Politika pp-1

by Tom Clancy

  Still holding the guy by his wrist, Perry moved in on him and jammed his knee into his crotch. The guy doubled over, clutching himself. Then he sank to the ground.

  Perry was bending to snatch up the knife up when he heard the loud crash of breaking glass.

  He glanced quickly over at the shorter man. Holding the bottle by its neck, he had smashed it against the side of a building, shaken off the paper bag, and was waving its jagged stump at Scull. Beer and suds were running down the wall where he’d shattered it.

  Scull grinned slightly. The guy swiped the bottle stump at him, shaking droplets of liquid from the pointy spurs of glass. Scull felt a rush of air against his face and slipped backward an instant before it would have torn into his cheek. Then he reached into his jacket pocket, brought out a thin metal OC canister, and thumbed down its sprayhead. A conical mist discharged from its nozzle into his attacker’s face. The guy gagged, dropped the broken bottle, and began to stagger around blindly, clutching at his face as the pepper spray dilated the capillaries of his eyes and swelled the soft membranes in his nose and throat. Scull shoved the canister back into his pocket, spun him around by the shoulder, and drove an uppercut into his middle. The guy sagged to his knees beside his friend, gasping for breath, thick ropes of mucus glistening on his chin.

  Scull looked down at him without moving. Disoriented, his eyes red and teary, the guy still hadn’t quit. He struggled to pull himself upright and somehow managed to get his knees under him. Scull swung his leg out and kicked him full in the face. He dropped back to the ground, his hands covering his nose, blood spurting through his fingers.

  “Should’ve stayed down,” Scull muttered.

  Perry realized that he still had the taller guy’s gravity knife in his hand. He folded the blade into the handle and slipped it into the back pocket of his trousers.

  Then he felt a tug on his sleeve. The old woman. She had stepped forward, a smile on her plump, upturned face.

  “Spasibo,” she said, thanking him in Russian. She pulled two oranges from her canvas bag and held them out for him to take. “Bolshoya spasibo.”

  Perry put his hand on her arm.

  “Thanks for offering, Grandmother, but you should keep them for yourself,” he said, motioning for her to return the fruit to her sack. “Go home now. Bishir yetso.”

  “We’d better get out of here ourselves,” Scull said.

  Perry glanced both ways. A crowd had begun to gather around them. The cars and buses had continued their slow progress along the street, though many rubberneckers were pausing at the curb to get a look at the commotion.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Still want that drink?”

  “I’m thirstier than ever,” Scull said.

  “Then lead the way,” Perry said.

  They hurried off down the street.

  EIGHT

  WASHINGTON, D.C. NOVEMBER 5, 1999

  It seemed to Gordian that Dan Parker had been watching his back for as long as they’d known each other… which was now something like thirty-five years. In Nam, when both served with the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing, he had been wingman to Gordian’s lead in the countless bombing runs they had made over enemy territory. Going low against VC strongpoints in their F-4 Phantoms, they had learned the difficulty of hitting camouflaged, dug-in targets with their payloads at speeds approaching Mach 2—and come to understand the importance of developing guided weapons systems that would allow pilots to drop their ordnance in tight spots without having to fly multiple passes over their objectives, while practically holding their fingers up into the wind to decide which way it was blowing.

  Gordian’s final day in a warplane — and in the war, for that matter — had been January 20, 1968, when he was downed during a close-support mission about four miles east of Khe Sanh. Ditching out of his fiery cockpit over an enemy-held ridge, he had scarcely shucked his parachute before he found himself surrounded by a bristling ring of North Vietnamese machine guns. As a pilot, he had been a prized catch, able to provide information about Air Force tactics and technology… and valuable enough for his captors to put him in a specimen cage rather than mount his head on a trophy wall. But throughout his five-year imprisonment in the Hanoi Hilton he had kept what he knew to himself, resisting carrot-and-stick coercions that had ranged from promises of early release to solitary confinement and torture.

  Meanwhile, Dan had completed his second tour of duty in ’70 and returned to the States with a chest full of military decorations. The son of a prominent California congressman, he’d successfully pressured his social and political contacts to get a Red Cross pipeline through to Gordian. The humanitarian teams had provided basic medical treatment, delivered letters and care packages, and reported back to Gordian’s family about his condition, all despite an uncooperative North Vietnamese government that had done little more than pay lip service to the Geneva Convention.

  Dan’s efforts on his friend’s behalf hardly stopped there. As the Paris peace talks staggered toward a cease-fire agreement, he had twisted arms to ensure that Gordian was among the first prisoners of war to be released. And although Gordian emerged from captivity weakened and underweight, he was in vastly better shape than he would have been without Dan’s unfailing support.

  In the following decades, that support would reach across to the professional arena even as their friendship and mutual respect took on increasingly greater dimension. Their experiences in Vietnam had left both men convinced of the need for technology that would combine advanced navigation and reconnaissance capabilities with a precision missile delivery system. Together they had been forced to rely on guesswork time and again when making their strikes, placing their lives in jeopardy and causing unnecessary collateral damage to civilian locations. And Gordian had never forgotten that he owed his incarceration in a POW camp to a Russian surface-to-air missile that he hadn’t seen coming. While things had changed dramatically since the advent of smart weapons, there was still a lack of integration — a gap, so to speak — between infrared-targeting and radar surveillance systems.

  By the late eighties, Gordian had begun to see how it was at least theoretically possible to fill that gap using modern satellite communications… and Dan was in a position to help him obtain the funding he needed to make those ideas a reality. Having followed in his father’s footsteps, he had pursued a career in politics, and in his third term as a congressman from California occupied seats on several House allocations committees. His confidence in Gordian had been instrumental in shaking loose underwriting grants which, added to Gordian’s own huge investment of corporate profits into R&D, opened the way for the development of GAPSFREE, the most impressive jewel in UpLink’s wire-and-silicon crown.

  In terms of its adaptability to existing avionics and communications hardware, GAPSFREE was almost too good a package to be believed. Interfacing with orbital Global Positioning System satellites, it allowed the pilot or weapons officer of a fighter plane to know exactly where he was in relation to his target, or what was targeting him, providing real-time data relayed directly from the satellites to onboard navigational computers, and using synthetic-aperture radar to peer through fog and battle smoke. The system was also light and compact enough to be enclosed in a weapons pod that could be affixed to hardpoints on even low-tech aircraft like the A-10, transforming them — in combination with some cockpit modifications — into lethal fighter-bombers able to launch the smartest of smart weapons. This versatility made GAPSFREE the cheapest and most effective guidance system for missiles and precision guided munitions ever designed.

  Not surprisingly, it also made Gordian’s firm the worldwide leader in recon tech.

  And made Gordian a very, very rich man.

  Having reached this sort of professional milestone, many entrepreneurs would have retired, or at least rested on their laurels. But Gordian had already begun pushing his ideas toward their next logical phase. Parlaying his tremendous success, he expanded his corporation in numerous ways, moving in
to dozens of countries, opening up new markets, and absorbing local chemical, communications, telephone, and industrial holdings on all four continents. His ultimate goal was to create a single, world spanning, satellite-based communications network that would allow phone transmissions to be made inexpensively from a mobile phone — or fax, or modem — to a destination anywhere on the globe.

  What drove him was neither ego nor a desire for greater wealth, but a belief that this system could truly make a difference in the lives of millions, perhaps billions of people, bringing communications services and technology to every spot on earth. In his eyes, rapid access to information was a weapon. He had returned from Vietnam with a firm commitment to do what he could to stand up to totalitarian governments and oppressive regimes. And he had seen firsthand how no such government could stand in the face of freedom of communication.

  To achieve his goal, however, he needed the support of the governments of a dozen or more key countries. He needed them to assign radio frequencies to his company; he needed them to give him access to their space programs to provide for the scores of low-earth-orbit satellite launches that NASA simply couldn’t handle; and he needed them to allow him to build ground stations in countries scattered all across the planet, to link into his satellite network and feed signals into existing land lines.

  He also needed Dan Parker. Again. Of course. Since 1997, Dan had been guiding him through the regulatory tangle that had accompanied the evolution of handheld satellite communications. More recently, he’d been keeping tabs on events in Congress that could affect Gordian’s plans to have his Russian ground station operational by the end of the year.

  Now, sitting across from Dan at the Washington Palm on Nineteenth Street, Gordian took a drink of his beer and glanced up at the sports and political cartoons covering the walls. Stirring his martini to melt the ice cubes, Dan looked impatient for their food to arrive. Gordian couldn’t remember him ever not being impatient when he was expecting his food.

  They were at their regular corner table beneath an affectionate caricature of Tiger Woods. A decade ago, when they’d started having their monthly lunches here, the drawing in that spot had been of O.J. Simpson. Then that had come down and one of Marv Albert had taken its place. Then Albert was removed and Woods had gone up.

  “Tiger,” Gordian mused aloud. “An all-American legend.”

  “Let’s keep our fingers crossed he stays up there,” Parker said.

  “He goes, who’ll be left?”

  Dan shook his head. “Secretariat, maybe.”

  “Maybe,” Gordian said.

  They waited some more. The people around them were mostly political staffers, reporters, and lobbyists, with a sprinkling of tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of someone important. So far Gordian hadn’t noticed any stargazers looking in his direction. He wondered idly if he was having a bad hair day.

  “So,” he said, “how about you tell me about Delacroix’s latest isolationist rants.”

  Dan eyed someone eating a corned beef sandwich at the next table.

  “I want my food,” he said.

  “I know,” Gordian said. “I was hoping to take your mind off it.”

  Dan shrugged.

  “From what I hear from my colleagues in the Senate, Delacroix’s been pressing the themes you’d expect. Talking about the cost of an aid commitment to Russia, pointing out — correctly, I should mention — that the bill for our peacekeeping mission in Bosnia has wound up being five times higher than the early projections. And that the Russian parliament and banking system are largely controlled by organized crime, which means a percentage of any loans we extend will probably be skimmed by corrupt officials.”

  Gordian took another drink of beer. “What else?”

  “He’s claiming the President’s offer amounts to appeasement… the argument being that he’s trying to buy concessions in the next round of START and nuclear testban talks with candy, rather than score points through hardball negotiations.”

  Gordian spotted a waiter moving toward them with a serving tray balanced on his arm.

  “Our sirloins are here,” he said.

  “Thank God,” Dan said, and snapped open his napkin. “How long we been waiting?”

  Gordian checked his watch. “A whopping ten minutes.”

  They sat in silence as their plates were set in front of them and the waiter zipped off.

  Dan reached for his silverware and attacked his steak.

  “Gooood,” he growled, mimicking Boris Karloff in Bride of Frankenstein.

  Gordian started on his own lunch, giving Dan a chance to come up for air before resuming their conversation.

  “You’ve given me Delacroix’s publicly stated objections to the proposal,” he said. “What about his underlying, politically opportunistic ones?”

  Dan looked at him and chewed a slice of meat.

  “Nice to know you think so lowly of your elected officials.”

  “Present company excepted,” Gordian said.

  “You remember when Delacroix led the push for social services reductions a few years ago?” Dan asked.

  “Hard to forget,” Gordian said. “Didn’t he spear a giant stuffed pig on the Senate floor or something?”

  “Actually, that happened during a more recent session. And it was a piñata.” Dan worked at the steak with his knife and fork. “His prop for the cutback debate was a giant mechanical mouth.”

  “At least he consistently thinks big.”

  Dan grinned. “The point is, nobody’s forgotten his stance, which was considered bullish and hard-hearted even by conservatives. And now he’s afraid it’ll look bad if he keeps quiet about millions of dollars’ worth of food and financial aid going to foreigners… Russians, no less.”

  Gordian shook his head. “The two issues aren’t related. Even if we want to ignore the critical nature of the emergency—”

  “Which is being questioned…”

  “It still boils down to a matter of strategic importance for our country,” Gordian said.

  Dan drained his martini and signaled for another one. “Look, I don’t like having to defend the Louisiana pit bull. But try to imagine what Delacroix’s political opponents will make of his going along with the aid program. The very same people who are in favor of it will accuse him of hypocrisy, and remind the public that he’s the guy who wanted school lunches taken away from American kids.”

  Gordian was silent again. He looked down at his plate. Ever since Ashley had instructed their personal chef to omit the red meat from their meals — he couldn’t quite recall if it was the saturated fat content, carcinogenic antibiotics, or steroidal growth additives that bothered her — his steak lunches at the Palm had taken on a rebellious air, become a respite, even an escape, from the healthful monotony of tossed greens and seafood and grilled chicken breast. And to enhance this forbidden pleasure, to experience it in all its cholesterol-soaked fullness, he had gone from having his steaks served medium-rare to a bare, dripping step from raw. Once a month, he broke free of all dietary shackles to become a wolf, a carnivorous alpha male, sinking his fangs into bloody flesh after a successful hunt.

  Today, however, he hadn’t been able to muster much of an appetite. His steak looked so neglected he almost wanted to give it an apology.

  “A couple of people from my Russian team were in Kaliningrad the other day,” he said. “You remember Vince Scull? I introduced him to you a while back.”

  Parker nodded.

  “The scenario-planning expert,” he said. “Sharp guy. Kind of struck me as the, uh, moody type, though.”

  “I don’t pay him to be adorable. There’s nobody better than Vince at anticipating big bang problems, and he left that city convinced there’ll be food riots throughout Russia within a month.” Gordian paused a moment, caught the waiter’s eye, and motioned at his empty beer mug. “Twenty years ago, when he was working for a Canadian investment firm in Iran, he advised his employers to get their staff out of th
e country. The company honchos thought his appraisal of the political climate was overly bleak. Six days later, the Ayatollah assumed power and the U.S. embassy staff was taken hostage. Scull stuck around to smuggle out some of the company’s American workers. When the danger to them was past, he resigned, and I snapped him up.”

  “What makes him so certain of disaster this time?”

  “A lot of things. I can fax you a copy of his report, if you’d like. But his contention’s that Kaliningrad is less reliant on domestic food supplies than other cities, I think because a lot of imported stuff comes through its free trade port. Yet the markets there were dry. If the people in that city are hurting, it’s going to be rougher in places like St. Petersburg, or even the capital.” Gordian’s fresh beer arrived and he took a drink. “I know it’s anecdotal, but Vince even got into a confrontation with some punks who tried running off with an old lady’s grocery bag. This is a half hour after he drove into town.”

  “As goes Kaliningrad, so goes the Federation,” Parker said. “That what you’re telling me?”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  Dan sighed. “Maybe the incident you mentioned clouded up Scull’s crystal ball. Or could be he’s just plain wrong. It happens to the best.”

  “So Starinov came here begging for a handout for nothing? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “You ask Bob Delacroix, he’d say the minister’s been exaggerating the severity of the crisis. That he needs a hot-button issue that’ll grab attention away from that Pedachenko character. Make him look like a statesman who can stand among other world leaders.”

  Gordian looked at him, his gray eyes firm.