by Tom Clancy
“Thanks, Ed. I’ll get you fully briefed in later today.”
“Aye, aye,” SURFPAC replied. He’d put a call to his squadron commanders immediately.
“What else?” Mancuso wondered.
“We haven’t heard anything directly from Washington, Admiral,” BG Lahr told his boss.
“Nice thing about being a CINC, Mike. You’re allowed to think on your own a little.”
What a fucking mess,” General-Colonel Bondarenko observed to his drink. He wasn’t talking about the news of the day, but about his command, even though the officers’ club in Chabarsovil was comfortable. Russian general officers have always liked their comforts, and the building dated back to the czars. It had been built during the Russo-Japanese war at the beginning of the previous century and expanded several times. You could see the border between pre-revolution and post-revolution workmanship. Evidently, German POWs hadn’t been trained this far east-they’d built most of the dachas for the party elite of the old days. But the vodka was fine, and the fellowship wasn’t too bad, either.
“Things could be better, Comrade General,” Bondarenko’s operations officer agreed. “But there is much that can be done the right way, and little bad to undo.”
That was a gentle way of saying that the Far East Military District was less of a military command than it was a theoretical exercise. Of the five motor-rifle divisions nominally under his command, only one, the 265th, was at eighty-percent strength. The rest were at best regimental-size formations, or mere cadres. He also had theoretical command of a tank division-about a regiment and a half-plus thirteen reserve divisions that existed not so much on paper as in some staff officer’s dreams. The one thing he did have was huge equipment stores, but a lot of that equipment dated back to the 1960s, or even earlier. The best troops in his area of command responsibility were not actually his to command. These were the Border Guards, battalion-sized formations once part of the KGB, now a semi-independent armed service under the command of the Russian president.
There was also a defense line of sorts, which dated back to the 1930s and showed it. For this line, numerous tanks-some of them actually German in origin-were buried as bunkers. In fact, more than anything else the line was reminiscent of the French Maginot Line, also a thing of the 1930s. It had been built to protect the Soviet Union against an attack by the Japanese, and then upgraded halfheartedly over the years to protect against the People’s Republic of China-a defense never forgotten, but never fully remembered either. Bondarenko had toured parts of it the previous day. As far back as the czars, the engineering officers of the Russian Army had never been fools. Some of the bunkers were sited with shrewd, even brilliant appreciation for the land, but the problem with bunkers was explained by a recent American aphorism: If you can see it, you can hit it, and if you can hit it, you can kill it. The line had been conceived and built when artillery fire had been a chancy thing, and an aircraft bomb was fortunate to hit the right county. Now you could use a fifteen-centimeter gun as accurately as a sniper rifle, and an aircraft could select which window-pane to put the bomb through on a specific building.
“Andrey Petrovich, I am pleased to hear your optimism. What is your first recommendation?”
“It will be simple to improve the camouflage on the border bunkers. That’s been badly neglected over the years,” Colonel Aliyev told his commander-in-chief. “That will reduce their vulnerability considerably.”
“Allowing them to survive a serious attack for … sixty minutes, Andrushka?”
“Maybe even ninety, Comrade General. It’s better than five minutes, is it not?” He paused for a sip of vodka. Both had been drinking for half an hour. “For the 265th, we must begin a serious training program at once. Honestly, the division commander did not impress me greatly, but I suppose we must give him a chance.”
Bondarenko: “He’s been out here so long, maybe he likes the idea of Chinese food.”
“General, I was out here as a lieutenant,” Aliyev said. “I remember the political officers telling us that the Chinese had increased the length of the bayonets on their AK-47s to get through the extra fat layer we’d grown after discarding true Marxism-Leninism and eating too much.”
“Really?” Bondarenko asked.
“That is the truth, Gennady Iosifovich.”
“So, what do we know of the PLA?”
“There are a lot of them, and they’ve been training seriously for about four years now, much harder than we’ve been doing.”
“They can afford to,” Bondarenko observed sourly. The other thing he’d learned on arriving was how thin the cupboard was for funds and training equipment. But it wasn’t totally bleak. He had stores of consumable supplies that had been stocked and piled for three generations. There was a virtual mountain of shells for the 100-mm guns on his many-and long-since obsolete-T-5⅘5 tanks, for example, and a sea of diesel fuel hidden away in underground tanks too numerous to count. The one thing he had in the Far East Military District was infrastructure, built up by the Soviet Union over generations of institutional paranoia. But that wasn’t the same as an army to command.
“What about aviation?”
“Mainly grounded,” Aliyev answered glumly. “Parts problems. We used up so much in Chechnya that there isn’t enough to go around, and the Western District still has first call.”
“Oh? Our political leadership expects the Poles to invade us?”
“That’s the direction Germany is in,” the G-3 pointed out.
“I’ve been fighting that out with the High Command for three years,” Bondarenko growled, thinking of his time as chief of operations for the entire Russian army. “People would rather listen to themselves than to others with the voice of reason.” He looked up at Aliyev. “And if the Chinese come?”
The theater operations officer shrugged. “Then we have a problem.”
Bondarenko remembered the maps. It wasn’t all that far to the new gold strike. . and the ever-industrious army engineers were building the damned roads to it. .
“Tomorrow, Andrey Petrovich. Tomorrow we start drawing up a training regimen for the whole command,” CINC-FAR EAST told his own G-3.
CHAPTER 27 Transportation
Diggs didn’t entirely like what he saw, but it wasn’t all that unexpected. A battalion of Colonel Lisle’s 2nd Brigade was out there, maneuvering through the exercise area-clumsily, Diggs thought. He had to amend his thoughts, of course. This wasn’t the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, and Lisle’s 2nd Brigade wasn’t the 11th ACR, whose troopers were out there training practically every day, and as a result knew soldiering about as well as a surgeon knew cutting. No, 1st Armored Division had turned into a garrison force since the demise of the Soviet Union, and all that wasted time in what was left of Yugoslavia, trying to be “peacekeepers,” hadn’t sharpened their war-fighting skills. That was a term Diggs hated. Peacekeepers be damned, the general thought, they were supposed to be soldiers, not policemen in battle dress uniform. The opposing force here was a German brigade, and by the looks of it, a pretty good one, with their Leopard-II tanks. Well, the Germans had soldiering in their genetic code somewhere, but they weren’t any better trained than Americans, and training was the difference between some ignorant damned civilian and a soldier. Training meant knowing where to look and what to do when you saw something there. Training meant knowing what the tank to your left was going to do without having to look. Training meant knowing how to fix your tank or Bradley when something broke. Training eventually meant pride, because with training came confidence, the sure knowledge that you were the baddest motherfucker in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and you didn’t have to fear no evil at all.
Colonel Boyle was flying the UH-60A in which Diggs was riding. Diggs was in the jump seat immediately aft and between the pilots’ seats. They were cruising about five hundred feet over the ground.
“Oops, that platoon down there just walked into something,” Boyle reported, pointing
. Sure enough the lead tank’s blinking yellow light started flashing the I’m dead signal.
“Let’s see how the platoon sergeant recovers,” General Diggs said.
They watched, and sure enough, the sergeant pulled the remaining three tanks back while the crew bailed out of the platoon leader’s M1A2 main battle tank. As a practical matter, both it and its crew would probably have survived whatever administrative “hit” it had taken from the Germans. Nobody had yet come up with a weapon to punch reliably through the Chobham armor, but someone might someday, and so the tank crews were not encouraged to think themselves immortal and their tanks invulnerable.
“Okay, that sergeant knows his job,” Diggs observed, as the helicopter moved to another venue. The general saw that Colonel Masterman was making notes aplenty on his pad. “What do you think, Duke?”
“I think they’re at about seventy-five percent efficiency, sir,” the G-3 operations officer replied. “Maybe a little better. We need to put everybody on the SimNet, to shake ’em all up a little.” That was one of the Army’s better investments. SIMNET, the simulator network, comprised a warehouse full of M1 and Bradley simulators, linked by supercomputer and satellite with two additional such warehouses, so that highly complex and realistic battles could be fought out electronically. It had been hugely expensive, and while it could never fully simulate training in the field, it was nevertheless a training aid without parallel.
“General, all that time in Yugoslavia didn’t help Lisle’s boys,” Boyle said from the chopper’s right seat.
“I know that,” Diggs agreed. “I’m not going to kill anybody’s career just yet,” he promised.
Boyle’s head turned to grin. “Good, sir. I’ll spread that word around.”
“What do you think of the Germans?”
“I know their boss, General Major Siegfried Model. He’s damned smart. Plays a hell of a game of cards. Be warned, General.”
“Is that a fact?” Diggs had commanded the NTC until quite recently, and had occasionally tried his luck at Las Vegas, a mere two hours up I-15 from the post.
“Sir, I know what you’re thinking. Think again,” Boyle cautioned his boss.
“Your helicopters seem to be doing well.”
“Yep, Yugoslavia was fairly decent training for us, and long as we have gas, I can train my people.”
“What about live-fire?” the commanding general of First Tanks asked.
“We haven’t done that in a while, sir, but again, the simulators are almost as good as the real thing,” Boyle replied over the intercom. “But I think you’ll want your track toads to get some in, General.” And Boyle was right on that one. Nothing substituted for live-fire in an Abrams or a Bradley.
The stakeout on the park bench turned out to be lengthy and boring. First of all, of course, they’d pulled the container, opened it, and discovered that the contents were two sheets of paper, closely printed with Cyrillic characters, but encrypted. So the sheet had been photographed and sent off to the cryppies for decryption. This had not proven to be easy. In fact, it had thus far proven to be impossible, leading the officers from the Federal Security Service to conclude that the Chinese (if that was who it was) had adopted the old KGB practice of using one-time pads. These were unbreakable in theoretical terms because there was no pattern, formula, or algorithm to crack.
The rest of the time was just a matter of waiting to see who came to pick up the package.
It ended up taking days. The FSS put three cars on the case. Two of them were vans with long-lens cameras on the target. In the meanwhile, Suvorov/Koniev’s apartment was as closely watched as the Moscow Stock Exchange ticker. The subject himself had a permanent shadow of up to ten trained officers, mainly KGB-trained spy-chasers instead of Provalov’s homicide investigators, but with a leavening of the latter because it was technically still their case. It would remain a homicide case until some foreign national-they hoped-picked up the package under the bench.
Since it was a park bench, people sat on it regularly. Adults reading papers, children reading comic books, teenagers holding hands, people chatting amiably, even two elderly men who met every afternoon for a game of chess played on a small magnetic board. After every such visit, the stash was checked for movement or disturbance, always without result. By the fourth day, people speculated aloud that it was all some sort of trick. This was Suvorov/Koniev’s way of seeing if he were being trailed or not. If so, he was a clever son of a bitch, the surveillance people all agreed. But they already knew that.
The break came in the late afternoon of day five, and it was the man they wanted it to be. His name was Kong Deshi, and he was a minor diplomat on the official list, age forty-six, a man of modest dimensions, and, the form card at the Foreign Ministry said, modest intellectual gifts-that was a polite way of saying he was considered a dunce. But as others had noted, that was the perfect cover for a spy, and one which wasted a lot of time for counterintelligence people, making them trail dumb diplomats all over the world who turned out to be nothing more than just that-dumb diplomats-of which the global supply was ample. The man was walking casually with another Chinese national, who was a businessman of some sort, or so they’d thought. Sitting, they’d continued to chat, gesturing around until the second man had turned to look at something Kong had pointed at. Then Kong’s right hand had slipped rapidly and almost invisibly under the bench and retrieved the stash, possibly replacing it with another before his hand went back in his lap. Five minutes later, after a smoke, they’d both walked off, back in the direction of the nearest Metro station.
“Patience,” the head FSS officer had told his people over the radio circuit, and so they’d waited over an hour, until they were certain that there were no parked cars about keeping an eye on the dead-drop. Only then had an FSS man walked to the bench, sat down with his afternoon paper, and pulled the package. The way he flicked his cigarette away told the rest of the team that there had been a substitution.
In the laboratory, it was immediately discovered that the package had a key lock, and that got everyone’s attention. The package was x-rayed immediately and found to contain a battery and some wires, plus a semi-opaque rectangle that collectively represented a pyrotechnic device. Whatever was inside the package was therefore valuable. A skilled locksmith took twenty minutes picking the lock, and then the holder was opened to reveal a few sheets of flash paper. These were removed and photographed, to show a solid collection of Cyrillic letters-and they were all random. It was a one-time-pad key sheet, the best thing they could have hoped to find. The sheets were refolded exactly as they had been replaced in the holder, and then the thin metal container-it looked like a cheap cigarette case-was returned to the bench.
“So?” Provalov asked the Federal Security Service officer on the case.
“So, the next time our subject sends a message, we’ll be able to read it.”
“And then we’ll know,” Provalov went on.
“Perhaps. We’ll know something more than we know now. We’ll have proof that this Suvorov fellow is a spy. That I can promise you,” the counterintelligence officer pronounced.
Provalov had to admit to himself that they were no closer to solving his murder case than they’d been two weeks before, but at least things were moving, even if the path merely led them deeper into the fog.
So, Mike?” Dan Murray asked, eight time zones away. ”No nibbles yet, Director, but now it looks like we’re chasing a spook. The subject’s name is Klementi Ivan’ch Suvorov, currently living as Ivan Yurievich Koniev.” Reilly read off the address. ”The trail leads to him, or at least it seems to, and we spotted him making probable contact with a Chinese diplomat.”
“And what the hell does all this mean?” FBI Director Murray wondered aloud into the secure phone.
“You got me there, Director, but it sure has turned into an interesting case.”
“You must be pretty tight with this Provalov guy.”
“He’s a good cop, and yes,
sir, we get along just fine.”
That was more than Cliff Rutledge could say about his relationship with Shen Tang.
“Your news coverage of this incident was bad enough, but your President’s remarks on our domestic policy is a violation of Chinese sovereignty!” the Chinese foreign minister said almost in a shout, for the seventh time since lunch.
“Minister,” Cliff Rutledge replied. “None of this would have happened but for your policeman shooting an accredited diplomat, and that is not, strictly speaking, an entirely civilized act.”
“Our internal affairs are our internal affairs,” Shen retorted at once.
“That is so, Minister, but America has her own beliefs, and if you ask us to honor yours, then we may request that you show some respect for ours.”
“We grow weary of America’s interference with Chinese internal affairs. First you recognize our rebellious province on Taiwan. Then you encourage foreigners to interfere with our internal policies. Then you send a spy under the cover of religious beliefs to violate our laws with a diplomat from yet another country, then you photograph a Chinese policeman doing his duty, and then your President condemns us for your interference with our internal affairs. The People’s Republic will not tolerate this uncivilized activity!”
And now you’re going to demand most-favored-nation trade status, eh? Mark Gant thought in his chair. Damn, this was like a meeting with investment bankers-the pirate kind-on Wall Street.