"Yeah," Ding confirmed with a tiny sip of his drink. "I was fifty yards away when that b.a.s.t.a.r.d killed Anna. Homer got him later on. Nice shot it was."

"I saw him shoot two days ago. He's superb."

"Homer's pretty good. Went home last fall on vacation and got himself a Dall sheep at eight hundred-plus yards up in Idaho. h.e.l.l of a trophy. He made it into the Boone and Crockett book in the top ten."

"He should go to Siberia and hunt tiger. I could arrange that," Kirillin offered.

"Don't say that too loud." Chavez chuckled. "Homer will take you up on it."

"He should meet Pavel Petrovich Gogol," Kirillin went on.

"Where'd I hear that name?" Clark wondered at once.

"The gold mine," Chavez handled the answer.

"He was a sniper in the Great Patriotic War. He has two gold stars for killing Germans, and he's killed hundreds of wolves. There aren't many like him left."

"Sniper on a battlefield. The hunting must get real excitring."

"Oh, it is, Domingo. It is. We had a guy in Third SOG who was good at it, but he d.a.m.ned near got his a.s.s killed half a dozen times. You know-" John Clark had a satellite beeper, and it started vibrating in his belt. He picked it up and checked the number. "Excuse me," he said and looked for a good place. The Moscow officers' club had a courtyard, and he headed for it.

What does this mean?" Arnie van Damm asked. The executive meeting had started with copies of the latest SORGE/SONGBIRD being pa.s.sed out. Arnie was the fastest reader of the group, but not the best strategic observer.

"It doesn't mean anything good, pal," Ryan observed, turning to the third page.

"Ed," Winston asked, looking up from page two. "What can you tell me about the source? This looks like the insider-trading doc.u.ment from h.e.l.l."

"A member of the Chinese Politburo keeps notes on his conversations with the other ministers. We have access to those notes, never mind how."

"So, this doc.u.ment and the source are both genuine?"

"We think so, yes."

"How reliable?" TRADER persisted.

The DCI decided to take a long step out on a thin limb. "About as reliable as one of your T-bills."

"Okay, Ed, you say so." And Winston's head went back down. In ten seconds, he muttered, "s.h.i.t . . ."

"Oh, yeah, George," POTUS agreed. " 's.h.i.t' about covers it."

"Concur, Jack," SecState agreed.

Of those present, only Ben Goodley managed to get all the way through it without a comment. For his part, Goodley, for all the status and importance that came from his job as the President's National Security Adviser, felt particularly junior and weak at the moment. Mainly he knew that he was far the President's inferior in knowledge of national-security affairs, that he was in his post mainly as a high-level secretary. He was a carded National Intelligence Officer, one of whom, by law and custom, accompanied the President everywhere he went. His job was to convey information to the President. Former occupants of his corner office in the West Wing of the White House had often told their presidents what to think and what to do. But he was just an information-conveyor, and at the moment, he felt weak even in that diminished capacity.

Finally, Jack Ryan looked up with blank eyes and a vacant face. "Okay. Ed, Mary Pat, what do we have here?"

"It looks as if Secretary Winston's predictions on the financial consequences of the Beijing Incident might be coming true."

"They're talking about precipitous consequences," Scott Adler observed coolly. "Where's Tony?"

"Secretary Bretano's down at Fort Hood, Texas, looking at the heavy troopers at Third Corps. He gets back late tonight. If we yank him back in a hurry, people will notice," van Damm told the rest.

"Ed, will you object if we get this to him, secure?"

"No"

"Okay." Ryan nodded and reached across his desk for his phone. "Send Andrea in, please." That took less than five seconds.

"Yes, Mr. President?"

"Could you walk this over to Signals, and have them TAPDANCE it to THUNDER?" He handed her the doc.u.ment. "Then please bring it back here?"

"Yes, sir."

"Thanks, Andrea," Ryan told the disappearing form. Then he took a drink of water and turned to his guests. "Okay, it looks pretty serious. How serious is it?"

"We're bringing Professor Weaver down from Brown to evaluate it for us. He's about the best guy in the country for reading their minds."

"Why the h.e.l.l doesn't he work for me?" Jack asked.

"He likes it at Brown. He comes from Rhode Island. We've offered him a job across the river half a dozen times that I know of," DCI Foley told Ryan, "but he always says the same thing."

"Same at State, Jack. I've known George for fifteen years or more. He doesn't want to work for the government."

"Your kind of man, Jack," Arnie added for a little levity.

"Besides, he can make more money as a contractor, can't he? Ed, when he comes down, make sure he comes in to see me."

"When? You're flying out in a few hours," Ed pointed out.

"s.h.i.t." Ryan remembered it now. Callie Weston was just finishing up the last of his official speeches in her office across the street. She was even coming across on Air Force One with the official party. Why was it that you couldn't deal with things one at a time? Because at this level, they just didn't arrive that way.

"All right," Jack said next. "We need to evaluate how serious this is, and then figure a way to forestall it. That means-what?"

"One of several things. We can approach them quietly," SecState Adler said. "You know, tell them that this has gone too far, and we want to work with them on the sly to ameliorate the situation."

"Except Amba.s.sador Hitch is over here now, consulting, remember? Where's he doing it today, Congressional or Burning Tree?" POTUS asked. Hitch enjoyed golf, a hobby he could hardly pursue in Beijing. Ryan could sympathize. He was lucky to get in one round a week, and what swing he'd once had was gone with the wind.

"The DCM in Beijing is too junior for something like this. No matter what we said through him, they wouldn't take it seriously enough."

"And what, exactly, could we give them?" Winston asked. "There's nothing big enough to make them happy that we could keep quiet. They'd have to give us something so that we could justify giving them anything, and from what I see here, they don't want to give us anything but a bellyache. We're limited in our action by what the country will tolerate."

"You think they'd tolerate a shooting war?" Adler snapped.

"Be cool, Scott. There are practical considerations. Anything juicy enough to make these Chinese b.a.s.t.a.r.ds happy has to be approved by Congress, right? To get such a concession through Congress would mean giving them the justification for it." Winston waved the secret doc.u.ment in his hand. "But we can't do that because Ed here would have a fit, and even if we did, somebody on the Hill would leak it to the papers in a New York minute, and half of them would call it danegeld, and say f.u.c.k the c.h.i.n.ks, millions for defense but not one penny for tribute. Am I right?"

"Yes," Arnie answered. "The other half would call it responsible statesmanship, but the average Joe out there wouldn't much like it. The average citizen would expect you to call Premier Xu on the phone and say, 'Better not do this, buddy,' and expect it to stick."

"Which would, by the way, kill SONGBIRD," Mary Pat added as a warning, lest they take that option seriously. "That would end a human life, and deny us further information that we need to have. And from my reading of this report, Xu would deny everything and just keep going forward. They really think they're in a corner, but they can't see a way to smart themselves out of it."

"The danger is . . . ?" TRADER asked.

"Internal political collapse," Ryan explained. "They're afraid that if anything upsets the political or economic conditions inside the country, the whole house of cards comes tumbling down. With serious consequences for the current royal family of the PRC."

"Called the chop." Ben Goodley had to say something, and that was an easy one. "Actually a rifle bullet today." It didn't help him feel much better. He was out of his depth and he knew it.

That's when the President's STU rang. It was SecDef Tony Bretano, THUNDER. "Yeah," Ryan said. "Putting you on speaker, Tony. Scott, George, Arnie, Ed, Mary Pat, and Ben are here, and we just read what you got."

"I presume this is real?"

"Real as h.e.l.l," Ed Foley told the newest member of the SORGE/ SONGBIRD chorus.

"This is worrisome."

"On that we are agreed, Tony. Where are you now?"

"Standing on top of a Bradley in the parking lot. Never seen so many tanks and guns in my life. Feels like real power here."

"Yeah, well, what you just read shows you the limits of our power."

"So I gather. If you want to know what I think we should do about it-well, make it clear to them somehow that this would be a really bad play for them."

"How do we do that, Tony?" Adler asked.

"Some animals-the puffer fish, for example. When threatened, it swallows a gallon of water and expands its size-makes it look too big to eat."

Ryan was surprised to hear that. He'd no idea that Bretano knew anything about animals. He was a physics and science guy. Well, maybe he watched the Discovery Channel like everyone else.

"Scare them, you mean?"

"Impress them, better way of putting it."

"Jack, we're going to Warsaw-we can let Grushavoy know about this . . . how about we invite him into NATO? The Poles are there already. It would commit all of Europe to come to Russia's defense in the event of an invasion. I mean, that's what alliances and mutual-defense treaties are all about. 'You're not just messing with me, Charlie. You're messing with all my friends, too: It's worked for a long time."

Ryan considered that one, and looked around the room. "Thoughts?"

"It's something," Winston thought.

"But what about the other NATO countries? Will they buy into this? The whole purpose of NATO," Goodley reminded them, "was to protect them from the Russians."

"The Soviets," Adler corrected. "Not the same thing anymore, remember?"

"The same people, the same language, sir," Goodley persisted. He felt pretty secure on this one. "What you propose is an elegant possible solution to the present problem, but to make it happen we'd have to share SORGE with other countries, wouldn't we?" The suggestion made the Foleys both wince. There were few things on the planet as talkative as a chief of government.

"What the h.e.l.l, we've been watching their military with overheads for a long time. We can say that we're catching stuff there that makes us nervous. Good enough for the unwashed," the DCI offered.

"Next, how do we persuade the Russians?" Jack wondered aloud. "This could be seen in Moscow as a huge loss of face."

"We have to explain the problem to them. The danger is to their country, after all," Adler p.r.o.nounced.

"But they're not unwashed. They'll want to know chapter and verse, and it is their national security we're talking about here," Goodley added.

"You know who's in Moscow now?" Foley asked POTUS.

"John?"

"RAINBOW SIX. John and Ding both know Golovko, and he's Grushavoy's number one boy. It's a nice, convenient back channel. Note that this also confirms that the Moscow rocket was aimed at him. Might not make Sergey Nikolay'ch feel better, but he'd rather know than guess."

"Why can't those stupid f.u.c.king people just say they're sorry they shot those two people?" Ryan wondered crossly.

"Why do you think pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins?" the DCI asked in reply.

Clark's portable phone was a satellite type with a built-in encryption system, really just a quarter-inch-thick plastic pad that actually made the phone easier to cradle against his shoulder. Like most such phones, it took time to synchronize with its companion on the other end, the task made harder by the delay inherent in the use of satellites.

"Line is secure," the synthetic female voice said finally.

"Who's this?"

"Ed Foley, John. How's Moscow?"

"Pleasant. What gives, Ed?" John asked. The DCI didn't call from D.C. on a secure line to exchange pleasantries.

"Get over to the emba.s.sy. We have a message we want you to deliver."

"What sort?"

"Get to the emba.s.sy. It'll be waiting. Okay?"

"Roger. Out." John killed the phone and walked back inside.

"Anything important?" Chavez asked.

"We have to go to the emba.s.sy to see somebody," Clark replied, simulating anger at the interruption of his quiet time of the day.

"See you tomorrow then, Ivan and Domingo," Kirillin saluted them with his gla.s.s.

"What gives?" Chavez asked from thirty feet away.

"Not sure, but it was Ed Foley who paged me."

"Something important?"

"I guess we'll just have to wait and see."

"Who drives?"

"Me." John knew Moscow fairly well, having learned it first on missions in the 1970s that he was just as happy to forget about, when his daughters had been the age of his new grandson.