***
Alternately murderous and benign, Warrant Officer Konstantin Eduardovich Simonov had a cheerful round face, pug nose, and freckles. Originally from Petersburg, he had become a warrant officer in an unusual way. He’d opted to be drafted, rather than continue to pursue a university education that he knew he wasn’t really mature enough to benefit from. He did this much to the disgust of his parents, low-level apparatchiks who had worked very hard to make sure their children would rise higher. The Army was no place to rise higher. Then Gorbachev released all university students from their military obligation, a blatant attempt to curry favor with the intelligentsia, the apparatchiks, and the West. His ugly gesture had tremendously insulted all those who were in service because they wanted to be or felt they were needed. Simonov was one of those who refused to quit the colors. He liked the Airborne, and he ended up liking Spetsnaz more. The training was interesting. And he realized that he liked combat. He had suspected he would like it before he partook, but the actuality of liking it had taken a lot of getting used to. He feared becoming addicted. A very wise officer had sensed it and told him, you just needed to keep that pleasure, like all pleasures, in its particular place. Simonov took the lesson to heart and began to ponder his future as a soldier who wanted more out of soldiering than combat. He didn’t care to remain in the enlisted ranks. But he didn’t want to become an officer. Too much responsibility, too much hypocrisy, too little pay. Becoming a warrant officer allowed him to be a soldier with some status and pursue what quickly became his second-favorite military pleasure: training other likely lads and turning them into soldiers. Real soldiers.
Of course, real soldiers didn’t spend their time providing security details for an American engineer who had once worked for the American Ministry of Defense or whatever they called it. Much less a woman. Let alone a beautiful woman, even if she did have a really excellent mind. Nor did he ever expect to have the experience of said engineer flopping down beside him one day in a ruined building in a secured neighborhood where they were training, and then having her lie back on her rucksack and ask him what he wanted by way of technology.
“You can’t be serious, Doctor. People like you don’t ask people like me what we need. People like you aren’t even supposed to be here. Least of all, women.”
Olivia looked into his eyes and felt a sudden playfulness, long suppressed, with this young man. Colonel Suslov had assigned Simonov to run her personal security detail and had told Olivia, sternly and in his presence, that she would obey him immediately and without question whenever danger arose. Since then, Simonov had barely spoken to her, even in the line of duty, except to bark an occasional “Down!” or “Into that building!” or some such. His attitude had clearly been, “You’re here. I have my orders. So do you. That’s all there is to it.”
At first, she’d regarded him as little more than another minder, another Borodkin. But she’d watched him as he’d watched her, and over time they’d acquired a certain abstract respect for each other. Olivia decided she liked him, in the way Americans often liked old-style juvenile delinquents or difficult dogs. You never quite knew whether to beat them or scratch them behind the ears. Today, exhausted but pleased because things were going very well, Olivia decided to do some scratching.
“You’re right,” she said calmly. “But I have my reasons. I’d heard that Russian soldiers are most excellent in bed, and as a professional woman well over thirty, my chances of marrying an American man are less than my chances of being hit by a meteorite. Or so I was told by all the experts on all the TV shows I never watched and in all the books and magazines I never read. I decided to become, as we say in America, proactive. My way of improving my marriage odds involves hauling around twenty kilos of crap on a wrecked back, being cold, dirty, hungry, and thirsty most of the time, obeying you unquestioningly and unhesitatingly, even when it involves diving into sewers, and shooting at people I can’t see, just to keep their heads down. I can’t tell you how sexy I find all this to be, so I thought that as an even more exciting form of foreplay I’d ask you what military technology you wanted.”
For an instant, Simonov had a sensation of snorting cold water through his nose. Then he started laughing. Olivia joined him and they found themselves trying to stop, looking at each other, then laughing again. After it finally ended, with two sets of ribs hurting, Simonov wiped his sprouting beard. “But you talk to the Kombrig and the chief of reconnaissance about what they need.”
“I do. And I talk to people at echelons well above them about what they need. But I also talk to the commander of my security team and his troops about what they need and want.”
“Russian boys are stubborn. It takes a while for us to figure some things out.”
“Americans, too.”
“I believe,” he said. “I will think about your question. For now, we need to move on down the street and see how your other toys are doing.” They gathered themselves and stepped outside. Fifty meters later, as they approached the door of yet another ruined building, Simonov stopped, then pointed to a wire, nearly invisible amid the junk and garbage on the ground before them. He backed her off two paces, then stopped.
“Do you see the wire, Doctor?”
“Yes.”
He pointed to their left, then to their right. “Do you see the secondaries?”
“Yes.”
“So do I. Note what they’ve done. The door is wired. But so are the logical places where you might take cover in event of ambush. There may be more wires behind us. Let’s give thanks whoever made this set of traps isn’t here to spring the ambush.”
“Or doesn’t consider us worth the effort.”
“Then we’ll give thanks for that, too. Now let’s turn around and walk back to where we were, one step at a time, eyes on the ground for wires or anything that looks like mines.”
Simonov took her wrist.
“No, Warrant Officer. We walk five meters apart.”
“Very well, Doctor. But I must tell you. You’ll never find a husband like that.”