Ralph Peters

by The war in 2020

  Williams's face looked smooth and unscarred now. He no longer appeared angry, and Ryder felt partially relieved.

  All of the warrant officers stood up in the colonel's presence, although Dicker Sienkiewicz rose slowly, asserting his bone-deep warrant-officership.

  "Chief Ryder?" Williams asked, briefly scanning their faces before his eyes settled on the right man. The colonel had not yet had sufficient time in command to thoroughly learn all of their faces, and there were no name tags on the warrants' ill-fitting civilian suits and sport jackets. "I need to talk to you." He glanced at the other warrants. "The rest of you guys just get on with your breakfast. Chief," he told Ryder, "you come with me."

  There was no secure area within the hotel, and the colonel simply headed for a barren table a bit removed from the breakfast crowd, waving away concerned waiters as though they were of less consequence than flies. Ryder followed the big man across the room like a guilty convict awaiting his sentence. He could hardly believe the change in himself. Normally, he was as dutiful as an officer could be. He lived for his work. Since the divorce. And here he was, in the midst of the real thing at last, perhaps even a key player, and he could not help thinking fearfully of a woman he had met only the evening before. A foreign, unexplained, officially disapproved woman.

  "Take a seat, Chief," the colonel said. He sat down heavily across from Ryder, slapping his field cap down on the tabletop. He did not bother to remove his carrying harness or the stained field jacket.

  Williams looked at Ryder with the penetrating, don't-dare-try-to-bullshit-me eyes the Army had taught the young warrant to associate with leaders who got things done.

  "Sounds like you broke the bank, Chief," Williams said. "Congratulations."

  Ryder nodded his thanks, unsure of himself.

  The colonel glanced around the big room one more time, making sure that no waiters would descend on them.

  "What a clusterfuck," the colonel said in disgust. "I can see I'm going to have to clean up this sideshow. Christ, I never saw such a bunch of hungover pussy-hounds. It's amazing you've gotten anything accomplished at all."

  Ryder looked down at the tablecloth.

  "Chief," the colonel said, "I'm going to get you out of this and give you a chance to do some real work. Not that what you've already done isn't top-notch. But it's just the beginning. You've opened up a world of new possibilities for us. Goddamnit, are you listening to me?"

  Ryder stiffened, shocked by the colonel's apparent ability to see inside him.

  "Yes, sir. I'm listening."

  "Well, we've got a hell of a show going on downcountry. And it's far from over, if an old soldier's instincts are worth a damn. I've been up all night, working on a very special contingency plan with my field staff. Thanks to you. Son, do you realize that the President of the United States has

  already been briefed on your... achievement yesterday?" Ryder had not known.

  "That's right," Williams continued. "The goddamned President himself. And we've been busting our asses to come up with a con-plan to exploit what you've given us. Now we're just lacking one piece." The colonel looked at Ryder.

  "What's that, sir?"

  "You. We need you downcountry. And I'll tell you honestly—if we implement this plan, it might be dangerous as hell." The colonel laughed happily. "But you'll be in good hands. You'll be working under an old friend of mine. He and I go back to a tent in the Azores. Now, he doesn't know shit about all this yet. He's a little busy at the moment. But I know old George Taylor well enough to know what I can sell him and what I can't. And he'll buy this one, all right. He'll see the beauty of the thing." The colonel smiled, recollecting. "Anyway, we're going to put you to work. Lot of details to iron out. With any luck, we may never have to execute this plan. But, by God, we're going to be ready."

  "Sir ... if you're talking about actually entering the Japanese control system, we're going to need some support from the Russians. They've got the—"

  "Taken care of." The colonel waved his hand. "I wasn't born yesterday, Chief. You'll have everything you need before you link up with old Georgie Taylor." Williams looked around in resurgent annoyance. "Chief, you just go on up and pack your things. Meet me in the lobby in half an hour. I'm going to have a cup of coffee and take a good shit. Then we'll get on the road and I'll fill you in on what's really happening. There's a bird waiting to take us both downrange."

  "Half an hour?" Ryder asked meekly.

  "Clock's ticking, Chief."

  "We . . . won't be coming back here, sir?"

  The colonel surveyed the room in disgust. "Not if I can help it. So don't leave anything behind, Mr. Ryder."

  Shut into the arthritic elevator, Ryder closed his eyes and dropped his head and shoulders back against the wall, tapping his skull against the cheap paneling. The device rattled and rose, its motion stirring up a smell of ammonia and stale cigarettes. He was ashamed. He could think only of the woman, and thinking of her made him feel sick.

  Ryder made a last stop at Dicker Sienkiewicz's room. The old man was gathering papers and paraphernalia into his briefcase, arming himself for another day's routine.

  "So what did the old man want?" he asked Ryder.

  "I got to go. Downcountry."

  The older man stopped packing his briefcase and looked at his younger comrade.

  "What the hell's the matter, kid?"

  "I just got to go. Special project. Downcountry. Listen, I need your help. Please, Dicker." Ryder pulled out a sealed white envelope. "There's this girl—this woman— I've met . . ."

  "The blondie? From last night? In the bar?"

  "Yeah. That's the one. Listen, she's okay. She's really okay."

  The older man smiled. "So I'm convinced. And not a bad looker."

  "She's not just another . . . she's really all right. I promised I'd meet her tonight. At eight. For dinner. Christ, I don't want her to think I just ..."

  "So you want me to give her that?" Dicker said pointing to the letter in Ryder's hand.

  "Please. It's important. It's just a note. I tried to explain."

  "I'll see that she gets it."

  "You'll recognize her okay?"

  Dicker smiled. "Do bears crap in the woods? I still remember women I seen on the subway thirty years ago."

  "Listen, I got to go. The old man's waiting."

  "All right. Don't worry about a thing, kid. You just take care of yourself. And good luck with whatever the hell you're up to."

  "Same to you. See you, Dicker."

  "See you."

  Chief Warrant Officer Five Stanley "Dicker" Sienkiewicz watched the boy go down the hall, then shut the door. The kid was clearly rattled. Big things in the wind. The old warrant felt a little left out, neglected. Once, he would have been considered indispensable when things got serious. But there was a new generation coming up. Educated. And so fast off the mark.

  You don't know when you got it good, Dicker told himself. At your age you just ought to be grateful for a warm bunk at night. Let those young studs go out and freeze their asses off.

  He sat down on the side of the bed, staring at the burn-spotted carpet. He tapped Ryder's letter against his free wrist, thinking of other things. Then he roused himself slightly and considered the envelope. He turned it over. Ryder had scrawled a name on it: Vallia.

  Dicker shook his head. He remembered her, all right. A good-looker. But trouble, if he ever saw trouble walk in on two legs. He was no puritan. But he knew that the women who bobbed up in Moscow hotel bars were not notable for their trustworthiness or general moral merit.

  The kid was too young to have his head screwed on straight. And Dicker knew that the boy had had a bad time with his divorce. Odd how that went. Some men went hog wild. Others turned inside. Or made bad decisions.

  Dicker genuinely liked Ryder. He did not want to betray his trust. But there was plenty more pussy where that one had come from, and Dicker had no wish to see the boy get himself in a fix over some little Russia
n tramp.

  With a sigh, the old warrant tore the envelope in half, then into quarters, dropping the shreds in the nearest wastepaper basket.

  The snowflakes fell like countless paper shreds. At first it had seemed as though the squadron had flown beyond the reach of the snowstorm, but as they skimmed above the wastelands, following the long arc of their assigned route, they gradually turned to the northwest and met the snow again. Heifetz had come forward from his ops cell, which mirrored the setup in Taylor's command M-100. He had just had an exasperating exchange with Reno up in the Third Squadron, and coming atop the cascade of events and emotions of the past hours, it had temporarily drained him. He took a break and squeezed up behind the pilots' positions. He did not sit down. Back in the ops cell, his world was of reality at a remove, registered through monitors and digital displays. Up here, where the copilot had cleared the windscreens of technical displays, he could remind himself of the world as the eye was meant to see it: cold, white, rushing toward him.

  Immediately after Heifetz's exchange with Reno, Taylor had resumed command of the regiment. One of Taylor's two escort birds was having problems—evidently the result of the stress the system had undergone when engaging the enemy's jets—and Taylor was attempting to nurse the failing system along. But that particular difficulty had not stopped Taylor from flexing his authority over the regiment through the magical command and control mechanisms that the new century had deposited in the hands of its soldiers. All of the greater matters appeared to be in order now, with the three squadrons cruising toward their follow-on assembly areas, bristling with electronic armament as they burrowed into the sky.

  Taylor had made short work of the enemy aircraft that had hit the old support site at Omsk, and Heifetz hoped that the action had offered Taylor a bit of the primeval absolution men felt upon killing in turn the enemy who had killed their kind. That old indestructible joy in blood that you would never scrub out of the human character.

  Heifetz knew that Taylor would take Martinez's death hard. Taylor would feel responsible for every soldier he lost, and he would be furious when he caught up with the reports of Reno's unnecessary casualties during the squadron commander's unauthorized glory raid. But there was an inevitable difference in the intensity of feelings in the wake of the death of a half-familiar face or rostered name and the loss of a man with whom you had lived, struggled, and shared raw strips of your life.

  Martinez had been a decent boy. Outwardly a bit of a joker, unable to settle his heart on any individual girl at an age when most officers were married with children. To Heifetz, a connoisseur in the matter, Martinez had seemed a bit haunted by his background. Capable, always surprisingly capable. And dutiful. With his sports car waiting for him late at night outside the headquarters building, the treasured machine facing the light-gilt office windows like an ignored sweetheart. Heifetz was sorry now for the exchanges that had been too peremptory, for the times he had passed by the younger officer's table in the mess hall. For his own ceaseless self-absorption.

  But Reno, in his rude selfishness, had been more than a little right. "For Christ's sake," Reno had complained across the empty sky, "we've just hit the jackpot, and you're worrying about pennies."

  For once, Heifetz did not think the turn of phrase had been a conscious ethnic slur on Reno's part. Which made it doubly painful to accept the accuracy of the observation. He was, Heifetz recognized, indeed the kind of man who allowed himself to become obsessed with life's small change: the perfect staff officer.

  Yes, they had hit the jackpot. As painful as the combat losses had been, they had been brilliantly minor in relation to the devastation the regiment had spread across the vast front. Quite literally, all of the equations of the battlefield would have to be calculated anew. It was a triumph of the sort that sent the amateur historian reaching back for fabled names.

  And yet, Heifetz thought wistfully, it was a death knell too. For the older generation of soldiers. For men such as David Heifetz. When he was a young man, he had gone to war mounted in his steel chariot. He and his gunner had selected the target, found the range, fired . . . and now the new rules reduced his kind to pushers of buttons, throwers of switches. He had always maintained that man would forever remain the central focus of combat. Now he was no longer so self-righteously certain.

  He was certain of so little, really.

  "Everything okay, sir?" the copilot asked back over his shoulder, unaccustomed to finding Heifetz astray.

  "Yes," Heifetz said. "I am only looking at the snow."

  "Going to make it a hell of a lot harder to hide these babies in the assembly area," the copilot said. "Pisser, ain't it? When they designed the automatic camouflage systems, they never did think about snow, did they?"

  "We'll manage," Heifetz said. He really did not want to talk.

  "Yes, sir," the copilot said quickly, afraid he had gone a step too far with the coldhearted warrior at his shoulder. "We'll work it out."

  Heifetz looked at the streaming snow. There was so little of which he could be certain now. He had entered the battle with an almost religious zeal, with a peculiar kind of joy burning in him. As the enemy's casualties mounted he had felt avenged. He knew that the Iranian or rebel tank crews concussed or sliced or burned to death were not the same men he had faced years before on the road to Damascus. The Iranians, of course, were not even Arabs. But they shared the same primitive guilt. The religion, the view of the world, the moral and spiritual proximity. Yes, he was a prejudiced man. And where was the man without prejudice? Where was the fabled good man? In this world, where having a different word for God meant a death sentence, where a different shading in the skin reduced you to the status of an animal? Where was the justice, Lord?

  He knew. He knew exactly where the source of goodness flowed. And it shamed him with an inexpressible thoroughness. All these years, he had lived the life of the zealot in his chosen desert, insisting that he was denying himself everything for Mira, for his son. To avenge them.

  Today, as the kill counters boosted the American score with dizzying speed, he had had his revenge. And that was the problem. It had been, unmistakably, his revenge. It had nothing to do with Mira or the boy, really.

  Mira had lived on the side of forgiveness, of atonement, even for the sins of strangers. He knew that had she been able to speak to him after her death by force and fire and the man-made light of God she would have spoken softly. She had never asked him to turn his back on the world. He had done it of his own volition, because it satisfied a need in him. He remembered her in light the color of lemons, her temples dark with sweat, as she labored over bundled reports in her office. Mira, the lawyer who worked for a laborer's wage, to atone for her country's sins. The rights of Palestinians. And if the brethren of those whom she struggled to shield had brought about her death, she would have forgiven them too. She was a being of unlimited forgiveness. She had never ceased forgiving him.

  All of the self-righteous rituals, the self-denials, had been sins against her. He knew what she wanted. She wanted him to live. To go on. But he had defied her, nourishing his delicious guilt, forever ripping the scabs off the sores in his spirit. It had been for himself, all of it. The fortress of sacrifice in which he hid from life. And the killings, the killings, the killings.

  Mira had never asked for that. Not for any of it. Mira had never asked for anything but love. And he had conditioned the boy to ask for even less.

  Impulsively, he pulled his wallet from a hind pocket of his uniform. His fingers probed behind an identification card and a driver's license, reaching into the darkness where the photograph had lain hidden for so long. The ancient wallet began to tear at the unaccustomed stress on its seams.

  The wrinkling and discoloration of the photograph disappeared in a moment's recognition. Mira. The boy. The sort of smile a good heart musters at the end of a long, hot afternoon. He had thought he remembered each detail of the photo, each nuance of light. But he had been wrong. He had forgotte
n how beautiful Mira had been. He had forgotten the boy's smallness, the mild unwillingness to look at the camera or the man behind it. He had forgotten so much.

  Forgive me, he said. And he began to tear the photograph into tiny flakes, starting with an upper corner and going methodically about the business, ensuring that no man would get an inkling of the nature of the waste as the aircraft was groomed in the wake of battle.

  The copilot looked back over his shoulder at Heifetz. For a moment it seemed as though he were about to speak. Then he thought better of it and turned his attention back to the controls.

  Colonel Noguchi sat behind the controls of his aircraft. He felt ready, fierce, vindicated. They had needed him after all. Old Noburu, with his womanly niceties, had been swept aside by the course of events. It was time for new men to enter the field. It was time for the new machines.

  The Americans had blundered. He, too, had been surprised to learn who his new enemies were. But it did not natter. In fact, it was better. The Americans had not earned their lesson. Now he would teach it to them with unforgettable clarity.

  Some young American officer had given the game away. Slabbering naively on the airwaves. Telling everything. The city: Orsk. The name of the assembly area: Silver. Even revealing his personal feelings. It was unthinkable to Noguchi that an officer would betray his emotions to his subordinates.

  Direction-finding based upon intercepts was, of course, far more difficult than it had been in decades past, thanks to ultra-agile communications means and spoofer technology. But, for every technological development in the science of warfare, there was ultimately a counterdevelopment. The Japanese arsenal had been just adequate to crack down the Americans.