“And you two,” Starukhin bellowed, turning on his aides. “Get out there and help him. What’s the matter with you jackasses?”
The aides moved with the panic of men caught in a terrible crime. One of them, a lieutenant colonel, jostled wildly against Starukhin in his anxiety, and the army commander gave him a hard shove toward the door. Soon the two aides stood glum-faced beside the driver in the steady rain.
They were hopeless. All of them. Starukhin sat back, squaring his shoulders, convinced that he had to carry the entire army on his back. All of his life, he thought, he had had to drive his will head-on into the ponderous complacency characteristic of the system into which he had been born. Every day was a struggle. When something broke, those responsible would sheepishly sit down and wait to be told to fix it. Then they would take their own good time about the task. Unless you drove them. And Starukhin had learned how to drive men. But now, during the great test of his lifetime, he feared his inability to move the men under his command.
More than anything, he feared failure. He feared it because he believed it would reveal some secret incompetence hidden within him. Deep within his soul, where no other human being had ever been allowed to penetrate, Starukhin doubted himself, and nothing seemed more important to him than the preservation of his pride.
The damned whoring British would not break. It seemed incredible to him that he could not simply will his way through them, hammering them to nothing with his personal determination and the tank-heavy army under his command. He drifted back and forth between his bobbing doubts and waves of immeasurable energy. Now, as he envisioned the defending British, he sensed that it would be impossible for them to resist.
Yet the British were resisting, fighting bitterly for every road and water obstacle, seemingly for every worthless little village and godforsaken hill. While to the north, that bastard Trimenko was breaking through. Starukhin knew that Trimenko’s Second Guards Tank Army was already ahead of schedule, splitting the seam between the Germans and the Dutch. While he, Starukhin, had to butt head-on against the British.
That little Jewish shit Chibisov undoubtedly had a hand in it, Starukhin was convinced. He stared through the mud-speckled windshield at the soaking trio bent over the vehicle’s engine, feeling a strange pleasure at the thought of Chibisov. The hatred he felt was so intense, so pure and unexamined, that it was soothing. After the war… the Chibisovs would be made to pay. The Motherland had to be purged yet again. It was time to settle accounts with the Jews and the Jew-loving writers, with the leeching minorities and false reformers. In the wordless clarity of the moment, Chibisov embodied everything foul in the Soviet Union, all responsibility for the failures of Starukhin’s own kind. And yet Starukhin recognized that he hated Chibisov not merely for his Jewish-ness, but for his easy, controlled brilliance as well. Everything came too easily to Chibisov. Malinsky’s staff Jew could perform offhandedly tasks that confronted Starukhin with agony and consternation.
Surely, Starukhin decided, Chibisov was sabotaging him, poisoning Malinsky against him and cleverly throwing the front’s support behind Trimenko. As he sat in the hard, low vehicle seat under canvas vibrant with rain Starukhin imputed to Chibisov every action that he would have taken in the other man’s place.
And Malinsky. How could Malinsky fail to support him, even at the expense of Trimenko? Trimenko was nobody’s friend. But Starukhin had served as a baby-sitter for Malinsky’s son in Cuba. Just to keep the boy out of Afghanistan. Starukhin was certain that the posting had been no accident. No, Malinsky must have fixed it up for the boy. And Starukhin clearly understood who possessed power and how much. He had known what would be tacitly expected of him. Keep the son out of trouble.
Of course, the kid had not been so bad. He worked hard enough. As the officer responsible for training, he had done all that was required, even a bit more. Young Malinsky was clever at solving problems. Yet somehow, there was so little to the boy. It was as though he was never fully present, as though his heart really wasn’t tucked inside the tunic of his uniform. There was no fire. Young Malinsky had gone through all of the paces, performing with ease. But he just did not seem like a real soldier.
Young Malinsky didn’t even drink like a man. In Cuba, the boy had spent all of his spare time cuddled with his redheaded bitch of a wife, following her around like an excited dog. Starukhin doubted that the boy would have had the strength to raise his hand to his wife even if he had caught her in the act of being unfaithful to him. Not that Starukhin had any evidence that she had betrayed young Malinsky. No, the little cunt was probably too smart for that. She knew what she had to do to have it good. But she was still a whore. One look at her and you knew. You could smell it. And her independence of manner, her lack of respect… the boy seemed to have no control over her. You had to treat women the same way you treated the men beneath you. Break them down. Force your will on them. Get them by the ears and shove it down their throats.
Starukhin thought briefly, disgustedly, of his own wife. A sack of fat. The woman had no pride, no respect for her position. She had the soul of a peasant, not of a general’s wife. Young Malinsky’s wife, now — she at least looked the part. But she was a calculating little tramp.
Hearing a series of distant explosions, Starukhin pounded his big fist on the frame of the car. The war would not wait for him. His war. The opportunity of his lifetime. Even the daylight seemed to be floundering, failing, letting him down. Everything was running away from him, while he sat in a broken-down vehicle in the mud. He felt as if the universe had conspired to humiliate him. And Trimenko and Chibisov and all of the whoring Jewish bastards of the world were leaving him behind. Starukhin felt as though he would explode with the enormity of his anger.
He threw open the door of the car and clambered out into the mud just as the rain picked up again. He stared at the sergeant and the two aides. They were tinkering dutifully with the engine, but it was clear that not one of them knew what to do.
“You’re relieved,” Starukhin told the two officers. “I don’t want to see your goddamned faces anywhere around the headquarters. Your careers are finished.”
Suddenly, two NATO aircraft roared in low overhead. The sound of their passage was so big it shocked the ears like an explosion. The aides and the sergeant threw themselves into the mud. But Starukhin only raised his wide face to meet the jets, automatically sensing that they were after something bigger than a stranded range car. In the instant of their passage, he clearly saw the black squared crosses and the hard colors of the West German air force. A moment later, the tactical helipad that served the army’s command post threw a bouquet of fire high into the heavens, followed quickly by a second bloom, orange, yellow, and a ghostly red, tricking the eyes as it singed the air to black. The mud grasping at Starukhin’s boots turned to jelly, and waves crossed the surface of the puddles. Then the sound of the blasts arrived with an intensity that seemed to penetrate the skin as well as the ears.
Without a word or backward look, Starukhin turned down the swamped trail toward his forward command post, raging at the rain that fell on him, cursing every man and woman who crossed his mind, marching, almost running in the slop, fervent and vicious with fear.
Ten
Lieutenant Colonel Gordunov braced in the helicopter doorway, drenched with rain. His headset perked with the worries and technical exchanges of the pilots. Their talkativeness grated on him. Like junk-sellers in a bazaar. But he kept his silence and watched the crowded trace of the highway in the wet, fading light. The formation of gunships and transport helicopters throbbed between the last green hills before the target area.