Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [233]
"The concert hall, the hotel, points of interest. We've had enough surprises for one morning, I think."
* * *
LITTLE BOYS GENERALLY detest shopping, but that is not ordinarily true of little girls. It was certainly not true of zaichik, who had never seen such a variety of brightly colored clothing, even in the special shops to which her parents had recently achieved access. With her mother selecting and watching, Svetlana tried on a total of six coats, ranging from forest green to an incandescent red with a black velvet collar, and while she tried two after that one, the red one was the one they purchased, and which zaichik insisted on wearing right away. The next stop was for Oleg Ivan'ch, who bought three videocassette recorders, all unlicensed Hungarian copies of Sony Betamax machines from Japan. This shop, he learned, would deliver them to his hotel room—visiting Westerners shopped there—and this purchase took care of half of his office shopping list. He decided to toss in some tapes also, the sort that he didn't want his daughter to see, but which would have gone over well with his friends at The Centre. And so, Zaitzev parted with nearly two thousand Comecon rubles, for which he would have little use in the West anyway.
The shopping expedition continued nearly to lunch, by which time they were carrying more goods than it was comfortable to lug about, and so they walked back to the ancient metro and headed back to their hotel to dump them off before doing something for their daughter.
* * *
HEROES SQUARE WAS a place built by the Hapsburgs to honor their royal (but not entirely willing) possession of Hungary at the end of the previous century, with statues of previous Hungarian kings, back to St. Stephen—"Istvan" in the Magyar language—whose crown Jimmy Carter had returned to the country just a few years before, the one with the bent cross on the top.
"That happened, so they say," Hudson explained, "when Stephen slammed his crown atop the other one. Returning it was probably a clever move on Carter's part. It's a symbol of their nationhood, you see. The communist regime could not very well reject it, and in accepting it, they had to acknowledge that the history of the country long predates Marxism-Leninism. I am not really a fan of Mr. Carter, but that was, I think, a subtle move on his part. The Hungarians mainly detest communism, Jack. The nation is fairly religious."
"There are a lot of churches," Ryan observed. He'd counted six or seven on the way to this park.
"That's the other thing that gives them a sense of political identity. The government doesn't like it, but it's too big and too dangerous a thing to destroy, and so there's rather an uneasy peace between the two."
"If I had to bet, I'd put my money down on the church."
Hudson turned. "As would I, Sir John."
Ryan looked around. "Hell of a big square." It looked like more than a square mile of pavement.
"That goes back to 1956," Hudson explained. "The Sovs wanted this to be large enough to bring in troop carriers. You can land an AN-ten Cub right here, which makes it quicker to bring in airborne troops if the locals ever revolt again. You could bring, oh, say ten or twelve Cubs, a hundred and fifty soldiers each, and they would defend the center of the city against the counterrevolutionaries and wait for the tanks coming in from the east. It's not a brilliant plan, but that is how they think."
"But what if you park two city buses here and shoot the tires out?"
"I didn't say it was perfect, Jack," Hudson replied. "Even better, a few land mines. Might as well kill a few of the bastards and start a nice little fire. No way a pilot would be able to see them on his approach. And transport pilots are the blindest and dumbest lot going."
And Ivan figures he'd insert his troops before things really got out of hand. Yeah, it made sense, Ryan thought.
"You know who the Soviet ambassador was in 'fifty-six?"
"No—wait a minute, I do… wasn't it Andropov?"
Hudson nodded. "Yuriy Vladimirovich himself. It explains why he is so beloved of the locals.