"Well, nobody ever said Ivan couldn't fight." Clark downed a shot. The working day was over, and everybody else was doing it.
"Shame their country's in such a mess," Chavez observed.
"It's their mess to clean up, Domingo. They'll do it if we keep out of their way." Probably, John didn't add. The hard part for him was thinking of them as something other than the enemy. He'd been here in the Bad Old Days, operating briefly on several occasions in Moscow as an "illegal" field officer, which in retrospect seemed like parading around Fifth Avenue in New York stark naked holding up a sign saying he hated Jews, blacks, and NYPD cops. At the time, it had just seemed like part of the job, John remembered. But now he was older, a grandfather, and evidently a lot more chicken than he'd been back in the '70s and '80s. Jesus, the chances he'd taken back then! More recently, he'd been in KGB-to him it would always be KGB-headquarters at #2 Dzerzhinskiy Square as a guest of the Chairman. Sure, Wilbur, and soon he'd hop in the alien spacecraft that landed every month in his backyard and accept their invitation for a luncheon flight to Mars. It felt about that crazy, John thought.
"Ivan Sergeyevich!" a voice called. It was Lieutenant General Yuriy Kirillin, the newly selected chief of Russian special forces-a man defining his own job as he went along, which was not the usual thing in this part of the world.
"Yuriy Andreyevich," Clark responded. He'd kept his given name and patronymic from his CIA cover as a convenience that, he was sure, the Russians knew all about anyway. So, no harm was done. He lifted a vodka bottle. It was apple vodka, flavored by some apple skins at the bottom of the bottle, and not bad to the taste. In any case, vodka was the fuel for any sort of business meeting in Russia, and since he was in Rome it was time to act Italian.
Kirillin gunned down his first shot as though he'd been waiting all week for it. He refilled and toasted John's companion: "Domingo Stepanovich," which was close enough. Chavez reciprocated the gesture. "Your men are excellent, comrades. We will learn much from them."
Comrades, John thought. Son of a bitch! "Your boys are eager, Yuriy, and hard workers."
"How long?" Kirillin asked. His eyes didn't show the vodka one little bit. Perhaps they were immune, Ding thought. He had to go easy on the stuff, lest John have to guide him home.
"Two weeks," Clark answered. "That's what Domingo tells me."
"That fast?" Kirillin asked, not displeased by the estimate.
"They're good troops, General," Ding said. "Their basic skills are there. They're in superb physical condition, and they're smart. All they need is familiarization with their new weapons, and some more directed training that we'll set up for them. And after that, they'll be training the rest of your forces, right?"
"Correct, Major. We will be establishing regional special-operations and counterterror forces throughout the country. The men you train this week will be training others in a few months. The problem with the Chechens came as a surprise to us, and we need to pay serious attention to terrorism as a security threat."
Clark didn't envy Kirillin the mission. Russia was a big country containing too many leftover nationalities from the Soviet Union-and for that matter from the time of the czars-many of whom had never particularly liked the idea of being part of Russia. America had had the problem once, but never to the extent that the Russians did, and here it wouldn't be getting better anytime soon. Economic prosperity was the only sure cure-prosperous people don't squabble; it's too rough on the china and the silverware-but prosperity was a way off in the future yet.
"Well, sir," Chavez went on, "in a year you'll have a serious and credible force, assuming you have the funding support you're going to need."
Kirillin grunted. "That is the question here, and probably in your country as well, yes?"
"Yeah." Clark had himself a laugh. "It helps if Congress loves you."
"You have many nationalities on your team," the Russian general observed.
"Yeah, well, we're mainly a NATO service, but we're used to working together. Our best shooter now is Italian."
"Really? I saw him, but-"
Chavez cut him off. "General, in a previous life, Ettore was James Butler Hickock. Excuse me, Wild Bill Hickock to you. That son of a bitch can sign his name with a handgun."
Clark refilled the vodka glasses. "Yuriy, he's won money off all of us at the pistol range. Even me."
"Is that a fact?" Kirillin mused, with the same look in his eyes that Clark had had a few weeks earlier. John punched him on the arm.
"I know what you're thinking. Bring money when you have your match with him, Comrade General," John advised. "You'll need it to pay off his winnings."
"This I must see," the Russian announced.
"Hey, Eddie!" Chavez waved his number-two over.
"Yes, sir?"
"Tell the general here how good Ettore is with a pistol."
"That fucking Eyetalian!" Sergeant Major Price swore. "He's even taken twenty pounds off Dave Woods."
"Dave's the range-master at Hereford, and he's pretty good, too,"
Ding explained. "Ettore really ought to be in the Olympics or something-maybe Camp Perry, John?"
"I thought of that, maybe enter him in the President's Cup match next year…" Clark mused. Then he turned. "Go ahead, Yuriy. Take him on. Maybe you will succeed where all of us failed."
"All of you, eh?"
"Every bloody one of us," Eddie Price confirmed. "I wonder why the Italian government gave him to us. If the Mafia want to go after him, I wish the bastards luck."
"This I must see," Kirillin persisted, leading his visitors to wonder how smart he was.
"Then you will see it, Tovarisch General, "Clark promised.
Kirillin, who'd been on the Red Army pistol team as a lieutenant and a captain, couldn't conceive of being beaten in a pistol match. He figured these NATO people were just having fun with him, as he might do if the situation were reversed. He waved to the bartender and ordered pepper vodka for his own next round. But all that said, he liked these NATO visitors, and their reputation spoke forcefully for itself. This Chavez, a major-he was really CIA, Kirillin knew, and evidently a good spy at that, according to his briefing from the SVR-had the look of a good soldier, with confidence won in the field, the way a soldier ought to win his confidence. Clark was much the same-and also very capable, so the book on him read-with his own ample experience both as a soldier and a spy. And his spoken Russian was superb and very literate, his accent of St. Petersburg, where he probably could-and probably once or twice had, Kirillin reflected-pass for a native. It was so strange that such men as these had once been his sworn enemies. Had battle happened, it would have been bloody, and its outcome very sad. Kirillin had spent three years in Afghanistan, and had learned firsthand just how horrid a thing combat was. He'd heard the stories from his father, a much-decorated infantry general, but hearing them wasn't the same as seeing, and besides, you never told the really awful parts because you tended to edit them out of your memory. One did not discuss seeing a friend's face turn to liquid from a rifle bullet over a few drinks in a bar, because it was just not the sort of thing you could describe to one who didn't understand, and you didn't need to describe it to one who did. You just lifted your glass to toast the memory of Grisha or Mirka, or one of the others, and in the community of arms, that was enough. Did these men do it? Probably. They'd lost men once, when Irish terrorists had attacked their own home station, to their ultimate cost, but not without inflicting their own harm on highly trained men.
And that was the essence of the profession of arms right there. You trained to skew the odds your way, but you could never quite turn them all the way in the direction you wished.