Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [283]
Saint Peter's Basilica was five minutes after that.
"Damn!" Jack breathed.
"Big, isn't it?"
It wasn't big; it was vast.
Sharp went to the left side of the cathedral, ending up in what looked like an area of shops—jewelry, it seemed—where he parked.
"Let's take a look, shall we?"
Ryan took the chance to leave the car and stretch his legs, and he had to remind himself that he was not here to admire the architecture of Bramante and Michelangelo. He was here to scout the terrain for a mission, as he had been taught to plan for at Quantico. It wasn't really all that hard if you spoke the language.
From above, it must have looked like an old-fashioned basketball key. The circular part of the piazza looked to be a good two hundred yards in diameter, then narrowed down to perhaps a third of that as you got away from the monstrous bronze doors to the church itself.
"When he sees the crowd, he boards his car—rather like a cross between a jeep and a golf trolley—just there, and he follows a cleared path in the crowd along this way," Sharp explained, "around there, and back. Takes about, oh, twenty minutes or so, depending on whether he stops the car for—what you Americans call pressing the flesh. I suppose I shouldn't compare him to a politician. He seems a very decent chap, a genuinely good man. Not all the popes have been so, but this one is. And he's no coward. He's had to live through the Nazis and the communists, and that never turned him a single degree from his path."
"Yeah, he must like riding the point of the lance," Ryan murmured in reply. There was just one thing occupying his mind now. "Where's the sun going to be?"
"Just at our backs."
"So, if there's a bad guy, he'll stand just about here, sun behind him, not in his eyes. People looking that way from the other side have the sun in their eyes. Maybe it's not all that much, but when your ass is on the line, you play every card in your hand. Ever been in uniform, Tom?"
"Coldstream Guards, leftenant through a captaincy. Saw some action in Aden, but mainly served in the BOAR. I agree with your estimate of the situation," Sharp said, turning to do his own evaluation. "And professionals are somewhat predictable, since they all study out of the same syllabus. But what about a rifle?"
"How many men you have to use for this?"
"Four, besides myself. C might send more down from London, but not all that many."
"Put one up there?" Ryan gestured to the colonnade. Seventy feet high? Eighty? About the same height as the perch Lee Harvey Oswald had used to do Jack Kennedy… with an Italian rifle, Jack reminded himself. That was good for a brief chill.
"I can probably get a man up there disguised as a photographer." And long camera lenses made for good telescopes.
"How about radios?"
"Say, six civilian-band walkie-talkies. If we don't have them at the embassy, I can have them flown in from London."
"Better to have military ones, small enough to conceal—we had one in the Corps that had an earpiece like from a transistor radio. Also better if it's encrypted, but that might be hard." And such systems, Ryan didn't add, are not entirely reliable.
"Yes, we can do that. You have a good eye, Sir John."
"I wasn't a Marine for long, but the way they teach lessons in the Basic School, it's kinda hard to forget them. This is one hell of a big place to cover with six men, fella."
"And not something SIS trains us to do," Sharp added.
"Hey, the U.S. Secret Service would cover this place with over a hundred trained agents—shit, maybe more—plus try to get intel on every hotel, motel, and flophouse in the area." Jack let out a breath. "Mr. Sharp, this is not possible. How thick are the crowds?"
"It varies. In the summer tourist season, there are enough people here to fill Wembley Stadium. This coming week? Certainly thousands," he estimated. "How many is hard to reckon."
This mission is a real shitburger, Ryan told himself.
"Any way to hit the hotels, try to get a line on this Strokov guy?"
"More hotels