Ralph Peters

by The war in 2020

  Meredith would have liked the hospital to be cleaner. He would have liked the treatment of his comrades, and especially of Heifetz, to be a bit handsomer, and he would have liked the hungover clerk at the information desk to show a little more respect when giving directions. But, most of all, he would have liked an excuse not to come. He already knew he would avoid coming back for as long as his conscience would let him.

  The odd thing was that Heifetz looked younger, less troubled. When they had served together, the operations officer's features had been permanently clenched, the eyes lined with tension and the chin set hard. Now Lucky Dave appeared beatifically calm. The tufts of flesh were smooth around the wandering eyes, and the mouth lay partway open in a mock smile.

  Meredith reached for words. It had been hard enough with the succession of passingly familiar faces on the other pillows in the ward. But what could you say to Lucky Dave?

  "I'm a lieutenant colonel now," Meredith began. "Just like you, goddamnit. Presidential promotion too." He tried to call up a manly smile. "Hell, just about everybody got one. The chief of personnel went through the roof. He said there hadn't been so many presidential promotions since the Civil War. So I'm a lieutenant colonel now. And I'll be damned if I'm going to call you 'sir.' Unless you want to get up out of that bed and whip my ass."

  Meredith stared at the uninterested planes of his comrade's face. Wondering how much Heifetz could really hear and understand. The doctors said it might be a hundred percent. But the face remained that of an infant who grasped nothing.

  "You know," Meredith went on, "the old man's in for a posthumous Medal of Honor. He's going to get it too. Just takes Congress a while to go through the formalities. They're already getting together a display about him out at the Cavalry Museum at Riley. You're going to be in it, and Manny. All of us. But mostly the old man."

  Meredith looked at the living death of Heifetz's eyes, then looked away. "You remember that old rag of a guidon he used to carry? The one he brought out of Africa? I passed it on to them for the museum. They're going to put it with his Medal of Honor, when that goes through." Meredith let his eyes wander over the blanket, the bed-frame, the floor. "The old man didn't have any family. No wife or anything. So I'm making sure that all his effects go to the museum, where they belong. Where he'll be remembered properly." He suddenly looked up, hoping Heifetz would offer some sign of agreement. "With nothing that could have embarrassed him."

  Meredith realigned himself in the chair and smiled. "Those sonsofbitches," he said. "You know how they get all hepped up on appearances. They're going to use a picture of the old man from back when he was a captain. Before his face got screwed up. But . . . what can you do?"

  To his surprise, Meredith took Heifetz's hand. It was soft and warm, yet utterly without human character. The fingers gave way as Meredith pressured them.

  Meredith's smile widened into a terrible grin. "And that sonofabitch Reno. He's got the regiment now. Got his colonelcy out of the operation. Under the hand of the President, and all that. Of course, he's all sweetness and light for the press. He and the old man were best buddies, to hear him tell it. But the first duty day we had back at Riley, he assembles everybody in the post theater. And he comes out on the stage like a little Patton. And you know what the first words are out of his mouth, Dave? He puffs himself all up and says, 'We're going to make some big changes around here, men.' He told me to my face he intends to reshape the regiment in his own image." Meredith laughed. "The chairman of the Joint Chiefs loves him.

  "Then the goddamned Russians. They sold us out, Dave. Plain as day. But nobody wants to hear that now. The war's over. And the Russians are our best buddies."

  Meredith tightened his grip on his comrade's hand. He wanted a response. Anything.

  "I'm bailing out," he said. "You know how the old man was. He would have told me to stay in the regiment and tough it out, to do what I could to control the damage Reno does. But I just can't, Dave. I know you understand. The old man just expected too much sometimes." The hand seemed to cower under Meredith's grip. He suddenly relaxed the pressure, afraid he was hurting Heifetz. But there was no response. It was all in his own head. "Anyway, I'm leaving the Seventh. Tucker Williams is going down to Huachuca with a mandate to try to clean up the intel school, and I'm going to be his XO. Who knows?

  Maybe we'll get it right this time. If they don't close the place down again. Christ, the peace treaty hasn't even been signed, and Congress is already looking for big cuts in the defense budget."

  Meredith released the other man's hand altogether. Down the ward one of the patients made a violent gargling noise, then his body began to contort like a fish tossed onto a boat deck. The duty nurse darted from behind her medicine trolley and manhandled the patient over onto his belly, burping him as if he were a baby.

  "Dave? I've got to go. I've got a hell of a drive ahead of me, and I'm on a tight schedule. Tucker Williams wanted me out there yesterday. You know how it is. I want to make Knoxville tonight."

  Meredith stood up. He had imagined that something dramatic might happen, that Heifetz might begin to weep or to otherwise acknowledge his presence. But the eyes just continued to flick haphazardly from right to left, up and down, and the mouth hung slackly, poised forever on the verge of speech. It was hard to believe that Heifetz understood a word.

  The tinny loudspeaker broadcast a pop song about the joy of being in love.

  "I've left Maureen, you know," Meredith said suddenly. "I can't explain it. I just couldn't go back." He smiled down at Heifetz. "You know, the old man was plain fucking crazy sometimes. I remember, oh, it was years ago now, the old bastard gave me a copy of Huckleberry Finn and told me to read it. He said it was his favorite book. I never could quite see myself in the Nigger Jim role. But I don't think that's what the old man had in mind. Anyhow, I feel a little like Huck at the end of the book. Only in a really shitty grown-up sort of way." He sat back down and hung his head. He began to cry.

  "I don't know what to do, Dave," he said. "I just don't know what to do."

  Snow was falling in Moscow, and Valya told herself she really had to get dressed and go to the park. It would be beautiful for a little while. But she made no move to rise from the couch. On the television, a silver-haired man read an economic report.

  The Americans were gone. She had been reinstated in her teaching post, and the other members of the faculty simply pretended nothing had happened. She heard nothing further from the state security officers since the departure of the Americans. But she still imagined that they were out there, watching her.

  She had gone out a few times with Tanya, and once with Naritsky. But it had not been satisfactory. For the past week, she had taken to declining all invitations, and when she was not teaching or standing in line for foodstuffs, she stayed in her apartment. She considered getting a cat, but she did not much like the idea of trying to housebreak it.

  She looked into the future and saw nothing. She looked into the mirror and felt cold breath on the back of her neck. And she had not had her period since November. Soon she would have to go back to the clinic. She had flirted briefly with the idea of having this baby, but the notion lost its appeal the moment she began to consider the practicalities involved. Really, she would be far better off with a cat. And she did not want to lose her figure. While there was still any hope at all.

  They did not need to put her in prison. She was already a prisoner in her life, her city, her country. She glanced from the television screen to the window again. The snow continued to fall as the day waned. For a while it would be beautiful in the park. Then the crowd would make it dirty again.

  The doorbell rang. Valya surveyed the wreckage of her room in distress. She decided that she really needed to develop more regular cleaning habits. Then she shrugged and rose from her nest on the sofa. It was probably only Tanya, after all.

  Running a comb of fingers through her hair, she opened the door. It took her a moment to recognize the man. There
were so many men in the world. After a few awkward seconds, the quality of his clothing spurred her memory. It was the American who had bought her dinner, the pleasant-enough boy with whom she had shared a single night. He stood before her now with flowers and a brightly

  wrapped package in his hands, and he looked nervously happy. He held out the flowers and began his stammering speech.

  "Valya," Ryder said, "will you marry me?"

  Garmisch, West Germany 4 April 1990

  Author's Note

  This is a book about nightmares. Its central theme plays on an enduring Russian nightmare. Although the Soviet Union's short-term problems will arise primarily west of the Ural Mountains, the enduring vision of racial and religious apocalypse scorching inward from the south and east haunts the Russian mind. The plot embraces extremes, as fiction demands. A likelier scenario would describe decades of intermittent unrest, often grim enough in local consequence, but with the anger of the common man never sufficiently well organized to weld very different ethnic groups into a militant union. As a Soviet analyst, were I forced to predict the future of Soviet Central Asia, I would describe it as locally unstable, sporadically fanatical and spotted with blood, blighted by disease and economic malaise—and generally far too dull to attract more than a passing glance from the Western news media. We shall hear of occasional massacres, but far less of the hot, dreary, and limited life of the average man or woman. In short, I expect central Asia to be pretty much the same as it has been for countless centuries.

  The Russians, like the Mongols, Persians, and the shadowy conquerors who preceded them, will eventually fade into the heat and dust. They will leave their traces, but they will leave. Will it be a matter of years, of decades, of a century? The clocks in Samarkand betray less anxiety than do the digital marvels of Washington—or the timepieces of Moscow, which forever seem to be rushing toward midnight.

  Driven by Aristotle and an unquenchable thirst for blood, Alexander the Great crossed the Oxus—today's

  Amu Darya. And what did he leave behind? Legends and sand. These poisoned deserts swallow history.

  But what about the issue of Islamic fundamentalism?

  I admire the perfect accuracy of Levi-Strauss's description of Islam as a "barracks religion," and I take a far less complacent view of Islamic fundamentalism than do colleagues for whom the only story of our time is the twilight of the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, I see the future of these varied peoples united by a common name for God as condemned to eternal mediocrity. Islamic fundamentalism is an exclusively negative phenomenon. Even more so than its Christian counterpart, it is a struggle against history, a nasty rearguard action against time and the hard material logic that will always dominate mankind and our crippled world. The ferocious Iranian attacks upon the Great Satan America, for instance, are merely manifestations of the collective Persian inability to cope with modernity. God becomes an excuse for personal and national failure.

  Only outside enemies, real or imagined, allow the Islamic world to display the odd, fleeting semblance of unity. The destruction of Israel in a nuclear exchange, for example, would be less likely to trigger Islamic unity than to utterly dissolve it. Unable to direct their frustrations at the Zionist devil, the Islamic nations of the Eurasian land-mass would quickly rediscover the holy and delectable mission of slaughtering each other over trivia. Islamic fundamentalism does not offer hope for the future—it simply serves up excuses for regional impotence.

  And what of the Russians themselves in this book? Several of the subplots are obviously metaphors for the Soviet Union today. Valya need not wait thirty years for her dose of misery. Her life describes the Soviet Union now. To me the Soviet Union is a land without hope. The only question of relevance to us is this: Will the USSR continue to muddle through, losing a restive republic here and there yet somehow groaning onward, or will the processes of decline and violent confrontation continue to accelerate, ultimately threatening healthier nations beyond the Soviet borders? I see no prospect whatsoever of a Soviet renaissance. Even if all the citizens of the USSR could miraculously begin to pull together and work very, very hard in a spirit of sacrifice, they would, at best, take one halting step forward—while the state's relative decline would continue to accelerate as the United States and New Europe took three or four steps forward and Japan took five in the same time frame.

  There is no hope. There will be no vast, prosperous market for Western goods in Greater Muscovy in my lifetime. For the short term, there may be no shortage of good-hearted believers and inept bankers in the West (the same people who brought us the cancer of Third World debt), but, in the longer term, I envision only a landscape of failure, indigence, and misery. The Russians are a doomed people. We must be careful not to let them know.

  The Soviet Union needs a new revolution, but it is unlikely to come. The people are too weary. They are good only for short, brutal outbursts. Should some constellation of events trigger a revolution after all, it will be neither kind nor gentle. And, despite the exaggerated Soviet promises on disarmament, they still have many, many nuclear weapons littered throughout a land that is proving impossible to control, if only because of its sheer size.

  The vastness that saved "Russia" time and again haunts her now. To become healthy and competitive, the USSR would need, among other things, a network of new roads, rail lines, and telecommunications on a scale so enormous that the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, pooling all of their assets, could not afford to construct it. Stir in a host of ecological problems that are already poisoning the last good earth and destroying the population's health, and the prospects are grim, indeed.

  And yet, the Soviet Union continues to attract me like a magnet. Perhaps that has more to do with my nightmares.

  Regarding the Japanese themes in the book, they are, obviously, take-offs on a current American nightmare. Again, I chose to exploit extremes for the purpose of metaphor. I do not envision Japan as ever again mounting a direct military challenge to the United States. It isn't necessary. The modalities of warfare have expanded, bringing economic combat increasingly to the fore: We are presently at war with Japan, and we have been for decades. But the formalities of warfare are also changing. Such wars not only do not require a conscious national decision and declaration, they do not even require general awareness on the part of the citizenry. I would never suggest that every Japanese businessman is party to a secret compact drawn up twenty or thirty years ago to economically defeat the United States. But I would suggest that the average Japanese executive is, however inarticulately, more deeply aware of the seriousness of the struggle.

  Just another case of trendy Japan-bashing? I hope not. In any case, I find General Noburu Kabata to be far and away the most sympathetic character in the book.

  The all-American theme in this book is military unpreparedness. Clearly, as an Army officer and true believer in the historical role of the United States, I am unabashedly biased. As a student of history, I cannot help feeling deep concern over the popular and legislative conviction that, with the Soviet Union in crisis, the Armed Forces of the United States can be reduced to a size that is barely ceremonial. Significant cuts can be made in our arsenal, but we must struggle against the American tendency to overdo everything, to view the world as black or white, either/or. Yes, the Soviet conventional threat has been reduced. But the world remains a brutal, hostile, and jealous place. We must maintain our standing military forces at a level that will allow us to avoid the sort of tragic sacrifices we were forced to make at the beginning of our wars, from 1812 on down to the great wars of this century, when our starved military establishments struggled desperately to buy time and green citizen-soldiers were thrown into battle unprepared. If we cannot afford the military the generals demand, we should nonetheless demand the best military we can afford. To make judicious cuts in our military at the present time makes economic, social, and political sense. Wanton cuts are just plain dumb.

  Finally, a note on the subt
heme of "Runciman's disease." I have long been fascinated by epidemiology. Had I been a man of profound courage, I might have become a doctor. Possessed of lesser bravery, I became a soldier. I am interested in the influence of disease on history, whether it be the effect of the Black Death on economic systems, or of stomach cancer, hepatitis, and parasites on the political consciousness of the residents of the Soviet territories surrounding the Aral Sea. Spurred by the phenomenon of AIDS—a disease which has had a far greater impact on social consciousness than on mortality figures in the United States—I tried to imagine what effect a really virulent and contagious disease might have today. On one hand, our level of medical care in the First World is stunningly good; on the other, the world has acquired a new porousness, thanks to technology. A disease that once took a decade to two to creep from China to the English Channel can now make the trip in a day. We have a host of new vectors. After all, it was not really homosexuality or fouled syringes that delivered AIDS to the wealthy West— it was the airplane.

  This is a shamelessly American book. We are the good guys on its pages as surely as I believe we are the good guys in "real life." When this novel reaches publication,

  I will have lived and served abroad for almost a decade in total. Instead of becoming more worldly, I find that I only become more convinced that the United States of America is mankind's most perfect creation to date. Certainly, we Americans are not without our flaws. We have, at times, been mortally foolish. But it is only thanks to us that even a small part of the world may live peacefully and decently today. There has never been a victor more benevolent, nor an ally so generous. Our errors were committed with the best of intentions, and our sacrifices redeemed the grimmest century in the history of mankind. I can only hope that my writing, for all of its many, many failings, serves my country well.