Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

So, did it all work?" Ming asked.

“Hmph?” Nomuri responded. This was strange. She was supposed to be in the afterglow period, his arm still around her, while they both smoked the usual after-sex cigarette.

“I did what you wished with my computer. Did it work?”

“I’m not sure,” Nomuri tried as a reply. “I haven’t checked.”

“I do not believe that!” Ming responded, laughing. “I have thought about this. You have made me a spy!” she said, followed by a giggle.

“I did what?”

“You want me to make my computer accessible to you, so you can read all my notes, yes?”

“Do you care?” He’d asked her that once before, and gotten the right answer. Would it be true now? She’d sure as hell seen through his cover story. Well, that was no particular surprise, was it? If she weren’t smart, she’d be useless as a penetration agent. But knowing what she was … how patriotic was she? Had he read her character right? He didn’t let his body tense next to hers, remarkably enough. Nomuri congratulated himself for mastering another lesson in the duplicity business.

A moment’s contemplation, then: “No.”

Nomuri tried not to let his breath out in too obvious an expression of relief.

“Well, then you need not concern yourself. From now on, you will do nothing at all.”

“Except this?” she asked with yet another giggle.

“As long as I continue to please you, I suppose!”

“Master Sausage!”

“Huh?”

“Your sausage pleases me greatly,” Ming explained, resting her head on his chest.

And that, Chester Nomuri thought, was sufficient to the moment.

Pavel Petrovich Gogol could believe his eyes, but only because he’d seen the whole Red Army armored corps on the move in the Western Ukraine and Poland, when he was a younger man. The tracked vehicles he saw now were even bigger and knocked down most of the trees, those that weren’t blown down by engineers with explosives. The short season didn’t allow the niceties of tree-felling and road-laying they used in the effete West. The survey team had found the source of the gold dust with surprising ease, and now a team of civil and military engineers was pushing a road to the site, slashing a path across the tundra and through the trees, dropping tons of gravel on the path which might someday be properly paved, though such roads were a problem in these weather conditions. Over the roads would come heavy mining equipment, and building materials for the workers who would soon make their homes in what had been “his” woods. They told him that the mine would be named in his honor. That hadn’t been worth much more than a spit. And they’d taken most of his golden wolf pelts-after paying for them and probably paying most generously, he allowed. The one thing they’d given him that he liked was a new rifle, an Austrian Steyr with a Zeiss scope in the American.338 Winchester Magnum caliber, more than ample for local game. The rifle was brand-new-he’d fired only fifteen rounds through it to make sure it was properly sighted in. The blued steel was immaculate, and the walnut stock was positively sensuous in its honeyed purity. How many Germans might he have killed with this! Gogol thought. And how many wolves and bear might he take now.

They wanted him to leave his river and his woods. They promised him weeks on the beaches at Sochi, comfortable apartments anywhere in the country. Gogol snorted. Was he some city pansy? No, he was a man of the woods, a man of the mountains, a man feared by the wolves and the bear, and even the tigers to the south had probably heard of him. This land was his land. And truth be told, he knew no other way to live, and was too old to learn one in any case. What other men called comforts he would call annoyances, and when his time came to die, he would be content to die in the woods and let a wolf or a bear pick over his corpse. It was only fair. He’d killed and skinned enough of them, after all, and good sport was good sport.

Well, the food they’d brought in-flown in, they’d told him-was pretty good, especially the beef, which was richer than his usual reindeer, and he had fresh tobacco for his pipe. The television reporters loved the pipe, and encouraged him to tell his story of life in the Siberian forests, and his best bear and wolf stories. But he’d never see the TV story they were doing on him; he was too far away from what they occasionally called “civilization” to have his own TV set. Still, he was careful to tell his stories carefully and clearly, so that the children and grandchildren he’d never had would see what a great man he’d been. Like all men, Gogol had a proper sense of self-worth, and he would have made a fine storyteller for any children’s school, which hadn’t occurred to any of the bureaucrats and functionaries who’d come to disturb his existence. Rather, they saw him as a TV personality, and an example of the rugged individualist whom the Russians had always worshipped on the one hand and brutally suppressed on the other.

But the real subject of the forty-minute story that was being put together by Russian national television wasn’t really here. It was seventeen kilometers away, where a geologist tossed a gold nugget the size of his fist up and down like a baseball, though it weighed far more than the equivalent volume of iron. That was merely the biggest nugget they’d found. This deposit, the geology team explained to the cameras, was worthy of a tale from mythology, the garden, perhaps, of Midas himself. Exactly how rich it was they’d learn only from tunneling into the ground, but the chief of the geology team was willing to wager his professional reputation that it would beggar the South African mine, by far the richest found to date on the planet. Every day the tapes the cameras made were uploaded to the Russian communications satellite that spent most of its time hanging over the North Pole-much of the country is too far north to make proper use of the geosynchronous birds used by the rest of the world.

This was not a problem for the National Security Agency. NSA has stations worldwide, and the one located at Chicksands in England took the feed of the Russian satellite and instantly cross-loaded it to an American military-communications satellite, which dispatched the signal to Fort Meade, Maryland. Agreeably, the signal was not encrypted and so could be immediately forwarded to Russian linguists for translation, and then off it went to CIA and other national assets for evaluation. As it played out, the President of the United States would see the footage a week before the average Russian citizen.

“Damn, who is that guy, Jim Bridger?” Jack asked.

“His name is Pavel Petrovich Gogol. He’s the guy credited with discovering the gold deposit. See,” Ben Goodley said. The camera took in the row of gilded wolf pelts.

“Damn, those could be hung in the Smithsonian … like something out of a George Lucas movie …” SWORDSMAN observed.

“Or you could buy one for your wife,” Goodley suggested.

POTUS shook his head. “Nah … but … maybe if it was a gilded sable coat … you think the voters could handle it?”

“I think I defer on such questions to Mr. van Damm,” the National Security Adviser said after a moment’s consideration.

“Yeah, might be fun to see him have a cow right here in the Oval Office. This tape isn’t classified, is it?”

“Yes, it is, but only ‘confidential.’ ”

“Okay, I want to show this one to Cathy tonight.” That level of classification wouldn’t faze anybody, not even a major city newspaper.

“You want one with subtitles or a voice-over translation?”