“So, the little guy’s walking better?” Clark asked.
“You know, the enthusiasm he has for it is kinda funny, the big grin every time he makes it from the TV to the coffee table, like he’s won the marathon, got a big gold medal, and a kiss from Miss America on his way to Disney World.”
“The big things are made up of a lot of little things, Domingo,” Clark observed, as the aircraft started its takeoff run. “And the horizon’s a lot closer when you’re that short.”
“I suppose, Mr. C. Does seem kinda amusing, though… and kinda cute,” he allowed.
“Not bad duty being the father of a little guy, is it?”
“I got no complaints,” Chavez agreed, leaning his seat back now that the gear was up.
“How’s Ettore working out?” Back to business, Clark decided. This grandpa stuff had its limitations.
“He’s in better shape now. Needed about a month to get caught up. He took some razzing, but he handled it just fine. You know, he’s smart. Good tactical instincts, considering he’s a cop and not a soldier.”
“Being a cop in Sicily isn’t like walking a beat on Oxford Street in London, you know?”
“Yeah, guess so,” Chavez agreed. “But on the simulator he hasn’t made a single shoot/no-shoot mistake yet, and that’s not bad. The only other guy who hasn’t blown one is Eddie Price.” The computerized training simulator back at Hereford was particularly ruthless in its presentation of possible tactical scenarios, to the point that in one a twelve-year-old picked up an AK-74 and hosed you if you didn’t pay close enough attention. The other nasty one was the woman holding the baby who’d just happened to pick up a pistol from a dead terrorist and turn innocently to face the incoming Men 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 a boss-handler. He credited that fact for his collection of Emmy awards, though his wife just grumbled about dusting the damned things behind the basement bar.
He needed a fresh new story for today. His American audience would be bored with another talking-head-plus-Broll piece on the trade negotiations. He needed some local color, he thought, something to make the American people feel as one with the Chinese people. It wasn’t easy, and there’d been enough stories on Chinese restaurants, which was the only Chinese thing with which most Americans were familiar. What, then? What did Americans have in common with the citizens of the People’s Republic of China? Not a hell of a lot, Wise told himself, but there had to be something he could use. He stood when breakfast arrived, looking out the picture windows as the waiter wheeled the cart close to the bed. It turned out that they’d goofed on his order, ham instead of bacon, but the ham looked okay and he went with it, tipping the waiter and sitting back down.
Something, he thought, pouring his coffee, but what? He’d been through this process often enough. The writers of fiction often chided reporters for their own sort of “creativity,” but the process was real. Finding stuff of interest was doubly hard for reporters, because, unlike novelists, they couldn’t make things up. They had to use reality, and reality could be a son of a bitch, Barry Wise thought. He reached for his reading glasses in the drawer of the night table and was surprised to see…
Well, it wasn’t all that surprising. It was a matter of routine in any American hotel, a Bible left there by the Gideon Society. It was only here, probably, because the hotel was American-owned and -operated, and they had a deal with the Gideon people… but what a strange place to find a Bible. The People’s Republic wasn’t exactly overrun with churches. Were there Christians here? Hmph. Why not find out? Maybe there was a story in that… Better than nothing, anyway. With that semi-decided, he went back to breakfast. His crew would be waking up about now. He’d have his producer look around for a Christian minister, maybe even a Catholic priest. A rabbi was too much to hope for. That would mean the Israeli embassy, and that was cheating, wasn’t it?