The Bear and the Dragon

add, TRW.

“I’m not here to make them happy, Admiral. Somebody told me I was here to defend the country efficiently.”

“Yes, sir.” It was hard not to like the guy, even if he did have the bureaucratic sensibilities of a pissed-off rhinoceros.

“So let’s find out if Aegis has the technical capabilities to do this particular job.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“What time do I have to drive up to the Hill?” the SecDef asked next.

“About thirty minutes, sir.”

Bretano grumbled. Half his working time seemed to be spent explaining things to Congress, talking to people who’d already made up their minds and who only asked questions to look good on C-SPAN. For Tony Bretano, an engineer’s engineer, it seemed like a hellishly unproductive way to spend his time. But they called it public service, didn’t they? In a slightly different context, it was called slavery, but Ryan was even more trapped than he was, leaving THUNDER with little room to complain. And besides, he’d volunteered, too.

They were eager enough, these Spetsnaz junior officers, and Clark remembered that what makes elite troops is often the simple act of telling them that they are elite-then waiting for them to live up to their own self-image. There was a little more to it, of course. The Spetsnaz were special in terms of their mission. Essentially they’d been copies of the British Special Air Service. As so often happened in military life, what one country invented, other countries tended to copy, and so the Soviet Army had selected troops for unusually good fitness tests and a high degree of political reliability-Clark never learned exactly how one tested for that characteristic-and then assigned them a different training regimen, turning them into commandos. The initial concept had failed for a reason predictable to anyone but the political leadership of the Soviet Union: The great majority of Soviet soldiers were drafted, served two years, then went back home. The average member of the British SAS wasn’t even considered for membership until he’d served four years and had corporal’s stripes, for the simple reason that it takes more than two years to learn to be a competent soldier in ordinary duties, much less the sort that required thinking under fire-yet another problem for the Soviets, who didn’t encourage independent thought for any of those in uniform, much less conscripted non-officers. To compensate for this, some clever weapons had been thought up. The spring-loaded knife was one with which Chavez had played earlier in the day. At the push of a button, it shot off the blade of a serious combat knife with a fair degree of accuracy over a range of five or six meters. But the Soviet engineer who’d come up with this idea must have been a movie watcher, because only in the movies do men fall silently and instantly dead from a knife in the chest. Most people find this experience painful, and most people respond to pain by making noise. As an instructor at The Farm, Clark had always warned, “Never cut a man’s throat with a knife. They flop around and make noise when you do that.”

By contrast, after all the thought and good engineering that had gone into the spring-knife, their pistol silencers were garbage, cans loaded with steel wool that self-destructed after less than ten shots, when manufacturing a decent suppressor required only about fifteen minutes of work from a semi-skilled machinist. John sighed to himself. There was no understanding these people.

But the individual troopers were just fine. He’d watched them run with Ding’s Team-2, and not one of the Russians fell out of the formation. Part of that had been pride, of course, but most of it had been ability. The shoot-house experience had been less impressive. They weren’t as carefully trained as the boys from Hereford, and not nearly so well equipped. Their supposedly suppressed weapons were sufficiently noisy to make John and Ding both jump … but for all that, the eagerness of these kids was impressive. Every one of the Russians was a senior lieutenant in rank, and each was airborne-qualified. They all were pretty good with light weapons-and the Russian snipers were as good as Homer Johnston and Dieter Weber, much to the surprise of the latter. The Russian sniper rifles looked a little clunky, but they shot pretty well-at least out to eight hundred meters.

“Mr. C, they have a ways to go, but they got spirit. Two weeks, and they’ll be right on line,” Chavez pronounced, looking skeptically at the vodka. They were in a Russian officers’ club, and there was plenty of the stuff about.

“Only two?” John asked.

“In two weeks, they’ll have all their skills down pat, and they’ll master the new weapons.” RAINBOW was transferring five complete team-sets of weapons to the Russian Spetsnaz team: MP-10 submachine guns, Beretta.45 pistols, and most important, the radio gear that allowed the team to communicate even when under fire. The Russians were keeping their own Dragunov long-rifles, which was partly pride, but the things could shoot, and that was sufficient to the mission. “The rest is just experience, John, and we can’t really give ‘em that. All we can really do is set up a good training system for ’em, and the rest they’ll do for themselves.”

“Well, nobody ever said Ivan couldn’t fight.” Clark downed a shot. The working day was over, and everybody else was doing it.

“Shame their country’s in such a mess,” Chavez observed.

“It’s their mess to clean up, Domingo. They’ll do it if we keep out of their way.” Probably, John didn’t add. The hard part for him was thinking of them as something other than the enemy. He’d been here in the Bad Old Days, operating briefly on several occasions in Moscow as an “illegal” field officer, which in retrospect seemed like parading around Fifth Avenue in New York stark naked holding up a sign saying he hated Jews, blacks, and NYPD cops. At the time, it had just seemed like part of the job, John remembered. But now he was older, a grandfather, and evidently a lot more chicken than he’d been back in the ‘70s and ’80s. Jesus, the chances he’d taken back then! More recently, he’d been in KGB-to him it would always be KGB-headquarters at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square as a guest of the Chairman. Sure, Wilbur, and soon he’d hop in the alien spacecraft that landed every month in his backyard and accept their invitation for a luncheon flight to Mars. It felt about that crazy, John thought.

“Ivan Sergeyevich!” a voice called. It was Lieutenant General Yuriy Kirillin, the newly selected chief of Russian special forces-a man defining his own job as he went along, which was not the usual thing in this part of the world.

“Yuriy Andreyevich,” Clark responded. He’d kept his given name and patronymic from his CIA cover as a convenience that, he was sure, the Russians knew all about anyway. So, no harm was done. He lifted a vodka bottle. It was apple vodka, flavored by some apple skins at the bottom of the bottle, and not bad to the taste. In any case, vodka was the fuel for any sort of business meeting in Russia, and since he was in Rome it was time to act Italian.

Kirillin gunned down his first shot as though he’d been waiting all week for it. He refilled and toasted John’s companion: “Domingo Stepanovich,” which was close enough. Chavez reciprocated the gesture. “Your men are excellent, comrades. We will learn much from them.”

Comrades, John thought. Son of a bitch! “Your boys are eager, Yuriy, and hard workers.”

“How long?” Kirillin asked. His eyes didn’t show the vodka one little bit. Perhaps they were immune, Ding thought. He had to go easy on the stuff, lest John have to guide him home.

“Two weeks,” Clark answered. “That’s what Domingo tells me.”

“That fast?” Kirillin asked, not displeased by the estimate.

“They’re good troops, General,” Ding said. “Their basic skills are there. They’re in superb physical condition, and they’re smart. All they need is familiarization with their new weapons, and some more directed training that we’ll set up for them. And after that, they’ll be training the rest of your forces, right?”

“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