No deviation for anything at all. For example, the 703rd Motor-Rifle Regiment spent all of last October on harvesting duty south of Kharkov-yet somehow they met their monthly norms for unit training at the same time. Lies are bad enough, but these are stupid lies!'
'It cannot be as bad as you fear, Pavel Leonidovich.'
'Do we dare to assume otherwise, Comrade?'
The General stared down at his desk. 'No. Very well, Pasha. You've formulated your plan. Let me hear it.'
'For the moment, you will be outlining the plan for our attack into the Muslim lands. I must get into the field to whip our field commanders into shape. If we wish to accomplish our goals in time for the attack west, we must make an example of the worst offenders. I have four commanders in mind. Their conduct has been grossly and undeniably criminal. Here are the names and charges.' He handed over a single sheet of paper.
'There are two good men here, Pasha,' the General objected.
'They are guardians of the State. They enjoy positions of the greatest trust. They have betrayed that trust by lying, and in doing so, they have endangered the State,' Alekseyev said, wondering how many men in his country could have that said of them. He dismissed the thought. There were problems enough right here.
'You understand the consequences of the charges you bring?'
'Of course. The penalty for treason is death. Did I ever falsify a readiness report? Did you?' Alekseyev looked away briefly. 'It is a hard thing, and I take no pleasure in it-but unless we snap our units into shape, how many young boys will die for their officers' failings? We need combat readiness more than we need four liars. If there is a gentler way to achieve this, I don't know what that might be. An army without discipline is a worthless mob. We have the directive from STAVKA to make examples of unruly privates and restore the authority of our NCOs. It is fitting that if privates must suffer for their failings, then their Colonels must suffer too. Theirs is the greater responsibility. Theirs is the greater reward. A few examples here will go a long way to restoring our army.'
'The inspectorate?'
'The best choice,' Alekseyev agreed. That way blame would not necessarily be traced back to the senior commanders themselves. 'I can send teams from the Inspector General's service out to these regiments day after tomorrow. Our training memoranda arrived in all divisional and regimental headquarters this morning. The news of these four traitors will encourage our unit commanders to implement them with vigor. Even then, it will be two weeks before we have a clear picture of what we need to focus on, but once we can identify the areas that need buttressing, we should have ample time to accomplish what we need to accomplish.'
'What will CINC-West be doing'
'The same, one hopes.' Alekseyev shook his head. 'Has he asked for any of our units yet?'
'No, but he will. We will not be ordered to launch offensive operations against NATO's southern flank-part of the continuing maskirovka. You may assume that many of our Category-B units will be detailed to Germany, possibly some of our 'A' tank forces also. However many divisions that fool has, he'll want more.'
'Just so we have enough troops to seize the oil fields when the time comes,' Pasha observed. 'Which plan are we supposed to execute?'
'The old one. We'll have to update it, of course.' The old plan predated Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, and now the Red Army had a whole new perspective on sending mechanized forces into an area occupied by armed Muslims.
Alekseyev's hands bunched into fists. 'Marvelous. We must formulate a plan without knowing when it will be implemented or what forces we'll have available to execute it.'
'Remember what you told me about the life of a staff officer, Pasha?' CINC-Southwest chuckled.
The younger man nodded ruefully, hoist on his own petard. 'Indeed, Comrade General: we will do our sleeping after the war.'
5. Sailors and Spooks
His eyes squinted painfully at the horizon. The sun was only half a diameter above the green-brown line of Maryland's Eastern Shore, a reminder, if he needed one, that he'd worked late the day before, gone to bed later still, then arisen at four-thirty so that he could get in a day's fishing. A slowly receding sinus like headache also let him know about the six-pack of beer he'd consumed in front of the TV.
But it was his first fishing day of the year, and the casting rod felt good in his hand as he gave it a gentle swing toward a ripple on the calm surface of the Chesapeake Bay. A blue or a rockfish? Whatever it was, it didn't nibble at his Bucktail lure. But there was no hurry.
'Coffee, Bob?'
'Thanks, Pop.' Robert Toland set his rod in its holder and leaned back into the midships swivel chair of his Boston Whaler Outrage. His father-in-law, Edward Keegan, held out the plastic cup-cap from a large thermos jug. Bob knew the coffee would be good. Ned Keegan was a former naval officer who appreciated a good cup, preferably flavored with brandy or Irish whiskey-something to open the eyes and put a fire in the belly.
'Cold or not, damn if it ain't nice to get out here.' Keegan sipped at his cup, resting one foot on the bait box. It wasn't just the fishing, both men agreed, getting out on the water was one sure cure for civilization.
'Be nice if the rock really are coming back, too,' Toland observed.
'What the hell-no phones.'
'What about your beeper?'
'I must have left it with my other pants.' Keegan chuckled. 'DIA will have to manage without me today.'
'Think they can?'
'Well, the Navy did.' Keegan was an academy graduate who had put in his thirty and retired to become a double-dipper. In uniform, he'd been an intelligence specialist, and now he had essentially the same job, which added civil service salary to his pension.
Toland had been a lieutenant (j.g.) serving aboard a destroyer based at Pearl Harbor when he'd first noticed Martha Keegan, a junior at the University of Hawaii, majoring in psychology and minoring in surfing. They'd been happily married for fifteen years now.
'So.' Keegan stood and lifted his rod. 'How are things at the Fort?'
Bob Toland was a middle-level analyst at the National Security Agency. He'd left the Navy after six years when the adventure of uniformed service had palled, but he remained an active reservist. His work at NSA dovetailed nicely with his naval reserve service. A communications expert with a degree in electronics, his current job was monitoring Soviet signals gathered by the NSA's numerous listening posts and ferret satellites. Along the way he'd also gotten a masters in the Russian language.
'Heard something real interesting last week, but I couldn't convince my boss it meant anything.'
'Who's your section chief?'
'Captain Albert Redman, U.S. Navy.' Toland watched a bay-built fishing boat motoring a few miles away, her captain laying out his crab pots. 'He's an asshole.'
Keegan laughed. 'You want to be careful saying stuff like that out loud, Bob, especially seeing how you go on active duty next week. Bert worked with me, oh, must have been fifteen years ago. I had to slap him down a few times. He does tend to be slightly opinionated.'
'Opinionated?' Toland snorted. 'That bastard's so friggin' narrow-minded his scratch pads are only an inch wide! First there was this new arms control thing, then I came up with something really unusual last Wednesday and he circular-filed it. Hell, I don't know why he even bothers looking at new data-he made his mind up five years ago.'
'I don't suppose you could tell me what it was?'
'I shouldn't.' Bob wavered for a moment. Hell, if he couldn't talk with his kids' own grandfather…'One of our ferret birds was over a Soviet military district headquarters last week and intercepted a microwaved telephone conversation. It was a report to Moscow about four colonels in the Carpathian Military District who were being shot for gundecking readiness reports. The story on their court-martial and execution was being set up for publication, probably in a Red Star this week.' He had entirely forgotten about the oil-field fire.
