Tom Clancy: Red Rabbit

“All ready?” Sharp asked, coming in.

“I guess we all have to be. What about the rest of the crew?”

“We rendezvous at the front of the basilica in thirty-five minutes.” And it was only a five-minute drive from there. “Here’s a friend for you to take along.” He handed over a pistol.

Jack took it and slid the slide back. It was, fortunately, empty.

“You may need this, too.” Sharp handed over two loaded magazines. Sure enough, they were hardball-full-metal-jacketed-cartridges, which would go right through the target, making only a nine-millimeter hole in and out. But Europeans thought you could drop an elephant with them. Yeah, sure, Jack thought, wishing for a.45 Colt M1911A1, which was much better suited for putting a man on the ground and leaving him there until the ambulance crew arrived. But he’d never mastered the big Colt, though he had, barely, qualified with it. It was with a rifle that Ryan could really shoot, but nearly anyone could shoot a rifle. Sharp didn’t provide a holster. The Browning Hi-Power would have to go in his belt, and he’d have to keep his jacket buttoned to conceal it. The bad thing about carrying a pistol was that they were heavy damned things to port around with you, and without a proper holster he’d have to keep adjusting it in his belt to make sure it didn’t fall out or slide down his pants. That just wouldn’t do. It would also make sitting down a pain in the gut, but there wouldn’t be much of that today. The spare magazine went into his coat pocket. He pulled the slide back, locked it in place, and slid the loaded one into the butt, then dropped the locking lever to release the slide. The weapon was now loaded and “in battery,” meaning ready to fire. On reflection, Ryan carefully dropped the hammer. A safety might have sufficed, but Ryan had been trained not to trust safeties. To fire the weapon, he’d have to remember to cock the hammer, something he’d fortunately forgotten to do with Sean Miller. But this time, if the worst happened, he would not.

“Time to boogie?” Jack asked Sharp.

“Does that mean go?” the Chief of Station Rome asked. “I meant to ask the other time you said that.”

“Yeah, like, boogie on down the road. It’s an Americanism. ‘Boogie’ used to be a kind of dance, I think.”

“And your radio.” Sharp pointed. “It clips on the belt over your wallet pocket. On/off switch”-he demonstrated-“earpiece fastens to your collar, and the microphone onto your collar. Clever bit of kit, this.”

“Okay.” Ryan got everything arranged properly, but left the radio off. The spare batteries went into his left-side coat pocket. He didn’t expect to need them, but safe was always better than sorry. He reached behind to find the on/off switch and flipped it off and on. “What’s the range on the radios?”

“Three miles-five kilometers-the manual says. More than we need. Ready?”

“Yeah.” Jack stood, set his pistol snugly on the left side of his belt, and followed Sharp out to the car.

Traffic was agreeably light this morning. Italian drivers were not, from what he’d seen so far, the raving maniacs he’d heard them to be. But the people out now would be people heading soberly to work, whether it was selling real estate or working in a warehouse. One of the difficult things for a tourist to remember was that a city was just another city, not a theme park set in place for his personal amusement.

And damned sure this morning Rome wasn’t here for anything approaching that, was it? Jack asked himself coldly.

Sharp parked his official Bentley about where they expected Strokov to park. There were other cars there, people who worked in the handful of shops, or perhaps early shoppers hoping to get their buying done before Wednesday’s regularly scheduled chaos.

In any case, this most expensive of British motorcars had diplomatic tags, and nobody would fool with it. Getting out, he followed Sharp into the piazza and reached back with his right hand to flip his radio on without exposing his pistol.

“Okay,” he said into his lapel. “Ryan is here. Who else is on the net?”

“Sparrow in place on the colonnade,” a voice answered immediately.

“King, in place.”

“Ray Stones, in place.”

“Parker, in place,” Phil Parker, the last of the arrivals from London, reported from his spot on the side street.

“Tom Sharp here with Ryan. We’ll do a radio check every fifteen minutes. Report immediately if you see the least thing of interest. Out.” He turned to Ryan. “So, that’s done.”

“Yeah.” He checked his watch. They had hours to go before the Pope appeared. What would he be doing now? He was supposed to be a very early riser. Doubtless the first important thing he did every day was to say Mass, like every Catholic priest in the world, and it was probably the most important part of his morning routine, something to remind himself exactly what he was-a priest sworn to God’s service-a reality he’d known and probably celebrated within his own mind through Nazi and communist oppression for forty-odd years, serving his flock. But now his flock, his parish, straddled the entire world, as did his responsibility to them, didn’t it?

Jack reminded himself of his time in the Marine Corps. Crossing the Atlantic on his helicopter-landing ship-unknowingly on his way to a life-threatening helicopter crash-on Sunday they’d held church services, and at that moment the church pennant had been run up to the truck. It flew over the national ensign. It was the U.S. Navy’s way of acknowledging that there was one higher loyalty than the one a man had for his country. That loyalty was to God Himself-the one power higher than that of the United States of America, and his country acknowledged that. Jack could feel it, here and now, carrying a gun. He could feel that fact like a physical weight on his shoulders. There were people who wanted the Pope-the Vicar of Christ on earth-dead. And that, suddenly, was massively offensive to him. The worst street criminal gave a priest, minister, or rabbi a free pass, because there might really be a god up there, and it wouldn’t do to harm His personal representative among the people. How much more would God be annoyed by the murder of His #1 Representative on Planet Earth. The Pope was a man who’d probably never hurt a single human being in his life. The Catholic Church was not a perfect institution-nothing with mere people in it was or ever could be. But it was founded on faith in Almighty God, and its policies rarely, if ever, strayed from love and charity.

But those doctrines were seen as a threat by the Soviet Union. What better proof of who the Bad Guys were in the world? Ryan had sworn as a Marine to fight his country’s enemies. But here and now he swore to himself to fight against God’s own enemies. The KGB recognized no power higher than the Party it served. And, in proclaiming that, they defined themselves as the enemy of all mankind-for wasn’t mankind made in God’s own image? Not Lenin’s. Not Stalin’s. God’s.

Well, he had a pistol designed by John Moses Browning, an American, perhaps a Mormon-Browning had come from Utah, but Jack didn’t know what faith he’d adhered to-to help him see about that.

Time passed slowly for Ryan. Constant reference to his watch didn’t help. People were arriving steadily. Not in large numbers, but rather like a baseball crowd, arriving single, or in pairs, or in small family groups. Lots of children, infants carried by their mothers, some escorted by nuns-school trips, almost certainly-to see the Pontifex Maximus. That term, too, came from the Romans, who with remarkable clarity likened a priest to a pontifex -bridge builder-between men and what was greater than men.