Ralph Peters (18 page)

Taylor had then been instrumental in the U.S. Army's reorganization, when the colors of the old cavalry regiments were resurrected to identify the new, streamlined units replacing the heavier, almost immovable divisions and corps. An expert in the field of heavy forces and emerging military technology, Taylor had nonetheless been sent to command a light task force in Mexico as the United States attempted to halt the multisided war on its southern border. Arriving in the wake of the Tampico massacre, Taylor had exploited the newly imposed press controls to keep reporters out of his area of operations, first in San Miguel de Allende, then, upon his further promotion, in the Guadalajara region. This part of the file had been defaced with question marks where GRU analysts had tried to figure out the paradox of the man's success. He broke rules, always doing the unexpected, and gained a reputation as a savage mountain fighter. His subordinates employed techniques ranging from helicopter descents to old-fashioned cavalry patrols, eradicating rebel groups one after the other, many of whom were little more than bandits, while others were Japanese-funded patriotic forces. Almost invariably, he was very well received by the local population, who should have been supporting the insurgents. None of the Soviet analysts could sort out the dialectical equations.

This killer who read good books, this scarred man who was a perfect robot of a soldier, had returned to the United States to assume command of the newly reformed and reequipped Seventh Cavalry Regiment (Heavy) at Fort Riley, Kansas. The unit was built around a new series of weapons systems the details of which were still unclear to Soviet intelligence, even as the Americans planned their mission on the same maps as Kozlov's comrades-in-arms. Taylor had been in command only nine months, much of which actually had been spent in Washington, testifying before various committees, when the Soviet Union had secretly asked the United States for its assistance in the face of a growing threat of a war for national survival.

And why were these men here after all? Why had the United States responded positively? Kozlov was certain their purpose was not to selflessly assist the people of the Soviet Union. Nor did they particularly covet the mineral wealth of Western Siberia for themselves, since they had largely purged the Japanese presence from Latin America—and the new finds there were adequate to American needs He did not even believe the American motivation was vengeance, either against the eternally recalcitrant and bloody-minded Iranians or even against the Japanese, whose long shadow lay so obviously over the Islamic executors of their imperialist plans. In the end, Kozlov suspected, his country had simply become a proving ground for a new generation of American weapons, nothing more.

His teeth ached so badly he wanted to claw them out of his gums. When would it end? When would any of it end?

To hell with the Americans, he decided. He didn't give a damn why they were here. As long as their weapons worked.

Major Manuel Xavier Martinez stood beside Taylor at the corner of the ravaged buffet table, picking at a few leftovers to take the place of a combat ration breakfast and working through yet another set of interoperability problems. The two men spoke in Spanish for the sake of privacy and, despite his weariness, the supply officer could not help finding the situation bizarrely amusing. He routinely addressed Taylor as
"
Jefe,
"
but this was only an inside joke. In fact, Taylor's Spanish was more grammatically correct, cleaner, and more exact, than was his own. Martinez's blood was Mexican-American, but his primary language—the tongue of his education and elective affinities—was the English of an erudite and educated man. His Spanish was the barrio dialect of his youth in San Antonio, fine for bullshitting on a street corner, but inadequate for expressing sophisticated logistical concepts. As they spoke Martinez punctuated his Spanish with far more English-language military terminology than his utterly Anglo-Saxon commander found necessary.

"
I still see two areas where we can really get screwed, sir,
"
Martinez said.
"
And I'm only talking about the log business.
"
He glanced across the smoke-fogged room to the portable workstation where Merry Meredith stared wearily at the incoming intelligence information.
"
I wouldn't want to be in Merry's shoes.
"

"
Merry can handle it,
"
Taylor said.

"
Yeah. I know that,
Jefe.
But it's not just that they're a lying bunch of bastards. It's the way they treat him. That lieutenant colonel with the rotten teeth. Christ, he acts like an Alabama sheriff from back in the nineteen fifties.
"
Martinez shook his head.
"
And you know it breaks Merry's heart. He's so into that Russian culture shit.
"

"
Merry's been through worse. You're just lucky they think you're a Georgian or an Armenian.
"

"
I still can't get a straight answer out of them,
"
Martinez said.
"
It's worse than Mexico.
"

"
Mexico was the bush leagues,
"
Taylor said.

"
All the more reason why I wish these guys would play it straight.
"

"
They can't,
"
Taylor said, with surprising patience in his voice. The man's calm never ceased to impress Martinez.
"
They can't tell us the truth about the overall situation because they just don't know it themselves. Listen to them, Manny. They're lost. And they're scared. And they're trying to put the best face on it they can. Their world's coming apart. But they're willing to give us what they've got.
"

"
The problem is finding out
what
they've got,
"
Martinez said. He took a drink of flat mineral water to wash the last bits of cracker from his throat.
"
Anyway, the first issue

I've got to look at is fuel. We've got enough of our own to run the mission. But the M-l00s will be nearly empty at the end of it. First squadron is going to be running on fumes, judging by the arrow Lucky Dave just drew for them. That means depending on Soviet fuel. Our own complement won't be full-up for another five, six days, depending on the Soviet rail system.
"

"
So what's the Martinez solution?
"
Taylor asked, face impassive, a graven death mask to which Martinez was only now becoming accustomed, after so many years of working together.

Martinez smiled.
"
I'm
that predictable.

Taylor nodded. A ghost of amusement on the dead lips.
"
Well
"
Martinez said,
"
the Sovs have one type of fuel that's almost as good as JP-10. And their boy says he can provide it. Of course, their fuel's polluted as often as not. We'll have to test each last bladder and blivet. But, if we can corner them into delivering the fuel on time, I suggest we run this mission on their fuel and conserve our own. Without burdening Taylor with unnecessary details, he quickly reviewed the other advantages of such an option. Their own fuel reserves were already uploaded on the big wing-in-ground fuelers, and it would save transfer and upload time. They would preserve their independence of action.

"
You're sure their fuel won't have us falling out of the
sky?
"

"
No,
"
Martinez said, even as he thought the problem through one last time,
"
no, we can quality control it As long as we get the pure stuff, the composition is just fine. Anyway, I'm not worried about the engines. Battle-site calibration's another issue.
"

"
All right. Go ahead. You said there were two problem areas.

"
Yeah,
Jefe.
You and Lucky Dave may have to get in on this one. These guys are just congenital centralizers
.
My counterpart wants to stash all of the supplies in one big site. At the far end, where we finish up the mission. He says the general wants it that way, that, otherwise, they can't guarantee support site protection. Logic doesn't make a dent in these guys. And decentralized ops just give

them the willies.
"
Martinez shook his head.
"
We come at everything from different angles. They're worried about guarding the stuff on the ground. You know. 'Who goes there?' and all that. While I'm worried about missiles and airstrikes. Christ, the way they want to heap everything up in one big pile, it would only take one lucky shot to put us out of business.
"

For the first time, Taylor's face showed concern. The scarred brows bunched.
"
I thought we were clear on that. We agreed that each squadron had to have its own discrete dispersal area. Heifetz has them on the graphics.
"

"
But Lucky Dave's talking apples, and they're talking oranges. They don't automatically assume that each squadron should have its own self-contained
support
site.
"
Martinez caught the electric flash in Taylor's eyes. The old man had missed the potential problem, as had everyone else. Martinez was sorry he had not been able to resolve the conflict himself, because he knew Taylor well enough to realize that the old man would beat himself up unmercifully for not having spotted the potential disconnect earlier. Martinez had never met another man, another soldier, who was so hard on himself. Not even Merry Meredith or Lucky Dave Heifetz, the other members of the Seventh Cavalry staff's self-flagellation society.

Martinez's life had not been full of heroes. He had been lucky enough not to look up to the street-corner cowboys back in San Antonio, boy-men as his absent father had been, and his adolescence and young adulthood had been spent in a struggle to be better than the rest, to show everyone that the kid from the barrio could shut them down. Getting higher grades, speaking better English. His ROTC scholarship to Texas A&M had not only paid the bills, but it had proved that he was every bit as
American
as any of the Anglos. He refused to be categorized as anything less, to let any man define him in any way that might diminish his singularity. When he went home to visit his mother, he refused to speak Spanish with her, even refused to eat the Mexican food she was so anxious to cook for him. And as a captain he had put down his entire savings to buy her a solid, middle-class house in a suburb in northwest San Antonio, one whose payments would
bind his salary for years to come. It was an enormous step, a triumph for him. Yet his unsuccessful, increasingly worried attempts to call home, to speak with the prematurely aged woman, soon brought him back to earth. He finally tracked her down at his aunt's number. And his mother wept, claiming she loved the house and she was as proud of him as any mother could ever be. It was only that the new house was so big, so empty, and so far from all that she knew. The neighbors did not understand Spanish. So she had taken to staying with her sister back in the barrio. Where she felt at home. Now the house stood empty, except on the rare occasions when he went back on leave. It was a monument to the personal limits, to the failure, of the young man without heroes.

And then there was Taylor. Martinez did not like to use the word
hero.
But, had he chosen to apply it to any man, his first choice would have been this unusual colonel who stood between him and the desolation of the buffet table.

Taylor of Mexico, intuitively grasping the situation and its requirements so much better than the Quartermaster captain who shared the indigenous bloodlines. The civilian academics and specialized advisers attached to the Army had lectured Taylor on the nutritional requirements of the populace and on the infrastructural deficiencies associated with chronic underdevelopment. And Taylor had kicked them out of his sector, in defiance of Army policy. He understood the need to satisfy minimum dietary requirements, but, above all, he understood the need for
theater.
Wearing preposterous silver spurs, Taylor was always the first man out of the helicopter. He traced canyon rims on a magnificent black stallion and walked upright where other men crawled. Martinez knew what it was to be afraid, and he did not believe that any sane man could be truly fearless. But Taylor certainly disguised his fear better than the rest—driving his utility vehicle, alone, into towns where the representatives of the U.S.-backed Monterrey provisional government hung from the utility poles with key body parts conspicuously absent. Exploiting the dramatic ugliness of his face to maximum effect and living on tortillas and beans so that he could ostentatiously give his rations to widows and orphans, Taylor transcended all of
the Anglo rules of behavior to achieve the grand level of gesture demanded by a tormented Mexico. His peers called him a hot dog, a show-off, a nut, and a dirty sonofabitch— as they struggled to emulate his success. Taylor, who seemed able to project himself with equal ease into the mindset of a Mexican peasant or a Los Angeles gang member. Taylor, who masked his intelligence and command of language behind the terse, requisitely profane speech his subordinates imagined a commander must employ. Major Manuel Xavier Martinez did not believe in heroes. But he was not certain he could ever be such a man as Colonel George Taylor.

"
Manny,
"
Taylor said to the supply officer,
"
it's a good thing I've got you to keep me from fucking this whole thing up. I should have made the goddamned Russians clarify exactly what they understood by force dispersion.
"
The colonel was angrily intense, but the sharpness was directed solely against himself.
"
When our boys come back in from the mission, I want to be damned sure they come in on top of all the fuel, bullets, beans, and Band-aids they need.
The
standard drill.
"

"
Standard drill,
"
Martinez agreed, anxious to please this man, to serve him well, yet, at the same time, ashamed that he would have to ask for further help.
"
I'm afraid you're going to have to take it up with Ivanov himself,
Jefe.
He's driving the train, and my counterpart's afraid to throw any switches on his own. He thinks I'm nuts for wanting to scatter our log sites all over creation and even crazier for questioning what a general wants.
"

Taylor nodded.
"
All right, Manny. Let's grab Dave and Merry and have another powwow with our little Russian brothers.
"

Martinez smiled.
"
I guess that means we have to let that sorry bugger Kozlov breathe on us again.
"
He looked down at a smeared cracker he had lifted off his plate. The sight of it was so dismal, laden with a rough gray paste, that he held it in midair, unable to bring it the rest of the way to his mouth.

He felt Taylor staring at him. The intensity of the colonel's gaze seemed to freeze the supply officer's hand in midair, the trick of a sorcerer. Instantly, Martinez's eyes
were drawn to Taylor's, and he saw absolute seriousness in the depths of the other man's stare.

"
Eat it,
"
Taylor said quietly, the tone of his Spanish as dry and ungiving as a high mountain desert.
"
And then smile.
"