Jack Ryan 5 - The Cardinal of the Kremlin by Tom Clancy Read Free Book Online

usually mined, and the inner one patrolled by dogs. The towers were on the inner perimeter, spaced two hundred meters apart. The soldiers who manned the towers were housed in a better-than-average new concrete barracks—
    “Can you isolate one of the guards?” Jack asked.
    Graham spoke into his phone, and the picture changed. One of his technicians was already doing this, as much to test camera calibration and ambient air conditions as for the purpose Ryan intended.
    As the camera zoomed in, a moving dot became a man-shape in greatcoat and probably a fur hat. He was walking a big dog of uncertain breed and had a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his right shoulder. Man and dog left puffs of vapor in the air as they breathed. Ryan leaned forward unconsciously, as though this would give him a better view.   
    “That guy's shoulder boards look green to you?” he asked Graham.
    The reconnaissance expert grunted. “Yep. He's KGB, all right.”
    “That close to
    
    
     Afghanistan
    
    
    ?” the Admiral mused. “They know we have people operating there. You bet they'll take their security provisions seriously.”
    “They must have really wanted those hilltops,” Ryan observed. “Seventy miles overland are a few million people who think killing Russians is God's will. This place is more important than we thought. It isn't just a new facility, not with that kind of security. If that's all it was, they wouldn't have had to put it here, and they for damned sure wouldn't have picked a place where they had to build a new power supply and risk exposure to hostiles. This may be an R and D facility now, but they must have bigger plans for it.”
    “Like what?”
    “Going after my satellites, maybe.” Art Graham thought of them as his.
    “Have they tickled any of 'em recently?” Jack asked.
    “No, not since we rattled their cage last April. Common sense broke out for once.”
    That was an old story. Several times in the past few years, American reconnaissance and early-warning satellites had been 'tickled"—laser beams or microwave energy had been focused on the satellites, enough to dazzle their receptors but not enough to do serious harm. Why had the Russians done it? That was the question. Was it merely an exercise to see low we'd react, to see if it caused a ruckus at the North American Aerospace Defense Command—NORAD—at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado? An attempt to determine for themselves how sensitive the satellites were? Was it a demonstration, a warning of their ability to destroy the satellites? Or was it simply what Jack's British friends called bloody-mindedness? It was so hard to tell what the Soviets were thinking.
    They invariably protested their innocence, of course. When the American satellite had been temporarily blinded over Sary Shagan, they said that a natural-gas pipeline had caught fire. The fact that the nearby Chimkent-Pavlodar pipeline iried mostly oil had escaped the Western press.
    The satellite pass was complete now. In a nearby room a tire of videotape recorders were rewound, and now the complete camera coverage would be reviewed at leisure.
    “Let's have a look at Mozart again, and Bach also, please,” Greer commanded.
    “Hell of a commute,” Jack noted. The residential and industrial site on Mozart was only one kilometer or so from the emplacement on Bach, the next mountaintop over, but the road looked frightful. The picture froze on Bach. The formula fences and guard towers was repeated, but this time the distance between the outermost perimeter fence and the next was at least two hundred meters. Here the ground surface appeared to be bare rock. Jack wondered how you plant mines in that—or maybe they didn't, he thought. It was obvious that the ground had been leveled with bulldozers a explosives to the unobstructed flatness of a pool table. From the guard towers, it must have looked like a shooting gallery.
    “Not kidding, are they?” Graham observed quietly.
    “So that's what they're