Red Army (47 page)

“Shall I call for tea or some refreshments, Comrade Front Commander?” Chibisov asked.

Malinsky nodded. Yes. But it was really an unconcerned gesture. The old man was engrossed in the map again, seeking out advantageous ground and constructing hypothetical situations for a possible clash with the Americans. He had come back from the depths of weariness one more time, rejuvenated by the prospect of another combat challenge, of a new enemy.

Suddenly, Malinsky turned from the map, smiling. He stood up with the sprightliness of a boy. “We’ll beat them, Pavel Pavlovitch. They’ve waited too long. I don’t believe they can reach us in time to make a difference.” Malinsky set his face into a resolute expression, and Chibisov felt as though he were staring at the personification of the long history of Russian military struggles. “Damn them, let them come, the Americans. We can beat the Americans, too.”

Malinsky surprised his chief of staff by taking hold of his upper arm. Chibisov automatically recoiled from the human touch, then mastered his reflexes and forced himself to endure the grasp. He felt as though his armor had been penetrated, as though even this friendly grasp might fatally weaken his tenuous control over his lungs, over his fate.

“You realize that we had to fight,” Malinsky said passionately, vividly Russian in his tone of confidence. “Do you see that, Pavel Pavlovitch? It wasn’t only the political situation. We’ve been through worse crises. But we had to fight them now. It was the last chance. They were beating us without ever firing a shot. They forced us to fight so long with their weapons -- technology, economics, their entire arsenal for destroying us in peacetime. And we could not compete. We were losing, and it became so apparent that even a fool could see it. They were laughing at us, Pavel Pavlovitch. But they aren’t laughing now. There is one thing we can still beat them at. Look at that map. We’ll beat the Americans, if they come. We have no choice.”

Major General Borchak, special KGB representative to the front’s military council, labored over his daily report. Writing official correspondence was an art, and Borchak prided himself on his mastery of it. You had to write in such a way that it provided indisputable facts for future use by your superiors, but you had to arrange those facts in such a manner that they did not directly affix blame, so that they could be given an innocent, sober interpretation, should the individual about whom you were reporting ever attain access to his file or gain unexpected power over you. Borchak struggled to communicate his grave doubts about Malinsky and his clique, but to do so without the sort of crude directness that might one day become a liability.

He did not like Malinsky. Overall, he found army generals a bit too puffed up, too convinced of their indispensability. Certainly, the regular military forces had a role to play. But the ultimate guarantor of Soviet power was and always would be the state security apparatus. Military commanders were narrow-minded, greedy, and naive. For the most part, they could be managed. But Malinsky made Borchak uneasy.

Borchak would have much preferred the front commander to have a few obvious vices. The most desirable traits in a high-ranking military officer, from Borchak’s point of view, were occasional weaknesses toward alcohol or women -- or even a reasonable appetite for material corruption. Officers who had such traits inevitably left a trail that could be exploited should the need arise. A man like Starukhin, for instance, could never be a threat in the long term. He would always say something in his drunken belligerence that was potentially fatal. But Malinsky was too clean. Of course, you could always make a case of sorts out of his bloodlines. Such a stale approach was not much to Borchak’s taste, however. As a matter of professional pride. He would have much preferred something immediate and powerful, with an unmistakable taint of filth, to hold over the man.

He considered how Malinsky could be painted before a tribunal or special committee. For one thing, Malinsky had a tendency to underutilize the military council. He certainly did not adequately consult with the representatives of the state security apparatus at every opportunity. He was willfully independent. In fact, Malinsky possessed several distinctly unsocialist habits. He even seemed to foster a small-scale personality cult with his staff and subordinate commanders. Nor was morale in the front everything that could be desired. The reports of Article 27 cases, unauthorized leaving of the field of battle, and of Article 25, 30, and 31 cases, were sufficiently numerous to undercut the man’s reputation as a dedicated communist. Abandonment of equipment, plundering, and violence against the civilian population were among the most serious military crimes. It was obvious that Malinsky had not placed adequate stress on the inculcation of communist values and discipline within the formations under his command.

The trouble was, of course, that Malinsky’s forces were doing too well. Thus far, their successes had dramatically exceeded Borchak’s expectations. Had progress been a bit slower, had the fighting been more difficult, had there been more local reverses, the situation would have been more to Borchak’s liking. He wanted the armed forces of the Soviet Union to win. But it would not do for them to perform
too
gloriously. The KGB had learned its lesson from Beria’s fall, decades before. There would be no Zhukovs, no kingmakers, this time. Afghanistan had had several of the ingredients of a model war, in Borchak’s eyes. Failure had put the military in its proper place.

If NATO granted nuclear release to its forces ... it might be possible to manage the situation so that the ground forces took a bloody nose, and Malinsky and those like him could be brought back under firm control. Now Malinsky wanted authorization for preemptive strikes at his discretion. Borchak was firmly committed to fighting that request through KGB channels. As always, the military were taking a very short view of things. They could not see beyond the battle to the peace. Of course, the whole timing of the nuclear business would have to be precise. The mission was to defeat NATO. But the balance of power between the Party, the military, and state security had to be maintained.

If Malinsky made a mistake, if a substantial part of his operation failed . . . then, even though ultimate success was achieved, he could be charged with making unjustified decisions, with failing to employ the full range of decision-making support tools and the proper methodology available to him as a front commander. He could be portrayed as subjectivist, too prone to making executive-style decisions, while ignoring the objective conditions for success postulated by Soviet military science. The military’s own toys could be turned against them in the end.

An alternative would be to work on the son. Malinsky’s boy was not the strong figure his father was. He was ridiculously infatuated with his wife. And wives could always be managed. Nonetheless, such an approach was a bit too Byzantine. And the father might just cut his ties and sacrifice the son. You never could tell. Borchak much preferred the thought of something directly implicating Malinsky in corruption or disloyalty, no matter how slight the evidence. The point was not to destroy the man, after all, but simply to harness him, to chop him down to size if he ever became a threat of any kind.

Borchak disliked Malinsky the way a man might dislike a particular food. But he hated the front commander’s chief of staff. Borchak could not even stomach looking at Chibisov. His purpose was to manage Malinsky. But he would have enjoyed destroying his smug little Jew of a deputy.

The Jews had always been and always would be a problem. Until they were finally expunged from Russia. Oh, the Jews could make revolutions. But they never knew when to stop. Borchak found it impossible to believe that Chibisov was truly loyal to the Soviet Union. But the chief of staff was clever. And Malinsky protected him.

Of course, that might open up new possibilities. If Chibisov could be implicated in something unsavory, and if Malinsky could be induced to defend his subordinate a bit too publicly, a bit too vehemently . . .

There was always a way. Every man had his weakness, his flaw, his instant of poor judgment, and it would be vital to keep the military firmly under control after the fighting ceased and the real work began. The military men thought they were so grand. But the difficult part of it all would be the occupation, the painstaking rebuilding of an acceptable government on the Rhine, the deals, the seeming compromises, the appearance of civilized, even generous behavior as the undesirable elements in reformed Germany were quietly eliminated. Entirely new formulas had to be developed to keep the Germanies divided, to maintain a sufficient degree of hatred and rivalry between them. The Soviet Union had not paid so great a price in blood to see the Germanies unified. Such a thought was anathema to all sensible men. . . . Borchak was aware of the intense debates in Moscow over what sort of restrictive federalism might be safely permitted, and over what contours the occupation would take on. So far, as his own boss had told him with a bitter laugh, the only thing anyone agreed on was that the new capital would be Weimar.

Borchak finished his report. He was not completely satisfied with it, but he felt that he was beginning to build up his arsenal of weapons to bring Malinsky low. Should the need arise. When you could not strike a man directly, you needed to weave a web of incidentals around him. Borchak was confident that he could do the latter.

He slipped the completed report into his courier briefcase. But before he went to the special communications center to send it, he drew out another message form and addressed it privately to his office-mate in Moscow.

“Dear Rodion Mikhailovitch,” he began, “please look in on Yevdokia and the children, if you can find the time. Greet them from me; tell them I love them and that my thoughts are with them. Tell Yevdokia I said to go ahead with the plans to add the additional room onto the dacha before winter, but also that she need not be overly extravagant. I look forward to seeing all of you again. Greetings to Irina. Arkady.”

The brigade’s operations maps decorated the wall of the German living room. Battery-powered lamps shone their harsh, flattening light about the crowded room, striking Anton’s eyes as he moved from officer to officer, checking, correcting, struggling to remain lucid despite his building fever.

At midnight, he had led his wounded brigade across the big bridge at Bad Oeynhausen. He had dismounted to empty his bowels yet again and to watch the progression of bristling war machines on the march, their spiky outlines silhouetted by fires burning out of control in the town. The bridgehead had been in a chaotic state, guarded by a crust of air-defense batteries, hastily dug-in antitank positions, grubby air-assault troops, and a battered assortment of scarred-up tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Major General Anseev, the corps commander, had flown down in a light liaison helicopter, a brave act given the density of nervous gunners packed into the bridgehead. He hastened to brief Anton on a possible change in the situation. Indicators were building of a possible counterattack by U.S. Army forces coming up from the south. The information only consisted of bits and pieces, and the corps commander even acknowledged that there might be nothing to it, just the imaginings of overwrought staff officers. But Anton had to rush his force through one designated pass across the Teutoburg forest ridge, a distance of more than fifty kilometers on a network of secondary roads, then to prepare for a possible wheel to the south. If an American grouping did appear, it was imperative to hold them west of the Teutoburg and south of the Paderborn-Soest-Dortmund line. Anton was to prepare contingency measures for a meeting engagement opened from the march, as well as for a hasty defense, as dictated by the developing situation. The corps’ attack helicopters would forward base west of the Weser by first light. Since he was marching on the southern flank of the corps, Anton would have first call on the aircraft. Further, he would receive heavy multiple rocket launchers and additional tube artillery from the corps artillery brigade.

Images fuzzed in Anton’s head. He understood what the corps commander said, but it only sounded hopelessly difficult, an unreasonable burden. He would have to pull in his commanders and hastily reorganize, without sufficient time for even the most rudimentary staff procedures. The additional assets made available by the corps commander only sounded like additional headaches. It all seemed so nightmarishly hard to manage, impossible to keep under control.

“The front is making every effort to locate the American grouping, if such a force is actually out there,” the corps commander said. “If anything critical comes up, I’ll personally open the long-range net. You may, of course, open up the net upon initial contact. But I don’t think there will be a problem before daylight, at the earliest. The Americans couldn’t move that fast.” The corps commander stroked his mustache. “In the meantime, go like the wind. Speed is the best security.”

Anton nodded. A part of him hoped with the hope of a child that the corps commander would see how ill he was and relieve him of his responsibilities on the spot. But the corps commander seemed totally immersed in the military problem.

Anton braced himself. He told himself that his diarrhea was slackening, although he knew he was running a high fever. How would it do, he asked himself, for the son of General Malinsky, the
privileged
son of the
great
General Malinsky, to miss the war because he had a case of the shits? But the sarcasm did not work. And Anton knew that he would keep on going until his body physically quit on him, paying the price of his father’s terrible love.

Anton cared less and less for his personal pride now. But he could not imagine letting the old man down. Not without absolute physical failure. Or death, Anton thought, before dismissing the notion as the morbidity of illness.

He wished he were home, in bed, with Zena caring for him. He could lie propped up in his bed, drinking tea, and Zena could read to him. Perhaps a lesser tale by one of the giants whose pens had swept across the Russian earth before the Revolution. And he could draw Zena close to him, until her straight thick red hair blazed on the white of the bedclothing.