Ralph Peters

by The war in 2020

  His teeth ached so badly he wanted to claw them out of his gums. When would it end? When would any of it end?

  To hell with the Americans, he decided. He didn't give a damn why they were here. As long as their weapons worked.

  Major Manuel Xavier Martinez stood beside Taylor at the corner of the ravaged buffet table, picking at a few leftovers to take the place of a combat ration breakfast and working through yet another set of interoperability problems. The two men spoke in Spanish for the sake of privacy and, despite his weariness, the supply officer could not help finding the situation bizarrely amusing. He routinely addressed Taylor as "Jefe," but this was only an inside joke. In fact, Taylor's Spanish was more grammatically correct, cleaner, and more exact, than was his own. Martinez's blood was Mexican-American, but his primary language—the tongue of his education and elective affinities—was the English of an erudite and educated man. His Spanish was the barrio dialect of his youth in San Antonio, fine for bullshitting on a street corner, but inadequate for expressing sophisticated logistical concepts. As they spoke Martinez punctuated his Spanish with far more English-language military terminology than his utterly Anglo-Saxon commander found necessary.

  "I still see two areas where we can really get screwed, sir," Martinez said. "And I'm only talking about the log business." He glanced across the smoke-fogged room to the portable workstation where Merry Meredith stared wearily at the incoming intelligence information. "I wouldn't want to be in Merry's shoes."

  "Merry can handle it," Taylor said.

  "Yeah. I know that, Jefe. But it's not just that they're a lying bunch of bastards. It's the way they treat him. That lieutenant colonel with the rotten teeth. Christ, he acts like an Alabama sheriff from back in the nineteen fifties." Martinez shook his head. "And you know it breaks Merry's heart. He's so into that Russian culture shit."

  "Merry's been through worse. You're just lucky they think you're a Georgian or an Armenian."

  "I still can't get a straight answer out of them," Martinez said. "It's worse than Mexico."

  "Mexico was the bush leagues," Taylor said.

  "All the more reason why I wish these guys would play it straight."

  "They can't," Taylor said, with surprising patience in his voice. The man's calm never ceased to impress Martinez. "They can't tell us the truth about the overall situation because they just don't know it themselves. Listen to them, Manny. They're lost. And they're scared. And they're trying to put the best face on it they can. Their world's coming apart. But they're willing to give us what they've got."

  "The problem is finding out what they've got," Martinez said. He took a drink of flat mineral water to wash the last bits of cracker from his throat. "Anyway, the first issue

  I've got to look at is fuel. We've got enough of our own to run the mission. But the M-l00s will be nearly empty at the end of it. First squadron is going to be running on fumes, judging by the arrow Lucky Dave just drew for them. That means depending on Soviet fuel. Our own complement won't be full-up for another five, six days, depending on the Soviet rail system."

  "So what's the Martinez solution?" Taylor asked, face impassive, a graven death mask to which Martinez was only now becoming accustomed, after so many years of working together.

  Martinez smiled. "I'm that predictable.

  Taylor nodded. A ghost of amusement on the dead lips. "Well " Martinez said, "the Sovs have one type of fuel that's almost as good as JP-10. And their boy says he can provide it. Of course, their fuel's polluted as often as not. We'll have to test each last bladder and blivet. But, if we can corner them into delivering the fuel on time, I suggest we run this mission on their fuel and conserve our own. Without burdening Taylor with unnecessary details, he quickly reviewed the other advantages of such an option. Their own fuel reserves were already uploaded on the big wing-in-ground fuelers, and it would save transfer and upload time. They would preserve their independence of action.

  "You're sure their fuel won't have us falling out of the sky?"

  "No," Martinez said, even as he thought the problem through one last time, "no, we can quality control it As long as we get the pure stuff, the composition is just fine. Anyway, I'm not worried about the engines. Battle-site calibration's another issue."

  "All right. Go ahead. You said there were two problem areas.

  "Yeah, Jefe. You and Lucky Dave may have to get in on this one. These guys are just congenital centralizers. My counterpart wants to stash all of the supplies in one big site. At the far end, where we finish up the mission. He says the general wants it that way, that, otherwise, they can't guarantee support site protection. Logic doesn't make a dent in these guys. And decentralized ops just give

  them the willies." Martinez shook his head. "We come at everything from different angles. They're worried about guarding the stuff on the ground. You know. 'Who goes there?' and all that. While I'm worried about missiles and airstrikes. Christ, the way they want to heap everything up in one big pile, it would only take one lucky shot to put us out of business."

  For the first time, Taylor's face showed concern. The scarred brows bunched. "I thought we were clear on that. We agreed that each squadron had to have its own discrete dispersal area. Heifetz has them on the graphics."

  "But Lucky Dave's talking apples, and they're talking oranges. They don't automatically assume that each squadron should have its own self-contained support site." Martinez caught the electric flash in Taylor's eyes. The old man had missed the potential problem, as had everyone else. Martinez was sorry he had not been able to resolve the conflict himself, because he knew Taylor well enough to realize that the old man would beat himself up unmercifully for not having spotted the potential disconnect earlier. Martinez had never met another man, another soldier, who was so hard on himself. Not even Merry Meredith or Lucky Dave Heifetz, the other members of the Seventh Cavalry staff's self-flagellation society.

  Martinez's life had not been full of heroes. He had been lucky enough not to look up to the street-corner cowboys back in San Antonio, boy-men as his absent father had been, and his adolescence and young adulthood had been spent in a struggle to be better than the rest, to show everyone that the kid from the barrio could shut them down. Getting higher grades, speaking better English. His ROTC scholarship to Texas A&M had not only paid the bills, but it had proved that he was every bit as American as any of the Anglos. He refused to be categorized as anything less, to let any man define him in any way that might diminish his singularity. When he went home to visit his mother, he refused to speak Spanish with her, even refused to eat the Mexican food she was so anxious to cook for him. And as a captain he had put down his entire savings to buy her a solid, middle-class house in a suburb in northwest San Antonio, one whose payments would bind his salary for years to come. It was an enormous step, a triumph for him. Yet his unsuccessful, increasingly worried attempts to call home, to speak with the prematurely aged woman, soon brought him back to earth. He finally tracked her down at his aunt's number. And his mother wept, claiming she loved the house and she was as proud of him as any mother could ever be. It was only that the new house was so big, so empty, and so far from all that she knew. The neighbors did not understand Spanish. So she had taken to staying with her sister back in the barrio. Where she felt at home. Now the house stood empty, except on the rare occasions when he went back on leave. It was a monument to the personal limits, to the failure, of the young man without heroes.

  And then there was Taylor. Martinez did not like to use the word hero. But, had he chosen to apply it to any man, his first choice would have been this unusual colonel who stood between him and the desolation of the buffet table.

  Taylor of Mexico, intuitively grasping the situation and its requirements so much better than the Quartermaster captain who shared the indigenous bloodlines. The civilian academics and specialized advisers attached to the Army had lectured Taylor on the nutritional requirements of the populace and on the infrastructural deficiencies associated wi
th chronic underdevelopment. And Taylor had kicked them out of his sector, in defiance of Army policy. He understood the need to satisfy minimum dietary requirements, but, above all, he understood the need for theater. Wearing preposterous silver spurs, Taylor was always the first man out of the helicopter. He traced canyon rims on a magnificent black stallion and walked upright where other men crawled. Martinez knew what it was to be afraid, and he did not believe that any sane man could be truly fearless. But Taylor certainly disguised his fear better than the rest—driving his utility vehicle, alone, into towns where the representatives of the U.S.-backed Monterrey provisional government hung from the utility poles with key body parts conspicuously absent. Exploiting the dramatic ugliness of his face to maximum effect and living on tortillas and beans so that he could ostentatiously give his rations to widows and orphans, Taylor transcended all of the Anglo rules of behavior to achieve the grand level of gesture demanded by a tormented Mexico. His peers called him a hot dog, a show-off, a nut, and a dirty sonofabitch— as they struggled to emulate his success. Taylor, who seemed able to project himself with equal ease into the mindset of a Mexican peasant or a Los Angeles gang member. Taylor, who masked his intelligence and command of language behind the terse, requisitely profane speech his subordinates imagined a commander must employ. Major Manuel Xavier Martinez did not believe in heroes. But he was not certain he could ever be such a man as Colonel George Taylor.

  "Manny," Taylor said to the supply officer, "it's a good thing I've got you to keep me from fucking this whole thing up. I should have made the goddamned Russians clarify exactly what they understood by force dispersion." The colonel was angrily intense, but the sharpness was directed solely against himself. "When our boys come back in from the mission, I want to be damned sure they come in on top of all the fuel, bullets, beans, and Band-aids they need. The standard drill."

  "Standard drill," Martinez agreed, anxious to please this man, to serve him well, yet, at the same time, ashamed that he would have to ask for further help. "I'm afraid you're going to have to take it up with Ivanov himself, Jefe. He's driving the train, and my counterpart's afraid to throw any switches on his own. He thinks I'm nuts for wanting to scatter our log sites all over creation and even crazier for questioning what a general wants."

  Taylor nodded. "All right, Manny. Let's grab Dave and Merry and have another powwow with our little Russian brothers."

  Martinez smiled. "I guess that means we have to let that sorry bugger Kozlov breathe on us again." He looked down at a smeared cracker he had lifted off his plate. The sight of it was so dismal, laden with a rough gray paste, that he held it in midair, unable to bring it the rest of the way to his mouth.

  He felt Taylor staring at him. The intensity of the colonel's gaze seemed to freeze the supply officer's hand in midair, the trick of a sorcerer. Instantly, Martinez's eyes were drawn to Taylor's, and he saw absolute seriousness in the depths of the other man's stare.

  "Eat it," Taylor said quietly, the tone of his Spanish as dry and ungiving as a high mountain desert. "And then smile."

  Major Howard "Merry" Meredith had almost forgotten what it was like to be judged by the color of his skin. Although the Russians were not blatantly impolite, they barely masked their distaste in dealing with him. He was the sole member of Taylor's primary staff who spoke Russian, yet his opposite number obviously preferred dealing with Meredith's white subordinate through a translator.

  Merry Meredith could take it. He had been through far, far worse experiences in his life. Yet he could not help being saddened. He had long been warned about Russian racism ... but he had believed that he would be the exception. In deference to Pushkin. Only he of all these Americans had read the Russian classics. He knew the titles and even the dates of Repin's paintings, just as he believed he alone of the Americans grasped the iron inevitabilities that had brought this people to such tragedy. He even knew the names and ingredients of the array of zakuski, the bounty of snacks, which the hosts obviously had gone to great lengths to produce. Yet the Russians offered him only uneasy glances as he approached the buffet table, as though the color of his skin might dirty the food.

  Racial discrimination was something that had found no entry into his sheltered college-town youth, and West Point had constructed its own barriers against such prejudice. The Army itself had been so starved for talent that a man's racial, ethnic, or social background truly made no difference. It was only a bit later that he had finally been forced to look in the mirror.

  And now, years after that terrible day in Los Angeles, he found himself trying to work beside a Soviet colonel who regarded him as only a marginally higher form of animal. His counterpart lectured him on the intricacies of the enemy forces and the battlefield situation in so elementary a fashion that Meredith had to continually call up the example and image of Colonel Taylor to refrain from verbally launching into the paunchy polkovnik, if not physically assaulting him. The worst of it was that the Soviet clearly knew far less about the enemy and even the Soviets' own condition than did Meredith, and what little the colonel knew was out of date. Thanks to the constant intelligence updates he received in his earpiece and on the screen of his portable computer, Meredith knew that the battlefield situation was growing more desperate by the hour. Yet Colonel Baranov seemed interested only in demonstrating his personal—his racial—superiority.

  Meredith was grateful to see Manny Martinez break away from his one-on-one with Taylor and head toward the worktable that had been set up as an intelligence planning cell.

  Manny wore an inexplicably grand smile on his face, which hardly seemed to track with the prevailing atmosphere of physical and mental exhaustion.

  "Excuse me, sir," Manny said to the potbellied Soviet colonel, who looked for all the world like the leader of an oompah band, his pointer waving like a baton. Then he turned to Meredith. "Merry, the old man wants you to listen in on a little powwow. Can you break away for a minute?"

  Meredith felt like a schoolboy suddenly authorized to play hooky. He quickly made his excuses in Russian to the colonel, leaving his subordinate to suffer on in the name of the United States Army.

  Squeezing between the tables, Meredith found that Manny's grin was contagious.

  "What the hell are you smiling about, you silly bastard?" Meredith asked his friend.

  Manny's smile opened even wider. "It's the food. You've got to try it."

  "I have," Meredith said, puzzled. Although he intellectually understood the effort that had gone into the preparation of the buffet and the relative quality of the provisions, he could not believe that Manny really enjoyed the zakuski. His efforts to persuade other officers to eat had failed embarrassingly. "Come on, you're shitting me."

  "Not me, brother. It's great food. Just ask the old man."

  Meredith decided that it was all just a joke he'd missed, after all, and he let it go. Brushing past the last workstation, he caught the edge of an overlay on the rough wool of his trousers and tipped a number of markers onto the floor.

  "Some quarterback you must've been," Manny said. Meredith and his friend hastily retrieved the fallen tools from amid the wasteland of computer printouts on the floor, apologizing to the bleary-looking captain whose work they had upset. When they arose, Colonel Taylor was standing before them, along with General Ivanov, Kozlov, and another Soviet whom Meredith recognized as Manny's counterpart. In a moment, Lucky Dave Heifetz marched up, along with the Soviet chief of operations.

  Careful not to call attention to his maneuvering, Meredith shifted along the backfield so that he was not in the direct line of Kozlov's breath. The Soviet was a reasonably handsome man—until he opened his mouth, revealing broken, rotted teeth, the sight of which made a man wince.

  The Russian's breath was easily the most powerful offensive weapon in the Soviet arsenal. Meredith felt sorry for Kozlov, since it was evident that he really was a first-rate officer, determined to do his damndest to make things work. But Meredith did not feel sufficiently
sorry for him to stand too close.

  As it was, the room stank and the air felt dead, heavily motionless. The fabric of the stiff old-fashioned Soviet uniforms worn by all had grown rougher still with dried sweat. Meredith was not certain his stomach could take Kozlov's halitosis at this time of the morning, without sleep, and with the Russians' rich, bad food clumped in his belly.

  Taylor drew them all toward the map that lined the wall of the chamber, glancing toward Meredith to ensure that the intelligence officer was prepared to translate.

  "It seems," Taylor began, "that our haste has accidentally created some minor confusion for our Soviet allies."

  The translation was not difficult. Meredith knew precisely the tone Taylor wanted to strike, and it was exactly the right one. Whether dealing with street punks or Mexican bandits, with senators or Soviet generals, Taylor's ability to find not only the correct voice, but even the specific tone that best exploited his opposite number's preconceptions, never failed to impress Meredith.

  What did the Soviets think of Taylor himself? Meredith wondered. Meredith had noted that few of the Soviet officers bore noticeable RD scarring. He knew that the Soviet Union had suffered a far higher percentage of plague casualties than had his own nation, but it appeared as though there were some code that prevented badly scarred survivors from attaining high rank. Meredith wondered if it was merely the old Russian military obsession with appearances at work in yet another form.

  He tried to view Taylor afresh, as these strangers might see him. It was difficult to be objective, having worked with the man for so many years and feeling such a deep, if inarticulate affection for him. Even in the United States of 2020, Taylor was far more apt to be the object of prejudice, even of primitive fear, than a well-dressed, unscarred, full-fledged member of the establishment who just happened to wear skin the color of milk chocolate. Meredith wondered if the Russians would judge this man, too, solely by his appearance.