You silly bastard, he told himself. It's just a machine.
And machines don't suffer.
Savitsky ignored him now. The Soviet was spitting out a litany of Russian words that could only be obscenities. He had bent himself over the control panel in an attitude of such tension and fury that Ryder expected the man to lash out with his fists.
The monitor registered a craze of green lines.
There is pain in these rooms, Ryder thought. He tried to catch himself, to tell himself yet again that machines do not feel pain, but as he watched the tiny captive brain he imagined he was watching a grimacing, sweating, agonizing thing.
He lifted his hand toward Savitsky, whose face had become almost unrecognizable.
Suddenly, the entire bank of computers whirled to life. The eruption of corollary light from monitors and flow screens indicated that the machines were working frantically, pushed nearly to their capacity. The control booth dazzled with light issuing from all angles in staccato bursts.
Savitsky remained bent over the dial, covering it with hands like claws.
The main language flow reader began to flash, announcing a message from another world. Then the flow of characters began, in the peculiar language of top-end Japanese computers, repeating the same simple message over and over again:
"Please. Stop."
The data take was so voluminous that it quickly overloaded several of the Soviet storage reservoirs, and it kept coming, a deluge of information. But the two interrogators gave no sign of elation. They simply sat in the control booth without speaking to each other, without even acknowledging the other's presence. Each man was trapped in his own private weariness, his own confusion. Soon, linkages between data banks would need to be established, and superiors would need to be informed. The vast military bureaucracies would need to be moved to take advantage of the incredible range of opportunities that now presented themselves. But neither man was quite ready to start.
Finally, Ryder forced himself to climb out of the theoretical swamp through which he had been slopping, to consider the practical applications. There was a possibility of literally taking the enemy's war away from them. Their artillery could be directed to fire automatically on their own positions, their aircraft could be directed to attack their own troops. An entirely false intelligence picture could be painted for the enemy commander, lulling him to sleep until it was too late. The possible variations were endless. And there was only one catch: someone would have to sit down at a fully operative Japanese command console — the higher the level, the better — to infiltrate their network.
Ryder was confident. Nothing seemed impossible anymore. He felt his energy returning, compounding. He began to think about the best way to present the information to his superiors, to help them see the full possibilities, to get things going.
"Nick," he said. When Savitsky did not respond, Ryder touched the man's knee. "Nick, we've got to get moving."
The Soviet snorted. He looked exhausted, as if he had not slept for days, for years. He had given everything he had, and now he sat drained, his tunic sweat-soaked.
There would be a thousand problems, Ryder realized. But he was confident that each could be solved.
Savitsky blinked as though something was bothering his eyes, then he looked away. His limbs, his hands appeared lifeless.
"Yes," he said.
Looking at his weary companion, Ryder suddenly had a sense of things far greater than any single man, of things beyond words, of worlds in motion and the power of history. The hour of the Americans had come.
11
General Noburu Kabata sipped his Scotch, marveling at his unhappiness. Professionally, he had every reason to be pleased. The offensive continued to make splendid progress. The Soviets were all but finished east of the Urals, and they were in serious trouble between the Urals and the Caucasus. None of the problems within the friendly forces appeared insurmountable, and there was no apparent reason why all of the military goals of the operation should not be fulfilled. This was a time for joy or, at least, for satisfaction. For, even though his status was nominally that of a contract adviser to the Islamic Union and the government of Iran, this was his operation, the highlight of his career, and a triumph for Japanese policy. Yet, here he was drinking Scotch on an empty stomach, in the morning.
His father would not have approved. His father, who had pushed his eldest son to become a master of the golf club, rather than of the sword, as had been the family tradition. In Japan, he remembered his father saying, there was nothing more important than the ability to play a good round of golf — even for a general. And he remembered the vacation on which he had accompanied his father, so very many years before, to the golf courses of Pebble Beach, in California. He remembered the perfect greens along the stony, splashing coast, the remarkable private homes set among the cypresses, and his father's quiet comment that someday these careless, irresponsible Americans would be their servants.
His father had loved Scotch. He had trained himself to appreciate it, just as he later conditioned his son to the gentleman's drink of choice. So much was handed down. The tradition of bespoke suits from H. Huntsman & Sons of 11 Saville Row, the preference for the links of Scotland, the family military tradition that was older than the game of golf or the patent of any tailor shop. He knew his father would have been very proud of his military record, graced with achievements of a sort denied the older generation. But the elder general would not have approved of the consumption of alcohol in the morning, on duty.
Noburu consoled himself with the thought that he never lost control with alcohol. The drink was merely to better his temper in the face of yet another frustrating meeting with the foreign generals who commanded the armies executing his plan. Shemin, the Iraqi-born commander of the Islamic Union's forces, was a sharp politician, occasionally helpful in mediating disputes with the Iranians. But he was no soldier. Merely a strongman's brother, on whose shoulders his family had sewn epaulets. Shemin would have been far more at home plotting a coup than in planning a battle. On the positive side, Shemin usually accepted Noburu's plans and carefully worded orders, even when he did not quite understand them. But, on his bad days, Shemin struck Noburu as a typical Arab — illogical, apt to become fixated on the wrong thing at the wrong time, dishonest, subject to emotional outbursts, and very difficult to control when he was not in the right mood.
Tanjani, the Iranian commander, was worse. As fanatical as he was inept, he liked nothing better than to rear like a snake and spit poisonous accusations at Noburu. Nothing was ever good enough for the Iranian, who did not even begin to understand the physical principles that made the weapons that Japan had put into his hands function. The Iranian grasped only what was immediately visible to him and seemed to have no sense at all of the incredibly complex levels of warfare carried out in the electromagnetic spectrum. Of course, the others hardly understood the business themselves. Even Biryan, the commander of the Central Asian forces in revolt against the Soviet yoke, had only a nebulous understanding of the invisible battlefields flowing around the physical combat on the ground. Biryan was the most professional of the three subordinate commanders, the best schooled in military affairs. But he was also the most relentlessly savage, a man who could never drink his fill of blood. Noburu hated dealing with them, and their meetings always left him feeling soiled.