Tom Clancy's op-centre_ mirror image - Tom Clancy [26]
Rodgers also received a call from Assistant Deputy Director Karen Wong, who ran Op-Center on weekend evenings.
"General," she said, "I understand you've been called to a meeting."
"Yes, I have."
"Then here's some information you should take with you. As soon as Lynne Dominick in cryptology heard about the explosion, she took a fresh look at that bagel order from overseas. The timing and receiver location made it seem like a good fit."
"What did she find?"
"Knowing the outcome has allowed her to work backward," Wong said, "albeit very quickly. And it seems like a match. Assuming the last bagel represents the tunnel, she created a map. The rest of the order seems to be points in Manhattan-- for example, places to deliver components of the bomb."
Then we'd be up against the Russians, he thought with dread. And if they were behind this, it would not be regarded as terrorism. It would be considered an act of war.
"Tell Lynne that was heads-up work," Rodgers said. "Memo her findings and secure-fax it to the Oval Office."
"Right away. There's something else, though, that's happened in St. Petersburg," she said. "We've just learned from Commander Harry Hubbard at DI6 in London that he lost two people there. The first one was yesterday afternoon, a veteran named Keith Fields-Hutton. He was outside the Hermitage, by the Neva, and suffered what the Russians say was a heart attack."
"A euphemism for 'We killed him,"' Rodgers said. "Was he checking on the studio?"
"Yes," Wong said. "He never got to phone a single report, though. That's how fast he was spotted and terminated."
"Thanks," Rodgers said. "Has Paul been briefed?"
"Yes," said Wong. "He called after he heard about the explosion. He asked to talk to you after the meeting."
"I'll phone him," Rodgers said as he pulled up to the sentry at the gate which led to the winding White House driveway.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Monday, 6:00 A.M., St. Petersburg
When he was a boy growing up in the early 1950s, in the small town of Naryan-Mar on the Arctic Ocean, Sergei Orlov thought he would never treasure a sight more than he did the orange glow of the hearth in his parents' home as he trudged through the snow carrying two or three fish tucked in his canvas sack, caught in the small lake near his home. For Orlov, the glowing fireplace wasn't just a beacon in the cold, dark night. it was a bright and hopeful sign of life in a cold and barren wasteland.
Circling the earth in the late 1970s, flying five Soyuz missions that ranged from eight to eighteen days and commanding the last three, General Sergei Orlov saw something even more memorable. It was not something new. Dozens of cosmonauts had seen the earth from space. But whether they had described our world as a blue bubble, a beautiful marble, or a Christmas-tree ornament, they all agreed that seeing it gave them a new outlook on life. Political ideologies were no match for the power of that fragile globe. Space travelers realized that if humans had a destiny, it was not to fight for control of their home but to cherish its peace and warmth as they journeyed to the stars.
And then you return to earth, Orlov thought as he stepped from the number 44 bus on Nevsky Prospekt. The resolve and inspiration weaken as you're asked to do things in the name of country which you can't refuse. Russians don't refuse. Orlov's grandfather was a Czarist, yet he fought the White Russians during the Revolution. His father didn't refuse when he fought in the Second Ukrainian Front during the Second World War. It was for them, and not for Brezhnev, that he had trained a new generation of cosmonauts to spy on the United States and NATO forces from space as well as to work on new chemical poisons in zero gravity. He was trained to see the world not as the home of all humans but as a thing to be peeled and cut up and devoured in the name of a man called Lenin.
Then there are the parts coveted by men like Minister Dogin, he thought as he walked