Warshot

ringer for George C. Scott as Patton.

There was a swish of snow nearby.

“ ‘Scuse me, General?”

Freeman and his aide, Colonel Dick Norton, saw it was a reporter. Some of the press corps, particularly the Europeans, imitating Second Army’s first-battalion alpine troops out of the winter training center high in the Sierra Nevadas, were finding it easier to get about on skis. The newsman’s ID clip signified he was from one of the general’s least liked papers, the National Investigator, one of the American La Roche tabloid chain. “Only thing they investigate,” Freeman had once told Norton, “is tit and ass. That’s it and that’s all of it!”

“ ‘Scuse me, General?”

“Yes?” He knew the reporter was probably sniffing around for info about one of the men near the Baikal DMZ hundreds of miles to the east, who the night before had come in after four hours of guard duty and shot himself.

“You think Private Bronowski would have committed suicide, General, if he’d been back in the States when he got the news from his wife?”

Freeman kept walking, the squeak of his boots against the dry packed powder not letting up.

“No one likes being over here,” said Freeman, not bothering to break his stride for the reporter or to look at him. “But we were sent here by the U.N. to do a job — to maintain the peace and to ensure that Siberia’s annexation of Outer Mongolia doesn’t spread any farther.”

“Farther where?”

“Inner Mongolia,” said Freeman, almost adding, you fool, his breath stabbing the air in short bursts of warmth. “Men are bound to get homesick. ‘Course, I don’t expect your story of his wife being screwed by a Pentagon pen pusher while he’s stuck over here keeping the cease-fire helped any.”

“We just report the news, General.”

At that Freeman stopped and wheeled on the reporter, Dick Norton alarmed, the general looking as if he was within a couple of seconds of punching out the muckraker. The National Investigator reporter stood his ground. “General, you said no one likes being over here. Are you saying the president should recall—”

Freeman turned away and kept walking, Dick Norton informing the reporter, “We’re here to keep the cease- fire. Period. If you’d like to ask any more questions, you should put them at the scheduled press conference — Khabarovsk HQ. Sixteen hundred hours.”

The reporter moved off on his skis, still scribbling.

“By God!” muttered Freeman, pulling one glove so tight that the Gore-Tex looked grafted to his hand. “Can’t stand that vermin.”

“The blonde’s a bit better-looking, I must admit,” said Norton, trying to laugh it off.

“Rats!” said Freeman. “All of those La Roche reporters are rats.” He looked across at Norton. “You see that boy’s body? God damn, I’ve seen some horrible wounds in my time, but sticking a barrel in your mouth like that. Still, I haven’t got much time for anyone who shoots himself over beaver. But you can understand, I suppose.” His right fist hit the palm of his left. “Damn! Washington should have let me press Yesov’s army when we had ‘em on the run, Dick. Now they’re safe as church mice west of Baikal. All those damned politicians back home. That’s what it is.” They were approaching the general’s Quonset hut, the pillowed snow following the roofs half-moon bluish contour in the late afternoon light, the general pausing, watching the long trails of steam from the Quonset’s vents snaking high up into the pristine air. “But, no,” added Freeman bitterly. “Washington in its wisdom stopped us — just as they did Schwarzkopf. ‘Course,” Freeman conceded, “if Norman had gone farther west to run the Republican Guard to ground, our armor over there would’ve bogged down in the wet plains round Basra. But here, Dick, here we could’ve finished Yesov’s bastards off before they got halfway across that — that damned ice rink.” The rink Freeman was referring to was the four-hundred-mile-long Lake Baikal, now frozen solid. Norton spotted a covey of reporters approaching them, hungry on the scent of the suicide and bent, he warned Freeman, on making an issue of poor morale throughout Second Army.

They’d given Freeman good headlines for fighting Yesov’s Siberians to a standstill then pushing them back across Baikal, but now, with the suicide of one soldier, there was blood in the air, and the less scrupulous among the press corps had left their hosannas back in the bars of Khabarovsk. It was hooting time.

Freeman was smiling at the oncoming pack, most of them on skis, telling Norton, “Not that blond bitch from the Investigator. Leave her till last. First question for the brunette from CBS. By God, I’d like to reconnoiter her, Dick.”

“Cool it, General.”

Freeman nodded as pleasantly as he could in minus forty. “Ladies, gentlemen.” Norton gave CBS the nod.

“General,” began the brunette, flicking away strands of nut-brown hair that just for a moment turned gold in the dying rays of the sun. “Is it true that morale in Second Army is at its lowest ebb since the signing of the ceasefire?”

“Not at all. We’re talking here — I presume you are talking about the self-inflicted—”

“The suicide!”

“One soldier’s tragedy hardly extends to a whole army,” said Freeman.

“General?” interjected a French reporter from Paris Match in a loud tone. “We’ve had rumors that the Siberian Interior Ministry is out to punish — is actively searching for collaborators who helped the British and American forces before the cease-fire.”

Freeman was struck by the man’s use of the phrase “actively searching for.” He wondered what “passively searching for” would be. “We’ve had no such reports,” Freeman told him truthfully. “What they do in the zone west of Baikal I can’t say, but there’ll be no tracking down of collaborators in our zone — that is, east of Baikal. We’re not here to exact vengeance. We’re here to keep the peace.”

“You don’t think any OMONs are after you personally, do you, General?”

“Hell, no!” Freeman laughed, looking down at the crowd which he always thought of as an audience. “Any of those black-bonneted bastards come to get me, I’ll give them a Second Army welcome.” He patted his waistband, beneath which he carried the Sig Sauer P-220, always loaded with a fifteen-round magazine of nine-millimeter Parabellum. “And if that isn’t enough for ‘em, I’ll introduce them to my friend Charles Winchester.” There were a few laughs from those who had been on the Second Army beat longest, who knew he was referring to the twelve-gauge riot gun, loaded with 00, that he kept by his bed. “Hell,” continued the general, “the Winchester twelve hundred’ll stop…” He paused, searching for an apt analogy.

“Amtrak!” suggested one of the reporters.

“Hell,” the general joked, “anything’ll stop Amtrak.”

That was the headline in the next morning’s National Investigator, Stateside: GENERAL SLAMS AMTRAK!

Marshal Yesov’s aides delivered the headline and story to the Siberian commander. They had been instructed by him to monitor everything said by and about the general. They’d had a special file on him ever since he had fought so brilliantly in the Iraqi War.

CHAPTER FOUR

Irkutsk

Marshal Yesov and the other Siberian generals had been delighted by the Iraqi War. It had been the real’noe vremya—”real-time”—testing range that told them which of the old Russian, now CIS, weapons needed to be junked. A case in point was the Scud. Moscow had said they’d updated it after the Iraqi War, but in Siberia, in Novosibirsk’s satellite city, Akademgorodok, home of the republic’s most eminent scientists, the joke amid the Siberians— who hated Moscow as much as they did the Americans— was that firing a Scud was like drinking a glass of cheap Moscow vodka: you never knew where you’d land!