“So, how many exams did I pass and fail?” Ryan asked quietly.
“Honest answer? No telling. They all looked for something different. Remember that.” And some of them really didn’t give a damn, having come for their own domestic political reasons, but even under these circumstances it was impolitic to say so.
“Kinda figured that out on my own, Arnie. Now I circulate, right?”
“Hit India,” van Damm advised. “Adler thinks it’s important.”
“Roger.” At least he remembered what she looked like. So many of the faces in the line had turned immediately into blurs, just as happened at an over-large party of any sort. It made Ryan feel like a fraud. Politicians were supposed to have a photographic memory for names and faces. He did not, and wondered if there were some sort of training method to acquire one. Jack handed his glass off to an attendant, wiped his hands with one of the special napkins, and headed off to see India. Russia stopped him first.
“Mr. Ambassador,” Jack said. Valeriy Bogdanovich Lermonsov had been through the receiving line, but there hadn’t been time then for whatever he wanted to say. They shook hands again anyway. Lermonsov was a career diplomat, popular in the local community of his peers. There was talk that he’d been KGB for years, but that was hardly something Ryan could hold against him.
“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 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 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.