Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (526 page)

Such a target was almost as easy a kill as an aircraft—shooting airplanes down is easy if you hit them, not unlike dropping a pigeon with a shotgun. The trick remained hitting the damned things.

Even if you got close with your interceptor, close won you no cigars. The warhead on a SAM is little different from a shotgun shell. The explosive charge destroys the metal case, converting it into jagged fragments with an initial velocity of about five thousand feet per second. These are ordinarily quite sufficient to rip into the aluminum skin that constitutes the lift and control surfaces of the strength-members of an airplane’s internal framing, turning an aircraft into a ballistic object with no more ability to fly than a bird stripped of its wings.

But hitting one necessitates exploding the warhead far enough from the target that the cone formed of the flying fragments intersects the space occupied by the target. For an aircraft, this is not difficult, but for a missile warhead traveling
faster
than the explosive-produced fragments, it is—which explained the controversy over the Patriot missiles and the Scuds in 1991.

The gadget telling the SAM warhead where and when to explode is generically called the “fuse.” For most modern missiles, the fusing system is a small, low-powered laser, which “nutates,” or turns in a circle to project its beam in a cone forward of its flight path, until the beam hits and reflects off the target. The reflected beam is received by a receptor in the laser assembly, and
that
generates the signal telling the warhead to explode. But quick as it is, it takes a finite amount of time, and the inbound RV is coming in very fast. So fast, in fact, that if the laser beam lacks the power for more than, say, a hundred meters of range, there isn’t enough time for the beam to reflect off the RV in time to tell the warhead to explode soon enough to form the cone of destruction to engulf the RV target. Even if the RV is immediately next to the SAM warhead when the warhead explodes, the RV is going faster than the fragments, which cannot hurt it because they can’t catch up.

And there’s the problem,
Gregory saw. The laser chip in the Standard Missile’s nose wasn’t very powerful, and the nutation speed was relatively slow, and that combination could allow the RV to slip right past the SAM, maybe as much as half the time, even if the SAM came within three meters of the target, and that was no good at all. They might actually have been better off with the old VT proximity fuse of World War II, which had used a non-directional RF emitter, instead of the new high-tech gallium-arsenide laser chip. But there was room for him to play. The nutation of the laser beam was controlled by computer software, as was the fusing signal. That was something he could fiddle with. To that end, he had to talk to the guys who made it, “it” being the current limited-production test missile, the SM-2-ER-Block-IV, and they were the Standard Missile Company, a joint venture of Raytheon and Hughes, right up the street in McLean, Virginia. To accomplish that, he’d have Tony Bretano call ahead. Why not let them know that their visitor was anointed by God, after all?

M
y God, Jack,” Mary Pat said. The sun was under the yardarm. Cathy was on her way home from Hopkins, and Jack was in his private study off the Oval Office, sipping a glass of whiskey and ice with the DCI and his wife, the DDO. ”When I saw this, I had to go off to the bathroom.”

“I hear you, MP.” Jack handed her a glass of sherry—Mary Pat’s favorite relaxing drink. Ed Foley picked a Samuel Adams beer in keeping with his working-class origins. “Ed?”

“Jack, this is totally fucking crazy,” the Director of Central Intelligence blurted. “Fucking” was not a word you usually used around the President, even this one. “I mean, sure, it’s from a good source and all that, but, Jesus, you just don’t do shit like this.”

“Pat Martin was in here, right?” the Deputy Director (Operations) asked. She got a nod. “Well, then he told you this is damned near an act of war.”

“Damned near,” Ryan agreed, with a small sip of his Irish whiskey. Then he pulled out his last cigarette of the day, stolen from Mrs. Sumter, and lit it. “But it’s a hard one to deny, and we have to fit this into government policy somehow or other.”

“We have to get George down,” Ed Foley said first of all.

“And show him SORGE, too?” Ryan asked. Mary Pat winced immediately. “I know we have to guard that one closely, MP, but, damn it, if we can’t use it to figure out these people, we’re no better off than we were before we had the source.”

She let out a long breath and nodded, knowing that Ryan was right, but not liking it very much. “And our internal pshrink,” she said. “We need a doc to check this out. It’s crazy enough that we probably need a medical opinion.”

“Next, what do we say to Sergey?” Jack asked. “He knows we know.”

“Well, start off with ‘keep your head down,’ I suppose,” Ed Foley announced. “Uh, Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“You give this to your people yet, the Secret Service, I mean?”

“No ... oh, yeah.”

“If you’re willing to commit one act of war, why not another?” the DCI asked rhetorically. “And they don’t have much reason to like you at the moment.”

“But why Golovko?” MP asked the air. “He’s no enemy of China. He’s a pro, a king-spook. He doesn’t
have
a political agenda that I know about. Sergey’s an
honest
man.” She took another sip of sherry.

“True, no political ambitions that I know of. But he is Grushavoy’s tightest adviser on a lot of issues—foreign policy, domestic stuff, defense. Grushavoy likes him because he’s smart and honest—”

“Yeah, that’s rare enough in this town, too,” Jack acknowledged. That wasn’t fair. He’d chosen his inner circle well, and almost exclusively of people with no political ambition, which made them an endangered species in the environs of Washington. The same was true of Golovko, a man who preferred to serve rather than to rule, in which he was rather like the American President. “Back to the issue at hand. Are the Chinese making some sort of play, and if so, what?”

“Nothing that I see, Jack,” Foley replied, speaking for his agency in what was now an official capacity. “But remember that even with SORGE, we don’t see that much of their inner thinking. They’re so different from us that reading their minds is a son of a bitch, and they’ve just taken one in the teeth, though I don’t think they really know that yet.”

“They’re going to find out in less than a week.”

“Oh? How’s that?” the DCI asked.

“George Winston tells me a bunch of their commercial contracts are coming up due in less than ten days. We’ll see then what effect this has on their commercial accounts—and so will they.”

T
he day started earlier than usual in Beijing. Fang Gan stepped out of his official car and hurried up the steps into the building, past the uniformed guard who always held the door open for him, and this time did not get a thank-you nod from the exalted servant of the people. Fang walked to his elevator, into it, then stepped off after arriving at his floor. His office door was only a few more steps. Fang was a healthy and vigorous man for his age. His personal staff leaped to their feet as he walked in—an hour early, they all realized.

“Ming!” he called on the way to his inner office.

“Yes, Comrade Minister,” she said, on going through the still-open door.

“What items have you pulled off the foreign media?”

“One moment.” She disappeared and then reappeared with a sheaf of papers in her hand.
“London Times, London Daily Telegraph, Observer, New York Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Boston Globe.
The Western American papers are not yet available.” She hadn’t included Italian or other European papers because she couldn’t speak or read those languages well enough, and for some reason Fang only seemed interested in the opinions of English-speaking foreign devils. She handed over the translations. Again, he didn’t thank her even peremptorily, which was unusual for him. Her minister was exercised about something.

“What time is it in Washington?” Fang asked next.

“Twenty-one hours, Comrade Minister,” she answered.

“So, they are watching television and preparing for bed?”

“Yes, Comrade Minister.”

“But their newspaper articles and editorials are already prepared.”

“That is the schedule they work, Minister. Most of their stories are done by the end of a normal working day. At the latest, news stories—aside from the truly unusual or unexpected ones—are completely done before the reporters go home for their dinner.”

Fang looked up at that analysis. Ming was a clever girl, giving him information on something he’d never really thought about. With that realization, he nodded for her to go back to her desk.

F
or their part, the American trade delegation was just boarding their plane. They were seen off by a minor consular official who spoke plastic words from plastic lips, received by the Americans through plastic ears. Then they boarded their USAF aircraft, which started up at once and began rolling toward the runway.

“So, how do we evaluate this adventure, Cliff?” Mark Gant asked.

“Can you spell ’disaster’ ?” Rutledge asked in return.

“That bad?”

The Assistant Secretary of State for Policy nodded soberly. Well, it wasn’t his fault, was it? That stupid Italian clergyman gets in the way of a bullet, and then the widow of that other minister-person had to pray for him in public,
knowing
that the local government would object. And, of course, CNN had to be there for both events to stir the pot at home ... How was a diplomat supposed to make peace happen if people kept making things worse instead of better?

“That bad, Mark. China may never get a decent trade agreement if this crap keeps going on.”

“All they have to do is change their own policies a little,” Gant offered.

“You sound like the President.”

“Cliffy, if you want to join a club, you have to abide by the club rules. Is that so hard to understand?”

“You don’t treat great nations like the dentist nobody likes who wants to join the country club.”

“Why is the principle different?”

“Do you really think the United States can govern its foreign policy by
principle?”
Rutledge asked in exasperation. So much so, in fact, that he’d let his mind slip a gear.

“The President does, Cliff, and so does your Secretary of State,” Gant pointed out.

“Well, if we want a trade agreement with China, we have to consider their point of view.”

“You know, Cliff, if you’d been in the State Department back in 1938, maybe Hitler could have killed all the Jews without all that much of a fuss,” Gant observed lightly.

It had the desired effect. Rutledge turned and started to object: “Wait a minute—”

“It was just his internal policy, Cliff, wasn’t it? So what, they go to a different church—gas ’em. Who cares?”

“Now look, Mark—”

“You look, Cliff. A country has to stand for certain things, because if you don’t, who the fuck are you, okay? We’re in the club—hell, we pretty much run the club. Why, Cliff? Because people know what we stand for. We’re not perfect. You know it. I know it. They all know it. But they also know what we will and won’t do, and so, we can be trusted by our friends, and by our enemies, too, and so the world makes a little sense, at least in our parts of it. And that is why we’re respected, Cliff.”

“And all the weapons don’t matter, and all the commercial power we have, what about them?” the diplomat demanded.

“How do you think we got them, Cliffy?” Gant demanded, using the diminutive of Rutledge’s name again, just to bait him. “We are what we are because people from all over the world came to America to work and live out their dreams. They worked hard. My grandfather came over from Russia because he didn’t like getting fucked over by the czar, and he worked, and he got his kids educated, and they got
their
kids educated, and so now I’m pretty damned rich, but I haven’t forgotten what Grandpa told me when I was little either. He told me this was the best place the world ever saw to be a Jew. Why, Cliff? Because the dead white European men who broke us away from England and wrote the Constitution had some good ideas and they lived up to them, for the most part. That’s who we are, Cliff. And that means we have to
be
what we are, and
that
means we have to stand for certain things, and the world has to see us do it.”

“But we have so many flaws ourselves,” Rutledge protested.

“Of course we do! Cliff, we don’t have to be perfect to be the best around, and we never stop trying to be better. My dad, when he was in college, he marched in Mississippi, and got his ass kicked a couple of times, but you know, it all worked out, and so now we have a black guy in the Vice Presidency. From what I hear, maybe he’s good enough to take one more step up someday. Jesus, Cliff, how can you represent America to other nations if you don’t get it?”

Diplomacy is business,
Rutledge wanted to reply.
And I know how to do the business.
But why bother trying to explain things to this Chicago Jew? So, he rocked his seat back and tried to look dozy. Gant took the cue and stood for a seventy-foot walk. The Air Force sergeants who pretended to be stewardesses aboard served breakfast, and the coffee was pretty decent. He found himself in the rear of the aircraft looking at all the reporters, and that felt a little bit like enemy territory, but not, on reflection, as much as it did sitting next to that diplo-jerk.

T
he morning sun that lit up Beijing had done the same to Siberia even earlier in the day.

“I see our engineers are as good as ever,” Bondarenko observed. As he watched, earthmoving machines were carving a path over a hundred meters wide through the primeval forests of pine and spruce. This road would serve both the gold strike and the oil fields. And this wasn’t the only one. Two additional routes were being worked by a total of twelve crews. Over a third of the Russian Army’s available engineers were on these projects, and that was a lot of troops, along with more than half of the heavy equipment in the olive-green paint the Russian army had used for seventy years.