by Tom Clancy
“Have you met President Ryan?” Bondarenko asked, sipping an early-afternoon beer.
Diggs shook his head as he flipped the burgers and reached for his special sauce. “Never. Evidently he had a piece of getting the 10th ACR deployed to Israel, but, no. I know Robby Jackson, though. He’s J-3 now. Robby speaks very well of him.”
“This is American custom, what you do?” The Russian gestured to the charcoal burner.
Diggs looked up. “Learned it from my daddy. Could you pass my beer over, Gennady?” The Russian handed the glass to his host. “I do hate missing training days, but ...” But he liked a day off as much as the next guy.
“This place you have here is amazing, Marion.” Bondarenko turned to survey the valley. The immediate base area looked typically American, with its grid of roads and structures, but beyond that was something else. Scarcely anything grew, just what the Americans called creosote bushes, and they were like some sort of flora from a distant planet. The land here was brown, even the mountains looked lifeless. Yet there was something magnificent about the desert—and it reminded him of a mountaintop in Tajikistan. Maybe that was it.
“So, exactly how did you get those ribbons, General?” Diggs didn’t know all the story. His guest shrugged.
“The Mudjeheddin decided to visit my country. It was a secret research facility, since closed down—it’s a separate country now, as you know.”
Diggs nodded. “I’m a cavalryman, not a high-energy physicist. You can save the secret stuff.”
“I defended an apartment building—the home for the scientists and their families. I had a platoon of KGB border guards. The Mudje attacked us in company strength under cover of night and a snowstorm. It was rather exciting for an hour or so,” Gennady admitted.
Diggs had seen some of the scars—he’d caught his visitor in the shower the previous day. “How good were they?”
“The Afghans?” Bondarenko grunted. “You did not wish to be captured by them. They were absolutely fearless, but sometimes that worked against them. You could tell which bands had competent leadership and which did not. That one did. They wiped out the other half of the facility, and on my side”—a shrug—“we were bloody lucky. At the end we were fighting on the ground floor of the building. The enemy commander led his people bravely—but I proved to be a better shot.”
“Hero of the Soviet Union,” Diggs remarked, checking his burgers again. Colonel Hamm was listening, quietly. This was how members of that community measured one another, not so much by what they had done as by how they told the story.
The Russian smiled. “Marion, I had no choice. There was no place to run away, and I knew what they did to captured Russian officers. So, they give me medal and promotion, and then my country—how you say? Evaporate?” There was more to it, of course. Bondarenko had been in Moscow during the coup, and for the first time in his life faced with making a moral decision, he’d made the right one, attracting the notice of several people who were now highly placed in the government of a new and smaller country.
“How about a country reborn?” Colonel Hamm suggested. “How about, we can be friends now?”
“Da. You speak well, Colonel. And you command well.”
“Thank you, sir. Mainly I just sit back and let the regiment run itself.” That was a lie that any really good officer understood as a special sort of truth.
“Using Sov—Russian tactical doctrine!” It just seemed so outrageous to the Russian general.
“It works, doesn’t it?” Hamm finished his beer.
It would work, Bondarenko promised himself. It would work for his army as it had worked for the American, once he got back and got the political support he needed to rebuild the Russian Army into something it had never been. Even at its fighting peak, driving the Germans back to Berlin, the Red Army had been a heavy, blunt instrument, depending on the shock value of mass more than anything else. He also knew what a role luck had played. His former country had fielded the world’s finest tank, the T-34, blessed with a diesel engine designed in France to power dirigibles, a suspension system designed by an American named J. Walter Christie, and a handful of brilliant design innovations from young Russian engineers. That was one of the few instances in the history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in which his countrymen had managed to turn out a world-class product and in this case it had been the right one at the right time—without which his country would surely have died. But the time was past for his country to depend on luck and mass. In the early 1980s the Americans had come up with the right formula: a small, professional army, carefully selected, exquisitely trained, and lavishly equipped. Colonel Hamm’s OpFor, this 11th Cavalry Regiment, was like nothing he’d ever seen. His pre-travel brief had told him what to expect, but that was different from believing it. You had to see it to believe. In the right terrain, that one regiment could take on a division and destroy it in hours. The Blue Force was hardly incompetent, though its commander had declined the chance to come and eat here in order to work with his sub-unit leaders this day, so badly had they been mauled.
So much to learn here, but the most important lesson of all was how the Americans faced their lessons. Senior officers were humiliated regularly, both in the mock battles and afterward in what they called the AAR, “after-action review,” during which the observer-controller officers analyzed everything that had taken place, reading their notes off multicolored file cards like hospital pathologists.
“I tell you,” Bondarenko said after a few seconds of reflection, “in my army, people would start fistfights during—”
“Oh, we came close to that in the beginning,” Diggs assured him. “When they started this place up, commanders got relieved for losing battles, until everybody took a deep breath and realized that it was supposed to be tough here. Pete Taylor is the guy who really got the NTC running right. The OCs had to learn diplomacy, and the Blue Force people had to learn that they were here to learn, but I’ll tell you, Gennady, there isn’t another army in the world that inflicts humiliation on its commanders the way we do.”
“That’s a fact, sir. I was talking with Sean Connolly the other day—he’s CO of the 10th ACR in the Negev Desert,” Hamm explained to the Russian. “The Israelis still haven’t got it all the way figured out. They still bitch about what the OCs tell ’em.”
“We keep installing more cameras over there.” Diggs laughed as he started shoveling burgers onto the plate. “And sometimes the Israelis don’t believe what happened even after we show them the videotapes.”
“Still too much hoo-uh over there,” Hamm agreed. “Hey, I came here as a squadron commander, and I got my ass handed to me more’n once.”
“Gennady, after the Persian Gulf War, 3rd ACR came here for their regular rotation. Now, you remember, they led Barry McCaffrey’s 24th Mech—”
“Kicked ass and took names for two hundred twenty miles in four days,” Hamm confirmed. Bondarenko nodded. He’d studied that campaign in detail.
“Couple months later, they came here and got the shit kicked outa them. That’s the point, General. The training here is tougher than combat. There’s no unit in the world as smart and fast and tough as Al’s Blackhorse Cav—”
“Except your old Buffalo Soldiers, General,” Hamm interjected.
Diggs smiled at the reference to the 10th. He was used to Hamm’s interruptions anyway. “That’s a fact, Al. Anyway, if you can just break even against the OpFor, you’re ready to take on anybody in the world, on the wrong side of three-to-one odds, and kick their ass into the next time zone.”
Bondarenko nodded, smiling. He was learning fast. The small staff that had come with him was still prowling the base, talking with counterpart officers, and learning, learning, learning. Being on the wrong side of three-to-one odds wasn’t the tradition of Russian armies, but that might soon change. The threat to his country was China, and if that battle were ever fought, it would be at the far end of a lengthy supply line, against a huge conscript
army. The only answer to that threat was to duplicate what the Americans had done. Bondarenko’s mission was to change the entire military policy of his country. Well, he told himself, he’d come to the right place to learn how.
BULLSHIT, THE PRESIDENT thought behind an understanding smile. It was hard to like India. They called themselves the world’s largest democracy, but that wasn’t especially true. They talked about the most high-minded principles, but had, when convenient, muscled neighbors, developed nuclear weapons, and in asking America to depart the Indian Ocean—“It is, after all, called the Indian Ocean,” a former P.M. had told a former American Ambassador—decided that the doctrine of Freedom of the Seas was variably applicable. And for damned sure, they’d been ready to make a move on Sri Lanka. It was just that now, the move having been foiled, they were saying that no such move had ever been planned. But you couldn’t look in the eyes of a chief of state and smile, and say, “Bullshit.”
It just wasn’t done.
Jack listened patiently, sipping at another glass of Perrier fetched for him by a nameless aide. The situation in Sri Lanka was complex, and did, unfortunately, lend itself to misunderstanding, and India regretted that, and there were no hard feelings at all, but wouldn’t it be better if both sides stood down. The Indian fleet was withdrawing back to its bases, training complete, and a few ships damaged by the American demonstration, which, the Prime Minister said without so many words, wasn’t exactly cricket. Such bullies.
And what does Sri Lanka think of you? Ryan could have asked, but didn’t.
“If only you and Ambassador Williams had communicated more clearly on the issue,” Ryan observed sadly.
“Such things happen,” the Prime Minister replied. “David—frankly, pleasant man though he is, I fear the climate is too hot for one of his age.” Which was as close as she could come to telling Ryan to fire the man. Declaring Ambassador Williams persona non grata was far too drastic a step. Ryan tried not to change his expression, but failed. He needed Scott Adler over here, but the acting SecState was somewhere else at the moment.
“I hope you can appreciate the fact that I am really not in a position to make serious changes in the government at the moment.” Drop dead.
“Please, I wasn’t suggesting that. I fully appreciate your situation. My hope was to allay at least one supposed problem, to make your task easier.” Or I could make it harder.
“Thank you for that, Prime Minister. Perhaps your Ambassador here could discuss things with Scott?”
“I’ll be sure to speak to him on the matter.” She shook Ryan’s hand again and walked away. Jack waited for several seconds before looking at the Prince.
“Your Highness, what do you call it when a highranking person lies right in your face?” the President asked with a wry smile.
“Diplomacy.”
9
DISTANT HOWLS
GOLOVKO READ OVER Ambassador Lermonsov’s report without sympathy for its subject. Ryan looked “harried and uncomfortable,” “somewhat overwhelmed,” and “physically tired.” Well, that was to be expected. His speech at President Durling’s funeral, the diplomatic community agreed—along with the American media, which was straining its capacity for politeness—was not presidential. Well, anyone who knew Ryan knew him to be sentimental, especially when it came to the welfare of children. Golovko could easily forgive that. Russians were much the same. He ought to have done otherwise—Golovko had read over the official, undelivered oration; it was a good one, full of assurances for all listeners—but Ryan had always been what the Americans called a maverick (he’d had to look up the word, discovering that it denoted a wild, untamed horse, which was not far off the mark). That made Ryan both easy and impossible for the Russian to analyze. Ryan was an American, and Americans were and had always been devilishly unpredictable from Golovko’s perspective. He’d spent a professional lifetime, first as a field intelligence officer, then as a rapidly climbing staff officer in Moscow, trying to predict what America would do in all manner of situations, and only avoiding failure because he’d never failed to present three possible courses of action in his reports to his superiors.
But at least Ivan Emmetovich Ryan was predictably unpredictable, and Golovko flattered himself to think of Ryan as a friend—perhaps that was going a bit far, but the two men had played the game, most of the time from opposite sides of the field, and for the most part both had played it skillfully and well, Golovko the more experienced professional, Ryan the gifted amateur, blessed by a system more tolerant of mavericks. There was respect between them.
“What are you thinking now, Jack?” Sergey whispered to himself. Right now the new American President was sleeping, of course, fully eight hours behind Moscow, where the sun was only beginning to rise for a short winter day.
Ambassador Lermonsov had not been overly impressed, and Golovko would have to append his own notes to the report lest his government give that evaluation too much credence. Ryan had been far too skilled an enemy to the USSR to be taken lightly under any circumstances. The problem was that Lermonsov had expected Ryan to fit into one mold, and Ivan Emmetovich was not so easily classified. It wasn’t so much complexity as a different variety of complexity. Russia didn’t have a Ryan—it was not likely that he could have survived in the Soviet environment which still pervaded the Russian Republic, especially in its official bureaucracies. He was easily bored, and his temper, though kept under tight control at most times, was always there. Golovko had seen it bubbling more than once, but only heard of times when it had broken loose. Those stories had percolated out of CIA to ears which reported to Dzerzhinskiy Square. God help him as a head of government.
But that wasn’t Golovko’s problem.
He had enough of his own. He hadn’t entirely relinquished control of the Foreign Intelligence Service President Grushavoy had little reason to trust the agency which had once been the “Sword and Shield of the Party,” and wanted someone he could rely upon to keep an eye on that tethered predator; Golovko, of course—and at the same time, Sergey was the principal foreign-policy adviser to the beleaguered Russian President. Russia’s internal problems were so manifest as to deny the President the ability to evaluate foreign problems, and that meant that for all practical purposes the former spy gave advice that his President almost invariably followed. The chief minister—that’s what he was, with or without the title—took the burden seriously. Grushavoy had a domestic hydra to deal with—like the mythical beast of old, every head cut off just gave room for another to grow into its place. Golovko had fewer to deal with, but they made up for it in size. And part of him wished for a return to the old KGB. Only a few years before, it would have been child’s play. Lift a phone, speak a few words, and the criminals would have been picked up, and that would have been that not really, but it would have made things more... peaceful. More predictable. More orderly. And his country needed order. But the Second Chief Directorate, the “secret police” division of the agency, was gone, spun off into an independent bureau, its powers diminished, and its public respect—fear bordering on outright terror in the not-so-old days—had evaporated. His country had never been under the degree of control expected by the West, but now it was worse. The Russian Republic teetered on the edge of anarchy as her citizens groped for something called democracy. Anarchy was what had brought Lenin to power, for the Russians craved strong rule, scarcely having known anything else, and while Golovko didn’t want that—as a senior KGB officer he knew better than any what damage Marxism-Leninism had done to his nation—he desperately needed an organized country behind him, because the problems within attracted problems without. And so it was that his unofficial post as chief minister for national security was hostage to all manner of difficulties. His were the arms of an injured body, trying to fend off the wolves while it tried to heal.
And so he had little pity for Ryan, whose nation may have taken a severe blow to the head, but was otherwise healthy. However differently it might appear to others,
Golovko knew better, and because he did, he would be asking Ryan for help.
China. The Americans had defeated Japan, but the real enemy hadn’t been Japan. He had a desk covered with overhead photographs just brought down from a reconnaissance satellite. Too many divisions of the People’s Liberation Army were exercising in the field. Chinese nuclear-rocket regiments were still at a somewhat increased alert status. His own country had discarded its ballistic weapons—despite the threat from China, the huge resulting development loans from American and European banks had made the gamble look attractive only a few months before. Besides, his country, like America, still had bombers and cruise missiles which could be armed with atomic warheads, and so the disadvantage was far more theoretical than real. If one assumed that the Chinese subscribed to the same theories, that is. The Chinese were in any case maintaining their armed forces at a high state of readiness, and Russia’s Far Eastern group of forces was at a historic low. He consoled himself that with Japan taken out of play, the Chinese would not move. Probably not move, he corrected himself. If the Americans were hard to understand, the Chinese might as easily have been aliens from another planet. It was enough to remember that the Chinese had been as far as the Baltic once before. Like most Russians, Golovko had a deep respect for history. There he was, Sergey thought, lying on the snow, a stick in his hand to fight off the wolf while he tried to heal. His arm was still strong enough, and the stick still long enough to keep the fangs away. But what if there came another wolf? A document to the left of the satellite photographs was the first harbinger of that, like a distant howl on the horizon, the sort to make blood chill. Golovko didn’t reflect far enough. Lying down on the ground, the horizon could be surprisingly close.