line might be another such man who wanted to hunt you. Of all the enemies, that was the one you loathed and feared the most, because it became personal to see another man through a telescopic sight, to see his face, and take his life as a deliberate act against one man, even gazing at his face when the bullet struck. Gogol had been one of those, Gennady thought, a hunter of individual men. And he’d probably never lost a minute’s sleep over it. Some men were just born to it, and Pavel Petrovich Gogol was one of them. With a few hundred thousand such men, a general could conquer the entire world, but they were too rare for that...
... and maybe that was a good thing, Bondarenko mused.
“Might you come to my headquarters some night? I would like to feed you dinner and listen to your stories.”
“How far is it?”
“I will send you my personal helicopter, Sergeant Gogol.”
“And I will bring you a gilded wolf,” the hunter promised his guest.
“We will find an honored place for it at my headquarters,” Bondarenko promised in turn. “Thank you for your tea. I must depart and see to my command, but I will have you to headquarters for dinner, Sergeant Gogol.” Handshakes were exchanged, and the general took his leave.
“I would not want him on the other side of a battlefield,” Colonel Aliyev observed, as they got into their helicopter.
“Do we have a sniper school in the command?”
“Yes, General, but it’s mainly inactive.”
Gennady turned. “Start it up again, Andrushka! We’ll get Gogol to come and teach the children how it’s done. He’s a priceless asset. Men like that are the soul of a fighting army. It’s our job to command our soldiers, to tell them where to go and what to do, but those are the men who do the fighting and the killing, and it’s our job to make sure they’re properly trained and supplied. And when they’re too old, we use them to teach the new boys, to give them heroes they can touch and talk to. How the hell did we ever forget that, Andrey?” The general shook his head as the helicopter lifted off.
Gregory was back in his hotel room, with three hundred pages of technical information to digest as he sipped his Diet Coke and finished off his french fries. Something was wrong with the whole equation, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. The Navy had tested its Standard-2-ER missile against all manner of threats, mainly on computer, but also against live targets at Kwajalein Atoll. It had done pretty well, but there’d never been a full-up live test against a for-real ICBM reentry vehicle. There weren’t enough of them to go around. Mainly they used old Minuteman-II ICBMs, long since retired from service and fired out of test silos at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, but those were mostly gone. Russia and America had retired all of their ballistic weapons, chiefly as a reaction to the nuclear terrorist explosion at Denver and the even more horrific aftermath that had barely been averted. The negotiations to draw the numbers down to zero—the last ones had been eliminated in public just before the Japanese had launched their sneak attack on the Pacific Fleet—had gone so rapidly that a lot of the minor ancillary points had scarcely been considered, and only later had it been decided to take the “spare” launchers whose disposition had somehow been overlooked and retain them for ABM testing (every month a Russian officer checked the American ones at Vandenberg, and an American officer counted the Russian ones outside Plesetsk). The ABM tests were also monitored, but that entire area of effort was now largely theoretical. Both America and Russia retained a goodly number of nuclear warheads, and these could easily be affixed to cruise missiles, which, again, both sides had in relative abundance and no country could stop. It might take five hours instead of thirty-four minutes, but the targets would be just as dead.
Anti-missile work had been relegated to theater missiles, such as the ubiquitous Scuds, which the Russians doubtless regretted ever having built, much less sold to jerkwater countries that couldn’t even field a single decent mechanized division, but who loved to parade those upgraded V- 2-class ballistic stovepipes because they looked impressive as hell to the people on the sidewalks. But the new upgrades on Patriot and its Russian counterpart SAM largely negated that threat, and the Navy’s