Jack Ryan 11 - Bear And The Dragon Read Free

know what parts of town to avoid, and to be able to keep track of a crime to one of the thousands of American citizens.
    “Explosion?” an Army sergeant asked the radio. His head turned. “Lieutenant Wilson, police report an explosion right in front of Moscow Center.”
    “What kind?”
    “Sounds like a car blew up. Fire department is on the scene now, ambulance...” He plugged in headphones to get a better cut on the voice traffic. “Okay, white Mercedes-Benz, tag number -- ” He pulled out a pad and wrote it down. “Three people dead, driver and two passengers and...oh, shit!”
    “What is it, Reins?”
    “Sergey Golovko...” Sergeant Reins's eyes were shut, and he had one hand pressing the headphones to his ears. “Doesn't he drive a white Benz?”
    “Oh, shit!” Lieutenant Wilson observed for herself. Golovko was one of the people whom her people routinely tracked. “Is he one of the deaders?”
    “Can't tell yet, ell-tee. New voice...the captain at the station, just said he's coming down. Looks like they're excited about this one, ma'am. Lotsa chatter coming up.”
    Lieutenant Susan Wilson rocked back and forth in her swivel chair. Make a call on this one or not? They couldn't shoot you for notifying your superiors of something, could they...? “Where's the station chief?”
    “On his way to the airport, ell-tee, he's flying off to St. Petersburg today, remember?”
    “Okay.” She turned back to her panel and lifted the secure phone, a STU-6 (for “secure telephone unit”), to Fort Meade. Her plastic encryption key was in its proper slot, and the phone was already linked and synchronized with another such phone at NSA headquarters. She punched the # key to get a response.
    “Watch Room,” a voice said half a world away.
    “This is Station Moscow. We have an indication that Sergey Golovko may just have been assassinated.”
    “The SVR chairman?”
    “Affirmative. A car similar to his has exploded in Dzerzhinskiy Square, and this is the time he usually goes to work.”
    “Confidence?” the disembodied male voice asked. It would be a middle-grade officer, probably military, holding down the eleven-to-seven watch. Probably Air Force. “Confidence” was one of their institutional buzzwords.
    “We're taking this off police radios -- the Moscow Militia, that is. We have lots of voice traffic, and it sounds excited, my operator tells me.”
    “Okay, can you upload it to us?”
    “Affirmative,” Lieutenant Wilson replied.
    “Okay, let's do that. Thanks for the heads-up, we'll take it from here.”
     
    “Okay, Station Moscow out,” heard Major Bob Teeters. He was new in his job at NSA. Formerly a rated pilot who had twenty-one hundred hours in command of C-5s and C-17s, he'd injured his left elbow in a motorcycle accident eight months before, and the loss of mobility there had ended his flying career, much to his disgust. Now he was reborn as a spook, which was somewhat more interesting in an intellectual sense, but not exactly a happy exchange for an aviator. He waved to an enlisted man, a Navy petty officer first-class, to pick up on the active line from Moscow. This the sailor did, donning headphones and lighting up the word-processing program on his desktop computer. This sailor was a Russian linguist in addition to being a yeoman, and thus competent to drive the computer. He typed, translating as he listened in to the pirated Russian police radios, and his script came up on Major Teeters's computer screen.
    I HAVE THE LICENSE NUMBER, CHECKING NOW, the first line read.
    GOOD, QUICK AS YOU CAN.
    WORKING ON IT, COMRADE. (TAPPING IN THE BACKGROUND, DO THRE RUSSKIES HAVE COMPUTERS FOR TIS STUFF NOW?)
    I HAVE IT, WHITE MERCEDES BENZ, REGISTERED TO G. F. AVSYENKO, (NOT SURE OF SPELLING) 677 PROTOPOPOV PROSPEKT, FLAT 18A.
    HIM? I KNOW THAT NAME!
    Which was good for somebody, Major Teeters thought, but not all that great for Avsyenko. Okay, what next? The senior watch officer was another squid,