Tom Clancy - The Bear and the Dragon

“Well, his next fitness report’s going to get him a star, I think.”

“His Apache commander’s not bad either.”

“That’s a fact,” the divisional G-3 agreed. “Pegasus” was his call sign, and he’d kicked some serious ass this night.

“What’s next?”

“Sir, in three days we have a big SimNet exercise against the Big Red One at Fort Riley. Our boys are pretty hot for it.”

“Divisional readiness?” Diggs asked.

“We’re pushing ninety-five percent, General. Not much slack left to take up. I mean, sir, to go any farther, we gotta take the troops out to Fort Irwin or maybe the Negev Training Area. Are we as good as the Tenth Cav or the Eleventh? No, we don’t get to play in the field as much as they do.” And, he didn’t have to add, no division in any army in the world got the money to train that hard. “But given the limitations we have to live with, there’s not a whole lot more we can do. I figure we play hard on SimNet to keep the kids interested, but we’re just about as far as we can go, sir.”

“I think you’re right, Duke. You know, sometimes I kinda wish the Cold War could come back-for training purposes, anyway. The Germans won’t let us play the way we used to back then, and that’s what we need to take the next step.”

“Unless somebody springs for the tickets to fly a brigade out to California.” Masterman nodded.

“That ain’t gonna happen, Duke,” Diggs told his operations officer. And more was the pity. First Tanks’ troops were almost ready to give the Blackhorse a run for their money. Close enough, Diggs thought, that he’d pay to watch. “How’s a beer grab you, Colonel?”

“If the General is buying, I will gladly assist him in spending his money,” Duke Masterman said graciously, as their sergeant driver pulled up to the kazerne’s O-Club.

Good morning, Comrade General,” Gogol said, pulling himself to attention.

Bondarenko had felt guilt at coming to see this old soldier so early in the morning, but he’d heard the day before that the ancient warrior was not one to waste daylight. And so he wasn’t, the general saw.

“You kill wolves,” Gennady Iosifovich observed, seeing the gleaming pelts hanging on the wall of this rough cabin.

“And bear, but when you gild the pelts, they grow too heavy,” the old man agreed, fetching tea for his guests.

“These are amazing,” Colonel Aliyev said, touching one of the remaining wolf pelts. Most had been carried off.

“It’s an amusement for an old hunter,” Gogol said, lighting a cigarette.

General Bondarenko looked at his rifles, the new Austrian-made one, and the old Russian M1891 Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle.

“How many with this one?” Bondarenko asked.

“Wolves, bears?”

“Germans,” the general clarified, with coldness in his voice.

“I stopped counting at thirty, Comrade General. That was before Kiev. There were many more after that. I see we share a decoration,” Gogol observed, pointing to his visitor’s gold star, for Hero of the Soviet Union, which he’d won in Afghanistan. Gogol had two, one from Ukraine and the other in Germany.

“You have the look of a soldier, Pavel Petrovich, and a good one.” Bondarenko sipped his tea, served properly, a clear glass in a metal-was it silver? — holder.

“I served in my time. First at Stalingrad, then on the long walk to Berlin.”

I bet you did walk all the way, too, the general thought. He’d met his share of Great Patriotic War veterans, now mostly dead. This wizened old bastard had stared death in the face and spat at it, trained to do so, probably, by his life in these woods. He’d grown up with bears and wolves as enemies-as nasty as the German fascists had been, at least they didn’t eat you-and so had been accustomed to wagering his life on his eye and his nerve. There was no real substitute for that, the kind of training you couldn’t institute for an army. A gifted few learned how the hard way, and of those the lucky ones survived the war. Pavel Petrovich hadn’t had an easy time. Soldiers might admire their own snipers, might value them for their skills, but you could never say “comrade” to a man who hunted men as though they were animals-because on the other side of the line might be another such man who wanted to hunt you. Of all the enemies, that was the one you loathed and feared the most, because it became personal to see another man through a telescopic sight, to see his face, and take his life as a deliberate act against one man, even gazing at his face when the bullet struck. Gogol had been one of those, Gennady thought, a hunter of individual men. And he’d probably never lost a minute’s sleep over it. Some men were just born to it, and Pavel Petrovich Gogol was one of them. With a few hundred thousand such men, a general could conquer the entire world, but they were too rare for that…

… and maybe that was a good thing, Bondarenko mused.

“Might you come to my headquarters some night? I would like to feed you dinner and listen to your stories.”

“How far is it?”

“I will send you my personal helicopter, Sergeant Gogol.”

“And I will bring you a gilded wolf,” the hunter promised his guest.

“We will find an honored place for it at my headquarters,” Bondarenko promised in turn. “Thank you for your tea. I must depart and see to my command, but I will have you to headquarters for dinner, Sergeant Gogol.” Handshakes were exchanged, and the general took his leave.

“I would not want him on the other side of a battlefield,” Colonel Aliyev observed, as they got into their helicopter.

“Do we have a sniper school in the command?”

“Yes, General, but it’s mainly inactive.”

Gennady turned. “Start it up again, Andrushka! We’ll get Gogol to come and teach the children how it’s done. He’s a priceless asset. Men like that are the soul of a fighting army. It’s our job to command our soldiers, to tell them where to go and what to do, but those are the men who do the fighting and the killing, and it’s our job to make sure they’re properly trained and supplied. And when they’re too old, we use them to teach the new boys, to give them heroes they can touch and talk to. How the hell did we ever forget that, Andrey?” The general shook his head as the helicopter lifted off.

Gregory was back in his hotel room, with three hundred pages of technical information to digest as he sipped his Diet Coke and finished off his french fries. Something was wrong with the whole equation, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. The Navy had tested its Standard-2-ER missile against all manner of threats, mainly on computer, but also against live targets at Kwajalein Atoll. It had done pretty well, but there’d never been a full-up live test against a for-real ICBM reentry vehicle. There weren’t enough of them to go around. Mainly they used old Minuteman-II ICBMs, long since retired from service and fired out of test silos at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, but those were mostly gone. Russia and America had retired all of their ballistic weapons, chiefly as a reaction to the nuclear terrorist explosion at Denver and the even more horrific aftermath that had barely been averted. The negotiations to draw the numbers down to zero-the last ones had been eliminated in public just before the Japanese had launched their sneak attack on the Pacific Fleet-had gone so rapidly that a lot of the minor ancillary points had scarcely been considered, and only later had it been decided to take the “spare” launchers whose disposition had somehow been overlooked and retain them for ABM testing (every month a Russian officer checked the American ones at Vandenberg, and an American officer counted the Russian ones outside Plesetsk). The ABM tests were also monitored, but that entire area of effort was now largely theoretical. Both America and Russia retained a goodly number of nuclear warheads, and these could easily be affixed to cruise missiles, which, again, both sides had in relative abundance and no country could stop. It might take five hours instead of thirty-four minutes, but the targets would be just as dead.