“You know, Andrey, I can remember when the world shook with fear of our country’s army. Now, they shake with laughter, those who bother to take note of us.” Bondarenko took a sip of vodka from a flask. It had been a long time since he’d drunk alcohol on duty, but it was cold—the heater in the car was broken—and he needed the solace.
“Gennady Iosifovich, it is not as bad as it appears—”
“I agree! It is worse!” CINC-FAR EAST growled. “If the Chinks come north, I shall learn to eat with chopsticks. I’ve always wondered how they do that,” he added with a wry smile. Bondarenko was always one to see the humor in a situation.
“But to others we appear strong. We have thousands of tanks, Comrade General.”
Which was true. They’d spent the morning inspecting monstrous sheds containing of all things T-34/85 tanks manufactured at Chelyabinsk in 1946. Some had virgin guns, never fired. The Germans had shaken in their jackboots to see these tanks storm over the horizon, but that’s what they were, World War II tanks, over nine hundred of them, three complete division sets. And there were even troops to maintain them! The engines still turned over, serviced as they were by the grandchildren of the men who’d used them in combat operations against the fascisti. And in the same sheds were shells, some made as recently as 1986, for the 85-mm guns. The world was mad, and surely the Soviet Union had been mad, first to store such antiques, then to spend money and effort maintaining them. And even now, more than ten years after the demise of that nation-state, the sheer force of bureaucratic inertia still sent conscripts into the sheds to maintain the antique collection. For what purpose? No one knew. It would take an archivist to find the documents, and while that might be of interest to some historian of a humorous bent, Bondarenko had better things to do.
“Andrey, I appreciate your willingness to see the lighter side of every situation, but we do face a practical reality here.”
“Comrade General, it will take months to get permission to terminate this operation.”
“That is probably true, Andruska, but I remember a story about Napoleon. He wished to plant trees by the side of the French roads to shade his marching troops. A staff officer said, but, Marshal, it will take twenty years for the trees to grow enough to accomplish that. And Napoleon said, yes, indeed, so we must start at once! And so, Colonel, we will start with that at once.”
“As you say, Comrade General.” Colonel Aliyev knew that it was a worthwhile idea. He only wondered if he would have enough time to pursue all of the ideas that needed accomplishing. Besides, the troops at the tank sheds seemed happy enough. Some even took the tanks out into the open to play with them, drive them about the nearby test range, and even shoot the guns occasionally. One young sergeant had commented to him that it was good to use them, because it made the war movies he’d seen as a child seem even more real. Now that, Colonel Aliyev thought, was something to hear from a soldier. It made the movies better. Damn.
Who does that slant-eyed motherfucker think he is?” Gant demanded out in the garden.
“Mark, we laid a rather firm note on them this morning, and they’re just reacting to it.”
“Cliff, explain to me why it’s okay for other people to talk like that to us, but it’s not okay for us to talk that way to them, will you?”
“It’s called diplomacy,” Rutledge explained.
“It’s called horseshit, Cliff,” Gant hissed back. “Where I come from, if somebody disses you like that, you punch him right in the face.”
“But we don’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re above it, Mark,” Rutledge tried to explain. “It’s the little dogs that yap at you. The big powerful dogs don’t bother. They know they can rip your head off. And we know we can handle these people if we have to.”
“Somebody needs to tell them that, Cliffy,” Gant observed. “Because I don’t think they got the word yet. They’re talking like they own the world, and they think they can play tough-guy with us, Cliff, and until they find out they can’t, we’re going to have a lot more of their shit to deal with.”
“Mark, this is how it’s done, that’s all. It’s just how the game is played at this level.”
“Oh, yeah?” Gant countered. “Cliff, it’s not a game to them. I see that, but you don’t. After this break, we’re going back in there, and they’re going to threaten us. What do we do then?”
“We brush it off. How can they threaten us?”
“The Boeing order.”
“Well, Boeing will have to sell its airplanes to somebody else this year,” Rutledge said.
“Really? What about the interests of all those workers we’re supposed to represent?”
“Mark, at this level, we deal with the big picture, not the little one, okay?” Rutledge was actually getting angry with this stock TRADER.
“Cliffy, the big picture is made up of a lot of little ones. You ought to go back in there and ask if they like selling things to us. Because if they do, then they have to play ball. Because they need us a fucking lots more than we need them.”
“You don’t talk that way to a great power.”
“Are we a great power?”
“The biggest,” Rutledge confirmed.
“Then how come they talk that way to us?”
“Mark, this is my job. You’re here to advise me, but this is your first time to this sort of ball game, okay? I know how to play the game. It’s my job.”
“Fine.” Gant let out a long breath. “But when we play by the rules and they don’t, the game gets a little tedious.” Gant wandered off on his own for a moment. The garden was pretty enough. He hadn’t done this sort of thing enough to know that there was usually a garden of some sort for diplomats to wander in after two or three hours of talking at each other in a conference room, but he had learned that the garden was where a lot of the real work got done.
“Mr. Gant?” He turned to see Xue Ma, the diplomat/spook he’d chatted with before.
“Mr. Xue,” telescope said in his own greeting.
“What do you think of the progress of the talks?” the Chinese diplomat asked.
Mark was still trying to understand this guy’s use of language. “If this is progress, I’d hate to see what you call an adverse development.”
Xue smiled. “A lively exchange is often more interesting than a dull one.”
“Really? I’m surprised by all this. I always thought that diplomatic exchange was more polite.”
“You think this impolite?”
Gant again wondered if he was being baited or not, but decided the hell with it. He didn’t really need his government job anyway, did he? And taking it had involved a considerable personal sacrifice, hadn’t it? Like a few million bucks. Didn’t that entitle him to say what the hell he thought?
“Xue, you accuse us of threatening your national identity because we object to the murders your government—or its agents, I suppose— committed in front of cameras. Americans don’t like it when people commit murder.”
“Those people were breaking our laws,” Xue reminded him.
“Maybe so,” Gant conceded. “But in America when people break the law, we arrest them and give them a trial in front of a judge and jury, with a defense lawyer to make sure the trial is fair, and we damned sure don’t shoot people in the head when they’re holding a goddamned newborn infant!”
“That was unfortunate,” Xue almost admitted, “but as I said, those men were breaking the law.”
“And so your cops did the judge/jury/executioner number on them. Xue, to Americans that was the act of a barbarian.”
The “B” word finally got through. “America cannot talk to China in that way, Mr. Gant.”
“Look, Mr. Xue, it’s your country, and you can run your country as you wish. We’re not going to declare war on you for what you do inside your own borders. But there’s no law that says we have to do business with you either, and so we can stop buying your goods—and I have news for you: The American people will stop buying your stuff if you continue to do stuff like that.”
“Your people? Or your government?” Xue asked, with a knowing smile.
“Are you really that stupid, Mr. Xue?” Gant fired back.
“What do you mean?” The last insult had actually cracked through the shell, Gant saw.
“I mean America is a democracy. Americans make a lot of decisions entirely on their own, and one of them is what they spend their money on, and the average American will not buy something from a fucking barbarian.” Gant paused. “Look, I’m a Jew, okay? Sixty-some years ago, America fucked up. We saw what Hitler and the Nazis were doing in Germany, and we didn’t act in time to stop it. We really blew the call and a lot of people got killed unnecessarily, and we’ve been seeing things on TV about that since I was in short pants, and it ain’t never going to happen again on our watch, and when people like you do stuff like what we just saw, it just sets off the Holocaust light in American heads. Do you get it now?”