Chapter 17
The Coinage of Gold
Scott Adler was regarded as too young and inexperienced for the job, but that judgment came from would-be political appointees who’d schemed their way to near-the-top, whereas Adler had been a career foreign-service officer since his graduation from Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy twenty-six years earlier. Those who’d seen him work regarded him as a very astute diplomatic technician. Those who played cards with him—Adler liked to play poker before a major meeting or negotiation—thought he was one very lucky son of a bitch.
His seventh-floor office at the State Department building was capacious and comfortable. Behind his desk was a credenza covered with the usual framed photographs of spouse, children, and parents. He didn’t like wearing his suit jacket at his desk, as he found it too confining for comfort. In this he’d outraged some of the senior State Department bureaucrats, who thought this an entirely inappropriate informality. He did, of course, don the jacket for important meetings with foreign dignitaries, but he didn’t think internal meetings were important enough to be uncomfortable for.
That suited George Winston, who tossed his coat over a chair when he came in. Like himself, Scott Adler was a working guy, and those were the people with whom Winston was most comfortable. He might be a career government puke, but the son of a bitch had a work ethic, which was more than he could say for too many of the people in his own department. He was doing his best to weed the drones out, but it was no easy task, and civil-service rules made firing unproductive people a non-trivial exercise.
“Have you read the Chinese stuff?” Adler asked, as soon as the lunch tray was on the table.
“Yeah, Scott. I mean, holy shit, fella,” TRADER observed to EAGLE.
“Welcome to the club. The intelligence stuff we get can be very interesting.” The State Department had its own spook service, called Intelligence and Research, or I&R, which, while it didn’t exactly compete with CIA and the other services, occasionally turned up its own rough little diamonds from the thick diplomatic mud. “So, what do you think of our little yellow brothers?”
Winston managed not to growl. “Buddy, I might not even eat their goddamned food anymore.”
“They make our worst robber barons look like Mother Teresa. They’re conscienceless motherf*ckers, George, and that’s a fact.” Winston immediately started liking Adler more. A guy who talked like this had real possibilities. Now it was his turn to be coldly professional to counterpoint Adler’s working-class patois.
“They’re ideologically driven, then?”
“Totally—well, maybe with a little corruption thrown in, but remember, they figure that their political astuteness entitles them to live high on the hog, and so to them it’s not corruption at all. They just collect tribute from the peasants, and ‘peasant’ is a word they still use over there.”
“In other words, we’re dealing with dukes and earls?”
The Secretary of State nodded. “Essentially, yes. They have an enormous sense of personal entitlement. They are not used to hearing the word ‘no’ in any form, and as a result they don’t always know what to do when they do hear it from people like me. That’s why they’re often at a disadvantage in negotiations—at least, when we play hardball with them. We haven’t done much of that, but last year, after the Airbus shoot-down I came on a little strong, and then we followed up with official diplomatic recognition of the ROC government on Taiwan. That really put the PRC noses seriously out of joint, even though the ROC government hasn’t officially declared its independence.”
“What?” Somehow SecTreas had missed that.
“Yeah, the people on Taiwan play a pretty steady and reasonable game. They’ve never really gone out of their way to offend the mainland. Even though they have embassies all over the world, they’ve never actually proclaimed the fact that they’re an independent nation. That would flip the Beijing Chinese out. Maybe the guys in Taipei think it would be bad manners or something. At the same time, we have an understanding that Beijing knows about. If somebody messes with Taiwan, Seventh Fleet comes over to keep an eye on things, and we will not permit a direct military threat to the Republic of China government. The PRC doesn’t have enough of a navy to worry our guys that much, and so all that flies back and forth, really, is words.” Adler looked up from his sandwich. “Sticks and stones, y‘know?”
“Well, I had breakfast with Jack this morning, and we talked about the trade talks.”
“And Jack wants to play a little rougher?” SecState asked. It wasn’t much of a surprise. Ryan had always preferred fair play, and that was often a rare commodity in the intercourse among nation-states.
“You got it,” Winston confirmed around a bite of his sandwich. One thing about working-class people like Adler, the SecTreas thought, they knew what a proper lunch was. He was so tired of fairyfied French food for lunch. Lunch was supposed to be a piece of meat with bread wrapped around it. French cuisine was just fine, but for dinner, not for lunch.
“How rough?”
“We get what we want. We need them to get accustomed to the idea that they need us a hell of a lot more than we need them.”
“That’s a tall order, George. If they don’t want to listen?”
“Knock louder on the door, or on their heads. Scott, you read the same document this morning I did, right?”
“Yeah,” SecState confirmed.
“The people they’re cheating out of their jobs are American citizens.”
“I know that. But what you have to remember is that we can’t dictate to a sovereign country. The world doesn’t work that way.”
“Okay, fine, but we can tell them that they can’t dictate trade practices to us, either.”
“George, for a long time America has taken a very soft line on these issues.”
“Maybe, but the Trade Reform Act is now law—”
“Yeah, I remember. I also remember how it got us into a shooting war,” Adler reminded his guest.
“We won. I remember that, too. Maybe other people will as well. Scott, we’re running a huge trade deficit with the Chinese. The President says that has to stop. I happen to agree. If we can buy from them, then they damned well have to buy from us, or we buy our chopsticks and teddy bears elsewhere.”
“There are jobs involved,” Adler warned. “They know how to play that card. They cancel contracts and stop buying our finished goods, and then some of our people lose their jobs, too.”
“Or, if we succeed, then we sell more finished goods to them, and our factories have to hire people to make them. Play to win, Scott,” Winston advised.
“I always do, but this isn’t a baseball game with rules and fences. It’s like racing a sailboat in the fog. You can’t always see your adversary, and you can damned near never see the finish line.”
“I can buy you some radar, then. How about I give you one of my people to help out?”
“Who?”
“Mark Gant. He’s my computer whiz. He really knows the issues from a technical, monetary point of view.”
Adler thought about that. State Department had always been weak in that area. Not too many business-savvy people ended up in the Foreign Service, and learning it from books wasn’t the same as living it out in the real world, a fact that too many State Department “professionals” didn’t always appreciate as fully as they should.
“Okay, send him over. Now, just how rough are we supposed to play this?”
“Well, I guess you’ll need to talk that one over with Jack, but from what he told me this morning, we want the playing field leveled out.”
An easy thing to say, Adler thought, but less easy to accomplish. He liked and admired President Ryan, but he wasn’t blind to the fact that SWORDSMAN was not the most patient guy in the world, and in diplomacy, patience was everything—hell, patience was just about the only thing. “Okay,” he said, after a moment’s reflection. “I’ll talk it over with him before I tell my people what to say. This could get nasty. The Chinese play rough.”
“Life’s a bitch, Scott,” Winston advised.
SecState smiled. “Okay, duly noted. Let me see what Jack says. So, how’s the market doing?”
“Still pretty healthy. Price/earnings ratios are still a little outrageous, but profits are generally up, inflation is under control, and the investment community is nice and comfy. The Fed Chairman is keeping a nice, even strain on monetary policy. We’re going to get the changes we want in the tax code. So, things look pretty good. It’s always easier to steer the ship in calm seas, y‘know?”
Adler grimaced. “Yeah, I’ll have to try that sometime.” But he had marching orders to lay on a typhoon. This would get interesting.
So, how’s readiness?" General Diggs asked his assembled officers.
“Could be better,” the colonel commanding 1st Brigade admitted. “We’ve been short lately on funds for training. We have the hardware, and we have the soldiers, and we spend a lot of time in the simulators, but that’s not the same as going out in the dirt with our tracks.” There was general nodding on that point.
“It’s a problem for me, sir,” said Lieutenant Colonel Angelo Giusti, who commanded 1st Squadron, 4th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Known within the Army as the Quarter Horse for the 1st/4th unit designator, it was the division reconnaissance screen, and its commander reported directly to the commanding general of First Tanks instead of through a brigade commander. “I can’t get my people out, and it’s hard to train for reconnaissance in the kazerne. The local farmers get kinda irate when we crunch through their fields, and so we have to pretend we can do recon from hard-surface roads. Well, sir, we can‘t, and that bothers me some.”
There was no denying the fact that driving armored vehicles across a cornfield was tough on the corn, and while the U.S. Army trailed every tactical formation with a Hummer whose passengers came with a big checkbook to pay for the damage, the Germans were a tidy people, and Yankee dollars didn’t always compensate for the suddenly untidy fields. It had been easier when the Red Army had been right on the other side of the fence, threatening death and destruction on West Germany, but Germany was now one sovereign country, and the Russians were now on the far side of Poland, and a lot less threatening than they’d once been. There were a few places where large formations could exercise, but those were as fully booked as the prettiest debutante’s dance card at the cotillion, and so the Quarter Horse spent too much time in simulators, too.
“Okay,” Diggs said. “The good news is that we’re going to profit from the new federal budget. We have lots more funds to train with, and we can start using them in twelve days. Colonel Masterman, do you have some ways for us to spend it?”
“Well, General, I think I might come up with something. Can we pretend that it’s nineteen-eighty-three again?” At the height of the Cold War, Seventh Army had trained to as fine an edge as any army in history, a fact ultimately demonstrated in Iraq rather than in Germany, but with spectacular effect. Nineteen eighty-three had been the year the increased funding had first taken real effect, a fact noted fully by the KGB and GRU intelligence officers, who’d thought until that time that the Red Army might have had a chance to defeat NATO. By 1984, even the most optimistic Russian officers fell off that bandwagon for all time. If they could reestablish that training regimen, the assembled officers all knew they’d have a bunch of happy soldiers, because, though training is hard work, it is what the troops had signed up for. A soldier in the field is most often a happy soldier.
“Colonel Masterman, the answer to your question is, Yes. Back to my original question. How’s readiness?”
“We’re at about eighty-five percent,” 2nd Brigade estimated. “Probably ninety or so for the artillery—”
“Thank you, Colonel, and I agree,” the colonel commanding divisional artillery interjected.
“But we all know how easy life is for the cannon-cockers,” 2nd Brigade added as a barb.
“Aviation?” Diggs asked next.
“Sir, my people are within three weeks of being at a hundred percent. Fortunately, we don’t squash anybody’s corn when we’re up practicing. My only complaint is that it’s too easy for my people to track tanks on the ground if they’re road-bound, and a little more realistic practice wouldn’t hurt, but, sir, I’ll put my aviators up against anyone in this man’s army, especially my Apache drivers.” The “snake” drivers enjoyed a diet of raw meat and human babies. The problems they’d had in Yugoslavia a few years earlier had alarmed a lot of people, and the aviation community had cleaned up its act with alacrity.
“Okay, so you’re all in pretty good shape, but you won’t mind sharpening the edge up a little, eh?” Diggs asked, and got the nods he expected. He’d read up on all his senior officers on the flight across the pond. There was little in the way of dead wood here. The Army had less trouble than the other services in holding on to good people. The airlines didn’t try to hire tank commanders away from 1st Armored, though they were always trying to steal fighter and other pilots from the Air Force, and while police forces loved to hire experienced infantrymen, his division had only about fifteen hundred of them, which was the one structural weakness in an armored division: not enough people with rifles and bayonets. An American tank division was superbly organized to take ground—to immolate everyone who happened to be on real estate they wanted—but not so well equipped to hold the ground they overran. The United States Army had never been an army of conquest. Indeed, its ethos has always been liberation, and part and parcel of that was the expectation that the people who lived there would be of assistance, or at least show gratitude for their deliverance, rather than hostility. It was so much a part of the American military’s history that its senior members rarely, if ever, thought about other possibilities. Vietnam was too far in the past now. Even Diggs had been too young for that conflict, and though he’d been told how lucky he was to have missed it, it was something he almost never thought about. Vietnam had not been his war, and he didn’t really want to know about light infantry in the jungle. He was a cavalryman, and his idea of combat was tanks and Bradleys on open ground.
“Okay, gentlemen. I’ll want to meet with all of you individually in the next few days. Then I need to come out and see your outfits. You will find that I’m a fairly easy guy to work for”—by which he meant that he wasn’t a screamer, as some general officers were; he demanded excellence as much as anyone else, but he didn’t think ripping a man’s head off in public was a good way to achieve it—“and I know you’re all pretty good. In six months or less, I want this division ready to deal with anything that might come down the road. I mean anything at all.”
Who might that be, Colonel Masterman mused to himself, the Germans? It might be a little harder to motivate the troops, given the total absence of a credible threat, but the sheer joy of soldiering was not all that much different from the kick associated with football. For the right guy, it was just plain fun to play in the mud with the big toys, and after a while, they started wondering what the real thing might be like. There was a leavening of troops in First Tanks from the 10th and 11th Cavalry Regiments who’d fought the previous year in Saudi Arabia, and like all soldiers, they told their stories. But few of the stories were unhappy ones. Mainly they expounded on how much like training it had been, and referred to their then-enemies as “poor, dumb raghead sunsabitches” who’d been, in the final analysis, unworthy of their steel. But that just made them swagger a little more. A winning war leaves only good memories for the most part, especially a short winning war. Drinks would be hoisted, and the names of the lost would be invoked with sadness and respect, but the overall experience had not been a bad one for the soldiers involved.
It wasn’t so much that soldiers lusted for combat, just that they often felt like football players who practiced hard but never actually got to play for points. Intellectually, they knew that combat was the game of death, not football, but that was too theoretical for most of them. The tankers fired their practice rounds, and if the pop-up targets were steel, there was the satisfaction of seeing sparks from the impact, but it wasn’t quite the same as seeing the turret pop off the target atop a column of flame and smoke ... and knowing that the lives of three or four people had been extinguished like a birthday-cake candle in front of a five-year-old. The veterans of the Second Persian Gulf War did occasionally talk about what it was like to see the results of their handiwork, usually with a “Jesus, it was really something awful to see, bro,” but that was as far as it went. For soldiers, killing wasn’t really murder once you stepped back from it; they’d been the enemy, and both had played the game of death on the same playing field, and one side had won, and the other side had lost, and if you weren’t willing to run that risk, well, don’t put the uniform on, y‘know? Or, “Train better, a*shole, cuz we be serious out here.” And that was the other reason soldiers liked to train. It wasn’t just interesting and fairly enjoyable hard work. It was life insurance if the game ever started for real, and soldiers, like gamblers, like to hold good cards.
Diggs adjourned the meeting, waving for Colonel Masterman to stay behind.
“Well, Duke?”
“I’ve been nosing around. What I’ve seen is pretty good, sir. Giusti is especially good, and he’s always bitching about training time. I like that.”
“So do I,” Diggs agreed at once. “What else?”
“Like the man said, artillery is in very good shape, and your maneuver brigades are doing okay, considering the lack of field time. They might not like using the sims all that much, but they are making good use of them. They’re about twenty percent off where we were in the Tenth Cav down in the Negev playing with the Israelis, and that isn’t bad at all. Sir, you give me three or four months in the field, and they’ll be ready to take on the world.”
“Well, Duke, I’ll write you the check next week. Got your plans ready?”
“Day after tomorrow. I’m taking some helicopter rides to scout out the ground we can use and what we can’t. There’s a German brigade says they’re eager to play aggressor for us.”
“They any good?”
“They claim to be. I guess we’ll just have to see. I recommend we send Second Brigade out first. They’re a little sharper than the other two. Colonel Lisle is our kind of colonel.”
“His package looks pretty good. He’ll get his star next go-round.”
“About right,” Masterman agreed. And what about my star? he couldn’t ask. He figured himself a pretty good bet, but you never really knew. Oh, well, at least he was working for a fellow cavalryman.
“Okay, show me your plans for Second Brigade’s next adventure in the farmland ... tomorrow?”
“The broad strokes, yes, sir.” Masterman bobbed his head and walked off toward his office.
How rough?" Cliff Rutledge asked.
“Well,” Adler replied, “I just got off the phone with the President, and he says he wants what he wants and it’s our job to get it for him.”
“That’s a mistake, Scott,” the Assistant Secretary of State warned.
“Mistake or not, we work for the President.”
“I suppose so, but Beijing’s been pretty good about not tearing us a new a*shole over Taiwan. This might not be the right time for us to press on them so hard.”
“Even as we speak, American jobs are being lost because of their trade policy,” Adler pointed out. “When does enough become too much?”
“I guess Ryan decides that, eh?”
“That’s what the Constitution says.”
“And you want me to meet with them, then?”
SecState nodded. “Correct. Four days from now. Put your position paper together and run it past me before we deliver it, but I want them to know we’re not kidding. The trade deficit has to come down, and it has to come down soon. They can’t make that much money off us and spend it somewhere else.”
“But they can’t buy military hardware from us,” Rutledge observed.
“What do they need all that hardware for?” Scott Adler asked rhetorically. “What external enemies do they have?”
“They’ll say that their national security is their affair.”
“And we reply that our economic security is our affair, and they’re not helping.” That meant observing to the PRC that it looked as though they were preparing to fight a war—but against whom, and was that a good thing for the world? Rutledge would ask with studied sangfroid.
Rutledge stood. “Okay, I can present our case. I’m not fully comfortable with it, but, well, I suppose I don’t have to be, do I?”
“Also correct.” Adler didn’t really like Rutledge all that much. His background and advancement had been more political than properly earned. He’d been very tight with former Vice President Kealty, for example, but after that incident had settled out, Cliff had dusted off his coattails with admirable speed. He would probably not get another promotion. He’d gone as far as one could go without really serious political ties—say a teaching position at the Kennedy School at Harvard, where one taught and became a talking head on the PBS evening news hour and waited to be noticed by the right political hopeful. But that was pure luck. Rutledge had come further than actual merit could justify, but with it came a comfortable salary and a lot of prestige on the Washington cocktail-party circuit, where he was on most of the A lists. And that meant that when he left government service, he’d increase his income by an order of magnitude or so with some consulting firm or other. Adler knew he could do the same, but probably wouldn’t. He’d probably take over the Fletcher School at Tufts and try to pass along what he’d learned to a new generation of would-be diplomats. He was too young for real retirement, though there was little in the way of a government afterlife from being Secretary of State, and academia wouldn’t be too bad. Besides, he’d get to do the odd consulting job, and do op-ed pieces for the newspapers, where he would assume the role of elder-statesman sage.
“Okay, let me get to work.” Rutledge walked out and turned left to head to his seventh-floor office.
Well, this was a plum, the Assistant Secretary thought, even if it was the wrong plum. The Ryan guy was not what he thought a president should be. He thought international discourse was about pointing guns at people’s heads and making demands, instead of reasoning with them. Rutledge’s way took longer, but was a lot safer. You had to give something to get something. Well, sure, there wasn’t much left to give the PRC, except maybe renouncing America’s diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. It wasn’t hard to understand the reason they’d done it, but it had still been a mistake. It made the PRC unhappy, and you couldn’t let some damned-fool “principle” get in the way of international reality. Diplomacy, like politics—another area in which Ryan was sadly lacking—was a practical business. There were a billion people in the People’s Republic, and you had to respect that. Sure, Taiwan had a democratically elected government and all that, but it was still a breakaway province of China, and that made it an internal matter. Their civil war was a fifty-plus-year affair, but Asia was a place where people took the long-term view.
Hmm, he thought, sitting down at his desk. We want what we want, and we’re going to get what we want ... Rutledge took out a legal pad and leaned back in his chair to make some notes. It might be the wrong policy. It might be dumb policy. It might be policy he disagreed with. But it was policy, and if he ever wanted to be kicked upstairs—actually to a different office on the same floor—to Undersecretary of State, he had to present the policy as though it were his own personal passion. It was like being a lawyer, Rutledge thought. They had to argue dumb cases all the time, didn’t they? That didn’t make them mercenaries. It made them professionals, and he was a professional.
And besides, he’d never been caught. One thing about Ed Kealty, he’d never told anybody how Rutledge had tried to help him be President. Duplicitous he might have been toward the President, but he’d been loyal to his own people about it, as a politician was supposed to be. And that Ryan guy, smart as he might have been, he’d never caught on. So there, Mr. President, Rutledge thought. You may be smart, you think, but you need me to formulate your policy for you. Ha!
This is a pleasant change, Comrade Minister," Bondarenko observed on coming in. Golovko waved him to a chair, and poured him a small glass of vodka, the fuel of a Russian business meeting. The visiting general-lieutenant took the obligatory sip and expressed his thanks for the formal hospitality. He most often came here after normal working hours, but this time he’d been summoned officially, and right after lunch. It would have made him uneasy—once upon a time, such an invitation to KGB headquarters would involve a quick trip to the men’s room—except for his cordial relationship with Russia’s chief spy.
“Well, Gennady Iosifovich, I’ve talked you and your ideas over with President Grushavoy, and you’ve had three stars for a long time. It is time, the president and I agreed, for you to have another, and a new assignment.”
“Indeed?” Bondarenko wasn’t taken aback, but he became instantly wary. It wasn’t always pleasant to have one’s career in others’ hands, even others one liked.
“Yes. As of Monday next, you will be General-Colonel Bondarenko, and soon after that you will travel to become commander-in-chief of the Far East Military District.”
That got his eyebrows jolting upward. This was the award of a dream he’d held in his own mind for some time. “Oh. May I ask, why there?”
“I happen to agree with your concerns regarding our yellow neighbors. I’ve seen some reports from the GRU about the Chinese army’s continuing field exercises, and to be truthful, our intelligence information from Beijing is not all we would wish. Therefore, Eduard Petrovich and I feel that our eastern defenses might need some firming up. That becomes your job, Gennady. Do it well, and some additional good things might happen for you.”
And that could only mean one thing, Bondarenko thought, behind an admirable poker face. Beyond the four stars of a general-colonel lay only the single large star of a marshal, and that was as high as any Russian soldier could go. After that, one could be commander-in-chief of the entire army, or defense minister, or one could retire to write memoirs.
“There are some people I’d like to take out to Chabarsovil with me, some colonels from my operations office,” the general said contemplatively.
“That is your prerogative, of course. Tell me, what will you wish to do out there?”
“Do you really want to know?” the newly frocked four-star asked.
Golovko smiled broadly at that. “I see. Gennady, you wish to remake the Russian army in your image?”
“Not my image, Comrade Minister. A winning image, such as we had in 1945. There are images one wishes to deface, and there are images one dares not touch. Which, do you think, ought we to have?”
“What will the costs be?”
“Sergey Nikolay’ch, I am not an economist, nor am I an accountant, but I can tell you that the cost of doing this will be far less than the cost of not doing it.” And now, Bondarenko thought, he’d get wider access to whatever intelligence his country possessed. It’d have been better if Russia had spent the same resources on what the Americans delicately called National Technical Means—strategic reconnaissance satellites—that the Soviet Union had once done. But he’d get such as there was, and maybe he could talk the air force into making a few special flights ...
“I will tell that to President Grushavoy.” Not that it would do all that much good. The cupboard was still bare of funding, though that could change in a few years.
“Will these new mineral discoveries in Siberia give us a little more money to spend?”
Golovko nodded. “Yes, but not for some years. Patience, Gennady.”
The general took a final shot of the vodka. “I can be patient, but will the Chinese?”
Golovko had to grant his visitor’s concern. “Yes, they are exercising their military forces more than they used to.” What had once been a cause for concern had become, with its continuance, a matter of routine, and Golovko, like many, tended to lose such information in the seemingly random noise of daily life. “But there are no diplomatic reasons for concern. Relations between our countries are cordial.”
“Comrade Minister, I am not a diplomat, nor am 1 an intelligence officer, but I do study history. I recall that the Soviet Union’s relations with Hitler’s Germany were cordial right up until June 23, 1941. The leading German elements passed Soviet trains running westbound with oil and grain to the fascisti. I conclude from this that diplomatic discourse is not always an indicator of a nation’s intentions.”
“That is true, and that is why we have an intelligence service.”
“And then you will also recall that the People’s Republic has in the past looked with envy on the mineral riches of Siberia. That envy has probably grown with the discoveries we have made. We have not publicized them, but we may assume that the Chinese have intelligence sources right here in Moscow, yes?”
“It is a possibility not to be discounted,” Golovko admitted. He didn’t add that those sources would most probably be true-believing communists from Russia’s past, people who lamented the fall of their nation’s previous political system, and saw in China the means, perhaps, to restore Russia to the true faith of Marxism-Leninism, albeit with a little Mao tossed in. Both men had been Communist Party members in their day: Bondarenko because advancement in the Soviet Army had absolutely demanded it, and Golovko because he would never have been entrusted with a post in KGB without it. Both had mouthed the words, and kept their eyes mostly open during party meetings, in both cases while checking out the women in the meetings or just day-dreaming about things of more immediate interest. But there were those who had listened and thought about it, who had actually believed all that political rubbish. Both Bondarenko and Golovko were pragmatists, interested mainly in a reality they could touch and feel rather than some model of words that might or might not come to pass someday. Fortunately for both, they’d found their way into professions more concerned with reality than theory, where their intellectual explorations were more easily tolerated, because men of vision were always needed, even in a nation where vision was supposed to be controlled. “But you will have ample assets to act upon your concerns.”
Not really, the general thought. He’d have—what? Six motor-rifle divisions, a tank division, and a divisional formation of artillery, all regular-army formations at about seventy percent nominal strength and dubious training—that would be his first task, and not a minor one, to crack those uniformed boys into Red Army soldiers of the sort who had crushed the Germans at Kursk, and moved on to capture Berlin. That would be a major feat to accomplish, but who was better suited to this task? Bondarenko asked himself. There were some promising young generals he knew of, and maybe he’d steal one, but for his own age group Gennady Iosifovich Bondarenko felt himself to be the best brain in his nation’s armed forces. Well, then, he’d have an active command and a chance to prove it. The chance of failure was always there, but men such as he are the kind who see opportunities where others see dangers.
“I presume I will have a free hand?” he asked, after some final contemplation.
“Within reason.” Golovko nodded. “We’d prefer that you did not start a war out there.”
“I have no desire to drive to Beijing. I have never enjoyed their cooking,” Bondarenko replied lightly. And Russians should be better soldiers. The fighting ability of the Russian male had never been an issue for doubt. He just needed good training, good equipment, and proper leadership. Bondarenko thought he could supply two of those needs, and that would have to do. Already, his mind was racing east, thinking about his headquarters, what sort of staff officer he would find, whom he’d have to replace, and where the replacements would come from. There’d be drones out there, careerist officers just serving their time and filling out their forms, as if that were what it meant to be a field-grade officer. Those men would see their careers aborted—well, he’d give everyone thirty days to straighten up, and if he knew himself, he’d inspire some to rediscover their vocations. His best hope was in the individual soldiers, the young boys wearing their country’s uniform indifferently because no one had told them exactly what they were and how important that thing was. But he’d fix that. They were soldiers, those boys. Guardians of their country, and they deserved to be proud guardians. With proper training, in nine months they’d wear the uniforms better, stand straighter, and swagger a bit on leave, as soldiers were supposed to do. He’d show them how to do it, and he’d become their surrogate father, pushing and cajoling his new crop of sons toward manhood. It was as worthy a goal as any man could wish, and as Commander-in-Chief Far East, he just might set a standard for his country’s armed forces to emulate.
“So, Gennady Iosifovich, what do I tell Eduard Petrovich?” Golovko asked, as he leaned across the desk to give his guest a little more of the fine Starka vodka.
Bondarenko lifted the glass to salute his host. “Comrade Minister, you will please tell our president that he has a new CINC-Far East.”