The Cardinal of the Kremlin

by Tom Clancy

  Not a trick, Ortiz noted. He called it a tactic. He wants to go after transports now, he wants to kill a hundred Russians at a time. Jesus, what have we made of this man? The CIA officer shook his head. That wasn’t his concern.

  “You are weary, my friend. Rest. We can eat later. Please honor my house by sleeping here.”

  “It is true,” the Archer acknowledged. He was asleep within two minutes.

  Ortiz and the Captain sorted through the equipment brought to them. Included was the maintenance manual for the Mi- 24’s laser equipment, and radio code sheets, in addition to other things they’d seen before. By noon he had it all fully catalogued and began making arrangements to ship it all to the embassy; from there it would be flown immediately to California for a complete evaluation.

  The Air Force VC-137 lifted off right on time. It was a customized version of the venerable Boeing 707. The “V” prefix on its designation denoted that it was designed to carry VIP passengers, and the aircraft’s interior reflected this. Jack lay back on the couch and abandoned himself to the fatigue that enveloped him. Ten minutes later a hand shook his shoulder.

  “The boss wants you,” another member of the team said.

  “Doesn’t he ever sleep?” Jack growled.

  “Tell me about it.”

  Ernest Allen was in the VIP-est accommodations on the aircraft, a cabin set exactly atop the wing spar with six plush swivel chairs. A coffeepot sat on the table. If he didn’t have some coffee he’d soon be incoherent. If he did, he’d be unable to go back to sleep. Well, the government wasn’t paying him to sleep. Ryan poured himself some coffee.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Can we verify it?” Allen skipped the preliminaries.

  “I don’t know yet,” Jack replied. “It’s not just a question of National Technical Means. Verifying the elimination of so many launchers—”

  “They’re giving us limited on-site inspection,” noted a junior member of the team.

  “I’m aware of that,” Jack replied. “The question is, does that really mean anything?” The other question is, why did they suddenly agree to something we’ve wanted for over thirty years ... ?

  “What?” the junior member asked.

  “The Soviets have put a lot of work into their new mobile launchers. What if they have more of them than we know about? Do you think we can find a few hundred mobile missiles?”

  “But we have surface-scanning radar on the new birds, and—”

  “And they know it, and they can avoid it if they want to—wait a minute. We know that our carriers can and do evade Russian radar-ocean-recon satellites. If you can do it with a ship, you can damned sure do it with a train,” Jack pointed out. Allen looked on without comment, allowing his underling to pursue the line in his stead. A clever old fox, Ernie Allen.

  “So, CIA is going to recommend against—damn it, this is the biggest concession they’ve ever made!”

  “Fine. It’s a big concession. Everyone here knows that. Before we accept it, maybe we ought to make sure that they haven’t conceded something that they’ve made irrelevant to the process. There are other things, too.”

  “So you’re going to oppose—”

  “I’m not opposing anything. I’m saying we take our time and use our heads instead of being carried away by euphoria. ”

  “But their draft treaty is—it’s almost too good to be true.” The man had just proved Ryan’s point, though he didn’t see it quite that way.

  “Dr. Ryan,” Allen said, “if the technical details can be worked out to your satisfaction, how do you view the treaty?”

  “Sir, speaking from a technical point of view, a fifty-percent reduction in deliverable warheads has no effect at all on the strategic balance. It’s—”

  “That’s crazy!” objected the junior member.

  Jack extended his hand toward the man, pointing his index finger like the barrel of a gun. “Let’s say I have a pistol pointed at your chest right now. Call it a nine-millimeter Browning. That has a thirteen-round clip. I agree to remove seven rounds from the clip, but I still have a loaded gun, with six rounds, pointed at your chest—do you feel any safer now?” Ryan smiled, keeping his “gun” out.

  “Personally, I wouldn’t. That’s what we’re talking about here. If both sides reduce their inventories by half, that still leaves five thousand warheads that can hit our country. Think about how big that number is. All this agreement does is to reduce the overkill. The difference between five thousand and ten thousand only affects how far the rubble flies. If we start talking about reducing the number to one thousand warheads on either side, then maybe I’ll start thinking we’re on to something.”

  “Do you think the thousand-warhead limit is achievable?” Allen asked.

  “No, sir. Sometimes I just wish it were, though I’ve been told that a thousand-warhead limit could have the effect of making nuclear war ‘winnable,’ whatever the hell that means.” Jack shrugged and concluded: “Sir, if this current agreement goes through, it’ll look better than it is. Maybe the symbolic value of the agreement has value in and of itself; that’s a factor to be considered, but it’s not one within my purview. The monetary savings to both sides will be real, but fairly minor in terms of gross military expenditures. Both sides retain half of their current arsenals—and that means keeping the newest and most effective half, of course. The bottom line remains constant: in a nuclear war, both sides would be equally dead. I do not see that this draft treaty reduces the ‘threat of war,’ whatever that is. To do that, we either have to eliminate the damned things entirely or figure something to keep them from working. If you ask me, we have to do the latter before we can attempt the former. Then the world becomes a safer place—maybe.”

  “That’s the start of a whole new arms race.”

  “Sir, that race started so long ago that it isn’t exactly new.”

  2.

  Tea Clipper

  “More photos of Dushanbe coming in,” the phone told Ryan.

  “Okay, I’ll be over in a few minutes.” Jack rose and crossed the hall to Admiral Greer’s office. His boss had his back to the blazing white blanket that covered the hilly ground outside the CIA headquarters building. They were still clearing it off the parking lot, and even the railed walkway outside the seventh-floor windows had about ten inches’ worth.

  “What is it, Jack?” the Admiral asked.

  “Dushanbe. The weather cleared unexpectedly. You said you wanted to be notified.”

  Greer looked at the TV monitor in the corner of his office. It was next to the computer terminal that he refused to use—at least when anyone might watch his attempts to type with his index fingers and, on good days, one thumb. He could have the real-time satellite photos sent to his office “live,” but of late he’d avoided that. Jack didn’t know why. “Okay, let’s trot over.”

  Ryan held open the door for the Deputy Director for Intelligence, and they turned left to the end of the executive corridor on the building’s top floor. Here was the executive elevator. One nice thing about it was that you didn’t have to wait very long.

  “How’s the jet lag?” Greer asked. Ryan had been back for nearly a day now.

  “Fully recovered, sir. Westbound doesn’t bother me very much. It’s the eastbound kind that still kills me.” God, it’s nice to be on the ground.

  The door opened and both men walked across the building to the new annex that housed the Office of Imagery Analysis. This was the Intelligence Directorate’s own private department, separate from the National Photographic Intelligence Center, a joint CIA-DIA effort which served the whole intelligence community.

  The screening room would have done Hollywood proud. There were about thirty seats in the mini-theater, and a twenty-foot-square projection screen on the wall. Art Graham, the chief of the unit, was waiting for them.

  “You timed that pretty well. We’ll have the shots in another minute.” He lifted a phone to the projection room and spoke a few words. The scre
en lit up at once. It was called “Overhead Imagery” now, Jack reminded himself.

  “Talk about luck. That Siberian high-pressure system took a sharp swing south and stopped the warm front like a brick wall. Perfect viewing conditions. Ground temp is about zero, and relative humidity can’t be much higher than that!” Graham chuckled. “We maneuvered the bird in specially to take advantage of this. It’s within three degrees of being right overhead, and I don’t think Ivan has had time to figure out that this pass is under way.”

  “There’s Dushanbe,” Jack breathed as part of the Tadzhik SSR came into view. Their first look was from one of the wide-angle cameras. The orbiting KH-14 reconnaissance satellite had a total of eleven. The bird had been in orbit for only three weeks, and this was the first of the newest generation of spy satellites. Dushanbe, briefly known as Stalinabad a few decades earlier—that must have made the local people happy! Ryan thought—was probably one of the ancient caravan cities. Afghanistan was less than a hundred miles away. Tamurlane’s legendary Samarkand was not far to the northwest ... and perhaps Scheherazade had traveled through a thousand years earlier. He wondered why was it that history worked this way. The same places and the same names always seemed to show up from one century to the next.

  But CIA’s current interest in Dushanbe did not center on the silk trade.

  The view changed to one of the high-resolution cameras. It peered first into a deep, mountainous valley where a river was held back by the concrete and stone mass of a hydroelectric dam. Though only fifty kilometers southeast of Dushanbe, its power lines did not serve that city of 500,000. Instead they led to a collection of mountaintops almost within sight of the facility.

  “That looks like footings for another set of towers,” Ryan observed.

  “Parallel to the first set,” Graham agreed. “They’re putting some new generators into the facility. Well, we knew all along that they were only getting about half the usable power out of the dam.”

  “How long to bring the rest on-stream?” Greer asked.

  “I’d have to check with one of our consultants. It won’t take more than a few weeks to run the power lines out, and the top half of the powerhouse is already built. Figure the foundations for the new generators are already done. All they have to do is rig the new equipment. Six months, maybe eight if the weather goes bad.”

  “That fast?” Jack wondered.

  “They diverted people from two other hydro jobs. Both of them were ‘Hero’ projects. This one has never been talked about, but they pulled construction troops off two high-profile sites to do this one. Ivan does know how to focus his effort when he wants to. Six or eight months is conservative, Dr. Ryan. It may be done quicker,” Graham said.

  “How much power’ll be available when they finish?”

  “It’s not all that big a structure. Total peak output, with the new generators? Figure eleven hundred megawatts.”

  “That’s a lot of power, and all going to those hilltops,” Ryan said almost to himself as the camera shifted again.

  The one the Agency called “Mozart” was quite a hill, but this area was the westernmost extension of the Himalayan Range, and by those standards it was puny. A road had been blasted to the very top—there wasn’t a Sierra Club in the USSR—along with a helicopter pad for bringing VIPs out from Dushanbe’s two airports. There were sixteen buildings. One was for apartments, the view from which must have been fantastic, though it was a prototypical Russian apartment building, as stylish and attractive as a cinderblock, finished six months before. A lot of engineers and their families lived in it. It seemed strange to see such a building there, but the message of the building was: The people who lived here were privileged. Engineers and academicians, people with enough skill that the State wanted to look after them and their needs. Food was trucked up the new mountain road—or, in bad weather, flown in. Another of the buildings was a theater. A third was a hospital. Television programming came in via satellite earth-station next to a building that contained a few shops. That sort of solicitude was not exactly common in the Soviet Union. It was limited to high Party officials and people who worked in essential defense projects. This was not a ski resort.

  That was also obvious from the perimeter fence and guard towers, both of which were recent. One of the identifiable things about Russian military complexes was the guard towers; Ivan had a real fixation for the things. Three fences, with two ten-meter spaces enclosed. The outer space was usually mined, and the inner one patrolled by dogs. The towers were on the inner perimeter, spaced two hundred meters apart. The soldiers who manned the towers were housed in a better-than-average new concrete barracks—

  “Can you isolate one of the guards?” Jack asked.

  Graham spoke into his phone, and the picture changed. One of his technicians was already doing this, as much to test camera calibration and ambient air conditions as for the purpose Ryan intended.

  As the camera zoomed in, a moving dot became a man-shape in greatcoat and probably a fur hat. He was walking a big dog of uncertain breed and had a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his right shoulder. Man and dog left puffs of vapor in the air as they breathed. Ryan leaned forward unconsciously, as though this would give him a better view.

  “That guy’s shoulder boards look green to you?” he asked Graham.

  The reconnaissance expert grunted. “Yep. He’s KGB, all right.”

  “That close to Afghanistan?” the Admiral mused. “They know we have people operating there. You bet they’ll take their security provisions seriously.”

  “They must have really wanted those hilltops,” Ryan observed. “Seventy miles overland are a few million people who think killing Russians is God’s will. This place is more important than we thought. It isn’t just a new facility, not with that kind of security. If that’s all it was, they wouldn’t have had to put it here, and they for damned sure wouldn’t have picked a place where they had to build a new power supply and risk exposure to hostiles. This may be an R and D facility now, but they must have bigger plans for it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Going after my satellites, maybe.” Art Graham thought of them as his.

  “Have they tickled any of ’em recently?” Jack asked.

  “No, not since we rattled their cage last April. Common sense broke out for once.”

  That was an old story. Several times in the past few years, American reconnaissance and early-warning satellites had been “tickled”—laser beams or microwave energy had been focused on the satellites, enough to dazzle their receptors but not enough to do serious harm. Why had the Russians done it? That was the question. Was it merely an exercise to see how we’d react, to see if it caused a ruckus at the North American Aerospace Defense Command—NORAD—at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado? An attempt to determine for themselves how sensitive the satellites were? Was it a demonstration, a warning of their ability to destroy the satellites? Or was it simply what Jack’s British friends called bloody-mindedness? It was so hard to tell what the Soviets were thinking.

  They invariably protested their innocence, of course. When one American satellite had been temporarily blinded over Sary Shagan, they said that a natural-gas pipeline had caught fire. The fact that the nearby Chimkent-Pavlodar pipeline carried mostly oil had escaped the Western press.

  The satellite pass was complete now. In a nearby room a score of videotape recorders were rewound, and now the complete camera coverage would be reviewed at leisure.

  “Let’s have a look at Mozart again, and Bach also, please,” Greer commanded.

  “Hell of a commute,” Jack noted. The residential and industrial site on Mozart was only one kilometer or so from the emplacement on Bach, the next mountaintop over, but the road looked frightful. The picture froze on Bach. The formula of fences and guard towers was repeated, but this time the distance between the outermost perimeter fence and the next was at least two hundred meters. Here the ground surface appeared to be bare rock. Jack wondered how you plante
d mines in that—or maybe they didn’t, he thought. It was obvious that the ground had been leveled with bulldozers and explosives to the unobstructed flatness of a pool table. From the guard towers, it must have looked like a shooting gallery.

  “Not kidding, are they?” Graham observed quietly.

  “So that’s what they’re guarding ...” Ryan said.

  There were thirteen buildings inside the fence. In an area perhaps the size of two football fields—which had also been leveled—were ten holes, in two groups. One was a group of six arranged hexagonally, each hole about thirty feet across. The second group of four was arrayed in a diamond pattern, and the holes were slightly smaller, perhaps twenty-five feet. In each hole was a concrete pillar about fifteen feet across, planted in bedrock, and every hole was at least forty feet deep—you couldn’t tell from the picture on the screen. Atop each pillar was a metal dome. They appeared to be made of crescent-shaped segments.

  “They unfold. I wonder what’s in them?” Graham asked rhetorically. There were two hundred people at Langley who knew of Dushanbe, and every one wanted to know what was under those metal domes. They’d been in place for only a few months.

  “Admiral,” Jack said, “I need to kick open a new compartment.”

  “Which one?”

  “Tea Clipper.”

  “You’re not asking much!” Greer snorted. “I’m not cleared for that.”

  Ryan leaned back in his chair. “Admiral, if what they’re doing in Dushanbe is the same thing we’re doing with Tea Clipper, we sure as hell ought to know. Goddammit, how are we supposed to know what to look for if we’re not told what one of these places looks like!”

  “I’ve been saying that for quite a while.” The DDI chuckled. “SDIO won’t like it. The Judge will have to go to the President for that.”

  “So he goes to the President. What if the activity here is connected with the arms proposal they just made?”

  “Do you think it is?”

  “Who can say?” Jack asked. “It’s a coincidence. They worry me.”