by Tom Clancy
They heard it before they saw it, the distinctive whop-whop-whop of the twin-bladed rotor. There was enough helicopter traffic over the area that the danger it brought was not immediately obvious. The one outside came to the edge of the trailer and looked through the treetops, then turned when he thought he heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. Inside, Leonid and Oleg looked up from their half-assembled crate in irritation rather than concern, but that changed in an instant when the sound of the helicopter became a roar as the chopper came into a hover directly overhead. In the back of the trailer, Bisyarina went to the window and saw it first. It was the last thing she would ever see.
“On target,” Paulson said.
“On target,” the other rifleman agreed.
“Shoot!”
They fired at nearly the same moment, but Paulson knew the other shot had gone first. That one broke the thick window, and the bullet went wild, deflected by the breaking glass. The second hollow-point match bullet was a split-second behind it, and struck the Soviet agent in the face. Paulson saw it, but it was the instant of firing that was locked in his mind, the crosshairs on the target. To their left, the machine-gunner was already firing when Paulson called his shot: “Center-head.”
“Target is down,” the second rifleman said into the radio. “Female target is down. Hostage in view.” Both reloaded their rifles and searched for new targets.
Weighted ropes dropped from the helicopter, and four men rappelled down. Werner was in front, and swung his way through the broken window, his MP-5 submachine gun in hand. Gregory was there, shouting something. Werner was joined by another team member, who threw the chair on its side and knelt between it and the rest of the structure. Then a third man came through, and all three trained their weapons the other way.
Outside, the Chevy Suburban arrived in time to see one of the KGB men firing a pistol at an agent who’d landed atop the trailer and was caught on something, unable to bring his weapon around. Two agents leaped from the vehicle and fired three rounds each, dropping the man in his tracks. The agent atop the trailer freed himself and waved.
Inside, Leonid and Oleg were reaching for their weapons. One looked back to see a constant stream of machine-gun bullets chewing through the metal sides of the trailer, clearly to keep them from approaching Gregory. But those were their orders.
“Hostage is safe, hostage is safe. Female target is down,” Werner called over the radio.
“Outside target is down,” another agent called. From the outside. He watched another team member put a small explosive charge on the door. The man backed up and nodded. “Ready!”
“Machine-gunner, cease fire, cease fire,” Werner ordered.
The two KGB officers inside heard it stop and went toward the back. The front door of the trailer was blown off its hinges as they did so. The blast was supposed to be sufficient to disorient, but both men were too alert for that. Oleg turned, bringing his weapon up in two hands to cover Leonid. He fired at the first figure through the door, hitting the man in the arm. That agent fell, trying to bring his weapon around. He fired and missed, but drew Oleg’s attention to himself. The second man in the door had his MP-5 cradled in his arm. His gun fired two rounds. Oleg’s last impression was one of surprise: he hadn’t heard them shoot. He understood when he saw the canlike silencers.
“Agent wounded and bad guy down. Another bad guy heading back. Lost him turning the corner.” The agent ran after him, but tripped on a packing case.
They let him come through the door. One agent, his torso protected with a bullet-resistant vest, was between the door and the hostage. They could take the chance now. It was the one who’d gotten the rent-a-car, Werner knew at once, and his weapon wasn’t pointed at anybody yet. The man saw three HRT members dressed in black Nomex jump suits and obviously protected with body armor. His face showed the beginnings of hesitation.
“Drop the gun!” Werner screamed. “Don’t—”
Leonid saw where Gregory was and remembered his orders. The pistol started coming around.
Werner did what he’d always told his people not to do, but would never remember why. He loosed half a dozen rounds at the man’s arm, going for the gun—and miraculously enough, it worked. The gun hand jerked like a puppet’s and the pistol fell free in a cloud of spraying blood. Werner leaped forward, knocking the subject down and placing the muzzle of his silenced gun right on his forehead.
“Number three is down! Hostage safe! Team: check in!”
“Outside, number one down and dead.”
“Trailer, number two down and dead! One agent hit in the arm, not serious.”
“Female down and dead,” Werner called. “One subject wounded and in custody. Secure the area! Ambulances, now!” From the time of the sniper shots, it had taken a total of twenty-nine seconds.
Three agents appeared at the window through which Werner and the other two had arrived. One of the agents inside pulled out his combat knife and cut through the ropes that held Gregory, then practically threw him out the window, where he was caught and carried off like a rag doll. Al was put in the back of the HRT truck and rushed off. On the highway, an Air Force helicopter landed. As soon as Gregory was tossed inside, it lifted off.
All HRT members have medical training, and two on the assault team had trained with firemen-paramedics. One of them was wounded in the arm, and directed the bandaging done by the man who’d shot Oleg. The other trained paramedic came back and started working on Leonid.
“He’ll make it. The arm’s gonna need some surgery, though. Radius, ulna, and humerus all fractured, boss.”
“You should have dropped the gun,” Werner told him. “You didn’t have much of a chance.”
“Jesus.” It was Paulson. He stood at the window and looked to see what his single bullet had done. An agent was searching the body, looking for a weapon. He stood up, shaking his head. That told the rifleman something he would have preferred not to know. In that moment, he knew that he’d never hunt again. The bullet had entered just below the left eye. Most of the rest of her head was on the wall opposite the window. Paulson told himself that he should never have looked. The rifleman turned away after five long seconds and unloaded his weapon.
The helicopter took Gregory directly to the project. Six armed security people were waiting when it landed, and hustled him inside. He was surprised when someone snapped some pictures. Someone else tossed Al a can of Coke, and he anointed himself with carbonated spray when he worked the pop-top. After taking a drink, he spoke: “What the hell was all that?”
“We’re not even sure ourselves,” the chief of project security replied. It took a few more seconds for Gregory’s mind to catch up with what had happened. That’s when he started shaking.
Werner and his people were outside the trailer while the evidence team took over. A dozen New Mexico State Police officers were there also. The wounded agent and the wounded KGB officer were loaded into the same ambulance, though the latter was handcuffed to his stretcher and doing his best not to scream with the pain of three shattered bones in his arm.
“Where you taking him?” a state police captain asked.
“The base hospital at Kirtland—both of them,” Werner replied.
“Long ways.”
“Orders are to keep this one under wraps. For what it’s worth, the guy who popped your officer is that one over there—from the description he gave us, it’s him anyway.”
“I’m surprised you took one alive.” That earned the Captain a curious look. “I mean, they were all armed, right?”
“Yeah,” Werner agreed. He smiled in an odd sort of way. “I’m surprised, too.”
24.
The Rules of the Game
THE amazing thing was that it didn’t make the news. Only a handful of unmuffled shots had been fired, and gunfire is not all that unusual a thing in the American West. An inquiry to the New Mexico State Police had gotten the reply that the investigation into the shooting of Officer Mendez was still
continuing, with a break expected at any time, but that the helicopter activity was merely part of a routine search-and-rescue exercise conducted jointly by the state police and Air Force personnel. It wasn’t all that good a story, but good enough to keep reporters off everyone’s back for a day or two.
The evidence team sifted through the trailer and not surprisingly found little of note. A police photographer took the requisite pictures of all the victims—he called himself a professional ghoul—and handed over the film to the senior FBI agent on the scene. The bodies were bagged and driven to Kirtland, from which they were flown to Dover Air Force Base, where there was a special receiving center staffed by forensic pathologists. The developed photos of the dead KGB officers were sent electronically to Washington. The local police and FBI began talking about how the case against the surviving KGB agent would be handled. It was determined that he’d broken at least a dozen statutes, evenly divided between federal and state jurisdiction, and various attorneys would have to sort that mess out, even though they knew that the real decision would be made in Washington. They were wrong in that assessment, however. Part of it would be decided elsewhere.
It was four in the morning when Ryan felt a hand on his shoulder. He rolled over and looked in time to see Candela flip on the bedstand light.
“What?” Ryan asked as coherently as he could manage.
“The Bureau pulled it off. They have Gregory and he’s fine,” Candela said. He handed over some photos. Ryan’s eyes blinked a few times before going very wide.
“That’s a hell of a thing to wake up to,” Jack said, even before seeing what had happened to Tania Bisyarina. “Holy shit!” He dropped the photos on the bed and walked into the bathroom. Candela heard the sound of running water, then Ryan emerged and walked to the refrigerator. He pulled out a can of soda and popped it open.
“Excuse me. You want one?” Jack gestured at the refrigerator.
“It’s a little early for me. You made the pass to Golovko yesterday?”
“Yeah. The session starts this afternoon. I want to see our friend about eight. I was planning to get up about five-thirty.”
“I thought you’d want to see these right away,” Candela said. That elicited a grunt.
“Sure. It beats the morning paper ... We got his ass,” Ryan noted, staring at the carpet. “Unless ...”
“Unless he wants to die real bad,” the CIA officer agreed.
“What about his wife and daughter?” Jack asked. “If you got opinions, I sure as hell want to hear them.”
“The meet’s where I suggested?”
“Yep.”
“Push him as hard as you can.” Candela lifted the pictures off the bed and tucked them in an envelope. “Make sure you show him these. I don’t think it’ll trouble his conscience much, but it’ll damned well show him we’re serious. If you want an opinion, I thought you were crazy before. Now”—he grinned—“I think you’re just about crazy enough. I’ll be back when you’re all woke up.”
Ryan nodded and watched him leave before heading into the shower. The water was hot, and Jack took his time, in the process filling the small room with steam that he had to wipe off the mirror. When he shaved, he made a conscious effort to stare at his beard rather than his eyes. It wasn’t a time for self-doubt.
It was dark outside his windows. Moscow was not lit the same way as an American city. Perhaps it was the near-total absence of cars at this hour. Washington always had people moving about. There was always the unconscious certainty that somewhere people were up and about their business, whatever that might be. The concept didn’t translate here. Just as the words of one language never exactly, never quite correspond to those of another, so Moscow was to Ryan just similar enough to other major cities he’d visited to seem all the more alien in its differences. People didn’t go about their business here. For the most part they went about the business assigned to them by someone else. The irony was that he would soon be one of the people giving orders, to a person who’d forgotten how to take them.
Morning came slowly to Moscow. The traffic sounds of trolley cars and the deeper rumble of truck diesels were muted by the snow cover, and Ryan’s window didn’t face in the proper direction to catch the first light of dawn. What had been gray began to acquire color, as though a child were playing with the controls on a color television. Jack finished his third cup of coffee, and set down the book he’d been reading at seven-thirty. Timing was everything on occasions like this, Candela told him. He made a final trip to the bathroom before dressing for his morning walk.
The sidewalks had been swept clean of the Sunday-night snowstorm, though there were still piles at the curbs. Ryan nodded to the security guards, Australian, American, and Russian, before turning north on Chaykovskogo. The bitter northerly wind made his eyes water, and he adjusted the scarf around his neck slightly as he walked toward Vosstaniya Square. This was Moscow’s embassy district. The previous morning he’d turned right at the far side of the square and seen half a dozen legations mixed together randomly, but this morning he turned left on Kudrinskiy Pereulok—the Russians had at least nine ways of saying “street,” but the nuances were lost on Jack—then right, then left again on Barrikad-naya.
“Barricade” seemed an odd name for both a street and a movie theater. It looked odder still in Cyrillic lettering. The B was recognizable, though the Cyrillic “B” is actually a V, and the Rs in the word looked like Roman Ps. Jack altered his course somewhat, walking as close to the buildings as possible as he approached. Just as expected, a door opened and he turned into it. Again he was patted down. The security man found the sealed envelope in the coat pocket, but didn’t open it, to Ryan’s relief.
“Come.” The same thing he’d said the first time, Jack noted. Perhaps he had a limited vocabulary.
Gerasimov was sitting on an aisle seat, his back confidently to Ryan as Jack walked down the slope to see the man.
“Good morning,” he said to the back of the man’s head.
“How do you like our weather?” Gerasimov asked, waving the security man away. He stood and led Jack down toward the screen.
“Wasn’t this cold where I grew up.”
“You should wear a hat. Most Americans prefer not to, but here it is a necessity.”
“It’s cold in New Mexico, too,” Ryan said.
“So I’m told. Did you think I would do nothing?” the KGB Chairman asked. He did so without emotion, like a teacher to a slow student. Ryan decided to let him enjoy the feeling for a moment.
“Am I supposed to negotiate with you for Major Gregory’s freedom?” Jack asked neutrally—or tried to. The extra morning coffee had put an edge on his emotions.
“If you wish,” Gerasimov replied.
“I think you will find this to be of interest.” Jack handed over the envelope.
The KGB Chairman opened it and took out the photographs. He didn’t display any reaction as he flipped through the three frames, but when he turned to look at Ryan his eyes made the morning’s wind seem like the breath of spring.
“One’s alive,” Jack reported. “He’s hurt, but he’ll recover. I don’t have his picture. Somebody screwed up on that end. We have Gregory back, unhurt.”
“I see.”
“You should also see that your options are now those which we intended. I need to know which choice you will make.”
“It is obvious, is it not?”
“One of the things I have learned in studying your country is that nothing is as obvious as we would like.” That drew something that was almost a smile.
“How will I be treated?”
“Quite well.” A hell of lot better than you deserve.
“My family?”
“Them also.”
“And how do you propose to get the three of us out?”
“I believe your wife is Estonian by birth, and that she often travels to her home. Have them there Friday night,” Ryan said, continuing with some details.
“E
xactly what—”
“You do not need that information, Mr. Gerasimov.”
“Ryan, you cannot—”
“Yes, sir, I can,” Jack cut him off, wondering why he’d said “sir.”
“And for me?” the Chairman asked. Ryan told him what he’d have to do. Gerasimov agreed. “I have one question.”
“Yes?”
“How did you fool Polatonov? He’s a very clever man.”
“There really was a minor flap with the SEC, but that wasn’t the important part.” Ryan got ready to leave. “We couldn’t have done it without you. We had to stage a really good scene, something that you don’t fake. Congressmen Trent was over here six months ago, and he met a fellow named Valeriy. They got to be very close friends. He found out later that you gave Valeriy five years for ‘antisocial activity.’ Anyway, he wanted to get even. We asked for his help and he jumped at it. So I suppose you could say that we used your own prejudices against you.”
“What would have have us do with such people, Ryan?” the Chairman demanded. “Do you—”
“I don’t make laws, Mr. Gerasimov.” Ryan walked out. It was nice, he thought on the return to the embassy compound, to have the wind at his back for a change.
“Good morning, Comrade General Secretary.”
“You need not be so formal, Ilyra Arkadyevich. There are Politburo members more senior to you who do not have the vote, and we have been comrades too ... long. What is troubling you?” Narmonov asked cautiously. The pain in his colleague’s eyes was evident. They were scheduled to talk about the winter wheat crop, but—
“Andrey Il’ych, I do not know how to begin.” Vaneyev nearly choked on the words, and tears began to stream from his eyes. “It is my daughter ...” He went on for ten fitful minutes.