Well?” General Diggs looked at his subordinate.
“Well, sir,” Colonel Giusti said, “I think the cavalry squadron is in pretty good shape.” Like Diggs, Angelo Giusti was a career cavalryman. His job as commander of 1st Armored’s cavalry squadron (actually a battalion, but the cav had its own way of speaking) was to move out ahead of the division proper, locating the enemy and scouting out the land, being the eyes of Old Ironsides, but with enough combat power of its own to look after itself. A combat veteran of the Persian Gulf War, Giusti had smelled the smoke and seen the elephant. He knew what his job was, and he figured he had his troopers trained up about as well as circumstances in Germany allowed. He actually preferred the free-form play allowed by simulators to the crowded training fields of the Combat Maneuver Training Center, which was barely seventy-five square kilometers. It wasn’t the same as being out there in your vehicles, but neither was it restricted by time and distance, and on the global SimNet system you could play against a complete enemy battalion, even a brigade if you wanted your people to get some sweat in their play. Except for the bumpy-float sensation of driving your Abrams around (some tankers got motion sickness from that), it conveyed the complexity better than any place except the NTC at Fort Irwin in the California desert, or the comparable facility the Army had established for the Israelis in the Negev.
Diggs couldn’t quite read the younger officer’s mind, but he’d just watched the Quarter Horse move around with no lack of skill. They’d played against some Germans, and the Germans, as always, were pretty good at the war business—but not, today, as good as First Tanks’ cavalry troopers, who’d first outmaneuvered their European hosts, and then (to the surprise and distaste of the German brigadier who’d supervised the exercise) set an ambush that had cost them half a battalion of their Leos, as the Americans called the Leopard-II main battle tanks. Diggs would be having dinner with the brigadier later today. Even the Germans didn’t know night-fighting as well as the Americans did—which was odd, since their equipment was roughly comparable, and their soldiers pretty well trained ... but the German army was still largely a conscript army, most of whose soldiers didn’t have the time-in-service the Americans enjoyed.
In the wider exercise—the cavalry part had just been the “real” segment of a wider command post exercise, or CPX—Colonel Don Lisle’s 2nd Brigade was handling the fuller, if theoretical, German attack quite capably. On the whole, the Bundeswehr was not having a good day. Well, it no longer had the mission of protecting its country against a Soviet invasion, and with that had gone the rather furious support of the citizenry that the West German army had enjoyed for so many years. Now the Bundeswehr was an anachronism with little obvious purpose, and the occupier of a lot of valuable real estate for which Germans could think up some practical uses. And so the former West German army had been downsized and mainly trained to do peacekeeping duty, which, when you got down to it, was heavily armed police work. The New World Order was a peaceful one, at least so far as Europeans were concerned. The Americans had engaged in combat operations to the rather distant interest of the Germans, who, while they’d always had a healthy interest in war-fighting, were now happy enough that their interest in it was entirely theoretical, rather like a particularly intricate Hollywood production. It also forced them to respect America a little more than they would have preferred. But some things couldn’t be helped.
“Well, Angelo, I think your troopers have earned themselves a beer or two at the local Gasthauses. That envelopment you accomplished at zero-two-twenty was particularly adroit.”
Giusti grinned and nodded his appreciation. “Thank you, General. I’ll pass that one along to my S-3. He’s the one who thought it up.”
“Later, Angelo.”
“Roger that one, sir.” Lieutenant Colonel Giusti saluted his divisional commander on his way.
“Well, Duke?”
Colonel Masterman pulled a cigar out of his BDU jacket and lit it up. One nice thing about Germany was that you could always get good Cuban ones here. “I’ve known Angelo since Fort Knox. He knows his stuff, and he had his officers particularly well trained. Even had his own book on tactics and battle-drill printed up.”
“Oh?” Diggs turned. “Is it any good?”
“Not bad at all,” the G-3 replied. “I’m not sure that I agree with it all, but it doesn’t hurt to have everyone singing out of the same hymnal. His officers all think pretty much the same way. So, Angelo’s a good football coach. Sure enough he kicked the Krauts’ asses last night.” Masterman closed his eyes and rubbed his face. “These night exercises take it out of you.”
“How’s Lisle doing?”
“Sir, last time I looked, he had the Germans well contained. Our friends didn’t seem to know what he had around them. They were putzing around trying to gather information—short version, Giusti won the reconnaissance battle, and that decided things—again.”
“Again,” Diggs agreed. If there was any lesson out of the National Training Center, it was that one. Reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance. Find the enemy. Don’t let the enemy find you. If you pulled that off, it was pretty hard to lose. If you didn’t, it was very hard to win.
“How’s some sleep grab you, Duke?”
“It’s good to have a CG who looks after his troopers, mon Général.” Masterman was sufficiently tired that he didn’t even want a beer first.
And so with that decided, they headed for Diggs’s command UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter for the hop back to the divisional kazerne. Diggs particularly liked the four-point safety belt. It made it a lot easier to sleep sitting up.
One of the things I have to do today, Ryan told himself, is figure out what to do about the Chinese attempt on Sergey. He checked his daily briefing sheet. Robby was out west again. That was too bad. Robby was both a good sounding board and a source of good ideas. So, he’d talk it over with Scott Adler, if he and Scott both had holes in their day, and the Foleys. Who else? Jack wondered. Damn, whom else could he trust with this? If this one leaked to the press, there’d be hell to pay. Okay, Adler had to be there. He’d actually met that Zhang guy, and if some Chinese minister-type had owned a piece of this, then he’d be the one, wouldn’t he?
Probably. Not certainly, however. Ryan had been in the spook business too long to make that mistake. When you made certainty assumptions about things you weren’t really sure about, you frequently walked right into a stone wall headfirst, and that could hurt. Ryan punched a button on his desk. “Ellen?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Later today, I need Scott Adler and the Foleys in here. It’ll take about an hour. Find me a hole in the schedule, will you?”
“About two-thirty, but it means putting off the Secretary of Transportation’s meeting about the air-traffic-control proposals.”
“Make it so, Ellen. This one’s important,” he told her.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
It was by no means perfect. Ryan preferred to work on things as they popped into his mind, but as President you quickly learned that you served the schedule, not the other way around. Jack grimaced. So much for the illusion of power.
Mary Pat Foley strolled into her office, as she did nearly every morning, and as always turned on her computer—if there was one thing she’d learned from SORGE, it was to turn the damned thing all the way off when she wasn’t using it. There was a further switch on her phone line that manually blocked it, much as if she’d pulled the plug out of the wall. She flipped that, too. It was an old story for an employee of an intelligence service. Sure, she was paranoid, but was she paranoid enough?
Sure enough, there was another e-mail from
[email protected] Chet Nomuri was still at work, and this download took a mere twenty-three seconds. With the download complete, she made sure she’d backed it up, then clobbered it out of her in-box so that no copies remained even in the ether world. Next, she printed it all up and called down for Joshua Sears to do the translations and some seat-of-th
e-pants analysis. SORGE had become routine in handling if not in importance, and by a quarter to nine she had the translation in hand.
“Oh, Lord. Jack’s just going to love this one,” the DDO observed at her desk. Then she walked the document to Ed’s larger office facing the woods. That’s when she found out about the afternoon trip to the White House.
Mary Abbot was the official White House makeup artist. It was her job to make the President look good on TV, which meant making him look like a cheap whore in person, but that couldn’t be helped. Ryan had learned not to fidget too much, which made her job easier, but she knew he was fighting the urge, which both amused and concerned her.
“How’s your son doing at school?” Ryan asked.
“Just fine, thank you, and there’s a nice girl he’s interested in.”
Ryan didn’t comment on that. He knew that there had to be some boy or boys at St. Mary’s who found his Sally highly interesting (she was pretty, even to disinterested eyes), but he didn’t want to think about that. It did make him grateful for the Secret Service, however. Whenever Sally went on a date, there would be at least a chase car full of armed agents close by, and that would take the starch out of most teenaged boys. So, the USSS did have its uses, eh? Girl children, Jack thought, were God’s punishment on you for being a man. His eyes were scanning his briefing sheets for the mini-press conference. The likely questions and the better sorts of answers to give to them. It seemed very dishonest to do it this way, but some foreign heads of government had the question prescreened so that the answers could be properly canned. Not a bad idea in the abstract, Jack thought, but the American media would spring for that about as quickly as a coyote would chase after a whale.
“There,” Mrs. Abbot said, as she finished touching up his hair. Ryan stood, looked in the mirror, and grimaced as usual.
“Thank you, Mary,” he managed to say.
“You’re welcome, Mr. President.”
And Ryan walked out, crossing the hall from the Roosevelt Room to the Oval Office, where the TV equipment was set up. The reporters stood when he entered, as the kids at St. Matthew’s had stood when the priest came into class. But in third grade, the kids asked easier questions. Jack sat down in a rocking swivel chair. Kennedy had done something similar to that, and Arnie thought it a good idea for Jack as well. The gentle rocking that a man did unconsciously in the chair gave him a homey look, the spin experts all thought—Jack didn’t know that, and knowing it would have caused him to toss the chair out the window, but Arnie did and he’d eased the President into it merely by saying it looked good, and getting Cathy Ryan to agree. In any case, SWORDSMAN sat down, and relaxed in the comfortable chair, which was the other reason Arnie had foisted it on him, and the real reason why Ryan had agreed. It was comfortable.
“We ready?” Jack asked. When the President asked that, it usually meant Let’s get this fucking show on the road! But Ryan thought it was just a question.
Krystin Matthews was there to represent NBC. There were also reporters from ABC and Fox, plus a print reporter from the Chicago Tribune. Ryan had come to prefer these more intimate press conferences, and the media went along with it because the reporters were assigned by lot, which made it fair, and everyone had access to the questions and answers. The other good thing from Ryan’s perspective was that a reporter was less likely to be confrontational in the Oval Office than in the raucous locker-room atmosphere of the pressroom, where the reporters tended to bunch together in a mob and adopt a mob mentality.
“Mr. President,” Krystin Matthews began. “You’ve recalled both the trade delegation and our ambassador from Beijing. Why was that necessary?”
Ryan rocked a little in the chair. “Krystin, we all saw the events in Beijing that so grabbed the conscience of the world, the murder of the cardinal and the minister, followed by the roughing-up—to use a charitable term for it—of the minister’s widow and some members of the congregation.”
He went on to repeat the points he’d made in his previous press conference, making particular note of the Chinese government’s indifference to what had happened.
“One can only conclude that the Chinese government doesn’t care. Well, we care. The American people care. And this administration cares. You cannot take the life of a human being as casually as though you are swatting an insect. The response we received was unsatisfactory, and so, I recalled our ambassador for consultations.”
“But the trade negotiations, Mr. President,” the Chicago Tribune broke in.
“It is difficult for a country like the United States of America to do business with a nation which does not recognize human rights. You’ve seen for yourself what our citizens think of all this. I believe you will find that they find those murders as repellent as I do, and, I would imagine, as you do yourself.”
“And so you will not recommend to Congress that we normalize trading relations with China?”
Ryan shook his head. “No, I will not so recommend, and even if I did, Congress would rightly reject such a recommendation.”
“At what time might you change your position on this issue?”
“At such time as China enters the world of civilized nations and recognizes the rights of its common people, as all other great nations do.”
“So you are saying that China today is not a civilized country?”
Ryan felt as though he’d been slapped across the face with a cold, wet fish, but he smiled and went on. “Killing diplomats is not a civilized act, is it?”
“What will the Chinese think of that?” Fox asked.
“I cannot read their minds. I do call upon them to make amends, or at least to consider the feelings and beliefs of the rest of the world, and then to reconsider their unfortunate action in that light.”
“And what about the trade issues?” This one came from ABC.
“If China wants normalized trade relations with the United States, then China will have to open its markets to us. As you know, we have a law on the books here called the Trade Reform Act. That law allows us to mirror-image other countries’ trade laws and practices, so that whatever tactics are used against us, we can then use those very same tactics with respect to trade with them. Tomorrow, I will direct the Department of State and the Department of Commerce to set up a working group to implement TRA with respect to the People’s Republic,” President Ryan announced, making the story for the day, and a bombshell it was.
Christ, Jack,” the Secretary of the Treasury said in his office across the street. He was getting a live feed from the Oval Office. He lifted his desk phone and punched a button. ”I want a read of the PRC’s current cash accounts, global,” he told one of his subordinates from New York. Then his phone rang.
“Secretary of State on Three,” his secretary told him over the intercom. SecTreas grunted and picked up the phone.
“Yeah, I saw it too, Scott.”
So, Yuriy Andreyevich, how did it go?” Clark asked. It had taken over a week to set up, and mainly because General Kirillin had spent a few hours on the pistol range working on his technique. Now he’d just stormed into the officers’ club bar looking as though he’d taken one in the guts.
“Is he a Mafia assassin?”
Chavez had himself a good laugh at that. “General, he came to us because the Italian police wanted to get him away from the Mafia. He got in the way of a mob assassination, and the local chieftain made noises about going after him and his family. What did he get you for?”
“Fifty euros,” Kirillin nearly spat.
“You were confident going in, eh?” Clark asked. “Been there, done that.”
“Got the fuckin’ T-shirt,” Ding finished the statement with a laugh. And fifty euros was a dent even in the salary of a Russian three-star.
“Three points, in a five-hundred-point match. I scored four ninety-three!”
“Ettore only got four ninety-six?” Clark asked. “Jesus, the boy’s slowing down.” He slid a glass in front of the Russian general o
fficer.
“He’s drinking more over here,” Chavez observed.
“That must be it.” Clark nodded. The Russian general officer was not, however, the least bit amused.
“Falcone is not human,” Kirillin said, gunning down his first shot of vodka.
“He could scare Wild Bill Hickok, and that’s a fact. And you know the worst part about it?”
“What is that, Ivan Sergeyevich?”
“He’s so goddamned humble about it, like it’s fucking normal to shoot like that. Jesus, Sam Snead was never that good with a five-iron.”
“General,” Domingo said after his second vodka of the evening. The problem with being in Russia was that you tended to pick up the local customs, and one of those was drinking. “Every man on my team is an expert shot, and by expert, 1 mean close to being on his country’s Olympic team, okay? Big Bird’s got us all beat, and none of us are used to losing any more’n you are. But I’ll tell you, I’m goddamned glad he’s on my team.” Just then, Falcone walked through the door. “Hey, Ettore, come on over!”
He hadn’t gotten any shorter. Ettore towered over the diminutive Chavez, and still looked like a figure from an E1 Greco painting. “General,” he said in greeting to Kirillin. “You shoot extremely well.”
“Not so good as you, Falcone,” the Russian responded.
The Italian cop shrugged. “I had a lucky day.”
“Sure, guy,” Clark reacted, as he handed Falcone a shot glass.
“I’ve come to like this vodka,” Falcone said on gunning it down. “But it affects my aim somewhat.”
“Yeah, Ettore.” Chavez chuckled. “The general told us you blew four points in the match.”
“You mean you have done better than this?” Kirillin demanded.
“He has,” Clark answered. “I watched him shoot a possible three weeks ago. That was five hundred points, too.”
“That was a good day,” Falcone agreed. “I had a good night’s sleep beforehand and no hangover at all.”