The Bear and the Dragon

“You were KGB? Really?” Excitement in her voice. This girl was good.

“Yes, one of many. Nothing special about it.”

“To you, perhaps, but not to me. Was there really a school for women like me? Did KGB train women to … to take care of the needs of men?”

A man’s laugh this time: “Oh, yes, my dear. There was such a school. You would have done well there.”

Now the laugh was coquettish. “As well as I do now?”

“No, not at what you charge.”

“But am I worth it?” she asked.

“Easily” was the satisfied answer.

“Would you like to see me again, Vanya?” Real hope, or beautifully simulated hope, in the question.

“Da, I would like that very much, Maria.”

“So, you take care of people with special needs. What needs are those?” She could get away with this because men so enjoyed to be found fascinating by beautiful women. It was part of their act of worship at this particular altar, and men always went for it.

“Not unlike what I was trained to do, Maria, but the details need not concern you.”

Disappointment: “Men always say that,” she grumped. “Why do the most interesting men have to be so mysterious?”

“In that is our fascination, woman,” he explained. “Would you prefer that I drove a truck?”

“Truck drivers don’t have your … your manly abilities,” she replied, as if she’d learned the difference.

“A man could get hard just listening to this bitch,” one of the FSS officers observed.

“That’s the idea,” Provalov agreed. “Why do you think she can charge so much?”

“A real man need not pay for it.”

“Was I that good?” Suvorov/Koniev asked in their headphones.

“Any better and I would have to pay you, Vanya,” she replied, with joy in her voice. Probably a kiss went along with the proclamation.

“No more questions, Maria. Let it lie for now,” Oleg Gregoriyevich urged to the air. She must have heard him.

“You know how to make a man feel like a man,” the spy/assassin told her. “Where did you learn this skill?”

“It just comes naturally to a woman,” she cooed.

“To some women, perhaps.” Then the talking stopped, and in ten minutes, the snoring began.

“Well, that’s more interesting than our normal cases,” the FSS officer told the others.

“You have people checking out the bench?”

“Hourly.” There was no telling how many people delivered messages to the dead-drop, and they probably weren’t all Chinese nationals. No, there’d be a rat-line in this chain, probably not a long one, but enough to offer some insulation to Suvorov’s handler. That would be good fieldcraft, and they had to expect it. So, the bench and its dead-drop would be checked out regularly, and in that surveillance van would be a key custom-made to fit the lock on the drop-box, and a photocopier to make a duplicate of the message inside. The FSS had also stepped up surveillance of the Chinese Embassy. Nearly every employee who came outside had a shadow now. To do this properly meant curtailing other counterespionage operations in Moscow, but this case had assumed priority over everything else. It would soon become even more important, but they didn’t know that yet.

How many engineers do we have available?” Bondarenko asked Aliyev in the east Siberian dawn.

“Two regiments not involved with the road-building,” the operations officer answered.

“Good. Get them all down here immediately to work on the camouflage on these bunkers, and to set up false ones on the other side of these hills. Immediately, Andrey.”

“Yes, General, I’ll get them right on it.”

“I love the dawn, the most peaceful time of day.”

“Except when the other fellow uses it for his attack.” Dawn was the universal time for a major offensive, so that one had all the light of the day to pursue it.

“If they come, it will be right up this valley.”

“Yes, it will.”

“They will shoot up the first line of defenses-what they think they are, that is,” Bondarenko predicted, pointing. The first line was composed of seemingly real bunkers, made of rebarred concrete, but the gun tubes sticking out of them were fake. Whatever engineer had laid out these fortifications had been born with an eye for terrain worthy of Alexander of Macedon. They appeared to be beautifully sited, but a little too much so. Their positioning was a little too predictable, and they were visible, if barely so, to the other side, and something barely visible would be the first target hit. There were even pyrotechnic charges in the false bunkers, so that after a few direct hits they’d explode, and really make the enemy feel fine for having hit them. Whoever had come up with that idea had been a genius of a military engineer.

But the real defenses on the front of the hills were tiny observation posts whose buried phone lines led back to the real bunkers, and beyond them to artillery positions ten or more kilometers back. Some of these were old, also pre-sited, but the rockets they launched were just as deadly today as they’d been in the 1940s, design progeny of the Katushka artillery rockets the Germans had learned to hate. Then came the direct-fire weapons. The first rank of these were the turrets of old German tanks. The sights and the ammunition still worked, and the crewmen knew how to use them, and they had escape tunnels leading to vehicles that would probably allow them to survive a determined attack. The engineers who had laid this line out were probably all dead now, and General Bondarenko hoped they’d been buried honorably, as soldiers deserved. This line wouldn’t stop a determined attack-no fixed line of defenses could accomplish that-but it would be enough to make an enemy wish he’d gone somewhere else.

But the camouflage needed work, and that work would be done at night. A high-flying aircraft tracing over the border with a side-looking camera could see far into his country and take thousands of useful, pretty pictures, and the Chinese probably had a goodly collection of such pictures, plus whatever they could get from their own satellites, or from the commercial birds that anyone could employ now for money-

“Andrey, tell intelligence to see if we can determine if the Chinese have accessed commercial photo satellites.”

“Why bother? Don’t they have their own-”

“We don’t know how good their reconsats are, but we do know that the new French ones are as good as anything the Americans had up until 1975 or so, and that’s good enough for most purposes.”

“Yes, General.” Aliyev paused. “You think something is going to happen here?”

Bondarenko paused, frowning as he stared south over the river. He could see into China from this hilltop. The ground looked no different, but for political reasons it was alien land, and though the inhabitants of that land were no different ethnically from the people native to his land, the political differences were enough to make the sight of them a thing of concern, even fear, for him. He shook his head.

“Andrey Petrovich, you’ve heard the same intelligence briefings I’ve heard. What concerns me is that their army has been far more active than ours. They have the ability to attack us, and we do not have the ability to defeat them. We have less than three full-strength divisions, and the level of their training is inadequate. We have much to do before I will begin to feel comfortable. Firming up this line is the easiest thing to do, and the easiest part of firming it up is hiding the bunkers. Next, we’ll start rotating the soldiers back to the training range and have them work on their gunnery. That will be easy for them to do, but it hasn’t been done in ten months! So much to do, Andrushka, so much to do.”

“That is so, Comrade General, but we’ve made a good beginning.”

Bondarenko waved his hand and growled, “Ahh, a good beginning will be a year from now. We’ve taken the first morning piss in what will be a long day, Colonel. Now, let’s fly east and see the next sector.”

General Peng Xi-Wang, commander of the Red Banner 34th Shock Army, only sixteen kilometers away, looked through powerful spotting glasses at the Russian frontier. Thirty-fourth Shock was a Type A Group Army, and comprised about eighty thousand men. He had an armored division, two mechanized ones, a