The Frenchman was a member of the Joint Military Liaison Group, a convenient leftover of the Second World War which enabled both sides to spy on each other. A lean, poker-faced man, he wore paratrooper’s wings and smoked Gauloises. He was an intelligence officer, of course.
“What do you make of this, Major?” the NBC reporter asked.
“They made a mistake four kilometers back. They should have turned left, but didn’t.” A Gallic shrug.
“Not very impressive performance for the Russians, is it?” The reporter laughed. The Frenchman was more thoughtful.
“Did you notice that they had a German officer with them?”
The reporter had noticed the different uniform, but not realized its significance. “Oh, is that what he was? Why didn’t they ask him for help?”
“Yes,” the French major answered. He didn’t say that this was the fourth time he had seen a Soviet officer refrain from asking assistance from his East German guide . . . and all in the last two days. To have Soviet units get lost was an old story. The Russians used a different alphabet in addition to the different language. That made it easy to make navigational errors, and the Soviets always had DDR officers along to help them find their way around. Until now. He flicked his cigarette onto the road. “What else did you notice, Monsieur?”
“The colonel was pretty mad at that major. Then a captain—I think—showed him the mistake, I guess, and how to correct it.”
“How long?”
“Less than five minutes after they stopped.”
“Very good.” The Frenchman smiled. The major was heading back to Berlin, and that battalion had a new operations officer now. The smile disappeared.
“Looks pretty dumb to get lost like that, doesn’t it?”
The Frenchman got back into his car to follow the Russians. “Have you ever gotten lost in a foreign country, Monsieur?”
“Yes, who hasn’t?”
“But they found their mistake quickly, no?” The major waved to his driver to pull off. And all by themselves this time, he thought.
Intéressant
. . .
The TV reporter shrugged and walked back to his own vehicle. He followed the last tank in line, annoyed that they were moving at only thirty kilometers per hour. The tanks moved northwest at that speed until they reached Highway 187, where miraculously they joined up with another Soviet unit and, dropping back to their normal speed of twenty kilometers per hour, resumed their progress west toward the exercise area.
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA
It was impressive. As they watched the Moscow television news program, a whole regiment of tanks advanced across a flat landscape. Their objective turned to a horizontal fountain of dirt as an artillery barrage pounded the simulated enemy positions. Fighter-bombers streaked across the sky and helicopters performed their own death-dance. The voice-over commentary proclaimed the readiness of the Soviet Army to meet any foreign threat. It certainly looked that way.
The next five-minute segment concerned the Vienna arms talks. There was the usual complaint about how the United States was fighting over certain aspects of the clearly generous original Soviet proposal, but the speaker went on to say that real progress was being made despite American intransigence, and that a comprehensive agreement was possible by the end of summer. Toland was puzzled by the nature of the Soviet description of the negotiations. He’d never paid much attention to this sort of rhetoric before, and found the good-guy/bad-guy descriptions curious.
“Pretty normal stuff,” Lowe responded to the question. “You’ll know the deal is close to being struck when the beefs start disappearing. Then they talk about how enlightened our President is for a class enemy. They can get real euphoric around signing time. Really, this stuff is pretty mild. Think about it. What sort of language do they usually use about us?”
“The exercise look normal?”
“It’s normal, all right. Ever think about how much fun it is to face a hundred tanks? You did notice that they all carry five-inch guns? Then think about the artillery support they get. Then think about the aircraft. The Russians are real believers in this combined-arms stuff. When they come at you, they come with the whole inventory. They have this set-piece stuff down cold.”
“How do we counter it?”
“You take the initiative. You let the other guy get all set to fight his battle his way, son, you might as well bag it.”
“Same story at sea.”
“Yeah.”
KIEV, THE UKRAINE
Alekseyev atypically poured himself a cup of tea at the corner table before approaching his commander’s desk. When he walked over, his grin was a meter wide.
“Comrade General, Progress goes well!”
“So I can see, Pavel Leonidovich.”
“I would never have believed it. The improvement in our officer corps is extraordinary. The deadwood is being disposed of, and those men whom we’ve moved up to new posts are eager and capable.”
“So, shooting those four colonels has worked?” CINC-Southwest noted sardonically. He’d run the first two days of the exercise from his command headquarters and yearned to get into the field where the real action was. But that was not a theater commander’s job. Alekseyev was his best set of eyes for what was really happening.
“A hard choice, but a good one. The results speak for themselves.” The edge came off the younger man’s enthusiasm. His conscience still remembered that. The problem with hard decisions, he learned, was not making them, but learning to live with the consequences, however necessary. He set the thought aside yet again. “With two more weeks of intensive exercises, the Red Army will be ready. We can do it. We can defeat NATO.”
“We don’t have to fight NATO, Pasha.”
“Then Allah help the Arabs!” Alekseyev said.
“Allah help us. West gets another of our tank divisions.” The General held up a dispatch. “The one you were with today, in fact. I wonder how he has been doing?”
“My spies tell me, quite well.”
“And you have joined the KGB, Pasha?”
“A classmate of mine is on CINC-West staff. They, too, have adopted a policy for eliminating incompetents. I have seen the benefits. A new man in a posting has much better incentive to do his job properly than one for whom it has become routine.”
“Except at the top, of course.”
“Commander-in-Chief West is one man I never expected to defend, but everything I’ve been told leads me to believe he’s getting his forces ready in the same way as we.”
“Things must indeed be improved if you are this magnanimous.”
“They are, Comrade. Another tank division lost to Germany. Well, he needs it more than we. I tell you, we will sweep the Arabs aside like dirt on a smooth tile floor. In truth we always could. There are not so many of them, and if these Arabs are like the Libyans I saw three years ago—these have no mountains to hide in. This is not Afghanistan. Our mission is to conquer, not to pacify. This we can do. I estimate two weeks. The only problem I foresee is the destruction of the oil fields. They can use scorched earth as a defense just as we have, and that will be difficult for us to prevent, even with paratroops. Still and all, our objective is achievable. Our men will be ready.”
9
A Final Look
NORFOLK, VIRGINIA
“There’s something to be said for instant traditions, Chuck.” This was their fourth Russian movie via satellite. Toland handed over the bowl of popcorn. “It’ll be a pity to lose you back to the Corps.”
“Bite your tongue! Sixteen-hundred hours Tuesday, Colonel Charles DeWinter Lowe goes back into the Marine business. I’ll leave the paper-shuffling to you squids.”
Toland laughed. “And you won’t miss the evening movie?”
“Maybe a little.” Half a mile away a satellite receiver was tracking a Soviet communications satellite. They’d been pirating signals off this satellite and two of her sisters for weeks now, to keep tabs on the Soviet TV news, and also to catch the evening movie. Both men admired the work of Sergey Eisenstein.
And
Alexander Nevsky
was his masterwork.
Toland popped open a can of Coke. “I wonder how Ivan would react to a John Ford Western? Somehow I get the feeling that Comrade Eisenstein might have been exposed to one or two.”
“Yeah, the Duke would have fit in pretty good here. Or better yet, Errol Flynn. You heading home tonight?”
“Right after the movie. God, a four-day weekend off. Can I stand the strain?”
The titles showed a new frame, different from the one on his personal tape of the movie back home. The original soundtrack dialogue had been retained and cleaned up somewhat, but the music had been redone by the Moscow State Symphony and chorus. They did true justice to Prokofiev’s evocative score.
The film began with a view of the Russian . . . steppes? Toland wondered. Or was that supposed to be the southern part of the country? Anyway, it showed rolling grassland littered with bones and weapons from an old battle against the Mongols. The Yellow Peril, still a Russian bugaboo. The Soviet Union had absorbed a lot of Mongols—but now the Chinese had nuclear weapons and the world’s largest army.
“The print is terrific,” Lowe observed.
“Hell of a lot better than my tape,” Toland agreed. A pair of VHS machines was recording this, though the Navy wasn’t supplying the tapes. Each officer had bought one himself. SACLANT’s Inspector General had an evil reputation.
All this happened pretty close to the Baltic coast, Toland reminded himself. The introduction of the main character was made through a song as he was evidently out directing some men with a fishing net. A good socialist introduction, the officers agreed: the hero out doing manual labor. A brief verbal confrontation with the Mongols, then a musing about which danger to Russian integrity was greater, the German or the Mongol.
“Jesus, you know they
still
think that way?” Toland chuckled.
“The more things change . . .” Lowe popped open his own Coke.
“I kinda wonder about this guy, though. When he went back into the water after the net, he ran like a girl, what with his arms flying all over.”
“You should try running in knee-deep water,” the Marine growled.
And the scene shifted to the German Danger.
“A bunch of out-of-work knights, just like the crusades. Hell, just like Indian movies from the thirties. Chopping people up, throwing babies into the fire.”
“You suppose they really did things like that?”
“Ever hear of a place called Auschwitz, Bob?” Lowe inquired. “You know, in the civilized twentieth century?”
“Those guys didn’t bring a bishop with them.”
“Try reading up on the crusaders’ liberation of Jerusalem. Either they killed, or raped first and then killed, all for the Greater Glory of God, with bishops and cardinals cheering them on. Nice bunch. Yeah, it’s probably true enough. Christ knows the Eastern Front in ‘41-’45 saw a lot of it on both sides. Nasty campaign, that was. Want some more popcorn?”
Finally the people mobilized themselves, especially the peasants:
Vstavaitye, lyudi russkiye,
na slavny boi, na smyertny boi . . .
“Damn!” Toland sat forward. “They really punched that song up.” The soundtrack was almost perfect, even accounting for the satellite transmission difficulties.
Arise, you Russian People,
in a just battle, in a fight to the death:
arise, you people free and brave,
defend our fair native land!
Toland counted more than twenty specific uses of the word “Russia” or “Russian.”
“That’s odd,” he observed. “They’re trying to get away from that. The Soviet Union is supposed to be all one happy family, not the New Russian Empire.”
“I guess you’d call it a historical quirk,” Lowe commented. “Stalin commissioned the film to alert his people to the Nazi threat. Ole Joe was a Georgian, but he turned out to be one hell of a Russian nationalist. Strange, but he was one strange dude.”
The movie was clearly a production of the 1930s. The strident characters were right out of John Ford or Raoul Walsh: a stand-alone heroic figure in Prince Alexander Nevsky, two brave but buffoonish sidekicks, and the
de rigueur
love interest. The German enemies were arrogant and for the most part invisible behind unlikely helmets designed by Eisenstein himself. The invading Germans had already divided up Russia among themselves, one knight made “prince” of Pskov, where in a horrible example of pacification the invaders had slaughtered men, women, and children—the children were thrown into a bonfire—to show who was boss. The great battle scene took place on a frozen lake.
“What kinda lunatic is going to fight on a frozen lake when he’s wearing a half ton of sheet steel?” Toland groaned. Lowe explained that it had really happened that way, more or less.
“I’m sure they played around with it some, like
They Died With Their Boots On,”
the colonel observed. “But the battle really happened.”
The battle was a truly epic scene. The German knights attacked with casual disregard for proper tactics, and the Russian peasants, ably led by Alexander and his two sidekicks, encircled them with a Cannae-like envelopment maneuver. Then, of course, came single combat between Prince Alexander and the German chieftain. There was no doubt of the outcome. Their commander vanquished in single combat, the German ranks came apart, and when they tried to rally on the edge of the lake, the ice gave way, drowning nearly everyone.
“That’s realistic enough,” Lowe chuckled. “Think how many armies have been swallowed up by the Russian countryside!”
The remainder of the movie resolved the love interest (each buffoon got himself a pretty girl), and liberated Pskov. Curiously, while the prince hoisted a bunch of children into his saddle for the ride in, he never showed the slightest interest in female company—and ended with a sermon, Alexander standing alone and speaking about what happens to people who invaded Russia.