Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

“Well, good, we know what they look like. Time for us to be off, Sir John.” Hudson waved up and down Váci Utca as though describing it to a new visitor to Budapest, and then led his guest back to the embassy, his eyes sweeping like radar antennae. He kept gesturing out of sync with his words. “So, we know what they look like. I don’t see any obvious coverage. That is good. If this were one of your sting operations, they would not have let the bait come so near to us like this-at least, I would not do it that way, and KGB is fairly predictable.”

“Think so?”

“Oh, yes. Ivan is very good, but predictable, rather like they play football, or chess, I suppose: a very straightforward game with excellent execution, but little in the way of originality or flair. Their activities are always circumscribed. It’s their culture. They do not encourage people to stand out from the crowd, do they?”

“True, but their leaders often have.”

“That one died thirty years ago, Jack, and they do not want another one.”

“Concur.” No sense arguing the point. The Soviet system did not encourage individualism of any sort. “Now where?”

“The concert hall, the hotel, points of interest. We’ve had enough surprises for one morning, I think.”

LITTLE BOYS GENERALLY detest shopping, but that is not ordinarily true of little girls. It was certainly not true of zaichik , who had never seen such a variety of brightly colored clothing, even in the special shops to which her parents had recently achieved access. With her mother selecting and watching, Svetlana tried on a total of six coats, ranging from forest green to an incandescent red with a black velvet collar, and while she tried two after that one, the red one was the one they purchased, and which zaichik insisted on wearing right away. The next stop was for Oleg Ivan’ch, who bought three videocassette recorders, all unlicensed Hungarian copies of Sony Betamax machines from Japan. This shop, he learned, would deliver them to his hotel room-visiting Westerners shopped there-and this purchase took care of half of his office shopping list. He decided to toss in some tapes also, the sort that he didn’t want his daughter to see, but which would have gone over well with his friends at The Centre. And so, Zaitzev parted with nearly two thousand Comecon rubles, for which he would have little use in the West anyway.

The shopping expedition continued nearly to lunch, by which time they were carrying more goods than it was comfortable to lug about, and so they walked back to the ancient metro and headed back to their hotel to dump them off before doing something for their daughter.

HEROES SQUARE WAS a place built by the Hapsburgs to honor their royal (but not entirely willing) possession of Hungary at the end of the previous century, with statues of previous Hungarian kings, back to St. Stephen-“Istvan” in the Magyar language-whose crown Jimmy Carter had returned to the country just a few years before, the one with the bent cross on the top.

“That happened, so they say,” Hudson explained, “when Stephen slammed his crown atop the other one. Returning it was probably a clever move on Carter’s part. It’s a symbol of their nationhood, you see. The communist regime could not very well reject it, and in accepting it, they had to acknowledge that the history of the country long predates Marxism-Leninism. I am not really a fan of Mr. Carter, but that was, I think, a subtle move on his part. The Hungarians mainly detest communism, Jack. The nation is fairly religious.”

“There are a lot of churches,” Ryan observed. He’d counted six or seven on the way to this park.

“That’s the other thing that gives them a sense of political identity. The government doesn’t like it, but it’s too big and too dangerous a thing to destroy, and so there’s rather an uneasy peace between the two.”

“If I had to bet, I’d put my money down on the church.”

Hudson turned. “As would I, Sir John.”

Ryan looked around. “Hell of a big square.” It looked like more than a square mile of pavement.

“That goes back to 1956,” Hudson explained. “The Sovs wanted this to be large enough to bring in troop carriers. You can land an AN-ten Cub right here, which makes it quicker to bring in airborne troops if the locals ever revolt again. You could bring, oh, say ten or twelve Cubs, a hundred and fifty soldiers each, and they would defend the center of the city against the counterrevolutionaries and wait for the tanks coming in from the east. It’s not a brilliant plan, but that is how they think.”

“But what if you park two city buses here and shoot the tires out?”

“I didn’t say it was perfect, Jack,” Hudson replied. “Even better, a few land mines. Might as well kill a few of the bastards and start a nice little fire. No way a pilot would be able to see them on his approach. And transport pilots are the blindest and dumbest lot going.”

And Ivan figures he’d insert his troops before things really got out of hand. Yeah, it made sense , Ryan thought.

“You know who the Soviet ambassador was in ’fifty-six?”

“No-wait a minute, I do. . wasn’t it Andropov?”

Hudson nodded. “Yuriy Vladimirovich himself. It explains why he is so beloved of the locals. A bloody great lot of people lost their lives in that adventure.”

Ryan remembered being in grammar school then-too young to appreciate the complications: It was the fall of a presidential election year, and at the same time Britain and France had decided to invade Egypt to protect their rights with the Suez Canal. Eisenhower had been hamstrung by two simultaneous crises, and had perforce been unable to do much of anything. But America had gotten a good bunch of immigrants out of it. Not a total loss.

“And the local Secret Police?”

“Just down Andrassy Utca from here, Number sixty. It’s an ordinary-looking building that positively drips with blood. Not as bad now as it used to be. The original lot there were devotees of Iron Feliks, more ruthless than Hitler’s Gestapo. But after the failed rebellion, they moderated somewhat and changed their name from Allamvedelmi Osztaly to Allavedelmi Hivatal. State Security Bureau instead of State Security Section. The former boss was replaced, and they got gentler. Formerly, they had a deserved reputation for torture. Supposedly, that is a thing of the past. The reputation alone is enough to make a suspect crumble. Good thing to have a diplomatic passport,” Andy concluded.

“How good are they?” Jack asked next.

“Oafish. Perhaps they recruited competent people once, but that is well in the past. Probably a lingering effect of how evil they were in the forties and fifties. Good people don’t want to work there and there’s no real benefit from doing so, of the kind that KGB can offer its recruits. In fact, this country has some superb universities. They turn out remarkably good engineers and people in the sciences. And the Semmelweis medical school is first-rate.”

“Hell, half the guys in the Manhattan Project were Hungarians, weren’t they?”

Hudson nodded. “Indeed they were, and many of them Hungarian Jews. Not too many of those left, though in the big war the Hungarians saved about half of theirs. The Chief of State, Admiral Horthy, was probably killed over that-he died under what are euphemistically called ‘mysterious circumstances.’ Hard to say what sort of chap he actually was, but there is a school of thought that says he was a rabid anti-Communist, but decidedly not a pro-Nazi. Perhaps just a man who picked a bad place and time to be born. We may never know for sure.” Hudson enjoyed being a tour guide for a change. Not a bad change of pace from being a king-well, maybe prince-spook.