The Cardinal of the Kremlin (Jack Ryan, #4; Jack Ryan Universe, #5)

by Tom Clancy

It would take 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.

The Reception of the Party

To Russians, who rarely had enough of anything, “having enough” meant having more than anyone else—preferably more than everyone else. Ryan thought it evidence of a national inferiority complex, and reminded himself that people who feel themselves inferior have a pathological desire to disprove their own perceptions. That one factor dominated all aspects of the arms-control process, displacing mere logic as the basis for reaching an agreement.

The degree to which America and the Soviet Union misunderstood each other was at one and the same time amusing and supremely dangerous. Jack wondered if the intelligence community over here tried to get the truth out, as CIA usually did now, or merely told its masters what they wanted to hear, as CIA had done all too often in the past.

Ortiz and the Captain sorted through the equipment brought to them. Included was the maintenance manual for the Mi-24’s laser equipment, and radio code sheets, in addition to other things they’d seen before. By noon he had it all fully catalogued and began making arrangements to ship it all to the embassy; from there it would be flown immediately to California for a complete evaluation.

CHAPTER TWO Tea Clipper

Most officers would have done little more than grunt, but Filitov was a combat soldier whose success on the battlefield had resulted from his devotion to the welfare of his men. A lesson that few officers ever understood, he reminded himself. Too bad.

“How old are these shots?” the General asked five minutes later as he leafed through the photos.

wonder if they’re trying to do a holographic image. If they can really lock their illuminating beams in phase . . . theoretically it’s possible. There are a couple of things that make it tricky, but the Russians like the brute-force approach . . . Damn!” His eyes lit up. “That’s one hell of an interesting idea! I’ll have to think about that one.”

“You’re telling me that they built this place just to take pictures of our satellites?” Ryan demanded. “No, sir. They can use it for that, no sweat. It makes a perfect cover. And a system that can image a satellite at geosynchronous altitude might be able to clobber one in low earth orbit. If you think of these four mirrors here as a telescope, remember that a telescope can be a lens for a camera, or part of a gunsight. It could also make a damned efficient aiming system. How much power runs into this lab?” Ryan set down a photo. “The current power output from this dam is something like five hundred megawatts. But—” “They’re stringing new power lines,” Gregory observed. “How come?”

that’s like five hundred megawatts of new power. Jesus, what if they just made a breakthrough? How hard is it to find out what’s happening there?” “Take a look at the photos and tell me how easy you think it would be to infiltrate the place,” Ryan suggested.

The Agency was redrawing its meteorological data on the Soviet Union, and one of the technicians decided to do a computer analysis of the best places over there for astronomical observation. This is one of them. The weather over the last few months has been unusually cloudy, but on average the skies are about as clear there as they are here. The same is true of Sary Shagan, Semipalatinsk, and another new one, Storozhevaya.” Ryan set out some more photographs. Gregory looked at them. “They sure are busy.”

This book was written before the public noticed climate change. Imagine if the shift in weather patterns disables all our observatories.

“Good morning, Misha,” Marshal of the Soviet Union Dmitri Timofeyevich Yazov said. “And to you, Comrade Defense Minister,” Colonel Filitov replied.

“Shit.” The officer snorted. “These ignorant savages—” Ortiz cut him off. “Captain, the next time I hear you say that, or even think it real loud, will be your last day here. These people are working for us. They’re bringing us stuff that we can’t get any place else. You will, repeat will

treat them with the respect they deserve. Is that clear!” “Yes, sir.” Christ, this guy’s turned into a sand nigger himself.

CHAPTER...

The Weary ...

Site Bach is almost certainly a sparse array laser. We need to know what kind of lasers, though—could be gas-dynamic, free-electron, chemical. He thinks it’ll be the free-electron kind, but that’s just a guess.

If so, Ivan may soon have a laser that can snuff one of our satellites right out of business. Probably a soft kill, the Major says—it’ll smoke the camera receptors and the photovoltaic cells. But the next step—”

Bondarenko was more than just “clever,” and both knew it. He had helped develop laser range-finders for battlefield use, and until recently had been engaged in a project to use lasers in place of radios for secure front-line communications.

The sunrise was spectacular. The blazing sphere edged above a nameless mountain to the east, and its light marched down the nearer slopes, chasing the shadows into the deep, glacial valleys. This installation was no easy objective, even for the inhuman barbarians of the mudjaheddin. The guard towers were well sited, with clear fields of fire that extended for several kilometers. They didn’t use searchlights out of consideration for the civilians who lived here, but night-vision devices were a better choice in any case, and he was sure that the KGB troops used those. And—he shrugged—site security wasn’t the reason he’d been sent down, though it was a fine excuse to needle the KGB security detail.

neck. He went inside and took the elevator up. Not surprisingly, there was no hot water for his shower this early in the morning.

“Yesterday’s Pravda spoke of the arms negotiations,” the man persisted. “Is there hope for progress?” “I have no idea,” Misha replied.

“Does anyone wish a drink?” he asked. Drinking was absolutely forbidden in the baths, but as any true Russian would say, that merely made the vodka taste better. “No!” came the reply in chorus.

“Five years ago vodka didn’t do this to me. I tell you, quality control is not what it used to be,” the first went on.

The imposition of sales restrictions on alcohol had begun a whole new—and extremely profitable—part of the city’s black market. The attendant had also passed along a small film cassette that his contact had handed over with the birch branches. For his part, the bath attendant was also relieved. This was his only contact. He didn’t know the man’s name, and had spoken the code phrase with the natural fear that this part of the CIA’s Moscow network had long since been compromised by the KGB’s counterintelligence department, the dreaded Second Chief Directorate.

The Russians knew that CIA had a number of husband-wife teams in the field, but the idea that spies would take their children abroad wasn’t something that the Soviets could accept easily.

He was far too obviously inquisitive to be any kind of intelligence officer. They, after all, did everything possible to be inconspicuous.

The current Times correspondent in Moscow had described him to his own colleagues and contacts as a nebbish, and rather a dull one at that, and in doing so gave Foley the most sought-after compliment in the business of espionage: Him? He’s not smart enough to be a spy. For this and several other reasons, Foley was entrusted with running the Agency’s longest-lived, most productive agent-in-place, Colonel Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov, code name CARDINAL.

Foley followed procedures that had been unchanged for nearly thirty years. He reviewed the six exposed frames through a magnifying glass of the type used to inspect 35mm slides.

He memorized each frame in a few seconds, and began typing a translation on his personal

portable typewriter. It was a manual whose well-worn cloth ribbon was too frayed to be of use to anyone, particularly the KGB. Like many reporters, Foley was not a good typist. His pages bore strikeovers and X-outs. The paper was chemically treated, and you couldn’t use an er...

he crumpled the film into a ball and set it in a metal ashtray, where a wooden kitchen match reduced the only direct evidence of CARDINAL’s existence to ashes.

He then smoked a cigar to disguise the distinctive smell of burning celluloid.

A retired Army warrant officer, he had a DSC and four Purple Hearts for flying casualties out of Vietnam battlefields.

When he smiled at people, he did so in the Russian way, with the mouth but almost never the eyes.

“Safe trip, Augie.”

the courier’s diplomatic passport enabled him to walk past the security checkpoints and right onto the British Airways plane bound for Heathrow Airport.

Three hours later, the 747 thumped down at Heathrow. Again he was able to clear customs perfunctorily.

Over the Atlantic, the courier enjoyed a Pan Am dinner, and a movie that he hadn’t seen before, which happened rarely enough.

The government was paying him twenty grand a year to sit on airplanes and read books, which, combined with his retirement pay from the Army, gave him a fairly

comfortable life. He never bothered himself wondering what he carried in the diplomatic bag, or in this metal case in his coat. He figured it was all a waste of time anyway. The world didn’t change very much.

Ritter walked to his personal Xerox machine and made several copies of the flash-paper pages, which were then burned.

The entire CIA took perverse pride in the fact that only its failure made the news. The Directorate of Operations in particular craved the public assessment that the press constantly awarded them. The foulups of the KGB never got the attention that CIA’s did, and the public image, so often reinforced, was widely believed even in the Russian intelligence community. It rarely occurred to anyone that the leaks were purposeful.

“Your usual keen eye for detail, James,” Ritter said. “God, what if they get there first?”

CHAPTER FOUR Bright Stars and Fast Ships

Gregory had his own personal computer—a very powerful Hewlett-Packard provided by the Project—and occasionally wrote some of his “code” there. He had to be careful about the security classification of his work, of course, though he often joked that he himself wasn’t cleared for what he was doing. That was not an unknown situation inside government.

Living in the New Mexico highlands, she was able to do her own observations on a $5,000 Meade telescope, and, on occasion, to use the instruments at the Project to probe the heavens—because, she pointed out, it was the only effective way to calibrate them.

“The Minister wishes an appraisal of the effectiveness and reliability of your systems.” “Your knowledge of lasers?” Pokryshkin asked with a raised eyebrow.

CHAPTER FIVE Eye of the Snake/ Face of the Dragon