He felt Taylor staring at him. The intensity of the colonel's gaze seemed to freeze the supply officer's hand in midair, the trick of a sorcerer. Instantly, Martinez's eyes were drawn to Taylor's, and he saw absolute seriousness in the depths of the other man's stare.
"Eat it," Taylor said quietly, the tone of his Spanish as dry and ungiving as a high mountain desert. "And then smile."
Major Howard "Merry" Meredith had almost forgotten what it was like to be judged by the color of his skin. Although the Russians were not blatantly impolite, they barely masked their distaste in dealing with him. He was the sole member of Taylor's primary staff who spoke Russian, yet his opposite number obviously preferred dealing with Meredith's white subordinate through a translator.
Merry Meredith could take it. He had been through far, far worse experiences in his life. Yet he could not help being saddened. He had long been warned about Russian racism… but he had believed that he would be the exception. In deference to Pushkin. Only he of all these Americans had read the Russian classics. He knew the titles and even the dates of Repin's paintings, just as he believed he alone of the Americans grasped the iron inevitabilities that had brought this people to such tragedy. He even knew the names and ingredients of the array of zakuski, the bounty of snacks, which the hosts obviously had gone to great lengths to produce. Yet the Russians offered him only uneasy glances as he approached the buffet table, as though the color of his skin might dirty the food.
Racial discrimination was something that had found no entry into his sheltered college-town youth, and West Point had constructed its own barriers against such prejudice. The Army itself had been so starved for talent that a man's racial, ethnic, or social background truly made no difference. It was only a bit later that he had finally been forced to look in the mirror.
And now, years after that terrible day in Los Angeles, he found himself trying to work beside a Soviet colonel who regarded him as only a marginally higher form of animal. His counterpart lectured him on the intricacies of the enemy forces and the battlefield situation in so elementary a fashion that Meredith had to continually call up the example and image of Colonel Taylor to refrain from verbally launching into the paunchy polkovnik, if not physically assaulting him. The worst of it was that the Soviet clearly knew far less about the enemy and even the Soviets' own condition than did Meredith, and what little the colonel knew was out of date. Thanks to the constant intelligence updates he received in his earpiece and on the screen of his portable computer, Meredith knew that the battlefield situation was growing more desperate by the hour. Yet Colonel Baranov seemed interested only in demonstrating his personal — his racial — superiority.
Meredith was grateful to see Manny Martinez break away from his one-on-one with Taylor and head toward the worktable that had been set up as an intelligence planning cell.
Manny wore an inexplicably grand smile on his face, which hardly seemed to track with the prevailing atmosphere of physical and mental exhaustion.
"Excuse me, sir," Manny said to the potbellied Soviet colonel, who looked for all the world like the leader of an oompah band, his pointer waving like a baton. Then he turned to Meredith. "Merry, the old man wants you to listen in on a little powwow. Can you break away for a minute?"
Meredith felt like a schoolboy suddenly authorized to play hooky. He quickly made his excuses in Russian to the colonel, leaving his subordinate to suffer on in the name of the United States Army.
Squeezing between the tables, Meredith found that Manny's grin was contagious.
"What the hell are you smiling about, you silly bastard?" Meredith asked his friend.
Manny's smile opened even wider. "It's the food. You've got to try it."
"I have," Meredith said, puzzled. Although he intellectually understood the effort that had gone into the preparation of the buffet and the relative quality of the provisions, he could not believe that Manny really enjoyed the zakuski. His efforts to persuade other officers to eat had failed embarrassingly. "Come on, you're shitting me."
"Not me, brother. It's great food. Just ask the old man."
Meredith decided that it was all just a joke he'd missed, after all, and he let it go. Brushing past the last workstation, he caught the edge of an overlay on the rough wool of his trousers and tipped a number of markers onto the floor.
"Some quarterback you must've been," Manny said. Meredith and his friend hastily retrieved the fallen tools from amid the wasteland of computer printouts on the floor, apologizing to the bleary-looking captain whose work they had upset. When they arose, Colonel Taylor was standing before them, along with General Ivanov, Kozlov, and another Soviet whom Meredith recognized as Manny's counterpart. In a moment, Lucky Dave Heifetz marched up, along with the Soviet chief of operations.
Careful not to call attention to his maneuvering, Meredith shifted along the backfield so that he was not in the direct line of Kozlov's breath. The Soviet was a reasonably handsome man — until he opened his mouth, revealing broken, rotted teeth, the sight of which made a man wince.
The Russian's breath was easily the most powerful offensive weapon in the Soviet arsenal. Meredith felt sorry for Kozlov, since it was evident that he really was a first-rate officer, determined to do his damndest to make things work. But Meredith did not feel sufficiently sorry for him to stand too close.
As it was, the room stank and the air felt dead, heavily motionless. The fabric of the stiff old-fashioned Soviet uniforms worn by all had grown rougher still with dried sweat. Meredith was not certain his stomach could take Kozlov's halitosis at this time of the morning, without sleep, and with the Russians' rich, bad food clumped in his belly.
Taylor drew them all toward the map that lined the wall of the chamber, glancing toward Meredith to ensure that the intelligence officer was prepared to translate.
"It seems," Taylor began, "that our haste has accidentally created some minor confusion for our Soviet allies."
The translation was not difficult. Meredith knew precisely the tone Taylor wanted to strike, and it was exactly the right one. Whether dealing with street punks or Mexican bandits, with senators or Soviet generals, Taylor's ability to find not only the correct voice, but even the specific tone that best exploited his opposite number's preconceptions, never failed to impress Meredith.
What did the Soviets think of Taylor himself? Meredith wondered. Meredith had noted that few of the Soviet officers bore noticeable RD scarring. He knew that the Soviet Union had suffered a far higher percentage of plague casualties than had his own nation, but it appeared as though there were some code that prevented badly scarred survivors from attaining high rank. Meredith wondered if it was merely the old Russian military obsession with appearances at work in yet another form.
He tried to view Taylor afresh, as these strangers might see him. It was difficult to be objective, having worked with the man for so many years and feeling such a deep, if inarticulate affection for him. Even in the United States of 2020, Taylor was far more apt to be the object of prejudice, even of primitive fear, than a well-dressed, unscarred, full-fledged member of the establishment who just happened to wear skin the color of milk chocolate. Meredith wondered if the Russians would judge this man, too, solely by his appearance.
"… and we want to resolve all problems in an atmosphere of openness and good faith," Meredith translated.