Without remorse - Tom Clancy [206]
'The Invisible Man,' Ryan said quietly, finally giving the case a name. 'He should have killed Mrs Charles. You know what we've got here?'
Douglas snorted. 'Somebody I don't want to meet alone.'
'Three groups to take Moscow out?'
'Sure, why not?' Zacharias replied. 'It's your political leadership, isn't it? It's a huge communications center, and even if you get the Politburo out, they'll still get most of your military and political command and control -'
'We have ways to get our important people out,' Grishanov objected out of professional and national pride.
'Sure.' Robin almost laughed, Grishanov saw. Part of him was insulted, but on reflection he was pleased with himself that the American colonel felt that much at ease now. 'Kolya, we have things like that, too. We have a real ritzy shelter set up in West Virginia for Congress and all that. The 1st Helicopter Squadron is at Andrews, and their mission is to get VIPs the heck out of Dodge - but guess what? The durned helicopters can't hop all the way to the shelter and back without refueling on the return leg. Nobody thought about that when they selected the shelter, because that was a political decision. Guess what else? We've never tested the evacuation system. Have you tested yours?'
Grishanov sat down next to Zacharias, on the floor, his back against the dirty concrete wall. Nikolay Yevgeniyevich just looked down and shook his head, having learned yet more from the American. 'You see? You see why I say we'll never fight a war? We're alike! No, Robin, we've never tested it, we've never tried to evacuate Moscow since I was a child in the snow. Our big shelter is at Zhiguli. It's a big stone - not a mountain, like a big - bubble? I don't know the word, a huge circle of stone from the center of the earth.'
'Monolith? like Stone Mountain in Georgia?'
Grishanov nodded. There was no harm in giving secrets to this man, was there? 'The geologists say it is immensely strong, and we tunneled into it back in the late 1950s. I've been there twice. I helped supervise the air-defense office when they were building it. We expect - this is the truth, Robin - we expect to get our people there by train.'
'It won't matter. We know about it. If you know where it is, you can take it out, just a matter of how many bombs you put there.' The American had a hundred grams of vodka in him. 'Probably the Chinese do, too. But they'll go for Moscow anyway, especially if it's a surprise attack.'
'Three groups?'
'That's how I'd do it.' Robin's feet straddled an air-navigation chart of the southeastern Soviet Union. 'Three vectors, from these three bases, three aircraft each, two to carry the bombs, one a protective jammer. Jammer takes the lead. Bring in all three groups on line, like, spaced wide like this.' He traced likely courses on the map. 'Start your penetration descent here, take 'em right into these valleys, and by the time they hit the plains -'
'Steppes,' Kolya corrected.
'They're through your first line of defense, okay? They're smoking in low, tike three hundred feet. Maybe they don't even jam at first. Maybe you have one special group, even. The guys you really train.'
'What do you mean, Robin?'
'You have night flights into Moscow, airliners, I mean?'
'Of course.'
'Well, what say you take a Badger, and you leave the strobes on, okay, and maybe you have little glow lights down the fuselage that you can turn on and off - you know, like windows? Hey, I'm an airliner.'
'You mean?'
'It's something we looked at once. There's a squadron with the light kits still at ... Pease, I think. That used to be the job - the B-47s based in England. If we ever decided like you guys were going to go after us, from intelligence or something, okay? You gotta have a plan for everything. That was one of ours. We called it Jumpshot. Probably in the dead files now, that was one of LeMay's specials. Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev - and Zhiguli. Three birds