The Best Defense

by Todd A. Stone

  The gunships rollercoastered over the sharp hills, just above the treetop level. Such flying tactics made for an uncomfortable flight even for those with strong stomachs, but Dimonokov blinked back the nausea. Flying close to the ground kept you alive. In Afghanistan, where he’d fought Muslim radicals long before any Americans—except CIA operatives—knew the country even existed, flying straight and level got you a ticket home in a body bag—if they recovered your body parts. Even the rudest Afghani goatherd could aim a shoulder-fired American Stinger missile, listen for the ‘locked-on-target’ tone, and knock an unsuspecting helicopter from the sky with the press of a single button.

  It was a lesson learned at the expense of dead pilots and soldiers and officers. Once out of Afghanistan, his army promptly forgot it, then learned it again at the same bloody cost in the first punitive expedition into Chechnya. There, the rebels turned captured or stolen Russian SA-7 and SA-9 man-portable air defense missiles against the Hind gunships and Hip troop-carrying helicopters that hunted them.

  “Five minutes from target,” the pilot said. Dimonokov checked his map and verified their position.

  Dimonokov remembered passing the wreckage of downed helicopters and burnt hulks of Russian armored vehicles when he led Regiment 23 into the rebel province. The regular Army had been routed; its pompous, corrupt, big-bellied, beribboned generals embarrassed by bands of Allah-worshipping bearded bandits dressed in rags. The rebels lured the generals’ tanks and mechanized fighting vehicles into the capital city’s narrow streets. Without dismounted infantry support, the buttoned-up armored vehicles became steel coffins. The rebels first picked them off with gasoline bombs and homemade explosives, then graduated to using powerful anti-tank rockets sold to them by starving Russian soldiers who traded their weapons for the food and water their own army had failed to bring them.

  He was ashamed then. The soldiers were soft—the mighty Russian Army a hollow paper tiger, embarrassed on the world stage. Only Dimonokov’s Special Security Regiment 23 was successful—too successful. Their mission was to terrorize the terrorists. They were pulled out after six months—too much bad press for the new leaders who wanted to look more humane, more Western.

  The regulars did do one thing right, he mused as the Hind bobbed and weaved. On their way out of Chechnya, they leveled the cities and scorched the countryside.

  “Target area in one minute,” the Hind’s pilot called over the intercom.

  Dimonokov switched the radio from intercom to transmit, sending a message to his team leaders and the pilots in the other four gunships.

  “Ground teams stand by to deploy.”

  Things were supposed to get better after the first expedition into Chechnya, Dimonokov remembered. From the ashes of defeat would rise great a great phoenix of reform. A smaller, more professional army. Better training. Better equipment. Better pay. Like the West. There were many long-winded speeches and proclamations and a forest’s worth of paper directives, along with forced retirements and many recriminations where the guilty blamed the innocent and the incompetent ousted the professional.

  Things got worse, not better. What did he expect? This was Russia.

  The Army was cut, and cut, and cut again. Pay came sporadically, when it came at all. Spare parts became scarce, and training was nonexistent. At the top, generals invented whole divisions of ghost soldiers, then pocketed the pay of the phantom troops. Electricity and water were cut off from Army bases for lack of payment—the finance officers had disappeared with the funds. Machine guns, trucks, even tanks were stolen and sold to the Mafiya. A navy admiral was jailed for trying to sell a nuclear submarine to a Colombian drug cartel.

  From each according to his need, to each according to his ability, thought Dimonokov. His beloved Spetsnaz soldiers—thoroughly trained in unconventional warfare, expert marksmen with any weapon in the world, deadly fighters in hand-to-hand combat—sold what they had, too. They sold themselves—they became bodyguards for high-level Mafiya chiefs and enforcers for organized crime street lieutenants. Common soldiers sold their weapons. Officers sold arms rooms full of machine guns. The generals and politicians sold Russia’s iron fist—its nuclear weapons.

  And when the Mafiya came with fistfuls of money, ready to buy advanced Russian shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, the weapons were available at a discount. That the Mafiya were only middlemen, taking their mark-up on missiles headed for Islamic radical groups, was of no matter.

  So Dimonokov ordered the helicopters’ pilots to fly contouring the nap of the earth, trading off airsickness for survival. It galled him that he was required to take such precautions in his own country, his own back yard. But reports said the warheads were stolen, and then later that the thieves’ small convoy had been ambushed. It was not unheard of for one clan of Mafiya to steal from the other, or from their Middle Eastern clients after a delivery was made. The missiles were a real possibility with any of them.

  He hated the corrupt bureaucrats who put his country’s armed might up for sale, hated the thieving Mafiya who brokered it, hated the smelly Arabs who used it against his soldiers, and he hated the rich, fat Americans who started it all.

  He hated the missiles too, and while he would admit it only to himself and only for the briefest of microseconds, he truly feared them.

  “Thirty seconds.”

  Viktor Dimonokov considered himself lucky, in a way. His connection through his brother Alexi meant his Special Security Regiment 23 did not suffer the way regular Army units did. Even the elite Spetsnaz brigades, from which Dimonokov drew his recruits for the Special Security, were hurting. Alexi kept the money for the special “Master Warrior” project flowing. Viktor did not ask how, and he did not ask what Alexi wanted in return. He simply did his job as a warrior in service to the Motherland. His mission was to safeguard selected nuclear processing and storage facilities—an easy task for a specialized, highly trained force such as his.

  He would keep safe the atomic mailed fist of his country and then give to the Motherland a more powerful weapon: new, world-dominating warriors. Not a bad legacy.

  “Visual on target,” the pilot announced.

  In a clearing ahead, Dimonokov saw the burned out chassis of three trucks in a ditch beside a curve in the road.

  “Execute as planned. First and second teams deploy. Teams three and four provide security.” He pulled a stopwatch from his pocket and a pair of binoculars from their case.

  The lead two helicopters sprinted over the open area below to the far edge of the clearing. They did not touch down, but rather dropped sharply to hover just a few feet above the earth. A team of Dimonokov’s Special Security soldiers jumped from each helicopter and then sprinted to the clearing’s edge. The last man was barely clear of the open troop doors when the pilots gave their machines full power and bolted straight up.

  Dimonokov’s two other gunships hung back, hovering just above treetop level and covering the first two helicopters’ movements. Then, as the lead two machines took up covering positions, the trailing Hinds moved to opposite corners of the clearing and dropped their troops.

  Through his binoculars, Dimonokov followed actions on the ground. As it tried to hover, one of the gunships bounced down and back up. Jumping from a moving deck at first four feet, then suddenly thirty feet, above the ground, a Special Security soldier lost his footing and fell. Even through the binoculars, Dimonokov could tell the man landed hard. He saw a telltale puff of smoke: the soldier’s AK-104 assault rifle—specially designed for the Spetsnaz troops— accidentally discharged when he hit.

  They were fearfully strong, Dimonokov thought, instantly obedient, and violently aggressive. Excellent qualities for Master Warriors. But agile they were not—mentally or physically. It was a tradeoff—the very hormone and nutritional therapies that gave them unmatched brute strength and a single-minded viciousness also slowed their reactions and dulled their thinking.

  Dimonokov was not greatly bothered by such a tradeoff, de
spite old Steglyr’s warnings. After all they were, as even Steglyr would say, Russians.

  The much-rehearsed drill on the ground went like clockwork: Dimonokov’s Special Security teams methodically secured the site’s perimeter, covered by the guns of the four Hinds. Then two search teams peeled off to inspect and secure the wrecked vehicles. Dimonkov liked their mechanical precision. He told himself it was a sufficient substitute for initiative and the ability to think on one’s feet.

  His radio crackled.

  “Area secure,” the ground force leader radioed, “vehicles inspected. Seventeen bodies, no survivors. Negative cargo. One casualty.”

  He pressed the ‘transmit’ button. “The trucks were empty?”

  “Only the metal containers remain.”

  “Move nothing. I will see for myself.” He flipped a switch and ordered his pilot to land.

  ~*~

  Dimonokov and his long-time senior operations sergeant walked through the wreckage. The spring sun should have warmed them, but cold tumbled invisibly off the Urals and made them pull their collars up.

  “I knew those two,” Sergeant Sergei Steglyr said, pointing at two bodies in a ditch. “Spetsnaz Brigade 16.”

  “They sold out,” Dimonokov said. “I will build better warriors than they ever could hope to be.”

  Steglyr stopped. He motioned to the Special Security soldier who followed a few steps behind, carrying Dimonokov’s command radio. “Stand over there. Come if we tell you to or if there is a message, and not otherwise.”

  The trooper nodded and fell back.

  Dimonokov and Steglyr walked on.

  “I need to speak freely.”

  “Have you ever held your tongue?”

  “Often, but I have always told you what was necessary for you to hear, even when you did not wish to hear it.”

  “And now?”

  “Those dead—the troopers—they were good soldiers once. If they sold out, they did so to buy bread. They had families. A Spetsnaz man knows how to go hungry. Wives and babies, they must eat.”

  “Now their women and children will starve. The Mafiya has no pensions.”

  “It is Russia. There are no good choices. A man does what he can. The rest he leaves to Providence, and then he takes a drink.”

  “You are more Russian than Russia herself.”

  “My colonel, I brought you up from a pup of an officer. I remember young infantry lieutenant Dimonokov, his parachutist’s wings shining so bright they would dazzle you. Knew everything. Wanted to be the best and lead the best. A wet behind the ears upstart who would be a hero’s hero and banish the enemies of the motherland.”

  “A long time ago.”

  “We have fought many battles together. In so many ways, you have not changed. Perhaps that is why I send the old turds at the Personnel Office money to keep serving alongside you.”

  “You send them money to stay? Hah! I send them money to keep you.”

  “They are very good Russians, those Personnel Office men.”

  “You do not wish to talk about Personnel.”

  “I do not. Remove your glove. Look at your hand.”

  Dimonokov did so. The skin on his big hand had a dull, waxen, whitish yellow tint. His hand trembled.

  “Now look at them.” Steglyr pointed to the bodies.

  The coloring in the corpse’s faces looked sickeningly similar.

  “This is what your Master Warrior drugs and hormones are doing, my colonel. They are killing you. They are killing your men. Russia does not need walking corpses.”

  Dimonokov pulled his glove back on.

  “Russia needs great men. I will create them. Worry more about training the troops than about my complexion.”

  The Special Security soldier with the radio on his back ran up to Dimonokov. “Colonel, Team Two security reports a civilian vehicle approaching along the road from the northwest. A Mercedes moving at a high rate of speed, sir.”

  Dimonokov scowled.

  “Someone you know?” Steglyr asked.

  “More likely one of his minions.” He turned to the radio operator. “Tell Team Two to let the civilian through, but have them caution the driver to proceed slowly. Let him get a good look at this. Then contact Team Four. When the civilian is about to exit the perimeter, I want them to stop him. I want him strip-searched, I want his papers checked, and I want his vehicle searched down to the last crevice. When that is finished, he may proceed. Aircraft number two will follow him for forty kilometers. Tell the pilot I want him to follow low and close—low and close enough to smell the stink when the vehicle’s driver sees the twin cannons in his mirror and shits his pants.”

  “Yes, sir. What will Team Four be looking for?”

  “Nothing. They will just be looking—and sending a message.”

  The radio operator sent the message and stepped back.

  Dimonokov stopped and looked back over the carnage. Despite the cold, flies buzzed around the bodies.

  “Who did this?” Dimonokov asked.

  Steglyr walked across the road and poked through the bushes.

  The white Mercedes, filthy with road dirt, drove by. The driver took in the scene, and then snapped his head forward to stare straight ahead.

  Over thirty years of fighting his country’s “shadow wars” made it easy for Steglyr to read the signs. “A team of eight,” Steglyr said. “Just like our own. But this was not a Spetsnaz operation. The firing positions are much too spread out. They used no explosives or mines, as we always do, but instead built the obstacle right into the road, disguised as a pothole.”

  Dimonokov shook his head. “Mafiya would not take such precautions. And there would have been more of them. No Russians killed these Russians.”

  “No Chinamen, Jews, Koreans, or Arabs either,” Steglyr said. “You and I, we have fought them all. None of them have the intelligence gathering resources to plan an ambush such as this. None of them strike this surgically.”

  Dimonokov stared off toward the mountains for a long moment.

  “Americans. I hate the Americans.”

  Chapter Three

  The Pentagon

  Office of the Army Representative

  Joint Threat Reduction Action Committee

  No sooner did Ambrose open his Pentagon office door than did a fuming Val Macintyre barge in and slam it behind her.

  She stood ready for war in front of his desk.

  “Why the hell isn’t my name on that XO list?”

  Feeling the full weight of his staff officer’s stare on his back, Ambrose crossed the lowest-bidder carpet to his stained coffeemaker. Certificates testifying to a career of many achievements and many campaigns—Viet Nam, Grenada, Panama, Saudi, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan—decorated the Department-of-the-Army-Standardized-Color-Scheme-Light-Brown wall above the machine. Then he took a seat, sipping his coffee while looking at her over his worn steel desk.

  “Sit down,” Ambrose said quietly. Val didn’t move.

  “That wasn’t a request, Major.”

  Val sat.

  “Did you look at those XO positions? Were they what you want?”

  “I want an executive officer’s position because that is a necessary step to being selected for a command. I want a command—I want what you promised me when I took this assignment.”

  “I know exactly what you want,” Ambrose shot back. “You want a command where you can show the Army, Marshall Wolfe, and everybody else that women in general and you in particular can soldier as well as or better than any man. You want a command where the action is, not some no-funding, no-priority, back-burner, paper-pushing command some place out in the boonies. You want a combat command because that’s the one thing some people say women can’t do, and when someone says ‘you can’t’ to you, you charge hell-bent-for-leather straight up the middle roaring ‘I will!’ And, while you’re at it, you’d like a command where you can have Wolfe around more than just every now and then, because as much as you hate to admit i
t, like the rest of us mere humans you get lonely.”

  The truth stung Val so hard she could only deny it. “My relationship with Colonel Wolfe is not relevant.”

  “Your relationship with Colonel Wolfe is what brought you to the Pentagon to work for me,” Ambrose said, his tone almost fatherly, “second only to your desire prove yourself, so you can stop having to prove yourself. If you’d get it through your head that you don’t have to prove yourself, and if you’d get that Scottish temper of yours under control and stop making a frontal assault on every problem that comes up, you’d find you’d get a lot further. Quit playing other people’s games and make them play yours.”

  “About the list…”

  “You mean about Grimes. Jim Grimes is going to find himself as the XO of a supply unit that the Army has cut funds for. Grossly under strength, no real mission, and with so many unrealistic demands that whoever leads it will always be in a ‘no-win’ situation. Four of the last six commanders and five of the last seven XOs of that unit have been relieved. Is that a place you really want to be?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Look at that list carefully—look beyond the obvious. It’s a skill you could stand to improve on. Look at who is being chosen to go where, and look at what kind of XO jobs they’re being assigned to. Then see if you still want to lead a bayonet charge through Personnel Command’s front door.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And do not, under any circumstances, let Jim Grimes get too deep under your skin.”

  Easier said than done, thought Val. “I won’t, sir.”

  “I’ll see to it that you get the command you want, but until then we have other business. You reviewed all the reports and other paperwork from Infernesk. Tell me what’s going on there.”