The War in 2020

by Ralph Peters

Babryshkin radioed to the chemical defense officer. Do you have a definite reading at this time?"

  "This is Kama. Superfast nerve, type Sh-M. It's already gone. I've unmasked myself."

  Babryshkin shook his head at the universe. Then he tugged at his mask, feeling the sudden wetness as the rubber lifted away from his skin. He shook the mask out, then tucked it methodically into its carrier.

  "Hold in place," he ordered his driver. "I'm going to dismount." But first he reentered the radio net. "All stations. All clear, all clear." He paused for just a moment, searching for the right words. When he could not find them, he simply said, "Clean off your vehicles." Then he unlocked his hatch and climbed out.

  He was lucky. There wasn't so much dirty work. All of his passengers had tumbled from the maneuvering tank in their struggles with death, save for the old man, who still lay coddled against the rear of the gun housing, burned-out cigarette stub in his hand. Babryshkin got him under the armpits and rolled him off the side of the tank.

  There was nothing you could do. He stood up, drinking in the cold, harmless air. As far as he could see, nothing remained alive in the roadway. Worse than the plague, he thought. Far worse. No act of God.

  Something white caught his eye in the middle distance. At first, he was baffled. Then he recognized the carcasses of the two sheep that had been driven from God knew where.

  Pointless.

  Suddenly, a scream slashed out at the world, piercing, even over the idle of the big tank engine. Babryshkin looked around.

  The woman whose life he had saved was standing up in the commander's hatch, screaming at the panorama with a ferocity that hurt in the listener's throat.

  Well, at least she's got a voice to scream with, Babryshkin thought, glad even of this much evidence of life.

  10

  Moscow

  2 November 2020

  Ryder sat in the sparsely furnished office outside of the interrogation block, drinking gray coffee and waiting for his Soviet counterpart to return. Although he had drunk no alcohol the night before, he felt hungover. The captain billeted in the next hotel room had been hammering one of the Russian bar girls all night, with an energy that was as impressive as it was annoying. For hours, Ryder had lain awake as his neighbor's bed thumped against the wall. Now and then, the captain's partner would call out in a language Ryder did not understand, but whose message was unmistakable, and Ryder's thoughts would return to his wife, Jennifer, who refused to be called Jenny, and who had always been so silent in the bedroom. Ryder suspected that his old friend had been right when he declared that Ryder was biologically programmed to end up with the wrong women, but Ryder felt no malice toward his wife. Lying there in the Moscow night, he simply missed her, without understanding exactly why. The one affair in which he had indulged since his divorce the year before had been premature and unmemorable, and had not made the least impression on the lingering image of his wife-Ryder hoped she was happy now, with her new husband who promised to be all that he had failed to be.

  Finally, Ryder had given up trying to sleep. Propping himself up, he drew his field computer from the shoulder holster slung over the bedpost. The tiny machine lit up at the electronically recognizable touch of Ryder's fingers, unable to spring to life under any other hand, unable to share its secrets with anyone else. It was almost as if the machine was relieved at his touch, as though it, too, had been made restless by the lions in the next room. Ryder called up a program he had been working on in Meiji, the Japanese military-industrial computer language, and he strummed through its odd music until he came to the problem that had been annoying him for days. Then the sexual thunder exploded again.

  The problem between Ryder and his wife had not been physical disappointment. If anything, he had shown the greater appetite and resourcefulness, and he had never tired of her. But Jennifer had married him as a very promising graduate student in one of the elite new government-funded programs, not as a soldier. Ryder had been specializing in computer science and Japanese, along with a variety of specialized Japanese computer languages. It was a program open only to the brightest, and although it called for four years of military service after graduation, the longterm prospects were fantastic. American industry was screaming for employees with such qualifications, and Jennifer had married that particular future, while Ryder had been delighted to marry such a smart, beautiful, loving girl. Her parents had died in the plague years, she was alone, and he imagined that he would fill a terrible need in her life.

  The problems had begun in the Army. Although Ryder's specialty pay as a warrant officer interrogator put his income above that of the average line major, Jennifer could not accustom herself to what she perceived as their low financial and social status. Her behavior was not the behavior of the physically enthusiastic college girl he had married. In private, then, later, in public, when she was drunk, she took to calling him Pretty Boy. She said that she should have married a man, someone who knew how to get ahead in the world, and not a child.

  Ryder had actually looked in the mirror one night when Jennifer did not come home, wondering at his face, trying to understand how a man looked and what it meant. He had never cared much about his appearance. But the girls back home in Hancock, Nebraska, had cared, as had the wonderful, sun-washed girls of Stanford University a bit later on. There had always been girls, to the envy of his friends, who could not believe he would not take advantage of every last opportunity, who were utterly baffled by his inclination to treat girls and, later, women as people. "You're nuts," his old friend told him. "You're crazy. You treat them too good. If you just learn to treat them like shit, they spend their lives on their knees with their mouths open. Jeff, I swear, you're biologically programmed to end up with the wrong…"

  He wanted to be a good man, to behave responsibly and decently toward women and toward other men. And the more Jennifer complained and threatened, the more attractive his military service became to him. On his own, he would never have dreamed of joining the Army. But the financial support for his attendance at the university had allowed him to study hard at a good school, instead of working his way through a mediocre one. He had initially regarded his term of required military service as an obligation to be fulfilled, nothing more. But he found the work satisfied him, filling him with a sense of worth he knew he would never find in Jennifer's dreamworld of corporations and credit cards. So he betrayed her, her trust, her faith. When he told her he intended to remain in the Army, she paled. Then she began to scream, cursing him with a vividness for which her relatively demure conduct in the bedroom had not prepared him. She swept her arm across the nearest countertop, hurling glass, wood and cork, dried flowers, and magazines across the room. Then she left, without real argument and without a coat.

  She returned the next day but did not speak to him. Yet, their lives slowly seemed to normalize. Just before he went out on maneuvers, she even slept with him again. She seemed to be trying. Then, in the middle of the war games, he had the opportunity to return to main post for a few hours, and he phoned her, asking her to meet him in the cafeteria. She did. And she told him she was leaving him, just as he was biting into a slice of pizza.

  Well, Ryder told himself, Moscow was an easy enough city in which to become depressed. The hotel rooms were never quite clean, the food was difficult to get down, and the daily ride to and from the fabled faded building that housed KGB headquarters led through dishwater gray streets where no one ever smiled. Not much to smile about, of course. From what little Ryder had seen of their lives, these people lived under conditions an American would find absolutely intolerable. On top of that, the war was going very badly for them.

  Ryder felt sorry for the Russians. He was sorry that any man or woman had to live in so gray a world, and he yearned to make a professional contribution to the joint U.S.-Soviet effort, to somehow make things better. But, thus far, the joint interrogation sessions, although revealing as to Soviet capabilities, had produced little of value concerning the enem
y.

  Ryder took another sip of the thin, bitter coffee to clear his head and glanced again at the subject file. He had almost memorized the data. The case was a windfall, a miracle of good luck — but it promised to be tough going, perhaps the most important and difficult interrogation in which he had ever been involved. The subject was potentially very lucrative, but there would be layers of defenses. And time was critical. The Soviets were collapsing, and Ryder had just learned that morning, at the prebreakfast U.S. staff meeting, that the Seventh Cavalry, who were out in the thick of things beyond the Urals, were going to be committed early. None of the officers of the Tenth Cavalry, all military intelligence specialists, had been happy to hear that. Men had mumbled through their hangovers, still wearing the smell of women with whom they were not supposed to be fraternizing. The speedup in events meant that carefully plotted work schedules had to be discarded and that the officers, got up in a poor imitation of businessman's dress, would have to wake up properly and scramble to get some results with their well-meaning but hopelessly bureaucratic Soviet counterparts.

  Ryder knew he had been lucky in at least one regard. Nick Savitsky, his counterpart interrogator, seemed to be completely open, and he was relatively flexible for a Soviet, anxious to learn about the American methods. Of course, much of that was simply the desire to gain information for the KGB files — but Ryder was doing the same for the U.S. It was the nature of the business.

  Ryder was worried about Savitsky today, however. The subject they were going to work on had the potential of opening up the enemy's entire infrastructure. But you had to go delicately, patiently. Savitsky, like the other Soviets Ryder had encountered, did not always seem to understand that. They were given to excesses that sometimes ruined a subject's ability to respond. A Soviet interrogation, no matter how sophisticated, always had an air of violence about it, and there was a tendency to mishandle a subject severely, without really thinking through the consequences. He had already seen Savitsky in one fit of vengeful fury.

  The door opened, and Savitsky came in, smiling, ill-shaven.

  "Good morning, Jeff," he said, pronouncing the name as "Cheff." He dropped into a chair just opposite Ryder. "And how are things?"

  Usually, the two men worked in English, which Savitsky spoke reasonably well. For highly technical exchanges, they switched to Japanese, but Savitsky was less comfortable in that language than was Ryder.

  "Horrasho," Ryder replied, using one of his half-dozen words of Russian. He had been told that the word meant "very good." It was a very popular word with the officers of the Tenth Cavalry, who liked to pronounce it "whore-show," and regularly applied it to the nightly follies in the hotel bar.

  "Today will be a big day," Savitsky said, helping himself to the coffee, "an important day." Ryder had learned that the coffee was put there each morning especially for him, and its presence was a treat for Savitsky, who never made a move toward the interrogation chamber until they had finished each last sip. Ryder had also noted that Savitsky would quietly wrap the used grounds in newspaper and slip them into his briefcase.

  Ryder watched for a moment as the Russian thickened his coffee with teaspoon after teaspoon of sugar.

  "Nick," he said, trying to sound nonchalant, "I had an idea last night about how to approach this case. I think I've got an angle—"

  "Don't worry, don't worry," Savitsky interrupted. "Today — everything is the Russian way. I will show you something. A thing you have not seen." Savitsky smiled, either at the thought of the interrogation or at the piercing warmth of the coffee. "You will like it, I know." The Russian cradled his chipped cup in red hands, and nodded his head happily. "You must trust me."

  Oh, shit, Ryder thought.

  But Nick was in high spirits. "I have learned so much from you, my friend. You Americans… you Americans… always with such technology perfection. But today, I am showing you something splendid. Something I know you have not seen." The Russian laughed slightly into the steam from his cup. "All of your American comrades will have a great interest."

  Ryder let it go for the moment. He did not want to do anything to spoil the cooperation between the two of them. But neither did he wish to waste a subject of such incredible possibilities. He decided to wait, at least until things threatened to get out of hand. If nothing else, he was anxious just to see the subject. Until now, the Soviets had played this one close to the chest.

  Nick drained the last of his coffee, his facial expression moving from near ecstasy to regret.

  "Everything is very good," he told Ryder. "Now we will go to work."

  Ryder followed the Soviet through the cramped maze of hallways and security barriers that was slowly becoming familiar. Corridors as decayed and dank as an inner-city school after hours, stinking of disinfectant and age. Standard locking systems, not all of which worked the first time Savitsky tried them. Sometimes the vault doors were simply propped open, or minded by an inside guard. Framed photographs on the walls showed mostly unimportant men, since the years of infighting had stripped the walls of the readily recognizable faces. Bad air, poor light. An old woman mopping the floor with formidable slowness.

  The last security door slammed shut behind the two men.

  They followed a short hallway that was cluttered with electronics in various stages of disassembly, then turned into a small room that resembled the inside of a recording studio's control booth. The walls and counters were covered with racks of artificial-intelligence terminals, direct-function computers, environmental controls, recording and auto-translating devices — the tools of the contemporary interrogator's trade. Only these were all a bit nicked or chipped. There was a smell of old burned-out wires, and not all of the monitor lights worked. Much of the equipment was a generation out of date, while the most modem gear was of European or even U.S. manufacture. The Soviets had specialized in the areas of electronic translation, inferential patterning, and specialized software, and one of Ryder's superiors had compared them to brilliant tacticians who were forced to rely on foreign weaponry.

  A long glass window covered most of one wall. To anyone out in the interrogation chamber, the window appeared to be a mirror, but from Ryder's position in the musty booth he could look out on the shadowy forms of the "application room." The design was a holdover from the old days, and the room remained so dark that he could not yet see the subject. He waited impatiently for Savitsky to turn up the lighting.

  "The subject is already wired into our system," Savitsky said, as he touched over the control panel in the bad light. "We'll double-check, as you Americans like to say. But you will see. Everything is fine. Today, everyone is anxious to see how our performance will be." Savitsky turned his shadowy face toward Ryder. "Today, for the first time, I have received a direct call from the Kremlin. There is very much interest."

  "I hope they're not too impatient," Ryder said. "This could take time."

  Savitsky laughed slightly. It was a friendly laugh, that of a confident man. "But that is the surprise," he said. "Soon you will see. A very big surprise for our American friends."

  Ryder did not know how to respond. This was so important. If any sort of foolishness were allowed to destroy the utility of the subject, an enormous opportunity would go to waste.

  Turn up the damned lights, Ryder thought. Let me see. As if responding to Ryder's thoughts, Savitsky flipped a row of switches. Beyond the big window, spotlights came up to scour an electronic operating room with a sterile white glare. Despite the complicated disorder of the interrogation chamber, with its cascades of wires that connected one clutter of electronics to the next, Ryder focused immediately on the subject.

  "Christ," he said to Savitsky, in honest surprise. "I expected…"

  Savitsky laughed. "Amazing, isn't it?"

  "Smaller than I thought, for one thing. Much smaller."

  Savitsky stood with his arms folded across his chest in satisfaction. "Remarkable, I think. You know, such… inconspicuity — is that what you say?"
>
  "Inconspicuousness."

  "Yes. Inconspicuousness. How easily overlooked. It was only pure luck that a specialist was on the scene."

  Ryder shook his head. It really was amazing.

  "Well, my friend," Savitsky said, "shall we go out and have a closer look?"

  Ryder followed the Soviet out of the control booth, almost stepping on the man's heels in his excitement. His sole interest now was the subject, and he almost tripped over a coil of wires.

  Savitsky made straight for the central operating table, and he hovered over the subject for a moment, waiting for Ryder to come up beside him. Ryder remained so astonished that he felt almost as though he were out of breath. It truly was amazing. Unless the Soviets had made some sort of mistake, unless this wasn't the great brain after all.

  But all of Ryder's professional instincts told him that this was the genuine article, that there had been no mistake, and that the Japanese were still the best at some things, no matter how broadly U.S. technology had struggled to come back. The electronic intelligence brain that processed and stored all of the data necessary to command and control vast stretches of the front fit into a solid black brick little larger than a man's wallet.

  "My God," Ryder said. "I thought… it would be at least the size of a suitcase."

  "Yes," Savitsky agreed. "It's frightening. Had you been able to combine the power of every supercomputer in the world at the turn of the century, the power would not have approached… such a power as resides in this device."

  Ryder possessed access to the latest classified research in the States, as well as to intelligence files on foreign developments. But no one had anticipated that the process of miniaturization had gone this far. The Japanese had pulled off another surprise, and it worried Ryder. What else might they have in store?

  "It was really pure luck," Savitsky stressed, as though he still could not quite believe it himself. "Perhaps the only luck we have had in this war. Not only did we not shoot down the enemy, our systems did not even detect him. The enemy command ship experienced the simplest of mechanical malfunctions. Imagine, my friend. One of the most sophisticated tactical-operational airborne command centers in the Japanese inventory… dropping from the sky because a bolt came loose or a washer disintegrated. Such wonderful luck. Had the aircraft experienced an electronic problem, the brain would have destroyed itself to prevent capture. Computer suicide."