Diggs adjourned the meeting, waving for Colonel Masterman to stay behind.
“Well, Duke?”
“I’ve been nosing around. What I’ve seen is pretty good, sir. Giusti is especially good, and he’s always bitching about training time. I like that.”
“So do I,” Diggs agreed at once. “What else?”
“Like the man said, artillery is in very good shape, and your maneuver brigades are doing okay, considering the lack of field time. They might not like using the sims all that much, but they are making good use of them. They’re about twenty percent off where we were in the Tenth Cav down in the Negev playing with the Israelis, and that isn’t bad at all. Sir, you give me three or four months in the field, and they’ll be ready to take on the world.”
“Well, Duke, I’ll write you the check next week. Got your plans ready?”
“Day after tomorrow. I’m taking some helicopter rides to scout out the ground we can use and what we can’t. There’s a German brigade says they’re eager to play aggressor for us.”
“They any good?”
“They claim to be. I guess we’ll just have to see. I recommend we send Second Brigade out first. They’re a little sharper than the other two. Colonel Lisle is our kind of colonel.”
“His package looks pretty good. He’ll get his star next go-round.”
“About right,” Masterman agreed. And what about my star? he couldn’t ask. He figured himself a pretty good bet, but you never really knew. Oh, well, at least he was working for a fellow cavalryman.
“Okay, show me your plans for Second Brigade’s next adventure in the farmland … tomorrow?”
“The broad strokes, yes, sir.” Masterman bobbed his head and walked off toward his office.
How rough?" Cliff Rutledge asked.
“Well,” Adler replied, “I just got off the phone with the President, and he says he wants what he wants and it’s our job to get it for him.”
“That’s a mistake, Scott,” the Assistant Secretary of State warned.
“Mistake or not, we work for the President.”
“I suppose so, but Beijing’s been pretty good about not tearing us a new asshole over Taiwan. This might not be the right time for us to press on them so hard.”
“Even as we speak, American jobs are being lost because of their trade policy,” Adler pointed out. “When does enough become too much?”
“I guess Ryan decides that, eh?”
“That’s what the Constitution says.”
“And you want me to meet with them, then?”
SecState nodded. “Correct. Four days from now. Put your position paper together and run it past me before we deliver it, but I want them to know we’re not kidding. The trade deficit has to come down, and it has to come down soon. They can’t make that much money off us and spend it somewhere else.”
“But they can’t buy military hardware from us,” Rutledge observed.
“What do they need all that hardware for?” Scott Adler asked rhetorically. “What external enemies do they have?”
“They’ll say that their national security is their affair.”
“And we reply that our economic security is our affair, and they’re not helping.” That meant observing to the PRC that it looked as though they were preparing to fight a war-but against whom, and was that a good thing for the world? Rutledge would ask with studied sangfroid.
Rutledge stood. “Okay, I can present our case. I’m not fully comfortable with it, but, well, I suppose I don’t have to be, do I?”
“Also correct.” Adler didn’t really like Rutledge all that much. His background and advancement had been more political than properly earned. He’d been very tight with former Vice President Kealty, for example, but after that incident had settled out, Cliff had dusted off his coattails with admirable speed. He would probably not get another promotion. He’d gone as far as one could go without really serious political ties-say a teaching position at the Kennedy School at Harvard, where one taught and became a talking head on the PBS evening news hour and waited to be noticed by the right political hopeful. But that was pure luck. Rutledge had come further than actual merit could justify, but with it came a comfortable salary and a lot of prestige on the Washington cocktail-party circuit, where he was on most of the A lists. And that meant that when he left government service, he’d increase his income by an order of magnitude or so with some consulting firm or other. Adler knew he could do the same, but probably wouldn’t. He’d probably take over the Fletcher School at Tufts and try to pass along what he’d learned to a new generation of would-be diplomats. He was too young for real retirement, though there was little in the way of a government afterlife from being Secretary of State, and academia wouldn’t be too bad. Besides, he’d get to do the odd consulting job, and do op-ed pieces for the newspapers, where he would assume the role of elder-statesman sage.
“Okay, let me get to work.” Rutledge walked out and turned left to head to his seventh-floor office.
Well, this was a plum, the Assistant Secretary thought, even if it was the wrong plum. The Ryan guy was not what he thought a president should be. He thought international discourse was about pointing guns at people’s heads and making demands, instead of reasoning with them. Rutledge’s way took longer, but was a lot safer. You had to give something to get something. Well, sure, there wasn’t much left to give the PRC, except maybe renouncing America’s diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. It wasn’t hard to understand the reason they’d done it, but it had still been a mistake. It made the PRC unhappy, and you couldn’t let some damned-fool “principle” get in the way of international reality. Diplomacy, like politics-another area in which Ryan was sadly lacking-was a practical business. There were a billion people in the People’s Republic, and you had to respect that. Sure, Taiwan had a democratically elected government and all that, but it was still a breakaway province of China, and that made it an internal matter. Their civil war was a fifty-plus-year affair, but Asia was a place where people took the long-term view.
Hmm, he thought, sitting down at his desk. We want what we want, and we’re going to get what we want … Rutledge took out a legal pad and leaned back in his chair to make some notes. It might be the wrong policy. It might be dumb policy. It might be policy he disagreed with. But it was policy, and if he ever wanted to be kicked upstairs-actually to a different office on the same floor-to Undersecretary of State, he had to present the policy as though it were his own personal passion. It was like being a lawyer, Rutledge thought. They had to argue dumb cases all the time, didn’t they? That didn’t make them mercenaries. It made them professionals, and he was a professional.
And besides, he’d never been caught. One thing about Ed Kealty, he’d never told anybody how Rutledge had tried to help him be President. Duplicitous he might have been toward the President, but he’d been loyal to his own people about it, as a politician was supposed to be. And that Ryan guy, smart as he might have been, he’d never caught on. So there, Mr. President, Rutledge thought. You may be smart, you think, but you need me to formulate your policy for you. Ha!
This is a pleasant change, Comrade Minister," Bondarenko observed on coming in. Golovko waved him to a chair, and poured him a small glass of vodka, the fuel of a Russian business meeting. The visiting general-lieutenant took the obligatory sip and expressed his thanks for the formal hospitality. He most often came here after normal working hours, but this time he’d been summoned officially, and right after lunch. It would have made him uneasy-once upon a time, such an invitation to KGB headquarters would involve a quick trip to the men’s room-except for his cordial relationship with Russia’s chief spy.