Army General Ivanov listened to the easy flow of the black American's Russian, wondering where he had learned to speak the language so well. The Americans were full of surprises. And some of them were pleasant surprises — they were so willing, so confident, so quick. But other surprises were more difficult to digest. Such as this business about the dispersion of the support sites. The Americans' speech was very polite. But behind the courtesy they were adamant. Ivanov had already noticed the pattern. The Americans would give in on inconsequential points, but insist on having their own way in the more significant matters.
Ivanov was physically tired, and he was weary of arguing. All right, let them do what they wanted. And the Soviet Army would do what it wanted with its own forces. Let the Americans have their try. Ivanov would have liked to believe, to have faith, but he had experienced too much failure over too long a time. He doubted that a single regiment of these mystery-shrouded American wonder weapons would be enough to make a decisive difference. But he would be grateful for whatever they achieved. The situation was desperate, and he was haunted by the vision of going down in history as one of those Russian military commanders whose names were synonymous with disaster.
But who could say how much longer there would even be a Russian history? Look at the depth to which they had already sunk. Begging for help from the Americans….
Well, they, too, were living on borrowed time. Ivanov believed that the age of the white race was past, that the future belonged to the masses of Asia, and that the best one could hope for would be to hold back the tide a little longer.
Ivanov looked from American face to American face. How awkward they looked in their Soviet uniforms. This brutal-looking colonel — the man had to be some kind of monster inside as well as outside, or he would have availed himself of the fine American cosmetic surgery. And the one who looked like a Georgian playboy. Then there was the Israeli — Ivanov knew his type, the constipated sort who never smiled, never took a drink. You always had to watch the Jews. The Germans had not been able to manage them, nor had the Arabs, with their nuclear weapons and nerve gas. But the Jews had not been so smart after all — they had backed the American horse, when they should have bet on the Japanese. Then there was this black major who spoke such fine Russian. Ivanov believed that this American staff had been consciously selected, man by man, to convince the Russians of the internal solidarity of the American people, much as the staged photos of his youth had attempted to do with Soviet society, posing smiling Estonians and Ukrainians with Azerbaijanis and Tadzhiks. But the Americans were not fooling anyone, and Ivanov wondered how such a staff would fare in combat.
It had all been so different once, when he had been a young officer. Even a junior lieutenant had commanded respect. Then that man Gorbachev had come, with his reforms, his promises. And he had begun chipping away at the military. And ambitious men within the military had helped him. Ivanov himself had been convinced of the need for perestroika, caught up in the delusions of the times. So few of the promises had come true. People simply lost their respect, their fear. They wanted to live like West Europeans, like Americans. They did not understand the role of the Soviet Union, of Russia, in the world. They thought only of themselves. Then, as the country began to come apart, more sensible men had finally taken over. But it was too late. Ivanov was familiar with the theories— the inevitability of the decline of an economic model that had outlived its utility, the price of decades of overspending on defense, the oppressiveness of the system that stifled possibilities of growth…
Lies, lies, lies. Gorbachev and his cronies had betrayed the trust, they had given victory away. In the end, gutting the military had saved no one. The economy did not magically spring to life. Instead, conditions had become worse and worse. Shooting would have been too good for the men who had ruined the greatest country on earth.
Once the system had been spoiled, nothing else had worked, either. It was like trying to squeeze toothpaste back into the tube. Democracy. The word was barely worth laughing at. The Soviet Union had needed strength. In its place, the people had received promises, inequity, betrayal.
The decades during which Ivanov had gained his rank had been little more than a chronicle of decline, of insurgencies, of riots, of half-measures. His life had been squandered in a long twilight.
And now it had come to this. Civil war, invasion, collapse. And these Americans, who had come out of spite, for revenge.
As he settled the last details with these arrogant, overly confident men masquerading in the uniform that had clothed his life and dreams, Ivanov felt a tragic sense of loss toward his country's past, like a man in the worst of marriages remembering the girl he should have wed.
The staff meeting was breaking up. The Americans would go and finish their final preparations. Then they would enter the war. With their miraculous new weapons whose details they would not discuss even now.
Well, good luck to them. Ivanov hoped they would kill many of his country's enemies. Certainly, if confidence alone could kill, the Americans would do very well, indeed.
Perhaps they had very great secrets, even greater than Soviet intelligence suspected. But, alone among the Soviets and Americans in the room, General Ivanov also knew a secret. It was a terrible secret, one which the Soviet hierarchy had kept from everyone below Ivanov's rank, so as not to further demoralize the war effort. Not even poor Kozlov knew. But, Ivanov suspected, the Americans were soon going to find out.
8
"Perhaps…" Bouquette said, "we should slip off somewhere for a drink after all this. I do think we owe ourselves a break."
Daisy looked up from her notes. Clifton Bouquette stood above her, a bit too close. Her eyes scanned up the weave of his slacks, then along the silken breeding certificate of his tie. In these frantic days, when everyone else's shirt looked as though it had been worn hours too long, Bouquette's starched collar glowed with perfect whiteness. He was the sort of man who was born with a perfect knot in his tie, and now, at an age when other men had begun to soften toward incapability, when faces grew ashen with care, Bouquette stood easily, with a sportsman's elasticity, and his skin showed only the handsome damage of countless weekends spent sailing. When she first arrived in Washington, Daisy had been anxious to look up to, to believe in, men such as Clifton Reynard Bouquette, and the readiness of such a man to overlook his wife in order to spend even a few of his sought-after hours with a plain, if bright, young analyst had made her feel as though dreams — serious, grown-up dreams — really did come true in this city. She had felt that way for the first half-dozen affairs. Then it had all become routine, and the men with so many names had not needed to offer quite so many excuses for their absences, their inabilities, their growing inattention. She told herself that she was their equal, using them as sharply as they elected to use her, and she could not understand the feeling of desolation that had grown up around her professional success. Daisy Fitzgerald was a woman who could understand the course of nations, who could brilliantly intuit the march of events. But, she realized, she had never managed to understand men. Why, indeed, did a man such as Clifton Reynard Bouquette, deputy director of the Unified Intelligence Agency, wealthy in so many ways, married to a forbiddingly attractive woman not much older than Daisy, want to risk even the slightest embarrassment to sleep with a woman whose hair was never quite right and whose skin still broke out under stress or when she ate any of half of the good edible things in the world, a woman whose plain features had driven her to achievement? She remembered a workmate's laughing comment to the effect that Cliff Bouquette would crawl between the hind legs of anything female and breathing.