The Bear and the Dragon - By Tom Clancy Page 0,132

the 1980s. He always had at least one fast-attack or boomer slow-attack submarine in the Formosa Strait, too, something that was advertised only by casual references allowed to leak to the media from time to time. Only very rarely would a submarine make a local port call, however. They were more effective when not seen. But in another filing cabinet he had lots of periscope photos of Chinese warships, and some “hull shots,” photos made from directly underneath, which was mainly good for testing the nerve of his submarine drivers.

He also occasionally had his people track ChiComm submarines, much as he’d done in Dallas against the former Soviet navy. But this was much easier. The Chinese nuclear-power plants were so noisy that fish avoided them to prevent damage to their ears, or so his sonarmen joked. As much as the PRC had rattled its saber at Taiwan, an actual attack, if opposed by his 7th Fleet, would rapidly turn into a bloody shambles, and he hoped Beijing knew that. If they didn’t, finding out would be a messy and expensive exercise. But the ChiComms didn’t have much in the way of amphibious capability yet, and showed no signs of building it.

“So, looks like a routine day in theater?” Mancuso asked, as the briefing wound down.

“Pretty much,” General Lahr confirmed.

“What sort of assets do we have tasked to keep an eye on our Chinese friends?”

“Mainly overheads,” the J-2 replied. “We’ve never had much in the way of human intelligence in the PRC—at least not that I ever heard about.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, in simplest terms it would be kind of hard for you or me to disappear into their society, and most of our Asian citizens work for computer-software companies, last time I checked.”

“Not many of them in the Navy. How about the Army?”

“Not many, sir. They’re pretty underrepresented.”

“I wonder why.”

“Sir, I’m an intelligence officer, not a demographer,” Lahr pointed out.

“I guess that job is hard enough, Mike. Okay, if anything interesting happens, let me know.”

“You bet, sir.” Lahr headed out the door, to be replaced by Mancuso’s J-3 operations officer, who would tell him what all his theater assets were up to this fine day, plus which ships and airplanes were broken and needed fixing.

She hadn’t gotten any less attractive, though getting her here had proven difficult. Tanya Bogdanova hadn’t avoided anything, but she’d been unreachable for several days.

“You’ve been busy?” Provalov asked.

“Da, a special client,” she said with a nod. “We spent time together in St. Petersburg. I didn’t bring my beeper. He dislikes interruptions,” she explained, without showing much in the way of remorse.

Provalov could have asked the cost of several days in this woman’s company, and she would probably have told him, but he decided that he didn’t need to know all that badly. She remained a vision, lacking only the white feathery wings to be an angel. Except for the eyes and the heart, of course. The former cold, and the latter nonexistent.

“I have a question,” the police lieutenant told her.

“Yes?”

“A name. Do you know it? Klementi Ivan’ch Suvorov.”

Her eyes showed some amusement. “Oh, yes. I know him well.” She didn’t have to elaborate on what “well” meant.

“What can you tell me about him?”

“What do you wish to know?”

“His address, for starters.”

“He lives outside Moscow.”

“Under what name?”

“He does not know that I know, but I saw his papers once. Ivan Yurievich Koniev.”

“How do you know this?” Provalov asked.

“He was asleep, of course, and I went through his clothes,” she replied, as matter-of-factly as if she’d told the militia lieutenant where she shopped for bread.

So, he fucked you, and you, in turn, fucked him, Provalov didn’t say. “Do you remember his address?”

She shook her head. “No, but it’s one of the new communities off the outer ring road.”

“When did you last see him?”

“It was a week before Gregoriy Filipovich died,” she answered at once.

It was then that Provalov had a flash: “Tanya, the night before Gregoriy died, whom did you see?”

“He was a former soldier or something, let me think ... Pyotr Alekseyevich ... something ...”

“Amalrik?” Provalov asked, almost coming off his seat.

“Yes, something like that. He had a tattoo on his arm, the Spetsnaz tattoo a lot of them got in Afghanistan. He thought very highly of himself, but he wasn’t a very good lover,” Tanya added dismissively.

And he never will be, Provalov could have said then, but didn’t. “Who set up that, ah, appointment?”

“Oh, that was Klementi Ivan’ch. He had an arrangement with Gregoriy. They knew