THE REST OF THE DAY WAS a blur. Even while living through it, Ryan knew that he'd never really remember more than snippets. His first experience with computers had been as a student at Boston College. Before the age of personal computing, he'd used the dumbest of dumb terminals—a teletype—to communicate with a mainframe somewhere, along with other BC students, and more still from other local schools. That had been called "time-sharing," just one more term from a bygone age when computers had cost a million or so dollars for performance that now could be duplicated in the average man's watch. But the term still applied to the American presidency, Jack learned, where the ability to pursue a single thought through from beginning to end was the rarest of luxuries, and work consisted of following various intellectual threads from one separate meeting to the next, like keeping track of a whole group of continuing TV series from episode to episode, trying not to confuse one with another, and knowing that avoiding that error was totally impossible.
After dismissing Murray and Price, it had begun in earnest.
Ryan's introduction began with a national-security briefing delivered by one of the national intelligence officers assigned to the White House staff. Here, over a period of twenty-six minutes, he learned what he already knew because of the job he'd held until the previous day. But he had to sit through it anyway, if for no other reason than to get a feel for the man who would be one of his daily briefing team. They were all different. Each one had an individual perspective, and Ryan had to understand the nuances peculiar to the separate voices he'd be hearing.
"So, nothing on the horizon for now?" Jack asked.
"Nothing we see at the National Security Council, Mr. President. You know the potential trouble spots as well as I do, of course, and those change on a day-to-day basis." The man hedged with the grace of someone who'd been dancing to this particular brand of music for years. Ryan's face didn't change, only because he'd seen it before. A real intelligence officer didn't fear death, didn't fear finding his wife in bed with his best friend, didn't fear any of the normal vicissitudes of life. A national intelligence officer did fear being found wrong on anything he said in his official capacity. To avoid that was simple, however: you never took a real stand on any single thing. It was a disease not limited to elected officials, after all. Only the President had to take a stand, and it was his good fortune to have such trained experts to supply him with the information he needed, wasn't it?
"Let me tell you something," Ryan said after a few seconds of reflection.
"What is that, sir?" the NIO asked cautiously.
"I don't just want to hear what you know. I also want to hear what you and your people think. You are responsible for what you know, but I'll take the heat for acting on what you think. I've been there and done that, okay?"
"Of course, Mr. President." The man allowed himself a smile that masked his terror at the prospect. "I'll pass that along to my people."
"Thank you." Ryan dismissed the man, knowing then and there that he needed a National Security Advisor he could trust, and wondering where he'd get one.
The door opened as though by magic to let the NIO out—a Secret Service agent had done that, having watched through the spy hole for most of the briefing. The next in was a DOD briefing team.
The senior man was a two-star who handed over a plastic card.
"Mr. President, you need to put this in your wallet."
Jack nodded, knowing what it was before his hands touched the orange plastic. It looked like a credit card, but on it was a series of number groups….
"Which one?" Ryan asked.
"You decide, sir."
Ryan did so, reading off the third such group twice. There were two commissioned officers with the general, a colonel and a major, both of whom wrote down the number group he'd selected and read it back to him twice. President Ryan now had the ability to order the release of strategic nuclear weapons.
"Why is this necessary?" he asked. "We trashed the last ballistic weapons last year."
"Mr. President, we still have cruise missiles which can be armed with W-80 warheads, plus B-61 gravity bombs assigned to our bomber fleet. We need your authorization to enable the Permissible Action Links—the PALs—and the idea is that we enable them as early as possible, just in case—"
Ryan completed the sentence: "I get taken out early."
You're really important now, Jack, a nasty little voice told him. Now you can initiate a nuclear attack. "I hate those goddamned things. Always have."
"You aren't supposed to like them, sir," the general sympathized. "Now, as you know, the Marines have the VMH-1 helicopter squadron that's always ready to get you out of here and to a place of safety at a moment's notice, and…"
Ryan listened to the rest while his mind wondered if he should do what Jimmy Carter had done at this point: Okay, let's see, then. Tell them I want them to pick me up NOW. Which presidential command had turned into a major embarrassment for a lot of Marines. But he couldn't do that now, could he? It would get out that Ryan was a paranoid fool, not someone who wanted to see if the system really worked the way people said it would. Besides, today VMH-1 would definitely be spun up, wouldn't it?
The fourth member of the briefing team was an Army warrant officer in civilian clothes who carried a quite ordinary-looking briefcase known as "the football," inside of which was a binder, inside of which was the attack plan—actually a whole set of them…
"Let me see it." Ryan pointed. The warrant hesitated, then unlocked the case and handed over the navy blue binder, which Ryan flipped open.
"Sir, we haven't changed it since—"
The first section, Jack saw, was labeled MAJOR ATTACK OPTION. It showed a map of Japan, many of whose cities were marked with multicolored dots. The legend at the bottom showed what the dots meant in terms of delivered megatonnage; probably another page would quantify the predicted deaths. Ryan opened the binder rings and removed the whole section. "I want these pages burned. I want this MAO eliminated immediately." That merely meant that it would be filed away in some drawer in Pentagon War Plans, and also in Omaha. Things like this never died.
"Sir, we have not yet confirmed that the Japanese have destroyed all of their launchers, nor have we confirmed the neutralization of their weapons. You see—"
"General, that's an order," Ryan said quietly. "I can give them, you know."
The man's back braced to attention. "Yes, Mr. President."
Ryan flipped through the rest of the binder. Despite his previous job, what he found was a revelation. Jack had always avoided too-intimate knowledge of the damned things. He'd never expected them to be used. After the terrorist incident in Denver and all the horror that had swept the surface of the planet in its aftermath, statesmen across continents and political beliefs had indulged themselves in a collective think about the weapons under their control. Even during the shooting war with Japan just ended, Ryan had known that somewhere, some team of experts had concocted a plan for a nuclear retaliatory strike, but he'd concentrated his efforts at making it unnecessary, and it was a source of considerable pride to the new President that he'd never even contemplated implementing the plan whose summary was still in his left hand. LONG RIFLE, he saw, was the code name. Why did the names have to be like that, virile and exciting, as though for something that one could be proud of?
"What's this one? LIGHT SWITCH…?"
"Mr. President," the general answered, "that's a method of using an EMP attack. Electromagnetic pulse. If you explode a device at very high altitude, there's nothing—no air, actually—to absorb the initial energy of the detonation and convert it into mechanical energy—no shock wave, that is. As a result all the energy goes out in its original electromagnetic form. The resulting energy surge is murder on power and telephone lines. We always had a bunch of weapons fused for high-altitude burst in our SIOPs for the Soviet Union. Their telephone system was so primitive that it would have been easy to destroy. It's a cheap mission-kill, won't really hurt anybody on the ground."
"I see." Ryan closed the binder and handed it back to the warrant officer, who immediately locked the now-lighter document away. "I take it there's nothing going on which is likely to require a nuclear strike of any kind?"
"Correct, Mr. President."
"So, what's the point of having this man sitting outside my office all the time?"
"You can't predict all possible contingencies, can you, sir?" the general asked. It must have been difficult for him to deliver the line with a straight face, Ryan realized, as soon as the shock went away.
"I guess not," a chastised President replied.
THE WHITE HOUSE Protocol Office was headed by a lady named Judy Simmons, who'd been seconded to the White House staff from the State Department four months earlier. Her office in the basement of the building had been busy since just after midnight, when she'd arrived from her home in Burke, Virginia. Her thankless job was to prepare arrangements for what would be the largest state funeral in American history, a task on which over a hundred staff members had already kibitzed, and it was not yet lunch time.
The list of all the dead still had to be compiled, but from careful examination of the videotapes it was largely known who was in the chamber, and there was biographical information on all of them—married or single, religion, etc. — from which to make the necessary, if preliminary, plans. Whatever was finally decided, Jack would be the master of the grim ceremony, and had to be kept informed of every step of the planning. A funeral for thousands, Ryan thought, most of whom he hadn't known, for most of whose as yet unrecovered bodies waited wives and husbands and children.
"National Cathedral," he saw, turning the page. The approximate numbers of religious affiliations had been compiled. That would determine the clergy to take the various functions in the ecumenical religious service.
"That's where such ceremonies are usually carried out, Mr. President," a very harried official confirmed. "There will not be room for all of the remains" — she didn't say that one White House staffer had suggested an outdoor memorial service at RFK Stadium in order to accommodate all the victims—"but there will be room for the President and Mrs. Durling, plus a representative sampling of the congressional victims. We've contacted eleven foreign governments on the question of the diplomats who were present. We also have a preliminary list of foreign-government representatives who will be coming in to attend the ceremony." She handed over that sheet as well.
Ryan scanned it briefly. It meant that after the memorial service he'd be meeting «informally» with numerous chiefs of state to conduct «informal» business. He'd need a briefing page for each meeting, and in addition to whatever they all might ask or want, every one would be checking him out. Jack knew how that worked. All over the world, presidents, prime ministers, and a few lingering dictators would now be reading briefing documents of their own—who was this John Patrick Ryan, and what can we expect of him? He wondered if they had a better idea of the answer than he did. Probably not. Their NIOs wouldn't be all that different from his, after all. And so a raft of them would come over on government jets, partly to show respect for President Durling and the American government, partly to eyeball the new American President, partly for domestic political consumption at home, and partly because it was expected that they should do so. And so this event, horrific as it was for uncounted thousands, was just one more mechanical exercise in the world of politics. Jack wanted to cry out in rage, but what else was there to do? The dead were dead, and all his grief could not bring them back, and the business of his country and others would go on.
"Have Scott Adler go over this, will you?" Somebody would have to determine how much time he should spend with the official visitors, and Ryan wasn't qualified to do that.
"Yes, Mr. President."
"What sort of speeches will I have to deliver?" Jack asked.
"We have our people working on that for you. You should have preliminary drafts by tomorrow afternoon," Mrs. Simmons replied.
President Ryan nodded and slid the papers into his out-pile. When the Chief of Protocol left, a secretary came in—he didn't know this lady's name—with a pile of telegrams, the leftovers from Eighth and I that he hadn't gotten to, plus another sheet of paper that showed his activities for the day, prepared without his input or assistance. He was about to grumble about that when she spoke.
"We have over ten thousand telegrams and e-mails from—well, from citizens," she told him.
"Saying what?"
"Mainly that they're praying for you."
"Oh." Somehow that came as a surprise, and a humbling one at that. But would God listen?
Jack went back to reading the official messages, and the first day went on.
THE COUNTRY HAD essentially come to a halt, even as its new President struggled to come to terms with his new job. Banks and financial markets were closed, as were schools and many businesses. All the television networks had moved their broadcast headquarters to the various Washington bureaus in a haphazard process that had them all working together. A gang of cameras sited around the Hill kept up a continuous feed of recovery operations, while reporters had to keep talking, lest the airwaves be filled with silence. Around eleven that morning, a crane removed the remains of the 747's tail, which was deposited on a large flatbed trailer for transport to a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base. That would be the site for what was called the "crash investigation," for want of a better term, and cameras tracked the vehicle as it threaded its way along the streets. Two of the engines went out shortly thereafter in much the same way.
Various «experts» helped fill the silence, speculating on what had happened and how. This was difficult for everyone involved, as there had been few leaks as yet— those who were trying to find out what had happened were too busy to talk with reporters on or off the record, and though the journalists couldn't say it, their most fertile source of leaks lay in ruin before thirty-four cameras. That gave the experts little to say. Witnesses were interviewed for their recollections—there was no tape of the inbound aircraft at all, much to the surprise of everyone. The tail number of the aircraft was known—it could hardly be missed, painted as it was on the wreckage of the aircraft, and that was as easily checked by reporters as by federal authorities. The ownership of the aircraft by Japan Airlines was immediately confirmed, along with the very day the aircraft had rolled out of the Boeing plant near Seattle. Officials of that company submitted to interviews, and along the way it was determined that the 747–400 (PIP) aircraft weighed just over two hundred tons empty, a number doubled with the mass of fuel, passengers, and baggage it could pull into the air. A pilot with United Airlines who was familiar with the aircraft explained to two of the networks how a pilot could approach Washington and then execute the death dive, while a Delta colleague did the same with the others. Both airmen were mistaken in some of the particulars, none of them important.
"But the Secret Service is armed with antiaircraft missiles, isn't it?" one anchor asked.
"If you've got an eighteen-wheeler heading for you at sixty miles an hour, and you shoot out one of the tires on the trailer, that doesn't stop the truck, does it?" the pilot answered, noting the look of concentrated intelligence on the face of a highly paid journalist who understood little more than what appeared on his TelePrompTer. "Three hundred tons of aircraft doesn't just stop, okay?"
"So, there was no way to stop it?" the anchor asked with a twisted face.
"None at all." The pilot could see that the reporter didn't understand, but he couldn't come up with anything to clarify matters further.
The director, in his control room off of Nebraska Avenue, changed cameras to follow a pair of Guardsmen bringing another body down the steps. An assistant director was keeping an eye on that set of cameras, trying to maintain a running tally of the number of bodies removed. It was now known that the bodies of President and Mrs. Durling had been recovered and were at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for autopsy—required by law for wrongful death—and disposition. At network headquarters in New York, every foot of videotape of or about Durling was being organized and spliced for presentation throughout the day. Political colleagues were being sought out and interviewed. Psychologists were taken on to explain how the Durling children could deal with the trauma, and then expanded their horizons to talk about the impact of the event on the country as a whole, and how people could deal with it. About the only thing not examined on the television news was the spiritual aspect; that many of the victims had believed in God and attended church from time to time was not worthy of air time, though the presence of many people in churches was deemed newsworthy enough for three minutes on one network—and then, because each was constantly monitoring the others for ideas, that segment was copied by the others over the next few hours.
IT ALL CAME down to this, really, Jack knew. The numbers only added individual examples, identical to this one in magnitude and horror. He'd avoided it for as much of the day as had been possible, but finally his cowardice had run out.
The Durling kids hovered between the numbness of denial, and terror of a world destroyed before their eyes as they'd watched their father on TV. They'd never see Mom and Dad again. The bodies were far too damaged for the caskets to be open. No last good-byes, no words, just the traumatic removal of the foundation that held up their young lives. And how were children supposed to understand that Mom and Dad weren't just Mom and Dad, but were—had been—something else to someone else, and for that reason, their deaths had been necessary to someone who hadn't known or cared about the kids?
Family members had descended on Washington, most of them flown in by the Air Force from California. Equally shocked, they nevertheless, in the presence of children, had to summon from within themselves the strength to make things somewhat easier for the young. And it gave them something to do. The Secret Service agents assigned to JUNIPER and JUNIOR were probably the most traumatized of all. Trained to be ferociously protective of any "principal," the agents who looked after the Durling kids—more than half were women—carried the additional burden of the normal solicitude any human held for any child, and none of them would have hesitated a microsecond to give his or her life to protect the youngsters—in the knowledge that the rest of the Detail would have weapons out and blazing. The men and women of this sub-detail had played with the kids, had bought them Christmas and birthday presents, had helped with homework. Now they were saying good-bye, to the kids, to the parents, and to colleagues. Ryan saw the looks on their faces, and made a mental note to ask Andrea if the Service would assign a psychologist to them.
"No, it didn't hurt." Jack was sitting down so that the kids could look level into his eyes. "It didn't hurt at all."
"Okay," Mark Durling said. The kids were immaculately dressed. One of the family members had thought it important that they be properly turned out to meet their father's successor. Jack heard a gasp of breath, and his peripheral vision caught the face of an agent—this one a man—who was on the edge of losing it. Price grabbed his arm and moved him toward the door, before the kids could take note of it.
"Do we stay here?"
"Yes," Jack assured him. It was a lie, but not the sort to hurt anyone. "And if you need anything, anything at all, you can come and see me, okay?"
The boy nodded, doing his best to be brave, and it was time to leave him to his family. Ryan squeezed his hand, treating him like the man he ought not to have become for years, for whom the duties of manhood were arriving all too soon. The boy needed to cry, and Ryan thought he needed to do that alone, for now.
Jack walked out the door into the oversized hall of the bedroom level. The agent who'd left, a tall, rugged-looking black man, was sobbing ten feet away. Ryan went over to him.
"You okay?"
"Fuck—sorry—I mean—shit!" the agent shook his head, ashamed at the display of emotion. His father had been lost in an Army training accident at Fort Rucker, Price knew, when he was twelve years old, and Special Agent Tony Wills, who'd played tight end at Grambling before joining the Service, was unusually good with kids. At times like this, strengths often became weaknesses.
"Don't apologize for being human. I lost my mom and dad, too. Same time," Ryan went on, his voice dreamy and uneven with fatigue. "Midway Airport, 737 landed short in snow. But I was all grown up when it happened."
"I know, sir." The agent wiped his eyes and stood erect with a shudder. "I'll be okay."
Ryan patted him on the shoulder and headed for the elevator. To Andrea Price: "Get me the hell out of here."
The Suburban headed north, turning left onto Massachusetts Avenue, which led to the Naval Observatory and the oversized Victorian-gingerbread barn which the country provided for the sitting Vice President. Again, it was guarded by Marines, who let the convoy through. Jack walked into the house. Cathy was waiting at the entry. She only needed one look.
"Tough one?"
All Ryan could do was nod. He held her tight, knowing that his tears would start soon. His eyes caught the knot of agents around the periphery of the entry hall of the house, and it occurred to him that he'd have to get used to them, standing like impassive statues, present in the most private of moments. I hate this job.
BUT BRIGADIER GENERAL Marion Diggs loved his. Not everyone had stood down. As the Marine Barracks in Washington had gone to a high level of activity, then to be augmented from the sprawling base at Quantico, Virginia, so other organizations remained busy or became busier, for they were people who were not really allowed to sleep anyway—at least not all of them at once. One of these organizations was at Fort Irwin, California. Located in the high Mojave Desert, the base really did sprawl, over an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. The landscape was bleak enough that ecologists had to struggle to find an ecology there among the scrawny creosote bushes, and over drinks even the most dedicated of that profession would confess to finding the surface of the moon far more interesting. Not that they hadn't made his life miserable, Diggs thought, fingering his binoculars. There was a species of desert tortoise, which was distinguished from a turtle somehow or other (the general didn't have a clue), and which soldiers had to protect. To take care of that, his soldiers had collected all the tortoises they could find and then relocated them to an enclosure large enough that the reptiles probably didn't notice the fence at all. It was known locally as the world's largest turtle bordello. With that out of the way, whatever other wildlife existed at Fort Irwin seemed quite able to look after itself. The occasional coyote appeared and disappeared, and that was that. Besides, coyotes were not endangered.
The visitors were. Fort Irwin was home to the Army's National Training Center. The permanent residents of that establishment were the OpFor, "the opposing force." Originally two battalions, one of armor and the other of mechanized infantry, the OpFor had once styled itself the "32nd Guards Motor Rifle Regiment," a Soviet designation, because at its opening in the 1980s, the NTC had been designed to teach the U.S. Army how to fight, survive, and prevail in a battle against the Red Army on the plains of Europe. The soldiers of the «32nd» dressed in Russian-style uniforms, drove Soviet-like equipment (the real Russian vehicles had proved too difficult to maintain, and American gear had been modified to Soviet shapes), employed Russian tactics, and took pride in kicking the hell out of the units that came to play on their turf. It wasn't strictly fair. The OpFor lived here and trained here, and hosted regular units up to fourteen times per year, whereas the visiting team might be lucky to come here once in four years. But nobody had ever said war was fair.
Times had changed with the demise of the Soviet Union, but the mission of the NTC had not. The OpFor had recently been enlarged to three battalions—now called "squadrons," because the unit had assumed the identity of the llth Armored Cavalry Regiment, the Blackhorse Cav—and simulated brigade or larger enemy formations. The only real concession to the new political world was that they didn't call themselves Russians anymore. Now they were "Krasnovians," a word, however, derived from krasny, Russian for "red."
General-Lieutenant Gennady Iosefovich Bondarenko knew most of this—the turtle bordello was something on which he'd not been briefed; his initial tour of the base had taken care of that, however—and was as excited as he had ever been.
"You started in Signal Corps?" Diggs asked. The base commander was terse of speech and efficient of movement, dressed in desert-camouflage fatigues called "chocolate chip" from their pattern. He, too, had been fully briefed, though, like his visitor, he had to pretend that he hadn't been,
"Correct." Bondarenko nodded. "But I kept getting into trouble. First Afghanistan, then when the Mudje raided into Soviet Union. They attacked a defense-research facility in Tadzhik when I was visitor there. Brave fighters, but unevenly led. We managed to hold them off," the Russian reported in a studied monotone. Diggs could see the decorations that had resulted; he had commanded a cavalry squadron leading Barry McCaffrey's 24th Mechanized Infantry Division in a wild ride on the American left during Desert Storm, then gone on to command the 10th «Buffalo» ACR, still based in the Negev Desert, as part of America's commitment to Israeli security. Both men were forty-nine. Both had smelled the smoke. Both were on the way up.
"You have country like this at home?" Diggs asked.
"We have every sort of terrain you can imagine. It makes training a challenge, especially today. There," he said. "It's started."
The first group of tanks was rolling now, down a broad, U-shaped pass called the Valley of Death. The sun was setting behind the brown-colored mountains, and darkness came rapidly here. Scuttling around also were the HMMWVs of the observer-controllers, the gods of the NTC, who watched everything and graded what they saw as coldly as Death himself. The NTC was the world's most exciting school. The two generals could have observed the battle back at base headquarters in a place called the Star Wars Room. Every vehicle was wired, transmitting its location, direction of movement, and when the time came, where it was shooting and whether it scored a hit or not. From that data, the computers at Star Wars sent out signals, telling people when they had died, though rarely why. That fact they learned later from the observer-controllers. The generals didn't want to watch computer screens, however—Bondarenko's staff officers were doing that, but the place for their general was here. Every battlefield had a smell, and generals had to have the nose for it.
"Your instrumentation is like something from a science novel."
Diggs shrugged. "Not much changed from fifteen years ago. We have more TV cameras on the hilltops now, though." America would be selling much of that technology to the Russians. That was a little hard for Diggs to accept. He'd been too young for Vietnam. His was the first generation of flag officers to have avoided that entanglement. But Diggs had grown up with one reality in his life: fighting the Russians in Germany. A cavalry officer for his entire career, he'd trained to be in one of the forward-deployed regiments—really, augmented brigades—to make first contact. Diggs could remember a few times when it had seemed pretty damned likely that he'd find his death in the Fulda Gap, facing somebody like the man standing next to him, with whom he'd killed a six-pack the night before over stories of how turtles reproduced.
"In," Bondarenko said with a sly grin. Somehow the Americans thought Russians were humorless. He had to correct that misimpression before he left.
Diggs counted ten before his deadpan reply: "Out."
Ten more seconds: "In." Then both started laughing. When first introduced to the favorite base joke, it had taken half a minute for Bondarenko to get it. But the resulting laughter had ended up causing abdominal pain. He recovered control and pointed. "This is the way war should be."
"It gets pretty tense. Wait and see."
"You use our tactics!" That was plain from the way the reconnaissance screen deployed across the valley.
Diggs turned. "Why not? They worked for me in Iraq."
The scenario for this night—the first engagement for the training rotation—was a tough one: Red Force in the attack, advance-to-contact, and eliminate the Blue Force reconnaissance screen. The Blue Force in this case was a brigade of the 5th Mechanized Division conducting hasty defense.
The overall idea was that this was a very fluid tactical situation. The llth ACR was simulating a division attack on a newly arrived force one third its theoretical size. It was, really, the best way to welcome people to the desert. Let them eat dirt.
"Let's get moving." Diggs hopped back into his HMMWV, and the driver moved off to a piece of high ground called the Iron Triangle. A short radio message from his senior OC made the American general growl. "God damn it!"
"Problem?"
General Diggs held up a map. "That hill is the most important piece of real estate in the valley, but they didn't see it. Well, they're going to pay for that little misjudg-ment. Happens every time." Already, the OpFor had people racing for the unoccupied summit.
"To push that far that fast, is it prudent for Blue?" "General, it sure as hell ain't prudent not to, as you will see."
"WHY HASN'T HE spoken more, appeared in public more?"
The intelligence chief could have said many things. President Ryan was undoubtedly busy. So many things to do. The government of his country was in shambles, and before he could speak, he had to organize it. He had a state funeral to plan. He had to speak to numerous foreign governments, to give them the usual assurances. He had to secure things, not the least of which was his own personal safety. The American Cabinet, the President's principal advisers, was gone and had to be reconstituted… but that was not what he wanted to hear.
"We have been researching this Ryan," was the answer given. Mainly from newspaper stories—a lot of them— faxed from his government's UN mission. "He has made few public speeches before this day, and then only to present the thoughts of his masters. He was an intelligence officer—actually an 'inside' man, an analyst. Evidently a good one, but an inside person."
"So, why did Durling elevate him so?"
"That was in the American papers yesterday. Their government requires a vice-presidential presence. Durling also wanted someone to firm up his international-affairs team, and in this Ryan had some experience. He performed well, remember, in their conflict with Japan."
"An assistant then, not a leader."
"Correct. He has never aspired to high office. Our information is that he agreed to the second post as a caretaker, for less than a year."
"I am not surprised." Daryaei looked at the notes: assistant to Vice Admiral James Greer, the DDI/CIA; briefly the acting DDI; then Deputy Director of Central Intelligence; then National Security Advisor to President Dur- ling; finally he'd accepted the temporary post of Vice President. His impressions of this Ryan person had been correct from the very beginning: a helper. Probably a skilled one, as he himself had skilled assistants, none of whom, however, could assume his own duties. He was not dealing with an equal. Good. "What else?"
"As an intelligence specialist, he will be unusually well informed of foreign affairs. In fact, his knowledge of such things may be the best America has had in recent years, but at the cost of near-ignorance of domestic issues," the briefing officer went on. This tidbit had come from the New York Times.
"Ah." And with that bit of information, the planning started. At this point it was merely a mental exercise, but that would soon change.
"SO HOW ARE things in your army?" Diggs asked. The two generals stood alone atop the principal terrain feature, watching the battle play out below them with low-light viewing gear. As predicted, the 32nd—Bondarenko had to think of them that way—had overwhelmed the Blue Force reconnaissance screen, maneuvered to the left, and was now rolling up the «enemy» brigade. With the lack of real casualties, it was a lovely thing to watch as the blinking yellow «dead» lights lit up one by one. Then he had to answer the question.
"Dreadful. We face the task of rebuilding everything from the ground up."
Diggs turned. "Well, sir, that's where I came in at." At least you don't have to deal with drugs, the American thought. He could remember being a new second lieutenant, and afraid to enter barracks without sidearms. If the Russians had made their move in the early 1970s… "You really want to use our model?"
"Perhaps." The only thing the Americans got wrong— and right—was that the Red Force allowed tactical initiative for its sub-unit commanders, something the Soviet Army would never have done. But, combined with doctrine developed by the Voroshilov Academy, the results were plain to see. That was something to remember, and Bondarenko had broken rules in his own tactical encounters, which was one reason why he was a living three-star instead of a dead colonel. He was also the newly appointed chief of operations for the Russian Army. "The problem is money, of course."
"I've heard that song before, General." Diggs allowed himself a rueful chuckle.
Bondarenko had a plan for that. He wanted to cut the size of his army by fifty percent, and the money saved would go directly into training the remaining half. The results of such a plan he could see before him. Traditionally, the Soviet Army had depended on mass, but the Americans had proven both here and in Iraq that training was master of the battlefield. As good as their equipment was—he'd get his materiel briefing tomorrow—he envied Diggs his personnel more than anything. Proof of that arrived the moment he formed the thought.
"General?" The new arrival saluted. "Blackhorse! We stripped their knickers right off."
"This is Colonel Al Hamm. He's CO of the llth. His second tour here. He used to be OpFor operations officer. Don't play cards with him," Diggs warned.
"The general is too kind. Welcome to the desert, General Bondarenko." Hamm extended a large hand.
"Your attack was well executed, Colonel." The Russian examined him.
"Thank you, sir. I have some great kids working for me. Blue Force was overly tentative. We caught them between two chairs," Hamm explained. He looked like a Russian, Bondarenko thought, tall and meaty with a pale, florid complexion surrounding twinkling blue eyes. For this occasion, Hamm was dressed in his old "Russian"-style uniform, complete with a red star on the tanker's beret, and his pistol belt outside the over-long blouse. It didn't quite make the Russian feel at home, but he appreciated the respect the Americans showed him.
"Diggs, you were right. Blue should have done everything to get here first. But you made them start too far back to make that option seem attractive."
"That's the problem with battlefields," Hamm answered for his boss. "Too much of the time they choose you instead of the other way around. That's lesson number one for the boys of the 5th Mech. If you let anybody else define the terms of the battle, well, it isn't much fun."