Gordon felt so totally sympathetic toward Daryl’s plight — so completely on Daryl’s side — that it jarred him to remember that he himself was the enemy. That he had done this to his best friend — his longest political associate — just days after his nomination. But it had to be done, he told himself. Daryl just wouldn’t drop the ‘angry young man’ bullshit. He was constantly quarreling with the other members of the campaign staff. There had even been some press rumblings that all wasn’t well inside Gordon’s team. Worse yet, the implication had been that the lines were drawn on the basis of race!
‘Stop the car, Gordon,’ Daryl said — composed.
Gordon picked up the phone and said, ‘Stop the car.’ The agent with the phone to his ear looked back through the soundproof glass. ‘I said, stop the car, right now. Right here.’
The man hesitated, then said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and hung up. He made several phone calls. All the while the motorcade hurtled toward the city. They were in the blighted slums now. The glittering buildings downtown toward which the Vice Presidential party was headed loomed high over low-rent apartments. Every third building was boarded up. Some were burned out. Men congregated in empty trash- and rubble-strewn lots. Daryl didn’t say a word. He just stared out the window.
Finally, the motorcade slowed to a stop. It had taken quite a long time to arrange the unscheduled maneuver. It was as if the inertia of the dozen cars, trucks and vans had resisted the effort. Agents poured out of their vehicles. Shabbily-attired pedestrians stopped and stared at the well-armed, well-dressed security forces. Daryl opened his door.
‘Daryl!’ Gordon called out. When Gordon could think of nothing to say, Daryl slammed the door. He looked totally out of place in his dark gray suit and starched white shirt. He walked up to an unshaven man on the sidewalk. The brim of the man’s stained hat hung limply down around the gray stubble of a straggly beard. The man raised a bony arm and pointed up the street. Daryl took off walking, his stride confident.
The limo’s phone buzzed. Gordon picked it up. ‘Can we get going, Senator Davis?’ the agent in front asked.
The effort of speaking was almost too much. ‘Yes.’
The agents piled back into their vehicles as Gordon watched Daryl recede up the street until he was out of sight. Finally, the motorcade took off again. Gordon kept his eyes peeled along the sidewalk as they picked up speed. He never saw Daryl, but he spotted Daryl’s new briefcase. It was sitting incongruously upright in an open mesh trash can.
The crewman slid open the helicopter door. Nate Clark felt sub-zero air fill the’ warm cabin. As raw as the weather in Alaska had been during his brief acclimatization training, Clark felt instantly that the cold of Siberia was of a different order. And it was not yet technically autumn. The worry of what was coming that winter was with him constantly.
After fleeing the downdraft of the rotor, Clark was met by a civilian who introduced himself as an employee of the International Atomic Energy Commission. He led Nate to a nearby missile silo. Russian officers from the Strategic Rocket Forces milled about the heavy blast door. It had been swung open on its hinges. A crane slowly raised a jet-black cone from the silo. In it, Nate knew, was a thermonuclear warhead.
He couldn’t help but look around at the nearby hills. They stood in the open. The exposed crane operator was now lowering his delicate cargo into a heavy armored container mounted on a flat-bed truck. His civilian host described their progress in removing Russian nuclear weapons for safekeeping. But Nate’s eyes roamed the treeline. The skyline of the surrounding ridges. The swale that fell away from the flat, bulldozed missile pad.
On a nearby hill, Nate saw the regular string of dots for which he was looking. He thanked the civilian for the tour, then led Major Reed and the small security detail toward the firebase.
As they neared the base of the hill, men shouted in German from above. Clark and the others froze. German soldiers wove their way down the slope. The Germans saluted — wide-eyed on seeing the three black stars on Nate’s collar — and led the entourage through their defenses. They kept repeating ‘Minen’ as they pointed all around. The mines were all marked with thin sticks to which were tied colorful strips of cloth.
At the top of the first steep grade Nate was met by an officer. The man removed his glove to salute. He then shook Clark’s hand and rammed his fingers back into his glove before introducing himself in English.
‘Welcome to Firebase Zavitinsk, General Clark,’ the man said.
The German paratroopers were camped at the edge of the Zavitinsk Missile Base. At sunset, Clark knew, the IAEC technicians all returned to warm quarters. But in their outpost just north of the Amur River, the two hundred Germans hunkered down for the night. From his vantage on the hill, Nate’s eyes followed the twin tracks of the Trans-Siberian Railway into the haze to the east and west. After days spent organizing his staff, he had chosen these men for his first inspection tour.
They were the closest forces he had to the Chinese border.
‘Sorry for the unannounced visit,’ Clark said. He zipped his parka up to his chin and tugged the knit cap he wore under his helmet over his chilled ear lobes. ‘How are your men adjusting to this weather?’
‘This?’ the handsome German colonel asked. His bright white teeth and eyes were set in a red and weathered face. ‘The weather is not a problem today. There is sun.’
‘I meant the cold,’ Clark said as he followed the man down steps into an icy cut in the earth. His chin quivered with the first chatter of his teeth.
‘Ah!’ The colonel shook his head. ‘You must do what you must do, ja?’
They stood upright but still remained behind cover. The trench had been dug about three feet deep. An equally high mound of sandbags was piled around the lip. ‘These sandbags must give a pretty good fix on your positions,’ Clark commented. ‘Shouldn’t you deepen your trenches?’
The German shrugged, then kicked the toe of his boot into the dirt at the floor of the trench. ‘We dug until the first freeze. Now…?’ He shrugged again. ‘We could blast it out with explosives, but we don’t have enough yet. Our supplies are… are not so gut!’ His smile was gone.
Clark looked around at the soldiers. One thing that would degrade a unit faster than cold would be empty bellies. ‘We’ll fix that,’ Clark said.
‘Besides,’ Clark’s host continued, ‘when the snow comes, it will cover everything.’ The colonel held out his hand toward a dark bunker that opened off the trench. ‘Come, General Clark.’ Nate stooped and entered. His eyes stung immediately from the fumes of small chemical heaters. Clark was so uncomfortable bent over at the waist in the low room that he knelt on one knee. His escort knelt beside him.
‘We keep living quarters separate from fighting positions by fifty meters,’ the German whispered. As Clark’s eyes adjusted, he realized that the dark rolls covering the floor around him were men. Nothing but their faces protruded from black sleeping bags that fitted around their heads like the hoods of parkas. ‘Separating the two areas make less casualties from artillery.’
Clark looked at him at the mention of artillery. The only potentially hostile artillery in the area was Chinese.
‘Artillery is a problem, yes,’ the colonel said, ‘when you do not control the surrounding area. If it got bad, we would push the perimeter out. That would allow us to conceal and disperse our fighting positions. It would also give us some security against surprise attack. But we have good command and control in concentrated positions, and the soldiers fight better when they are together.’