"Within reason." Golovko nodded. "We'd prefer that you did not start a war out there."

"I have no desire to drive to Beijing. I have never enjoyed their cooking," Bondarenko replied lightly. And Russians should be better soldiers. The fighting ability of the Russian male had never been an issue for doubt. He just needed good training, good equipment, and proper leadership. Bondarenko thought he could supply two of those needs, and that would have to do. Already, his mind was racing east, thinking about his headquarters, what sort of staff officer he would find, whom he'd have to replace, and where the replacements would come from. There'd be drones out there, careerist officers just serving their time and filling out their forms, as if that were what it meant to be a field-grade officer. Those men would see their careers aborted-well, he'd give everyone thirty days to straighten up, and if he knew himself, he'd inspire some to rediscover their vocations. His best hope was in the individual soldiers, the young boys wearing their country's uniform indifferently because no one had told them exactly what they were and how important that thing was. But he'd fix that. They were soldiers, those boys. Guardians of their country, and they deserved to be proud guardians. With proper training, in nine months they'd wear the uniforms better, stand straighter, and swagger a bit on leave, as soldiers were supposed to do. He'd show them how to do it, and he'd become their surrogate father, pushing and cajoling his new crop of sons toward manhood. It was as worthy a goal as any man could wish, and as Commander-in-Chief Far East, he just might set a standard for his country's armed forces to emulate.

"So, Gennady Iosifovich, what do I tell Eduard Petrovich?" Golovko asked, as he leaned across the desk to give his guest a little more of the fine Starka vodka.

Bondarenko lifted the gla.s.s to salute his host. "Comrade Minister, you will please tell our president that he has a new CINC-Far East."

CHAPTER 18.

Evolutions The interesting part for Mancuso in his new job was that he now commanded aircraft, which he could fairly well understand, but also ground troops, which he hardly understood at all. This latter contingent included the 3rd Marine Division based on Okinawa, and the Army's 25th Light Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks on Oahu. Mancuso had never directly commanded more than one hundred fifty or so men, all of whom had been aboard his first and last real-as he thought of it-command, USS Dallas. That was a good number, large enough that it felt larger than even an extended family, and small enough that you knew every face and name. Pacific Command wasn't anything like that. The square of Dallas's crew didn't begin to comprise the manpower which he could direct from his desk.

He'd been through the Capstone course. That was a program designed to introduce new flag officers to the other branches of the service. He'd walked in the woods with Army soldiers, crawled in the mud with Marines, even watched an aerial refueling from the jump seat of a C-5B transport (the most unnatural act he ever expected to see, two airplanes mating in midair at three hundred knots), and played with the Army's heavy troops at Fort Irwin, California, where he'd tried his hand at driving and shooting tanks and Bradleys. But seeing it all and playing with the kids, and getting mud on his clothing, wasn't really the same as knowing it. He had some very rough ideas of what it looked and sounded and smelled like. He'd seen the confident look on the faces of men who wore uniforms of different color, and told himself about a hundred times that they were, really, all the same. The sergeant commanding an Abrams tank was little different in spirit from a leading torpedoman on a fast-attack boat, just not recently showered, and a Green Beret was little different from a fighter pilot in his G.o.dlike self-confidence. But to command such people effectively, he ought to know more, CINCPAC told himself. He ought to have had more "joint" training. But then he told himself that he could take the best fighter jock in the Air Force or the Navy, and even then it would take months for them to understand what he'd done on Dallas. h.e.l.l, just getting them to understand the importance of reactor safety would take a year-about what it had taken him to learn all those things once upon a time, and Mancuso wasn't a "nuc" by training. He'd always been a front-end guy. The services were all different in their feel for the mission, and that was because the missions were all as different in nature as a sheepdog was from a pit bull.

But he had to command them all, and do so effectively, lest he make a mistake that resulted in a telegram coming to Mrs. Smith's home to announce the untimely death of her son or husband because some senior officer had f.u.c.ked up. Well, Admiral Bart Mancuso told himself, that was why he had such a wide collection of staff officers, including a surface guy to explain what that sort of target did (to Mancuso any sort of surface ship was a target), an Airedale to explain what naval aircraft did, a Marine and some soldiers to explain life in the mud, and some Air Force wing-wipers to tell him what their birds were capable of. All of them offered advice, which, as soon as he took it, became his idea alone, because he was in command, and command meant being responsible for everything that happened in or near the Pacific Ocean, including when some newly promoted E-4 petty officer commented l.u.s.tily on the t.i.ts of another E-4 who happened to have them-a recent development in the Navy, and one which Mancuso would just as soon have put off for another decade. They were even letting women on submarines now, and the admiral didn't regret having missed that one little bit. What the h.e.l.l would Mush Morton and his crop of WWII submarines have made of that?

He figured he knew how to set up a naval exercise, one of those grand training evolutions in which half of 7th Fleet would administratively attack and destroy the other half, followed by the simulated forced-entry landing of a Marine battalion. Navy fighters would tangle with Air Force ones, and after it was all over, computer records would show who'd won and who'd lost, and bets of various sorts would be paid off in various bars-and there'd be some hard feelings, because fitness reports (and with them, careers) could ride on outcomes of simulated engagements.

Of all his services, Mancuso figured his submarine force was in the best shape, which made sense, since his previous job had been COMSUBPAC, and he'd ruthlessly whipped his boats into shape. And, besides, the little shooting war they'd engaged in two years before had given everyone the proper sense of mission, to the point that the crews of the boomers who'd laid on a submarine ambush worthy of Charlie Lockwood's best day still swaggered around when on the beach. The boomers remained in service as auxiliary fast-attacks because Mancuso had made his case to the CNO, who was his friend, Dave Seaton, and Seaton had made his case to Congress to get some additional funding, and Congress was nice and tame, what with two recent conflicts to show them that people in uniform did have more purposes than opening and closing doors for the people's elected representatives. Besides, the Ohio-cla.s.s boats were just too expensive to throw away, and they were mainly off doing valuable oceanographic missions in the North Pacific, which appealed to the tree- (actually fish- and dolphin- in this case) huggers, who had far too much political power in the eyes of this white-suited warrior.

With every new day came his official morning briefing, usually run by Brigadier General Mike Lahr, his J-2 Intelligence Officer. This was particularly good news. On the morning of 7 December, 1941, the United States had learned the advantage of providing senior area commanders with the intelligence they might need, and so this CINCPAC, unlike Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, got to hear a lot.

"Morning, Mike," Mancuso said in greeting, while a chief steward's mate set up morning coffee.

"Good morning, sir," the one-star replied.

"What's new in the Pacific?"

"Well, top of the news this morning, the Russians have appointed a new guy to head their Far Eastern Military District. His name is Gennady Bondarenko. His last job was J-3 operations officer for the Russian army. His background's pretty interesting. He started off in signals, not a combat arm, but he distinguished himself in Afghanistan toward the end of that adventure on their part. He's got the Order of the Red Banner and he's a Hero of the Soviet Union-got both of those as a colonel. He moved rapidly up from there. Good political connections. He's worked closely with a guy named Golovko-he's a former KGB officer who's still in the spook business and is personally known to the President-ours, that is. Golovko is essentially the operational XO for the Russian President Grushavoy-like a chief minister or something. Grushavoy listens to him on a lot of issues, and he's a pipeline into the White House on matters 'of mutual interest.' "

"Great. So the Russians have Jack Ryan's ear via this guy. What sort of mensch is he?" CINCPAC asked.

"Very smart and very capable, our friends at Langley say. Anyway, back to Bondarenko. The book on the guy says he's also very smart and also very capable, a contender for further advancement. Brains and personal bravery can be career-enhancing in their military, just like ours."

"What sort of shape is his new command in?"

"Not very good at all, sir. We see eight division-sized formations, six motor-rifle divisions, one tank, and one artillery division. All appear to be under strength on our overheads, and they don't spend much time in the field. Bondarenko will change that, if he goes according to the form card."

"Think so?"

"As their J-3, he agitated for higher training standards-and he's a bit of an intellectual. He published a lengthy essay last year on the Roman legions. It was called 'Soldiers of the Caesars.' It had that great quote from Josephus, 'Their drills are bloodless battles and their battles are b.l.o.o.d.y drills.' Anyway, it was a straight historical piece, sources like Josephus and Vegetius, but the implication was clear. He was crying out for better training in the Russian army, and also for career NCOs. He spent a lot of time with Vegetius's discussion of how you build centurions. The Soviet army didn't really have sergeants as we understand the term, and Bondarenko is one of the new crop of senior officers who's saying that the new Russian army should reintroduce that inst.i.tution. Which makes good sense," Lahr thought.

"So, you think he's going to whip his people into shape. What about the Russian navy?"

"They don't belong to him. He's got Frontal Aviation tactical aircraft and ground troops, but that's all."

"Well, their navy's so far down the s.h.i.tter they can't see where the paper roll is," Mancuso observed. "What else?"

"A bunch of political stuff you can read up on at your leisure. The Chinese are still active in the field. They're running a four-division exercise now south of the Amur River."

"That big?"

"Admiral, they've been on an increased training regimen for almost three years now. Nothing frantic or anything, but they've been spending money to get the PLA up to speed. This one's heavy with tanks and APCs. Lots of artillery live-fire exercises. That's a good training area for them, not much in the way of civilians, kinda like Nevada but not as flat. At first when they started this we kept a close eye on it, but it's fairly routine now."

"Oh, yeah? What do the Russians think about it?"

Lahr stretched in his chair. "Sir, that's probably why Bondarenko drew this a.s.signment. This is backward from how the Russians trained to fight. The Chinese have them heavily outnumbered in theater, but n.o.body sees hostilities happening. The politics are pretty smooth at the moment."

"Uh-huh," CINCPAC grunted behind his desk. "And Taiwan?"

"Some increased training near the strait, but those are mainly infantry formations, and nothing even vaguely like amphibious exercises. We keep a close eye on that, with help from our ROC friends."

Mancuso nodded. He had a filing cabinet full of plans to send 7th Fleet west, and there was almost always one of his surface ships making a "courtesy call" to that island. For his sailors, the Republic of China was one h.e.l.l of a good liberty port, with lots of women whose services were subject to commercial negotiations. And having a gray U.S. Navy warship tied alongside pretty well put that city off-limits for a missile attack. Even scratching an American warship was cla.s.sified delicately as a casus belli, a reason for war. And n.o.body thought the ChiComms were ready for that sort of thing yet. To keep things that way, Mancuso had his carriers doing constant workups, exercising their interceptor and strike-fighter forces in the manner of the 1980s. He always had at least one fast-attack or boomer slow-attack submarine in the Formosa Strait, too, something that was advertised only by casual references allowed to leak to the media from time to time. Only very rarely would a submarine make a local port call, however. They were more effective when not seen. But in another filing cabinet he had lots of periscope photos of Chinese warships, and some "hull shots," photos made from directly underneath, which was mainly good for testing the nerve of his submarine drivers.

He also occasionally had his people track ChiComm submarines, much as he'd done in Dallas against the former Soviet navy. But this was much easier. The Chinese nuclearpower plants were so noisy that fish avoided them to prevent damage to their ears, or so his sonarmen joked. As much as the PRC had rattled its saber at Taiwan, an actual attack, if opposed by his 7th Fleet, would rapidly turn into a b.l.o.o.d.y shambles, and he hoped Beijing knew that. If they didn't, finding out would be a messy and expensive exercise. But the ChiComms didn't have much in the way of amphibious capability yet, and showed no signs of building it.

"So, looks like a routine day in theater?" Mancuso asked, as the briefing wound down.

"Pretty much," General Lahr confirmed.

"What sort of a.s.sets do we have tasked to keep an eye on our Chinese friends?"

"Mainly overheads," the J-2 replied. "We've never had much in the way of human intelligence in the PRC-at least not that I ever heard about."

"Why is that?"

"Well, in simplest terms it would be kind of hard for you or me to disappear into their society, and most of our Asian citizens work for computer-software companies, last time I checked."

"Not many of them in the Navy. How about the Army?"

"Not many, sir. They're pretty underrepresented."

"I wonder why."

"Sir, I'm an intelligence officer, not a demographer," Lahr pointed out.

"I guess that job is hard enough, Mike. Okay, if anything interesting happens, let me know."

"You bet, sir." Lahr headed out the door, to be replaced by Mancuso's J-3 operations officer, who would tell him what all his theater a.s.sets were up to this fine day, plus which ships and airplanes were broken and needed fixing.

She hadn't gotten any less attractive, though getting her here had proven difficult. Tanya Bogdanova hadn't avoided anything, but she'd been unreachable for several days.

"You've been busy?" Provalov asked.

"Da, a special client," she said with a nod. "We spent time together in St. Petersburg. I didn't bring my beeper. He dislikes interruptions," she explained, without showing much in the way of remorse.

Provalov could have asked the cost of several days in this woman's company, and she would probably have told him, but he decided that he didn't need to know all that badly. She remained a vision, lacking only the white feathery wings to be an angel. Except for the eyes and the heart, of course. The former cold, and the latter nonexistent.

"I have a question," the police lieutenant told her.

"Yes?"

"A name. Do you know it? Klementi Ivan'ch Suvorov."

Her eyes showed some amus.e.m.e.nt. "Oh, yes. I know him well." She didn't have to elaborate on what "well" meant.

"What can you tell me about him?"

"What do you wish to know?"

"His address, for starters."

"He lives outside Moscow."

"Under what name?"

"He does not know that I know, but I saw his papers once. Ivan Yurievich Koniev."

"How do you know this?" Provalov asked.

"He was asleep, of course, and I went through his clothes," she replied, as matter-of-factly as if she'd told the militia lieutenant where she shopped for bread.

So, he f.u.c.ked you, and you, in turn, f.u.c.ked him, Provalov didn't say. "Do you remember his address?"

She shook her head. "No, but it's one of the new communities off the outer ring road."

"When did you last see him?"

"It was a week before Gregoriy Filipovich died," she answered at once.

It was then that Provalov had a flash: "Tanya, the night before Gregoriy died, whom did you see?"

"He was a former soldier or something, let me think . . . Pyotr Alekseyevich . . . something . . ."

"Amalrik?" Provalov asked, almost coming off his seat.

"Yes, something like that. He had a tattoo on his arm, the Spetsnaz tattoo a lot of them got in Afghanistan. He thought very highly of himself, but he wasn't a very good lover," Tanya added dismissively.

And he never will be, Provalov could have said then, but didn't. "Who set up that, ah, appointment?"

"Oh, that was Klementi Ivan'ch. He had an arrangement with Gregoriy. They knew each other, evidently for a long time. Gregoriy often made special appointments for Klementi's friends."

Suvorov had one or both of his killers f.u.c.k the wh.o.r.es belonging to the man they would kill the next day . . . ? Whoever Suvorov was, he had an active sense of humor . . . or the real target actually had been Sergey Nikolay'ch. Provalov had just turned up an important piece of information, but it didn't seem to illuminate his criminal case at all. Another fact which only made his job harder, not easier. He was back to the same two possibilities: This Suvorov had contracted the two Spetsnaz soldiers to kill Rasputin, and then had them killed as "insurance" to avoid repercussions. Or he'd contracted them to eliminate Golovko, and then killed them for making a serious error. Which? He'd have to find this Suvorov to find out. But now he had a name and a probable location. And that was something he could work on.

CHAPTER 19.

Manhunting Things had quieted down at Rainbow headquarters in Hereford, England, to the point that both John Clark and Ding Chavez were starting to show the symptoms of restlessness. The training regimen was as demanding as ever, but n.o.body had ever drowned in sweat, and the targets, paper and electronic were-well, if not as satisfying as a real human miscreant wasn't the best way to put it, then maybe not as exciting was the right phrase. But the Rainbow team members didn't say that, even among themselves, for fear of appearing bloodthirsty and unprofessional. To them the studied mental posture was that it was all the same. Practice was bloodless battle, and battle was b.l.o.o.d.y drill. And certainly by taking their training so seriously, they were still holding a very fine edge. Fine enough to shave the fuzz off a baby's face.

The team had never gone public, at least not per se. But the word had leaked out somehow. Not in Washington, and not in London, but somewhere on the continent, the word had gotten out that NATO now had a very special and very capable counterterrorist team that had raped and pillaged its way through several high-profile missions, and only once taken any lumps, at the hands of Irish terrorists who had, however, paid a bitter price for their misjudgment. The European papers called them the "Men of Black" for their a.s.sault uniforms, and in their relative ignorance the European newsies had somehow made Rainbow even more fierce than reality justified. Enough so that the team had deployed to the Netherlands for a mission seven months before, a few weeks after the first news coverage had broken, and when the bad guys at the grammar school had found there were new folks in the neighborhood, they'd stumbled through a negotiating session with Dr. Paul Bellow and cut a deal before hostilities had to be initiated, which was pleasing for everyone. The idea of a shoot-out in a school full of kids hadn't even appealed to the Men of Black.

Over the last several months, some members had been hurt or rotated back to their parent services, and new members had replaced them. One of these was Ettore Falcone, a former member of the Carabinieri sent to Hereford as much for his own protection as to a.s.sist the NATO team. Falcone had been walking the streets of Palermo in Sicily with his wife and infant son one pleasant spring evening when a shoot-out had erupted right before his eyes. Three criminals were hosing a pedestrian, his wife, and their police bodyguard with submachine guns, and in an instant Falcone had pulled out his Beretta and dropped all three with head shots from ten meters away. His action had been too late to save the victims, but not too late to incur the wrath of a capo mafioso, two of whose sons had been involved in the hit. Falcone had publicly spat upon the threat, but cooler heads had prevailed in Rome-the Italian government did not want a blood feud to erupt between the Mafia and its own federal police agency-and Falcone had been dispatched to Hereford to be the first Italian member of Rainbow. He had quickly proven himself to be the best pistol shot anyone had ever seen.

"d.a.m.n," John Clark breathed, after finishing his fifth string of ten shots. This guy had beaten him again! They called him Big Bird. Ettore-Hector-was about six-three and lean like a basketball player, the wrong size and shape for a counterterror trooper, but, Jesus, could this son of a b.i.t.c.h shoot!

"Grazie, General," the Italian said, collecting the fivepound note that had accompanied this blood feud.

And John couldn't even b.i.t.c.h that he'd done it for real, whereas Big Bird had only done it with paper. This spaghetti-eater had dropped three guys armed with SMGs, and done it with his wife and kid next to him. Not just a talented shooter, this guy had two big bra.s.s ones dangling between his legs. And his wife, Anna-Maria, was reputed to be a dazzling cook. In any case, Falcone had bested him by one point in a fifty-round shootoff. And John had practiced for a week before this grudge match.

"Ettore, where the h.e.l.l did you learn to shoot?" RAINBOW Six demanded.

"At the police academy, General Clark. I never fired a gun before that, but I had a good instructor, and I learned well," the sergeant said, with a friendly smile. He wasn't the least bit arrogant about his talent, and somehow that just made it worse.

"Yeah, I suppose." Clark zippered his pistol into the carrying case and walked away from the firing line.

"You, too, sir?" Dave Woods, the rangemaster, said, as Clark made for the door.

"So I'm not the only one?" RAINBOW Six asked.

Woods looked up from his sandwich. "b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, that lad's got a f.o.o.kin' letter of credit at the Green Dragon from besting me!" he announced. And Sergeant-Major Woods really had taught Wyatt Earp everything he knew. And at the SAS/Rainbow pub he'd probably taught the new boy how to drink English bitter. Beating Falcone would not be easy. There just wasn't much room to take a guy who often as not shot a "possible," or perfect score.

"Well, Sergeant-Major, then I guess I'm in good company." Clark punched him on the shoulder as he headed out the door, shaking his head. Behind him, Falcone was firing another string. He evidently liked being Number One, and practiced hard to stay there. It had been a long time since anyone had bested him on a shooting range. John didn't like it, but fair was fair, and Falcone had won within the rules.

Was it just one more sign that he was slowing down? He wasn't running as fast as the younger troops at Rainbow, of course, and that bothered him, too. John Clark wasn't ready to be old yet. He wasn't ready to be a grandfather either, but he had little choice in that. His daughter and Ding had presented him with a grandson, and he couldn't exactly ask that they take him back. He was keeping his weight down, though that often required, as it had today, skipping lunch in favor of losing five paper-pounds at the pistol range.

"Well, how did it go, John?" Alistair Stanley asked, as Clark entered the office building.

"The kid's real good, Al," John replied, as he put his pistol in the desk drawer.

"Indeed. He won five pounds off me last week."

A grunt. "I guess that makes it unanimous." John settled in his swivel chair, like the "suit" he'd become. "Okay, anything come in while I was off losing money?"

"Just this from Moscow. Ought not to have come here anyway," Stanley told his boss, as he handed over the fax.

They want what?" Ed Foley asked in his seventh-floor office.

"They want us to help train some of their people," Mary Pat repeated for her husband. The original message had been crazy enough to require repet.i.tion.