“My government wishes to ask if an invitation to Moscow could be entertained.”
“I have no objection to it, Mr. Ambassador, but we were just over a few months ago and my time has many demands on it right now.”
“I have no doubt of that, but my government wishes to discuss several questions of mutual interest.” That code phrase made Ryan turn his body fully to face the Russian.
“Oh?”
“I feared that your schedule would be a problem, Mr. President. Might you then receive a personal representative for a quiet discussion of issues?”
That could only be one person, Jack knew. “Sergey Nikolay’ch?”
“Would you receive him?” the Ambassador persisted.
Ryan had a brief moment of, if not panic, then disquiet. Sergey Golovko was the chairman of the RVS–the reborn, downsized, but still formidable KGB. He also was one of the few people in the Russian government who had both brains and the trust of the current Russian president, Eduard Petravich Grushavoy, himself one of the few men in the world with more problems than Ryan had. Moreover, Grushavoy was keeping Golovko as close as Stalin had kept Beriya, needing a counselor with brains, experience, and muscle. The comparison wasn’t strictly fair, but Golovko would not be coming over to deliver a recipe for borscht. “Items of mutual interest” usually meant serious business; coming directly to the President and not working through the State Department was another such indicator, and Lermonsov’s persistence made things seem more serious still.
“Sergey’s an old friend,” Jack said with a friendly smile. All the way back to when he had a pistol in my face. “He’s always welcome in my house. Let Arnie know about the scheduling?”
“I will do that, Mr. President.”
Ryan nodded and moved off. The Prince of Wales had
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the Indian Prime Minister in a holding pattern, awaiting Ryan’s appearance.
“Prime Minister, Your Highness,” Ryan said with a nod.
“We thought it important that some matters be clarified.”
“What might those be?” the President asked. He had an electrical twitch under his skin, from knowing what had to be coming now.
“The unfortunate incident in the Indian Ocean,” the Prime Minister said. “Such misunderstandings.”
“I’m–glad to hear that…”
EVEN THE ARMY takes days off, and the funeral of a President was one such day. Both Blue Force and OpFor had taken a day to stand down. That included the commanders. General Diggs’s house was on a hilltop overlooking a singularly bleak valley, but for all that it was a magnificent sight, and the desert was warm that day from Mexican winds, which allowed a barbecue on his walled and hedged back yard.
“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 dis-
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tant 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
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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 llth 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
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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 pathol-ogists.
“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.”