McGraw gave Stan a measuring study. “I hear you won the Medal of Honor up in Alaska during the first Chinese invasion.”
“Yes sir,” Stan said.
“Old son, don’t you ‘yes sir’ me. I read the brief. In Alaska, you went against orders, everyone’s orders, and blew up the storage tanks the Chinese desperately needed.”
Stan should have known McGraw would have read up on the commanding officers in around the Denver area. The man was big and he looked as if he must be stupid, but Tom McGraw did his homework. He was like a football coach who stayed up until three A.M. each night watching film of the opposing team. Back in the day, little had caught Tom by surprise. It seemed as if that hadn’t changed.
“Let’s hurry up and look at your men,” Tom said. “It’s cold out here and I don’t like a soldier freezing his balls off unless there’s a good reason for it. Afterward, you can show me a Behemoth. I’ll climb through it and gush about what it can do. We’ll do all that and then you and I are going to drink a lot of beer, do you hear me?”
“I sure do, sir.”
“Old son, who do you think you’re talking to?”
“You bet, Tom. Let’s get drunk.”
General McGraw grinned at Larson. It made deep skin-crinkles at the outer corners of his eyes: the mark of an outdoor man. McGraw elbowed the lean general in the side. Larson looked uncomfortable at the treatment. He was a good commander, but didn’t care for the roughhousing of a man like Tom, especially before the men.
“We’ll swap stories,” Tom told Stan. “And then I’m going to tell you what you can do for me.”
Right, Stan thought to himself. After the beers, Tom would tell him to get his butt into gear and get those Behemoths ready to roll. They were going to kick some Chinese rear.
Larson checked his watch.
“You busy, General?” McGraw asked Larson.
“No, I simply—”
“Sure you’re not,” McGraw said. “Go on, do what you need to. I haven’t had a moment’s rest in weeks, months, really. Stan and I are going to drink a few. I’ll speak to you before I leave. Until then, let me unwind with an old friend.”
“As you wish, General,” Larson said. He saluted crisply. McGraw saluted back.
How do I tell Tom this is the wrong time to attack with the Behemoths? No, Stan amended. How do I tell him so this fire-eater can understand it?
Several hours later, as the sun set into the mountains, Stan and Tom McGraw sat in the small officer’s club of the Behemoth Tank Park. They were at a round table, with a dozen empty beer bottles on the wooden surface. A plate of sandwiches was the beers’ only company.
“Now let’s have a real drink,” Tom said.
Stan signaled the enlisted waiter. The rest of the officer’s club was empty, McGraw having sent everyone else away.
Tom gave the drink order, and soon the two of them sipped whiskey on the rocks. They kept reminiscing about old times and swapped battle stories. They kept drinking, nibbling on sandwiches as the hours ticked away.
I shouldn’t drink so much, Stan told himself. I bet this is how it started with my dad.
Tom picked up another whiskey. His round cheeks had turned red and his eyes had become glazed. The big general almost appeared asleep as he peered at something on the table.
“You’ll have to excuse me for a minute,” Stan said. “I need to relieve myself.”
“Go on, take your piss,” Tom said, waving him away with those huge hands. Stan had never gotten over the size of the fingers. He noticed Tom had a worn, gold wedding ring. He’d heard several years ago that Tom’s wife had died. Had the general remarried?
Lurching out of the dining area, Stan went to the head and relived himself. He came back to find the general swirling his whiskey so the ice cubes clinked.
As Stan sat down, Tom slammed the glass onto the table, making the empty beer bottles wobble. Stan watched in fascination. The nearest one swayed more than the rest so it almost tipped over. Then it righted itself until it came to rest. Stan laughed, nodding in appreciation.
“Professor, I have a confession to make.”
Lifting his head, Stan aimed bleary eyes at Tom. “You’ve never had a problem in your life.”
“Who said anything about a problem? I said a confession.”
“But you mean problem,” Stan said.
Tom squinted at him. “You always were a smart SOB. Is your head still full of historical parallels and theorems?”
“It is indeed,” Stan said.
“What does this situation remind you of?”
“Do you mean the Chinese approach toward Denver?”
“We can start there,” Tom said. “What do you see?”
Stan smiled drunkenly. These days, he tried to keep the majority of his insights to himself. He’d found that people weren’t interested in his opinions on running a war. Well, General Larson was, but few others. They seldom appreciated his historical parallels. But if Tom had asked—
“These rains remind me of the Grand Turk on his march to Vienna in 1529,” Stan said.
“Why is it you can never answer straight?” Tom asked.
“The Grand Turk in this case was Suleiman the Magnificent,” Stan said. “He ruled the Ottoman Empire and was the last great warrior chief of an amazing family. The Turks had invented an interesting system of slave soldiers: tough European boys stolen from their parents in the Balkans, raised as Muslims and forbidden to marry. The slave soldiers—Janissaries—were like monkish Spartans, trained to fight and conquer. They provided the horse-archer Turks with excellent infantry. That was something the Turks had always lacked.
“Anyway, it was 1529 and the Grand Turk was on the march. He was invading Europe again, marching on the city of Vienna on the Blue Danube. If he could conquer the Austrian city, he would have likely incorporated the land into the empire and made ready to gobble up the rest of Europe.”
Stan folded his hands over his stomach as he sat back, making the chair creak. “Like our Chinese invaders, the Turks had hordes of soldiers under their banner. Unfortunately for them, it rained like it’s been raining here. It turned everything muddy and caused the rivers to overflow. What it meant for Suleiman was he didn’t bring his giant siege cannons in time. They were impossible to transport through the mud. Most of Europe then was heavily forested with almost no metaled roads. Even the Danube flotilla couldn’t float those huge cannons.
“That was one of Suleiman’s secrets—not the mud, but the cannons, some of them weighing up to twelve tons apiece. The gigantic cannons were important because they could knock down the old medieval walls that had made castles and walled cities so impenetrable in the preceding centuries. I know you’ve seen movies where catapults and other siege engines use rocks to batter and blow apart heavy stone walls. That’s pure fiction. Until gunpowder-powered cannons came along, those walls stood up against just about anything. Sometimes sappers dug under walls and brought them down with cave-ins. Most of the time starvation was the only way for besiegers to capture walled cities and castles. With this high-tech invention—the big new cannons—those formerly impenetrable walls became yesterday’s news. The cannons had made them obsolete.”
“The ancient Assyrians would have shown you otherwise,” Tom said. “They stormed walled cities.”
“The Assyrians used terror to sap morale, gold to open locked doors and siege towers to send their hardened warriors over the top to take the city in bloody butchery. They never blew down walls with quick-firing catapults.”
“Okay,” Tom said. “You’ve made your point about cannons. So what happened next with this Suleiman?”