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The Cardinal of the Kremlin |
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| eBook: Microsoft Reader | 8.26 x 5.23in | 560 pages | ISBN 9781101000137 | 01 Jul 1989 | Berkley |
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Two men possess vital information on Russia's Star Wars missile defense
system.
One of them is CARDINAL -- America's highest agent in the Kremlin -- and he's
about to be terminated by the KGB.
The other one is the American who can save CARDINAL and lead the world to the
brink of peace . . . or war.
Here is author Tom Clancy's heart-stopping masterpiece -- a riveting novel about one
of the most intriguing issues of our time.
Prologue
Threats -- Old, New, and Timeless
They called him the Archer. It was an honorable title, though his countrymen had cast
aside their reflex bows over a century before, as soon as they had learned about firearms.
In part, the name reflected the timeless nature of the struggle. The first of the Western
invaders -- for that was how they thought of them -- had been Alexander the Great, and
more had followed since. Ultimately, all had failed. The Afghan tribesmen held their
Islamic faith as the reason for their resistance, but the obstinate courage of these men was
as much a part of their racial heritage as their dark pitiless eyes.
The Archer was a young man, and an old one. On those occasions that he had both
the desire and the opportunity to bathe in a mountain stream, anyone could see the
youthful muscles on his thirty-year-old body. They were the smooth muscles of one for
whom a thousand-foot climb over bare rock was as unremarkable a part of life as a stroll
to the mailbox.
It was his eyes that were old. The Afghans are a handsome people whose forthright
features and fair skin suffer quickly from wind and sun and dust, too often making them
older than their years. For the Archer, the damage had not been done by wind. A teacher
of mathematics until three years before, a college graduate in a country where most
deemed it enough to be able to read the holy Koran, he'd married young, as was the
custom in his land, and fathered two children. But his wife and daughter were dead, killed
by rockets fired from a Sukhoi-24 attack-fighter. His son was gone. Kidnapped. After the
Soviets had flattened the village of his wife's family with air power, their ground troops
had come, killing the remaining adults and sweeping up all the orphans for shipment to the
Soviet Union, where they would be educated and trained in other modern ways. All
because his wife had wanted her mother to see the grandchildren before she died, the
Archer remembered, all because a Soviet patrol had been fired upon a few kilometers from
the village. On the day he'd learned this -- a week after it had actually happened -- the
teacher of algebra and geometry had neatly stacked the books on his desk and walked out
of the small town of Ghazni into the hills. A week later he'd returned to the town after
dark with three other men and proved that he was worthy of his heritage by killing three
Soviet soldiers and taking their arms. He still carried that first Kalashnikov.
But that was not why he was known as the Archer. The chief of his little band of
mudjaheddin -- the name means "Freedom Fighter" -- was a perceptive leader
who did not look down upon the new arrival who'd spent his youth in classrooms, learning
foreign ways. Nor did he hold the young man's initial lack of faith against him. When the
teacher joined the group, he'd had only the most cursory knowledge of Islam, and the
headman remembered the bitter tears falling like rain from the young man's eyes as their
imam had counseled him in Allah's will. Within a month he'd become the most ruthless --
and most effective -- man in the band, clearly an expression of God's own plan. And it was
he whom the leader had chosen to travel to Pakistan, where he could use his knowledge of
science and numbers to learn the use of surface-to-air missiles. The first SAMS with which
the quiet, serious man from Amerikastan had equipped the mudjaheddin
had been the Soviets' own SA-7, known by the Russians as strela, "arrow." The
first "man-portable" SAM, it was not overly effective unless used with great skill. Only a
few had such skill. Among them the arithmetic teacher was the best, and for his successes
with the Russian "arrows," the men in the group took to calling him the Archer.
He waited with a new missile at the moment, the American one called Stinger, but all
of the surface-to-air missiles in this group -- indeed, throughout the whole area -- were
merely called arrows now: tools for the Archer. He lay on the knife-edge of a ridge, a
hundred meters below the summit of the hill, from which he could survey the length of a
glacial valley. Beside him was his spotter, Abdul. The name appropriately meant "servant,"
since the teenager carried two additional missiles for his launcher and, more importantly,
had the eyes of a falcon. They were burning eyes. He was an orphan.
The Archer's eyes searched the mountainous terrain, especially the ridgelines, with an
expression that reflected a millennium of combat. A serious man, the Archer. Though
friendly enough, he was rarely seen to smile; he showed no interest in a new bride, not
even to join his lonely grief to that of a newly made widow. His life had room for but a
single passion.
"There," Abdul said quietly, pointing.
"I see it."
The battle on the valley floor -- one of several that day -- had been under way for
thirty minutes, about the proper time for the Soviet soldiers to get support from their
helicopter base twenty kilometers over the next line of mountains. The sun glinted briefly
off the Mi-24's glass-covered nose, enough for them to see it, ten miles off, skirting over
the ridgeline. Farther overhead, and well beyond his reach, circled a single Antonov-26
twin-engine transport. It was filled with observation equipment and radios to coordinate
the ground and air action. But the Archer's eyes followed only the Mi-24, a Hind attack
helicopter loaded with rockets and cannon shells that even now was getting information
from the circling command aircraft.
The Stinger had come as a rude surprise to the Russians, and their air tactics were
changing on a daily basis as they struggled to come to terms with the new threat. The
valley was deep, but more narrow than the rule. For the pilot to hit the Archer's fellow
guerrillas, he had to come straight down the rocky avenue. He'd stay high, at least a
thousand meters over the rocky floor for fear that a Stinger team might be down there
with the riflemen. The Archer watched the helicopter zigzag in flight as the pilot surveyed
the land and chose his path. As expected, the pilot approached from leeward so that the
wind would delay the sound of his rotor for the few extra seconds that might be crucial.
The radio in the circling transport would be tuned to the frequencies known to be used
by the mudjaheddin so that the Russians could detect a warning of its approach,
and also an indication where the missile team might be. Abdul did indeed carry a radio,
switched off and tucked in the folds of his clothing.
Slowly, the Archer raised the launcher and trained its two-element sight on the
approaching helicopter. His thumb went sideways and down on the activation switch, and
he nestled his cheekbone on the conductance bar. He was instantly rewarded with the
warbling screech of the launcher's seeker unit. The pilot had made his assessment, and his
decision. He came down the far side of the valley, just beyond missile range, for his first
firing run. The Hind's nose was down, and the gunner, sitting in his seat in front of and
slightly below the pilot, was training his sights on the area where the fighters were. Smoke
appeared on the valley floor. The Soviets used mortar shells to indicate where their
tormentors were, and the helicopter altered course slightly. It was almost time. Flames
shot out of the helicopter's rocket pods, and the first salvo of ordnance streaked
downward.
Then another smoke trail came up. The helicopter lurched left as the smoke
raced into the sky, well clear of the Hind, but still a positive indication of danger ahead; or
so the pilot thought. The Archer's hands tightened on the launcher. The helicopter was
sideslipping right at him now, expanding around the inner ring of the sight. It was now in
range. The Archer punched the forward button with his left thumb, "uncaging" the missile
and giving the infrared seeker-head on the Stinger its first look at the heat radiating from
the Mi-24's turboshaft engines. The sound carried through his cheekbone into his ear
changed. The missile was now tracking the target. The Hind's pilot decided to hit the area
from which the "missile" had been launched at him, bringing the aircraft farther left, and
turning slightly. Unwittingly, he turned his jet exhaust almost right at the Archer as he
warily surveyed the rocks from which the rocket had come.
The missile screamed its readiness at the Archer now, but still he was patient. He put
his mind into that of his target, and judged that the pilot would come closer still before his
helicopter had the shot he wanted at the hated Afghans. And so he did. When the Hind
was only a thousand meters off, the Archer took a deep breath, superelevated his sight,
and whispered a brief prayer of vengeance. The trigger was pulled almost of its own
accord.
The launcher bucked in his hands as the Stinger looped slightly upward before
dropping down to home on its target. The Archer's eyes were sharp enough to see it
despite the almost invisible smoke trail it left behind. The missile deployed its maneuvering
fins, and these moved a few fractions of a millimeter in obedience to the orders generated
by its computer brain -- a microchip the size of a postage stamp. Aloft in the circling An-
26, an observer saw a tiny puff of dust and began to reach for a microphone to relay a
warning, but his hand had barely touched the plastic instrument before the missile struck.
The missile ran directly into one of the helicopter's engines and exploded. The
helicopter was crippled instantly. The driveshaft for the tail rotor was cut, and the Hind
began spinning violently to the left while the pilot tried to auto-rotate the aircraft down,
frantically looking for a flat place while his gunner radioed a shrill call for rescue. The pilot
brought the engine to idle, unloading his collective to control torque, locked his eyes on a
flat space the size of a tennis court, then cut his switches and activated the onboard
extinguishing system. Like most fliers he feared fire above all things, though he would
learn the error soon enough.
The Archer watched the Mi-24 hit nose-down on a rocky ledge five hundred feet
below his perch. Surprisingly, it didn't burn as the aircraft came apart. The helicopter
cartwheeled viciously, the tail whipping forward and over the nose before it came to rest
on its side. The Archer raced down the hill with Abdul right behind. It took five minutes.
The pilot fought with his straps as he hung upside down. He was in pain, but he knew
that only the living felt pain. The new model helicopter had had improved safety systems
built in. Between those and his own skill he'd survived the crash. Not his gunner, he
noticed briefly. The man in front hung motionless, his neck broken, his hands limply
reaching for the ground. The pilot had no time for that. His seat was bent, and the
chopper's canopy had shattered, its metal frame now a prison for the flyer. The emergency
release latch was jammed, the explosive release bolts unwilling to fire. He took his pistol
from the shoulder holster and started blasting at the metal framework, one piece at a time.
He wondered if the An-26 had gotten the emergency call. Wondered if the rescue
helicopter at his base was on the way. His rescue radio was in a pants pocket, and he'd
activate it soon as he got away from his broken bird. The pilot cut his hands to ribbons as
he pried the metal away, giving himself a clear path out. He thanked his luck again that he
was not ending his life in a pillar of greasy smoke as he released his straps and climbed out
of the aircraft to the rocky ground.
His left leg was broken. The jagged end of a white bone stuck clear out of his flight
suit; though he was too deeply in shock to feel it, the sight of the injury horrified him. He
holstered his empty pistol and grabbed a loose piece of metal to serve as a cane. He had
to get away. He hobbled to the far end of the ledge and saw a path. It was three
kilometers to friendly forces. He was about to start down when he heard something and
turned. Hope changed to horror in an instant, and the pilot realized that a fiery death
would have been a blessing.
The Archer blessed Allah's name as he withdrew his knife from its sheath.
--------------------------------------------------------
There couldn't be much left of her, Ryan thought. The hull was mainly intact -- at
least superficially -- but you could see the rough surgery made by the welders as clearly as
the stitches made on Frankenstein's monster. An apt-enough comparison, he thought
silently. Man had made these things, but they could one day destroy their makers in the
space of an hour.
"God, it's amazing how big they look on the outside . . ."
"And so small on the inside?" Marko asked. There was a wistful sadness in his voice.
Not so long before, Captain Marko Ramius of the Voyenno Morskoi Flot had conned his
ship into this very drydock. He hadn't been there to watch U.S. Navy technicians dissect
her like pathologists over a cadaver, removing the missiles, the reactor plant, the sonars,
the onboard computers and communications gear, the periscopes, and even the galley
stoves for analysis at bases spread all over the United States. His absence had been at his
own request. Ramius' hatred for the Soviet system did not extend to the ships that system
built. He'd sailed this one well and Red October had saved his life.
And Ryan's. Jack fingered the hairline scar on his forehead and wondered if they'd
ever cleaned his blood off the helmsman's console. "I'm surprised you didn't want to take
her out," he observed to Ramius.
"No." Marko shook his head. "I only want to say good-bye. He was good ship."
"Good enough," Jack agreed quietly. He looked at the half-repaired hole that the
Alfa's torpedo had made in the port side and shook his head in silence. Good enough
to save my ass when that torpedo hit. The two men watched in silence, separated
from the sailors and Marines who'd secured the area since the previous December.
The drydock was flooding now, the filthy water from the Elizabeth river rushing into
the concrete box. They'd take her out tonight. Six American fast-attack submarines were
even now "sanitizing" the ocean east of the Norfolk Navy Base, ostensibly part of an
exercise that would also involve a few surface ships. It was nine o'clock on a moonless
night. It would taken an hour to flood the drydock. A crew of thirty was already aboard.
They'd fire up the ship's diesel engines and sail her out for her second and final voyage, to
the deep ocean trench north of Puerto Rico, where she would be scuttled in twenty-five
thousand feet of water.
Ryan and Ramius watched as the water covered the wooden blocks that supported
the hull, wetting the submarine's keel for the first time in nearly a year. The water came in
more quickly now, creeping up the plimsoll marks painted fore and aft. On the submarine's
deck, a handful of seamen wearing bright orange lifejackets for safety paced around,
making ready to slip the fourteen stout mooring lines that held her steady.
The ship herself remained quiet. Red October gave no sign of welcome for
the water. Perhaps she knew the fate that awaited her, Ryan said to himself. It was a
foolish thought -- but he also knew that for millennia sailors had imputed personalities to
the ships they served.
Finally she started to move. The water buoyed the hull off the wooden blocks. There
was a muted series of thuds, more felt than heard as she rose off them ever so slowly,
rocking back and forth a few inches at a time.
A few minutes later the ship's diesel engine rumbled to life, and the line handlers on
the ship and the drydock began to take in the lines. At the same time, the canvas that
covered the seaward end of the drydock was taken down, and all could see the fog that
hung on the water outside. Conditions were perfect for the operation. Conditions
had to be perfect; the Navy had waited six weeks for them, a moonless night and
the thick seasonal fog that plagued the Chesapeake Bay region at this time of year. When
the last line was slipped, an officer atop the submarine's sail raised a hand-held air horn
and blew a single blast.
"Under way!" his voice called, and the sailors at the bow struck the jack and put
down the staff. For the first time, Ryan noticed that it was the Soviet jack. He smiled. It
was a nice touch. On the sail's aft end, another seaman ran up the Soviet naval ensign, its
bright red star emblazoned with the shield of the Red Banner Northern Fleet. The Navy,
ever mindful of traditions, was saluting the man who stood at his side.
Ryan and Ramius watched the submarine start to move under her own power, her
twin bronze propellers turning gently in reverse as she backed out into the river. One of
the tugs helped her turn to face north. Within another minute she was gone from sight.
Only the lingering rumble of her diesel came across the oily water of the navy yard.
Marko blew his nose once and blinked a half-dozen times. When he turned away from
the water, his voice was firm.
"So, Ryan, they fly you home from England for this?"
"No, I came back a few weeks ago. New job."
"Can you say what job is?" Marko asked.
"Arms control. They want me to coordinate the intelligence side for the negotiations
team. We have to fly over in January."
"Moscow?"
"Yes, it's a preliminary session -- setting the agenda and doing some technical stuff,
that sort of thing. How about you?"
"I work at AUTEC in Bahamas. Much sun and sand. You see my tan?" Ramius
grinned. "I come to Washington every two-three months. I fly back in five hours. We
work on new quieting project." Another smile. "Is classified."
"Great! I want you to come over to my house then. I still owe you a dinner." Jack
handed over a card. "Here's my number. Call me a few days before you fly in, and I'll set
things up with the Agency." Ramius and his officers were under a very strict protection
regime from CIA security officers. The really amazing thing, Jack thought, was that the
story hadn't leaked. None of the news media had gotten word, and if security really was
that tight, probably the Russians also didn't know the fate of their missile submarine
Krazny Oktyabr. She'd be turning east about now, Jack thought, to pass over the
Hampton Roads tunnel. Roughly an hour after that she'd dive and head southeast. He
shook his head.
Ryan's sadness at the submarine's fate was tempered by the thought of what she'd
been built for. He remembered his own reaction, in the sub's missile room a year before,
the first time he'd been so close to the ghastly things. Jack accepted the fact that nuclear
weapons kept the peace -- if you could really call the world's condition peace --
but like most of the people who thought about the subject, he wished for a better way.
Well, this was one less submarine, twenty-six less missiles, and one hundred eighty-two
less warheads. Statistically, Ryan told himself, it didn't count for much.
But it was something.
---------------------------------------------
Ten thousand miles away and eight thousand feet above sea level the problem was
unseasonable weather. The place was in the Tadzhik Soviet Socialist Republic, and the
wind came from the south, still bearing moisture from the Indian Ocean that fell as
miserably cold drizzle. Soon it would be the real winter that always came early here,
usually on the heels of the blazing, airless summer, and all that fell would be cold and
white.
The workers were mostly young, eager members of the Komsomol. They had been
brought in to help finish a construction project that had been begun in 1983. One of them,
a masters candidate at Moscow State University's school of physics, rubbed the rain from
his eyes and straightened to ease a crick in his back. This was no way to utilize a
promising young engineer, Morozov thought. Instead of playing with this surveyor's
instrument, he could be building lasers in his laboratory, but he wanted full membership in
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and wanted even more to avoid military service.
The combination of his school deferment and his Komsomol work had helped mightily to
this end.
"Well?" Morozov turned to see one of the site engineers. A civil engineer, he was,
who described himself as a man who knew concrete.
"I read the position as correct, Comrade Engineer."
The older man stooped down to look through the sighting scope. "I agree," the man
said. "And that's the last one, the gods be praised." Both men jumped with the sound of a
distant explosion. Engineers from the Red Army obliterating yet another rocky
outcropping outside of the fenced perimeter. You didn't need to be a soldier to understand
what that was all about, Morozov thought to himself.
"You have a fine touch with optical instruments. Perhaps you will become a civil
engineer, too, eh? Build useful things for the State?"
"No, Comrade. I study high-energy physics -- mainly lasers." These, too, are
useful things.
The man grunted and shook his head. "Then you might come back here, God help
you."
"Is this -- "
"You didn't hear anything from me," the engineer said, just a touch of firmness in his
voice.
"I understand," Morozov replied quietly. "I suspected as much."
"I would be careful voicing that suspicion," the other said conversationally as he
turned to look at something.
"This must be a fine place to watch the stars," Morozov observed, hoping for the
right response.
"I wouldn't know," the civil engineer replied with an insider's smile. "I've never met
an astronomer."
Morozov smiled to himself. He'd guessed right after all. They had just plotted the
position of the six points on which mirrors would be set. These were equidistant from a
central point located in a building guarded by men with rifles. Such precision, he knew,
had only two applications. One was astronomy, which collected light coming down. The
other application involved light going up. The young engineer told himself that here was
where he wanted to come. This place would change the world.
-- from The Cardinal of the Kremlin
by Tom Clancy
Copyright ? 1989 by Jack Ryan Enterprises Ltd.
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