Clancy, Tom - The Bear And The Dragon

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THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON
Tom Clancy
P R O L O G U E
The White Mercedes
Going to work was the same everywhere, and the changeover from Marxism-Leninism to Chaos-
Capitalism hadn't changed matters much--- well, maybe things were now a little worse. Moscow, a
city of wide streets, was harder to drive in now that nearly anyone could have a car, and the center
lane down the wide boulevards was no longer tended by militiamen for the Politburo and used by
Central Committee men who considered it a personal right of way, like Czarist princes in their
troika sleds. Now it was a left-turn lane for anyone with a Zil or other private car. In the case of
Sergey Nikolay'ch Golovko, the car was a white Mercedes 600, the big one with the S-class body
and twelve cylinders of German power under the hood. There weren't many of them in Moscow,
and truly his was an extravagance that ought to have embarrassed him... but didn't. Maybe there
were no more nomenklatura in this city, but rank did have its privileges, and he was chairman of
the SVR. His apartment was also large, on the top floor of a high-rise building on Kutusovskiy
Prospekt, a structure relatively new and well-made, down to the German appliances which were a
long-standing luxury accorded senior government officials.
He didn't drive himself. He had Anatoliy for that, a burly former Spetsnaz special-operations
soldier who carried a pistol under his coat and who drove the car with ferocious aggression, while
tending it with loving care. The windows were coated with dark plastic, which denied the casual
onlooker the sight of the people inside, and the windows were thick, made of polycarbonate and
specced to stop anything up to a 12.7-mm bullet, or so the company had told Golovko's purchasing
agents sixteen months before. The armor made it nearly a ton heavier than was the norm for an
S600 Benz, but the power and the ride didn't seem to suffer from that. It was the uneven streets that
would ultimately destroy the car. Road-paving was a skill that his country had not yet mastered,
Golovko thought as he turned the page in his morning paper. It was the American International
Herald Tribune, always a good source of news since it was a joint venture of The Washington Post
and The New York Times, which were together two of the most skilled intelligence services in the
world, if a little too arrogant to be the true professionals Sergey Nikolay'ch and his people were.
He'd joined the intelligence business when the agency had been known as the KGB, the
Committee for State Security, still, he thought, the best such government department the world had
ever known, even if it had ultimately failed. Golovko sighed. Had the USSR not fallen in the early
1990s, then his place as Chairman would have put him as a full voting member of the Politburo, a
man of genuine power in one of the world's two superpowers, a man whose mere gaze could make
strong men tremble... but... no, what was the use of that? he asked himself. It was all an illusion, an
odd thing for a man of supposed regard for objective truth to value. That had always been the cruel
dichotomy. KGB had always been on the lookout for hard facts, but then reported those facts to
people besotted with a dream, who then bent the truth in the service of that dream. When the truth
had finally broken through, the dream had suddenly evaporated like a cloud of steam in a high
wind, and reality had poured in like the flood following the breakup of an ice-bound river in
springtime. And then the Politburo, those brilliant men who'd wagered their lives on the dream, had
found that their theories had been only the thinnest of reeds, and reality was the swinging scythe,
and the eminence bearing that tool didn't deal in salvation.
But it was not so for Golovko. A dealer in facts, he'd been able to continue his profession, for his
government still needed them. In fact, his authority was broader now than it would have been,
because as a man who well knew the surrounding world and some of its more important
personalities intimately, he was uniquely suited to advising his president, and so he had a voice in
foreign policy, defense, and domestic matters. Of them, the third was the trickiest lately, which had
rarely been the case before. It was now also the most dangerous. It was an odd thing. Previously,
the mere spoken (more often, shouted) phrase "State Security!" would freeze Soviet citizens in their
stride, for KGB had been the most feared organ of the previous government, with power such as
Reinhart Heydrich's Sicherheitsdienst had only dreamed about, the power to arrest, imprison,
interrogate, and to kill any citizen it wished, with no recourse at all. But that, too, was a thing of the
past. Now KGB was split, and the domestic-security branch was a shadow of its former self, while
the SVR--- formerly the First Chief Directorate--- still gathered information, but lacked the
immediate strength that had come with being able to enforce the will, if not quite the law, of the
communist government. But his current duties were still vast, Golovko told himself, folding the
paper.
He was only a kilometer away from Dzerzhinskiy Square. That, too, was no longer the same. The
statue of Iron Feliks was gone. It had always been a chilling sight to those who'd known who the
man was whose bronze image had stood alone in the square, but now it, too, was a distant memory.
The building behind it was the same, however. Once the stately home office of the Rossiya
Insurance Company, it had later been known as the Lubyanka, a fearsome word even in the
fearsome land ruled by Iosef Vissarionovich Stalin, with its basement full of cells and interrogation
rooms. Most of those functions had been transferred over the years to Lefortovo Prison to the east,
as the KGB bureaucracy had grown, as all such bureaucracies grow, filling the vast building like an
expanding balloon, as it claimed every room and corner until secretaries and file clerks occupied
the (remodeled) spaces where Kamenev and Ordzhonikidze had been tortured under the eyes of
Yagoda and Beriya. Golovko supposed that there hadn't been too many ghosts.
Well, a new working day beckoned. A staff meeting at 8:45, then the normal routine of briefings
and discussions, lunch at 12:15, and with luck he'd be back in the car and on his way back home
soon after six, before he had to change for the reception at the French Embassy. He looked forward
to the food and wine, if not the conversation.
Another car caught his eye. It was a twin to his own, another large Mercedes S-class, iceberg
white just like his own, complete down to the American-made dark plastic on the windows. It was
driving purposefully in the bright morning, as Anatoliy slowed and pulled behind a dump truck,
one of the thousand such large ugly vehicles that covered the streets of Moscow like a dominant
life-form, this one's load area cluttered with hand tools rather than filled with earth. There was yet
another truck a hundred meters beyond, driving slowly as though its driver was unsure of his route.
Golovko stretched in his seat, barely able to see around the truck in front of his Benz, wishing for
the first cup of Sri Lankan tea at his desk, in the same room that Beriya had once...
...the distant dump truck. A man had been lying in the back. Now he rose, and he was holding...
"Anatoliy!" Golovko said sharply, but his driver couldn't see around the truck to his immediate
front .
...it was an RPG, a slender pipe with a bulbous end. The sighting bar was up, and as the distant
truck was now stopped, the man came up to one knee and turned, aiming his weapon at the other
white Benz---
---the other driver saw it and tried to swerve, but found his way blocked by the morning traffic
and---
---not much in the way of a visual signature, just a thin puff of smoke from the rear of the
launcher-tube, but the bulbous part leapt off and streaked into the hood of the other white
Mercedes, and there it exploded.
It hit just short of the windshield. The explosion wasn't the fireball so beloved of Western
movies, just a muted flash and gray smoke, but the sound roared across the square, and a wide, flat,
jagged hole blew out of the trunk of the car, and that meant that anyone inside the vehicle would
now be dead, Golovko knew without pausing to think on it. Then the gasoline ignited, and the car
burned, along with a few square meters of asphalt. The Mercedes stopped almost at once, its left-
side tires shredded and flattened by the explosion. The dump truck in front of Golovko's car panic-
stopped, and Anatoliy swerved right, his eyes narrowed by the noise, but not yet---
"Govno!" Now Anatoliy saw what had happened and took action. He kept moving right,
accelerating hard and swerving back and forth as his eyes picked holes in the traffic. The majority
of the vehicles in sight had stopped, and Golovko's driver sought out the holes and darted through
them, arriving at the vehicle entrance to Moscow Center in less than a minute. The armed guards
there were already moving out into the square, along with the supplementary response force from
its shack just inside and out of sight. The commander of the group, a senior lieutenant, saw
Golovko's car and recognized it, waved him inside and motioned to two of his men to accompany it
to the drop-off point. The arrival time was now the only normal aspect of the young day. Golovko
stepped out, and two young soldiers formed up in physical contact with his heavy topcoat. Anatoliy
stepped out, too, his pistol in his hand and his coat open, looking back through the gate with
suddenly anxious eyes. His head turned quickly.
"Get him inside!" And with that order, the two privates strong-armed Golovko through the
double bronze doors, where more security troops were arriving.
"This way, Comrade Chairman," a uniformed captain said, taking Sergey Nikolay'ch's arm and
heading off to the executive elevator. A minute later, he stumbled into his office, his brain only
now catching up with what it had seen just three minutes before. Of course, he walked to the
window to look down.
Moscow police--- called militiamen--- were racing to the scene, three of them on foot. Then a
police car appeared, cutting through the stopped traffic. Three motorists had left their vehicles and
approached the burning car, perhaps hoping to render assistance. Brave of them, Golovko thought,
but an entirely useless effort. He could see better now, even at a distance of three hundred meters.
The top had bulged up. The windshield was gone, and he looked into a smoking hole, which had
minutes before been a hugely expensive vehicle, and which had been destroyed by one of the
cheapest weapons the Red Army had ever mass-produced. Whoever had been inside had been
shredded instantly by metal fragments traveling at nearly ten thousand meters per second. Had they
even known what had happened? Probably not. Perhaps the driver had had time to look and
wonder, but the owner of the car in the back had probably been reading his morning paper, before
his life had ended without warning.
That was when Golovko's knees went weak. That could have been him... suddenly learning if
there were an afterlife after all, one of the great mysteries of life, but not one which had occupied
his thoughts very often...
But whoever had done the killing, who had been his target? As Chairman of the SVR, Golovko
was not a man to believe in coincidences, and there were not all that many white Benz S600s in
Moscow, were there?
"Comrade Chairman?" It was Anatoliy at the office door.
"Yes, Anatoliy Ivan'ch?"
"Are you well?"
"Better than he," Golovko replied, stepping away from the window. He needed to sit now. He
tried to move to his swivel chair without staggering, for his legs were suddenly weak indeed. He sat
and found the surface of his desk with both his hands, and looked down at the oaken surface with
its piles of papers to be read--- the routine sight of a day which was not now routine at all. He
looked up.
Anatoliy Ivan'ch Shelepin was not a man to show fear. He'd served in Spetsnaz through his
captaincy, before being spotted by a KGB talent scout for a place in the 8th "Guards" Directorate,
which he'd accepted just in time for KGB to be broken apart. But Anatoliy had been Golovko's
driver and bodyguard for years now, part of his official family, like an elder son, and Shelepin was
devoted to his boss. He was a tall, bright man of thirty-three years, with blond hair and blue eyes
that were now far larger than usual, because though Anatoliy had trained for much of his life to
deal with and in violence, this was the first time he'd actually been there to see it when it happened.
Anatoliy had often wondered what it might be like to take a life, but never once in his career had he
contemplated losing his own, certainly not to an ambush, and most certainly not to an ambush
within shouting distance of his place of work. At his desk outside Golovko's office, he acted like a
personal secretary more than anything else. Like all such men, he'd grown casual in the routine of
protecting someone whom no one would dare attack, but now his comfortable world had been
sundered as completely and surely as that of his boss.
Oddly, but predictably, it was Golovko's brain that made it back to reality first.
"Anatoliy?"
"Yes, Chairman?"
"We need to find out who died out there, and then find out if it was supposed to be us instead.
Call militia headquarters, and see what they are doing."
"At once." The handsome young face disappeared from the doorway.
Golovko took a deep breath and rose, taking another look out the window as he did so. There
was a fire engine there now, and firefighter were spraying the wrecked car to extinguish the
lingering flames. An ambulance was standing by as well, but that was a waste of manpower and
equipment, Sergey Nikolay'ch knew. The first order of business was toy get the license-plate
number from the car and identify its owner, and from that knowledge determine if the unfortunate
had died in Golovko's place, or perhaps had possessed enemies of his own. Rage had not yet
supplanted the shock of the event. Perhaps that would come later, Golovko thought, as he took a
step toward his private washroom, for suddenly his bladder was weak. It seemed a horrid display of
frailty, but Golovko had never known immediate fear in his life, and, like many, thought in terms of
the movies. The actors there were bold and resolute, never mind that their words were scripted and
their reactions rehearsed, and none of it was anything like what happened when explosives arrived
in the air without warning.
Who wants me dead? he wondered, after flushing the toilet.
The American Embassy a few miles away had a flat roof on which stood all manner of radio
antennas, most of them leading to radio receivers of varying levels of sophistication, which were in
turn attached to tape recorders that turned slowly in order to more efficiently use their tapes. In the
room with the recorders were a dozen people, both civilian and military, all Russian linguists who
reported to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, between Baltimore and
Washington. It was early in the day, and these people were generally at work before the Russian
officials whose communications they worked to monitor. One of the many radios in the room was a
scanning monitor of the sort once used by American citizens to listen in on police calls. The local
cops used the same bands and the exact same type of radios that their American counterparts had
used in the 1970s, and monitoring them was child's play--- they were not encrypted yet. They
listened in on them for the occasional traffic accident, perhaps involving a big shot, and mainly to
keep a finger on the pulse of Moscow, whose crime situation was bad and getting worse. It was
useful for embassy personnel to know what parts of town to avoid, and to be able to keep track of a
crime to one of the thousands of American citizens.
"Explosion?" an Army sergeant asked the radio. His head turned. "Lieutenant Wilson, police
report an explosion right in front of Moscow Center."
"What kind?"
"Sounds like a car blew up. Fire department is on the scene now, ambulance..." He plugged in
headphones to get a better cut on the voice traffic. "Okay, white Mercedes-Benz, tag number---" He
pulled out a pad and wrote it down. "Three people dead, driver and two passengers and... oh, shit!"
"What is it, Reins?"
"Sergey Golovko..." Sergeant Reins's eyes were shut, and he had one hand pressing the
headphones to his ears. "Doesn't he drive a white Benz?"
"Oh, shit!" Lieutenant Wilson observed for herself. Golovko was one of the people whom her
people routinely tracked. "Is he one of the deaders?"
"Can't tell yet, ell-tee. New voice... the captain at the station, just said he's coming down. Looks
like they're excited about this one, ma'am. Lotsa chatter coming up."
Lieutenant Susan Wilson rocked back and forth in her swivel chair. Make a call on this one or
not? They couldn't shoot you for notifying your superiors of something, could they...? "Where's the
station chief?"
"On his way to the airport, ell-tee, he's flying off to St. Petersburg today, remember?"
"Okay." She turned back to her panel and lifted the secure phone, a STU-6 (for "secure telephone
unit"), to Fort Meade. Her plastic encryption key was in its proper slot, and the phone was already
linked and synchronized with another such phone at NSA headquarters. She punched the # key to
get a response.
"Watch Room," a voice said half a world away.
"This is Station Moscow. We have an indication that Sergey Golovko may just have been
assassinated."
"The SVR chairman?"
"Affirmative. A car similar to his has exploded in Dzerzhinskiy Square, and this is the time he
usually goes to work."
"Confidence?" the disembodied male voice asked. It would be a middle-grade officer, probably
military, holding down the eleven-to-seven watch. Probably Air Force. "Confidence" was one of
their institutional buzzwords.
"We're taking this off police radios--- the Moscow Militia, that is. We have lots of voice traffic,
and it sounds excited, my operator tells me."
"Okay, can you upload it to us?"
"Affirmative," Lieutenant Wilson replied.
"Okay, let's do that. Thanks for the heads-up, we'll take it from here."
Okay, Station Moscow out," heard Major Bob Teeters. He was new in his job at NSA. Formerly a
rated pilot who had twenty-one hundred hours in command of C-5s and C-17s, he'd injured his left
elbow in a motorcycle accident eight months before, and the loss of mobility there had ended his
flying career, much to his disgust. Now he was reborn as a spook, which was somewhat more
interesting in an intellectual sense, but not exactly a happy exchange for an aviator. He waved to an
enlisted man, a Navy petty officer first-class, to pick up on the active line from Moscow. This the
sailor did, donning headphones and lighting up the word-processing program on his desktop
computer. This sailor was a Russian linguist in addition to being a yeoman, and thus competent to
drive the computer. He typed, translating as he listened in to the pirated Russian police radios, and
his script came up on Major Teeters's computer screen.
I HAVE THE LICENSE NUMBER, CHECKING NOW, the first line read.
GOOD, QUICK AS YOU CAN.
WORKING ON IT, COMRADE. (TAPPING IN THE BACKGROUND, DO THRE RUSSKIES
HAVE COMPUTERS FOR TIS STUFF NOW?)
I HAVE IT, WHITE MERCEDES BENZ, REGISTERED TO G. F . AVSYENKO, (NOT SURE
OF SPELLING) 677 PROTOPOPOV PROSPEKT, FLAT 18A.
HIM? I KNOW THAT NAME!
Which was good for somebody, Major Teeters thought, but not all that great for Avsyenko.
Okay, what next? The senior watch officer was another squid, Rear Admiral Tom Porter, probably
drinking coffee in his office over in the main building and watching TV, maybe. Time to change
that. He called the proper number.
"Admiral Porter."
"Sir, this is Major Teeters down in the watch center. We have some breaking news in Moscow."
"What's that, Major?" a tired voice asked.
"Station Moscow initially thought that somebody might have killed Chairman Golovko of the
KG--- the SVR, I mean."
"What was that, Major?" a somewhat more alert voice inquired.
"Turns out it probably wasn't him, sir. Somebody named Avsyenko---" Teeters spelled it out.
"We're getting the intercepts off their police radio bands. I haven't run the name yet."
"What else?"
"Sir, that's all I have right now."
By this time, a CIA field officer named Tom Barlow was in the loop at the embassy. The third-
ranking spook in the current scheme of things, he didn't want to drive over to Dzerzhinskiy Square
himself, but he did the next best thing. Barlow called the CNN office, the direct line to a friend.
"Mike Evans."
"Mike, this is Jimmy," Tom Barlow said, initiating a prearranged and much-used lie.
"Dzerzhinskiy Square, the murder of somebody in a Mercedes. Sounds messy and kinda
spectacular."
"Okay," the reporter said, making a brief note. "We're on it."
At his desk, Barlow checked his watch. 8:52 local time. Evans was a hustling reporter for a
hustling news service. Barlow figured there'd be a mini cam there in twenty minutes. The truck
would have its own Kuband uplink to a satellite, down from there to CNN headquarters in Atlanta,
and the same signal would be pirated by the DoD downlink at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and spread
around from there on government-owned satellites to interested parties. An attempt on the life of
Chairman Golovko made it interesting as hell to a lot of people. Next he lit up his desktop Compaq
computer and opened the file for Russian names that were known to CIA.
A duplicate of that file resided in any number of CIA computers at Langley, Virginia, and on one
of those in the CIA Operations Room on the 7th floor of the Old Headquarters Building, a set of
fingers typed A-V-S-Y E-N-K-O... and came up with nothing other than:
ENTIRE FILE SEARCHED. THE SEARCH ITEM WAS NOT FOUND.
That evoked a grumble from the person on the computer. So, it wasn't spelled properly.
"Why does this name sound familiar?" he asked. "But the machine says no-hit."
"Let's see..." a co-worker said, leaning over and respelling the name. "Try this..." Again a no-hit.
A third variation was tried.
"Bingo! Thanks, Beverly," the watch officer said. "Oh, yeah, we know who this guy is. Rasputin.
Low-life bastard--- sure as hell, look what happened when he went straight," the officer chuckled.
Rasputin?" Golovko asked. "Nekulturniy swine, eh?" He allowed himself a brief smile. "But who
would wish him dead?" he asked his security chief, who, if anything, was taking the matter even
more seriously than the Chairman. His job had just become far more complicated. For starters, he
had to tell Sergey Nikolay'ch that the white Mercedes was no longer his personal conveyance. Too
ostentatious. His next task of the day was to ask the armed sentries who posted the corners of the
building's roof why they hadn't spotted a man in the load area of a dump truck with an RPG---
within three hundred meters of the building they were supposed to guard! And not so much as a
warning over their portable radios until the Mercedes of Gregoriy Filipovich Avseyenko had been
blown to bits. He'd sworn many oaths already on this day, and there would be more to come.
"How long has he been out of the service?" Golovko asked next.
"Since '93, Comrade Chairman," Major Anatoliy Ivan'ch Shelepin said, having just asked the
same question and received the answer seconds earlier.
The first big reduction-in-force, Golovko thought, but it would seem that the pimp had made the
transition to private enterprise well. Well enough to own a Mercedes Benz S-600... and well
enough to be killed by enemies he'd made along the way... unless he'd unknowingly sacrificed his
own life for that of another. That question still needed answering. The Chairman had recovered his
self-control by this point, enough at any rate for his mind to begin functioning. Golovko was too
bright a man to ask Why would anyone wish to end my life? He knew better than that. Men in
positions like his made enemies, some of them deadly ones... but most of them were too smart to
make such an attempt. Vendettas were dangerous things to begin at his level, and for that reason,
they never happened. The business of international intelligence was remarkably sedate and
civilized. People still died. Anyone caught spying for a foreign government against Mother Russia
was in the deepest of trouble, new regime or not--- state treason was still state treason--- but those
killings followed... what did the Americans call it? Due process of law. Yes, that was it. The
Americans and their lawyers. If their lawyers approved of something, then it was civilized.
"Who else was in the car?" Golovko asked.
"His driver. We have the name, a former militiaman. And one of his women, it would seem, no
name for her yet."
"What do we know of Gregoriy's routine? Why was he there this morning?"
"Not known at this time, Comrade," Major Shelepin replied. "The militia are working on it."
"Who is running the case?"
"Lieutenant Colonel Shablikov, Comrade Chairman."
"Yefim Konstantinovich--- yes, I know him. Good man," Golovko allowed. "I suppose he'll need
his time, eh?"
"It does require time," Shelepin agreed.
More than it took for Rasputin to meet his end, Golovko thought. Life was such a strange thing,
so permanent when one had it, so fleeting when it was lost--- and those who lost it could never tell
you what it was like, could they? Not unless you believed in ghosts or God or an afterlife, things
which had somehow been overlooked in Golovko's childhood. So, yet another great mystery, the
spymaster told himself. It had come so close, for the first time in his life. It was disquieting, but on
reflection, not so frightening as he would have imagined. The Chairman wondered if this was
something he might call courage. He'd never thought of himself as a brave man, for the simple
reason that he'd never faced immediate physical danger. It was not that he had avoided it, only that
it had never come close until today, and after the outrage had passed, he found himself not so much
bemused as curious. Why had this happened? Who had done it? Those were the questions he had to
answer, lest it happen again. To be courageous once was enough, Golovko thought.
Dr. Benjamin Goodley arrived at Langley at 5:40, five minutes earlier than his customary time.
His job largely denied him much of a social life, which hardly seemed fair to the National
Intelligence Officer. Was he not of marriageable age, possessed of good looks, a man with good
prospects both in the professional and business sense? Perhaps not the latter, Goodley thought,
parking his car in a VIP slot by the cement canopy of the Old Headquarters Building. He drove a
Ford Explorer because it was a nice car for driving in the snow, and there would be snow soon. At
least winter was coming, and winter in the D.C. area was wholly unpredictable, especially now that
some of the eco-nuts were saying that global warming would cause an unusually cold winter this
year. The logic of that escaped him. Maybe he'd have a chat with the President's Science Adviser to
see if that made any sense talking with someone who could explain things. The new one was pretty
good, and knew how to use single-syllable words.
Goodley made his way through the pass-gate and into the elevator. He walked into the
Operations Room at 5:50 A.M.
"Hey, Ben," one said.
"Morning, Charlie. Anything interesting happening?"
"You're gonna love this one, Ben," Charlie Roberts promised. "A big day in Mother Russia."
"Oh?" Narrowed eyes. Goodley had his worries about Russia, and so did his boss. "What's that?"
"No big deal. Just somebody tried to whack Sergey Nikolay'ch."
His head snapped around like an owl's. "What?"
"You heard me, Ben, but they hit the wrong car with the RPG and took out somebody else we
know--- well, used to know," Roberts corrected himself.
"Start from the beginning."
"Peggy, roll the videotape," Roberts commanded his watch officer with a theatrical wave of the
arm.
"Whoa!" Goodley said after the first five seconds. "So, who was it really?"
"Would you believe Gregoriy Filipovich Avseyenko?"
"I don't know that name," Goodley admitted.
"Here." The watch officer handed over a manila folder. "What we had on the guy when he was
KGB. A real sweetheart," she observed, in the woman's neutral voice of distaste.
"Rasputin?" Goodley said, scanning the first page. "Oh, okay, I have heard something about this
one."
"So has the Boss, I bet."
"I'll know in two hours," Goodley imagined aloud. "What's Station Moscow saying?"
"The station chief is in St. Pete's for a trade conference, part of his cover duties. What we have is
from his XO. The best bet to this point is that either Aveseyenko made a big enemy in the Russian
Mafia, or maybe Golovko was the real target, and they hit the wrong car. No telling which at this
point." Followed by the usual NIO damned-if-I-know shrug.
"Who would want to take Golovko out?"
"Their Mafia? Somebody got himself an RPG, and they don't sell them in hardware stores, do
they? So, that means somebody deeply into their criminal empire, probably, made the hit--- but
who was the real target? Avseyenko must have had some serious enemies along the way, but
Golovko must have enemies or rivals, too." She shrugged again. "You pays your money and you
takes your choice."
"The Boss likes to have better information," Goodley warned.
"So do I, Ben," Peggy Hunter replied. "But that's all I got, and even the fuckin' Russians don't
have better at this point."
"Any way we can look into their investigation?"
"The Legal Attaché, Mike Reilly, is supposed to be pretty tight with their cops. He got a bunch
of them admitted to the FBI's National Academy post-grad cop courses down at Quantico."
"Maybe have the FBI tell him to nose around?"
Mrs. Hunter shrugged again. "Can't hurt. Worst thing anybody can say is no, and we're already
there, right?"
Goodley nodded. "Okay, I'll recommend that." He got up. "Well," he observed on his way out the
door, "the Boss won't bitch about how boring the world is today." He took the CNN tape with him
and headed back to his SUV
The sun was struggling to rise now. Traffic on the George Washington Parkway was picking up
with eager-beaver types heading into their desks early, probably Pentagon people, most of them,
Goodley thought, as he crossed over the Key Bridge, past Teddy Roosevelt Island. The Potomac
was calm and flat, almost oily, like the pond behind a mill dam. The outside temperature, his
dashboard said, was forty-four, and the forecast for the day was a high in the upper fifties, a few
clouds, and calm winds. An altogether pleasant day for late fall, though he'd be stuck in his office
for all of it, pleasant or not.
Things were starting early at The House, he saw on pulling in. The Blackhawk helicopter was
just lifting off as he pulled into his reserved parking place, and the motorcade had already formed
up at the West Entrance. It was enough to make him check his watch. No, he wasn't late. He hustled
out of his car, bundling the papers and cassette into his arms as he hurried inside.
"Morning, Dr. Goodley," a uniformed guard said in greeting.
"Hi, Chuck." Regular or not, he had to pass through the metal detector. The papers and cassette
were inspected by hand--- as though he'd try to bring a gun in, Ben thought in passing irritation.
Well, there had been a few scares, hadn't there? And these people were trained not to trust anybody.
Having passed the daily security test, he turned left, sprinted up the stairs, then left again to his
office, where some helpful soul--- he didn't know if it was one of the clerical staff or maybe one of
the Service people--- had his office coffee machine turning out some Gloria Jean's French
Hazelnut. He poured himself a cup and sat down at his desk to organize his papers and his thoughts.
He managed to down half of the cup before bundling it all up again for the ninety-foot walk. The
Boss was already there.
"Morning, Ben."
"Good morning, Mr. President," replied the National Security Adviser.
"Okay, what's new in the world?" POTUS asked.
"It looks as though somebody might have tried to assassinate Sergey Golovko this morning."
"Oh?" President Ryan asked, looking up from his coffee. Goodley filled him in, then inserted the
cassette in the Oval Office VCR and punched PLAY.
"Jeez," Ryan observed. What had been an expensive car was now fit only for the crushing
machine. "Who'd they get instead?"
"One Gregoriy Filipovich Avseyenko, age fifty-two---"
"I know that name. Where from?"
"He's more widely known as Rasputin. He used to run the KGB Sparrow School."
Ryan's eyes went a little wider. "That cocksucker! Okay, what's the story on him?"
"He got RIF'd back in '93 or so, and evidently set himself up in the same business, and it would
seem he's made some money at it, judging by his car, anyway. There was evidently a young woman
in with him when he was killed, plus a driver. They were all killed."
Ryan nodded. The Sparrow School had been where for years the Soviets had trained attractive
young women to be prostitutes in the service of their country both at home and abroad, because,
since time immemorial, men with a certain weakness for women had often found their tongues
loosened by the right sort of lubrication. Not a few secrets had been conveyed to the KGB by this
method, and the women had also been useful in recruiting various foreign nationals for the KGB
officers to exploit. So, on having his official office shut down, Rasputin--- so called by the Soviets
for his ability to get women to bend to his will--- had simply plied his trade in the new free-
enterprise environment.
"So, Avseyenko might have had 'business' enemies angry enough to take him out, and Golovko
might not have been the target at all?"
"Correct, Mr. President. The possibility exists, but we don't have any supporting data one way or
the other."
"How do we get it?"
"The Legal Attaché at the embassy is well connected with the Russian police," the National
Security Adviser offered.
"Okay, call Dan Murray at FBI and have his man nose around," Ryan said. He'd already
considered calling Golovko directly--- they'd known each other for more than ten years, though one
of their initial contacts had involved Golovko's pistol right in Jack's face on one of the runways of
Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport--- and decided against it. He couldn't show that much immediate
interest, though later, if they had a private moment together, he'd be able to ask a casual question
about the incident. "Same for Ed and MP at CIA."
"Right." Goodley made a note.
"Next?"
Goodley turned the page. "Indonesia is doing some naval exercises that have the Aussies a little
interested...." Ben went on with the morning briefing for twenty more minutes, mainly covering
political rather than military matters, because that's what national security had become in recent
years. Even the international arms trade had diminished to the point that quite a few countries were
treating their national military establishments as boutiques rather than serious instruments of
statecraft.
"So, the world's in good shape today?" the President summarized.
"Except for the pothole in Moscow, it would seem so, sir."
The National Security Adviser departed, and Ryan looked at his schedule for the day. As usual,
he had very little in the way of free time. About the only moments on his plan-of-the-day without
someone in the office with him were those in which he'd have to read over briefing documents for
the next meeting, many of which were planned literally weeks in advance. He took off his reading
glasses--- he hated them--- and rubbed his eyes, already anticipating the morning headache that
would come in about thirty minutes. A quick re-scan of the page showed no light moments today.
No troop of Eagle Scouts from Wyoming, nor current World Series champs, nor Miss Plum
Tomato from California's Imperial Valley to give him something to smile about. No. Today would
be all work.
Shit, he thought.
The nature of the Presidency was a series of interlocking contradictions. The Most Powerful Man
in the World was quite unable to use his power except under the most adverse circumstances,
which he was supposed to avoid rather than to engage. In reality, the Presidency was about
negotiations, more with the Congress than anyone else; it was a process for which Ryan had been
unsuited until given a crash course by his chief of staff, Arnold van Damm. Fortunately, Arnie did a
lot of the negotiations himself, then came into the Oval Office to tell the President what his
(Ryan's) decision and/or position was on an issue, so that he (van Damm) could then do a press
release or a statement in the Press Room. Ryan supposed that a lawyer treated his client that way
much of the time, looking after his interests as best he could while not telling him what those
interests were until they were already decided. The President, Arnie told everyone, had to be
protected from direct negotiations with everyone--- specially Congress. And, Jack reminded
himself, he had a fairly tame Congress. What had it been like for presidents dealing with
contentious ones?
And what the hell, he wondered, not for the first time, was he doing here?
The election process had been the purest form of hell--- despite the fact that he'd had what Arnie
invariably had called a cakewalk. Never less than five speeches per day, more often as many as
nine, in as many different places before as many diverse groups--- but always the same speech,
摘要：

THEBEARANDTHEDRAGONTomClancyPROLOGUETheWhiteMercedesGoingtoworkwasthesameeverywhere,andthechangeoverfromMarxism-LeninismtoChaos-Capitalismhadn'tchangedmattersmuch---well,maybethingswerenowalittleworse.Moscow,acityofwidestreets,washardertodriveinnowthatnearlyanyonecouldhaveacar,andthecenterlanedownth...

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