“Oops,” Jackson observed. “So it could all be a false flag. Pretty one, I admit, but false even so.”
“Perhaps, but unlikely. There’s stuff here that is awfully sensitive to let out voluntarily, even for a major sting operation.”
“So I see,” Ryan partially agreed. “But I remember what Jim Greer used to say: Ain’t nothing too crazy to be true. Our fundamental problem with these guys is that their culture is so different in so many ways that they might as well be Klingons.”
“Well, they don’t display much love for us in this,” Ben Goodley observed, flipping halfway through the briefing folder. “Jesus, this is interesting material. We going to show it to Scott Adler?”
“That’s our recommendation,” the DCI agreed. “Adler is pretty good at figuring people out and his take on some of this—especially page five—will be very interesting. Tony Bretano, too.”
“Okay, that’s EAGLE and THUNDER. Who else?” Ryan asked.
“That’s all for now,” Ed Foley said, with a nod from his wife. “Mr. Pres—”
Ryan’s eyes flared a little. “My name is…
The DCI held up his hand. “Okay. Jack, let’s keep this one real close for a while. We’ll figure a way to launder the information so that some others can know what we’ve learned. But not how. Not ever that. SONGBIRD’S too precious an asset to lose.”
“This is potentially right up there with CARDINAL, isn’t it?”
“Maybe even better, Jack,” Mary Pat said. “This is like having a bug in the boardroom, and we’ve streamlined our methods on this one. We’re being very, very careful with this source.”
“Okay, what about analysts?” Ben Goodley asked. “Our best guy with the PRC is Professor Weaver up at Brown University. You know him, Ed.”
Foley nodded. “Yeah, I know him, but let’s hold off for a while. We have a pretty good guy in-house. Let me see what he can develop for us before we start farming things out. By the way, we’re looking at something like a total of fifteen hundred printed pages from this source, plus daily information from now on.”
Ryan looked up at that one. Daily information. How the hell had they arranged that? Back to business, he told himself. “Okay, for one thing, I want an evaluation of the Zhang Han San character,” Ryan said. “I’ve seen this bastard’s name before. He started two wars we got pulled into. What the hell is he all about?”
“We have a psychiatrist on staff to work on that,” Mary Foley replied. After she didn’t say, we scrub this information clean of source-related material. “He does our profiling.”
“Okay, yeah, I remember him.” Ryan nodded agreement on this point. “Anything else?”
“Just the usual,” Ed Foley said as he stood. “Don’t leave these documents on your desk, okay?”
They all nodded agreement. They all had personal safes for that purpose, and every one was wired into the Secret Service command center, and was on round-the-clock TV surveillance. The White House was a good place to store documents, and besides, the secretaries were cleared higher than God. Mary Pat left the office with a special spring in her step. Ryan waved for his Vice President to stay as the rest walked toward the West Entrance.
“What do you think?” SWORDSMAN asked TOMCAT.
“This looks pretty damned hot, Jack. Jesus, boy, how the hell do they get stuff like this?”
“If they ever get around to telling me, I can’t tell you, Rob, and I’m not sure I want to know. It isn’t always pretty.”
The retired fighter pilot agreed. “I believe it. Not quite the same as catapulting off the boat and shooting the bastard in the lips, is it?”
“But just as important.”
“Hey, Jack, I know. Battle of Midway, like. Joe Rochefort and his band of merry men at FRUPAC back in ‘42 saved our country a lot of hassles with our little yellow friends in WestPac when they told Nimitz what was coming.”
“Yeah, Robby, well, looks like we have more of the same sort of friends. If there’s operational stuff in here, I want your opinion of it.”
“I can do that already. Their army and what passes for a navy are talking in the open about how they take us on, how to counter carriers and stuff like that. It’s mostly pipe dreams and self-delusion, but my question is, why the hell are they putting this in the open? Maybe to impress the unwashed of the world—reporters and the other idiots who don’t know shit about war at sea—and maybe to impress their own people with how smart and how tough they are. Maybe to put more heat on the ROC government on Taiwan, but if they want to invade, they have something to do first, like building a real navy with real amphibious capability. But that would take ten years, and we’d probably notice all the big gray canoes in the water. They’ve got some submarines, and the Russians, of all people, are selling them hardware—just forked over a Sovremenny-class DDG, complete with Sunburn missiles, supposedly. Exactly what they want to do with them, I have no idea. It’s not the way I’d build up a navy, but they didn’t ask me for advice. What freaks me is, the Russians sold them the hardware, and they’re selling some other stuff, too. Crazy,” the Vice President concluded.
“Tell me why,” POTUS commanded.
“Because once upon a time a guy named Genghis Khan rode all the way to the Baltic Sea—like, all the way across Russia. The Russkies have a good sense of history, Jack. They ain’t forgot that. If I’m a Russian, what enemies do I have to worry about? NATO? The Poles? Romania? I don’t think so. But off to my southeast is a great big country with a shitload of people, a nice large collection of weapons, and a long history of killing Russians. But I was just an operations guy, and sometimes I get a little paranoid about what my counterparts in other countries might be thinking.” Robby didn’t have to add that the Russians had invented paranoia once upon a time.
“This is madness!” Bondarenko swore. “There are many ways to prove Lenin was right, but this is not the one I would choose!” Vladimir Il’ych Ulyanov had once said that the time would come when the capitalist countries would bid among themselves to sell to the Soviet Union the rope with which the Soviet Union would later hang them. He hadn’t anticipated the death of the country he’d founded, and certainly not that the next Russia might be the one doing what he had predicted.
Golovko could not disagree with his guest. He’d made a similar argument, though with fewer decibels, in the office of President Grushavoy. “Our country needs the hard currency, Gennady Iosifovich.”
“Indeed. And perhaps someday we will also need the oil fields and the gold mines of Siberia. What will we do when the Chinks take those away from us?” Bondarenko demanded.
“The Foreign Ministry discounts that possibility’ Sergey Nikolay’ch replied.
“Fine. Will those foreign-service pansies take up arms if they are proven wrong, or will they wring their hands and say it isn’t their fault? I am spread too thin for this. I cannot stop a Chinese attack, and so now we sell them the T-99 tank design…
“It will take them five years to bring about series production, and by that time we will have the T-10 in production at Chelyabinsk, will we not?”
That the People’s Liberation Army had four thousand of the Russian-designed T-80/90 tanks was not discussed. That had happened years earlier. But the Chinese had not used the Russian-designed 115-mm gun, opting instead for the 105-mm rifled gun sold to them by Israel Defense Industries, known to America as the M-68. They came complete with three million rounds of ammunition made to American specifications, down to the depleted uranium projectiles, probably made with uranium depleted by the same reactors that made plutonium for their nuclear devices. What was it about politicians? Bondarenko wondered. You could talk and talk and talk to them, but they never listened! It had to be a Russian phenomenon, the general thought, rather than a political one. Stalin had executed the intelligence officer who’d predicted—correctly, as it turned out—the German attack of June 1941 on the Soviet Union. And that one had come within sight of Moscow. Executed him, why? Because his prediction was less pleasing than that of Levrenti Beriya, who’d had the good sense to say what Stalin had wanted to hear. And Beriya had survived being completely wrong. So much for the rewards of patriotism.
“If we have the money for it, and if Chelyabinsk hasn’t been retooled to make fucking washing machines!” Russia had cannibalized its defense infrastructure even more quickly than America had. Now there was talk of converting the MiG airplane plants to automobile production.
Would this never stop? Bondarenko thought. He had a potentially hostile nation next door, and he was years away from rebuilding the Russian Army into the shape he wished. But to do that meant asking President Grushavoy for something that he knew he couldn’t have. To build a proper army, he had to pay the soldiers a living wage, enough to attract the patriotic and adventurous boys who wanted to wear their country’s uniform for a few years, and most particularly those who found that they enjoyed uniformed life enough to make a career of it, to become sergeants, the middle-level professional soldiers without whom an army simply could not function, the sinews that held the muscles to the bone. To make that happen, a good platoon sergeant had to make almost as much money as a skilled factory worker, which was only fair, since the demands of such a man were on the same intellectual level. The rewards of a uniformed career could not be duplicated in a television plant. The comradeship, and the sheer joy of soldiering, was something to which a special sort of man responded. The Americans had such men, as did the British and the Germans, but these priceless professionals had been denied the Russian Army since the time of Lenin, the first of many Soviet leaders who’d sacrificed military efficiency in favor of the political purity the Soviet Union had insisted upon. Or something like that, Bondarenko thought. It all seemed so distant now, even to one who’d grown up within the misbegotten system.