Fortunes of War

by Stephen Coonts

  Cassidy walked out of the room as someone called the crowd to attention. The people in the room were struggling to snap out of the low lounge chairs as he went through the door. Over his shoulder, he said, “Preacher, come with me.”

  Preacher was Paul Fain, a tallish man with a square face and a ruddy complexion. When he entered the colonel’s room, he closed the door behind him and grinned, displaying perfect white teeth. “Good to see you, Bob.”

  Cassidy reached for Fain’s outstretched hand. “What in the dickens are you doing here, Preach? Of all people, I never expected to see your name on that list.”

  “Life’s an adventure. This sounded like a good one, and when I heard you were in charge, well … Here I am!”

  “What about Isabelle? What did she say when you broke it to her?”

  “She wasn’t happy, but she knows me, inside and out. We’re stuck with each other.”

  Fain was the only uniformed ordained minister not in the Chaplain Corps that Cassidy had ever met. He was serving as assistant pastor in his first church when he chucked it all years ago and joined the Air Force. When Cassidy had last seen him, Fain was flying F-22’s at Nellis. Isabelle was his long-suffering wife, a woman who thought she married a minister but wound up with a fighter pilot instead.

  They chatted for several minutes about old times, and Cassidy made Fain bring him up-to-date on Isabelle and the two children.

  Finally, Cassidy said, “Preacher, I want you to think this Russia thing through. The rest of them”— Cassidy nodded toward the television lounge—“are adventurers, rolling dice with their lives. Live or die, they don’t really care. They want excitement, to try something new, to bet their lives on their skill and courage. A few of them just want to kill somebody. You aren’t like them.”

  “And you are?”

  “Listen to me, Preach. I’m trying to level with you. My wife and kid died years ago. I’m single. I’ve got nothing in this world. If I get zapped over Russia, no one is going to miss me. No one. The same with that crowd down there. I can order them in!combat. When they die I won’t lose any sleep over them…, and no one else will either.”

  “What makes you think I am different from them?”

  Cassidy was embarrassed. “You’re different because I know you. And someone will miss you — Isabelle, the kids.”

  Fain didn’t reply.

  Cassidy growled, “I’ll miss you, for Christ’s sake. I don’t want to take that chance. Go home to Isabelle.”

  “No. I volunteered for this fight. Somebody has to be willing to lay his precious neck on the line or the ruthless bastards are always going to keep coming out on top. When God wants me, he can take me. That’s always been the case, Bob, and Isabelle can live with it. She has faith in me, and faith in God.”

  Cassidy went over to the window and looked out at the summer evening. Clouds were rolling in. Soon the rain should come. “I guess I don’t have faith,” he mused. “Not that kind, anyway. The ruthless, implacable bastards always seem to come out winners.” He found this whole discussion irritating. Preacher Fain should have stayed at home. “People live, and then they die. That’s the way of the world. I don’t want to lose any more friends. I’ve lost too many people I care about already.”

  “I have enough faith for both of us, Colonel.”

  Cassidy didn’t know what to say. Fain was cool as ice, as usual. “Okay, Preach. I give up. You want in, you’re in. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. How about sending in Dick Guelich?”

  “Thanks, Bob.”

  “You’re my admin officer. We’ve got a long night of paperwork ahead of us, so get some pencils and paper and a beer from the fridge, then come on back here.”

  “Okay.”

  Lee Foy found Aaron Hudek in the entertainment room playing a holographic video game. “Hey, Fur Ball.”

  Hudek didn’t look around. He kept squirting energy balls at alien space fighters, who were addicted to head-on attacks. “Toy Sauce. What are you doing here?”

  “Same as you.”

  Hudek eventually ran out of energy balls. As he fed more coins into the machine, he said, “Couldn’t resist a chance at those Jap fighter jocks, eh? Gonna pop a few. If they don’t get you first.”

  “Mr. Personality. Gonna be great having you on this expedition.”

  “Suck it, Sauce.”

  “The road might be rocky, but fortunately we have a world-class diplomat along to impress the locals.”

  Hudek was using both hands on the video game’s controls, tapping them, massaging them, caressing them while he moaned with pleasure. The suicidal aliens kept ripping in to get fried, almost too fast for the eye to follow. Foy giggled. “Still the magic touch with machinery, huh, Fur Ball?”

  “Wanta make a bet? A grand to the guy who gets the first kill?”

  Hudek kept his eyes glued on those incoming alien idiots. Foy took his time answering. “The difficulty is collecting from a dead man. When I win, you’ll probably be long gone to a better, cleaner world.”

  “God, the camaraderie! The male bonding rituals!” Hudek exclaimed ecstatically. “What a fool I was to think I could live without it.”

  Hudek shot down several hundred more aliens; then the game ended abruptly, a few points shy of a free game. He studied the score, then muttered, “Damn.” He glanced around as he dug in his pocket for more quarters. “You still here? Stay out of my space, Sauce. I don’t have time to wet-nurse you.”

  “You’re my executive officer,” Bob Cassidy told Dick Guelich. “You got operations,” he said to Joe Malan. “We’ll land in Germany at the Rhein-Main Air Base. A squadron of F-22’s there will transfer all their planes to us and we’ll ask for volunteers from the maintenance troops. We should get enough mechanics and specialists to keep the planes flying, at least for a while. “Our problem is training. I demanded at least a week before we go to Russia. We may get more time, but don’t count on it. “One week. It’s nowhere near enough. We don’t have time to train them; they are going in!combat knowing just what they know now. What we can do is make them think about combat, shake off the peacetime complacency, key them up, get them sharp.”

  “A week isn’t enough time,” Guelich said. “Two months, maybe, but a week?”

  “We got seven days.”

  “That’ll be enough,” Joe Malan said. “I think everybody has trained to combat ready at one time or another. If we put them in the simulator, concentrate on the systems, refresh on tactics, and talk about what they can expect in the air over Siberia, they’ll be at seventy-five or eighty percent. The first Zero they see, they’ll get pumped the rest of the way.”

  “That’s your job, Joe.”

  “I have to get transitioned to this plane,” Malan objected. “I never flew an F-22.”

  “Piece of cake,” Guelich told him. “We’ll put you in the magic box first. It’s easier than an F-16 or F-18. Very straightforward airframe. You’ll pick up the system quickly.”

  “What I want to know,” Joe Malan said, “is how we are going to do all the paperwork. Air Force squadrons have staffs of clerks and ground-pounders doing this stuff, and we don’t.”

  “What paperwork?”

  “A standardization program, evaluations, records; a safety program, lectures, inspections; training records; sexual harassment prevention, counseling, investigations, all of that.”

  “Who says we have to do that stuff?”

  Malan pulled a message from the Air Force chief of staff from the pile waiting for Cassidy’s attention. “Right here, in black and white.”

  He began to read from the message. Bob Cassidy reached for the document, removed it from Malan’s hands, and methodically tore it into tiny pieces. He dribbled the pieces into a wastebasket. “Any questions?”

  The others laughed. An hour later, they had hashed out a plan. Cassidy felt relieved— both Guelich and Malan were professionals. Guelich had given his first impression that the job was impossible, yet when told that they were goi
ng to do it anyway, he had jumped in with both feet. Malan immediately started planning how to do it. Cassidy ran them out finally, so he could get some sleep. He was exhausted. When the door closed, he fell into bed still dressed.

  10

  When he was maneuvering to consolidate his power, Aleksandr Kalugin dwelled for a dark moment on Marshal Ivan Samsonov, the army chief of staff. The two men were opposites in every way. Kalugin loved money above all things, had no scruples that anyone had ever been able to detect, and never told the truth if a lie would serve, even for a little while. Samsonov, on the other hand, had spent his adult life in uniform and seemed to embody the military virtues. He was honest, courageous, patriotic, and, amazingly, embedded as he was in a bureaucracy that fed on half-truths and innuendo, boldly frank. Ivan Sam-sonov was universally regarded as a soldier’s soldier. Pondering these things, Kalugin decided he would sleep better at night if Samsonov did not have the armed forces at his beck and call. He had Samsonov quietly arrested, shot, and buried. With that unpleasantness behind him, Kalugin faced his next problem: whom to put in Samsonov’s place. The invasion of Siberia had certainly been a grand political opportunity for Kalugin, but he knew that even a dictator must have military victories in order to survive. He needed an accomplished soldier to win those victories, one who could and would save Russia, yet a man in debt to Kalugin for his place. After the nation was saved, well, if necessary, the hero could go into the ground beside Samsonov. Until then … Kalugin pretended to fret the choice for days while the Japanese army marched ever deeper into Siberia. He had already decided to name the man whom Samsonov had replaced, Marshal Oleg Stolypin, but the outpouring of raw patriotism occurring in Russia just then made it seem politic to remain quiet. Since the collapse of communism in 1991, the national scene had too often reflected the public mood: rancor, acrimony, hardball politics, charges and countercharges resulting in political deadlock, which made it impossible for any group to govern. The politicians bickered and postured and clawed at one another while the nation rotted. Until now. At last the Russian people had an enemy they could unite against.

  Kalugin thought the moment sublime. He savored it. He was the absolute master of Russia. None opposed him or even dreamed of doing so. All looked to him to save the nation. Unfortunately, the euphoria would eventually wear off. Sooner or later people would want action. One evening, Kalugin sent a car to Stolypin’s dacha in the Lenin Hills to bring the old soldier to the Kremlin. “I have sent for you,” he told the retired officer when he walked into the president’s office, “because Russia needs you.” Stolypin was escorted by several members of Kalugin’s private security force, men he paid personally who did not work for any government agency. The security people withdrew, reluctantly. They had searched the former soldier from head to toe, looking for weapons, contraband, letters from people in prison, anything. The hallways outside were filled with armed guards, men personally loyal to Kalugin because he had been feeding them and their families for almost twenty years. They were also in the courtyard outside the window, on the roofs across the street. Kalugin was taking no chances. Now the president offered the old man hot tea. Stolypin had retired from the army before Kalugin won the presidency, so they had never worked together, although they had a nodding acquaintance from parties and official functions. The marshal was in his early seventies. He had short, white hair and thick peasant’s hands. He was stolid, too, like a peasant, and as he sipped his tea, he looked around the president’s office vacantly, without interest. “Tell me frankly,” Kalugin said, “what we must do to defeat the Japanese in Siberia.”

  “I don’t know that we can,” the old man replied, then sipped more tea. “The draft laws have not been enforced for years; the logistics system has collapsed; weapons procurement has stopped … Baldly, Mr. President, we have no army … No army, no NAVY, no air force.”

  “If we spend the summer and fall building an army, can we not win when the Japanese are buried under a Siberian winter?”

  “I am not sanguine. Japan is a rich nation. They can supply their forces by air. We will be the ones most hindered by winter.”

  “Come, come, Marshal,” Kalugin scoffed. “The Russian man is tough, able to endure great hardships. Winter is the Russian season.”

  “In another age, Mr. President, winter was a large battalion. It ruined the French, the Poles, and the Germans. The world has changed since then. Japan is physically closer to the Siberian oil fields than we are. By winter they will be comfortably established, well dug in. Russia will have to mobilize, put the entire economy on a war footing, like we did during World War Two. Even then, we may not win.”

  “Enoughst” Kalugin roared. “Enough of this defeatism! I will not hear it. I am the guardian of holy Mother Russia. We will defend her to the very last drop of Russian blood.”

  Stolypin shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Mr. President, everything we do must be based on the hard realities. We must work with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. The bitter truth is that the armed forces are in the same condition as the rest of Russia. It will take time to change that.”

  Kalugin rapped his knuckles on the desk. “Ask Samsonov,” Stolypin said. “Get his opinion.”

  “What is your advice?” Kalugin said, his knuckle poised above the desk. “Negotiate the best deal possible with the Japanese— buy time. Rebuild the army. When we are strong enough, drive them into the sea.”

  Kalugin made a gesture of dismissal. “That course is politically impossible. By all appearances, we would be compromising with aggression. The people would never stand for it.”

  “Mr. President, you asked for a professional opinion and I have given it. Building an army will take time.”

  “Nothing can be done in the interim?”

  “We can use small units, bleed the Japanese where we can without excessive cost. However, we must ensure that we do not squander assets that we will need to win the victory later.”

  “We must do more. More than pinpricks.” Kalugin’s face had a hard, unyielding look. Stolypin shifted his feet. He cleared his throat, sipped tea, and sized up the politician in the tailored gray Italian suit seated behind the desk. “What does Marshal Samsonov say?” he asked finally. “Why isn’t he here?”

  “He’s dead. Tragically. A heart attack, two nights ago. We have not announced it yet … The people put such faith in him.”

  Stolypin grimaced. “A good man, the very best. Ah well, death comes for us all.” He sighed. After a bit, he asked, “Who is to replace him?”

  “Y.”

  Stolypin was genuinely surprised.

  “I’m too old, too tired. You need a young man full of fire. He will need to weld together an army, which will not be a small task.”

  “I am giving you the responsibility, Marshal,” Kalugin said crisply. “Your country needs you.”

  “Can we get foreign help? Military help?”

  “We are working on that.”

  “The military protocol with the United States — will they send troops?

  Equipment? Fuel? Food? Weapons? God knows, we need everything we can get.”

  “They are offering a squadron of planes.”

  “A squadron?” Stolypin thundered. He sprang from his chair with a vigor that surprised Kalugin, then paced back and forth. “A squadron! They promised to come to our aid if we destroyed our nuclear weapons. So we did. Fools that we were, we believed their lies.”

  He stopped in front of a picture of Stalin hanging over a fireplace and stood staring at it. “At least some of the politicians believed them.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Do you have any vodka for this tea?”

  “Yes.” Kalugin reached into the lower reaches of his desk for a bottle and poured a shot into Stolypin’s tea. Stolypin sipped the mixture. “I didn’t believe any of it, Mr. President. The Americans always act in America’s best interests, just as we always act in Russia’s best interests. They made a promise, just a promi
se, written on good paper and signed with good ink and worth maybe ten rubles at a curio shop. So I acted in Russia’s best interests. I secreted ten warheads, kept them back so they were not destroyed. The last time I saw Samsonov, he said we still have them.”

  Kalugin couldn’t believe his ears. “We still have nuclear weapons?”

  “Ten.”

  “Only ten?”

  “Only? We had to lie and cheat to keep ten.”

  Kalugin was trying to comprehend the enormity of this revelation. “Where are the weapons?” he asked after a bit. “Mr. President, they are at Trojan Island.”

  “I am not familiar with the place.”

  “Trojan Island is an extinct cone-shaped volcano near the Kuril Strait. Although the island is fairly small, the volcano reaches up over two thousand meters, so it is almost always shrouded in clouds, which kept it hidden from satellite photography when we built the base. The nearby waters are deep, ice-free year-round, and there is good access to the Pacific. For these reasons, we built a submarine base there twenty years ago, a base that can only be entered underwater. It is similar to the base at Bolshaya Litsa, on the Kola Peninsula.”

  “Do the Japanese know of this place?”

  “I would be amazed if they did, sir. The base was officially abandoned when the last of the boomer boats were scrapped. We hid the warheads there for just that reason.”

  “Nuclear weapons,” Kalugin mused, his eyelids reducing his eyes to mere slits. “The use of nuclear weapons involves huge, incalculable risks,” Sto-lypin said. “That road is unknown. We devoted much thought to pondering where it might lead years ago, when we had such weapons in quantity.”

  “And what were your conclusions?”

  “That we would use them only as a last resort, when all else had failed.”

  Kalugin merely grunted. He was deep in thought. Stolypin dropped into a chair, helped himself to more vodka and tea. Kalugin grinned wolfishly. “Marshal Stolypin, let us drink to Russia. You have answered my prayers, and saved your country.”