Jack Ryan 11 - Bear And The Dragon (40 page)

“Morning, Mike,” Mancuso said in greeting, while a chief steward's mate set up morning coffee.

“Good morning, sir,” the one-star replied.

“What's new in the Pacific?”

“Well, top of the news this morning, the Russians have appointed a new guy to head their Far Eastern Military District. His name is Gennady Bondarenko. His last job was J-3 operations officer for the Russian army. His background's pretty interesting. He started off in signals, not a combat arm, but he distinguished himself in Afghanistan toward the end of that adventure on their part. He's got the Order of the Red Banner and he's a Hero of the Soviet Union -- got both of those as a colonel. He moved rapidly up from there. Good political connections. He's worked closely with a guy named Golovko -- he's a former KGB officer who's still in the spook business and is personally known to the President -- ours, that is. Golovko is essentially the operational XO for the Russian President Grushavoy -- like a chief minister or something. Grushavoy listens to him on a lot of issues, and he's a pipeline into the White House on matters 'of mutual interest.'”

“Great. So the Russians have Jack Ryan's ear via this guy. What sort of mensch is he?” CINCPAC asked.

“Very smart and very capable, our friends at Langley say. Anyway, back to Bondarenko. The book on the guy says he's also very smart and also very capable, a contender for further advancement. Brains and personal bravery can be career-enhancing in their military, just like ours.”

“What sort of shape is his new command in?”

“Not very good at all, sir. We see eight division-sized formations, six motor-rifle divisions, one tank, and one artillery division. All appear to be under strength on our overheads, and they don't spend much time in the field. Bondarenko will change that, if he goes according to the form card.”

“Think so?”

“As their J-3, he agitated for higher training standards -- and he's a bit of an intellectual. He published a lengthy essay last year on the Roman legions. It was called 'Soldiers of the Caesars.' It had that great quote from Josephus, 'Their drills are bloodless battles and their battles are bloody drills.' Anyway, it was a straight historical piece, sources like Josephus and Vegetius, but the implication was clear. He was crying out for better training in the Russian army, and also for career NCOs. He spent a lot of time with Vegetsius's discussion of how you build centurions. The Soviet army didn't really have sergeants as we understand the term, and Bondarenko is one of the new crop of senior officers who's saying that the new Russian army should reintroduce that institution. Which makes good sense,” Lahr thought.

“So, you think he's going to whip his people into shape. What about the Russian navy?”

“They don't belong to him. He's got Frontal Aviation tactical aircraft and ground troops, but that's all.”

“Well, their navy's so far down the shitter they can't see where the paper roll is,” Mancuso observed. “What else?”

“A bunch of political stuff you can read up on at your leisure. The Chinese are still active in the field. They're running a four-division exercise now south of the Amur River.”

“That big?”

“Admiral, they've been on an increased training regimen for almost three years now. Nothing frantic or anything, but they've been spending money to get the PLA up to speed. This one's heavy with tanks and APCs. Lots of artillery live-fire exercises. That's a good training area for them, not much in the way of civilians, kinda like Nevada but not as flat. At first when they started this we kept a close eye on it, but it's fairly routine now.”

“Oh, yeah? What do the Russians think about it?”

Lahr stretched in his chair. “Sir, that's probably why Bondarenko drew this assignment. This is backward from how the Russians trained to fight. The Chinese have them heavily outnumbered in theater, but nobody sees hostilities happening. The politics are pretty smooth at the moment.”

“Uh-huh,” CINCPAC grunted behind his desk. “And Taiwan?”

“Some increased training near the strait, but those are mainly infantry formations, and nothing even vaguely like amphibious exercises. We keep a close eye on that, with help from our ROC friends.”

Mancuso nodded. He had a filing cabinet full of plans to send 7th Fleet west, and there was almost always one of his surface ships making a “courtesy call” to that island. For his sailors, the Republic of China was one hell of a good liberty port, with lots of women whose services were subject to commercial negotiations. And having a gray U.S. Navy warship tied alongside pretty well put that city off-limits for a missile attack. Even scratching an American warship was classified delicately as a casus belli, a reason for war. And nobody thought the ChiComms were ready for that sort of thing yet. To keep things that way, Mancuso had his carriers doing constant workups, exercising their interceptor and strike-fighter forces in the manner of the 1980s. He always had at least one fast-attack or boomer slow-attack submarine in the Formosa Strait, too, something that was advertised only by casual references allowed to leak to the media from time to time. Only very rarely would a submarine make a local port call, however. They were more effective when not seen. But in another filing cabinet he had lots of periscope photos of Chinese warships, and some “hull shots,” photos made from directly underneath, which was mainly good for testing the nerve of his submarine drivers.

He also occasionally had his people track ChiComm submarines, much as he'd done in Dallas against the former Soviet navy. But this was much easier. The Chinese nuclear-power plants were so noisy that fish avoided them to prevent damage to their ears, or so his sonarmen joked. As much as the PRC had rattled its saber at Taiwan, an actual attack, if opposed by his 7th Fleet, would rapidly turn into a bloody shambles, and he hoped Beijing knew that. If they didn't, finding out would be a messy and expensive exercise. But the ChiComms didn't have much in the way of amphibious capability yet, and showed no signs of building it.

“So, looks like a routine day in theater?” Mancuso asked, as the briefing wound down.

“Pretty much,” General Lahr confirmed.

“What sort of assets do we have tasked to keep an eye on our Chinese friends?”

“Mainly overheads,” the J-2 replied. “We've never had much in the way of human intelligence in the PRC -- at least not that I ever heard about.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, in simplest terms it would be kind of hard for you or me to disappear into their society, and most of our Asian citizens work for computer-software companies, last time I checked.”

“Not many of them in the Navy. How about the Army?”

“Not many, sir. They're pretty underrepresented.”

“I wonder why.”

“Sir, I'm an intelligence officer, not a demographer,” Lahr pointed out.

“I guess that job is hard enough, Mike. Okay, if anything interesting happens, let me know.”

“You bet, sir.” Lahr headed out the door, to be replaced by Mancuso's J-3 operations officer, who would tell him what all his theater assets were up to this fine day, plus which ships and airplanes were broken and needed fixing.

She hadn't gotten any less attractive, though getting her here had proven difficult. Tanya Bogdanova hadn't avoided anything, but she'd been unreachable for several days.

“You've been busy?” Provalov asked.

“Da, a special client,” she said with a nod. “We spent time together in St. Petersburg. I didn't bring my beeper. He dislikes interruptions,” she explained, without showing much in the way of remorse.

Provalov could have asked the cost of several days in this woman's company, and she would probably have told him, but he decided that he didn't need to know all that badly. She remained a vision, lacking only the white feathery wings to be an angel. Except for the eyes and the heart, of course. The former cold, and the latter nonexistent.

“I have a question,” the police lieutenant told her.

“Yes?”

“A name. Do you know it? Klementi Ivan'ch Suvorov.”

Her eyes showed some amusement. “Oh, yes. I know him well.” She didn't have to elaborate on what “well” meant.

“What can you tell me about him?”

“What do you wish to know?”

“His address, for starters.”

“He lives outside Moscow.”

“Under what name?”

“He does not know that I know, but I saw his papers once. Ivan Yurievich Koniev.”

“How do you know this?” Provalov asked.

“He was asleep, of course, and I went through his clothes,” she replied, as matter-of-factly as if she'd told the militia lieutenant where she shopped for bread.

So, he fucked you, and you, in turn, fucked him, Provalov didn't say. “Do you remember his address?”

She shook her head. “No, but it's one of the new communities off the outer ring road.”

“When did you last see him?”

“It was a week before Gregoriy Filipovich died,” she answered at once.

It was then that Provalov had a flash: “Tanya, the night before Gregoriy died, whom did you see?”

“He was a former soldier or something, let me think. Pyotr Alekseyevich...something...”

“Amalrik?” Provalov asked, almost coming off his seat.

“Yes, something like that. He had a tattoo on his arm, the Spetsnaz tattoo a lot of them got in Afghanistan. He thought very highly of himself, but he wasn't a very good lover,” Tanya added dismissively.

And he never will be, Provalov could have said then, but didn't. “Who set up that, ah, appointment?”

“Oh, that was Klementi Ivan'ch. He had an arrangement with Gregoriy. They knew each other, evidently for a long time. Gregoriy often made special appointments for Kiementi's friends.”

Suvorov had one or both of his killers fuck the whores belonging to the man they would kill the next day...Whoever Suvorov was, he had an active sense of humor...or the real target actually had been Sergey Nikolay'ch. Provalov had just turned up an important piece of information, but it didn't seem to illuminate his criminal case at all. Another fact which only made his job harder, not easier. He was back to the same two possibilities: This Suvorov had contracted the two Spetsnaz soldiers to kill Rasputin, and then had them killed as “insurance” to avoid repercussions. Or he'd contracted them to eliminate Golovko, and then killed them for making a serious error. Which? He'd have to find this Suvorov to find out. But now he had a name and a probable location. And that was something he could work on.

Things had quieted down at RAINBOW headquarters in Hereford, England, to the point that both John Clark and Ding Chavez were starting to show the symptoms of restlessness. The training regimen was as demanding as ever, but nobody had ever drowned in sweat, and the targets, paper and electronic were -- well, if not as satisfying as a real human miscreant wasn't the best way to put it, then maybe not as exciting was the right phrase. But the RAINBOW team members didn't say that, even among themselves, for fear of appearing bloodthirsty and unprofessional. To them the studied mental posture was that it was all the same. Practice was bloodless battle, and battle was bloody drill. And certainly by taking their training so seriously, they were still holding a very fine edge. Fine enough to shave the fuzz off a baby's face.

The team had never gone public, at least not per se. But the word had leaked out somehow. Not in Washington, and not in London, but somewhere on the continent, the word had gotten out that NATO now had a very special and very capable counterterrorist team that had raped and pillaged its way through several high-profile missions, and only once taken any lumps, at the hands of Irish terrorists who had, however, paid a bitter price for their misjudgment. The European papers called them the “Men of Black” for their assault uniforms, and in their relative ignorance the European newsies had somehow made RAINBOW even more fierce than reality justified. Enough so that the team had deployed to the Netherlands for a mission seven months before, a few weeks after the first news coverage had broken, and when the bad guys at the grammar school had found there were new folks in the neighborhood, they'd stumbled through a negotiating session with Dr. Paul Bellow and cut a deal before hostilities had to be initiated, which was pleasing for everyone. The idea of a shoot-out in a school full of kids hadn't even appealed to the Men of Black.

Over the last several months, some members had been hurt or rotated back to their parent services, and new members had replaced them. One of these was Ettore Falcone, a former member of the Carabinieri sent to Hereford as much for his own protection as to assist the NATO team. Falcone had been walking the streets of Palermo in Sicily with his wife and infant son one pleasant spring evening when a shoot-out had erupted right before his eyes. Three criminals were hosing a pedestrian, his wife, and their police bodyguard with submachine guns, and in an instant Falcone had pulled out his Beretta and dropped all three with head shots from ten meters away. His action had been too late to save the victims, but not too late to incur the wrath of a capo mafioso, two of whose sons had been involved in the hit. Falcone had publicly spat upon the threat, but cooler heads had prevailed in Rome -- the Italian government did not want a blood feud to erupt between the Mafia and its own federal police agency -- and Falcone had been dispatched to Hereford to be the first Italian member of RAINBOW. He had quickly proven himself to be the best pistol shot anyone had ever seen.

“Damn!” John Clark breathed, after finishing his fifth string of ten shots. This guy had beaten him again! They called him Big Bird. Ettore -- Hector -- was about six-three and lean like a basketball player, the wrong size and shape for a counterterror trooper, but, Jesus, could this son of a bitch shoot!

“Grazie, General,” the Italian said, collecting the five-pound note that had accompanied this blood feud.

And John couldn't even bitch that he'd done it for real, whereas Big Bird had only done it with paper. This spaghetti-eater had dropped three guys armed with SMGs, and done it with his wife and kid next to him. Not just a talented shooter, this guy had two big brass ones dangling between his legs. And his wife, Anna-Maria, was reputed to be a dazzling cook. In any case, Falcone had bested him by one point in a fifty-round shootoff. And John had practiced for a week before this grudge match.