Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [145]
"Our friend needs a ride," she said, just loudly enough to be heard by her husband. "Him, wife, and daughter, age three and a half."
"When?" Ed wanted to know.
"Soon."
"How?"
"Up to us."
"He's serious?" Ed asked his wife, meaning, Worth our time?
"Think so."
You couldn't be sure, but MP had a good eye for reading people, and he was willing to wager on those cards. He nodded. "Okay."
"Any company?" she asked next.
Foley's eyes were about equally divided between the street and the mirrors. If they were being followed, it was by the Invisible Man. "Nope."
"Good." She turned the sound down some. "You know, I like it, too, Ed, but easy on the ears."
"Fine, honey. I have to go back to the office this afternoon."
"What for?" she asked in the semi-angry voice every husband in the world knows.
"Well, I have some paperwork from yesterday—"
"And you want to check the baseball scores," she huffed. "Ed, why can't we get satellite TV in our apartment block?"
"They're working on getting it for us, but the Russians are making a little trouble. They're afraid it might be a spy tool," he added in a disgusted voice.
"Yeah," she observed. "Sure. Give me a break." Just in case KGB had a very clever black-bag guy who prowled the parking lot at night. Maybe the FBI could pull that one off but, though they had to guard against the possibility, she doubted that the Russians had anybody that clever. Their radios were just too bulky. Even so, yes. They were paranoid, but were they paranoid enough?
* * *
CATHY TOOK SALLY and Little Jack outside. There was a park just a block and a half away, off Fristow Way, where there were a few swings that Sally liked and grass for the little guy to pull at and try to eat. He'd just figured out how to use his hands, badly and awkwardly, but whatever found its way into his little fist immediately thereafter found its way to his mouth, a fact known by every parent in the world. Still and all, it was a chance to get the kids some sun—the winter nights would be long and dark here—and it got the house quiet for Jack to get some work done on his Halsey book.
He'd already taken out one of Cathy's medical textbooks, Principles of Internal Medicine, to read up on shingles, the skin disease that had tormented the American admiral at a very inconvenient rime. Just from reading the subchapter on the ailment—related to chicken pox, it turned out—it must have been like medieval torture to the then elderly naval aviator. Even more so that his beloved carrier battle group, Enterprise and Yorktown, would have to sail into a major engagement without him. But he'd taken it like a man—the only way William Frederick Halsey, Jr., had ever taken anything—and recommended his friend Raymond Spruance to take his place. The two men could scarcely have been more different. Halsey the profane, hard-drinking, chain-smoking former football player. Spruance, the nonsmoking, teetotaling intellectual reputed never to have raised his voice in anger. But they'd become the closest of friends, and would later in the war switch off command of the Pacific Fleet, renaming it from Third Fleet to Fifth Fleet and back again when command was exchanged. That, Ryan thought, was the most obvious clue that Halsey had been the intellectual, too, and not the blustering hell-for-leather aggressor that the contemporary newspapers had proclaimed him to be. Spruance the intellectual would not have befriended a knuckle-dragger. But their staffs had snarled at each other like tomcats fighting over a tabby in heat, probably the military equivalent of "my daddy can whip your daddy," engaged