The War in 2020

deficiencies associated with chronic underdevelopment. And Taylor had kicked them out of his sector, in defiance of Army policy. He understood the need to satisfy minimum dietary requirements, but, above all, he understood the need for theater. Wearing preposterous silver spurs, Taylor was always the first man out of the helicopter. He traced canyon rims on a magnificent black stallion and walked upright where other men crawled. Martinez knew what it was to be afraid, and he did not believe that any sane man could be truly fearless. But Taylor certainly disguised his fear better than the rest — driving his utility vehicle, alone, into towns where the representatives of the U.S.-backed Monterrey provisional government hung from the utility poles with key body parts conspicuously absent. Exploiting the dramatic ugliness of his face to maximum effect and living on tortillas and beans so that he could ostentatiously give his rations to widows and orphans, Taylor transcended all of the Anglo rules of behavior to achieve the grand level of gesture demanded by a tormented Mexico. His peers called him a hot dog, a show-off, a nut, and a dirty sonofabitch— as they struggled to emulate his success. Taylor, who seemed able to project himself with equal ease into the mindset of a Mexican peasant or a Los Angeles gang member. Taylor, who masked his intelligence and command of language behind the terse, requisitely profane speech his subordinates imagined a commander must employ. Major Manuel Xavier Martinez did not believe in heroes. But he was not certain he could ever be such a man as Colonel George Taylor.

'Manny,' Taylor said to the supply officer, 'it's a good thing I've got you to keep me from fucking this whole thing up. I should have made the goddamned Russians clarify exactly what they understood by force dispersion.' The colonel was angrily intense, but the sharpness was directed solely against himself. 'When our boys come back in from the mission, I want to be damned sure they come in on top of all the fuel, bullets, beans, and Band-aids they need. The standard drill.'

'Standard drill,' Martinez agreed, anxious to please this man, to serve him well, yet, at the same time, ashamed that he would have to ask for further help. 'I'm afraid you're going to have to take it up with Ivanov himself, Jefe. He's driving the train, and my counterpart's afraid to throw any switches on his own. He thinks I'm nuts for wanting to scatter our log sites all over creation and even crazier for questioning what a general wants.'

Taylor nodded. 'All right, Manny. Let's grab Dave and Merry and have another powwow with our little Russian brothers.'

Martinez smiled. 'I guess that means we have to let that sorry bugger Kozlov breathe on us again.' He looked down at a smeared cracker he had lifted off his plate. The sight of it was so dismal, laden with a rough gray paste, that he held it in midair, unable to bring it the rest of the way to his mouth.

He felt Taylor staring at him. The intensity of the colonel's gaze seemed to freeze the supply officer's hand in midair, the trick of a sorcerer. Instantly, Martinez's eyes were drawn to Taylor's, and he saw absolute seriousness in the depths of the other man's stare.

'Eat it,' Taylor said quietly, the tone of his Spanish as dry and ungiving as a high mountain desert. 'And then smile.'

* * *

Major Howard 'Merry' Meredith had almost forgotten what it was like to be judged by the color of his skin. Although the Russians were not blatantly impolite, they barely masked their distaste in dealing with him. He was the sole member of Taylor's primary staff who spoke Russian, yet his opposite number obviously preferred dealing with Meredith's white subordinate through a translator.

Merry Meredith could take it. He had been through far, far worse experiences in his life. Yet he could not help being saddened. He had long been warned about Russian racism… but he had believed that he would be the exception. In deference to Pushkin. Only he of all these Americans had read the Russian classics. He knew the titles and even the dates of Repin's paintings, just as he believed he alone of the Americans grasped the iron inevitabilities that had brought this people to such tragedy. He even knew the names and ingredients of the array of zakuski, the bounty of snacks, which the hosts obviously had gone to great lengths to produce. Yet the Russians offered him only uneasy glances as he approached the buffet table, as though the color of his skin might dirty the food.

Racial discrimination was something that had found no entry into his sheltered college-town youth, and West Point had constructed its own barriers against such prejudice. The Army itself had been so starved for talent that a man's racial, ethnic, or social background truly made no difference. It was only a bit later that he had finally been forced to look in the mirror.

And now, years after that terrible day in Los Angeles, he found himself trying to work beside a Soviet colonel who regarded him as only a marginally higher form of animal. His counterpart lectured him on the intricacies of the enemy forces and the battlefield situation in so elementary a fashion that Meredith had to continually call up the example and image of Colonel Taylor to refrain from verbally launching into the paunchy polkovnik, if not physically assaulting him. The worst of it was that the Soviet clearly knew far less about the enemy and even the Soviets' own condition than did Meredith, and what little the colonel knew was out of date. Thanks to the constant intelligence updates he received in his earpiece and on the screen of his portable computer, Meredith knew that the battlefield situation was growing more desperate by the hour. Yet Colonel Baranov seemed interested only in demonstrating his personal — his racial — superiority.

Meredith was grateful to see Manny Martinez break away from his one-on-one with Taylor and head toward the worktable that had been set up as an intelligence planning cell.

Manny wore an inexplicably grand smile on his face, which hardly seemed to track with the prevailing atmosphere of physical and mental exhaustion.

'Excuse me, sir,' Manny said to the potbellied Soviet colonel, who looked for all the world like the leader of an oompah band, his pointer waving like a baton. Then he turned to Meredith. 'Merry, the old man wants you to listen in on a little powwow. Can you break away for a minute?'

Meredith felt like a schoolboy suddenly authorized to play hooky. He quickly made his excuses in Russian to the colonel, leaving his subordinate to suffer on in the name of the United States Army.

Squeezing between the tables, Meredith found that Manny's grin was contagious.

'What the hell are you smiling about, you silly bastard?' Meredith asked his friend.

Manny's smile opened even wider. 'It's the food. You've got to try it.'

'I have,' Meredith said, puzzled. Although he intellectually understood the effort that had gone into the preparation of the buffet and the relative quality of the provisions, he could not believe that Manny really enjoyed the zakuski. His efforts to persuade other officers to eat had failed embarrassingly. 'Come on, you're shitting me.'

'Not me, brother. It's great food. Just ask the old man.'

Meredith decided that it was all just a joke he'd missed, after all, and he let it go. Brushing past the last workstation, he caught the edge of an overlay on the rough wool of his trousers and tipped a number of markers onto the floor.

'Some quarterback you must've been,' Manny said. Meredith and his friend hastily retrieved the fallen tools from amid the wasteland of computer printouts on the floor, apologizing to the bleary-looking captain whose work they had upset. When they arose, Colonel Taylor was standing before them, along with General Ivanov, Kozlov, and another Soviet whom Meredith recognized as Manny's counterpart. In a moment, Lucky Dave Heifetz marched up, along with the Soviet chief of operations.

Careful not to call attention to his maneuvering, Meredith shifted along the backfield so that he was not in the direct line of Kozlov's breath. The Soviet was a reasonably handsome man — until he opened his mouth, revealing broken, rotted teeth, the sight of which made a man wince.

The Russian's breath was easily the most powerful offensive weapon in the Soviet arsenal. Meredith felt sorry for Kozlov, since it was evident that he really was a first-rate officer, determined to do his damndest to make things work. But Meredith did not feel sufficiently sorry for him to stand too close.

As it was, the room stank and the air felt dead, heavily motionless. The fabric of the stiff old-fashioned Soviet uniforms worn by all had grown rougher still with dried sweat. Meredith was not certain his stomach could take Kozlov's halitosis at this time of the morning, without sleep, and with the Russians' rich, bad food clumped in his belly.

Taylor drew them all toward the map that lined the wall of the chamber, glancing toward Meredith to ensure that the intelligence officer was prepared to translate.

'It seems,' Taylor began, 'that our haste has accidentally created some minor confusion for our Soviet