“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 bastards 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 document 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 fuck the Chinks, 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 hell,” 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 counties? 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 hell, 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 pronounced.
“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 fucking 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 embassy. We have a message we want you to deliver.”
“What sort?”
“Get to the embassy. 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 embassy 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 glass.
“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.
The drive took twenty minutes, and the hard part turned out to be persuading the Marine guard that they really were entitled to come inside after normal business hours. To this end, the man waiting for them, Tom Barlow, proved useful. The Marines knew him, and he knew them, and that made everything okay, sort of.
“What’s the big deal?” Jack asked, when they got to Barlow’s office.
“This.” He handed the fax across, a copy to each. “Might want to take a seat, guys.”
“Madre de Dios” Chavez gasped thirty seconds later.
“Roger that, Domingo,” his boss agreed. They were reading a hastily laundered copy of the latest SORGE dispatch.
“We got us a source in Beijing, ‘mano.”
“Hang a big roger on that one, Domingo. And we’re supposed to share the take with Sergey Nikolay’ch. Somebody back home is feeling real ecumenical.”
“Fuck!” Chavez observed. Then he read on a little. “Oh, yeah, I see. This does make some sense.”
“Barlow, we have a phone number for our friend?”
“Right here.” The CIA officer handed over a Post-it note and pointed to a phone. “He’ll be out at his dacha, out in the Lenin Hills. They haven’t changed the name yet. Since he found out he was the target, he’s gotten a little more security-conscious.”
“Yeah, we’ve met his baby-sitter, Shelepin,” Chavez told Barlow. “Looks pretty serious.”
“He’d better be. If I read this right, he might be called up to bat again, or maybe Grushavoy’s detail.”
“Is this for real?” Chavez had to wonder. “I mean, this is cams belli stuff.”
“Well, Ding, you keep saying that international relations is two countries fucking each other.” Then he dialed the phone. “Tovarisch Golovko,” he told the voice that answered it, adding in Russian, “It’s Klerk, Ivan Sergeyevich. That’ll get his attention,” John told the other two.