Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (345 page)

Popov stepped off his airliner and walked onto the concourse alone, like any other businessman, carrying his attaché case with its combination lock, and not a single piece of metal inside, lest some magnetometer operator ask him to open it and so reveal the paper currency inside—terrorists had really ruined air travel for everyone, the former KGB officer thought to himself. Were someone to make the baggage-scanners more sophisticated, enough to count money inside carry-on baggage, for example, it would further put a dent in the business affairs of many people, including himself. Traveling by train was
so
boring.

Their tradecraft was good. Hans was at his designated location, sitting there, reading
Der Spiegel
and wearing the agreed-upon brown leather jacket, and he saw Dmitriy Arkadeyevich, carrying his black attaché case in his left hand, striding down the concourse with all the other business travelers. Fürchtner finished his coffee and left to follow him, trailing Popov by about twenty meters, angling off to the left so that they took different exits, crossing over to the parking garage by different walkways. Popov allowed his head to turn left and right, caught Hans on the first sweep and observed how he moved. The man had to be tense, Popov knew. Betrayal was how most of the people like Fürchtner got caught, and though Dmitriy was known and trusted by them, you could
only
be betrayed by someone whom you trusted, a fact known to every covert operator in the world. And though they knew Popov both by sight and reputation, they couldn’t read minds—which, of course, worked quite well for Popov in this case. He allowed himself a quiet smile as he walked into the parking garage, turned left, stopped as though disoriented, and then looked around for any overt signs that
he
was being followed before finding his bearings and moving on his way. Fürchtner’s car proved to be in a distant corner on the first level, a blue Volkswagen Golf.

“Guten Tag,”
he said, on sitting in the right-front seat.

“Good morning, Herr Popov,” Fürchtner replied in English. It was American in character and almost without accent. He must have watched a lot of television, Dmitriy thought.

The Russian dialed the combinations into the locks of the case, opened the lid, and placed it in his host’s lap. “You should find everything in order.”

“Bulky,” the man observed.

“It is a sizable sum,” Popov agreed.

Just then suspicion appeared in Fürchtner’s eyes. That surprised the Russian, until he thought about it for a moment. The KGB had never been lavish in their payments to their agents, but in this attaché case was enough cash to enable two people to live comfortably in any of several African countries for a period of some years. Hans was just realizing that, Dmitriy saw, and while part of the German was content just to take the money, the smart portion of his brain suddenly wondered where the money had come from. Better not to wait for the question, Dmitriy thought.

“Ah, yes,” Popov said quietly. “As you know, many of my colleagues have outwardly turned capitalist in order to survive in my country’s new political environment. But we are still the Sword and Shield of the Party, my young friend. That has not changed. It is ironic, I grant you, that now we are better able to compensate our friends for their services. It turns out to be less expensive than maintaining the safe houses which you once enjoyed. I personally find that amusing. In any case, here is your payment, in cash, in advance, in the amount you specified.”

“Danke,”
Hans Fürchtner observed, staring down into the attaché case’s ten centimeters of depth. Then he hefted the case. “It’s heavy.”

“True,” Dmitriy Arkadeyevich agreed. “But it could be worse. I might have paid you in gold,” he joked, to lighten the moment, then decided to make his own play. “Too heavy to carry on the mission?”

“It
is
a complication, Iosef Andreyevich.”

“Well, I can hold the money for you and come to you to deliver it upon the completion of your mission. That is your choice, though I do not recommend it.”

“Why is that?” Hans asked.

“Honestly, it makes me nervous to travel with so much cash. The West, well, what if I am robbed? This money is
my
responsibility,” he replied theatrically.

Fürchtner found that very amusing. “Here, in Österreich, robbed on the street? My friend, these capitalist sheep are very closely regulated.”

“Besides, I do not even know where you will be going, and I really do not need to know—at this time, anyway.”

“The Central African Republic is our ultimate destination. We have a friend there who graduated Patrice Lumumba University back in the sixties. He trades in arms to progressive elements. He will put us up for a while, until Petra and I can find suitable housing.”

They were either very brave or very foolish to go to that country, Popov thought. Not so long before it had been called the Central African Empire, and had been ruled by “Emperor Bokassa I,” a former colonel in the French colonial army, which had once garrisoned this small, poor nation. Bokassa had killed his way to the top, as had so many African chiefs of state, before dying, remarkably enough, of natural causes—so the papers said, anyway; you could never really be sure, could you? The country he’d left behind, a small diamond producer, was somewhat better off economically than was the norm on the dark continent, though not by much. But then, who was to say that Hans and Petra would ever get there?

“Well, my friend, it is your decision,” Popov said, patting the attaché case still open in Fürchtner’s lap.

The German considered that for half a minute or so. “I have seen the money,” he concluded, to his guest’s utter delight. Fürchtner lifted a thousand-note packet of the cash and riffled it like a deck of cards before putting it back. Next he scribbled a note and placed it inside the case. “There is the name. We will be with him starting . . . late tomorrow, I imagine. All is ready on your end?”

“The American aircraft carrier is in the eastern Mediterranean. Libya will allow your aircraft to pass without interference, but will not allow overflights of any NATO aircraft following you. Instead, their air force will provide the coverage and will lose you due to adverse weather conditions. I will advise you not to use more violence than is necessary. Press and diplomatic pressure has more strength today than it once did.”

“We have thought that one through,” Hans assured his guest.

Popov wondered briefly about that. But he’d be surprised if they even boarded an aircraft, much less got it to Africa. The problem with “missions” like this one was that no matter how carefully most of its parts had been considered, this chain was decidedly no stronger than its weakest link, and the strength of
that
link was all too often determined by others, or by chance, which was even worse. Hans and Petra were believers in their political philosophy, and like earlier people who’d believed so much in their religious faith so as to take the most absurd of chances, they would pretend to plan this “mission” through with their limited resources—and when you got down to it, their only resource was their willingness to apply violence to the world; and lots of people had that—and substitute hope for expectations, belief for knowledge. They would accept random chance, one of their deadliest enemies, as a neutral element, when a true professional would have sought to eliminate it entirely.

And so their belief structure was really a blindfold, or perhaps a set of blinkers, which denied the two Germans the ability to look objectively at a world that had passed them by, and to which they were unwilling to adapt. But for Popov the real meaning of this was their willingness to let him hold the money. Dmitriy Arkadeyevich had adapted himself quite well to changing circumstances.

“Are you sure, my young friend?”

“Ja,
I am sure.” Fürchtner closed the case, reset the locks, and passed it over to Popov’s lap. The Russian accepted the responsibility with proper gravity.

“I will guard this carefully.”
All the way to my bank in Bern.
Then he extended his hand. “Good luck, and please be careful.”

“Danke.
We will get you the information you require.”

“My employer needs that badly, Hans. We depend on you.” Dmitriy left the car and walked back in the direction of the terminal, where he’d get a taxi to his hotel. He wondered when Hans and Petra would make their move. Perhaps today? Were they
that
precipitous? No, he thought, they would say that they were that
professional.
The young fools.

Sergeant First Class Homer Johnston extracted the bolt from his rifle, which he lifted to examine the bore. The ten shots had dirtied it some, but not much, and there was no erosion damage that he could see in the throat forward of the chamber. None was to be expected until he’d fired a thousand or so rounds, and he’d only put five hundred forty through it to this point. Still, in another week or so he’d have to start using a fiber-optic instrument to check, because the 7-mm Remington Magnum cartridge did develop high temperatures when fired, and the excessive heat burned up barrels a little faster than he would have preferred. In a few months, he’d have to replace the barrel, a tedious and fairly difficult exercise even for a skilled armorer, which he was. The difficulty was in matching the barrel perfectly with the receiver, which would then require fifty or so rounds on the known-distance range to make sure that it delivered its rounds as accurately as it was intended to do. But that was in the future. Johnston sprayed a moderate amount of Break-Free onto the cleaning patch and ran it through the barrel, back to front. The patch came out dirty. He removed it from the cleaning rod, then put a new one on the tip, and repeated the motion six times until the last patch came through totally clean. A final clean patch dried the bore of the select-grade Hart barrel, though the Break-Free cleaning solvent left a thin—not much more than a molecule’s thickness—coating of silicon on the steel, which protected against corrosion without altering the microscopic tolerances of the barrel. Finished and satisfied, he replaced the bolt, closing it on an empty chamber with the final act of pulling the trigger, which de-cocked the rifle as it dropped the bolt into proper position.

He loved the rifle, though somewhat surprisingly he hadn’t named it. Built by the same technicians who made sniper rifles for the United States Secret Service, it was a 7-mm Remington Magnum caliber, with a Remington match-quality receiver, a select-grade Hart barrel, and Leupold ten-power Gold Ring telescopic sight, all married to an ugly Kevlar stock—wood would have been much prettier, but wood warped over time, whereas Kevlar was dead, chemically inert, unaffected by moisture or time. Johnston had just proven, again, that his rifle could fire at about one quarter of a minute of angle’s accuracy, meaning that he could fire three consecutive rounds inside the diameter of a nickel at one hundred yards. Someday somebody might design a laser weapon, Johnston thought, and maybe that could improve on the accuracy of this handmade rifle. But nothing else could. At a range of one thousand yards, he could put three consecutive rounds into a circle of four inches—that required more than a rifle. That meant gauging the wind for speed and direction to compensate for drift-deflection. It also meant controlling his breathing and the way his finger touched the two-and-a-half-pound double-set trigger. His cleanup tasks done, Johnston lifted the rifle and carried it to its place in the gun vault, which was climate-controlled, and nestled it where it belonged before going back to the bullpen. The target he’d shot was on his desk.

Homer Johnston lifted it. He’d shot three rounds at 400 meters, three at 500, two at 700, and his last two at 900. All ten were inside the head-shape of the silhouette target, meaning that all ten would have been instantly fatal to a human target. He shot only cartridges that he’d loaded himself: Sierra 175-grain hollow-point boat-tailed match bullets traveling in front of 63.5 grains of IMR 4350 smokeless powder seemed to be the best combination for that particular rifle, taking 1.7 seconds to reach a target 1,000 yards downrange. That was an awfully long time, especially against a moving target, Sergeant Johnston thought, but it couldn’t be helped. A hand came down on his shoulder.

“Homer,” a familiar voice said.

“Yeah, Dieter,” Johnston said, without looking up from the target. He was in the zone, all the way in. Shame it wasn’t hunting season.

“You did better than me today. The wind was good for you.” It was Weber’s favorite excuse. He knew guns pretty well for a European, Homer thought, but guns were American things, and that was that.

“I keep telling you, that semiautomatic action doesn’t headspace properly.” Both of Weber’s 900-meter rounds were marginal. They would have incapacitated the target, but not definitely killed it, even though they scored as hits. Johnston was the best rifle in Rainbow, even better than Houston, by about half a cunt hair on a good day, Homer admitted to himself.

“I like to get my second round off more quickly than you,” Weber pointed out. And that was the end of the argument. Soldiers were as loyal to their firearms as they were to their religions. The German was far better in rate of fire with his golliwog Walther sniper rifle, but that weapon didn’t have the inherent accuracy of a bolt-action and also fired a less-speedy cartridge. The two riflemen had debated the point over many a beer already, and neither would ever move the other.

In any case, Weber patted his holster. “Some pistol, Homer?”

“Yeah.” Johnston stood. “Why not?” Handguns were not serious weapons for serious work, but they were fun, and the rounds were free here. Weber had him faded in handguns by about one percent or so. On the way to the range, they passed Chavez, Price and the rest, coming out with their MP-10s, joking with one another as they passed. Evidently everyone had had a good morning on the range.

“Ach,”
Weber snorted, “anyone can shoot at five meters!”