Jack Ryan 3 - Red Rabbit by Tom Clancy Read Free Book Online

any other, usually a .44-caliber bullet from one of the old Smith & Wesson revolvers the czars had purchased from America.
    As a result, factory managers had learned that if they couldn't meet The Plan's expectations in fact, they'd do so on paper, thus prolonging both their lives and the perks of their office. The facts of their failure were usually lost in the elephantine bureaucracy that had been inherited from the czars and then nurtured to further growth under Marxism-Leninism. His own agency had a lot of that same tendency, Andropov knew. He could say something, even thunder out the words, but that didn't mean that any real result had to happen. Sometimes it did—indeed, fairly often of late, because Yuriy Vladimirovich kept his own personal notes and would follow up a week or so later. And, gradually, his agency was learning to change.
    But there was no changing the fact that obfuscation was the foil of even his brand of ruthlessness. Even Stalin reborn could not change that—and nobody wanted Stalin reborn. Institutional obfuscation had reached all the way to the summit of the Party hierarchy. The Politburo was no more decisive than the management staff of State Farm “Sunrise.” No one had learned efficiency, he'd observed on his climb to the top of the heap, and as a result a great deal happened with a wink and a nod, with an understanding that it really wasn't all that important.
    And because so little progress actually happened, it devolved on him and KGB to make right all the things that went wrong. If the organs of the State could not come up with what the State needed, then KGB had to go steal it from those who did have it. Andropov's spy agency, and its sister service, the military's GRU, stole all manner of weapons designs from the West. They were so efficient, he thought with a grunt, that Soviet pilots occasionally died from the same design defects that had killed American pilots years before.
    And that was the rub. However efficient KGB was, its most stirring successes merely guaranteed that his country's military was five years behind the West at best. And the one thing he and his field officers couldn't steal from the West was the quality control in their industries that made advanced weapons possible. How many times, he wondered, had his people secured designs from America and elsewhere only to learn that his country simply could not replicate them?
    And that was what he had to fix. The mythical tasks of Hercules seemed trivial in comparison, Andropov told himself, stubbing out his cigarette. Transform his nation? In Red Square, they kept the mummy of Lenin as some sort of Communistic god, the relic of the man who had transformed Russia from a backward monarchic state into… a backward socialist state. The Moscow government expressed contempt for any countries that tried to combine socialism with capitalism—except for one little thing: KGB tried to steal from them, too. The West rarely shed blood and treasure to find out about Soviet weapons—except to find out what was wrong with them. The Western intelligence services did their best to frighten their parent governments, proclaiming every new Soviet weapon to be Satan's own tool of destruction, but then they later found out that the Soviet tiger wore lead boots, and couldn't catch the deer, however frightening the tiger's teeth might appear. Whatever original ideas Russian scientists did come up with—and there were many of them—were duly stolen and converted by the West into instruments that actually worked.
    The design bureaus made their promises to the military and to the Politburo. They told them how their new systems would improve, with just a little more funding… Hah! And all the time, this new American president was doing what his predecessors hadn't: He was feeding his tiger. The American industrial monster was eating raw red meat, and actually manufacturing in numbers the weapons they'd developed over the preceding decade. His