Greatness. Power. Was it too easy to confuse the two concepts? And what was greatness without honor? The greatness of a barbarian.
He thought again of the Americans, almost wistfully this time. What a greatness theirs had been! A confused, exuberant, self-tormenting, slovenly, self-righteous, brilliant greatness… faltering ultimately into sloth, decadence, and folly. The Japanese people, humiliated by the kindness of their enemies, had had no choice but to humiliate those enemies in turn.
Suddenly, the illogic of his position struck him. Weren't the central Asians, the Iranians, and the Arabs right after all? What good did mercy do? The safest thing was always the complete massacre, the sowing of the ground with salt.
Enough. His duty now was to finish the mission entrusted to him. Afterward, it would be equally his duty to resign in protest. Not publicly, but quietly, stating his reasons only to those at the heights of power. Even though he knew in advance it would do no good.
We are a bloody people, he told himself.
The gods were laughing, of course. He had considered himself safe from the threatened moral dilemma as the offensive rolled northward, with the Scramblers remaining unused at a succession of closely guarded airfields. Then his allies had begun supplementing Japanese technology with their chemical attacks. No, Noburu realized, the ancients were correct. A man could not avoid his fate.
Noburu remembered the joy of his first combat mission. It seemed at once long ago and only yesterday. Riding along with the South Africans as a technical adviser on the new gunships. B Squadron, he remembered, Natal Light Horse. They had lifted off from their hide positions near Lubumbashi, rising into the perfect morning light, one squadron among many dispersed from southern Zaire down into the Zambian copper belt, erupting suddenly in a coordinated attack on the witless Americans. His squadron had been the first to make contact, and he had been at the controls himself, correcting the inept mistakes of a young lieutenant. They had easily swept the Americans from the sky. He remembered the pathetic attempts at evasive maneuvers, then the Americans' hopeless aerial charge. It had been a wonderful feeling, the richest of all elations, to watch the old American Apache helicopters flash and fall to earth. It had not occurred to him until years afterward that there had been living, thinking, feeling men in those ambushed machines. He had known only the joy of success in battle, something so elementary it could not be civilized out of a man. Never before and never afterward had he been so proud to be Japanese.
But he had carried those dead American pilots with him, unknowingly. They had waited deep inside of him as he garnered new ranks and fresh honors. Then, unexpectedly, unreasonably, their ghosts had begun to appear to him. His dreams were not the dreams of amorous regret that visited the sleep of healthy men. Nor were they the dreams of a true soldier. They were the dreams of a coward. His gunship sailed the morning sky, the blue, vast African sky, again. But this time he was the hunted. He could see the faces of the Americans behind the windscreens of their gunships, far too closely. They were the faces of dead men. Flying around him, mocking him, teasing him. Drawing out his agony until they grew tired of the game and decided to finish him off, laughing, howling for revenge.
"Sir," Akiro called suddenly, in his startling military bark. "This is interesting."
Noburu shook off his demons. He rose and crossed the room to where his aide sat intently before the screen of the commander's workstation. There was no trace of the Scotch in his walk. All that remained of the drink was a sharpness in his stomach. I'm growing old, Noburu thought.
"What is it?"
"Have a look at this imagery, sir. It's the Soviet industrial complex outside the city of Omsk."
Noburu considered the crisp picture on the screen. Like all of his contemporaries, he had learned to read imagery from space-based collectors at a glance. He saw rows of industrial halls and warehouses, with the active heat sources indicating a very low level of activity. Everything looked antique, monuments to decline. He could detect nothing of evident military importance.
"You'll have to explain it to me," Noburu said. "I see nothing."
"Yes," Akiro said. "In a sense, that's the point." He gave the terminal a sharp verbal command, and the industrial landscape faded, then reappeared. Noburu noted the earlier date in the legend of the new picture. In this previously harvested imagery, the buildings were cold, unused.
"This image was recorded just before the start of the offensive," Akiro said. "You see, sir? No activity. The industrial park had fallen into complete disuse. Then, yesterday, as our forces approached the border of western Siberia, we scanned the area again." He gave another quick command. The first image reappeared. "And this is what we found. Suddenly, there are heat sources in the derelict buildings. But there are no signs of renewed production. Only these muffled heat sources. They were so faint that we barely picked them up. This image has been greatly intensified."
"Have we X-rayed the site?" Noburu asked.
Akiro smiled. After another brief command, an X-ray image appeared.
Now there was nothing in evidence except the skeletons of unused machinery, vacant production lines. Emptiness.
Noburu got the point. Someone was going to great lengths to use very sophisticated technical camouflage means to hide whatever was dispersed throughout the mammoth complex.
He and Akiro understood each other.
"If the weather had not taken such a cold turn, we could have missed it entirely," Akiro said. "As it was, the imagery analyst almost passed over it."
"How large a force does intelligence believe is in there?"
"It is, of course, difficult to say. The camouflage techniques are remarkably good — this must be the very best equipment the Soviets possess. In any case, intelligence believes it would be easy to hide an entire armored division in there. Perhaps more."
Noburu reviewed the geography in his head. The force could be employed to defend Omsk. But, given the lengths to which the Soviets had gone to hide it, the formation would more likely be used as a counterattack force, probably on the Petropavlovsk front.
"Well," Noburu said, "even a fresh division won't make much of a difference. It would take at least an army-level formation to begin to shore up their lines around Petropavlovsk. And, given the backwardness of their military technology, even a full Soviet army could not sustain a deep attack against us now."
"We could, of course, simply catch them as they attempt to deploy," Akiro said.
Noburu waved his hand. "No. There's no point in taking chances. How current was that image?"
"We just scanned the area during the night."
Noburu thought for a moment, reexamining the details of the battle map he held in his memory. "Even if they moved immediately, they could not influence the battle in less than forty-eight hours. The distance is too great. I'll tell Yameshima to hit them tomorrow. There's no point in disrupting today's schedule. But tomorrow we'll take care of whatever the Soviets have hidden in there." He stared at the screen a moment longer. "Really, quite a remarkable effort. It almost seems unfair that none of them will ever reach the battlefield."
"The weapons are no good," General Adi Tanjani told Noburu in English, which was the only language all of the commanders shared in common. "They are breaking.
Noburu looked at the man, trying not to reveal the slightest hint of his disdain. He shifted his glance from the Iranian to General Shemin of the Islamic Union, then to General Biryan, late of the Soviet Indigenous Forces, Central Asia, and now the senior military man in the Free Islamic Republic of Kazakhstan. To Noburu, they looked like a gang of thieves. Finally, Noburu met the eyes of Colonel Piet Kloete, another "contract employee," who was the staff man responsible for the stable of South African pilots who flew the most sophisticated intermediate-range Japanese systems. Noburu shared many of the South African's views, not least of which was disgust at the illogic and ineptitude of these men to whom they were nominally subordinate. Yet, ultimately, Kloete had the limitations of the mercenary, just as his nation had those same limitations on a grander level.