Jack Ryan 10 - Rainbow Six (74 page)

“Any game in the woods there?” Bill Henriksen asked.

“One would see birds, of course, many kinds, and occasionally elk-you call them moose here, I think-but rarely. State hunters were always killing them. Wolves are their main target. They hunt them from helicopters. We Russians do not like wolves as you do here in America. Too many folk tales of rabid ones killing people, you see. Mostly lies, I expect.”

Brightling nodded. “Same thing here. Wolves are just big wild dogs, you can train them as pets if you want. Some people do that.”

“Wolves are cool,” Bill added. He'd often thought about making one a pet, but you needed a lot of land for that. Maybe when the Project was fulfilled.

What the hell was this all about? Dmitriy wondered, still playing along. “I always wanted to see a bear, but there are none of them left in the Moscow area. I saw them only at the zoo. I loved bears,” he added, lying. They'd always frightened the hell out of him. You heard scores of bear stories as a child in Russia, few of them friendly, though not as antinature as the wolf stories. Large dogs? Wolves killed people in the steppes. The farmer's and peasants hated the damned things and welcomed lie state hunters with their helicopters and machine guns, the better to hunt them down and slaughter them.

“Well, John and I are Nature Lovers,” Bill explained, waving to the waiter for another bottle of wine. “Always have been. All the way back to Boy Scouts - like your Young Pioneers, I suppose.”

“The state was not kind to nature in the Soviet Union. Much worse than the problems you've had here in America. Americans have come to Russia to survey the damage and suggest ways to fix the problems of pollution and such.” Especially in the Caspian Sea, where pollution had killed off most of the sturgeon, and with it the fish eggs known as caviar, which had for so long been a prime means of earning foreign currency for the USSR.

“Yes, that was criminal,” Brightling agreed soberly. “But it's a global problem. People don't respect nature the way they should,” Brightling went on for several minutes, delivering what had to be a brief canned lecture, to which Dmitriy listened politely.

“That is a great political movement in America, is it not?”

“Not as powerful as many would like,” Bill observed. “But it's important to some of us.”

“Such a movement would be useful in Russia. It is a pity that so much has been destroyed for no purpose,” Popov responded, meaning some of it. The state should conserve resources for proper exploitation, not simply destroy them because the local political hacks didn't know how to use them properly. But then the USSR had been so horridly inefficient in everything it did-well, except espionage, Popov corrected himself. America had done well. he thought. The cities were far cleaner than their Russian counterparts, even here in New York, and you only needed to drive an hour from any city to see green grass and tidy productive farms. But the greater question was: why had a conversation that had begun with the discussion of a terrorist incident drifted into this? Had he done anything to invite it? No, his employer had abruptly steered it in this direction. It had not been an accident. That meant they were sounding him out - but on what?

This nature drivel? He sipped at his wine and stared at his dinner companions. “You know, I've never really had a chance to see America. I would like very much to see the national parks. What is the one with the geysers? Gold stone? Something like that?”

“Yellowstone, it's in Wyoming. Maybe the prettiest place in America,” Henriksen told the Russian.

“Nope, Yosemite,” Brightling countered. “In California. That's the prettiest valley in the whole world. Overrun with goddamned tourists now, of course, but that'll change.”

“Same story at Yellowstone, John, and, yeah, that'll change, too. Someday,” Bill Henriksen concluded.

They seemed pretty positive about the things that would change. But the American state parks were run by the federal government for all citizens, weren't they? They had to be, because they were tax-supported. No limited access for the elite here. Equality for all-something he'd been taught in Soviet schools, except here they actually lived it. One more reason, Dmitriy thought, why one country had fallen, and the other had grown stronger.

“What do you mean `that'll change'?” Popov asked.

“Oh, the idea is to lessen the impact of people on the areas. It's a good idea, but some other things have to happen first,” Brightling replied.

“Yeah, John, just one or two,” Henriksen agreed, with a chuckle. Then he decided that this feeling-out process had gone far enough. “Anyway, Dmitriy, how will we know when Grady wants to go forward?”

“I will call him. He left me a mobile-phone number which I can use at certain times of the day.”

“Trustful soul.”

“For me, yes. We have been friends since the 1980s, back when he was in the Bekaa Valley. And besides, the phone is mobile, probably bought with a false credit card by someone else entirely. These things are very useful to intelligence officers. They are difficult to track unless you have very sophisticated equipment. America has them, and so does England, but other nations, no, not very many of them.”

“Well, call him as soon as you think proper. We want this one to run, don't we, John?”

“Yes,” Dr. Brightling said definitively. “Bill, set up the money for the transfer tomorrow. Dmitriy, go ahead and set up the bank account.”

“Yes, John,” Popov replied, as the dessert cart approached the table.

Grady, they saw, was excited about this mission. It was approaching two in the Dublin morning. The photos had been developed by a friend of the movement, and six of them blown up. The large ones were pinned to the wall. The small ones lay in appropriate places on a map unfolded on the worktable.

“They will approach from here, right up this road. Only one place for them to park their vehicles, isn't there?”

“Agreed,” Rodney Sands said, checking angles.

“Okay, Roddy, then we do this...” Grady outlined the plan.

“How do we communicate?”

“Cellular phones. Every group will have one, and we'll select speed-dial settings so that we can trade information rapidly and efficiently.”

“Weapons?” Danny McCorley asked.

“We have plenty of those, lad. They will respond with five men, perhaps as many as ten, but no more than that. They've never deployed more than ten or eleven men to a mission, even in Spain. We've counted them on the TV tapes, haven't we? Fifteen of us, ten of them, and surprise works for us in both phases.”

The Barry twins, Peter and Sam, looked skeptical at first, but if the mission was run quickly . . . if it ran according to the schedule . . . yes, it was possible.

“What about the women?” Timothy O'Neil asked.

“What about them?” Grady asked. “They are our primary targets.”

“A pregnant woman, Sean . . . it will not look good politically.”

“They are Americans, and their husbands are our enemies, and they are bait for getting them close. We will not kill them at once, and if circumstances permit, they might well be left alive to mourn their loss, lad,” Grady added, just to assuage the conscience of the younger man. Timmy wasn't a coward, but he did have some lingering bourgeois sentimentality.

O'Neil nodded submission. Grady wasn't a man to cross, and was in any case their leader. “I lead the group into the hospital, then?”

Grady nodded. “Yes. Roddy and I will remain outside with the covering group.”

“Very well, Sean,” Timmy agreed, committing himself to the mission now and forever.

CONCLUSIONS

One problem with an investigation like this was that you risked alerting the subject, but that couldn't always be helped. Agents Sullivan and Chatham circulated around the bar until nearly midnight, finding two women who knew Mary Bannister, and one who knew Anne Pretloe. In the case of the former, they got the name of a man with whom Bannister had been seen dancing-a bar regular who hadn't shown up that night, but whose address they'd get rapidly enough from his telephone number, which was known, it seemed, to quite a few of the women here. By midnight they were ready to leave, somewhat annoyed to have spent so much time in a lively bar drinking nothing more potent than Coca-Cola, but with a few new leads to run down. It was so far a typical case. Special Agent Sullivan thought of it like walking through a supermarket looking for dinner, picking over the shelves randomly, selecting things to eat, never knowing how the selections would turn out in the kitchen.

“'Morning, baby,” Ding said, before he rolled out of bed, as always starting his day off with a kiss.

“Hi, Ding.” Patsy tried to roll over, but it was difficult, almost as much as sleeping on her back, unable to move with her belly full of child. It couldn't come soon enough, Patricia Clark Chavez thought, despite the discomfort the delivery was sure to inflict upon her. She felt his hand Aide over the stretched skin of what had once been a flat, trim abdomen.

“How's the little guy?”

“Waking up, feels like,” she answered with a distant smile, wondering what he or she would look like. Ding was convinced it had to be a boy. It seemed he would accept no other possibility. Must be a Latino thing, she figured. A physician, she knew different. Whatever it was, however, it would almost certainly be healthy. The little thing inside her had been active since she'd felt the first “bloop,” as she called it, at three months. “There he goes,” she reported, when he/she turned over inside the sea of amniotic fluid.

Domingo Chavez felt it on the palm of his hand, smiled, and leaned down to kiss his wife again before heading to the bathroom. “Love ya, Pats,” he said on the way. As usual, the world was in its proper shape. On the way to the bathroom, he sneaked a look at the nursery, with the colored critters on the wall, and the crib all ready for use. Soon, he told himself. Just about any time, the OB had said, adding that first babies were usually late, however. Fifteen minutes later, he was in his morning sweats and on his way out the door, some coffee in him but nothing else, since he didn't like to eat breakfast before exercising. His car took the short drive to the Team-2 building, where everyone else was arriving.

“Hey, Eddie,” Chavez said to Price in greeting.

“Good morning, Major,” the sergeant major called in return. Five minutes later, the team was out on the grass, all dressed in their morning workout gear. This morning Sergeant Mike Pierce, still the team's kill leader, led the routine. The stretching and strength exercises took fifteen minutes, and then came the morning run.

“Airborne rangers jump from planes,” Pierce called, and then the remainder of the team chorused;

“They ain't got no goddamned brains!”

The traditional chant made perfectly good sense to Chavez, who'd been through Ranger School at Fort Benning, but not Jump School. It made far better sense, he thought, to come to battle in a helicopter rather than as skeet for the bastards on the ground to shoot at, a perfect target, unable to shoot back. The very idea frightened him. But he was the only member of Team-2 who'd never jumped, and that made him a “fucking leg,” or straightlegged infantryman, not one of the anointed people with the silver icecream cone badge. Strange that he'd never heard any of his people josh him about it, he thought, passing the first mile post on the track. Pierce was a gifted runner. and was setting a fast pace, maybe trying to get somebody to fall out. But no one would do that, and everyone knew it. At home, Ding thought, Patsy was getting herself ready for work in the hospital emergency room. She was leaning toward specialization in ER medicine at the moment, which meant getting a general surgery certification. Funny that she hadn't selected her area of medical specialty yet. She certainly had the brains to do nearly anything, and her smallish hands would be perfect for surgery. She often practiced dexterity by playing with a deck of cards, and over the past few months she'd become expert at dealing seconds. She'd showed him what she was doing and how, but even then, watching closely, he couldn't see her do it, which had amazed and annoyed her husband. Her motor-control nerves must be incredible, Domingo thought proudly, pounding into the third mile of the run. This was when you began to feel it, because in mile three your legs were thinking that they'd gone pretty far already, and maybe slowing down would be nice. At least that was true for Ding. Two members of the team ran marathons, and as far as he'd been able to tell, chose two, Loiselle and Weber, respectively the smallest and largest members of the team, never got tired. The German especially, graduate of the Bundeswehr mountain warfare school, and holder of the Bergermeister badge, was about the toughest son of a bitch he'd ever met-and Chavez thought of himself as a tough little son of a bitch. Loiselle was just like a little damned rabbit, moving along with grace and invisible power.

Ten more minutes, Chavez thought, his legs starting to complain to him, but not allowing any of it to show, his face set in a calm, determined mien, almost bored as his feet pounded on the cinders of the track. Team-1 was running, too, opposite them on the track, and fortunately neither team raced the other. They did record their times for the run, but direct competition would have forced all of the Rainbow troopers into a destructive regimen that would only produce injuries-and enough of those happened from routine training, though Team-2 was fully mission-capable at the moment, with all injuries healed.

“Detail... quick-time, march!” Pierce finally called, as they completed the morning jaunt. Another fifty meters and they halted.

“Well, people, good morning. I hope you all enjoyed waking up for another day of safeguarding the world from the bad guys,” Pierce told them, sweat on his smiling face. “Major Chavez,” he said next, walking back to his usual place in the ranks.

“Okay, gentlemen, that was a good workout. Thank you, Sergeant Pierce, for leading the run this morning. Showers and breakfast, troops. Fall out.” With that command the two ranks of five each disintegrated, the men heading off to their building to shower off the sweat. A few of them worked legs or arms a little for some exerciseinduced cricks. The endorphins had kicked in, the body's own reward for exertion, creating the “runner's high,” as some called it, which would mellow in a few minutes to the wonderful sense of well-being that they'd enjoy for the rest of the morning. Already they were chatting back and forth about various things, professional and not.