"Clancy, Tom - Jack Ryan 03 - The Cardinal of the Kremlin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clancy Tom)

The screening room would have done Hollywood proud. There were about thirty seats in the mini-theater, and a twenty-foot-square projection screen on the wall. Art Graham, the chief of the unit, was waiting for them.
"You timed that pretty well. We'll have the shots in another minute." He lifted a phone to the projection room and spoke a few words. The screen lit up at once. It was called "Overhead Imagery" now, Jack reminded himself.
"Talk about luck. That Siberian high-pressure system took a sharp swing south and stopped the warm front like a brick wall. Perfect viewing conditions. Ground temp is about zero, and relative humidity can't be much higher than that!" Graham chuckled. "We maneuvered the bird in specially to take advantage of this. It's within three degrees of being right overhead, and I don't think Ivan has had time to figure out that this pass is under way."
"There's Dushanbe," Jack breathed as part of the Tadzhik SSR came into view. Their first look was from one of the wide-angle cameras. The orbiting KH-14 reconnaissance satellite had a total of eleven. The bird had been in orbit foi only three weeks, and this was the first of the newest gen eration of spy satellites. Dushanbe, briefly known as Stalin-abad a few decades earlierЧthat must have made the local people happy! Ryan thoughtЧwas probably one of the ancient caravan cities. Afghanistan was less than a hundred miles away. Tamurlane's legendary Samarkand was not fai to the northwest . . . and perhaps Scheherazade had traveled through a thousand years earlier. He wondered why was ( that history worked this way. The same places and the sami names always seemed to show up from one century to th
next. But CIA's current interest in Dushanbe did not center 01
the silk trade. The view changed to one of the high-resolution cameras
It peered first into a deep, mountainous valley where a river was held back by the concrete and stone mass of a hydroelectric dam. Though only fifty kilometers southeast of Dushanbe, its power lines did not serve that city of 500,000. Instead they led to a collection of mountaintops almost within sight of the facility.
"That looks like footings for another set of towers," Ryan observed.
"Parallel to the first set," Graham agreed. "They're putting some new generators into the facility. Well, we knew all along that they were only getting about half the usable power out of the dam."
"How long to bring the rest on-stream?" Greer asked.
"I'd have to check with one of our consultants. It won't take more than a few weeks to run the power lines out, and the top half of the powerhouse is already built. Figure the foundations for the new generators are already done. All they have to do is rig the new equipment. Six months, maybe eight if the weather goes bad."
"That fast?" Jack wondered.
"They diverted people from two other hydro jobs. Both of them were 'Hero' projects. This one has never been talked about, but they pulled construction troops off two high-profile sites to do this one. Ivan does know how to focus his effort when he wants to. Six or eight months is conservative, Dr. Ryan. It may be done quicker," Graham said.
"How much power'll be available when they finish?"
"It's not all that big a structure. Total peak output, with the new generators? Figure eleven hundred megawatts."
"That's a lot of power, and all going to those hilltops," Ryan said almost to himself as the camera shifted again.
The one the Agency called "Mozart" was quite a hill, but this area was the westernmost extension of the Himalayan Range, and by those standards it was puny. A road had been blasted to the very topЧthere wasn't a Sierra Club in the USSRЧalong with a helicopter pad for bringing VIPs out from Dushanbe's two airports. There were sixteen buildings. One was for apartments, the view from which must have been fantastic, though it was a prototypical Russian apartment building, as stylish and attractive as a cinderblock, finished
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message of the building was: The people who lived here were privileged. Engineers and academicians, people with enough skill that the State wanted to look after them and their needs. Food was trucked up the new mountain roadЧor, in bad weather, flown in. Another of the buildings was a theater. A third was a hospital. Television programming came in via satellite earth-station next to a building that contained a few shops. That sort of solicitude was not exactly common in the Soviet Union. It was limited to high Party officials and people who worked in essential defense projects. This was not a ski
resort.
That was also obvious from the perimeter fence and guard towers, both of which were recent. One of the identifiable things about Russian military complexes was the guard towers; Ivan had a real fixation for the things. Three fences, with two ten-meter spaces enclosed. The outer space was usually mined, and the inner one patrolled by dogs. The towers were on the inner perimeter, spaced two hundred meters apart. The soldiers who manned the towers were housed in a better-than-average new concrete barracksЧ "Can you isolate one of the guards?" Jack asked. Graham spoke into his phone, and the picture changed. One of his technicians was already doing this, as much to test camera calibration and ambient air conditions as for the purpose Ryan intended.
As the camera zoomed in, a moving dot became a mairi shape in greatcoat and probably a fur hat. He was walking! big dog of uncertain breed and had a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his right shoulder. Man and dog left puffs of vapor in the air as they breathed. Ryan leaned forward unconsciously, as though this would give him a better view. j "That guy's shoulder boards look green to you?" he aske|
Graham. The reconnaissance expert grunted. "Yep. He's KGB,
right."
"That close to Afghanistan?" the Admiral mused. "Thej know we have people operating there. You bet they'll tak their security provisions seriously."
"They must have really wanted those hilltops," Ryan ob served. "Seventy miles overland are a few million people who think killing Russians is God's will. This place is more im portant than we thought. It isn't just a new facility, not will
THE CARDINAL OF THE KREMLIN Х 31
that kind of security. If that's all it was, they wouldn't have had to put it here, and they for damned sure wouldn't have picked a place where they had to build a new power supply and risk exposure to hostiles. This may be an R and D facility now, but they must have bigger plans for it." "Like what?"
"Going after my satellites, maybe." Art Graham thought of them as his.
"Have they tickled any of 'em recently?" Jack asked. "No, not since we rattled their cage last April. Common sense broke out for once."
That was an old story. Several times in the past few years, American reconnaissance and early-warning satellites had been 'tickled"Чlaser beams or microwave energy had been fo-aised on the satellites, enough to dazzle their receptors but aot enough to do serious harm. Why had the Russians done t? That was the question. Was it merely an exercise to see low we'd react, to see if it caused a ruckus at the North \merican Aerospace Defense CommandЧNORADЧat Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado? An attempt to determine for hemselves how sensitive the satellites were? Was it a dem-Mistration, a warning of their ability to destroy the satellites? 3r was it simply what Jack's British friends called bloody-bindedness? It was so hard to tell what the Soviets were (linking.
I They invariably protested their innocence, of course. When the American satellite had been temporarily blinded over lary Shagan, they said that a natural-gas pipeline had caught re. The fact that the nearby Chimkent-Pavlodar pipeline iried mostly oil had escaped the Western press. The satellite pass was complete now. In a nearby room a tire of videotape recorders were rewound, and now the mplete camera coverage would be reviewed at leisure. "Let's have a look at Mozart again, and Bach also, please," Jreer commanded.
"Hell of a commute," Jack noted. The residential and in-strial site on Mozart was only one kilometer or so from the iplacement on Bach, the next mountaintop over, but the ad looked frightful. The picture froze on Bach. The formula fences and guard towers was repeated, but this time the tance between the outermost perimeter fence and the next s at least two hundred meters. Here the ground surface
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appeared to be bare rock. Jack wondered how you plant mines in thatЧor maybe they didn't, he thought. It was < vious that the ground had been leveled with bulldozers a explosives to the unobstructed flatness of a pool table. Fro) the guard towers, it must have looked like a shooting gallerj "Not kidding, are they?" Graham observed quietly. "So that's what they're guarding . . ." Ryan said. There were thirteen buildings inside the fence. In an ar< perhaps the size of two football fieldsЧwhich had also bei leveledЧwere ten holes, in two groups. One was a groupi six arranged hexagonally, each hole about thirty feet acros The second group of four was arrayed in a diamond patter and the holes were slightly smaller, perhaps twenty-five fq In each hole was a concrete pillar about fifteen feet acrcf planted in bedrock, and every hole was at least forty ft deepЧyou couldn't tell from the picture on the screen. At each pillar was a metal dome. They appeared to be made crescent-shaped segments. | "They unfold. I wonder what's in them?" Graham ask rhetorically. There were two hundred people at Langley vi knew of Dushanbe, and every one wanted to know whatu under those metal domes. They'd been in place for onlj
few months.
"Admiral," Jack said, "I need to kick open a new oB
partment." ХХ
"Which one?" Х
"Tea Clipper." Х
"You're not asking much!" Greer snorted. "I'm not deal
for that." I
Ryan leaned back in his chair. "Admiral, if what they!
doing in Dushanbe is the same thing we're doing with li
Clipper, we sure as hell ought to know. Goddammit, bз
are we supposed to know what to look for if we're not tf
what one of these places looks like!" I
"I've been saying that for quite a while." The DDI chui