took the tanks out into the open to play with them, drive them about the nearby test range, even shoot the guns occasionally. One young sergeant had commented to him that it was good to use them, because it made the war movies he’d seen as a child seem even more real. Now that, Colonel Aliyev thought, was something to hear from a soldier. It made the movies better. Damn.
Who does that slant-eyed motherfucker think he is?” Gant demanded out in the garden.
“Mark, we laid a rather firm note on them this morning, and they’re just reacting to it.”
“Cliff, explain to me why it’s okay for other people to talk like that to us, but it’s not okay for us to talk that way to them, will you?”
“It’s called diplomacy,” Rutledge explained.
“It’s called horseshit, Cliff,” Gant hissed back. “Where I come from, if somebody disses you like that, you punch him right in the face.”
“But we don’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re above it, Mark,” Rutledge tried to explain. “It’s the little dogs that yap at you. The big powerful dogs don’t bother. They know they can rip your head off. And we know we can handle these people if we have to.”
“Somebody needs to tell them that, Cliffy,” Gant observed. “Because I don’t think they got the word yet. They’re talking like they own the world, and they think they can play tough-guy with us, Cliff, and until they find out they can’t, we’re going to have a lot more of their shit to deal with.”
“Mark, this is how it’s done, that’s all. It’s just how the game is played at this level.”
“Oh, yeah?” Gant countered. “Cliff, it’s not a game to them. I see that, but you don’t. After this break, we’re going back in there, and they’re going to threaten us. What do we do then?”
“We brush it off. How can they threaten us?”
“The Boeing order.”
“Well, Boeing will have to sell its airplanes to somebody else this year,” Rutledge said.
“Really? What about the interests of all those workers we’re supposed to represent?”
“Mark, at this level, we deal with the big picture, not the little one, okay?” Rutledge was actually getting angry with this stock trader.
“Cliffy, the big picture is made up of a lot of little ones. You ought to go back in there and ask if they like selling things to us. Because if they do, then they have to play ball. Because they need us a fucking lot more than we need them.”
“You don’t talk that way to a great power.”
“Are we a great power?”
“The biggest,” Rutledge confirmed.
“Then how come they talk that way to us?”
“Mark, this is my job. You’re here to advise me, but this is your first time to this sort of ball game, okay? I know how to play the game. It’s my job.”
“Fine.” Gant let out a long breath. “But when we play by the rules and they don’t, the game gets a little tedious.” Gant wandered off on his own for a moment. The garden was pretty enough. He hadn’t done this sort of thing enough to know that there was usually a garden of some sort for diplomats to wander in after two or three hours of talking at each other in a conference room, but he had learned that the garden was where a lot of the real work got done.
“Mr. Gant?” He turned to see Xue Ma, the diplomat/spook he’d chatted with before.
“Mr. Xue,” TELESCOPE said in his own greeting.
“What do you think of the progress of the talks?” the Chinese diplomat asked.
Mark was still trying to understand this guy’s use of language. “If this is progress, I’d hate to see what you call an adverse development.”
Xue smiled. “A lively exchange is often more interesting than a dull one.”
“Really? I’m surprised by all this. I always thought that diplomatic exchange was more polite.”
“You think this impolite?”
Gant again wondered if he was being baited or not, but decided the hell with it. He didn’t really need his government job anyway, did he? And taking it had involved a considerable personal sacrifice, hadn’t it? Like a few million bucks. Didn’t that entitle him to say what the hell he thought?
“Xue, you accuse us of threatening your national identity because we object to the murders your government—or its agents, I suppose—committed in front of cameras. Americans don’t like it when people commit murder.”
“Those people were breaking our laws,” Xue reminded him.
“Maybe so,” Gant conceded. “But in America when people break