Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

He said he felt suddenly ill. I gave him my card,” she told the interrogators. ”He gave me fifty euros for my trouble.” Which was fair payment, she thought, for wasting half an hour of her valuable time.

“Anything else? Did he look ill?”

“He said that the food suddenly disagreed with him. I wondered if he’d gotten cold feet as some men do, but not this one. He is a man of some sophistication. You can always tell.”

“Very well. Thank you, Yelena. If he calls you, please let us know.”

“Certainly.” It had been a totally painless interview, which came as rather a surprise for her, and for that reason she’d cooperated fully, wondering what the hell she’d stumbled into. A criminal of some sort? Drug trafficker, perhaps? If he called her, she’d call these people and to hell with him. Life for a woman of her trade was difficult enough.

He’s on the computer,” an electronics specialist said at FSS headquarters. He read the keystrokes off the keyboard bug they’d planted, and they not only showed up on his screen, but also ran live on a duplicate of the subject desktop system. ”There, there’s the clear-text. He’s got the message.”

There was a minute or so of thoughtful pause, and then he began typing again. He logged onto his e-mail service and started typing up messages. They all said some variant of “contact me as soon as you can,” and that told them what he was up to. A total of four letters had gone out, though one suggested forwarding to one or more others. Then he logged off and shut his computer down.

“Now, let’s see if we can identify his correspondents, shall we?” the senior investigator told his staff. That took all of twenty minutes. What had been routine drudgery was now as exciting as watching the World Cup football final.

The Myasishchev M-5 reconnaissance aircraft lifted off from Taza just before dawn. An odd-looking design with its twin booms, it was a forty-years-too-late Russian version of the venerable Lockheed U-2, able to cruise at seventy thousand feet at a sedate five hundred or so knots and take photographs in large numbers with high resolution. The pilot was an experienced Russian air force major with orders not to stray within ten kilometers of the Chinese border. This was to avoid provoking his country’s potential enemies, and that order was not as easy to execute as it had been to write down in Moscow, because the borders between countries are rarely straight lines. So, the major programmed his autopilot carefully and sat back to monitor his instruments while the camera systems did all the real work. The main instrument he monitored was his threat-receiver, essentially a radio scanner programmed to note the energy of radar transmitters. There were many such transmitters on the border, most of the low-to mid-frequency search types, but then a new one came up. This was on the X-band, and it came from the south, and that meant that a Chinese surface-to-air missile battery was illuminating him with a tracking-and-targeting radar. That got his attention, because although seventy thousand was higher than any commercial aircraft could fly, and higher than many fighters could reach, it was well within the flight envelope of a SAM, as an American named Francis Gary Powers had once discovered over Central Russia. A fighter could outmaneuver most SAMs, but the M-5 was not a fighter and had trouble outmaneuvering clouds on a windless day. And so he kept his eye on the threat-receiver’s dials while his ears registered the shrill beep-beep of the aural alert. The visual display showed that the pulse-repetition rate was in the tracking rather than the lock-up mode. So, a missile was probably not in the air, and the sky was clear enough that he’d probably see the smoke trail that such missiles always left, and today-no, no smoke coming up from the ground. For defensive systems, he had only a primitive chaff dispenser and prayer. Not even a white-noise jammer, the major groused. But there was no sense in worrying. He was ten kilometers inside his own country’s airspace, and whatever SAM systems the Chinese possessed were probably well inside their own borders. It would be a stretch for them to reach him, and he could always turn north and run while punching loose a few kilos of shredded aluminum foil to give the inbound missile something else to chase. As it played out, the mission involved four complete sweeps of the border region, and that required ninety otherwise boring minutes before he reprogrammed the M-5 back to the old fighter base outside Taza.

The ground crew supporting the mission had also been deployed from the Moscow area. As soon as the M-5 rolled to a stop, the film cassettes were unloaded and driven to the portable film lab for development, then forwarded, still wet, to the interpreters. They saw few tanks, but lots of tracks in the ground, and that was all they needed to see.

Iknow, Oleg. I understand that we developed the intelligence in Washington and forwarded it to your people immediately,” Reilly said to his friend.

“You must be proud of that,” Provalov observed.

“Wasn’t the Bureau that did it,” Reilly responded. The Russians would be touchy about having Americans provide them with such sensitive information. Maybe Americans would have reacted the same way. “Anyway, what are you going to do about it?”

“We’re trying to locate his electronic correspondents. We have their addresses, and they are all on Russian-owned ISPs. FSS probably has them all identified by now.”

“Arrest them when?”

“When they meet Suvorov. We have enough to make the arrests now.”

Reilly wasn’t sure about that. The people Suvorov wanted to meet could always say that they came to see him by invitation without having a clue as to the purpose of the meeting, and a day-old member of the bar could easily enough sell the “reasonable doubt” associated with that to a jury. Better to wait until they all did something incriminating, and then squeeze one of them real hard to turn state’s evidence on the rest. But the rules and the juries were different here.

Anatoliy, what are you thinking about?“ Golovko asked. ”Comrade Chairman, I am thinking that Moscow has suddenly become dangerous,” Major Shelepin replied. ”The idea of former Spetsnaz men conspiring to commit treason on this scale sickens me. Not just the threat, but also the infamy of it. These men were my comrades in the army, trained as I was to be guardians of the State.” The handsome young officer shook his head.

“Well, when this place was the KGB, it happened to us more than once. It is unpleasant, yes, but it is reality. People are corruptible. It is human nature,” Golovko said soothingly. Besides, the threat isn’t against me now, he didn’t add. An unworthy thought, perhaps, but that also was human nature. “What is President Grushavoy’s detail doing now?”

“Sweating, I should imagine. Who can say that this is the only threat? What if this Kong bastard has more than one such agent in Moscow? We should pick him up, too.”

“So we shall, when the time comes. He’s been observed to do only one dead-drop over the past week, and we control that one-yes, yes, I know,” Sergey added, when he saw the beginnings of Anatoliy’s objections. “He isn’t the only MSS operative in Moscow, but he’s probably the only one on this case. Security considerations are universal. They must worry that one of their officers might be in our employ, after all. There are many wheels in such an operation, and they don’t all turn in the same direction, my young friend. You know what I miss?”

“I should imagine it is having the second chief directorate under the same roof. That way the operation would be run cooperatively.”