The Bear and the Dragon

“The kid’s real good, Al,” John replied, as he put his pistol in the desk drawer.

“Indeed. He won five pounds off me last week.”

A grunt. “I guess that makes it unanimous.” John settled in his swivel chair, like the “suit” he’d become. “Okay, anything come in while I was off losing money?”

“Just this from Moscow. Ought not to have come here anyway,” Stanley told his boss, as he handed over the fax.

They want what?' Ed Foley asked in his seventh-floor office.

“They want us to help train some of their people,” Mary Pat repeated for her husband. The original message had been crazy enough to require repetition.

“Jesus, girl, how ecumenical are we supposed to get?” the DCI demanded.

“Sergey Nikolay’ch thinks we owe him one. And you know …”

He had to nod at that. “Yeah, well, maybe we do, I guess. This has to go up the line, though.”

“It ought to give Jack a chuckle,” the Deputy Director (Operations) thought.

Shit,' Ryan said in the Oval Office, when Ellen Sumter handed him the fax from Langley. Then he looked up. ”Oh, excuse me, Ellen.'

She smiled like a mother to a precocious son. “Yes, Mr. President.”

“Got one I can …?”

Mrs. Sumter had taken to wearing dresses with large slash pockets. From the left one, she fished out a flip- top box of Virginia Slims and offered it to her President, who took one out and lit it from the butane lighter also tucked in the box.

“Well, ain’t this something?”

“You know this man, don’t you?” Mrs. Sumter asked.

“Golovko? Yeah.” Ryan smiled crookedly, again remembering the pistol in his face as the VC-137 thundered down the runway at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport all those years before. He could smile now. At the time, it hadn’t seemed all that funny. “Oh, yeah, Sergey and I are old friends.”

As a Presidential secretary, Ellen Sumter was cleared for just about everything, even the fact that President Ryan bummed the occasional smoke, but there were some things she didn’t and would never know. She was smart enough to have curiosity, but also smart enough not to ask.

“If you say so, Mr. President.”

“Thanks, Ellen.” Ryan sat back down in his chair and took a long puff on the slender cigarette. Why was it that stress of any sort made him gravitate back to these damned things that made him cough? The good news was that they also made him dizzy. So, that meant he wasn’t a smoker, not really, POTUS told himself. He read over the fax again. It had two pages. One was the original fax from Sergey Nikolay’ch to Langley- unsurprisingly, he had Mary Pat’s direct fax line, and wanted to show off that fact-and the second was the recommendation from Edward Foley, his CIA director.

For all the official baggage, it was pretty simple stuff. Golovko didn’t even have to explain why America had to accede to his request. The Foleys and Jack Ryan would know that KGB had assisted the CIA and the American government in two very sensitive and important missions, and the fact that both of them had also served Russian interests was beside the point. Thus Ryan had no alternative. He lifted the phone and punched a speed-dial button.

“Foley,” the male voice at the other end said.

“Ryan,” Jack said in turn. He then heard the guy at the other end sit up straighter in his chair. “Got the fax.”

“And?” the DCI asked.

“And what the hell else can we do?”

“I agree.” Foley could have said that he personally liked Sergey Golovko. Ryan did, too, as he knew. But this wasn’t about like or don’t-like. They were making government policy here, and that was bigger than personal factors. Russia had helped the United States of America, and now Russia was asking the United States of America for help in return. In the regular intercourse among nations, such requests, if they had precedents, had to be granted. The principle was the same as lending your neighbor a rake after he had lent you a hose the previous day, just that at this level, people occasionally got killed from such favors. “You handle it or do I?”

“The request came to Langley. You do the reply. Find out what the parameters are. We don’t want to compromise Rainbow, do we?”

“No, Jack, but there’s not much chance of that. Europe’s quieted down quite a bit. The Rainbow troopers are mainly exercising and punching holes in paper. That news story that ran-well, we might actually want to thank the putz who broke it.” The DCI rarely said anything favorable about the press. And in this case some government puke had talked far too much about something he knew, but the net effect of the story had had the desired effect, even though the press account had been replete with errors, which was hardly surprising. But some of the errors had made Rainbow appear quite superhuman, which appealed to their egos and gave their potential enemies pause. And so, terrorism in Europe had slowed down to a crawl after its brief (and somewhat artificial, they knew now) rebirth. The Men of Black were just too scary to mess with. Muggers, after all, went after the little old ladies who’d just cashed their Social Security checks, not the armed cop on the corner. In this, criminals were just being rational. A little old lady can’t resist a mugger very effectively, but a cop carries a gun.

“I expect our Russian friends will keep a lid on it.”

“I think we can depend on that, Jack,” Ed Foley agreed.

“Any reason not to do it?”

Ryan could hear the DCI shift in his seat. “I never have been keen on giving ’methods’ away to anybody, but this isn’t an intelligence operation per se, and most of it they could get from reading the right books. So, I guess we can allow it.”

“Approved,” the President said.

Ryan imagined he could see the nod at the other end. “Okay, the reply will go out today.”

With a copy to Hereford, of course. It arrived on John’s desk before closing time. He summoned Al Stanley and handed it to him.

“I suppose we’re becoming famous, John.”

“Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?” Clark asked distastefully. Both were former clandestine operators, and if there had been a way to keep their own supervisors from knowing their names and activities, they would have found it long before.

“I presume you will go yourself. Whom will you take to Moscow with you?”

“Ding and Team-2. Ding and I have been there before. We’ve both met Sergey Nikolay’ch. At least this way he doesn’t see all that many new faces.”

“Yes, and your Russian, as I recall, is first-rate.”

“The language school at Monterey is pretty good,” John said, with a nod.

“How long do you expect to be gone?”

Clark looked back down at the fax and thought it over for a few seconds. “Oh, not more than … three weeks,” he said aloud. “Their Spetsnaz people aren’t bad. We’ll set up a training group for them, and after a while, we can probably invite them here, can’t we?”

Stanley didn’t have to point out that the SAS in particular, and the British Ministry of Defense in general, would have a conniption fit over that one, but in the end they’d have to go along with it. It was called diplomacy, and its principles set policy for most of the governments in the world, whether they liked it or not.

“I suppose we’ll have to, John,” Stanley said, already hearing the screams, shouts, and moans from the rest of the camp, and Whitehall.

Clark lifted his phone and hit the button for his secretary, Helen Montgomery. “Helen, could you please call Ding and ask him to come over? Thank you.”

“His Russian is also good, as I recall.”

“We had some good teachers. But his accent is a little southern.”

“And yours?”