The Best Defense Page 3

  Surrounded by the high peaks of the Southern Range of the Ural Mountains, the inaccessible ammunition storage facility was sufficiently out of sight to be completely out of mind.

  That made it a perfect place, Denight knew, to store “sensitive” materials, such as loads of nuclear warheads and chemical weapons that the US had “purchased” from the Russians and other former Soviet states. With no politically acceptable place to put those weapons and no environmentally safe way to get them there, the answer was simple.

  “Store ‘em at Infernesk with the rest of the junk.”

  Denight’s technical assistance troops did a twelve-month “hardship” tour at Infernesk while their families stayed stateside. The amenities were few, and personnel shortages insured the hours were long. Diversions were scarce. A tiny resort connected to the ruins of the castle Infernesk held little excitement. The castle itself was perched halfway up a mountain slope and, beyond the comprehension of the Americans, just inside the pass. The view from its towers and the steep hillsides were only interesting enough for a single day’s tour. Only the base’s improvised cantina offered a temporary respite.

  Because of classified nature of the work at the depot, Denight’s soldiers were forbidden from fraternizing with the local populace. Not that there was much populace to fraternize with. In its heyday, the nearby “secret city” of Infernesk boasted almost twenty thousand inhabitants, all workers at the warhead assembly/disassembly plant near the depot or in the depot itself. Now, except for a handful of stubborn farming families, a few shopkeepers, the resort’s small staff, and the Russian guards, Infernesk was a ghost town.

  Denight sometimes thought about a transfer or even retiring—he had more than enough years in. But he knew he’d never do either. The Army was his life, and he’d do what he knew was best for the commander, the sergeants, the troops, and his depot. In the Army they call it loyalty.

  That was Edward T. Denight’s way.

  Halfway down the table, operations section leader Second Lieutenant Christine Tampier cringed at McRyen’s slanders—both of his own troops and of his senior NCO—non-commissioned officer. The blonde-haired, fresh-faced West Point graduate squirmed in her seat, uncertain of how to deal with her confusion and discomfort. The Major’s behavior didn’t jive with what the newly commissioned officer’s Military Academy instructors had taught her about officer-NCO relations.

  Seated at McRyen’s right hand, Master Sergeant Annette Rich tipped a look of pity and embarrassment toward Denight, her face a mask of false compassion. With her head still tilted slightly towards him, the Military Police Detachment Leader’s gaze darted from face to face, ensuring she’d been seen. Then she brought up one shielding hand to rub the bridge of her nose in mock tiredness. As she did so, Rich turned towards McRyen and smiled.

  Across from Christine, Claire Horowitz, Sergeant First Class and admin section chief, sat wearily. She had seen this battle before, other times and other places. Claire silently wished for McRyen to be standing under a hoisted pallet of high explosive propellant when the fraying cabling he refused to classify as unserviceable snapped—and for Rich to be there alongside—but in an instant dismissed the thought. Wishing death upon another person was wrong, she told herself, no matter how despicable a bastard or bitch. And besides, Horowitz thought cynically, it could never happen. McRyen never came out of his office to see the effort and hours the soldiers—her soldiers—were putting in.

  Denight seemed to let the insults roll off his stripes. “You’re right, sir, that our soldiers who are specialists and technicians have few opportunities to learn leadership here. That’s why sending them to school is important. These troops are hungry for training, sir.”

  McRyen shot a quick leer at Christine. “There’s some training that needs to be conducted, all right.” He swiveled his gaze back to Denight. “We’re short personnel as it is, and I won’t sacrifice an outstanding processing rate just to let some doofus get a shot at a promotion.”

  Her head down and eyes staring vacantly into her open notebook, Christine missed McRyen’s gaze. Yet the major’s mention of their processing rate stuck. In the five months since her graduation from the Ordnance Officer’s Basic Course and her assignment to Infernesk, the depot garrison was barely able to inventory the incoming shipments. Each week her reports documented that the depot was becoming more and more overfilled with ordnance that they couldn’t—and as shorthanded as they were, probably wouldn’t—decommission and reprocess. McRyen didn’t seem to care. She looked up at McRyen, naively searching for answers and guidance.

  McRyen studied her the way a hyena eyes its next meal.

  Christine looked away.

  Denight didn’t care much for women in the Army. To him they were more burden and bother than full members of the team. But a twinge of sadness mixed itself into his carefully controlled anger. He glanced at Christine. No young lieutenant, he felt, deserved the no-where, no-win assignment to Infernesk, and no lieutenant deserved such a sorry excuse for an officer as Major McRyen. For a split-second Tampier’s athlete’s build and well-scrubbed look reminded Denight of his own daughter.

  Without moving, he shook it off and turned his mind back to the meeting. Better to corner the C.O. later, Denight thought. To prove he’s in charge he’s got to beat me down. Time to retrograde.

  “I’ll come see you, sir,” Denight said softly.

  “You just do that, Sergeant Major,” McRyen pronounced from on high. “Sergeant Rich, Lieutenant Tampier, see me after this.” Denight’s name was noticeably absent from the short list. McRyen closed his notebook. “That’s all...”

  They rose and stood at attention until McRyen left.

  Rich stopped on her way out. “Maybe I can talk to him, Sergeant Major,” she said. Her sympathy dripped so false that even Christine turned to look.

  Denight considered lining Rich out then and there. The condition of her MP detachment’s equipment, her troops’ complaints of favoritism and unprofessionalism, her behind-his-back conferences with McRyen, even her duplicity in the depot’s leadership meetings were all common knowledge and more than enough justification. But in him loyalty ran down the chain of command as well as up. Rich was an NCO. No matter how much a bitch, she was still a sergeant. So was he. And sergeants dealt with sergeants in private.

  “Negative. The Old Man wants to see you about some business, so you see him about that business. I’ll see him about mine. Understand?”

  She shrugged a see-it’s-not-my-fault-I-tried shrug. “If you say so.”

  “I say so. And I say after you see him, you see me.”

  Rich’s face crashed to pure hate. She spun on her heel and left.

  When they were all out of sight, Ed Denight sat heavily, grasping the table edge for support on his way down. I’m tired, he thought, just plain worn out—from the inside out. He wanted a cigarette and a drink, and mumbled a curse at the injustice of being able to have neither.

  This Army’s changing too fast, Denight thought. So am I. His next few breaths were slow and labored, weighted down by question of why he bothered to keep on fighting when there was so little time and so little that mattered left to fight for.

  The Peacock Lounge

  City of Perm

  Russian Federation

  Alexi Dimonokov heard the electronic ring of his cell phone over the lounge’s bar music and was not happy. He kept the phone in the lower left pocket of his sport jacket. The booth was small and Alexi fat. With the big-boned, big-breasted blonde farm girl on his lap, it was difficult to reach the phone.

  He kissed her gently on the cheek and squeezed her thigh, sneaking his hand up her short skirt to get a cheap feel between her legs.

  “I must answer this, pumpkin.”

  She wrapped her arms around his neck and mock pouted. “Not before you finish telling me how you are going to make me a movie star.”

  Alexi sighed, pried her arms off, and pushed her off his lap as if she was a sack of potatoes.
He dug the phone from his pocket.

  Alexi wished he had a better cell phone. This one gave him an upset stomach when it rang. It rang too often these days. His bosses in Moscow wanted to know why their cut from the brothels was down. He had tried to tell them that with no money in their pockets, the burly eastern Russian men who worked in Perm’s factories were spending their few remaining rubles on bread and vodka, not whores.

  They didn’t want to listen, these hardheads in the big city. They accused him of skimming more than his share. He shamed them. Alexi Dimonokov, he said, was their friend, not a common thief such as Pytor Ziven, his rival. He was a friend who had worked hard to rise in the Party—when there was a Party—to become the city of Perm’s Reviewer of Business Licenses. That alone generated enough bribe money to satisfy decent men, but they were not decent, they were greedy. Their mothers, bless their sacred memories, would not be proud. The bosses wanted not just money from the working girls, but girls themselves—to be exported to work in European brothels, Asian brothels; some even went to the Middle East, and a few to America. So he got them girls. Then they wanted guns. So he called his brother, Viktor the Colonel. He asked for guns.

  Alexi shook his head. He would not do that again. Alexi was the smaller, smarter, younger brother. Viktor was older, bigger, and had somehow grown strong like an ape and as violent as the wild boars that roamed the foothills of the Ural Mountains. Viktor’s wrath was held in check only by the fact that they were brothers, and that Alexi made sure that Viktor’s precious Special Security Regiment was taken care of: the base’s bills were paid, the special food, chemicals, and scientific equipment all arrived on time and as Viktor requested.

  So Viktor gave him a name, and that name led him to Roskotovitch’s name, and eventually the bosses in Moscow got the rifles and bullets and machine guns they wanted.

  They should have more such friends, Alexi told them. He even sent them a portion of the protection money he got from twenty businesses. Twenty! Did they know he was squeezing the manufacturers and bankers and shop owners; did he have to tell them? No, he was a good friend, and sent them their share without being asked. Ziven would never do such a thing.

  Of course, he kept all the extortion money from the other forty businesses that he did not tell his bosses about. And the drug money, the gambling money, and the money from his nephews in America, who stole cars and shipped them to Russia, where Alexi sold them for ten times their US price.

  He was a good friend, to be sure. But Alexi told himself he was first a good Russian.

  Now the greedy bosses wanted bombs, and not just any bombs. They wanted nuclear bombs. Regular bombs, those Alexi could get, no problem. His cousin knew a man who had an uncle who knew the General at the Air Force base not a hundred kilometers away. The General liked girls—young girls—and that was never a problem. But nuclear ones—what did they have to blow up that was that big? They didn’t need nuclear bombs, he told them. Too much trouble.

  And too close to the deal he was trying to work himself.

  He told them, as a friend, that it could not be done. They said they knew he had a brother in the Army guarding the bombs. They said they knew other things too. But never mind. Alexi must do it for them, and how was his health? How were his children? Such good fortune he had; they hoped it would stay that way. Did he really feel Ziven was untrustworthy? They had recently spoken to him; perhaps he was also their friend.

  He looked at the number. It was not from Moscow. He pressed a button and the ringing stopped.

  “Alexi, are you there? It’s Josef. The presents did not arrive. Mother is not answering her phone, and neither are any of her friends. I don’t know what happened to them.”

  “Find out.”

  “How? It’s a thousand kilometers from—I mean, their trip covered that much.”

  Josef, Alexi thought, was a peasant and an idiot. There were three trucks, seventeen men, and three atomic weapons. Presents. Mother. A trip. This was code?

  “You were responsible for getting mother’s presents. Get in your car. Drive the route. Find them.”

  “Mother’s presents?”

  Peasant, idiot, and thickheaded pain in the ass.

  He pivoted in his seat and hunched over the table. “You go find them. Go now. Drive all day and all night if you have to, but find them. Then come tell me why I should not cut your dick and balls off and throw you on a shit barge and dump you in the Volga!”

  He snapped the phone shut. This could be a problem. The bosses wanted the nuclear bombs, and had paid him in advance. The Arab wanted them, and had paid him in advance. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his wide forehead. The slant-eyed Korean wanted them, and had also paid him in advance. And now came the rumor from the bosses that the Americans were going to try to buy them all.

  He would have to talk to his cousin in America. He would have to talk to Viktor. And he would have to come up with a lot of money. Fast.

  The Pentagon

  Office of the Army Representative

  Joint Threat Reduction Action Committee

  After seven straight hours of reviewing storage requirements for nuclear weapons, weights and sizes and packing requirements, and blueprints of the Infernesk Depot’s bunker layout, Val’s eyes burned and her back ached. She was happy to lock up the reams of Top-Secret-stamped papers and sign out of the claustrophobic Classified Document Room.

  Her cramped cubicle in the small office she shared with Grimes never looked so good.

  Grimes was wearing a thousand-meter smirk when she walked in.

  “I’ve cranked through most of the work to plan this operation,” Val said. “Looks like I’ll finish my part first. So just what in hell have you done today?”

  “Today? I’ve made the grade.”

  “The only grade you’ll get is an ‘F’. It takes work to get noticed and get ahead.”

  “The lists are out,” Grimes gloated, looking up from his computer. “You lose again, Macintyre.”

  “Let me see that.” Val bulled her way into Grimes’ cubicle and shoved him out of the way. She jammed the keyboard’s down arrow and scrolled though the posting containing the Department of the Army’s Consolidated List for Assignment of Battalion and Brigade Executive Officers.

  “Read it once, read it twice, but there ain’t no Macintyre to be found.” Grimes leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. “Just the name of yours truly. Tentative assignment: Executive Officer, 195th Support Brigade, Separate. Just call me XO.”

  “My name should be here.”

  “Battalion and equivalent commanders are chosen from a centralized list managed at Department of Defense level.”

  “I know that. Everybody knows that.” Val read the list again. Her eyes burned and she squinted hard—she would not cry, must not cry.

  “To be selected for command, an individual must first successfully serve as an executive officer. Therefore, DOD Personnel Command centrally manages that list too.”

  “I know, damn it, I know.”

  “Still looking? Won’t help. So if you’re not on the XO list, a commander you won’t be. Sorry about that. But we still need good staff officers—to support those of us who are destined to lead.”

  “This is not fair.”

  “Life isn’t fair. The Army is even less fair.”

  “Easy to say when you’re not the one being cheated out of a position you’ve earned.”

  “There, there. It’s just a case of the best man won. You should go have a good cry, that always seems to help women cope.”

  “I should just resign and get the hell out of here.”

  “The Army would lose a good officer. Excuse me, a good staff officer.”

  Southern Range, Ural Mountains

  148 air miles northwest of Infernesk

  Russian Federation

  Five hulking Russian Mi-35 Hind helicopter gunships roared low over the mountain forest, the barrels of their twin 23mm chin turret guns ju
tting forward like angry fangs. The titanium-armored Hinds were flying packages of brute force. Besides the pair of remotely controlled automatic cannons, hanging from pylons under each helicopter’s stubby side wings were four weapons pods, each containing twenty 80mm S-8 rockets. Inside the troop compartments, eight heavily armed soldiers from Special Security Regiment 23—each selected from the Spetsnaz—sat strapped into folding seats.

  Colonel Viktor Dimonokov’s command ship flew in the center spot of the ‘diced five’ formation. Dimonokov sat in the commandeered flight engineer’s seat to see forward, rather than entrusting navigation to the pilot and passively watching the countryside go by outside the troop compartment’s square side windows. Let his staff and Steglyr do that. He peered over the pilot’s shoulder, matching terrain features with points on his map.

  Dimonokov liked the Urals; even as a hardened soldier, the land touched something in his Russian heart. The mountains were the traditional dividing line between more European West Russia and what Dimonokov, and many others, felt was the heart of Russia—Siberia. Here in the Southern Urals, steppe and forest-steppe landscapes were typical of the foothills of the mountain range. Higher in the mountains, the hillsides were covered with mixed forests, and the highest peaks, like islands, emerged among the green ocean of forest. The Ural’s highest mountains were in the region’s western row of ridges—tall Yamantau rising over a mile, close behind it the Bolshoi Ieremele, over fifteen hundred meters above the sea. Dimonokov loved them most of all.

  The narrow space behind the pilot was a tight fit for Dimonokov, who stood just four inches short of seven feet tall. His back was thick and wide, his shoulders weightlifter-broad. Iron muscles stretched beneath his camouflage uniform. Beneath the aircrew helmet’s visor, his face was weathered and lined from years of military service to Mother Russia.