The Bear and the Dragon

a little more than they would have preferred. But some things couldn’t be helped.

“Well, Angelo, I think your troopers have earned themselves a beer or two at the local Gasthauses. That envelopment you accomplished at zero-two-twenty was particularly adroit.”

Giusti grinned and nodded his appreciation. “Thank you, General. I’ll pass that one along to my S-3. He’s the one who thought it up.”

“Later, Angelo.”

“Roger that one, sir.” Lieutenant Colonel Giusti saluted his divisional commander on his way.

“Well, Duke?”

Colonel Masterman pulled a cigar out of his BDU jacket and lit it up. One nice thing about Germany was that you could always get good Cuban ones here. “I’ve known Angelo since Fort Knox. He knows his stuff, and he had his officers particularly well trained. Even had his own book on tactics and battle-drill printed up.”

“Oh?” Diggs turned. “Is it any good?”

“Not bad at all,” the G-3 replied. “I’m not sure that I agree with it all, but it doesn’t hurt to have everyone singing out of the same hymnal. His officers all think pretty much the same way. So, Angelo’s a good football coach. Sure enough he kicked the Krauts’ asses last night.” Masterman closed his eyes and rubbed his face. “These night exercises take it out of you.”

“How’s Lisle doing?”

“Sir, last time I looked, he had the Germans well contained. Our friends didn’t seem to know what he had around them. They were putzing around trying to gather information-short version, Giusti won the reconnaissance battle, and that decided things-again.”

“Again,” Diggs agreed. If there was any lesson out of the National Training Center, it was that one. Reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance. Find the enemy. Don’t let the enemy find you. If you pulled that off, it was pretty hard to lose. If you didn’t, it was very hard to win.

“How’s some sleep grab you, Duke?”

“It’s good to have a CG who looks after his troopers, mon General.” Masterman was sufficiently tired that he didn’t even want a beer first.

And so with that decided, they headed for Diggs’s command UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter for the hop back to the divisional kazerne. Diggs particularly liked the four-point safety belt. It made it a lot easier to sleep sitting up.

One of the things I have to do today, Ryan told himself, is figure out what to do about the Chinese attempt on Sergey. He checked his daily briefing sheet. Robby was out west again. That was too bad. Robby was both a good sounding board and a source of good ideas. So, he’d talk it over with Scott Adler, if he and Scott both had holes in their day, and the Foleys. Who else? Jack wondered. Damn, whom else could he trust with this? If this one leaked to the press, there’d be hell to pay. Okay, Adler had to be there. He’d actually met that Zhang guy, and if some Chinese minister-type had owned a piece of this, then he’d be the one, wouldn’t he?

Probably. Not certainly, however. Ryan had been in the spook business too long to make that mistake. When you made certainty assumptions about things you weren’t really sure about, you frequently walked right into a stone wall headfirst, and that could hurt. Ryan punched a button on his desk. “Ellen?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Later today, I need Scott Adler and the Foleys in here. It’ll take about an hour. Find me a hole in the schedule, will you?”

“About two-thirty, but it means putting off the Secretary of Transportation’s meeting about the air-traffic- control proposals.”

“Make it so, Ellen. This one’s important,” he told her.

“Yes, Mr. President.”

It was by no means perfect. Ryan preferred to work on things as they popped into his mind, but as President you quickly learned that you served the schedule, not the other way around. Jack grimaced. So much for the illusion of power.

Mary Pat Foley strolled into her office, as she did nearly every morning, and as always turned on her computer-if there was one thing she’d learned from SORGE, it was to turn the damned thing all the way off when she wasn’t using it. There was a further switch on her phone line that manually blocked it, much as if she’d pulled the plug out of the wall. She flipped that, too. It was an old story for an employee of an intelligence service. Sure, she was paranoid, but was she paranoid enough?

Sure enough, there was another e-mail from cgood@jadecastle.com. Chet Nomuri was still at work, and this download took a mere twenty-three seconds. With the download complete, she made sure she’d backed it up, then clobbered it out of her in-box so that no copies remained even in the ether world. Next, she printed it all up and called down for Joshua Sears to do the translations and some seat-of-the-pants analysis. SORGE had become routine in handling if not in importance, and by a quarter to nine she had the translation in hand.

“Oh, Lord. Jack’s just going to love this one,” the DDO observed at her desk. Then she walked the document to Ed’s larger office facing the woods. That’s when she found out about the afternoon trip to the White House.

Mary Abbot was the official White House makeup artist. It was her job to make the President look good on TV, which meant making him look like a cheap whore in person, but that couldn’t be helped. Ryan had learned not to fidget too much, which made her job easier, but she knew he was fighting the urge, which both amused and concerned her.

“How’s your son doing at school?” Ryan asked.

“Just fine, thank you, and there’s a nice girl he’s interested in.”

Ryan didn’t comment on that. He knew that there had to be some boy or boys at St. Mary’s who found his Sally highly interesting (she was pretty, even to disinterested eyes), but he didn’t want to think about that. It did make him grateful for the Secret Service, however. Whenever Sally went on a date, there would be at least a chase car full of armed agents close by, and that would take the starch out of most teenaged boys. So, the USSS did have its uses, eh? Girl children, Jack thought, were God’s punishment on you for being a man. His eyes were scanning his briefing sheets for the mini- press conference. The likely questions and the better sorts of answers to give to them. It seemed very dishonest to do it this way, but some foreign heads of government had the question prescreened so that the answers could be properly canned. Not a bad idea in the abstract, Jack thought, but the American media would spring for that about as quickly as a coyote would chase after a whale.

“There,” Mrs. Abbot said, as she finished touching up his hair. Ryan stood, looked in the mirror, and grimaced as usual.

“Thank you, Mary,” he managed to say.

“You’re welcome, Mr. President.”

And Ryan walked out, crossing the hall from the Roosevelt Room to the Oval Office, where the TV equipment was set up. The reporters stood when he entered, as the kids at St. Matthew’s had stood when the priest came into class. But in third grade, the kids asked easier questions. Jack sat down in a rocking swivel chair. Kennedy had done something similar to that, and Arnie thought it a good idea for Jack as well. The gentle rocking that a man did unconsciously in the chair gave him a homey look, the spin experts all thought-Jack didn’t know that, and knowing it would have caused him to toss the chair out the window, but Arnie did and he’d eased the President into it merely by saying it looked good, and getting Cathy Ryan to agree. In any case, SWORDSMAN sat down, and relaxed in the comfortable chair, which was the other reason Arnie had foisted it on him, and the real reason why Ryan had agreed. It was comfortable.

“We ready?” Jack asked. When the President asked that, it usually meant Let’s get this fucking show on the road! But Ryan thought it was just a question.

Krystin Matthews was there to represent NBC. There were also reporters from ABC and Fox, plus a print reporter from the Chicago Tribune. Ryan had come to prefer these more intimate press conferences, and the media went along with it because the reporters were assigned by lot, which made it fair, and