“Unless somebody springs for the tickets to fly a brigade out to California.” Masterman nodded.
“That ain’t gonna happen, Duke,” Diggs told his operations officer. And more was the pity. First Tanks’ troops were almost ready to give the Blackhorse a run for their money. Close enough, Diggs thought, that he’d pay to watch. “How’s a beer grab you, Colonel?”
“If the General is buying, I will gladly assist him in spending his money,” Duke Masterman said graciously, as their sergeant driver pulled up to the kazerne’s O-Club.
“Good morning, Comrade General,” Gogol said, pulling himself to attention.
Bondarenko had felt guilt at coming to see this old soldier so early in the morning, but he’d heard the day before that the ancient warrior was not one to waste daylight. And so he wasn’t, the general saw.
“You kill wolves,” Gennady Iosifovich observed, seeing the gleaming pelts hanging on the wall of this rough cabin.
“And bear, but when you gild the pelts, they grow too heavy,” the old man agreed, fetching tea for his guests.
“These are amazing,” Colonel Aliyev said, touching one of the remaining wolf pelts. Most had been carried off.
“It’s an amusement for an old hunter,” Gogol said, lighting a cigarette.
General Bondarenko looked at his rifles, the new Austrian-made one, and the old Russian Ml891 Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle.
“How many with this one?” Bondarenko asked.
“Wolves, bears?”
“Germans,” the general clarified, with coldness in his voice.
“I stopped counting at thirty, Comrade General. That was before Kiev. There were many more after that. I see we share a decoration,” Gogol observed, pointing to his visitor’s gold star, for Hero of the Soviet Union, which he’d won in Afghanistan. Gogol had two, one from Ukraine and the other in Germany.
“You have the look of a soldier, Pavel Petrovich, and a good one.” Bondarenko sipped his tea, served properly, a clear glass in a metal—was it silver?—holder.
“I served in my time. First at Stalingrad, then on the long walk to Berlin.”
I bet you did walk all the way, too, the general thought. He’d met his share of Great Patriotic War veterans, now mostly dead. This wizened old bastard had stared death in the face and spat at it, trained to do so, probably, by his life in these woods. He’d grown up with bears and wolves as enemies—as nasty as the German fascists had been, at least they didn’t eat you—and so had been accustomed to wagering his life on his eye and his nerve. There was no real substitute for that, the kind of training you couldn’t institute for an army. A gifted few learned how the hard way, and of those the lucky ones survived the war. Pavel Petrovich hadn’t had an easy time. Soldiers might admire their own snipers, might value them for their skills, but you could never say “comrade” to a man who hunted men as though they were animals—because on the other side of the line might be another such man who wanted to hunt you. Of all the enemies, that was the one you loathed and feared the most, because it became personal to see another man through a telescopic sight, to see his face, and take his life as a deliberate act against one man, even gazing at his face when the bullet struck. Gogol had been one of those, Gennady thought, a hunter of individual men. And he’d probably never lost a minute’s sleep over it. Some men were just born to it, and Pavel Petrovich Gogol was one of them. With a few hundred thousand such men, a general could conquer the entire world, but they were too rare for that. . .
. . . and maybe that was a good thing, Bondarenko mused.
“Might you come to my headquarters some night? I would like to feed you dinner and listen to your stories.”
“How far is it?”
“I will send you my personal helicopter, Sergeant Gogol.”
“And I will bring you a gilded wolf,” the hunter promised his guest.
“We will find an honored place for it at my headquarters,” Bondarenko promised in turn. “Thank you for your tea. I must depart and see to my command, but I will have you to headquarters for dinner,
Sergeant Gogol.” Handshakes were exchanged, and the general took his leave.
“I would not want him on the other side of a battlefield,” Colonel Aliyev observed, as they got into their helicopter.
“Do we have a sniper school in the command?”
“Yes, General, but it’s mainly inactive.”
Gennady turned. “Start it up again, Andrushka! We’ll get Gogol to come and teach the children how it’s done. He’s a priceless asset. Men like that are the soul of a fighting army. It’s our job to command our soldiers, to tell them where to go and what to do, but those are the men who do the fighting and the killing, and it’s our job to make sure they’re properly trained and supplied. And when they’re too old, we use them to teach the new boys, to give them heroes they can touch and talk to. How the hell did we ever forget that, Andrey?” The general shook his head as the helicopter lifted off.
Gregory was back in his hotel room, with three hundred pages of technical information to digest as he sipped his Diet Coke and finished off his french fries. Something was wrong with the whole equation, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. The Navy had tested its Standard-2-ER missile against all manner of threats, mainly on computer, but also against live targets at Kwajalein Atoll. It had done pretty well, but there’d never been a full-up live test against a for-real ICBM reentry vehicle. There weren’t enough of them to go around. Mainly they used old Minuteman-II ICBMs, long since retired from service and fired out of test silos at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, but those were mostly gone. Russia and America had retired all of their ballistic weapons, chiefly as a reaction to the nuclear terrorist explosion at Denver and the even more horrific aftermath that had barely been averted. The negotiations to draw the numbers down to zero—the last ones had been eliminated in public just before the Japanese had launched their sneak attack on the Pacific Fleet—had gone so rapidly that a lot of the minor ancillary points had scarcely been considered, and only later had it been decided to take the “spare” launchers whose disposition had somehow been overlooked and retain them for ABM testing (every month a Russian officer checked the American ones at Vandenberg, and an American officer counted the Russian ones outside Plesetsk). The ABM tests were also monitored, hut that entire area of effort was now largely theoretical. Both America and Russia retained a goodly number of nuclear warheads, and these could easily be affixed to cruise missiles, which, again, both sides had in relative abundance and no country could stop. It might take five hours instead of thirty-four minutes, but the targets would be just as dead.
Anti-missile work had been relegated to theater missiles, such as the ubiquitous Scuds, which the Russians doubtless regretted ever having built, much less sold to jerkwater countries that couldn’t even field a single decent mechanized division, but who loved to parade those upgraded V-2-class ballistic stovepipes because they looked impressive as hell to the people on the sidewalks. But the new upgrades on Patriot and its Russian counterpart SAM largely negated that threat, and the Navy’s Aegis system had been tested against them, with pretty good success. Like Patriot, though, Standard was really a point-defense weapon with damned little cross-range ability to cover an area instead of maybe twenty square miles of important sea-estate.
All in all, it was a pity that they’d never solved the power-throughput problem with his free-electron lasers. Those could have defended whole coastlines, if only . . . and if only his aunt had balls, Gregory thought, she’d be his uncle. There was talk of building a chemical laser aboard a converted 747 that could sure as hell clobber a ballistic launch during boost phase, but to do that, the 747 had to be fairly close to the launch point, and so that was just one more version of theater defense, and of little strategic use.
The Aegis system had real possibilities. The SPY radar system was first-rate, and though the computer that managed the information was the flower of 1975 technology—a current Apple Macintosh had it beat by a good three orders of magnitude in all categories of performance— intercepting a ballistic warhead wasn’t a question of computing speed so much as kinetic energy—getting the kill vehicle to the right place at the right time. Even that wasn’t so great a feat of engineering. The real work had been done as far back as 1959, with the Nike Zeus, which had turned into Spartan and shown great promise before being shitcanned by the 1972 treaty with the Soviet Union, which was, belatedly, just as dead as the Safeguard system, which had been aborted at half-built.