possible.
Besides, he wanted to watch the unfolding battle from here, where he
could see it, feel it with his own senses, instead of as some kind of
fantastic light display on a computer screen.
“There … could be some danger, Admiral.”
“This is war, Dmitri. There is always danger.” Something occurred to
him, a sudden thought. “How are you settling in as air wing commander?”
“Well enough, sir. I wish Captain Terekhov were still here.”
“He will be. His signal this morning stated that he ejected safely and
had been recovered by one of our frigates. But you believe you can handle his
duties in CIC?”
Again, the man’s tongue flicked across his lips. “Yes, Admiral.”
“Good.” Khenkin turned, staring toward the south once again. “Very
good. Captain Lazerov is an excellent Combat Direction Officer. Listen to
him. You will do well.”
Khenkin felt strangely at peace. He’d not expected that, not at all, for
he could feel the weight of Russia’s imperial destiny riding above his small
task force like the ponderous mass of thunderheads above the steppes just
before a sudden storm. But the knowledge that the Americans were now at last
rushing headlong toward a final confrontation with the Red Banner Northern
Fleet was almost reassuring.
All his life, Khenkin had been a Communist. During the coup of 1991,
when the dedicated Communist cadre of the KGB and Politburo had briefly–and
ineptly–seized power in Moscow, he, along with most of the other military
officers of his generation, had watched from the sidelines. The coup plotters
had meant well, but their timing, their poor planning, had betrayed both their
haste and lack of understanding of the forces that were shaping the Soviet
Union at the time. Instead he, and many others, had waited, knowing that the
restructured, so-called democratic government would do nothing to put bread in
people’s bellies, or provide work, or stabilize spiraling prices. The
ordinary workers of Russia and the other republics couldn’t care less who
their rulers were. All they wanted was stability … and food on the grocery
shelves.
And that, of course, had been why the marshals and generals had so easily
taken power in the months and years that followed, how the Communists once
again found themselves leading the greatest power on Earth.
But it had occurred to Khenkin that he was about to be a very small part
of a kind of scientific demonstration. If, as the Marxists claimed, Communism
evolved naturally from capitalism, it was because there was a kind of law of
survival of the fittest that governed the way nations and governments changed,
adapted, and grew. Many of his countrymen felt still that Communism had been
exposed as a bankrupt philosophy by the events of 199 1, that the return of
the generals to power was a kind of death rattle, a spasm soon extinguished.
Which was right? Khenkin himself did not know. The devotion he’d once
felt for the Communist Party had been tarnished by the aftermath of the Coup
of ’91; by now it had very nearly rusted away, corroded by the continuing lies
and hypocrisy that were a part of day-to-day life in the Soviet Union under
the CPSU.
Soyuz. Union. Was it the wave of the future or a dying cult? If the
Americans and their Jefferson triumphed this day, there would be no resurgence
of the old Soviet Union. If Soyuz won, there would be nothing to stop the
complete subjugation of Scandinavia and, very soon after that, of all of
Europe. The technology, the food, the industries engulfed by the victorious
Soviet armies would fuel a renaissance of the Soviet economy and make the
Rodina truly mistress … no, Mother of the world.
It was like a return to older, crueler days, to the ordeal of trial by
combat. Two ships, their escorts, their men, their machines, pitted against
each other in a battle to decide the fate of Europe and the world for the next
one thousand years. The thought was at once thrilling and terrifying.
For Khenkin, the best thing, the only thing to do was to leave the battle
where it belonged, in the hands and minds of the people who would fight it.