Tom Clancy - Command Authority

Dino Kadic made it back to his rented room thirty minutes after the bombing, pulled a beer from his refrigerator, and flipped on the television. He needed to pack, but it could wait for the length of time it would take him to have a dark Yarpivo. He would leave Moscow by train first thing in the morning, but for now he would take a few minutes to enjoy himself a little and watch the news coverage of his operation.

He did not have to wait long. After only a few sips he saw the first images from the scene: shattered glass and fires burning at the front of the restaurant. The camera moved to the left and panned past several SUVs scattered and tossed on the street; beyond them was the domed Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the flashing lights of emergency vehicles reflecting off the windows.

Kadic leaned back on the sofa, enraptured by the beauty of the chaos he created.

An attractive female reporter, just on the scene, seemed utterly shocked by the carnage around her. She lifted her microphone to her mouth and struggled to find words.

Kadic smiled while she went into the few details of the bombing available to her. Mostly she just stammered and detailed the devastation with poorly chosen adjectives.

After a minute of this, though, she brought her hand up to her ear and stopped talking suddenly, as she listened to a producer on her earpiece.

And then her eyes went wide.

“Is this confirmed? Can I say this on air?” She waited for a reply in her earpiece, and Kadic wondered what was going on. With a quick nod, the reporter said, “We have just been told that the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Stanislav Arkadyevich Biryukov, was leaving the restaurant at the exact moment of the explosion, and has been injured. His condition is presently unknown.”

Kadic lowered the beer bottle slowly and stared at the screen. A less cynical man might have taken the first news reports about the Vanil bombing as some sort of error. Surely she was mistaken. Incorrect information from stand-up reporting in the first minutes on a scene like this was the rule, not the exception.

But decades of work with intelligence agencies and mafia groups had made Dino Kadic nothing if not cynical. As soon as he heard Biryukov had been on the sidewalk at the moment the bomb detonated, he took the report as accurate, and he knew it was no coincidence.

He’d been set up. The contractor of the Haldane hit had instructed him on the time and location of the bombing, and had demanded more explosive be used to increase the blast radius. Whoever had done this had orchestrated Kadic’s operation to take out the real target, the head of the SVR.

“Picku matirinu!” It was Serbo-Croatian, akin to “Oh, fuck,” but even more profane.

And Dino Kadic knew something else. The people who set him up like this wouldn’t think twice about sending someone to silence him, so he could take the fall without being able to bring anyone else down with him.

As he sat there on the little sofa in his rented flat, he was sure.

It wasn’t if they would come for him… It was when .

And Kadic, being the cynic that he was, didn’t give himself much time. He would pack in sixty seconds and be down in his car in one hundred twenty seconds.

“Stay frosty.” He threw the beer bottle at the TV and leapt to his feet, began collecting his most important belongings and throwing them into a rolling duffel.

As a pair of dark green ZiL-130 truck-buses pulled up to the entrance of an apartment building on Gruzinskiy Val Street, the back door of each vehicle opened. In a matter of seconds, twenty-four members of the 604th Red Banner Special Purpose Center leapt to the pavement. They were Interior Ministry troops, some of the best trained and most elite in the Russian police force. To those walking by on the sidewalk on Gruzinskiy Val, the men looked like futuristic robots in their black body armor, black Nomex balaclavas, and smoked Plexiglas visors.

Eight men remained at ground level, while two teams of eight took the two stairwells up to the fourth floor. As they ascended, they held their AK-74 rifles against their shoulders and pointed them just offset of the man in front of them in the stack.

On the fourth floor they left the stairwells. A few apartment owners opened their doors in the hallway and found themselves staring down teams of masked and visored men with assault rifles. The residents quickly shut their doors, and several turned up the volume on their televisions to shield themselves from any knowledge of whatever the hell was going on.

The Red Banner men converged outside room 409, and the team leader moved up the train, positioning himself just behind the breacher.

Time to go,” Kadic said, sixty seconds exactly after leaping from the couch. He zipped his duffel closed and reached to pull it off the bed.

Behind him, the apartment door burst open, breaking from the hinges and flying into the room. Kadic spun to the movement and then threw his hands into the air, dropping the duffel. He had no choice but to attempt to surrender, though he understood almost instantly what was going on.

He was, after all, a cynic. There was no way in the world these men could have made it here so fast unless they were tipped off.

Unless he had been set up.

He croaked out one word in Russian.

“Pozhalusta!” Please!

The leader of the Red Banner unit paused, but only for an instant. Then he opened fire. His team followed suit, guns erupted, and the Croatian assassin jerked and spasmed as round after round ripped into his chest.

He toppled back onto the bed, his arms outstretched.

The team leader ordered his men to go through his belongings, while he began searching the body himself. They turned up a handgun—it had been stowed in his case—and the officer who found it took it by the barrel with his gloved hand and passed it grip-first to his leader. The team leader slipped it into the hand of the dead Croatian, closed the man’s bloody fingers around it, and then let it drop onto the floor.

A minute later he said, “We’re clear.” He pinched the transmit button on the side of his shoulder microphone. “Clear. One subject down.”

The team leader had his orders. Someone on high wanted this man dead, and a nice neat package of justifiable force had been easy enough to arrange.

Red Banner did what the Kremlin told them to do.

Jack, Cathy, and Sergey entered the Yellow Oval Room. Coffee was laid out for them, but Sergey did not touch his, so Jack and Cathy ignored theirs as well.

Golovko said, “I apologize for my passion at lunch.”

“Not at all,” said Jack.

“My wife died years ago, and since then, I’ve had little to think about but work, and my nation’s place in history. Under Valeri Volodin, Russia is sliding backward to a place the younger generation is not wise enough to fear, and nothing scares me more. I see it as my role to use my intimate knowledge of the darker aspects of our past to ensure we do not repeat it.”

Sergey spoke for a moment more about his trip to the United States, but he seemed distracted, and the perspiration on his forehead had only increased since lunch.

After an imploring look from Cathy, Jack Ryan said, “Sergey, I would like you to do me a personal favor.”

“Of course, Ivan Emmetovich.”

“I want to have someone look you over, just to make sure you are okay.”

“Appreciated, but not necessary.”

“Look at it from my perspective, Sergey. How will it play in the world media if the former head of SVR comes over here to the States and gets sick on a bad brisket?”