been a way to keep their own supervisors from knowing their names and activities, they would have found it long before.
“I presume you will go yourself. Whom will you take to Moscow with you?”
“Ding and Team-2. Ding and I have been there before. We’ve both met Sergey Nikolay’ch. At least this way he doesn’t see all that many new faces.”
“Yes, and your Russian, as I recall, is first-rate.”
“The language school at Monterey is pretty good,” John said, with a nod.
“How long do you expect to be gone?”
Clark looked back down at the fax and thought it over for a few seconds. “Oh, not more than ... three weeks,” he said aloud. “Their Spetsnaz people aren’t bad. We’ll set up a training group for them, and after a while, we can probably invite them here, can’t we?”
Stanley didn’t have to point out that the SAS in particular, and the British Ministry of Defense in general, would have a conniption fit over that one, but in the end they’d have to go along with it. It was called diplomacy, and its principles set policy for most of the governments in the world, whether they liked it or not.
“I suppose we’ll have to, John,” Stanley said, already hearing the screams, shouts, and moans from the rest of the camp, and Whitehall.
Clark lifted his phone and hit the button for his secretary, Helen Montgomery. “Helen, could you please call Ding and ask him to come over? Thank you.”
“His Russian is also good, as I recall.”
“We had some good teachers. But his accent is a little southern.”
“And yours?”
“Leningrad—well, St. Petersburg now, I guess. Al, do you believe all the changes?”
Stanley took a seat. “John, it is all rather mad, even today, and it’s been well over ten years since they took down the red flag over the Spaskiy gate.”
Clark nodded. “I remember when I saw it on TV, man. Flipped me out.”
“Hey, John,” a familiar voice called from the door. “Hi, Al.”
“Come in and take a seat, my boy.”
Chavez, simulated major in the SAS, hesitated at the “my boy” part. Whenever John talked that way, something unusual was about to happen. But it could have been worse. “Kid” was usually the precursor to danger, and now that he was a husband and a father, Domingo no longer went too far out of his way to look for trouble. He walked to Clark’s desk and took the offered sheets of paper.
“Moscow?” he asked.
“Looks like our Commander-in-Chief has approved it.”
“Super,” Chavez observed. “Well, it’s been a while since we met Mr. Golovko. I suppose the vodka’s still good.”
“It’s one of the things they do well,” John agreed.
“And they want us to teach them to do some other things?”
“Looks that way.”
“Take the wives with us?”
“No.” Clark shook his head. “This one’s all business.”
“When?”
“Have to work that out. Probably a week or so.”
“Fair enough.”
“How’s the little guy?”
A grin. “Still crawling. Last night he started pulling himself up, standing, like. Imagine he’ll start walking in a few days.”
“Domingo, you spend the first year getting them to walk and talk. The next twenty years you spend getting them to sit down and shut up,” Clark warned.
“Hey, Pop, the little guy sleeps all the way through the night, and he wakes up with a smile. Damned sight better than I can say for myself, y’know?” Which made sense. When Domingo woke up, all he had to look forward to was the usual exercises and a five-mile run, which was both strenuous and, after a while, boring.
Clark had to nod at that. It was one of the great mysteries of life, how infants always woke up in a good mood. He wondered where, in the course of years, one lost that.
“The whole team?” Chavez asked.
“Yeah, probably. Including BIG BIRD,” RAINBOW SIX added.
“Did he clean your clock today, too?” Ding asked.
“Next time I shoot against that son of a bitch, I want it right after the morning run, when he’s a little shaky,” Clark said crossly. He just didn’t like to lose at much of anything, and certainly not something so much a part of his identity as shooting a handgun.
“Mr. C, Ettore just isn’t human. With the MP, he’s good, but not spectacular, but with that Beretta, he’s like Tiger Woods with a pitching wedge. He just lays ’em dead.”
“I didn’t believe it until today. I think maybe I ought to have eaten lunch over at the Green Dragon.”
“I hear you, John,” Chavez agreed, deciding not to comment on his father-in-law’s waist. “Hey,