Tom Clancy - Red Rabbit

“Back in five, Ed,” the communications officer said on his way out the door. He took the elevator down to the first floor. The diplomatic courier was there. His name was Tommy Cox, a former Army warrant officer/helicopter pilot who’d been shot down four times in the Central Highlands as part of the First Cavalry Division, and a man who had only the most negative feelings for his country’s adversaries. The Diplomatic Bag was a canvas carry-on-type bag that would be handcuffed to his wrist during transit. He was already booked on a Pan Am 747 direct flight to New York’s Kennedy International, a flight of eleven hours, during which he would neither drink nor sleep, though he did have three paperback mysteries to read along the way. He’d be leaving the embassy in an official car in ten minutes, and his diplomatic credentials meant he wouldn’t be troubled with security or immigration procedures. The Russians were actually fairly cordial about that, though they probably drooled over the chance of seeing what was inside the canvas bag. For sure, it wasn’t Russian perfume or pantyhose for a friend in New York or Washington.

“Good flight, Tommy.”

Cox nodded. “Roger that, Mike.”

Russell headed back to Foley’s office topside. “Okay, it’s in the bag. Flight leaves in an hour and ten minutes, man.”

“Good.”

“Is a Rabbit what I think it is?”

“Can’t say, Mike,” Foley pointed out.

“Yeah, I know, Ed. Excuse my question.” Russell wasn’t one to break the rules, though he had as much curiosity as the next man. And he knew what a Rabbit was, of course. He’d spent his entire life inside the black world in one capacity or another, and the jargon wasn’t all that hard to pick up. But the black world had walls, and that was that.

Foley took his copy of the message, tucked it in his office safe, and set both the combination and the alarm. Then he headed down to the embassy cafeteria, where a TV was tuned in to ESPN. There he learned that his Yankees had lost another one-three straight, and in a pennant race! Is there no fairness in the world? he grumbled.

MARY PAT WAS doing housework, which was boring, but a good opportunity for her to put her brain in neutral while her imagination ran wild. Okay, she’d be meeting Oleg Ivanovich again. It would be up to her to figure a way to get the “package”-yet another CIA term of art, meaning the material or person(s) to be taken out of the country-to a safe place. There were many ways to do such a thing. They were all dangerous, but she and Ed and other CIA field spooks were trained to do dangerous things. Moscow was a city of millions, and in such an environment three people on the move were just part of the background noise, like one single leaf falling in an autumn forest, one more buffalo in the herd in Yellowstone National Park, one more car on the L.A. Freeway during rush hour. That wasn’t hard, was it?

Well, actually, it was. In the Soviet Union, every aspect of personal life was subject to control. As applied to America, sure, the package was just one more car on the L.A. Freeway, but going to Las Vegas meant crossing a state line, and you had to have a reason for that. Nothing was easy here in the sense that everything was easy in America.

And there was something else. .

It would be better, Mary Pat thought, that the Russians didn’t know he was gone. After all, it was not a murder if there wasn’t a corpse to let everyone know that somebody had died. And it wasn’t a defection unless they knew that one of their citizens had turned up somewhere else-where he wasn’t supposed to be. So, how much the better. . was it possible. .? she wondered.

Wouldn’t that be a kick in the ass? But how to make it happen? It was something to speculate on while she vacuumed the living room rug. And, oh, by the way, vacuuming would invalidate whatever bugs the Russians had implanted in the walls. . And so she stopped at once. Why waste that chance? She and Ed could communicate with their hands, but the bandwidth was like maple syrup in January.

She wondered if Ed would go for this. He might, she thought. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d think up. Ed, for all his skills, wasn’t a cowboy. Though he had his talents, and good ones they were, he was more a bomber pilot than a fighter pilot. But Mary Pat thought like Chuck Yeager in the X-1, like Pete Conrad in the lunar module. She was just better at thinking long-ball.

The idea also had strategic implications. If they could get their Rabbit out unknown to the opposition, then they could make indefinite use of whatever he knew, and that possibility, if you could figure out how to make it happen, was very enticing indeed. It wouldn’t be easy, and it might be a needless complication-and if so, it could be discarded-but it was worth thinking about, if she could get Ed’s brain into it. She’d need his planning talents and his reality-checking ability, but the basic idea set her head abuzz. It would come down to available assets. . And that would be the hard part. But “hard” didn’t mean “impossible.” And, for Mary Pat, “impossible” didn’t mean “impossible” either, did it? she asked herself.

Hell, no.

THE PAN AM FLIGHT rolled off on time, lurching across the lumpy taxiways of Sheremetyevo Airport, which was famous in the world of aviation for its roller-coaster paving. But the runways were adequate, and the big JT-9D Pratt and Whitney turbofan engines pushed the airframe to rotation speed, and the aircraft took flight. Tommy Cox, in seat 3-A, noted with a smile the usual reaction when an American airliner departed Moscow: The passengers all cheered and/or applauded. There was no rule, and the flight crew didn’t encourage it. It just happened all on its own-that’s how impressed Americans were with Soviet hospitality. It appealed to Cox, who had no love for the people who’d supplied the machine guns that had splashed his Huey four times and, by the way, earned him a total of three Purple Heart medals, a miniature ribbon of which decorated the lapels of all his suitcoats, along with the two repeat stars. He looked out the window, watching the ground fall away to his left and, when he heard the welcome ding, fished out a Winston to light with his Zippo. It was a pity he couldn’t drink or sleep on these flights, but the movie was one he hadn’t seen, remarkably enough. In this job you learned to appreciate the small things. Twelve hours to New York, but a direct flight was better than having to stop over in Frankfurt or Heathrow. Such places were just an opportunity for him to drag this fucking canvas bag around, sometimes without benefit of a cart or trolley. Well, he had a full pack of smokes, and the dinner menu didn’t look too bad. And the government actually paid him to sit down for twelve hours, baby-sitting a piece of cheap luggage. It was better than flying his Huey around the Central Highlands. Cox was long past wondering what important information he transported in his bag. And if other people were that interested, that was their problem.

RYAN HAD GOTTEN a hot three pages done-not a very productive day, and he couldn’t claim that the artistry of his prose demanded a slow writing pace. His language was literate-he’d learned his grammar from priests and nuns for the most part, and his word mechanics were serviceable-but not particularly elegant. In his first book, Doomed Eagles, every bit of artistic language he’d attempted to put into his manuscript had been edited out, to his quiet and submissive fury. And so the few critics who had read and commented on his historical epic had faintly praised the quality of his analysis, but then tersely noted that it might be a good textbook for academic students of history, but not something on which a casual reader might wish to waste his money. And so the book had netted 7,865 copies sold-not much to show for two and a half years’ work, but that, Jack reminded himself, was just his first outing, and maybe a new publisher would get him an editor who was more an ally than an enemy. He could hope, after all.