Read Jack Ryan 3 - Red Rabbit for Free Online Page A

didn't exactly require a Nobel-class intellect.
    “Okay, what is our fondest wish?”
    Greer took that one. “We aren't allowed to think in those terms. We want to find a modus vivendi with them.” That was what The New York Times said, anyway, and wasn't that the voice of the nation? “Okay, Bob. Spit it out.”
    “How do we attack them?” Ritter asked. “And by that I mean nail the bastards right where they live, hurt them—”
    “Bring them down?” Moore asked.
    “Why the hell not?” Ritter demanded.
    “Is it possible?” the DCI asked, interested that Ritter was thinking along such lines.
    “Well, Arthur, if they can aim that big a gun at us, why can't we do it to them?” Ritter had the bit in his teeth now. “They send money into political groups in our country to try and make it hard on our political process. They have antinuclear demonstrations all across Europe, calling to eliminate our Theater Nuclear Weapons while they rebuild theirs. We can't even leak what we know about that to the media—”
    “And if we did, the media wouldn't print it,” Moore observed. After all, the media didn't like nuclear weapons either, though it was willing to tolerate Soviet weapons because they, for one reason or another, were not destabilizing. What Ritter really wanted to do, he feared, was to see if the Soviets had influence on the American mass media. But even if it did, such an investigation would bear only poisoned fruit. The media held on to their vision of its integrity and balance as a miser held his hoard. But they knew without having the evidence that KGB did have some power over the American media, because it was so easy to establish and exercise. Flatter them, let them in on supposed secrets, and then become a trusted source. But did the Soviets know how dangerous a game that could be? The American news media did have a few core beliefs, and tampering with them was like tinkering with a live bomb. One wrong move could be expensive. No one in this Seventh-Floor office was under much illusion about the genius of the Russian intelligence service. It had skilled people, certainly, and trained them thoroughly and well, but KGB also had its weaknesses. Like the society it served, KGB applied a political template to reality, and largely ignored the information that didn't match up with the holes. And so, after months, even years, of painstaking planning and preparation, they often had operations go bad because one of their officers had decided that life in the land of the enemy wasn't quite so bad as it was portrayed. The cure for a lie was always the truth. It just had a way of smacking you in the face, and the smarter you were, the worse it hurt.
    “That's not important,” Ritter said, surprising both his colleagues.
    “Okay, keep going,” Moore ordered.
    “What we need to do is examine their vulnerabilities and attack them—with the objective of destabilizing their entire country.”
    “That's a very tall order, Robert,” Moore observed.
    “You take an ambition pill, Bob?” Greer asked, intrigued even so. “Our political masters will blanch at that large an objective.”
    “Oh, I know.” Ritter held up his hands. "Oh, no, we mustn't hurt them. They might nuke us. Come on, they're a hell of a lot less likely to lash out than we are. People, they are afraid of us, a lot more than we are of them.
    They are afraid of Poland, for Christ's sake. Why? Because there's a disease in Poland that their own people might catch. It's called rising expectations. And rising expectations are the one thing they can't satisfy. Their economy is as stagnant as stump water. If we give them a little push…"
    “'All we have to do is kick in the door, and the whole rotten structure will collapse,' ” Moore quoted. “That's been said before, but Adolf had himself a nasty little surprise when the snow started falling.”
    “He was an idiot who didn't read his Machiavelli,” Ritter retorted. “First, you conquer 'em,