by Tom Clancy
“Correct, Major. We will be establishing regional special-operations and counterterror forces throughout the country. The men you train this week will be training others in a few months. The problem with the Chechens came as a surprise to us, and we need to pay serious attention to terrorism as a security threat.”
Clark didn’t envy Kirillin the mission. Russia was a big country containing too many leftover nationalities from the Soviet Union-and for that matter from the time of the czars-many of whom had never particularly liked the idea of being part of Russia. America had had the problem once, but never to the extent that the Russians did, and here it wouldn’t be getting better anytime soon. Economic prosperity was the only sure cure-prosperous people don’t squabble; it’s too rough on the china and the silverware-but prosperity was a way off in the future yet.
“Well, sir,” Chavez went on, “in a year you’ll have a serious and credible force, assuming you have the funding support you’re going to need.”
Kirillin grunted. “That is the question here, and probably in your country as well, yes?”
“Yeah.” Clark had himself a laugh. “It helps if Congress loves you.”
“You have many nationalities on your team,” the Russian general observed.
“Yeah, well, we’re mainly a NATO service, but we’re used to working together. Our best shooter now is Italian.”
“Really? I saw him, but-”
Chavez cut him off. “General, in a previous life, Ettore was James Butler Hickok. Excuse me, Wild Bill Hickok to you. That son of a bitch can sign his name with a handgun.”
Clark refilled the vodka glasses. “Yuriy, he’s won money off all of us at the pistol range. Even me.”
“Is that a fact?” Kirillin mused, with the same look in his eyes that Clark had had a few weeks earlier. John punched him on the arm.
“I know what you’re thinking. Bring money when you have your match with him, Comrade General,” John advised. “You’ll need it to pay off his winnings.”
“This I must see,” the Russian announced.
“Hey, Eddie!” Chavez waved his number-two over.
“Yes, sir?”
“Tell the general here how good Ettore is with a pistol.”
“That fucking Eyetalian!” Sergeant Major Price swore. “He’s even taken twenty pounds off Dave Woods.”
“Dave’s the range-master at Hereford, and he’s pretty good, too,” Ding explained. “Ettore really ought to be in the Olympics or something-maybe Camp Perry, John?”
“I thought of that, maybe enter him in the President’s Cup match next year. .” Clark mused. Then he turned. “Go ahead, Yuriy. Take him on. Maybe you will succeed where all of us failed.”
“All of you, eh?”
“Every bloody one of us,” Eddie Price confirmed. “I wonder why the Italian government gave him to us. If the Mafia want to go after him, I wish the bastards luck.”
“This I must see,” Kirillin persisted, leading his visitors to wonder how smart he was.
“Then you will see it, Tovarisch General,” Clark promised.
Kirillin, who’d been on the Red Army pistol team as a lieutenant and a captain, couldn’t conceive of being beaten in a pistol match. He figured these NATO people were just having fun with him, as he might do if the situation were reversed. He waved to the bartender and ordered pepper vodka for his own next round. But all that said, he liked these NATO visitors, and their reputation spoke forcefully for itself. This Chavez, a major-he was really CIA, Kirillin knew, and evidently a good spy at that, according to his briefing from the SVR-had the look of a good soldier, with confidence won in the field, the way a soldier ought to win his confidence. Clark was much the same-and also very capable, so the book on him read-with his own ample experience both as a soldier and a spy. And his spoken Russian was superb and very literate, his accent of St. Petersburg, where he probably could-and probably once or twice had, Kirillin reflected-pass for a native. It was so strange that such men as these had once been his sworn enemies. Had battle happened, it would have been bloody, and its outcome very sad. Kirillin had spent three years in Afghanistan, and had learned firsthand just how horrid a thing combat was. He’d heard the stories from his father, a much-decorated infantry general, but hearing them wasn’t the same as seeing, and besides, you never told the really awful parts because you tended to edit them out of your memory. One did not discuss seeing a friend’s face turn to liquid from a rifle bullet over a few drinks in a bar, because it was just not the sort of thing you could describe to one who didn’t understand, and you didn’t need to describe it to one who did. You just lifted your glass to toast the memory of Grisha or Mirka, or one of the others, and in the community of arms, that was enough. Did these men do it? Probably. They’d lost men once, when Irish terrorists had attacked their own home station, to their ultimate cost, but not without inflicting their own harm on highly trained men.
And that was the essence of the profession of arms right there. You trained to skew the odds your way, but you could never quite turn them all the way in the direction you wished.
Yu Chun had experienced a thoroughly vile day. In the city of Taipei to look after her aged and seriously ill mother, she’d had a neighbor call urgently, telling her to switch on her TV, then seen her husband shot dead before her blinking eyes. And that had just been the first hammer blow of the day.
The next one involved getting to Beijing. The first two flights to Hong Kong were fully booked, and that cost her fourteen lonely and miserable hours sitting in the terminal as an anonymous face in a sea of such faces, alone with her horror and additional loneliness, until she finally boarded a flight to the PRC capital. That flight had been bumpy, and she had cowered in her last-row window seat, hoping that no one could see the anguish on her face, but hiding it as well as she might conceal an earthquake. In due course, that trial had ended, and she managed to leave the aircraft, and actually made it through immigration and customs fairly easily because she carried virtually nothing that could conceal contraband. Then it started all over again with the taxi to her home.
Her home was hidden behind a wall of policemen. She tried to pass through their line as one might wiggle through a market checkout, but the police had orders to admit no one into the house, and those orders did not include an exception for anyone who might actually live there. That took twenty minutes and three policemen of gradually increasing rank to determine. By this time, she’d been awake for twenty-six hours and traveling for twenty-two of them. Tears did not avail her in the situation, and she staggered her way to the nearby home of a member of her husband’s congregation, Wen Zhong, a man who operated a small restaurant right in his home, a tall and rotund man, ordinarily jolly, liked by all who met him. Seeing Chun, he embraced her and took her into his home, at once giving her a room in which to sleep and a few drinks to help her relax. Yu Chin was asleep in minutes, and would remain that way for some hours, while Wen figured he had his own things to do. About the only thing Chun had managed to say before collapsing from exhaustion was that she wanted to bring Fa An’s body home for proper burial. That Wen couldn’t do all by himself, but he called a number of his fellow parishioners to let them know that their pastor’s widow was in town. He understood that the burial would be on the island of Taiwan, which was where Yu had been born, but his congregation could hardly bid their beloved spiritual leader farewell without a ceremony of its own, and so he called around to arrange a memorial service at their small place of worship. He had no way of knowing that one of the parishioners he called reported directly to the Ministry of State Security.
Barry Wise was feeling pretty good about himself. While he didn’t make as much money as his colleagues at the other so-called “major” networks-CNN didn’t have an entertainment division to dump money into news-he figured that he was every bit as well known as their (white) talking heads, and he stood out from them by being a serious newsie who went into the field, found his own stories, and wrote his own co
py. Barry Wise did the news, and that was all. He had a pass to the White House press room, and was considered in just about every capital city in the world not only as a reporter with whom you didn’t trifle, but also as an honest conveyor of information. He was by turns respected and hated, depending on the government and the culture. This government, he figured, had little reason to love him. To Barry Wise, they were fucking barbarians. The police here had delusions of godhood that evidently devolved from the big shots downtown who must have thought their dicks were pretty big because they could make so many people dance to their tune. To Wise, that was the sign of a little one, instead, but you didn’t tell them that out loud, because, small or not, they had cops with guns, and the guns were certainly big enough.
But these people had huge weaknesses, Wise also knew. They saw the world in a distorted way, like people with astigmatism, and assumed that was its real shape. They were like scientists in a lab who couldn’t see past their own theories and kept trying to twist the experimental data into the proper result-or ended up ignoring the data which their theory couldn’t explain.
But that was going to change. Information was getting in. In allowing free-market commerce, the government of the PRC had also allowed the installation of a forest of telephone lines. Many of them were connected to fax machines, and even more were connected to computers, and so lots of information was circulating around the country now. Wise wondered if the government appreciated the implications of that. Probably not. Neither Marx nor Mao had really understood how powerful a thing information was, because it was the place where one found the Truth, once you rooted through it a little, and Truth wasn’t Theory. Truth was the way things really were, and that’s what made it a son of a bitch. You could deny it, but only at your peril, because sooner or later the son of a bitch would bite you on the ass. Denying it just made the inevitable bite worse, because the longer you put it off, the wider its jaws got. The world had changed quite a bit since CNN had started up. As late as 1980, a country could deny anything, but CNN’s signals, the voice and the pictures, came straight down from the satellite. You couldn’t deny pictures worth a damn.
And that made Barry Wise the croupier in the casino of Information and Truth. He was an honest dealer-he had to be in order to survive in the casino, because the customers demanded it. In the free marketplace of ideas, Truth always won in the end, because it didn’t need anything else to prop it up. Truth stood by itself, and sooner or later the wind would blow the props away from all the bullshit.
It was a noble enough profession, Wise thought. His mission in life was reporting history, and along the way, he got to make a little of it himself-or at least to help-and for that reason he was feared by those who thought that defining history was their exclusive domain. The thought often made him smile to himself. He’d helped a little the other day, Wise thought, with those two churchmen. He didn’t know where it would lead. That was the work of others.
He still had more work of his own to do in China.
CHAPTER 29 Billy Budd
So, what else is going to go wrong over there?” Ryan asked.
“Things will quiet down if the other side has half a brain,” Adler said hopefully.
“Do they?” Robby Jackson asked, just before Arnie van Damm could.
“Sir, that’s not a question with an easy answer. Are they stupid? No, they are not. But do they see things in the same way that we do? No, they do not. That’s the fundamental problem dealing with them-”
“Yeah, Klingons,” Ryan observed tersely. “Aliens from outer space. Jesus, Scott, how do we predict what they’re going to do?”
“We don’t, really,” SecState answered. “We have a bunch of good people, but the problem is in getting them all to agree on something when we need an important call. They never do,” Adler concluded. He frowned before going on. “Look, these guys are kings from a different culture. It was already very different from ours long before Marxism arrived, and the thoughts of our old friend Karl only made things worse. They’re kings because they have absolute power. There are some limitations on that power, but we don’t fully understand what they are, and therefore it’s hard for us to enforce or to exploit them. They are Klingons. So, what we need is a Mr. Spock. Got one handy, anyone?”
Around the coffee table, there were the usual half-humorous snorts that accompany an observation that is neither especially funny nor readily escapable.
“Nothing new from SORGE today?” van Damm asked.
Ryan shook his head. “No, the source doesn’t produce something every day.”
“Pity,” Adler said. “I’ve discussed the take from SORGE with some of my I and R people-always as my own theoretical musings. .”
“And?” Jackson asked.
“And they think it’s decent speculation, but not something to bet the ranch on.”
There was amusement around the coffee table at that one.
“That’s the problem with good intelligence information. It doesn’t agree with what your own people think-assuming they really think at all,” the Vice President observed.
“Not fair, Robby,” Ryan told his VP.
“I know, I know.” Jackson held up surrendering hands. “I just can’t forget the motto of the whole intelligence community: ‘We bet your life.’ It’s lonely out there with a fighter plane strapped to your back, risking your life on the basis of a piece of paper with somebody’s opinion typed on it, when you never know the guy it’s from or the data it’s based on.” He paused to stir his coffee. “You know, out in the fleet we used to think-well, we used to hope-that decisions made in this room here were based on solid data. It’s quite a disappointment to learn what things are really like.”
“Robby, back when I was in high school, I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember wondering if the world was going to blow up. But I still had to translate half a page of Caesar’s goddamned Gallic Wars, and I saw the President on TV, and I figured things were okay, because he was the President of the United Goddamned States, and he had to know what was really going on. So, I translated the battle with the Helvetii and slept that night. The President knows, because he’s the President, right? Then I become President, and I don’t know a damned thing more than I knew the month before, but everybody out there”-Ryan waved his arm at the window-“thinks I’m fucking omniscient…. Ellen!” he called loudly enough to get through the door.
The door opened seven seconds later. “Yes, Mr. President?”
“I think you know, Ellen,” Jack told her.
“Yes, sir.” She fished in her pocket and pulled out a flip-top box of Virginia Slims. Ryan took one out, along with the pink butane lighter stashed inside. He lit the smoke and took a long hit. “Thanks, Ellen.”
Her smile was downright motherly. “Surely, Mr. President.” And she headed back to the secretaries’ room, closing the curved door behind her.
“Jack?”
“Yeah, Rob?” Ryan responded, turning.
“That’s disgusting.”
“Okay, I am not omniscient, and I’m not perfect,” POTUS admitted crossly after the second puff. “Now, back to China.”
“They can forget MFN,” van Damm said. “Congress would impeach you if you asked for it, Jack. And you can figure that the Hill will offer Taiwan any weapons system they want to buy next go-round.”
“I have no problems with that. And there’s no way I was going to offer them MFN anyway, unless they decide to break down and start acting like civilized people.”
“And that’s the problem,” Adler reminded them all. “They think we’re the uncivilized ones.”
“I see trouble,” Jackson said, before anyone else could. Ryan figured it was his background as a fighter pilot to be first in things. “They’re just out of touch with the rest of the world. The only way to get them back in touch will involve some pain. Not to their people, especially, but sure as hell to the guys who make the decisions.”
“And they’re the ones who control
the guns,” van Damm noted.
“Roger that, Arnie,” Jackson confirmed.
“So, how can we ease them the right way?” Ryan asked, to center the conversation once more.
“We stick to it. We tell them we want reciprocal trade access, or they will face reciprocal trade barriers. We tell them that this little flare-up with the Nuncio makes any concessions on our part impossible, and that’s just how things are. If they want to trade with us, they have to back off,” Adler spelled out. “They don’t like being told such things, but it’s the real world, and they have to acknowledge objective reality. They do understand that, for the most part,” SecState concluded.
Ryan looked around the room and got nods. “Okay, make sure Rutledge understands what the message is,” he told EAGLE.
“Yes, sir,” SecState agreed, with a nod. People stood and started filing out. Vice President Jackson allowed himself to be the last in the line of departure.
“Hey, Rob,” Ryan said to his old friend.
“Funny thing, watched some TV last night for a change, caught an old movie I hadn’t seen since I was a kid.”
“Which one?”
“Billy Budd, Melville’s story about the poor dumb sailor who gets himself hanged. I’d forgot the name of Billy’s ship.”
“Yeah?” So had Ryan.
“It was The Rights of Man. Kind of a noble name for a ship. I imagine Melville made that up with malice aforethought, like writers do, but that’s what we fight for, isn’t it? Even the Royal Navy, they just didn’t fight as well as we did back then. The Rights of Man,” Jackson repeated. “It is a noble sentiment.”
“How does it apply to the current problem, Rob?”
“Jack, the first rule of war is the mission: First, why the hell are you out there, and then what are you proposing to do about it. The Rights of Man makes a pretty good starting point, doesn’t it? By the way, CNN’s going to be at Pap’s church tomorrow and at Gerry Patterson’s. They’re switching off, preaching in each other’s pulpit for the memorial ceremonies, and CNN decided to cover it as a news event in and of itself. Good call, I think,” Jackson editorialized. “Wasn’t like that in Mississippi back when I was a boy.”