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damned bit. We have no business putting a military aircraft that deep into Russian airspace.
Rubens, always the diplomat, did not point out that the United States had no outwardly legitimate business putting human agents into Russian territory, either or that both Russia and the United States had a very long history of intruding into each other territories when they needed to do so.
Of course, both countries had long used all kinds of assets to keep tabs on each other, from human agents to spy satellites to submarines to ELINT and reconnaissance aircraft. Of those various means of gathering intelligence, though, aircraft made the people in Washington the most nervous.
No doubt the shoot- down of Captain Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 over Sverdlovsk in May of 1960 had something to do with that.
Ghost Blue knows what he doing, Rubens told the National Security Director. He’ll know if he being picked up by the St. Petersburg air defense net, and he has means by which he can evade any hostiles.
A rather sweeping generalization, that. Rubens wasn’t trying to be misleading, but he was oversimplifying to a rather alarming degree. So very much could go wrong in
an op like this one. It was impossible to predict how it would come together.
Or fall apart.
Your tail is riding on this one, Mr. Rubens, Bing told him. Keep me in the loop.
Yes, ma’am.
But Bing had already hung up on him.
He glanced at Rockman as he replaced the handset. We’d better tell Dean, too.
Pistol Range
Fort Meade, Maryland
1633 hours EDT
Charlie Dean squeezed the trigger twice in rapid succession, tapping off two rounds, the bangs echoing down the white- painted room. Two shots, two hits squarely at the center of mass and less than two inches apart.
Recovering, he shifted his aim, gripping the pistol firmly in the classic Weaver stance, right hand holding the grip at full extension, finger lightly caressing the trigger, left hand cupping and holding the right. Accuracy in the Weaver stance depended on the interplay of forces as he pushed with the locked right arm and pulled with the supporting left.
Two more shots, two more hits, this time in the target head.
Target left! a voice growled from beside and slightly behind him. Dean shifted instantly, bending his left elbow slightly to pull his right arm into line with a second target, ten yards beyond and behind the first. Again, two taps at the center of mass, followed by a third and then the slide on his .45 locked open.
Raising the muzzle, he hit the magazine release and
dropped the empty magazine, before racking the slide once more to make sure the firing chamber was empty. Clear! he called.
Behind him, Gunny Mark Strieber mashed his thumb down on a button, and the two targets, each bearing the head and body of a vaguely human- shaped black silhouette, whined toward the firing line on their overhead tracks.
Not bad, Marine, Strieber said. Not too shabby at all, in fact. A bit of spread on your third group.
Both of the center- of- mass shots on the second target had struck within the inner kill zone, but they were a good five inches apart. His final shot was low, on the line between head and throat. He’d rushed it.
Yeah, but he still dead, Jim, Dean replied, parodying a well- known line from an old science fiction show on TV.
Strieber ticked a box off on the clipboard sheet he was holding. I’ll give it to you. This
time.
The Fort Meade pistol range was empty at the moment, except for the two of them. Dean set his weapona classic Colt .45 1911A1on the table in front of him, muzzle pointed carefully downrange, along with the empty magazine. He then pulled off his hearing protectors. The devices were decidedly high- tech, with active feedback to block out sharp sounds like gunfire while permitting ordinary speech.
So do I pass my quals? Dean asked Strieber.
You could use some improvement on the OC, Strieber replied, paging through the sheets on his clipboard. Then he shrugged. Still, for such an old
jarhead,