Fortunes of War

9

“Svechin has been into the torpedo juice again.”

“Anybody else?”

“Three or four of them have been sipping it, Captain. They do it because Svechin eggs them on.”

Pavel Saratov eyed the chief of the boat, a senior warrant, or starshi michman, who averted his gaze. “They haven’t been paid in five months, sir.”

“I know that.”

“They ask why we are here.”

“There is a war. We defend Mother Russia.”

“Ha! There is no money. There is no food. There is no clothing. The electricity is off half the time. There is no medicine, no vodka, no tobacco. The politicians are all thieves, children are sick, people are dying from pollution, industrial poisoning.”

Saratov rubbed his face, then his head. The chief continued: “We don’t have a country. That is what the men say. We left our families to starve in the dark and sailed away to drown at sea. If the Japanese want Siberia, let them have it. We might be better off under the Japanese. I hear they eat regularly.”

“The men say that?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“What is your opinion?”

“That is what the men say.”

“And you? Answer me.”

The chief’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “The men think we are doomed. That we have no chance. The P-3’s will find us again. We should surrender while we are still alive.”

“And you?”

“I am a loyal Russian, Captain.” Saratov said nothing. “We might sail to Hawaii,” the chief offered tentatively. After a moment of silence, he added, “Or the Aleutians. Ask for asylum from the Americans. I wish I were an American.”

Saratov played with the chart on the desk. Off to one side lay the messages. The Japanese had taken Nikolayevsk, Petropavlosk, and Kor-sakov. The Japanese had parachuted into Ostrov and Okha on Sakhalin Island, where Russian troops were resisting fiercely, according to the Kremlin. The Japanese had attacked Magadan and Gavan — no mention by the Kremlin of Russian resistance. Unconventional warfare teams had taken four emergency submarine resupply bases on the northern shore of the Sea of Okhotsk and in the Kurils — probably less than a dozen well-trained men in each team. Saratov was certain that all these conquests had been ridiculously easy. The four sub resupply bases didn’t even have troops assigned anymore, not since the turn of the century. The officer who decoded these messages, Bogrov, had whispered the news to two friends, who whispered to friends. Every man on the boat had heard the news by now. “Bring Svechin to the control room in fifteen minutes.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

The cramped space of the captain’s cabin held only a bunk, a foldout desk, and a chair. It was on this desk that Saratov had the chart spread. He stared at it without seeing it. The men were defeated. Without firing a shot, they were ready to surrender. Every man on the boat had grown up on Communist propaganda, that New Communist Man bullshit, an endless diet of crap about how the Party knows best, the moral imperative to care for everyone according to their needs. All that was over, finally, gone forever. Rampant inflation and an ever-expanding population destroyed the bureaucrats’ ability to provide. In an age of ever-increasing scarcity of basic necessities, corruption became endemic, crime rampant. Rusted, rotten, and dilapidated, the social framework shuddered one last time in the rising wind, then slowly collapsed. The Soviet Union died in the wreckage, leaving only starving republics without the resources to cope. Seventeen years later, Russia, the largest republic, was ruled by criminals and incompetents interested primarily in lining their own pockets. The men on this boat were here solely because they had a better chance of eating in the NAVY than they did out of it. And it was just a chance. For weeks last winter, everyone at the Petropavlosk Naval Base had survived on a diet of beets. Not even bread. Beets three times a day for four and a half weeks. Meanwhile, old babushkas and abandoned children starved in the streets. There were whispers of cannibalism out in the boondocks, but no one knew anything for certain. The rest of the world is high-teching its way to wealth and fortune, Saratov reflected bitterly. Even Chinese peasants eat better than poor Russians. The Japanese are rich, rich, rich, not to mention the Americans. And Pavel Saratov drained the alcohol from a torpedo and sold it on the black market to get money to buy food to feed his crew for this cruise! Of course, the torpedoes were not supposed to have alcohol in them. Their fuel was a devil’s brew of chemicals that allowed them to run at up to 55 knots, but the torpedo fuel had deteriorated so much over the years while in storage that it was worthless. The armory people fueled the torpedoes now with alcohol, because they had nothing better. Perhaps he should take the boat to an American port. He had more than enough diesel fuel to make Adak, in the Aleutians. The P-3’s were probably patrolling over the Japanese fleet off Vladivostok and Nikolayevsk, guarding the convoys in the Sea of Japan. The way east was wide open. He wiped his face with his hands, tried to think. These thoughts were unworthy. Shameful. He was a Russian officer. Russian officers had led men valiantly and gloriously for hundreds of years, hundreds. Glory. What crap!

For seventy years a fierce, venal oligarchy had ruled the Russian people. Mass murder, starvation, imprisonment, torture, and terror were routinely used to control the population and prevent unrest. And the Russian people had let it happen. Russians drank guilt with their mother’s milk. They were beaten. Defeated by life. Defeated by their own stupidities and inadequacies. His men were typical. Most of them just wanted alcohol— vodka or torpedo juice or fermented fruit, whatever. If you gave them alcohol you owned them, body and soul. They are animals. Why was he thinking these thoughts?

No one gave a good goddamn about one little dieselstelectric submarine or the fifty men inside her. Fifty men, not the sixty-five the ship was supposed to have. Certainly not the brass in Moscow. Those paper shuffling tubes of fatty Russian sausage sent this submarine to demolish a wreck that had blocked a channel for ten years, and they didn’t bother asking if the captain had food to feed the crew. Or fuel. Or charts. Or trained men. Just an order from on high: do this, or we will find someone who can. His eye fell on the Russian Orthodox liturgy book tucked into a cranny in the angle iron above the bunk. The old book had been given to him long, long ago by his mother. The Communists had never allowed religion in the armed forces, a policy that Saratov failed to understand. Banning religion made sense only to Communists. When the NAVY got rid of its political officers, Saratov began reading services aloud on Sunday mornings at sea and in port. He didn’t ask permission; he just did it. At first some of the men grumbled. They soon stopped. They got that essential alcohol occasionally, now and then food, so what did prayers matter?

He could hear the chief in the control room, six paces aft of his door. Bogrov was talking to the XO, then to Svechin, who was loud and sullen, still drunk. Saratov opened his desk safe and removed his pistol, a 7.62-mm Tokarev. The magazine was full. He inserted it into the handle, jacked the slide to chamber a round. Then he carefully lowered the hammer. The pistol had no safety. He put it into his pocket. He took the book with him. Everyone in the packed control room fell silent when he entered. The extra bodies filled the place, took every square inch not taken by the watch team. Even though he was inured to it, the stench of unwashed bodies took Saratov’s breath for a moment. He tossed the old book on the chart table. Svechin was obviously drunk, not at attention. He eyed the captain insolently. The boat was submerged. Saratov forced himself to check the gauges as everyone stared at him. The boat was four hundred feet down, making three knots to the southeast. “Drunk again, eh, Svechin?”

“I don’t think—“

“Stand at attention when you speak to me,” Saratov roared. “All of you. Attention!”

There was a general stiffening all around. Even Svechin stood a bit straighter. “I—“

“Alcohol from the torpedoes!”

Svechin looked sullen, half-sick. He refused to look at the captain. “Russia is at war. The torpedoes are our weapons. You are guilty of sabotage, Svechin. In wartime, sabotage is a capital offense.”

Svechin blanched. The chief’s Adam’s apple was in constant motion, up and down, up and down. “Lieutenant Bogrov discusses classified messages as if they were newspaper articles.”

Bogrov was from Moscow, and he believed that gave him some special standing; most of his shipmates came from the provinces, from small squalid villages scattered all over Russia. They had joined the NAVY to escape all that. “Captain, I—” Bogrov began. “Silence, you son of a bitch. I’ll deal with you later.”

Svechin was pale now, his lips pinched into a thin line. Saratov could hear them breathing, all of them, above the little noises of the boat running deep. They breathed in and out like blown horses. And he could still smell their stench, which surprised him. Normally his own stink masked that of the other men. “You men talk of surrender. Of fleeing to a neutral county.”

Just the breathing. “Talk, talk, talk. There isn’t a man on this boat! God, what miserable creatures you are!”

Better get it over with. He pulled the pistol from his pocket, gripped it firmly, and cocked the hammer. “Do you have anything to say, Svechin, before I carry out the penalty prescribed for sabotage in wartime?”

Svechin’s tongue came out. He wet his lips. Perspiration made his face shine. He had thick lips and pimples. “Please, Captain, I didn’t mean … We are all doomed. We’re going to die. I—” Pavel Saratov leveled the pistol and shot Svechin once, in the center of the forehead. The report was a thunderclap in the small space. Svechin slumped to the floor. His bowels relaxed. The odor of shit nauseated Saratov. The captain held the pistol pointed toward the overhead, so everyone could see it, while he waited for his ears to stop ringing. He worked his jaw from side to side. He had an overpowering urge to urinate, but he fought it back, somehow.

“I should shoot you too, Bogrov.” That came out like a frog croaking. He moved so that Bogrov was forced to look into his eyes. “You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.” Bogrov was at rigid attention. He refused to focus his eyes. Saratov moved to the next man, then the next, staring into the eyes of each in turn. “Chief, bring the boat to course two three five degrees. One hour after sunset, take the boat to periscope depth and rig the snorkel.”

“Aye aye, captain.”

“Call me then.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Put Svechin in a torpedo tube. XO, read the funeral service. Then pop him out.”

“Aye aye, sir,” the XO said. Saratov used both hands to lower the hammer on the pistol, pocketed it, then went back to his cabin. He was sitting in his chair with the curtain drawn fifteen minutes later when he heard Bogrov say softly to the chief, “He shoots a man dead, then orders the XO to pray over him. That’s one for the books.”

“Better shut your mouth, sir.” That was one of the steersmen. “Shut up, both of you,” the chief roared, unable to control himself.

The sun was still above the horizon in Moscow at ten o’clock the evening Kalugin entered the Congress of People’s Deputies. He came in through the lobby and walked up the aisle, nodding right and left at deputies he knew, but not pausing to shake hands. He had been a busy man this past week. During the last seventy-two hours he had had almost no sleep, but it didn’t show. As he walked down the aisle toward the raised speaker’s platform he looked like an aged lion girding himself for his last great battle. In fact he had already fought the battle and was the victor. Once he believed that Japan really intended to invade Russia, he had moved swiftly to create a political consensus that the nation’s survival was at stake. That was the easy part. Then came the crunch: Kalugin demanded that the elected representatives of the people of Russia grant him dictatorial powers to mobilize the nation and save it.

Of course, he had made many enemies through the years. Those he judged to be his worst enemies, he buried. Seven new corpses were now resting in hastily dug graves in the woods outside Moscow. Several dozen deputies who might be brought around if properly persuaded were locked in Lubyanka. Kalugin bought support where required, appointed ministers, and drafted decrees. Tonight, as he walked into the Congress amid the buzz of crisis, with the television cameras of the world watching, he was ready to declare his victory. Janos Ilin was one of the people in the gallery, packed shoulder-to-shoulder with his fellow FIS officers. He could see the top of Kalugin’s balding head as the president moved through the crowd of sycophant deputies. A dictator. Another dictator. To solve Russia’s problems with brute force and hot blood and endless rules and regulations, administered by powerless little men who lived in terror. Kalugin, the savior. Kalugin ascended the dais. Now he approached the podium. Massive applause. Everyone rose to their feet, still applauding. Finally, Kalugin motioned for his audience to be seated. “Tonight is a grave hour in the history of Russia. Japanese forces in the far east have captured Vladivostok; Nikolayevsk; Petropavlosk, on the Kamchatka Peninsula; and Sakhalin Island … “Russia has done nothing to deserve the vicious wounds being inflicted upon her by evil, greedy men, men intent on robbing future Russian generations of their birthright … “Your leaders have today come to me, asking me to wield the power of the presidency and the Congress to save holy Mother Russia.”

His voice seemed to grow louder, deeper, to fill the hall, like the thunder of a summer storm on the steppe. “In the name of the Russian people, I, Aleksandr Ivanovich Kalugin, take up the sword against our enemies.”

When Bob Cassidy walked into the lobby of the Mcguire Air Force Base Visiting Officers Quarters to register, the first person he saw was Clay Lacy, sitting in the corner looking forlorn. “Colonel Cassidy, Colonel Cassidy.” Lacy rushed over. “I’ve been waiting for you. I called Washington and they said to come to Mcguire, but these people don’t have me on their list.”

“Uh-huh.” Cassidy signed his name on a check-in card as the civilian behind the desk watched. “I need to see your ID card,” the desk clerk said to Cassidy. “Wearing a colonel’s uniform, I look like an illegal immigrant?”

“I just do what I’m told, Colonel.”

Cassidy dug out his wallet, extracted the card, and passed it over. “Didn’t get to talk to you after our interview,” Lacy was saying, “but I want to go with you. Over there.” He nodded his head to the east. Maybe south. He didn’t seem to want to say the word Russia. “I called Washington and they said to come here, to Mcguire, so I did. At my own expense. But when I got here, this man said I wasn’t on the list, so he couldn’t give me a room.”

“Do you really want to go?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Lacy said, glancing at the clerk behind the desk. “I’ll be frank with you, Lacy. You look like a flake to me.”

Lacy was offended. “Have you seen my service record?”

“Yeah. You still look like a flake. Think you got the balls for this?”

“Yes, sir.” Lacy set his jaw. He looked as if he might cry. Well, the folks in Air Force Officer Personnel said this guy was one hell of a pilot. Maybe there was some mix-up on the name. The colonel shrugged. If Lacy couldn’t cut the mustard in the air, he would put him in maintenance, or give him a rifle, make a perimeter guard out of him. Surely there was something useful an overgrown teenager like Lacy could do. Cassidy turned to the clerk. “Where’s your list for JCS Special Ops?”

The civilian produced a clipboard from beneath the counter. Cassidy looked over the printed list, then added Lacy’s name in ink at the bottom. He handed the clipboard back to the clerk. “Okay, Lacy. You’re on the list.”

“Wait a minute, Colonel,” the clerk protested. “Base Housing sent this list over—“

“Give Lacy a room, mister. Right now, no arguments or I’ll have your job.” He said it softly, barely glancing at the desk clerk as he picked up his bags. The clerk swallowed once, took a deep breath, and watched Cassidy’s back as he headed for the elevator. When the elevator door had closed on the colonel, the clerk turned to Lacy. “ID card, driver’s license, or something.”

They gathered that evening in the second-floor television room of the VOQ. Two Air Force policemen sealed the hall.

“For those of you who haven’t met me, I’m Colonel Bob Cassidy.

My friends call me Hoppy or Butch; you can call me Colonel.”

No one smiled. Cassidy sighed, looked at the list. “Answer up if you’re here. Allen, Cassini …”

They answered after each name. He knew about half of them, the ones he had recruited and several he had known from years ago.

He put the list down, looked around to see if he had everyone’s attention, then began. “Thanks for volunteering. You’ll probably regret it before long; that’s to be expected. About all I can promise you is an adventure. We are going to Germany in the morning on a C-141. There we’ll check out the newest version of the F-22. After a week, two at the most, we’ll go to Russia. You pilots will be civilians hired by the Russian government. They may even swear us into the Russian army — we’ll see how it goes. The aircraft will be loaned to the Russians by the U.s. Air Force. Although the U.s. markings will be removed, the planes will still be U.s. property, so they will be maintained by active-duty Air Force personnel, who will join us in Germany. Any questions?”

There were none.

“Besides me, I think there is only one other pilot in this room who has ever flown in combat. All of you will be veterans very soon. You undoubtedly have some preconceived notions of what combat will be like. What you cannot know now is how it will feel to have another human being trying his absolute damnedest to kill you. Nor can you know what it feels like to kill another person. All that is ahead.”

He looked at their faces, so innocent. Some of them would soon be dead; that was inevitable.

“We all won’t be coming back,” he said slowly. “If anyone wants out, now is the time to say so. You get a handshake and a free ride home from here, no questions asked.”

Nobody said a word. They didn’t look at one another, just seemed to focus on places that weren’t in the room.

“Okay,” said Bob Cassidy. “We are all in this together. From now on, you are under my rules. Not Air Force regulations: my rules. Disobey my rules here or in Germany, I’ll send you home. Disobey in Russia …” He left it hanging.

“No telephone calls, no letters, no E-mail, and no one leaves the building. Those of you I haven’t met, I will talk to as soon as possible. I want each of you to know what you are in for. That’s all.”

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 going 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.