Jack Ryan 10 - Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy Read Free Book Online Page B

unrealistic, John. We need, I would estimate, three weeks.”
    "I understand that-but the real world is not as accommodating as we would like it to be. Things that need doing-do them, and quickly. I will start running simulations on Monday next. People, I am not a hard man to work with. I've been in the field, and I know what happens out there. I don't expect perfection, but I do expect that we will always work for it. If we screw a mission up, that means that people who deserve to live will not live. That is going to happen. You know it. I know it. But we will avoid mistakes as much as possible, and we will learn the proper lessons from every one we make. Counterterrorism is a Darwinian world. The dumb ones are already dead, and the people out there we have to worry about are those who've learned a lot of lessons. So have we, and we're probably ahead of the game, tactically speaking, but we have to run hard to stay there. We will run hard.
    “Anyway,” he went on, “intelligence, what's ready and what's not?”
    Bill Tawney was John's age, plus one or two, John estimated, with brown, thinning hair and an unlit pipe in his mouth. A “Six” man-meaning he was a former (well, current) member of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, he was a field spook who'd come inside after ten years working the streets behind the Curtain. “Our communications links are up and running. We have liaison personnel to Lill friendly services either here or in the corresponding capitals.”
    “How good are they?”
    “Fair,” Tawney allowed. John wondered how much of that was Brit understatement. One of his most important but most subtle tasks would be to decode what every member of his staff said when he or she spoke was a task made all the more difficult by linguistic and cultural differences. On inspection, Tawney looked like a real pro, his brown eyes calm and businesslike. His file said that he'd worked directly with SAS for the past five years. Given SAS's record in the field, he hadn't stiffed them with bad intel very often, if at all. Good. “David?” he asked next. David Peled, the Israeli chief his technical branch, looked very Catholic, rather like something from an El Greco painting, a Dominican priest, perhaps, from the fifteenth century, tall, skinny, hollow of cheek and dark of hair (short), with a certain intensity of eye. Well, he'd worked a long time for Avi ben Jakob, whom Clark knew, if not well then well enough. Peled would be here for two reasons, to serve as a senior Rainbow staffer, thus winning allies and prestige for his parent intelligence service, the Israeli Mossad, and also to learn what he could and feed it back to his boss.
    “I am putting together a good staff,” David said, setting his tea down. “I need three to five weeks to assemble all the equipment I need.”
    “Faster,” Clark responded at once.
    David shook his head. “Not possible. Much of our electronics items can be purchased off the shelf, as it were, but some will have to be custom-made. The orders are all placed,” he assured his boss, “with high-priority flagsfrom the usual vendors. TRW, IDI, Marconi, you know who they are. But they can't do miracles, even for us. Three to five weeks for some crucial items.”
    “SAS are willing to hire anything important to us,” Stanley assured Clark from his end of the table.
    “For training purposes?” Clark asked, annoyed that he hadn't found out the answer to the question already.
    "Perhaps.
    Ding cut the run off at three miles. which they'd done in twenty minutes. Good time, he thought, somewhat winded, until he turned to see his ten men about as fresh as they'd been at the beginning, one or two with a sly smile for his neighbors at their wimpy new leader.
    Damn.
    The run had ended at the weapons range, where targets and arms were ready. Here Chavez had made his own change in his team's selection. A longtime Beretta aficionado, he'd decided that his men would use the recent .45 Beretta