The Bear and the Dragon

and it wasn’t his fault that there wasn’t. He checked his appointment sheet. The whole day was political bullshit … except it wasn’t bullshit. Everything he did in this office affected the lives of American citizens in one way or another, and that made it important, to them and to him. But who had decided to make him the national daddy? What the hell made him so damned smart? The people behind his back, as he thought of it, outside the overly thick windows of the Oval Office, all expected him to know how to do the right thing, and over the dinner table or a low-stakes card game, they’d bitch and moan and complain about the decisions he’d made that they didn’t like, as though they knew better-which was easy to say out there. In here it was different. And so, Ryan had to apply himself to every little decision, even menus for school lunches-that one was a real son of a bitch. If you gave kids what they liked to eat, nutritionists would complain that they really ought to eat healthy twigs and berries, but for the most part, parents would probably opt for burgers and fries, because that’s what the kids would eat, and even healthy food, uneaten, did them little good. He’d talked that one over with Cathy once or twice, but he really didn’t need to. She let their own kids eat pizza whenever they wished, claiming that pizza was high in protein, and that a kid’s metabolism could eat almost anything without ill effect, but when cornered, she’d admit that put her at odds with some of her fellow professors at Johns Hopkins. And so what was Jack Ryan, President of the United States, Doctor of Philosophy in History, Bachelor of Arts in Economics, and a Certified Public Accountant (Ryan couldn’t even remember why he had bothered taking that exam), supposed to think, when experts-including the one he was married to-disagreed? That was worth another snort, when his desk buzzer went off and Mrs. Sumter announced that his first appointment of the day was here. Already Jack was wishing for a bummed cigarette, but he couldn’t do that until he had a break in his schedule, because only Mrs. Sumter and a few of his Secret Service detail were allowed to know that the President of the United States suffered, intermittently, from that vice.

Jesus, he thought, as he did so often when the workday began, how did I ever get stuck in here? Then he stood and faced the door, conjuring up his welcoming Presidential smile as he tried to remember who the hell was coming in first to discuss farm subsidies in South Dakota.

The flight, as usual, was out of Heathrow, this one in a Boeing 737, because it wasn’t all that long a hop to Moscow. The Rainbow troopers filled the entire first-class section, which would please the cabin staff, though they didn’t know it yet, because the passengers would be unusually polite and undemanding. Chavez sat with his father- in-law, politely watching the safety-briefing video, though both knew that if the airplane hit the ground at four hundred knots, it really wouldn’t help all that much to know where the nearest emergency exit was. But such things were rare enough to be ignored. Ding grabbed the magazine from the pocket in front and flipped through it in the hope of finding something interesting. He’d already bought all the useful items from the “flying mall” magazine, some to his wife’s pitying amusement.

“So, the little guy’s walking better?” Clark asked.

“You know, the enthusiasm he has for it is kinda funny, the big grin every time he makes it from the TV to the coffee table, like he’s won the marathon, got a big gold medal, and a kiss from Miss America on his way to Disney World.”

“The big things are made up of a lot of little things, Domingo,” Clark observed, as the aircraft started its takeoff run. “And the horizon’s a lot closer when you’re that short.”

“I suppose, Mr. C. Does seem kinda amusing, though … and kinda cute,” he allowed.

“Not bad duty being the father of a little guy, is it?”

“I got no complaints,” Chavez agreed, leaning his seat back now that the gear was up.

“How’s Ettore working out?” Back to business, Clark decided. This grandpa stuff had its limitations.

“He’s in better shape now. Needed about a month to get caught up. He took some razzing, but he handled it just fine. You know, he’s smart. Good tactical instincts, considering he’s a cop and not a soldier.”

“Being a cop in Sicily isn’t like walking a beat on Oxford Street in London, you know?”

“Yeah, guess so,” Chavez agreed. “But on the simulator he hasn’t made a single shoot/no-shoot mistake yet, and that’s not bad. The only other guy who hasn’t blown one is Eddie Price.” The computerized training simulator back at Hereford was particularly ruthless in its presentation of possible tactical scenarios, to the point that in one a twelve-year-old picked up an AK-74 and hosed you if you didn’t pay close enough attention. The other nasty one was the woman holding the baby who’d just happened to pick up a pistol from a dead terrorist and turn innocently to face the incoming Men of Black. Ding had taken her down once, to find a Cabbage Patch doll on his desk the next morning with a packet of McDonald’s ketchup spread across the face. The RAINBOW troopers had a lively, if somewhat perverse, institutional sense of humor.

“So, what exactly are we supposed to be doing?”

“The old Eighth Chief Directorate of the KGB, their executive protective service,” John explained. “They’ve got worries about domestic terrorists-from the Chechens, I guess, and other internal nationalities who want out of the country. They want us to help train up their boys to deal with them.”

“How good are they?” Ding asked.

RAINBOW SIX shrugged. “Good question. The personnel are former KGB types, but with Spetsnaz training, so, probably career people as opposed to two-year in-and-outs in the Red Army. All probably titular commissioned officers, but with sergeants’ duties. I expect they’ll be smart, properly motivated, probably in decent physical shape, and they’ll understand the mission. Will they be as good as they need to be? Probably not,” John thought. “But in a few weeks we ought to be able to point them in the right direction.”

“So mainly we’re going to be training up their instructors?”

Clark nodded. “That’s how I read it, yeah.”

“Fair enough,” Chavez agreed, as the lunch menu appeared. Why was it, he wondered, that airline food never seemed to have what you wanted? This was dinner food, not lunch food. What the hell was wrong with a cheeseburger and fries? Oh, well, at least he could have a decent beer. The one thing he’d come to love about life in the UK was the beer. There wouldn’t be anything like it in Russia, he was sure.

Sunrise in Beijing was as drab as the polluted air could make it, Mark Gant thought. For some reason he’d slipped out of synch with the local time, despite the black capsule and planned sleep. He’d found himself awake just at first light, which fought through air that was as bad as Los Angeles on its worst-ever day. Certainly there was no EPA in the PRC, and this place didn’t even have much in the way of automobiles yet. If that ever happened, China might solve its local population problem with mass gassing. He hadn’t been around enough to recognize this as a problem of Marxist nations-but there weren’t many of them left to be examples, were there? Gant had never smoked-it was a vice largely removed from the stock-trading community, where the normal working stress was enough of a killer that they needed few others-and this degree of air pollution made his eyes water.

He had nothing to do and lots of time in which to do it-once awake he was never able to escape back into sleep-so he decided to flip on his reading light and go over some documents, most of which he’d been given without any particular expectation that he would read them. The purpose of diplomacy, Commander Spock had once said on Star Trek, was to prolong a crisis. Certainly the discourse meandered enough to make the Mississippi River look like a laser beam, but like the Father of Waters, it eventually had to get downstream, or downhill, or wherever the hell it was that rivers went. But this morning-what had awakened him? He looked out the window, seeing the orange-pink smudge beginning to form at the horizon, backlighting the buildings. Gant found them ugly, but he knew he just wasn’t used to them. The tenements of Chicago weren’t exactly the Taj Mahal, and the wood-frame house of his youth wasn’t Buckingham Palace. Still, the sense of different-ness here was overpowering. Everywhere you looked, things seemed alien, and he wasn’t cosmopolitan enough to overcome that feeling. It was like a background buzz in the Muzak, never quite there, but never gone away either. It was almost a sense of foreboding, but he shook it off. There was no reason to feel anything like that. He didn’t know that he would be proven wrong very soon.

Barry Wise was already up in his hotel room, with breakfast coming-the hotel was one of an American chain, and the breakfast menu approximately American as well. The local bacon would be different, but even Chinese chickens laid real eggs, he was sure. His previous day’s experiment with waffles hadn’t worked out very well, and Wise was a man who needed a proper breakfast to function throughout the day.