by Tom Clancy
Then came Phase Two. Horizon Corporation would manufacture and distribute the “A” vaccine, turn it out in thousand-liter lots, and send it all over the world by express flights to nations whose public-health-service physicians and nurses would be sure to inject every citizen they could find. Phase Two would finish the job begun with the global panic that was sure to result from Phase One. Four to six weeks after being injected, the “A” recipients would start to become ill. So, three weeks from today, Gearing thought, plus six weeks or so, plus two weeks, plus another six, plus a final two. A total of nineteen weeks, not even half a year, not even a full baseball season, and well over ninety-nine percent of the people on the earth would be dead. And the planet would be saved. No more slaughtering of sheep from a chemical-weapons release. No more extinction of species by thoughtless man. The ozone hole would soon heal itself. Nature would flourish once more. And he’d be there to see it, to enjoy and appreciate it all, along with his friends and colleagues in the Project. They’d save the planet and raise their children to respect it, love it, cherish it. The world would again be green and beautiful.
His feelings were not completely unambiguous. He could look out the windows and see people walking on the streets of Sydney, and it caused him pain to think of what would be happening to all of them. But he’d seen much pain. The sheep at Dugway. The monkeys and pigs and other test animals at Edgewood Arsenal. They, too, felt great pain. They, too, had a right to live, and people had disregarded both self-evident facts. The people down there didn’t use shampoo unless it had been tested on the eyes of laboratory rabbits, held stock-still in cruel little cages, there to suffer without words, without expression at all to most people, who didn’t understand animals, and cared less about them than they cared for how their burgers were cooked at the local McDonald’s. They were helping to destroy the earth because they didn’t care. Because they didn’t care, they didn’t even try to see what was important, and because they didn’t appreciate what was important . . . they would die. They were a species that had endangered itself, and so would reap the whirlwind of its own ignorance. They were not like himself, Gearing thought. They didn’t see. And under the cruel but fair laws of Charles Darwin, that left them at a comparative disadvantage. And so, as one animal replaced another, so he and his kind would replace them and theirs. He was only the instrument of natural selection, after all.
The jet lag was mainly gone, Chavez thought. The morning workout had been delicious in its sweat and endorphin-reduced pain, especially the run on the Olympic track. He and Mike Pierce had pushed hard on that, not timing it, but going as hard as they could, and on the run both had looked up at the empty stands and imagined the cheers they’d get had they been trained athletes. Then had come the showers and the grins, one soldier to another, at what they’d done, then dressing into their casual clothing, their pistols hidden under their shirts, their tactical radios jammed into pockets, and their security passes looped around their necks.
Later, the trumpets had blared, and the team of the first nation in the parade, Greece, marched out the tunnel at the far end, to the thundering cheers of the spectators in their seats, and the Sydney Olympiad had begun. Chavez told himself that as a security officer he was supposed to watch the crowd, but he found that he couldn’t, without some specific danger to look at. The proud young athletes marched almost as well as soldiers, as they followed their flags and their judges on the oval track. It must have been a proud moment for them, Ding thought, to represent your homeland before all the other nations of the world. Each of them would have trained for months and years to earn this honor, to accept the cheers and hope himself to be worthy of the moment. Well, it wasn’t the sort of thing you got to do as a field officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, nor a Team-2 commander of Rainbow. This was pure sport, pure competition, and if it didn’t really apply to the real world, then what did that hurt? Every event would be a form of activity taken down to its essence—and most of them were really military in nature. Running—the most important martial skill was the ability to run toward battle or away from it. The javelin—a lance to throw at one’s enemies. The shot put and discus—other missile weapons. The pole vault—to get one over a wall and into the enemy camp. The long jump—to get over a hole that the enemy had dug in the battlefield. These were all soldierly skills from antiquity, and the modern Games had gun sports, pistol and rifle, as well. The modern pentathlon was based on the skills needed by a military courier in the late nineteenth century—riding, running, and shooting his way to his destination, to tell his commander what he needed to know in order to command his troops effectively.
These men and women were warriors of a sort, here to win glory for themselves and their flags, to vanquish foes without bloodshed, to win a pure victory on the purest field of honor. That, Chavez thought, was a worthy goal for anyone, but he was too old and unfit to compete here. Unfit? he wondered. Well, not for one his age, and he was probably fitter than some of these people walking on the oval track, but not enough to win a single event. He felt his Beretta pistol under his shirt. That, and his ability to use it, made him fit to defend these kids against any who might wish to harm them, and that, Domingo Chavez decided, would have to do.
“Pretty cool, boss,” Pierce observed, watching the Greeks pass where they were standing.
“Yeah, Mike, it sure as hell is.”
CHAPTER 34
THE GAMES CONTINUE
As happens in all aspects of life, things settled into a routine. Chavez and his people spent most of their time with Colonel Wilkerson’s people, mainly sitting in the reaction-force center and watching the games on television, but also wandering to the various venues, supposedly to eyeball security matters up close, but in reality to see the various competitive events even closer. Sometimes they even wandered onto the event field by virtue of their go-anywhere passes. The Aussies, Ding learned, were ferociously dedicated sports fans, and wonderfully hospitable. In his off-duty time, he picked a neighborhood pub to hang out in, where the beer was good and the atmosphere friendly. On learning that he was an American, his “mates” would often as not buy a beer for him and ask questions while watching sports events on the wall-hung televisions. About the only thing he didn’t like was the cigarette smoke, for the Australian culture had not yet totally condemned the vice, but no place was perfect.
Each morning he and his people worked out with Colonel Wilkerson and his men, and they found that in this Olympic competition there was little difference between Australian and American special-operations troopers. One morning they went off to the Olympic pistol range, borrowing Olympic-style handguns—.22 automatics that seemed like toys compared to the .45s the Rainbow soldiers ordinarily packed—then saw that the target and scoring systems were very difficult indeed, if not especially related to combat shooting in the real world. For all his practice and expertise, Chavez decided that with luck he could have made the team from Mali. Certainly not the American or Russian teams, whose shooters were utterly inhuman in their ability to punch holes in the skinny silhouette targets that flipped full-face and sideways on computer-controlled hangers. But these paper targets didn’t shoot back, he told himself, and that did make something of a difference. Besides, success in his form of shooting was to make a real person dead, not to hit a quarter-sized target on a black paper target card. That made a difference, too, Ding and Mike Pierce thought aloud with their Aussie counterparts. What they did could never be an Olympic sport, unless somebody brought back the gladiatorial games of Rome, and that wouldn’t be happening. Besides, what they did for their living wasn’t a sport at all, was it? Neither was it a form of mass entertainment in the kinder and gentler modern world. Part of Chavez admitted that he wondered what the games in classical Rome’s Flavian Amphitheater had been like to watch, but it wasn’t something he could say aloud, lest people take him for an utter barbarian. Hail, Caesar! We who are about to die salute you! It wasn’t exactly the Super Bowl, was it? And so, “Major
” Domingo Chavez, along with sergeants Mike Pierce, Homer Johnston, and George Tomlinson, and Special Agent Tim Noonan, got to watch the games for free, sometimes with “official” jackets to give them the cover of anonymity.
The same was true, rather more distantly, of Dmitriy Popov, who stayed in his room to watch the Olympics on TV. He found the games a distraction from the questions that were running their own laps inside his brain. The Russian national team, naturally enough his favorite, was doing well, though the Australians were making a fine showing as hosts, especially in swimming, which seemed to be their national passion. The problem was in the vastly different time zones. When Popov was watching events live, it was necessarily an ungodly hour in Kansas, which made him somewhat bleary-eyed for his morning horseback rides with Maclean and Killgore—those had become a very pleasant morning diversion.
This morning was like the previous ten, with a cool westerly breeze, the rising orange sun casting strange but lovely light on the waving fields of grass and wheat. Buttermilk now recognized him, and awarded the Russian with oddly endearing signs of affection, which he in turn rewarded with sugar cubes or, as today, an apple taken from the morning breakfast buffet, which the mare crunched down rapidly from his hand. He had learned to saddle his own horse, which he now did quickly, leading Buttermilk outside to join the others and mounting up in the corral.
“Morning, Dmitriy,” Maclean said.
“Good morning, Kirk,” Popov replied pleasantly. In another few minutes, they were riding off, to the south this time, toward one of the wheat fields, at a rather more rapid pace than his first such ride.
“So, what’s it like to be an intelligence agent?” Killgore asked, half a mile from the barn.
“We are called intelligence officers, actually,” Popov said to correct the first Hollywood-generated misimpression. “Truthfully, it is mainly boring work. You spend much of your time waiting for a meeting, or filling out forms for submission to your headquarters, or the rezidentura. There is some danger—but only of being arrested, not shot. It has become a civilized business. Captured intelligence officers are exchanged, usually after a brief period of imprisonment. That never happened to me, of course. I was well trained.” And lucky, he didn’t add.
“So, no James Bond stuff, you never killed anybody, nothing like that?” Kirk Maclean asked.
“Good heavens, no,” Popov replied, with a laugh. “You have others do that sort of thing for you, surrogates, when you need it done. And that is quite rare.”
“How rare?”
“Today? Almost never I should think. At KGB, our job was to get information and pass it upwards to our government—more like reporters, like your Associated Press, than anything else. And much of the information we gathered was from open sources, newspapers, magazines, television. Your CNN is perhaps the best, most used source of information in the world.”
“But what sort of information did you gather?”
“Mainly diplomatic or political intelligence, trying to discern intentions. Others went after technical intelligence—how fast an airplane flies or how far a cannon shoots—but that was never my specialty area, you see. I was what you call here a people person. I met with various people and delivered messages and such, then brought the answers back to my station.”
“What kind of people?”
Popov wondered about how he should answer, and decided on the truth: “Terrorists, that was what you would call them.”
“Oh? Like which ones?”
“Mainly European, but some in the Middle East as well. I have language skills, and I can speak easily with people from various lands.”
“Was it hard?” Dr. Killgore asked.
“Not really. We had similar political beliefs, and my country provided them with weapons, training, access to some facilities in the Eastern Bloc. I was as much a travel agent as anything else, and occasionally I would suggest targets for them to attack—as payment for our assistance, you see.”
“Did you give them money?” Maclean this time.
“Yes, but not much money. The Soviet Union had only limited hard-currency reserves, and we never paid our agents very much. At least I did not,” Popov said.
“So, you sent terrorists out on missions to kill people?” This was from Killgore.
Popov nodded. “Yes. That was often my job. That was,” he added, “why Dr. Brightling hired me.”
“Oh?” Maclean asked.
Dmitriy wondered how far he could take this one. “Yes, he asked me to do similar things for Horizon Corporation.”
“You’re the guy who ramrodded the stuff in Europe?”
“I contacted various people and made suggestions which they carried out, yes, and so, yes, I do have some blood on my second hands, I suppose, but one cannot take such matters too seriously, can one? It is business, and it has been my business for some time.”
“Well, that’s a good thing for you, Dmitriy. That’s why you’re here,” Maclean told him. “John is pretty loyal to his people. You must have done okay.”
Popov shrugged. “Perhaps so. He never told me why he wanted these things done, but I gather it was to help his friend Henriksen get the consulting contract for the Sydney Olympics that I’ve been watching on TV.”
“That’s right,” Killgore confirmed. “That was very important to us.” Might as well watch, the epidemiologist thought, they’ll be the last ones.
“But why?”
They hesitated at the direct question. The physician and the engineer looked at each other. Then Killgore spoke.
“Dmitriy, what do you think of the environment?”
“What do you mean? Out here? It is beautiful. You’ve taught me much with these morning rides, my friends,” the Russian answered, choosing his words carefully. “The sky and the air, and the beautiful fields of grass and wheat. I have never appreciated how beautiful the world can be. I suppose that’s because I grew up in Moscow.” Which had been a hideously filthy city, but they didn’t know that.
“Yeah, well, it’s not all this way.”
“I know that, John. In Russia—well, the State didn’t care as you Americans do. They nearly killed all life in the Caspian Sea—where caviar comes from—from chemical poisoning. And there is a place just east of the Urals where our original atomic-bomb research created a wasteland. I haven’t seen it, but I have heard of it. The highway signs there tell you to drive very fast to be through the zone of dangerous radiation as quickly as possible.”