Chapter 42
Birch Trees
They drove into the sunset, west from the Russian capital. Traffic had picked up in Moscow since his last real adventure here, and you could use the center lane in the wide avenues. Ding handled navigation with a map, and soon they were beyond the ring roads around the Russian capital and entering the hills that surrounded the city. They passed a memorial which neither had ever seen before, three huge—
“What the hell is that?” Ding asked.
“This is as close as the Germans got in 1941,” John explained. “This is where they stopped ’em.”
“What do you call those things?” “Those things” were immense steel I-beams, three of them welded at ninety-degree angles to look like enormous jacks.
“Hedgehogs, but in the SEALs we called ’em horned scullies. Hard to drive a tank over one,” Clark told his younger partner.
“They take their history serious here, don’t they?”
“You would, too, if you stopped somebody who wanted to erase your country right off the map, sonny. The Germans were pretty serious back then, too. It was a very nasty war, that one.”
“Guess so. Take the next right, Mr. C.”
Ten minutes later, they were in a forest of birch trees, as much a part of the Russian soul as vodka and borscht. Soon thereafter they came to a guard shack. The uniformed guard held an AK-47 and looked surprisingly grim. Probably briefed on the threat to Golovko and others, John imagined. But he’d also been briefed on who was authorized to pass, and they only had to show their passports to get cleared, the guard also giving them directions about which country lane to take.
“The houses don’t look too bad,” Chavez observed.
“Built by German POWs,” John told him. “Ivan doesn’t exactly like the Germans very much, but he does respect their workmanship. These were built for the Politburo members, mainly after the war, probably. There’s our place.”
It was a wood-frame house, painted brown and looking like a cross between a German country house and something from an Indiana farm, Clark thought. There were guards here, too, armed and walking around. They’d been called from the first shack, John figured. One of them waved. The other two stood back, ready to cover the first one if something untoward happened.
“You are Klerk, Ivan Sergeyevich?”
“Da,” John answered. “This is Chavez, Domingo Stepanovich.”
“Pass, you are expected,” the guard told them.
It was a pleasant evening. The sun was down now, and the stars were making their appearance in the sky. There was also a gentle westerly breeze, but Clark thought he could hear the ghosts of war here. Hans von Kluge’s panzer grenadiers, men wearing the feldgrau of the Wehrmacht. World War II on this front had been a strange conflict, like modern TV wrestling. No choice between good and bad, but only between bad and worse, and on that score it had been six-five and pick ’em. But their host probably wouldn’t see history that way, and Clark had no intention of bringing up the subject.
Golovko was there, standing on the sheltered porch by the furniture, dressed casually. Decent shirt, but no tie. He wasn’t a tall man, about halfway between Chavez and himself in height, but the eyes always showed intelligence, and now they also showed interest. He was curious about the purpose of this meeting, as well he might be.
“Ivan Sergeyevich,” Golovko said in greeting. Handshakes were exchanged, and the guests conducted inside. Mrs. Golovko, a physician, was nowhere in evidence. Golovko first of all served vodka, and directed them to seats.
“You said you had a message for me.” The language for this meeting was to be English, John saw.
“Here it is.” Clark handed the pages across.
“Spasiba.” Sergey Nikolay’ch sat back in his chair and started to read.
He would have been a fine poker player, John thought. His face changed not at all through the first two pages. Then he looked up.
“Who decided that I needed to see this?” he asked.
“The President,” Clark answered.
“Your Ryan is a good comrade, Vanya, and an honorable man.” Golovko paused. “I see you have improved your human-intelligence capabilities at Langley.”
“That’s probably a good supposition, but I know nothing of the source here, Chairman Golovko,” Clark answered.
“This is, as you say, hot.”
“It is all of that,” John agreed, watching him turn another page.
“Son of a bitch!” Golovko observed, finally showing some emotion.
“Yeah, that’s about what I said,” Chavez entered the conversation.
“They are well-informed. This does not surprise me. I am sure they have ample espionage assets in Russia,” Golovko observed, with anger creeping into his voice. “But this is—this is naked aggression they discuss.”
Clark nodded. “Yep, that’s what it appears to be.”
“This is genuine information?” Golovko asked.
“I’m just the mailman, Chairman,” Clark replied. “I vouch for nothing here.”
“Ryan is too good a comrade to play agent provocateur. This is madness.” And Golovko was telling his guests that he had no good intelligence assets in the Chinese Politburo, which actually surprised John. It wasn’t often that CIA caught the Russians short at anything. Golovko looked up. “We once had a source for such information, but no longer.”
“I’ve never worked in that part of the world, Chairman, except long ago when I was in the Navy.” And the Chinese part of that, he didn’t explain, was mainly getting drunk and laid in Taipei.
“I’ve traveled to Beijing several times in a diplomatic capacity, not recently. I cannot say that I’ve ever really understood those people.” Golovko finished reading the document and set it down. “I can keep this?”
“Yes, sir,” Clark replied.
“Why does Ryan give us this?”
“I’m just the delivery boy, Sergey Nikolay’ch, but I should think the motive is in the message. America does not wish to see Russia hurt.”
“Decent of you. What concessions will you require?”
“None that I am aware of.”
“You know,” Chavez observed, “sometimes you just want to be a good neighbor.”
“At this level of statecraft?” Golovko asked skeptically.
“Why not? It does not serve American interests to see Russia crippled and robbed. How big are these mineral finds, anyway?” John asked.
“Immense,” Golovko replied. “I’m not surprised you’ve learned of them. Our efforts at secrecy were not serious. The oil field is one to rival the Saudi reserves, and the gold mine is very rich indeed. Potentially, these finds could save our economy, could make us a truly wealthy nation and a fit partner for America.”
“Then you know why Jack sent this over. It’s a better world for both of us if Russia prospers.”
“Truly?” Golovko was a bright man, but he’d grown up in a world in which both America and Russia had often wished each other dead. Such thoughts died hard, even in so agile a mind as his.
“Truly,” John confirmed. “Russia is a great nation, and you are great people. You are fit partners for us.” He didn’t add that, this way, America wouldn’t have to worry about bailing them out. Now they’d have the wherewithal to see to their own enrichment, and America needed only offer expertise and advice about how to enter the capitalist world with both feet, and open eyes.
“This from the man who helped arrange the defection of the KGB chairman?” Golovko asked.
“Sergey, as we say at home, that was business, not personal. I don’t have a hard-on for Russians, and you wouldn’t kill an American just for entertainment purposes, would you?”
Indignation: “Of course not. That would be nekulturniy.”
“It is the same with us, Chairman.”
“Hey, man,” Chavez added. “From when I was a teenager, I was trained to kill your people, back when I was an Eleven-Bravo carrying a rifle, but, guess what, we’re not enemies anymore, are we? And if we’re not enemies, then we can be friends. You helped us out with Japan and Iran, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but we saw that we were the ultimate target of both conflicts, and it was in our national interest.”
“And perhaps the Chinese have us as their ultimate target. Then this is in our interest. They probably don’t like us any more than they like you.”
Golovko nodded. “Yes, one thing I do know about them is their sense of racial superiority.”
“Dangerous way for people to think, man. Racism means your enemies are just insects to be swatted,” Chavez concluded, impressing Clark with the mixture of East LA accent and master‘s-degree analysis of the situation at hand. “Even Karl Marx didn’t say that he was better than anybody else ’cuz of his skin color, did he?”
“But Mao did,” Golovko added.
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Ding went on. “I read his Little Red Book in graduate school. He didn’t want to be just a political leader. Hell, he wanted to be God. Let his ego get in the way of his brain—not an uncommon affliction for people who take countries over, is it?”
“Lenin was not such a man, but Stalin was,” Golovko observed. “So, then Ivan Emmetovich is a friend of Russia. What shall I do with this?”
“That’s up to you, pal,” Clark told him.
“I must speak to my president. Yours comes to Poland tomorrow, doesn’t he?”
“I think so.”
“I must make some phone calls. Thank you for coming, my friends. Perhaps another time I will be able to entertain you properly.”
“Fair enough.” Clark stood and tossed off the end of his drink. More handshakes, and they left the way they’d come.
“Christ, John, what happens now?” Ding asked, as they drove back out.
“I suppose everybody tries to beat some sense into the Chinese.”
“Will it work?”
A shrug and arched eyebrows: “News at eleven, Domingo.”
Packing for a trip isn’t easy, even with a staff to do it all for you. This was particularly true for SURGEON, who was not only concerned about what she wore in public while abroad, but was also the Supreme Authority on her husband’s clothes, a status which her husband tolerated rather than entirely approved. Jack Ryan was still in the Oval Office trying to do business that couldn’t wait—actually it mostly could, but there were fictions in government that had to be honored—and also waiting for the phone to ring.
“Arnie?”
“Yeah, Jack?”
“Tell the Air Force to have another G go over to Warsaw in case Scott has to fly to Moscow on the sly.”
“Not a bad idea. They’ll probably park it at some air force base or something.” Van Damm went off to make the phone call.
“Anything else, Ellen?” Ryan asked his secretary.
“Need one?”
“Yeah, before Cathy and I wing off into the sunset.” Actually, they were heading east, but Mrs. Sumter understood. She handed Ryan his last cigarette of the day.
“Damn,” Ryan breathed with his first puff. He’d be getting a call from Moscow sure as hell—wouldn’t he? That depended on how quickly they digested the information, or maybe Sergey would wait for the morning to show it to President Grushavoy. Would he? In Washington, something that hot would be graded CRITIC and shoved under the President’s nose inside twenty minutes, but different countries had different rules, and he didn’t know what the Russians did. For damned sure he’d be hearing from one of them before he stepped off the plane at Warsaw. But for now ... He stubbed the smoke out, reached inside his desk for the breath spray, and zapped his mouth with the acidic stuff before leaving the office and heading outside—the West Wing and the White House proper are not connected by an indoor corridor, due to some architectural oversight. In any case, inside six minutes he was on the residential level, watching the ushers organize his bags. Cathy was there, trying to supervise, under the eyes of the Secret Service as well, who acted as though they worried about having a bomb slipped in. But paranoia was their job. Ryan walked over to his wife. “You need to talk to Andrea.”
“What for?”
“Stomach trouble, she says.”
“Uh-oh.” Cathy had suffered from queasiness with Sally, but that was ages ago, and it hadn’t been severe. “Not really much you can do about it, you know.”
“So much for medical progress,” Jack commented. “She probably could use some girl-girl support anyway.”
Cathy smiled. “Oh, sure, womanly solidarity. So, you’re going to bond with Pat?”
Jack grinned back at her. “Yeah, maybe he’ll teach me to shoot a pistol better.”
“Super,” SURGEON observed dryly.
“Which dress for the big dinner?” POTUS asked FLOTUS.
“The light-blue one.”
“Slinky,” Jack said, touching her arm.
The kids showed up then, shepherded up to the bedroom level by their various detail leaders, except for Kyle, who was carried by one of his lionesses. Leaving the kids was never particularly easy, though all concerned were somewhat accustomed to it. The usual kisses and hugs took place, and then Jack took his wife’s hand and led her to the elevator.
It let them off at the ground level, with a straight walk out to the helicopter pad. The VH-3 was there, with Colonel Malloy at the controls. The Marines saluted, as they always did. The President and First Lady climbed inside and buckled into the comfortable seats, under the watchful eyes of a Marine sergeant, who then went forward to report to the pilot in the right-front seat.
Cathy enjoyed helicopter flight more than her husband did, since she flew in one twice a day. Jack was no longer afraid of it, but he did prefer driving a car, which he hadn’t been allowed to do in months. The Sikorsky lifted up gently, pivoted in the air, and headed off to Andrews. The flight took about ten minutes. The helicopter alighted close to the VC-25A, the Air Force’s version of the Boeing 747; it was just a few seconds to the stairs, with the usual TV cameras to mark the event.
“Turn and wave, honey,” Jack told Cathy at the top of the steps. “We might make the evening news.”
“Again?” Cathy grumped. Then she waved and smiled, not at people, but at cameras. With this task completed, they went inside the aircraft and forward to the presidential compartment. There they buckled in, and were observed to do so by an Air Force NCO, who then told the pilot it was okay to spool up the engines and taxi to the end of Runway Zero-one-right. Everything after that was ordinary, including the speech from the pilot, followed by the usual, stately takeoff roll of the big Boeing, and the climb out to thirty-eight thousand feet. Aft, Ryan was sure, everyone was comfortable, because the worst seat on this aircraft was as good as the best first-class seat on any airline in the world. On the whole this seemed a serious waste of the taxpayers’ money, but to the best of his knowledge no taxpayer had ever complained very loudly.
The expected happened off the coast of Maine.
“Mr. President?” a female voice asked.
“Yeah, Sarge?”
“Call for you, sir, on the STU. Where do you want to take it?”
Ryan stood. “Topside.”
The sergeant nodded and waved. “This way, sir.”
“Who is it?”
“The DCI.”
Ryan figured that made sense. “Let’s get Secretary Adler in on this, too.”
“Yes, sir,” she said as he started up the spiral stairs.
Upstairs, Ryan settled into a working-type seat vacated for him by an Air Force NCO who handed him the proper phone. “Ed?”
“Yeah, Jack. Sergey called.”
“Saying what?”
“He thinks it’s a good idea you coming to Poland. He requests a high-level meeting, on the sly if possible.”
Adler took the chair next to Ryan and caught the comment.
“Scott, feel like a hop to Moscow?”
“Can we do it quietly?” SecState asked.
“Probably.”
“Then, yes. Ed, did you field the NATO suggestion?”
“Not my turf to try that, Scott,” the Director of Central Intelligence replied.
“Fair enough. Think they’ll spring for it?”
“Three-to-one, yes.”
“I’ll agree with that,” Ryan concurred. “Golovko will like it, too.”
“Yeah, he will, once he gets over the shock,” Adler observed, with irony in his voice.
“Okay, Ed, tell Sergey that we are amenable to a covert meeting. SecState flying into Moscow for consultations. Let us know what develops.”
“Will do.”
“Okay, out.” Ryan set the handset down and turned to Adler. “Well?”
“Well, if they spring for it, China will have something to think about.” This statement was delivered with a dollop of hope.
The problem, Ryan thought once again as he stood, is that Klingons don’t think quite the same way we do.
The bugs had them all smirking. Suvorov/Koniev had picked up another expensive hooker that night, and her acting abilities had played out in the proper noises at the proper moments. Or maybe he was really that good in bed, Provalov wondered aloud, to the general skepticism of the others in the surveillance van. No, the others thought, this girl was too much of a professional to allow herself to get into it that much. They all thought that was rather sad, lovely as she was to look at. But they knew something their subject didn’t know. This girl had been a “dangle,” pre-briefed to meet Suvorov/Koniev.
Finally the noise subsided, and they heard the distinctive snap of an American Zippo lighter, and the usual post-sex silence of a sated man and a (simulatedly) satisfied woman.
“So, what sort of work do you do, Vanya?” the female voice asked, showing the expected professional interest of an expensive hooker in a wealthy man she might wish to entertain again.
“Business” was the answer.
“What sort?” Again, just the right amount of interest. The good news, Provalov thought, was that she didn’t need coaching. The Sparrow School must have been fairly easy to operate, he realized. Women did this sort of thing from instinct.
“I take care of special needs for special people,” the enemy spy answered. His revelation was followed by a feminine laugh.
“I do that, too, Vanya.”
“There are foreigners who need special services which I was trained to handle under the old regime.”
“You were KGB? Really?” Excitement in her voice. This girl was good.
“Yes, one of many. Nothing special about it.”
“To you, perhaps, but not to me. Was there really a school for women like me? Did KGB train women to ... to take care of the needs of men?”
A man’s laugh this time: “Oh, yes, my dear. There was such a school. You would have done well there.”
Now the laugh was coquettish. “As well as I do now?”
“No, not at what you charge.”
“But am I worth it?” she asked.
“Easily” was the satisfied answer.
“Would you like to see me again, Vanya?” Real hope, or beautifully simulated hope, in the question.
“Da, I would like that very much, Maria.”
“So, you take care of people with special needs. What needs are those?” She could get away with this because men so enjoyed to be found fascinating by beautiful women. It was part of their act of worship at this particular altar, and men always went for it.
“Not unlike what I was trained to do, Maria, but the details need not concern you.”
Disappointment: “Men always say that,” she grumped. “Why do the most interesting men have to be so mysterious?”
“In that is our fascination, woman,” he explained. “Would you prefer that I drove a truck?”
“Truck drivers don’t have your ... your manly abilities,” she replied, as if she’d learned the difference.
“A man could get hard just listening to this bitch,” one of the FSS officers observed.
“That’s the idea,” Provalov agreed. “Why do you think she can charge so much?”
“A real man need not pay for it.”
“Was I that good?” Suvorov/Koniev asked in their headphones.
“Any better and I would have to pay you, Vanya,” she replied, with joy in her voice. Probably a kiss went along with the proclamation.
“No more questions, Maria. Let it lie for now,” Oleg Gregoriyevich urged to the air. She must have heard him.
“You know how to make a man feel like a man,” the spy/assassin told her. “Where did you learn this skill?”
“It just comes naturally to a woman,” she cooed.
“To some women, perhaps.” Then the talking stopped, and in ten minutes, the snoring began.
“Well, that’s more interesting than our normal cases,” the FSS officer told the others.
“You have people checking out the bench?”
“Hourly.” There was no telling how many people delivered messages to the dead-drop, and they probably weren’t all Chinese nationals. No, there’d be a rat-line in this chain, probably not a long one, but enough to offer some insulation to Suvorov’s handler. That would be good fieldcraft, and they had to expect it. So, the bench and its dead-drop would be checked out regularly, and in that surveillance van would be a key custom-made to fit the lock on the drop-box, and a photocopier to make a duplicate of the message inside. The FSS had also stepped up surveillance of the Chinese Embassy. Nearly every employee who came outside had a shadow now. To do this properly meant curtailing other counterespionage operations in Moscow, but this case had assumed priority over everything else. It would soon become even more important, but they didn’t know that yet.
How many engineers do we have available?” Bondarenko asked Aliyev in the east Siberian dawn.
“Two regiments not involved with the road-building,” the operations officer answered.
“Good. Get them all down here immediately to work on the camouflage on these bunkers, and to set up false ones on the other side of these hills. Immediately, Andrey.”
“Yes, General, I’ll get them right on it.”
“I love the dawn, the most peaceful time of day.”
“Except when the other fellow uses it for his attack.” Dawn was the universal time for a major offensive, so that one had all the light of the day to pursue it.
“If they come, it will be right up this valley.”
“Yes, it will.”
“They will shoot up the first line of defenses—what they think they are, that is,” Bondarenko predicted, pointing. The first line was composed of seemingly real bunkers, made of rebarred concrete, but the gun tubes sticking out of them were fake. Whatever engineer had laid out these fortifications had been born with an eye for terrain worthy of Alexander of Macedon. They appeared to be beautifully sited, but a little too much so. Their positioning was a little too predictable, and they were visible, if barely so, to the other side, and something barely visible would be the first target hit. There were even pyrotechnic charges in the false bunkers, so that after a few direct hits they’d explode, and really make the enemy feel fine for having hit them. Whoever had come up with that idea had been a genius of a military engineer.
But the real defenses on the front of the hills were tiny observation posts whose buried phone lines led back to the real bunkers, and beyond them to artillery positions ten or more kilometers back. Some of these were old, also pre-sited, but the rockets they launched were just as deadly today as they’d been in the 1940s, design progeny of the Katushka artillery rockets the Germans had learned to hate. Then came the direct-fire weapons. The first rank of these were the turrets of old German tanks. The sights and the ammunition still worked, and the crewmen knew how to use them, and they had escape tunnels leading to vehicles that would probably allow them to survive a determined attack. The engineers who had laid this line out were probably all dead now, and General Bondarenko hoped they’d been buried honorably, as soldiers deserved. This line wouldn’t stop a determined attack—no fixed line of defenses could accomplish that—but it would be enough to make an enemy wish he’d gone somewhere else.
But the camouflage needed work, and that work would be done at night. A high-flying aircraft tracing over the border with a side-looking camera could see far into his country and take thousands of useful, pretty pictures, and the Chinese probably had a goodly collection of such pictures, plus whatever they could get from their own satellites, or from the commercial birds that anyone could employ now for money—
“Andrey, tell intelligence to see if we can determine if the Chinese have accessed commercial photo satellites.”
“Why bother? Don’t they have their own—”
“We don’t know how good their reconsats are, but we do know that the new French ones are as good as anything the Americans had up until 1975 or so, and that’s good enough for most purposes.”
“Yes, General.” Aliyev paused. “You think something is going to happen here?”
Bondarenko paused, frowning as he stared south over the river. He could see into China from this hilltop. The ground looked no different, but for political reasons it was alien land, and though the inhabitants of that land were no different ethnically from the people native to his land, the political differences were enough to make the sight of them a thing of concern, even fear, for him. He shook his head.
“Andrey Petrovich, you’ve heard the same intelligence briefings I’ve heard. What concerns me is that their army has been far more active than ours. They have the ability to attack us, and we do not have the ability to defeat them. We have less than three full-strength divisions, and the level of their training is inadequate. We have much to do before I will begin to feel comfortable. Firming up this line is the easiest thing to do, and the easiest part of firming it up is hiding the bunkers. Next, we’ll start rotating the soldiers back to the training range and have them work on their gunnery. That will be easy for them to do, but it hasn’t been done in ten months! So much to do, Andrushka, so much to do.”
“That is so, Comrade General, but we’ve made a good beginning.”
Bondarenko waved his hand and growled, “Ahh, a good beginning will be a year from now. We’ve taken the first morning piss in what will be a long day, Colonel. Now, let’s fly east and see the next sector.”
General Peng Xi-Wang, commander of the Red Banner 34th Shock Army, only sixteen kilometers away, looked through powerful spotting glasses at the Russian frontier. Thirty-fourth Shock was a Type A Group Army, and comprised about eighty thousand men. He had an armored division, two mechanized ones, a motorized infantry division, and other attachments, such as an independent artillery brigade under his direct command. Fifty years of age, and a party member since his twenties, Peng was a long-term professional soldier who’d enjoyed the last ten years of his life. Since commanding his tank regiment as a senior colonel, he’d been able to train his troops incessantly on what had become his home country.
The Shenyang Military District comprised the northeasternmost part of the People’s Republic. It was composed of hilly, wooded land, and had warm summers and bitter winters. There was a touch of early ice on the Amur River below Peng now, but from a military point of view, the trees were the real obstacle. Tanks could knock individual trees down, but not every ten meters. No, you had to drive between and around them, and while there was room for that, it was hard on the drivers, and it ate up fuel almost as efficiently as tipping the fuel drum over on its side and just pouring it out. There were some roads and railroad rights-of-way, and if he ever went north, he’d be using them, though that made for good ambush opportunities, if the Russians had a good collection of antitank weapons. But the Russian doctrine, going back half a century, was that the best antitank weapon was a better tank. In their war with the fascists, the Soviet army had enjoyed possession of a superb tank in the T-34. They’d built a lot of the Rapier antitank guns, and duly copied NATO guided antitank weapons, but you dealt with those by blanketing an area with artillery fire, and Peng had lots of guns and mountains of shells to deal with the unprotected infantrymen who had to steer the missiles into their targets. He wished he had the Russian-designed Arena anti-missile system, which had been designed to protect their tanks from the swarm of NATO’s deadly insects, but he didn’t, and he heard it didn’t work all that well anyway.
The spotting glasses were Chinese copies of a German Zeiss model adopted for use by the Soviet Army of old. They zoomed from twenty- to fifty-power, allowing him an intimate view of the other side of the river. Peng came up here once a month or so, which allowed him to inspect his own border troops, who stood what was really a defensive watch, and a light one at that. He had little concern about a Russian attack into his country. The People’s Liberation Army taught the same doctrine as every army back to the Assyrians of old: The best defense is a good offense. If a war began here, better to begin it yourself. And so Peng had cabinets full of plans to attack into Siberia, prepared by his operations and intelligence people, because that was what operations people did.
“Their defenses look ill-maintained,” Peng observed.
“That is so, Comrade,” the colonel commanding the border-defense regiment agreed. “We see little regular activity there.”
“They are too busy selling their weapons to civilians for vodka,” the army political officer observed. “Their morale is poor, and they do not train anything like we do.”
“They have a new theater commander,” the army’s intelligence chief countered. “A General-Colonel Bondarenko. He is well regarded in Moscow as an intellect and as a courageous battlefield commander from Afghanistan.”
“That means he survived contact once,” Political observed. “Probably with a Kabul whore.”
“It is dangerous to underestimate an adversary,” Intelligence warned.
“And foolish to overestimate one.”
Peng just looked through the glasses. He’d heard his intelligence and political officer spar before. Intelligence tended to be an old woman, but many intelligence officers were like that, and Political, like so many of his colleagues, was sufficiently aggressive to make Genghis Khan seem womanly. As in the theater, officers played the roles assigned to them. His role, of course, was to be the wise and confident commander of one of his country’s premier striking arms, and Peng played that role well enough that he was in the running for promotion to General First Class, and if he played his cards very carefully, in another eight years or so, maybe Marshal. With that rank came real political power and personal riches beyond counting, with whole factories working for his own enrichment. Some of those factories were managed by mere colonels, people with the best of political credentials who knew how to kowtow to their seniors, but Peng had never gone that route. He enjoyed soldiering far more than he enjoyed pushing paper and screaming at worker-peasants. As a new second lieutenant, he’d fought the Russians, not very far from this very spot. It had been a mixed experience. His regiment had enjoyed initial success, then had been hammered by a storm of artillery. That had been back when the Red Army, the real Soviet Army of old, had fielded whole artillery divisions whose concentrated fire could shake the very earth and sky, and that border clash had incurred the wrath of the nation the Russians had once been. But no longer. Intelligence told him that the Russian troops on the far side of this cold river were not even a proper shadow of what had once been there. Four divisions, perhaps, and not all of them at full strength. So, however clever this Bondarenko fellow was, if a clash came, he’d have his hands very full indeed.
But that was a political question, wasn’t it? Of course. All the really important things were.
“How are the bridging engineers?” Peng asked, surveying the watery obstacle below.
“Their last exercise went very well, Comrade General,” Operations replied. Like every other army in the world, the PLA had copied the Russian “ribbon” bridge, designed by Soviet engineers in the 1960s to force crossings of all the streams of Western Germany in a NATO/Warsaw Pact war so long expected, but never realized. Except in fiction, mainly Western fiction that had had the NATO side win in every case. Of course. Would capitalists spend money on books that ended their culture? Peng chuckled to himself. Such people enjoyed their illusions ...
... almost as much as his own country’s Politburo members. That’s the way it was all over the world, Peng figured. The rulers of every land held images in their heads, and tried to make the world conform to them. Some succeeded, and those were the ones who wrote the history books.
“So, what do we expect here?”
“From the Russians?” Intelligence asked. “Nothing that I have heard about. Their army is training a little more, but nothing to be concerned about. If they wanted to come south across that river, I hope they can swim in the cold.”
“The Russians like their comforts too much for that. They’ve grown soft with their new political regime,” Political proclaimed.
“And if we are ordered north?” Peng asked.
“If we give them one hard kick, the whole rotten mess will fall down,” Political answered. He didn’t know that he was exactly quoting another enemy of the Russians.