by Tom Clancy
“John, has anybody gone back to Brazil to—”
“Not that I know of. Satellite overheads show that nobody’s cutting the grass next to their airport.”
“So, you figure the jungle killed them?”
“Nature isn’t real sentimental, Domingo. She doesn’t distinguish between friends and enemies.”
“I suppose not, Mr. C.” Even terrorists could do that, Chavez thought, but not the jungle. So, who was the real enemy of mankind? Himself, mostly, Ding decided, setting the newspaper down and looking again at the photo of John Conor Chavez, who’d just learned to sit up and smile. His son would grow into the Brave New World, and his father would be one of those who tried to ensure that it would be a safe one—for him and all the other kids whose main tasks were learning to walk and talk.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
CHAPTER 1 - Echoes of the Boom
CHAPTER 2 - The Dead Goddess
CHAPTER 3 - The Problems with Riches
CHAPTER 4 - Knob Rattling
CHAPTER 5 - Headlines
CHAPTER 6 - Expansion
CHAPTER 7 - Developing Leads
CHAPTER 8 - Underlings and Underthings
CHAPTER 9 - Initial Results
CHAPTER 10 - Lessons of the Trade
CHAPTER 11 - Faith of the Fathers
CHAPTER 12 - Conflicts of the Pocket
CHAPTER 13 - Penetration Agent
CHAPTER 14 - (dot)com
CHAPTER 15 - Exploitation
CHAPTER 16 - The Smelting of Gold
CHAPTER 17 - The Coinage of Gold
CHAPTER 18 - Evolutions
CHAPTER 19 - Manhunting
CHAPTER 20 - Diplomacy
CHAPTER 21 - Simmering
CHAPTER 22 - The Table and the Recipe
CHAPTER 23 - Down to Business
CHAPTER 24 - Infanticide
CHAPTER 25 - Fence Rending
CHAPTER 26 - Glass Houses and Rocks
CHAPTER 27 - Transportation
CHAPTER 28 - Collision Courses
CHAPTER 29 - Billy Budd
CHAPTER 30 - And the Rights of Men
CHAPTER 31 - The Protection of Rights
CHAPTER 32 - Coalition Collision
CHAPTER 33 - Square One
CHAPTER 34 - Hits
CHAPTER 35 - Breaking News
CHAPTER 36 - SORGE Reports
CHAPTER 37 - Fallout
CHAPTER 38 - Developments
CHAPTER 39 - The Other Question
CHAPTER 40 - Fashion Statements
CHAPTER 41 - Plots of State
CHAPTER 42 - Birch Trees
CHAPTER 43 - Decisions
CHAPTER 44 - The Shape of a New World Order
CHAPTER 45 - Ghosts of Horrors Past
CHAPTER 46 - Journey Home
CHAPTER 47 - Outlooks and All-Nighters
CHAPTER 48 - Opening Guns
CHAPTER 49 - Disarming
CHAPTER 50 - Thunder and Lightning
CHAPTER 51 - Falling Back
CHAPTER 52 - Deep Battle
CHAPTER 53 - Deep Concerns
CHAPTER 54 - Probes and Pushes
CHAPTER 55 - Looks and Hurts
CHAPTER 56 - March to Danger
CHAPTER 57 - Hyperwar
CHAPTER 58 - Political Fallout
CHAPTER 59 - Loss of Control
CHAPTER 60 - Skyrockets in Flight
CHAPTER 61 - Revolution
“Heart-stopping action ... Clancy still reigns.”
—The Washington Post
“Nobody can touch his gift for describing combat.”
—People
THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON
President Jack Ryan faces a world crisis unlike any he has ever known, in Tom Clancy’s extraordinary novel of international suspense....
A high-level assassination attempt in Russia has newly elected Ryan sending his most trusted eyes and ears—including antiterrorism specialist John Clark—to Moscow, for he fears the worst is yet to come. And he’s right. The attempt has left the already unstable Russia vulnerable to ambitious forces in China eager to fulfill their destiny—and change the face of the world as we know it....
“Builds to an excitingly cinematic climax as Ryan toils
to bring the world back from the brink of nuclear war.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Megasuspense ... thrilling.”
—The Indianapolis Star
NOVELS BY TOM CLANCY
The Hunt for Red October
Red Storm Rising
Patriot Games
The Cardinal of the Kremlin
Clear and Present Danger
The Sum of All Fears
Without Remorse
Debt of Honor
Executive Orders
Rainbow Six
The Bear and the Dragon
Red Rabbit
The Teeth of the Tiger
SSN: Strategies of Submarine Warfare
NONFICTION
Submarine: A Guided Tour Inside a Nuclear Warship
Armored Cav: A Guided Tour of an Armored Cavalry Regiment
Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing
Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit
Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force
Carrier: A Guided Tour of an Aircraft Carrier
Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces
Into the Storm: A Study in Command
(written with General Fred Franks, Jr., Ret., and Tony Koltz)
Every Man a Tiger
(written with General Charles Horner, Ret., and Tony Koltz)
Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces
(written with General Carl Stiner, Ret., and Tony Koltz)
Battle Ready
(written with General Tony Zinni, Ret., and Tony Koltz)
CREATED BY TOM CLANCY
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Operation Barracuda
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Checkmate
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Fallout
CREATED BY TOM CLANCY AND STEVE PIECZENIK
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center : Games of State
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center : Acts of War
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Balance of Power
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: State of Siege
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Divide and Conquer
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Line of Control
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mission of Honor
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center : Sea of Fire
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center : Call to Treason
Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: War of Eagles
Tom Clancy’s Net Force
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Hidden Agendas
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Night Moves
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Breaking Point
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Point of Impact
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: CyberNation
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: State of War
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Changing of the Guard
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Springboard
Tom Clancy’s Net Force: The Archimedes Effect
CREATED BY TOM CLANCY AND MARTIN GREENBERG
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Politika
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: ruthless.com
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Shadow Watch
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Bio-Strike
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Cold War
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Cutting Edge
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Zero Hour
Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Wild Card
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON
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Acknowledgments
As always, some friends were there to help:
Roland, the screw in Colorado,
for the superb language lesson—
good luck looking after your wayward children—
Harry, the kid in the ether world,
for some unexpected information,
John G., my gateway into
the world of technology,
And Charles, a fine teacher from long ago,
and probably a pretty good soldier, too.
History admires the wise, but it elevates the brave.
—EDMUND MORRIS
PROLOGUE
The White Mercedes
Going to work was the same everywhere, and the changeover from Marxism-Leninism to Chaos-Capitalism hadn’t changed matters much—well, maybe things were now a little worse. Moscow, a city of wide streets, was harder to drive in now that nearly anyone could have a car, and the center lane down the wide boulevards was no longer tended by militiamen for the Politburo and used by Central Committee men who considered it a personal right-of-way, like Czarist princes in their troika sleds. Now it was a left-turn lane for anyone with a Zil or other private car. In the case of Sergey Nikolay’ch Golovko, the car was a white Mercedes 600, the big one with the S-class body and twelve cylinders of German power under the hood. There weren’t many of them in Moscow, and truly his was an extravagance that ought to have embarrassed him ... but didn’t. Maybe there were no more nomenklatura in this city, but rank did have its privileges, and he was chairman of the SVR. His apartment was also large, on the top floor of a high-rise building on Kutusovskiy Prospekt, a structure relatively new and well-made, down to the German appliances which were a long-standing luxury accorded senior government officials.
He didn’t drive himself. He had Anatoliy for that, a burly former Spetsnaz special-operations soldier who carried a pistol under his coat and who drove the car with ferocious aggression, while tending it with loving care. The windows were coated with dark plastic, which denied the casual onlooker the sight of the people inside, and the windows were thick, made of polycarbonate and specced to stop anything up to a 12.7-mm bullet, or so the company had told Golovko’s purchasing agents sixteen months before. The armor made it nearly a ton heavier than was the norm for an S600 Benz, but the power and the ride didn’t seem to suffer from that. It was the uneven streets that would ultimately destroy the car. Road-paving was a skill that his country had not yet mastered, Golovko thought as he turned the page in his morning paper. It was the American International Herald Tribune, always a good source of news since it was a joint venture of The Washington Post and the New York Times, which were together two of the most skilled intelligence services in the world, if a little too arrogant to be the true professionals Sergey Nikolay’ch and his people were.
He’d joined the intelligence business when the agency had been known as the KGB, the Committee for State Security, still, he thought, the best such government department the world had ever known, even if it had ultimately failed. Golovko sighed. Had the USSR not fallen in the early 1990s, then his place as Chairman would have put him as a full voting member of the Politburo, a man of genuine power in one of the world’s two superpowers, a man whose mere gaze could make strong men tremble ... but ... no, what was the use of that? he asked himself. It was all an illusion, an odd thing for a man of supposed regard for objective truth to value. That had always been the cruel dichotomy. KGB had always been on the lookout for hard facts, but then reported those facts to people besotted with a dream, who then bent the truth in the service of that dream. When the truth had finally broken through, the dream had suddenly evaporated like a cloud of steam in a high wind, and reality had poured in like the flood following the breakup of an icebound river in springtime. And then the Politburo, those brilliant men who’d wagered their lives on the dream, had found that their theories had been only the thinnest of reeds, and reality was the swinging scythe, and the eminence bearing that tool didn’t deal in salvation.
But it was not so for Golovko. A dealer in facts, he’d been able to continue his profession, for his government still needed them. In fact, his authority was broader now than it would have been, because as a man who well knew the surrounding world and some of its more important personalities intimately, he was uniquely suited to advising his president, and so he had a voice in foreign policy, defense, and domestic matters. Of them, the third was the trickiest lately, which had rarely been the case before. It was now also the most dangerous. It was an odd thing. Previously, the mere spoken (more often, shouted) phrase “State Security!” would freeze Soviet citizens in their stride, for KGB had been the most feared organ of the previous government, with power such as Reinhart Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst had only dreamed about, the power to arrest, imprison, interrogate, and to kill any citizen it wished, with no recourse at all. But that, too, was a thing of the past. Now KGB was split, and the domestic-security branch was a shadow of its former self, while the SVR—formerly the First Chief Directorate—still gathered information, but lacked the immediate strength that had come with being able to enforce the will, if not quite the law, of the communist government. But his current duties were still vast, Golovko told himself, folding the paper.
He was only a kilometer away from Dzerzhinskiy Square. That, too, was no longer the same. The statue of Iron Feliks was gone. It had always been a chilling sight to those who’d known who the man was whose bronze image had stood alone in the square, but now it, too, was a distant memory. The building behind it was the same, however. Once the stately home office of the Rossiya Insurance Company, it had lat
er been known as the Lubyanka, a fearsome word even in the fearsome land ruled by Iosef Vissarionovich Stalin, with its basement full of cells and interrogation rooms. Most of those functions had been transferred over the years to Lefortovo Prison to the east, as the KGB bureaucracy had grown, as all such bureaucracies grow, filling the vast building like an expanding balloon, as it claimed every room and corner until secretaries and file clerks occupied the (remodeled) spaces where Kamenev and Ordzhonikidze had been tortured under the eyes of Yagoda and Beriya. Golovko supposed that there hadn’t been too many ghosts.
Well, a new working day beckoned. A staff meeting at 8:45, then the normal routine of briefings and discussions, lunch at 12:15, and with luck he’d be back in the car and on his way back home soon after six, before he had to change for the reception at the French Embassy. He looked forward to the food and wine, if not the conversation.
Another car caught his eye. It was a twin to his own, another large Mercedes S-class, iceberg white just like his own, complete down to the American-made dark plastic on the windows. It was driving purposefully in the bright morning, as Anatoliy slowed and pulled behind a dump truck, one of the thousand such large ugly vehicles that covered the streets of Moscow like a dominant life-form, this one’s load area cluttered with hand tools rather than filled with earth. There was yet another truck a hundred meters beyond, driving slowly as though its driver was unsure of his route. Golovko stretched in his seat, barely able to see around the truck in front of his Benz, wishing for the first cup of Sri Lankan tea at his desk, in the same room that Beriya had once ...