Tom Clancy: The Bear and the Dragon

John’s legs almost buckled at that news. For the past five hours, he’d been imagining a mushroom cloud with his name on it over some American city, but God, luck, or the Great Pumpkin had intervened, and he’d settle for that.

“What gives, Mr. C?” Chavez asked, with considerable worry in his voice. Diggs gave him the word, too.

“The Navy? The fuckin’ Navy? Well, I’ll be damned. They are good for something, eh?”

Jack Ryan was about half in the bag by this time, and if the media found out about it, the hell with them. The cabinet was back in town, but he’d put off the meeting until the following morning. It would take time to consider what had to be done. The most obvious response, the one talking heads were proclaiming on the various TV stations, was one he could not even contemplate, much less order. They’d have to find something better than wholesale slaughter. He wouldn’t order that, though some special operation to take out the Chinese Politburo certainly appealed to his current state of mind. A lot of blood had been spilled, and there would be some more, too. To think it had all begun with an Italian cardinal and a Baptist preacher, killed by some trigger-happy cop. Did the world really turn on so perverse an axis as that?

That, Ryan thought, calls for another drink.

But some good had to come from this. You had to learn lessons from this sort of thing. But what was there to learn? It was too confusing for the American President. Things had happened too fast. He’d gone to the brink of something so deep and so dreadful that the vast maw of it still filled his eyes, and it was just too much for one man to handle. He’d bounced back from facing imminent death himself, but not the deaths of millions, not as directly as this. The truth of the matter was that his mind was blanked out by it all, unable to analyze, unable to correlate the information in a way that would help him take a step forward, and all he really wanted and needed to do was to embrace his family, to be certain that the world still had the shape he wanted it to have.

People somehow expected him to be a superman, to be some godlike being who handled things that others could not handle- well, yeah, Jack admitted to himself. Maybe he had shown courage by remaining in Washington, but after courage came deflation, and he needed something outside himself to restore his manhood. The well he’d tapped wasn’t bottomless at all, and this time the bucket was clunking down on rocks…

The phone rang. Arnie got it. “Jack? It’s Scott Adler.”

Ryan reached for it. “Yeah, Scott, what is it?”

“Just got a call from Bill Kilmer, the DCM in Beijing. Seems that Foreign Minister Shen was just over to the embassy. They have apologized for launching the missile. They say it was a horrible accident and they’re glad the thing didn’t go off-”

“That’s fucking nice of them,” Ryan observed.

“Well, whoever gave the order to launch is under arrest. They request our assistance in bringing an end to hostilities. Shen said they’d take any reasonable action to bring that about. He said they’re willing to declare a unilateral cease-fire and withdraw all their forces back to their own borders, and to consider reparations to Russia. They’re surrendering, Jack.”

“Really? Why?”

“There appears to have been some sort of riot in Beijing. Reports are very sketchy, but it seems that their government has fallen. Minister Fang Gan seems to be the interim leader. That’s all I know, Jack, but it looks like a decent beginning. With your permission, and with the concurrence of the Russians, I think we ought to agree to this.”

“Approved,” the President said, without much in the way of consideration. Hell, he told himself, you don’t have to dwell too much on ending a war, do you? “Now what?”

“Well, I want to talk to the Russians to make sure they’ll go along. I think they will. Then we can negotiate the details. As a practical matter, we hold all the cards, Jack. The other side is folding.”

“Just like that? We end it all just like that?” Ryan asked.

“It doesn’t have to be Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel, Jack. It just has to work.”

“Will it work?”

“Yes, Jack, it ought to.”

“Okay, get hold of the Russians,” Ryan said, setting his glass down.

Maybe this was the end of the last war, Jack thought. If so, no, it didn’t have to be pretty.

It was a good dawn for General Bondarenko, and was about to get better. Colonel Tolkunov came running into his command center holding a sheet of paper.

“We just copied this off the Chinese radio, military and civilian. They are ordering their forces to cease fire in place and to prepare to withdraw from our territory.”

“Oh? What makes them think we will let them go?” the Russian commander asked.

“It’s a beginning, Comrade General. If this is accompanied by a diplomatic approach to Moscow, then the war will soon be over. You have won,” the colonel added.

“Have I?” Gennady Iosifovich asked. He stretched. It felt good this morning, looking at his maps, seeing the deployments, and knowing that he held the upper hand. If this was the end of the war, and he was the winner, then that was sufficient to the moment, wasn’t it? “Very well. Confirm this with Moscow.”

It wasn’t that easy, of course. Units in contact continued to trade shots for some hours, until the orders reached them, but then the firing died down, and the invading troops withdrew away from their enemies, and the Russians, with orders of their own, didn’t follow. By sunset, the shooting and the killing had stopped, pending final disposition. Church bells rang all over Russia.

Golovko took note of the bells and the people in the streets, swigging their vodka and celebrating their country’s victory. Russia felt like a great power again, and that was good for the morale of the people. Better yet, in another few years they’d start reaping the harvest of their resources-and before that would come bridge loans of enormous size… and maybe, just maybe, Russia would turn the corner, finally, and begin a new century well, after wasting most of the previous one.

It was nightfall before the word got out from Beijing to the rest of China. The end of the war so recently started came as a shock to those who’d never really understood the reasons or the facts in the first place. Then came word that the government had changed, and that was also a puzzling development for which explanations would have to wait. The interim Premier was Fang Gan, a name known from pictures rather than words or deeds, but he looked old and wise, and China was a country of great momentum rather than great thoughts, and though the course of the country would change, it would change slowly so far as its people were concerned. People shrugged, and discussed the puzzling new developments in quiet and measured words.

For one particular person in Beijing, the changes meant that her job would change somewhat in importance if not in actual duties. Ming went out to dinner-the restaurants hadn’t closed-with her foreign lover, gushing over drinks and noodles with the extraordinary events of the day, then walked off to his apartment for a dessert of Japanese sausage.