Ralph Peters

by The war in 2020

  ". . . and we want to resolve all problems in an atmosphere of openness and good faith," Meredith translated.

  Army General Ivanov listened to the easy flow of the black American's Russian, wondering where he had learned to speak the language so well. The Americans were full of surprises. And some of them were pleasant surprises—they were so willing, so confident, so quick. But other surprises were more difficult to digest. Such as this business about the dispersion of the support sites. The Americans' speech was very polite. But behind the courtesy they were adamant. Ivanov had already noticed the pattern. The Americans would give in on inconsequential points, but insist on having their own way in the more significant matters.

  Ivanov was physically tired, and he was weary of arguing. All right, let them do what they wanted. And the Soviet Army would do what it wanted with its own forces. Let the Americans have their try. Ivanov would have liked to believe, to have faith, but he had experienced too much failure over too long a time. He doubted that a single regiment of these mystery-shrouded American wonder weapons would be enough to make a decisive difference. But he would be grateful for whatever they achieved. The situation was desperate, and he was haunted by the vision of going down in history as one of those Russian military commanders whose names were synonymous with disaster.

  But who could say how much longer there would even be a Russian history? Look at the depth to which they had already sunk. Begging for help from the Americans....

  Well, they, too, were living on borrowed time. Ivanov believed that the age of the white race was past, that the future belonged to the masses of Asia, and that the best one could hope for would be to hold back the tide a little longer.

  Ivanov looked from American face to American face. How awkward they looked in their Soviet uniforms. This brutal-looking colonel—the man had to be some kind of monster inside as well as outside, or he would have availed himself of the fine American cosmetic surgery. And the one who looked like a Georgian playboy. Then there was the Israeli—Ivanov knew his type, the constipated sort who never smiled, never took a drink. You always had to watch the Jews. The Germans had not been able to manage them, nor had the Arabs, with their nuclear weapons and nerve gas. But the Jews had not been so smart after all—they had backed the American horse, when they should have bet on the Japanese. Then there was this black major who spoke such fine Russian. Ivanov believed that this American staff had been consciously selected, man by man, to convince the Russians of the internal solidarity of the American people, much as the staged photos of his youth had attempted to do with Soviet society, posing smiling Estonians and Ukrainians with Azerbaijanis and Tadzhiks. But the Americans were not fooling anyone, and Ivanov wondered how such a staff would fare in combat.

  It had all been so different once, when he had been a young officer. Even a junior lieutenant had commanded respect. Then that man Gorbachev had come, with his reforms, his promises. And he had begun chipping away at the military. And ambitious men within the military had helped him. Ivanov himself had been convinced of the need for perestroika, caught up in the delusions of the times. So few of the promises had come true. People simply lost their respect, their fear. They wanted to live like West Europeans, like Americans. They did not understand the role of the Soviet Union, of Russia, in the world. They thought only of themselves. Then, as the country began to come apart, more sensible men had finally taken over. But it was too late. Ivanov was familiar with the theories— the inevitability of the decline of an economic model that had outlived its utility, the price of decades of overspending on defense, the oppressiveness of the system that stifled possibilities of growth . . .

  Lies, lies, lies. Gorbachev and his cronies had betrayed the trust, they had given victory away. In the end, gutting the military had saved no one. The economy did not magically spring to life. Instead, conditions had become worse and worse. Shooting would have been too good for the men who had ruined the greatest country on earth.

  Once the system had been spoiled, nothing else had worked, either. It was like trying to squeeze toothpaste back into the tube. Democracy. The word was barely worth laughing at. The Soviet Union had needed strength. In its place, the people had received promises, inequity, betrayal.

  The decades during which Ivanov had gained his rank had been little more than a chronicle of decline, of insurgencies, of riots, of half-measures. His life had been squandered in a long twilight.

  And now it had come to this. Civil war, invasion, collapse. And these Americans, who had come out of spite, for revenge.

  As he settled the last details with these arrogant, overly confident men masquerading in the uniform that had clothed his life and dreams, Ivanov felt a tragic sense of loss toward his country's past, like a man in the worst of marriages remembering the girl he should have wed.

  The staff meeting was breaking up. The Americans would go and finish their final preparations. Then they would enter the war. With their miraculous new weapons whose details they would not discuss even now.

  Well, good luck to them. Ivanov hoped they would kill many of his country's enemies. Certainly, if confidence alone could kill, the Americans would do very well, indeed.

  Perhaps they had very great secrets, even greater than Soviet intelligence suspected. But, alone among the Soviets and Americans in the room, General Ivanov also knew a secret. It was a terrible secret, one which the Soviet hierarchy had kept from everyone below Ivanov's rank, so as not to further demoralize the war effort. Not even poor Kozlov knew. But, Ivanov suspected, the Americans were soon going to find out.

  8

  Washington, D.C.

  "PERHAPS ..." BOUQUETTE SAID, "WE SHOULD SLIP OFF somewhere for a drink after all this. I do think we owe ourselves a break."

  Daisy looked up from her notes. Clifton Bouquette stood above her, a bit too close. Her eyes scanned up the weave of his slacks, then along the silken breeding certificate of his tie. In these frantic days, when everyone else's shirt looked as though it had been worn hours too long, Bouquette's starched collar glowed with perfect whiteness. He was the sort of man who was born with a perfect knot in his tie, and now, at an age when other men had begun to soften toward incapability, when faces grew ashen with care, Bouquette stood easily, with a sportsman's elasticity, and his skin showed only the handsome damage of countless weekends spent sailing. When she first arrived in Washington, Daisy had been anxious to look up to, to believe in, men such as Clifton Reynard Bouquette, and the readiness of such a man to overlook his wife in order to spend even a few of his sought-after hours with a plain, if bright, young analyst had made her feel as though dreams—serious, grown-up dreams—really did come true in this city. She had felt that way for the first half-dozen affairs. Then it had all become routine, and the men with so many names had not needed to offer quite so many excuses for their absences, their inabilities, their growing inattention. She told herself that she was their equal, using them as sharply as they elected to use her, and she could not understand the feeling of desolation that had grown up around her professional success. Daisy Fitzgerald was a woman who could understand the course of nations, who could brilliantly intuit the march of events. But, she realized, she had never managed to understand men. Why, indeed, did a man such as Clifton Reynard Bouquette, deputy director of the Unified Intelligence Agency, wealthy in so many ways, married to a forbiddingly attractive woman not much older than Daisy, want to risk even the slightest embarrassment to sleep with a woman whose hair was never quite right and whose skin still broke out under stress or when she ate any of half of the good edible things in the world, a woman whose plain features had driven her to achievement? She remembered a workmate's laughing comment to the effect that Cliff Bouquette would crawl between the hind legs of anything female and breathing.

  "I can't, Cliff," she said. "I've got too much work."

  Bouquette inched closer, the nap of his trousers almost brushing her. She could smell him. It was a smell she remembered.

  "Oh,
come on, Daze. Can't keep going without a little break."

  "Really . . ."

  "Things will sort themselves out." Bouquette smiled beautifully. "After all, we don't want to get stale. Need to keep our perspective."

  "I've got to get back to the office after this. The sort wool of his trousers. And the remembered feel of him. The taste. The things he liked to do. And the urgency he had always felt to leave when he was done.

  She could feel a slight change in him. As though he had already invested too much time and effort in her tonight, as though, by her refusal, she were treating him with an inconceivable lack of gratitude.

  "Well," he said, in a subtly changed voice, still carefully low, so that the secret service men would not overhear, "just a quick drink on the way back then. For old time's sake. All right?"

  "Cliff, please," Daisy said, "I've got to look over my notes—"

  "You know that stuff inside out."

  "—and I'm seeing someone."

  Bouquette backed away slightly. He smiled and shook his head. "Oh, Daze . . . Daze . . . we're two of a kind, you and I. And you know it. We'll have our little flings with others, but we'll always—"

  "You have no right—" she said angrily. It was the first time she had ever raised her voice to him when they were both fully clothed, and it shocked him even more deeply than she had surprised herself. He backed up still farther, then instantly came very close to her, bending down as if to discuss something in her notes.

  "For God's sake," he whispered, "keep your voice down. Do you know where we are?"

  Nerves, she told herself, it's all nerves. I need sleep. Control yourself, control yourself.

  "I know exactly where we are," she said. "Now stop it" For a moment that she promised herself she would treasure, Daisy saw a shadow of fear, of self-doubt, of age pass over Bouquette's face. Then he recomposed his features into the sculpted mask the world knew so well.

  "We'll see," he said, smiling indulgently now, as though he pitied her foolishness. And he abruptly turned away. A few seconds later he was across the room, discussing the President's schedule with the secretary.

  She stared briefly at his back, aching to see an imperfection in the lines of his body, any sign of the tyranny of the calendar. She already had her first gray hairs. Just a few of them, but, it seemed to her, at far too young an age. Bouquette would never gray—his hair was of a blondness that would simply mellow. He was a man who knew the names of wines and waiters, who affected to like nothing so much as a beer drunk from a bottle. He preened over his sports injuries and worked very hard to impress when he made love, seeking to convince his partner that he was still coursing with boyish energy. He had boyish names, too, for the things he wanted her to do for him, and she had done each thing even when it hurt her, unable to explain to herself why she could not say no to actions that would leave her uncomfortable for days. And the more a thing hurt her, it seemed, the more controlled he would be in it, drawing it out. Where her pain excited another man to lose control, to stream wildly inside of her, it only seemed to strengthen Bouquette. He savored the sexual borderland between misery and the passionate cry. Then, suddenly, he would begin to curse, to growl obscenely, and with a powerful thrust into her vagina or anus, he would finish. Anxious to leave, ready with an excuse as to why, after hours of mingled limbs and sweat and whispers full of praise, he had to disappear into the night or afternoon. Yet, she had valued him as a lover. Because he had known so many things about her desires. As a matter of course. In the physical sense, he had been a far better lover than the man for whom she told herself she was waiting.

  There were, she suspected, few things that made a woman such as her more uncomfortable than being loved by an honest man.

  And what kind of a woman was she? She tried to concentrate on the scribbled notes that updated her computer printout. But she could not help thinking of the unexpected man, the unreasonable, embarrassing man who had suddenly turned up in her life like a blemish found on the skin upon waking. What kind of a woman was she? The kind who lashed a sincere—hopelessly sincere—lover with her past, telling him needlessly much about what she had done with others, speaking in the name of honesty, making him suffer for the unforgivable crime of loving her when all of those other better, smarter, richer, far handsomer men had simply used her body as a place to empty themselves. The only time she had not been able to hurt him consciously had been in her bed. Over a dinner table, over a drink, she had been able to savage him with her confessions, instinctively aware that he could take all of this hurt and survive. But as his clumsy hands searched over her body, as he pushed himself into her with a laughable attempt to resurrect some long-forgotten finesse, as he held her with a ferocity that made her gasp, holding her as though she might slip away from him forever even as he stabbed himself urgently inside her, she sensed a weakness that could not tolerate the slightest mocking, the least teasing word. She was the kind of woman who shut her eyes tightly in the struggle not to weep as he continued to hold her—desperately—after he had drained into her, reluctant even to let her rise to go to the bathroom.

  A plain girl with bad skin and bad judgment, who could foretell history, but not her own heart. Falling in something that might almost be love with a man whose face was something out of the shadows of an old horror film, a man too naive to lie, even to a woman such as she. She remembered him standing in her kitchen that last morning. She had known more about the situation into which he was being sent than he had, important things that he was forbidden to know, but which a lover of quality, of decent heart, could not have helped telling him. To warn him. But she had been unable to speak, and he had stood clumsily in the gray light, the wreck of his face curiously boyish, almost weak above the tie into which he had never learned to work a confident knot, "I love you . . .'' he had said. Not in the splendid darkness, which teased out so many lies, which excused the most ill-considered choice of words, but in the flat gray sober light, with rain tapping at the windows above the sink. In an unkempt kitchen in suburban Virginia, he had waited for a response. And, when she did not reply, he repeated himself: "I love you." As if testing his voice to see if it had really said such a thing. Eyes pretending to drowse, she kept her silence, legs cold where the bathrobe would not grip. Feeling slovenly, sluttish in a way that had little to do with her sex, a matter of hangovers worn on the skin and untidy hair. He stared at her in hopeless fear, and she recognized that nothing in his life, no matter how terrible or physically punishing, had cost quite the same sort of effort as those tentative words. "I . . . don't ..." she said finally, in a voice too drab for his moment, "George, I just don't know . . . what I feel right now." Her heart pounded, and she felt with painful intensity that, yes, at least for that instant, she did love this man, that she loved him with the same ferocity with which he had clutched her to him in the darkness. But she could not say the words. She felt as though her speech would damn her beyond all hope of redemption. No god was sufficiently forgiving to tolerate those words from her mouth. And the moment collapsed into the inconsequence of a teaspoon chiming the porcelain sides of a cup, the stuck lid of a jam jar, and terrycloth slipping from a bruised thigh. At most, she managed to convey to him that she would make an effort to keep her knees together until she saw him again. And she watched him go, a plain girl who had done so much more to hold a life's history of uncaring men, saying goodbye to the one good man who had happened to her.

  The door to the briefing room opened. John Miller, a staff aide, stepped halfway into the waiting room.

  "Mr. Bouquette, the President's ready for you." Bouquette marched across the room to retrieve his briefcase from its place beside Daisy's thicker, heavier attaché case. Grasping it confidently, he turned:

  "Is the President ready for Daisy, Miller? Or does he want to see me alone first?"

  The aide considered it for a fraction of a second, while all the politics and intricacies of his job raced through his mental computer.

  "She can co
me in too. Just remember, the President s tired. It's been a long day."

  Bouquette nodded. "For all of us."

  Daisy hastened to fit her notes back into her attaché case, feeling clumsy against Bouquette's polished manner. She had only recently reached the level where she personally briefed the President and the National Security Council, and she remained in awe of this holiest of realms, despite the years she had spent learning how very, very mortal and fallible the men were who governed the nation.

  At first, the familiar faces were a blur. The room was slightly overheated, the air surprisingly stale. She hastily put down her attaché case, then stood awkwardly, trying to look both alert and at ease. Inevitably, her eyes were drawn to the black man in the navy pin-striped suit.

  President Waters had loosened his tie. Normally, he was every bit as fastidious as Bouquette, and Daisy read the opened collar as a sign that the man had truly grown weary. President Waters had been elected in 2016, on a platform that focused on domestic renewal and on bridging the gap between the increasingly polarized elements in American society. Even after the disastrous trade war with the Japanese, as well as the long sequence of military humiliations and hard-won successes, even after Runciman's disease had cut a broad path across the continent, the United States remained a relatively wealthy country in an impoverished world. Yet the decades had more and more turned its society into a solvent majority and a number of marginalized subsectors whose members had fallen ever farther behind contemporary demands for an educated, highly skilled work force and the need for cultural integration to facilitate competitiveness. Then the United States had given sanctuary to the Israelis who had survived the final Mideast war, and although the Israelis settled largely in "homelands" located in the least promising areas of the Far West, they soon constituted a powerful force in post-epidemic America, where the shortage of skilled, dedicated workers had grown critical. The resulting explosion of anti-Israeli sentiment from minority groups that had isolated themselves ever more drastically from the mainstream manifested itself in demonstrations, confrontation, and, ultimately, in bloodshed. The candidacy of Jonathan Waters in 2016 succeeded on the premise that all Americans could live together—and succeed together. He promised education, urban renewal, and opportunity, and he was a handsome, magnetic man, who spoke in the rhetoric of Yale rather than the Baptist Church. A campaign-season joke called him the white-man's black and the black-man's white . . . and he felt like the right man for the times to a bare majority of the citizens of his country. He defeated an opponent who was a foreign policy expert, but who had few domestic solutions with which to inspire a troubled nation. Yet, the first term of President Waters had been shadowed by a wide range of international issues, while his domestic solutions remained promising—but the stuff of generational rather than overnight change. As Cliff Bouquette was fond of putting it, "The poor bugger's totally lost in all this, and he's about to be equally the loser at the polls." Everyone believed that Jonathan Waters was a genuinely good man. But a series of nationwide surveys indicated that he had lost his image as a leader.