Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5 - 8
Tom Clancy
Tom Clancy's Power Plays 5-8
Cold War
Cutting Edge
Zero Hour
Wild Card
Tom Clancy
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
ONE - BULL PASS (77°30’ S, 161°80’ E) MCMURDO DRY VALLEYS, ANTARCTICA FEBRUARY ...
TWO - SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA MARCH 1, 2002
THREE - NORTH HIGHLANDS, SCOTLAND MARCH 2, 2002
FOUR - PARIS, FRANCE MARCH 2, 2002
FIVE - ROSS ICE SHELF, ANTARCTICA (70°00’ S, 30°42’ W) MARCH 4, 2002
SIX - INVERNESS, SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS MARCH 6, 2002
SEVEN - ABOVE MCMURDO SOUND, ANTARCTICA (77°88’ S, 166°73’ E) MARCH 12, 2002
EIGHT - SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS
NINE - 93,000,000 MILES FROM EARTH MARCH 12, 2002
TEN - MOUNT EREBUS (77°53’ S, 167°17’ E) BULL PASS, ANTARCTICA MARCH 12, 2002
ELEVEN - PARIS, FRANCE MARCH 12, 2002
TWELVE - ROSS DEPENDENCY, SOUTHERN OCEAN (66°25’ S, 162°50’ E) MARCH 13, 2002
THIRTEEN - COLD CORNERS BASE, ANTARCTICA MARCH 13, 2002
FOURTEEN - NEAR COLD CORNERS BASE VICTORIA LAND, ANTARCTICA MARCH 13, 2002
FIFTEEN - ASOTNA, SWITZERLAND MARCH 12, 2002
SIXTEEN - COLD CORNERS BASE, ANTARCTICA MARCH 13, 2002
SEVENTEEN - COLD CORNERS BASE, ANTARCTICA MARCH 15, 2002
EIGHTEEN - COLD CORNERS BASE, ANTARCTICA MARCH 16, 2002
NINETEEN - COLD CORNERS BASE, ANTARCTICA MARCH 17, 2002
EPILOGUE
THE BESTSELLING NOVELS OF
TOM CLANCY
THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON
A clash of world powers. President Jack Ryan’s trial by fire . . .
“HEART-STOPPING ACTION . . . CLANCY STILL REIGNS.” —The Washington Post
RAINBOW SIX
John Clark is used to doing the CIA’s dirty work. Now he’s taking on the world. . . .
“ACTION-PACKED.”
—The New York Times Book Review
EXECUTIVE ORDERS
The most devastating terrorist act in history leaves Jack Ryan as president of the United States. . . .
“UNDOUBTEDLY CLANCY’S BEST YET.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
DEBT OF HONOR
It begins with the murder of an American woman in the back streets of Tokyo. It ends in war. . . .
“A SHOCKER CLIMAX SO PLAUSIBLE YOU’LL WONDER WHY IT HASN’T YET HAPPENED.”
—Entertainment Weekly
THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER
The smash bestseller that launched Clancy’s career—the incredible search for a Soviet defector and the nuclear submarine he commands . . .
“BREATHLESSLY EXCITING.”
—The Washington Post
RED STORM RISING
The ultimate scenario for World War III—the final battle for global control . . .
“THE ULTIMATE WAR GAME . . . BRILLIANT.”
—Newsweek
PATRIOT GAMES
CIA analyst Jack Ryan stops an assassination—and incurs the wrath of Irish terrorists. . . .
“A HIGH PITCH OF EXCITEMENT.”
—The Wall Street Journal
THE CARDINAL OF THE KREMLIN
The superpowers race for the ultimate Star Wars missile defense system. . . .
“CARDINAL EXCITES, ILLUMINATES . . . A REAL PAGE-TURNER.” —Los Angeles Daily News
CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER
The killing of three U.S. officials in Colombia ignites the American government’s explosive, and top secret, response. . . .
“A CRACKLING GOOD YARN.”
—The Washington Post
THE SUM OF ALL FEARS
The disappearance of an Israeli nuclear weapon threatens the balance of power in the Middle East—and around the world. . . .
“CLANCY AT HIS BEST . . . NOT TO BE MISSED.”
—The Dallas Morning News
WITHOUT REMORSE
The Clancy epic fans have been waiting for. His code name is Mr. Clark. And his work for the CIA is brilliant, cold-blooded, and efficient . . . but who is he really?
“HIGHLY ENTERTAINING.”
—The Wall Street Journal
AND DON’T MISS TOM CLANCY’S
FASCINATING NONFICTION WORKS . . .
SPECIAL FORCES
A Guided Tour of
U.S. Army Special Forces
“CLANCY IS A NATURAL.” —USA Today
CARRIER
A Guided Tour of
an Aircraft Carrier
“CLANCY IS A MASTER OF HARDWARE.”
—The Washington Post
AIRBORNE
A Guided Tour of
an Airborne Task Force
“NOBODY DOES IT BETTER.”
—The Dallas Morning News
SUBMARINE
A Guided Tour
Inside a Nuclear Warship
“TAKES READERS DEEPER THAN THEY’VE EVER GONE INSIDE A NUCLEAR SUBMARINE.”
—Kirkus Reviews
ARMORED CAV
A Guided Tour of
an Armored Cavalry Regiment
“TOM CLANCY IS THE BEST THERE IS.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
FIGHTER WING
A Guided Tour of
an Air Force Combat Wing
“CLANCY’S WRITING IS SO STRONG THAT READERS FEEL THEY ARE THERE.”
—Boston Sunday Herald
MARINE
A Guided Tour of
a Marine Expeditionary Unit
“NO ONE CAN EQUAL HIS TALENT.”
—Houston Chronicle
AT BOOKSTORES EVERYWHERE!
Novels by Tom Clancy
THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER
RED STORM RISING
PATRIOT GAMES
THE CARDINAL OF THE KREMLIN
CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER
THE SUM OF ALL FEARS
WITHOUT REMORSE
DEBT OF HONOR
EXECUTIVE ORDERS
RAINBOW SIX
THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON
SSN: STRATEGIES OF SUBMARINE WARFARE
Created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik
TOM CLANCY’S OP-CENTER
TOM CLANCY’S OP-CENTER: MIRROR IMAGE
TOM CLANCY’S OP-CENTER: GAMES OF STATE
TOM CLANCY’S OP-CENTER: ACTS OF WAR
TOM CLANCY’S OP-CENTER: BALANCE OF POWER
TOM CLANCY’S OP-CENTER: STATE OF SIEGE
TOM CLANCY’S OP-CENTER: DIVIDE AND CONQUER
TOM CLANCY’S OP-CENTER: LINE OF CONTROL
TOM CLANCY’S NET FORCE
TOM CLANCY’S NET FORCE: HIDDEN AGENDAS
TOM CLANCY’S NET FORCE: NIGHT MOVES
TOM CLANCY’S NET FORCE: BREAKING POINT
TOM CLANCY’S NET FORCE: POINT OF IMPACT
TOM CLANCY’S NET FORCE: CYBERNATION
Created by Tom Clancy and Martin Greenberg
TOM CLANCY’S POWER PLAYS: POLITIKA
TOM CLANCY’S POWER PLAYS: RUTHLESS.COM
TOM CLANCY’S POWER PLAYS: SHADOW WATCH
TOM CLANCY’S POWER PLAYS: BIO-STRIKE
TOM CLANCY’S POWER PLAYS: COLD WAR
Nonfiction
SUBMARINE: A GUIDED TOUR INSIDE A NUCLEAR WARSHIP
ARMORED CAV: A GUIDED TOUR OF AN ARMORED CAVALRY REGIMENT
FIGHTER WING: A GUIDED TOUR OF AN AIR FORCE COMBAT WING
MARINE: A GUIDED TOUR OF A MARINE EXPEDITIONARY UNIT
AIRBORNE: A GUIDED TOUR OF AN AIRBORNE TASK FORCE
CARRIER: A GUIDED TOUR OF AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER
SPECIAL FORCES: A GUIDED
TOUR OF U.S. ARMY SPECIAL FORCES
INTO THE STORM: A STUDY IN COMMAND (written with General Fred Franks)
EVERY MAN A TIGER (written with General Charles Horner)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and
any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
TOM CLANCY’S POWER PLAYS: COLD WAR
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with
RSE Holdings, Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition / December 2001
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2001 by RSE Holdings, Inc.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-00260-5
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ONE
BULL PASS (77°30’ S, 161°80’ E) MCMURDO DRY VALLEYS, ANTARCTICA
FEBRUARY 27, 2002
THEY HEARD THE COPTER LONG BEFORE IT CAME INTO sight, cresting the frozen peaks of Olympus on a southerly course toward Asgard.
Its pilot approached from the rear, nosed down a little, and hailed the team below as he flew past. Some cheerful words over his PA, a flap of a red-sleeved arm behind his windscreen. His large Bell 212 was identical to the aircraft that had dropped them into the valleys, but its National Science Foundation decals showed it wasn’t one of theirs.
Scarborough’s foot party was no less appreciative of the human contact. They were starting their first full day out of Cold Corners, and if mutual reliance made for good neighbors, this qualified as the most neighborly spot on earth.
All three returned the pilot’s wave, their own bright red coat sleeves upraised. Then they watched him level his bird in the crystal-clear sky, skirt the rim of Valhalla glacier, and vanish over the crooked spine of mountains running toward the coast. Away and gone with due haste. The fixed landing and refueling pad at Marble Point was some thirty miles off along his flight path, and he’d want to reach it in time for the early shift change.
Minutes later, Scarborough could still hear the chop of rotors echoing between the scoured brown walls of the pass.
The most neighborly spot on earth, and its quietest, he thought. The polar desert’s only native inhabitants were primitive invertebrates. A handful of tiny worms and insects on land, anaerobic microbes under the hardened lake surfaces. There would be no noise pollution from them. Nothing to dent the silence except for the occasional beating of wind against the valley walls and far rarer sounds of human intrusion.
Now Scarborough freed a hand from its clumsy pile mitten, leaving on his thinner polypropylene glove liner, adequate short-term protection on all but the worst summer days. The temperature had been 16° Fahrenheit when his group left camp that morning, torrid by local standards even with a chill factor of—20°, and he would need just a few moments to check his bearings.
Scarborough extricated his GPS receiver from his parka and pressed a keypad button. A topographic satellite image of the valley system north of the Asgard range filled his display, its contours reminding him of an old-fashioned ship’s anchor. Next, he scrolled down his menu to the “Navigate” option. A color icon representing the object of his search marked its last known coordinates near the deep, craggy notch at the pass’s junction with Wright Valley.
Scarborough studied the display a bit longer, his fur-trimmed hood pulled up, his balaclava covering the gray-flecked scruff of beard that would soon grow out into a winter forest. He wore dark polarized snow goggles over the mask’s eye slits, heavy-duty wind pants, and neck and leg gaiters for optimal retention of body heat. Here at the bottom of the globe, life was bounded by the cold, shaped by the cold, its limitations defined by how well you adapted to the cold. The threat of hypothermia meant bundling into innumerable layers of gear and apparel before you ventured outside, a tedious routine that packed on thirty pounds of added weight and was the cause of persistent, some might say epidemic, crankiness at the station.
As with so many aspects of existence in Antarctica, you either kept a sense of humor about it or went crazy, Scarborough thought. Thankfully most did the former. A wicked hand with a felt-tip pen, his dorm mate had even graced the front of their clothes closet with a masterpiece of graffiti that portrayed them as a couple of sullen, mopish genies who’d been sealed away inside a giant Coca-Cola bottle wearing only their waffle-knit longjohns, a visual pun on the fact that modern polar fleece outer garments were made of a synthetic fabric derived from recycled plastic soft-drink containers. Written above it was the title “PRISONERS OF FASHION.” Though this king-sized editorial cartoon had been unveiled months before, their Friday night poker regulars still got a sort of rueful kick out of it, using it as a springboard for their own wardrobe laments. Not that Scarborough could recall hearing anyone grouse about being overdressed out in the field.
His location established, he pocketed the GPS unit and glanced across the moraine at Bradley and Payton, who had wandered ahead of him seeking any trace of the rover. Though he’d been careful to stay mum about it, Scarborough shared a measure of their anxiousness. Developed under exclusive contract with NASA, the Scout IV remote interplanetary vehicle was the product of a tremendous investment in dollars, labor, and prestige for UpLink International. Its sudden and complete signal failure during late-stage field tests had everyone involved with the project on edge, and hoping what had gone wrong was something like a defective microprocessor, a programming error, maybe a radio transmission mast that failed to deploy.
Something simple, in other words.
In Scarborough’s opinion, however, those scenarios were limp noodles . . . as were the many similar theories being floated at Cold Corners. Scout’s critical systems had been designed with multiple redundancies, none more key to its performance as a lab-on-wheels than the telecommunications packet. Information compiled on the Martian surface was worthless if it couldn’t be beamed across the void to Earth, making successful data transfer a baseline requirement. The notion that a minor snafu could knock out the rover’s entire gamut of backup relays seemed dubious at best, and hinted that accountability for its possible failure was about to become a bouncing ball.
Scarborough’s mouth turned down in a private frown under his balaclava. Shevaun Bradley and David Payton were robotics experts who had been on the ice just over six weeks and planned to leave before final sunset, winging off to civilization aboard a Hercules LC-150 ski transport. Not so for Scarborough. Well into his second eighteen-month hitch with the station’s winter-over support crew, he had learned from unpleasant experience that tensions could build fast in shared isolation. The stickiest situations often occurred between habituated polies and summer personnel contingents, and part of his role as expeditionary guide was to lubricate the gears, so to speak. He knew Bradley a little and didn’t think she’d be a challenge on that score. Payton was another story.
Scarborough made his way toward the techies over wide beds of gravel and patches of bare bedrock that had been scrubbed to a shiny smoothness by time and weather. Stone chips crunched beneath the rubber soles of his boots. Boulders were scattered everywhere around him, many of knee height or smaller, some dwarfing the group’s transportable apple hut. The most imposing rocks Scarbor
ough had seen lay back in the direction of camp, a tumbled expanse that had proven sheer murder to negotiate. Carved out of the highland plateau by monumental glacial flows in the Paleozoic, bereft of rainfall for an estimated two million years, the entire landscape might have been transported from another world in some weird cosmic version of a skin graft . . . which, of course, was precisely why it was chosen as the site of the rover’s trial run. According to planetary geologists, no place on Earth bore a closer resemblance to Mars.
