The Bear and the Dragon Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER 1 - Echoes of the Boom

  CHAPTER 2 - The Dead Goddess

  CHAPTER 3 - The Problems with Riches

  CHAPTER 4 - Knob Rattling

  CHAPTER 5 - Headlines

  CHAPTER 6 - Expansion

  CHAPTER 7 - Developing Leads

  CHAPTER 8 - Underlings and Underthings

  CHAPTER 9 - Initial Results

  CHAPTER 10 - Lessons of the Trade

  CHAPTER 11 - Faith of the Fathers

  CHAPTER 12 - Conflicts of the Pocket

  CHAPTER 13 - Penetration Agent

  CHAPTER 14 - (dot)com

  CHAPTER 15 - Exploitation

  CHAPTER 16 - The Smelting of Gold

  CHAPTER 17 - The Coinage of Gold

  CHAPTER 18 - Evolutions

  CHAPTER 19 - Manhunting

  CHAPTER 20 - Diplomacy

  CHAPTER 21 - Simmering

  CHAPTER 22 - The Table and the Recipe

  CHAPTER 23 - Down to Business

  CHAPTER 24 - Infanticide

  CHAPTER 25 - Fence Rending

  CHAPTER 26 - Glass Houses and Rocks

  CHAPTER 27 - Transportation

  CHAPTER 28 - Collision Courses

  CHAPTER 29 - Billy Budd

  CHAPTER 30 - And the Rights of Men

  CHAPTER 31 - The Protection of Rights

  CHAPTER 32 - Coalition Collision

  CHAPTER 33 - Square One

  CHAPTER 34 - Hits

  CHAPTER 35 - Breaking News

  CHAPTER 36 - SORGE Reports

  CHAPTER 37 - Fallout

  CHAPTER 38 - Developments

  CHAPTER 39 - The Other Question

  CHAPTER 40 - Fashion Statements

  CHAPTER 41 - Plots of State

  CHAPTER 42 - Birch Trees

  CHAPTER 43 - Decisions

  CHAPTER 44 - The Shape of a New World Order

  CHAPTER 45 - Ghosts of Horrors Past

  CHAPTER 46 - Journey Home

  CHAPTER 47 - Outlooks and All-Nighters

  CHAPTER 48 - Opening Guns

  CHAPTER 49 - Disarming

  CHAPTER 50 - Thunder and Lightning

  CHAPTER 51 - Falling Back

  CHAPTER 52 - Deep Battle

  CHAPTER 53 - Deep Concerns

  CHAPTER 54 - Probes and Pushes

  CHAPTER 55 - Looks and Hurts

  CHAPTER 56 - March to Danger

  CHAPTER 57 - Hyperwar

  CHAPTER 58 - Political Fallout

  CHAPTER 59 - Loss of Control

  CHAPTER 60 - Skyrockets in Flight

  CHAPTER 61 - Revolution

  “Heart-stopping action ... Clancy still reigns.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Nobody can touch his gift for describing combat.”

  —People

  THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON

  President Jack Ryan faces a world crisis unlike any he has ever known, in Tom Clancy’s extraordinary novel of international suspense....

  A high-level assassination attempt in Russia has newly elected Ryan sending his most trusted eyes and ears—including antiterrorism specialist John Clark—to Moscow, for he fears the worst is yet to come. And he’s right. The attempt has left the already unstable Russia vulnerable to ambitious forces in China eager to fulfill their destiny—and change the face of the world as we know it....

  “Builds to an excitingly cinematic climax as Ryan toils

  to bring the world back from the brink of nuclear war.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Megasuspense ... thrilling.”

  —The Indianapolis Star

  NOVELS BY TOM CLANCY

  The Hunt for Red October

  Red Storm Rising

  Patriot Games

  The Cardinal of the Kremlin

  Clear and Present Danger

  The Sum of All Fears

  Without Remorse

  Debt of Honor

  Executive Orders

  Rainbow Six

  The Bear and the Dragon

  Red Rabbit

  The Teeth of the Tiger

  SSN: Strategies of Submarine Warfare

  NONFICTION

  Submarine: A Guided Tour Inside a Nuclear Warship

  Armored Cav: A Guided Tour of an Armored Cavalry Regiment

  Fighter Wing: A Guided Tour of an Air Force Combat Wing

  Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit

  Airborne: A Guided Tour of an Airborne Task Force

  Carrier: A Guided Tour of an Aircraft Carrier

  Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces

  Into the Storm: A Study in Command

  (written with General Fred Franks, Jr., Ret., and Tony Koltz)

  Every Man a Tiger

  (written with General Charles Horner, Ret., and Tony Koltz)

  Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces

  (written with General Carl Stiner, Ret., and Tony Koltz)

  Battle Ready

  (written with General Tony Zinni, Ret., and Tony Koltz)

  CREATED BY TOM CLANCY

  Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell

  Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Operation Barracuda

  Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Checkmate

  Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Fallout

  CREATED BY TOM CLANCY AND STEVE PIECZENIK

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mirror Image

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center : Games of State

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center : Acts of War

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Balance of Power

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: State of Siege

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Divide and Conquer

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Line of Control

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: Mission of Honor

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center : Sea of Fire

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center : Call to Treason

  Tom Clancy’s Op-Center: War of Eagles

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Hidden Agendas

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Night Moves

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Breaking Point

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Point of Impact

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: CyberNation

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: State of War

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Changing of the Guard

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: Springboard

  Tom Clancy’s Net Force: The Archimedes Effect

  CREATED BY TOM CLANCY AND MARTIN GREENBERG

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Politika

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: ruthless.com

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Shadow Watch

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Bio-Strike

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Cold War

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Cutting Edge

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Zero Hour

  Tom Clancy’s Power Plays: Wild Card

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with Rubicon, Inc.

  Copyright © 2000 by Rubicon, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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  Acknowledgments

  As always, some friends were there to help:

  Roland, the screw in Colorado,

  for the superb language lesson—

  good luck looking after your wayward children—

  Harry, the kid in the ether world,

  for some unexpected information,

  John G., my gateway into

  the world of technology,

  And Charles, a fine teacher from long ago,

  and probably a pretty good soldier, too.

  History admires the wise, but it elevates the brave.

  —EDMUND MORRIS

  PROLOGUE

  The White Mercedes

  Going to work was the same everywhere, and the changeover from Marxism-Leninism to Chaos-Capitalism hadn’t changed matters much—well, maybe things were now a little worse. Moscow, a city of wide streets, was harder to drive in now that nearly anyone could have a car, and the center lane down the wide boulevards was no longer tended by militiamen for the Politburo and used by Central Committee men who considered it a personal right-of-way, like Czarist princes in their troika sleds. Now it was a left-turn lane for anyone with a Zil or other private car. In the case of Sergey Nikolay’ch Golovko, the car was a white Mercedes 600, the big one with the S-class body and twelve cylinders of German power under the hood. There weren’t many of them in Moscow, and truly his was an extravagance that ought to have embarrassed him ... but didn’t. Maybe there were no more nomenklatura in this city, but rank did have its privileges, and he was chairman of the SVR. His apartment was also large, on the top floor of a high-rise building on Kutusovskiy Prospekt, a structure relatively new and well-made, down to the German appliances which were a long-standing luxury accorded senior government officials.

  He didn’t drive himself. He had Anatoliy for that, a burly former Spetsnaz special-operations soldier who carried a pistol under his coat and who drove the car with ferocious aggression, while tending it with loving care. The windows were coated with dark plastic, which denied the casual onlooker the sight of the people inside, and the windows were thick, made of polycarbonate and specced to stop anything up to a 12.7-mm bullet, or so the company had told Golovko’s purchasing agents sixteen months before. The armor made it nearly a ton heavier than was the norm for an S600 Benz, but the power and the ride didn’t seem to suffer from that. It was the uneven streets that would ultimately destroy the car. Road-paving was a skill that his country had not yet mastered, Golovko thought as he turned the page in his morning paper. It was the American International Herald Tribune, always a good source of news since it was a joint venture of The Washington Post and the New York Times, which were together two of the most skilled intelligence services in the world, if a little too arrogant to be the true professionals Sergey Nikolay’ch and his people were.

  He’d joined the intelligence business when the agency had been known as the KGB, the Committee for State Security, still, he thought, the best such government department the world had ever known, even if it had ultimately failed. Golovko sighed. Had the USSR not fallen in the early 1990s, then his place as Chairman would have put him as a full voting member of the Politburo, a man of genuine power in one of the world’s two superpowers, a man whose mere gaze could make strong men tremble ... but ... no, what was the use of that? he asked himself. It was all an illusion, an odd thing for a man of supposed regard for objective truth to value. That had always been the cruel dichotomy. KGB had always been on the lookout for hard facts, but then reported those facts to people besotted with a dream, who then bent the truth in the service of that dream. When the truth had finally broken through, the dream had suddenly evaporated like a cloud of steam in a high wind, and reality had poured in like the flood following the breakup of an icebound river in springtime. And then the Politburo, those brilliant men who’d wagered their lives on the dream, had found that their theories had been only the thinnest of reeds, and reality was the swinging scythe, and the eminence bearing that tool didn’t deal in salvation.

  But it was not so for Golovko. A dealer in facts, he’d been able to continue his profession, for his government still needed them. In fact, his authority was broader now than it would have been, because as a man who well knew the surrounding world and some of its more important personalities intimately, he was uniquely suited to advising his president, and so he had a voice in foreign policy, defense, and domestic matters. Of them, the third was the trickiest lately, which had rarely been the case before. It was now also the most dangerous. It was an odd thing. Previously, the mere spoken (more often, shouted) phrase “State Security!” would freeze Soviet citizens in their stride, for KGB had been the most feared organ of the previous government, with power such as Reinhart Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst had only dreamed about, the power to arrest, imprison, interrogate, and to kill any citizen it wished, with no recourse at all. But that, too, was a thing of the past. Now KGB was split, and the domestic-security branch was a shadow of its former self, while the SVR—formerly the First Chief Directorate—still gathered information, but lacked the immediate strength that had come with being able to enforce the will, if not quite the law, of the communist government. But his current duties were still vast, Golovko told himself, folding the paper.

  He was only a kilometer away from Dzerzhinskiy Square. That, too, was no longer the same. The statue of Iron Feliks was gone. It had always been a chilling sight to those who’d known who the man was whose bronze image had stood alone in the square, but now it, too, was a distant memory. The building behind it was the same, however. Once the stately home office of the Rossiya Insurance Company, it had later been known as the Lubyanka, a fearsome word even in the fearsome land ruled by Iosef Vissarionovich Stalin, with its basement full of cells and interrogation rooms. Most of those functions had been transferred over the years to Lefortovo Prison to the east, as the KGB bureaucracy had grown, as all such bureaucracies grow, filling the vast building like an expanding balloon, as it claimed every room and corner until secretaries and file clerks occupied the (remodeled) spaces where Kamenev and Ordzhonikidze had been tortured under the eyes of Yagoda and Beriya. Golovko supposed that there hadn’t been too man
y ghosts.

  Well, a new working day beckoned. A staff meeting at 8:45, then the normal routine of briefings and discussions, lunch at 12:15, and with luck he’d be back in the car and on his way back home soon after six, before he had to change for the reception at the French Embassy. He looked forward to the food and wine, if not the conversation.

  Another car caught his eye. It was a twin to his own, another large Mercedes S-class, iceberg white just like his own, complete down to the American-made dark plastic on the windows. It was driving purposefully in the bright morning, as Anatoliy slowed and pulled behind a dump truck, one of the thousand such large ugly vehicles that covered the streets of Moscow like a dominant life-form, this one’s load area cluttered with hand tools rather than filled with earth. There was yet another truck a hundred meters beyond, driving slowly as though its driver was unsure of his route. Golovko stretched in his seat, barely able to see around the truck in front of his Benz, wishing for the first cup of Sri Lankan tea at his desk, in the same room that Beriya had once ...

  ... the distant dump truck. A man had been lying in the back. Now he rose, and he was holding ...

  “Anatoliy!” Golovko said sharply, but his driver couldn’t see around the truck to his immediate front.

  ... it was an RPG, a slender pipe with a bulbous end. The sighting bar was up, and as the distant truck was now stopped, the man came up to one knee and turned, aiming his weapon at the other white Benz—

  —the other driver saw it and tried to swerve, but found his way blocked by the morning traffic and—