of Black. Ding had taken her down once, to find a Cabbage Patch doll on his desk the next morning with a packet of McDonald’s ketchup spread across the face. The RAINBOW troopers had a lively, if somewhat perverse, institutional sense of humor.
“So, what exactly are we supposed to be doing?”
“The old Eighth Chief Directorate of the KGB, their executive protective service,” John explained. “They’ve got worries about domestic terrorists—from the Chechens, I guess, and other internal nationalities who want out of the country. They want us to help train up their boys to deal with them.”
“How good are they?” Ding asked.
RAINBOW SIX shrugged. “Good question. The personnel are former KGB types, but with Spetsnaz training, so, probably career people as opposed to two-year in-and-outs in the Red Army. All probably titular commissioned officers, but with sergeants’ duties. I expect they’ll be smart, properly motivated, probably in decent physical shape, and they’ll understand the mission. Will they be as good as they need to be? Probably not,” John thought. “But in a few weeks we ought to be able to point them in the right direction.”
“So mainly we’re going to be training up their instructors?”
Clark nodded. “That’s how I read it, yeah.”
“Fair enough,” Chavez agreed, as the lunch menu appeared. Why was it, he wondered, that airline food never seemed to have what you wanted? This was dinner food, not lunch food. What the hell was wrong with a cheeseburger and fries? Oh, well, at least he could have a decent beer. The one thing he’d come to love about life in the UK was the beer. There wouldn’t be anything like it in Russia, he was sure.
Sunrise in Beijing was as drab as the polluted air could make it, Mark Gant thought. For some reason he’d slipped out of synch with the local time, despite the black capsule and planned sleep. He’d found himself awake just at first light, which fought through air that was as bad as Los Angeles on its worst-ever day. Certainly there was no EPA in the PRC, and this place didn’t even have much in the way of automobiles yet. If that ever happened, China might solve its local population problem with mass gassing. He hadn’t been around enough to recognize this as a problem of Marxist nations—but there weren’t many of them left to be examples, were there? Gant had never smoked—it was a vice largely removed from the stock-trading community, where the normal working stress was enough of a killer that they needed few others—and this degree of air pollution made his eyes water.
He had nothing to do and lots of time in which to do it—once awake he was never able to escape back into sleep—so he decided to flip on his reading light and go over some documents, most of which he’d been given without any particular expectation that he would read them. The purpose of diplomacy, Commander Spock had once said on Star Trek, was to prolong a crisis. Certainly the discourse meandered enough to make the Mississippi River look like a laser beam, but like the Father of Waters, it eventually had to get downstream, or downhill, or wherever the hell it was that rivers went. But this morning—what had awakened him? He looked out the window, seeing the orange-pink smudge beginning to form at the horizon, backlighting the buildings. Gant found them ugly, but he knew he just wasn’t used to them. The tenements of Chicago weren’t exactly the Taj Mahal, and the wood-frame house of his youth wasn’t Buckingham Palace. Still, the sense of different-ness here was overpowering. Everywhere you looked, things seemed alien, and he wasn’t cosmopolitan enough to overcome that feeling. It was like a background buzz in the Muzak, never quite there, but never gone away either. It was almost a sense of foreboding, but he shook it off. There was no reason to feel anything like that. He didn’t know that he would be proven wrong very soon.
Barry Wise was already up in his hotel room, with breakfast coming—the hotel was one of an American chain, and the breakfast menu approximately American as well. The local bacon would be different, but even Chinese chickens laid real eggs, he was sure. His previous day’s experiment with waffles hadn’t worked out very well, and Wise was a man who needed a proper breakfast to function throughout the day.
Unlike most American TV correspondent/reporters, Wise looked for his own stories. His producer was a partner, not