whenever he failed to concentrate hard enough on the business at hand.
He quickly mastered his thoughts and marched them on. A part of him continued to suspect that the woman was plain bad medicine, and he had far more important problems with which to grapple. The Soviet forces were taking a godawful beating. And his own options were running out.
He whistled as he stood in the cold, without really being aware of his action. 'Garry Owen,' the old Irish reel that another cavalryman had taken for the U.S. Army, many years before. Taylor had begun the whistling business as part of the carefully constructed persona he had employed in Mexico, but afterward the habit proved impossible to unlearn completely. It settled into a sometime quirk, another sort of scar to be worn through the years, something you tended to forget until a stranger's reaction called your attention back to it.
It was very cold. The autumn snows had not yet come, but the industrial wilderness in which the regiment under Taylor's command lay hidden had the sharp feel of winter, of cold rusting iron. It struck Taylor as the sort of place that could never hold any real warmth, although Merry Meredith insisted that this part of Western Siberia could be miserably hot in the summer. The site was a museum of inadequacy, with tens of square miles of derelict means: work halls with buckling roofs, broken gantries and skeletal cranes, crumbling smokestacks, and mazes of long-empty pipes. Inside the metal shells lay useless antique machines, numbering in the tens of thousands. The sheer vastness of the abandoned site was unsettling. But it was a perfect place to assemble a military force in secrecy.
Still, it was no place a man would choose to be of his own free will. The site was a graveyard, leaking old poisons. It offered no evidence of life beyond a few withered fringes of grass, brown and futile in the decaying afternoon light. The regimental surgeon and the medics were going to great lengths to create sterile islands, to monitor toxin levels, to hold death at arm's length until the regiment was committed to battle. And Taylor let them go, commending their efforts, even as he suspected that the prophylactic measures were no more determinate than incantations or crosses painted on doors. The Soviets had poisoned this landscape, just as they had poisoned their country. This was the land of the dead. The cold acid-sharp air was haunted by death. The catacombs of plants and warehouses in which his war machines lay waiting felt infectious. Not only with the chemical waste of generations, but with a sickness of spirit. The troops either whispered or spoke too loudly in the course of their duties. Of all the grim places his career had taken him, only a few had made Taylor so anxious to leave. Above all, the broken industrial complex had a feel of enmity, of resentment. Of jealousy toward the living.
Taylor laughed, startling the officers gathered loosely around him. He was thinking that, after all, this landscape and he bore a certain resemblance to each other.
'You're in a good mood, sir,' Major Martinez said, baffled. His voice wavered in the cold.
Taylor turned his jigsaw-puzzle face toward the supply officer, cutting a smile up into his cheeks. 'Come on, Manny. The Russians are late, there's a nightmare of a war going on, we're stuck here in this… this Soviet Disneyland, and we're all trying to pretend we're not freezing our butts off. Why shouldn't I be in a good mood?'
Even as he finished speaking, the constructed smile collapsed. He was in the worst of spirits, worried about his mission and his men, at a point beyond shouting. But he knew enough about the devils in each of the officers who relied upon him in this bad hour to want to be strong for them, even if he could not always be strong for himself.
'Well, it certainly isn't Texas,' Martinez answered, with an exaggerated shiver of his shoulders.
'Or Mexico,' Merry Meredith offered. A coffee-skinned man so handsome that most men underestimated his ferocity. Toughest intelligence officer Taylor had ever met. Loyal to the end. And, no doubt, missing his bright, redheaded wife and his children.
'Or Los Angeles,' Martinez shot back. They were teasing each other with the most wretched military memories they could bring to bear.
'Or Zaire,' Lieutenant Colonel Heifetz said suddenly, with an awkward, well-intentioned smile. 'Lucky Dave' Heifetz found it terribly difficult to deal with his fellow officers on anything but a professional level, and he had a reputation as the greatest of stoics, the man without emotion. But Taylor recognized the intent of the clumsy reference, the overwrought grin. Heifetz, too, felt the need to draw a little closer in the dying afternoon.
Taylor never spoke about Zaire. It was a rule that everyone tacitly recognized. Except Lucky Dave, whose social skills had begun to wither years before, in another country.
Taylor nodded to his hapless subordinate. Even now, after so long a time, it was the best he could do.
But Heifetz did not understand. He blundered on. His
Israeli accent grew more pronounced when he was ill at ease, and it was unusually heavy now.
'Yes, I think so,' Heifetz said. 'I believe that Zaire must have been the worst of climates. A very bad place.' Taylor shrugged, not quite meeting any man's eyes. 'Up on the big river,' he said. 'It's a hard place up on the river. But the grasslands weren't so bad.'
'Where the hell are the Russians?' Merry Meredith said quickly. Meredith had been with Taylor longer than any of them.
'I can't believe they're jerking us around like this,' Manny Martinez said. Martinez had made a life's work out of leaving San Antonio behind. Yet his body still wanted the southern sun.
'I don't think they're jerking us around, Manny,' Taylor said. 'Something's wrong. You can feel it.'
'Everything's wrong,' Meredith said. He was the regimental S-2, the intelligence officer, responsible, according to the time-honored division of labor, for enemy, weather, and terrain. 'The Soviet front's coming apart. It's gotten to the point where I don't know which problem area to look at first.' He laughed slightly, bitterly. 'Hell, I think one of the reasons I'm standing out here with you guys is that I just can't take it back in the bubble anymore. The combat information's just pouring in. And all of the news is bad.'
Taylor glanced off into the vacant afternoon. Still no sign of the Russians. It was especially troubling, since, up until now, they had been careful to live up to every support commitment, despite the overwhelming problems they themselves faced.
'Why don't you all go in and have a cup of coffee,' Taylor said. 'Go ahead. I need a little time to think. Merry, you can get us a threat update.'
Taylor knew that they all wanted to go back inside the vast work hall where the regimental headquarters had been established. It was not much warmer inside, but the difference was enough that your mind did not dwell constantly on the cold. Still, none of them moved. Nobody wanted to seem disloyal to the old man.
'Goddamnit, fellas,' Taylor said, 'if I tell you to go back inside, you go back inside. Do you understand me?' Heifetz moved crisply for the battered tin door set into the huge double gates of the work hall. Heifetz always obeyed promptly, with no outward sign of approval or disapproval. Of them all, Taylor knew, Heifetz had the least interest in creature comforts. He would have moved as sharply had Taylor ordered him to march into a freezing swamp.
Martinez dropped his eyes, then went off at a lope, trailing a mixture of reluctance and childlike relief. Merry Meredith was the last to go.
'Bring you out a cup of coffee, sir?' Meredith asked. 'No. Thanks. I just want to admire the beauty of the Soviet landscape.'
Meredith lingered, feet almost moving. 'You have to feel sorry for them.' Between their shared duty in Los Angeles and Mexico, Meredith had spent several years in a military educational program that taught officers a foreign language and thoroughly immersed them in the whys and wherefores of the country where that language was spoken. Meredith's language had been Russian, and Taylor knew the solidly middle-class black American had fallen a little in love with the object of his study.
'I suppose,' Taylor said.
'I mean, look at this. As far as the eye can see. And it's worthless. Dead. The whole damned country's like this. Thirty years ago, this was still one of the most productive industrial complexes in the Soviet Union.'
'You said that. In the briefing.'
'I know,' Meredith agreed. 'Maybe I'm just trying to convince myself that it's true.'
Taylor turned slightly away from the younger man. 'Could have been us, Merry. Almost was. Oh, I know you're a sucker for Russian culture and all that. But, where you see Anton Chekhov, I see Joseph Stalin.' Taylor paused for a moment, his mind filling with dozens of other names enchanted with beauty or ruin. 'Just remember. They did this to themselves. And now we're here to pull their irons out of the fire.
