could this son of a bitch shoot!
“Grazie, General,” the Italian said, collecting the five-pound note that had accompanied this blood feud.
And John couldn’t even bitch that he’d done it for real, whereas Big Bird had only done it with paper. This spaghetti-eater had dropped three guys armed with SMGs, and done it with his wife and kid next to him. Not just a talented shooter, this guy had two big brass ones dangling between his legs. And his wife, Anna-Maria, was reputed to be a dazzling cook. In any case, Falcone had bested him by one point in a fifty-round shootoff. And John had practiced for a week before this grudge match.
“Ettore, where the hell did you learn to shoot?” RAINBOW Six demanded.
“At the police academy, General Clark. I never fired a gun before that, but I had a good instructor, and I learned well,” the sergeant said, with a friendly smile. He wasn’t the least bit arrogant about his talent, and somehow that just made it worse.
“Yeah, I suppose.” Clark zippered his pistol into the carrying case and walked away from the firing line.
“You, too, sir?” Dave Woods, the rangemaster, said, as Clark made for the door.
“So I’m not the only one?” RAINBOW Six asked.
Woods looked up from his sandwich. “Bloody hell, that lad’s got a fookin’ letter of credit at the Green Dragon from besting me!” he announced. And Sergeant-Major Woods really had taught Wyatt Earp everything he knew. And at the SAS/Rainbow pub he’d probably taught the new boy how to drink English bitter. Beating Falcone would not be easy. There just wasn’t much room to take a guy who often as not shot a “possible,” or perfect score.
“Well, Sergeant-Major, then I guess I’m in good company.” Clark punched him on the shoulder as he headed out the door, shaking his head. Behind him, Falcone was firing another string. He evidently liked being Number One, and practiced hard to stay there. It had been a long time since anyone had bested him on a shooting range. John didn’t like it, but fair was fair, and Falcone had won within the rules.
Was it just one more sign that he was slowing down? He wasn’t running as fast as the younger troops at Rainbow, of course, and that bothered him, too. John Clark wasn’t ready to be old yet. He wasn’t ready to be a grandfather either, but he had little choice in that. His daughter and Ding had presented him with a grandson, and he couldn’t exactly ask that they take him back. He was keeping his weight down, though that often required, as it had today, skipping lunch in favor of losing five paper-pounds at the pistol range.
“Well, how did it go, John?” Alistair Stanley asked, as Clark entered the office building.
“The kid’s real good, Al,” John replied, as he put his pistol in the desk drawer.
“Indeed. He won five pounds off me last week.”
A grunt. “I guess that makes it unanimous.” John settled in his swivel chair, like the “suit” he’d become. “Okay, anything come in while I was off losing money?”
“Just this from Moscow. Ought not to have come here anyway,” Stanley told his boss, as he handed over the fax.
They want what?" Ed Foley asked in his seventh-floor office.
“They want us to help train some of their people,” Mary Pat repeated for her husband. The original message had been crazy enough to require repetition.
“Jesus, girl, how ecumenical are we supposed to get?” the DCI demanded.
“Sergey Nikolay’ch thinks we owe him one. And you know ...”
He had to nod at that. “Yeah, well, maybe we do, I guess. This has to go up the line, though.”
“It ought to give Jack a chuckle,” the Deputy Director (Operations) thought.
Shit," Ryan said in the Oval Office, when Ellen Sumter handed him the fax from Langley. Then he looked up. ”Oh, excuse me, Ellen."
She smiled like a mother to a precocious son. “Yes, Mr. President.”
“Got one I can ... ?”
Mrs. Sumter had taken to wearing dresses with large slash pockets. From the left one, she fished out a flip-top box of Virginia Slims and offered it to her President, who took one out and lit it from the butane lighter also tucked in the box.
“Well, ain’t this something?”
“You know this man, don’t you?” Mrs. Sumter asked.
“Golovko? Yeah.” Ryan smiled crookedly, again remembering the pistol in his face as the VC-137 thundered down the runway at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport all those years before. He could smile now. At the time,