“Morning, Josh,” Bretano greeted.
“Good morning, Mr. Secretary.”
“Okay, what’s new and interesting in the world today?”
“Well, sir, we have an inquiry from the White House that just came in.”
“And what might that be?” THUNDER asked. Painter explained. “Good question. Why is the answer so hard to figure out?”
“It’s something we’ve looked at on and off, but really Aegis was set up to deal with cruise-missile threats, and they top out at about Mach Three or so.”
“But the Aegis radar is practically ideal for that sort of threat, isn’t it?” The Secretary of Defense was fully briefed in on how the radar-computer system worked.
“It’s a hell of a radar system, sir, yes,” Painter agreed.
“And making it capable for this mission is just a question of software?
“Essentially yes. Certainly it involves software in the missile’s seekerhead, maybe also for the SPY and SPG radars as well. That’s not exactly my field, sir.”
“Software isn’t all that difficult to write, and it isn’t that expensive either. Hell, I had a world-class guy at TRW who’s an expert on this stuff, used to work in SDIO downstairs. Alan Gregory, retired from the Army as a half-colonel, Ph.D. from Stony Brook, I think. Why not have him come in to check it out?”
It amazed Painter that Bretano, who’d run one major corporation and had almost been headhunted away to head Lockheed-Martin before President Ryan had intercepted him, had so little appreciation for procedure.
“Mr. Secretary, to do that, we have to—”
“My ass,” THUNDER interrupted. “I have discretionary authority over small amounts of money, don’t I?”
“Yes, Mr. Secretary,” Painter confirmed.
“And I’ve sold all my stock in TRW, remember?”
“Yes, sir.” “So, I am not in violation of any of those fucking ethics laws,
“No, sir,” Painter had to agree.
“Good, so call TRW in Sunnyvale, get Alan Gregory, I think he’s a junior vice president now, and tell him we need him to fly here right away and look into this, to see how easy it would be to upgrade Aegis to providing a limited ballistic-missile-defense capability.”
“Sir, it won’t make some of the other contractors happy.” Including, Painter did not add, TRW.
“I’m not here to make them happy, Admiral. Somebody told me I was here to defend the country efficiently.”
“Yes, sir.” It was hard not to like the guy, even if he did have the bureaucratic sensibilities of a pissed-off rhinoceros.
“So let’s find out if Aegis has the technical capabilities do this particular job.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“What time do I have to drive up to the Hill?” the SecDef asked next.
“About thirty minutes, sir.”
Bretano grumbled. Half his working time seemed to be spent explaining things to Congress, talking to people who’d already made up their minds and who only asked questions to look good on C-SPAN. For Tony Bretano, an engineer’s engineer, it seemed like a hellishly unproductive way to spend his time. But they called it public service, didn’t they? In a slightly different context, it was called slavery, but Ryan was even more trapped than he was, leaving THUNDER with little room to complain. And besides, he’d volunteered, too.
They were eager enough, these Spetsnaz junior officers, and Clark remembered that what makes elite troops is often the simple act of telling them that they are elite—then waiting for them to live up to their own self-image. There was a little more to it, of course. The Spetsnaz were special in terms of their mission. Essentially they’d been copies of the British Special Air Service. As so often happened in military life, what one country invented, other countries tended to copy, and so the Soviet Army had selected troops for unusually good fitness tests and a high degree of political reliability—Clark never learned exactly how one tested for that characteristic—and then assigned them a different training regimen, turning them into commandos. The initial concept had failed for a reason predictable to anyone but the political leadership of the Soviet Union: The great majority of Soviet soldiers were drafted, served two years, then went back home. The average member of the British SAS wasn’t even considered for membership until he’d served four years and had corporal’s stripes, for the simple reason that it takes more than two years to learn to be a competent soldier in ordinary duties, much less the sort that required thinking under fire—yet another problem for the Soviets, who didn’t encourage independent thought for any of those in uniform, much less conscripted non-officers. To compensate for this, some clever weapons had been thought up. The spring-loaded knife was one with which Chavez had played earlier in the day. At the push of a button, it shot off the blade of a serious combat knife with a fair degree of accuracy over a range of five or six meters. But the Soviet engineer who’d come up with this idea must have been a movie watcher, because only in the movies do men fall silently and instantly dead from a knife in the chest. Most people find this experience painful, and most people respond to pain by making noise. As an instructor at The Farm, Clark had always warned, “Never cut a man’s throat with a knife. They flop around and make noise when you do that.”
By contrast, after all the thought and good engineering that had gone into the spring-knife, their pistol silencers were garbage, cans loaded with steel wool that self-destructed after less than ten shots, when manufacturing a decent suppressor required only about fifteen minutes of work from a semi-skilled machinist. John sighed to himself. There was no understanding these people.
But the individual troopers were just fine. He’d watched them run with Ding’s Team-2, and not one of the Russians fell out of the formation. Part of that had been pride, of course, but most of it had been ability. The shoot-house experience had been less impressive. They weren’t as carefully trained as the boys from Hereford, and not nearly so well equipped. Their supposedly suppressed weapons were sufficiently noisy to make John and Ding both jump . . . but for all that, the eagerness of these kids was impressive. Every one of the Russians was a senior lieutenant in rank, and each was airborne-qualified. They all were pretty good with light weapons—and the Russian snipers were as good as Homer Johnston and Dieter Weber, much to the surprise of the latter. The Russian sniper rifles looked a little clunky, but they shot pretty well—at least out to eight hundred meters.
“Mr. C, they have a ways to go, but they got spirit. Two weeks, and they’ll be right on line,” Chavez pronounced, looking skeptically at the vodka. They were in a Russian officers’ club, and there was plenty of the stuff about.
“Only two?” John asked.
“In two weeks, they’ll have all their skills down pat, and they’ll master the new weapons.” RAINBOW was transferring five complete team-sets of weapons to the Russian Spetsnaz team: MP-10 submachine guns, Beretta .45 pistols, and most important, the radio gear that allowed the team to communicate even when under fire. The Russians were keeping their own Dragunov long-rifles, which was partly pride, but the things could shoot, and that was sufficient to the mission. “The rest is just experience, John, and we can’t really give ’em that. All we can really do is set up a good training system for ’em, and the rest they’ll do for themselves.”
“Well, nobody ever said Ivan couldn’t fight.” Clark downed a shot. The working day was over, and everybody else was doing it.
“Shame their country’s in such a mess,” Chavez observed.
“It’s their mess to clean up, Domingo. They’ll do it if we keep out of their way.” Probably, John didn’t add. The hard part for him was thinking of them as something other than the enemy. He’d been here in the Bad Old Days, operating briefly on several occasions in Moscow as an “illegal” field officer, which in retrospect seemed like parading around Fifth Avenue in New York stark naked holding up a sign saying he hated Jews, blacks, and NYPD cops. At the time, it had just seemed like part of the job, John remembered. But now he was older, a grandfather, and evidently a lot more chicken than he’d been back in the ’70s and ’80s. Jesus, the chances he’d taken back then! More recently, he’d been in KGB—to him it would always be KGB—headquarters at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square as a guest of the Chairman. Sure, Wilbur, and soon he’d hop in the alien spacecraft that landed every month in his backyard and accept their invitation for a luncheon flight to Mars. It felt about that crazy, John thought.
“Ivan Sergeyevich!” a voice called. It was Lieutenant General Yuriy Kirillin, the newly selected chief of Russian special forces—a man defining his own job as he went along, which was not the usual thing in this part of the world.