're shooting is about a third of an inch in diameter, and you are, in fact, shooting at a target just that small, and a hiccup could jerk you off target, and under stress your aim just gets worse … unless you're used to the idea of killing people. Like Boris Strokov, colonel of the Dirzhavna Sugurnost. What if he was one of those who just didn't rattle, like Audie Murphy of the Third Infantry Division in WWII? But how many people like that were around? Murphy had been one in eight million American soldiers, and nobody had seen that deadly quality in him before it just popped out on the battlefield, probably surprising even him. Murphy himself probably never appreciated how different he was from everybody else.

 Strokov is a pro, Jack
reminded himself. And so he'll act like a pro. He'll plan every detail, especially the getaway .

“You must be Ryan,” a British voice said quietly. Jack turned to see a pale man with red hair.

“Who are you?”

“Mick King,” the man replied. “Sir Basil sent the four of us down. Sussing the area out?”

“How obvious am I?” Ryan worried suddenly.

“You could well be an architecture student.” King blew it off. “What do you think?”

“I think the shooter would stand right about here, and try to boogie on out that way,” Jack said, pointing. King looked around before speaking.

“It's a dicey proposition, however one plans it, with all the people sure to be here, but, yes, that does look the most promising option,” the spook agreed.

“If I were planning to do it myself, I'd want to use a rifle from up there. We'll need to have somebody topside to handle that possibility.”

“Agreed. I'll have John Sparrow go up there. The chap with short hair over there. He brought a ton of cameras with him.”

“One more man to camp out in the street that way. Our bird will probably have a car to skip town with, and that's where I'd park it.”

“A little too convenient, don't you think?”

“Hey, I'm an ex-Marine, not a chess master,” Ryan replied. But it was good to have somebody second-guessing him. There were a lot of tactical possibilities here, and everybody read a map a little differently, and Bulgarians might well study out of a different playbook altogether.

“It's a pig of a mission they've given us. Best hope is that this Strokov fellow doesn't show up. Oh, here he is,” King said, handing Ryan an envelope.

It was full of eight-by-ten prints, actually of pretty good quality.

“Nick Thompson told me he has lifeless eyes,” Ryan said, looking at one of them.

“Does seem rather a cold chap, doesn't he?”

“When we come here Wednesday, we going to be carrying?”

“I certainly shall be,” King said positively. “Nine-millimeter Browning. There ought to be a few more at the embassy. I know you can shoot accurately under pressure, Sir John,” he added, with casual respect.

“It doesn't mean I like to, pal.” And the best engagement range for any pistol was contact range, holding the gun right against the other bastard. Kinda hard to miss that way. It would even cut the noise down, too. Plus, it was a hell of a good way to tell someone not to do anything untoward.

For the next two hours, the five men walked the piazza, but they kept coming back to the same place.

“We can't cover it all, not without a hundred men,” Mick King finally said. “And if you can't be strong everywhere, you might as well pick one place and be strong there.”

Jack nodded, remembering how Napoleon had ordered his generals to come up with a plan for protecting France from invasion, and when a senior officer had spread his troops evenly along the borders, he'd heartlessly inquired if the guy was trying to protect against smuggling. So, yeah, if you couldn't be strong everywhere, then you planned to be strong somewhere, and prayed that you'd picked the right spot. The key, as always, was to put yourself into the other guy's head, just as they'd taught him to do as an intelligence analyst. Think the way your adversary thinks, and stop him that way. It sounded so good and so easy theoretically. It was rather different in the field, however.

They caught Tom Sharp walking into the basilica, and together they went off to a restaurant for lunch and a talk.

“Sir John is right,” King said. “The best spot is over on the left side. We have photos of the bugger. We put you, John”—he said to Sparrow—“atop the colonnade with your cameras. Your job will be to sweep the crowd and try to spot the bastard, and radio your information to us.”

Sparrow nodded, but his face showed what he thought of the job as the beers arrived.

“Mick, you had it right from the beginning,” Sparrow said. “It's a pig of a job. We ought to have the whole bloody SAS regiment here, and even that would not be enough.” The 22nd Special Air Service Regiment was actually just a company or two in size, brilliant troopers that they were.

“Ours is not to reason why, lad,” Sharp told them all. “So good to know that Basil knows his Tennyson.” The resulting snorts around the lunch table told the tale.

“What about radios?” Jack asked.

“On the way by courier,” Sharp answered. “Small ones, they'll fit in a pocket, and they have ear pieces, but not small microphones, unfortunately.”

“Shit,” Ryan observed. The Secret Service would have exactly what they needed for this mission, but you couldn't just call them up and have them delivered. “What about the Queen's protective detail? Who does that?”

“The Metropolitan Police, I believe. Why—”

“Lapel mikes,” Ryan answered. “It's what the Secret Service uses at home.”

“I can ask,” Sharp responded. “Good idea, Jack. They might well have what we need.”

“They ought to cooperate with us,” Mick King thought aloud.

“I'll see to it this afternoon,” Sharp promised.

 Yeah
, Ryan thought, we'll be the best-equipped guys ever to blow a mission .

“They call this beer?” Sparrow asked after his first sip.

“Better than American canned piss,” another of the new arrivals thought aloud.

Jack didn't rise to the bait. Besides, you went to Italy for the wine, not the beer.

“What do we know about Strokov?” Ryan asked.

“They faxed me the police file on him,” Sharp reported. “Read it this morning. He's five-eleven, about fifteen stone. Evidently, he likes to eat too much. So, not an athlete—certainly not a sprinter. Brown hair, fairly thick. Good language skills. Speaks accented English, but reportedly speaks French and Italian like a native. Thought to be an expert with small arms. He's been in the business twenty years—age forty-three or so. Selected for the special DS assassination unit about fifteen years ago, with eight kills attributed to him, possibly more—we don't have good information on that.”

“Delightful chap, sounds like,” Sparrow thought aloud. He reached for one of the photos. “Ought not to be difficult to spot. Better to get some of these prints reduced to pocket size, so that we can all carry them with us.”

“Done,” Sharp promised. The embassy had its own little photo lab, mainly for his use.

Ryan looked around the table. At least it was good to be surrounded by professionals. Given the chance to perform, they probably wouldn't blow it—like a good bunch of Marines. It was not all that much, but it was something.

“What about side arms?” Ryan asked next.

“All the nine-millimeter Brownings we need,” Tom Sharp assured him.

Ryan wanted to ask if they had hollow-point ammunition, but they probably just had military-issue hardball. That Geneva Convention bullshit. The nine-millimeter Parabellum cartridge was thought by Europeans to be powerful, but it was hardly a BB compared to the .45 Colt with which he'd been trained. So, then, why did he own a Browning Hi-Power? Jack asked himself. But the one he had at home was loaded with Federal 147-grain hollow-points, regarded by the American FBI as the only useful bullet to shoot out of the thing, good both for penetration and for expanding to the diameter of a dime inside the target's body, to make him bleed out in a hurry.

“He'd better be bloody close,” Mick King announced. “I haven't fired one of the things in years.” Which reminded Jack that England did not have the gun culture America has, even in their security services. James Bond was someone from the movies, Ryan had to remember. Ryan himself was probably the best pistol shot in the room, and he was a long way from being an expert. The pistols Sharp would hand out would be military-issue, the ones with invisible sights and crummy grips. The one Ryan owned had Pachmayr grips that fit his hand so nicely that it might have been a custom-made glove. Damn, nothing about this job was going to be easy.

“Okay. John, you'll be atop the colonnade. Find out how you get there, and arrange to get up there Wednesday morning early.”

“Right.” He had press credentials to make that easy. “I'll recheck the timing for everything as well.”

“Good,” Sharp replied. “We'll spend the afternoon going over the ground more. Look for things we may have overlooked. I'm thinking we put one man over on the side street to try and spot our friend Strokov coming in. If we spot him, we shadow him all the way in.”

“Not stop him out there?” Ryan asked.

“Better to get him in closer,” Sharp thought out loud. “More of us, less chance for him to bolt. If we're onto him, Jack, he won't be doing anything untoward, will he? We'll see to that.”

“Will he be that predictable?” Jack worried.

“He's doubtless been here already. Indeed, we could just spot him today or tomorrow, couldn't we?”

“I wouldn't bet the ranch on it,” Jack shot back.

“We play the card we are dealt, Sir John,” King said. “And hope for luck.”

There was no arguing with that, Ryan realized.

“If I were planning this operation, I'd be trying very hard to keep it simple. The most important preparation he'll be making is up here.” Sharp tapped the side of his head. “He, too, will be somewhat tense, no matter how experienced he is in this business. Yes, he's a clever bugger, but he is not bloody Superman. The key to his success is surprise. Well, he doesn't really have that, does he? And blown surprise is the worst nightmare of a field officer. Lose that and everything comes apart like a wrecked watch. Remember, if he sees one thing that he doesn't like, he will probably just walk away and plan to come back again. There is no clock on this mission from his point of view.”

“Think so?” Ryan wasn't the least bit sure of that.