Tom Clancy's op-centre_ mirror image - Tom Clancy [126]
"Finally, a masquerade I can relate to," George said as they started toward the square.
"Don't like it too much," Peggy said. "We're going to have a little spat inside so I can stalk off and strike a conversation with Volko.
George grinned. "I'm married. I can relate to that too." The grin broadened. "Strikers among strikers," he whispered. "I like the irony."
Peggy didn't return his smile as they went around the fringes of the crowd in the Palace Square. George wondered if she'd even heard him as she looked at the orderly mob, at the sculptural grouping over the General Staff Arch, at her feet-- anywhere but the Hermitage itself and the river beyond, on whose banks Keith Fields-Hutton had died. He thought he saw dampness in the corners of her eyes and a heaviness in her step that he had not seen before.
And he finally, happily, felt close to the person he had been sitting beside, hip-to-hip, for them better part of a day.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Tuesday, 10:51 P.M., Khabarovsk
Spetsnaz soldiers were trained to do many things with their chief weapon, the spade. They were left in a locked room with just the spade and a mad dog. They were ordered to chop down trees with them. On occasion, they had to dig ditches in frozen ground with them, ditches deep enough to lie in. At a specified time, tanks were rolled over the field. Soldiers who hadn't dug deep enough were crushed.
With the help of Liz Gordon, Lieutenant Colonel Squires had made a special study of spetsnaz techniques, searching for those that best accounted for the remarkable endurance and versatility of their soldiers. He couldn't adapt them all. Regular beatings to toughen the soldiers would never have been approved by the Pentagon, although he knew commanding officers who would have sanctioned them gladly. But he adapted many spetsnaz methods, including his favorites-- their ability to create camouflage in a very short time and to hide in the unlikeliest places.
When he had learned about the soldiers posted on top of the train, he realized they'd be watching the treetops, cliffs, boulders, and snowbanks along the route. He knew that someone in the engine would be watching the tracks for explosives or debris. But he also knew that he had to get under the train unseen, and that the best place to hide would be on the tracks themselves.
The glow of an engine-mounted headlight would be diffused and dull, and the soldiers would be paying careful attention to the rails. So he felt safe using a small hatchet to hack through two of the dry, old crossties, chop a shallow ditch in the railbed, lie on his back, and have Grey cover him and his sack of C-4 with snow-- leaving an arm-thick tunnel on the side so he could breathe. After interring Newmeyer nearby, Grey hid behind a boulder, far from the train; when Squires and Newmeyer tackled the two cars and the fireworks started, Grey would move on his target, the engine.
Squires had heard, then felt, the drumming approach of the train. He hadn't been nervous. He was below the surface of the rails where even the cowcatcher, if there was one, wouldn't touch the snow piled on top of him. His only concern was that the engineer see the tree too soon or not see it at all and collide with it. In the latter case, not only would the train be damaged but the wheels would kick the tree back and over him, in which case he would be, as he'd joked to Grey, "ground Chuck."
Neither of those had happened. But when the train did stop and Squires was able to burrow a little hole in front of his eyes, he saw that he was under the coal tender. That was one car ahead of where he had hoped he'd be.
At least the camouflage worked, he'd thought as he discreetly began to push the snow from himself. There was something very gratifying and historically fight about Russian troops falling for a Russian scheme-- like Rasputin being killed by Czarists and the Czar being killed by Revolutionaries.
As he'd finished brushing away the snow, Squires had heard shouting. Despite the fact that virtually every inch of skin was