was I.”
“But we’ve already checked your electronic accounts.”
“Do you think they are all written down?” He tapped the side of his head. “Do you think I am totally foolish?”
“Go on, make your proposal.”
“I will propose that I can go forward with the mission. I require them to authorize it by a signal—the way they set the shades in their windows, for example.”
“And for this?”
“And for this I will not be executed,” the traitor suggested.
“I see,” Yefremov said quietly. He would have been perfectly content to shoot the traitor right here and now, but it might be politically useful to go forward with his proposal. He’d kick that one upstairs.
The bad part about watching them was that you had to anticipate everything they did, and that meant that they got to have more sleep, about an hour’s worth, Aleksandrov figured, and no more than that only because they were predictable. He’d had his morning tea. Sergeant Buikov had enjoyed two morning cigarettes with his, and now they lay prone on wet dew-dampened ground, with their binoculars to their eyes. The Chinese had also had soldiers out of their tracks all night, set about a hundred meters away from them, so it seemed. They weren’t very adventurous, the captain thought. He would have spread his sentries much farther out, at least half a kilometer, in pairs with radios to go with their weapons. For that matter, he would have set up a mortar in the event that they spotted something dangerous. But the fox and the gardener seemed to be both conservative and confident, which was an odd combination of characteristics.
But their morning drill was precise. The petrol heaters came out for tea—probably tea, they all figured—and whatever it was that they had for breakfast. Then the camouflage nets came down. The outlying sentries came in and reported in person to their officers, and everyone mounted up. The first hop on their tracks was a short one, not even half a kilometer, and again the foot-scouts dismounted and moved forward, then quickly reported back for the second, much longer morning frog leap forward.
“Let’s move, Sergeant,” Aleksandrov ordered, and together they ran to their BRM for their first trek into the woods for their own third installment of frog leap backwards.
There they go again,” Major Tucker said, after getting three whole hours of sleep on a thin mattress four feet from the Dark Star terminal. It was Ingrid Bergman up again, positioned so that she could see both the reconnaissance element and main body of the Chinese army. ”You know, they really stick to the book, don’t they?”
“So it would seem,” Colonel Tolkunov agreed.
“So, going by that, tonight they’ll go to about here.” Tucker made a green mark on the acetate-covered map. “That puts them at the gold mine day after tomorrow. Where do you plan to make your stand?” the major asked.
“That depends on how quickly the Two Zero One can get forward.”
“Gas?” Tucker asked.
“Diesel fuel, but, yes, that is the main problem with moving so large a force.”
“Yeah, with us it’s bombs.”
“When will you begin to attack Chinese targets?” Tolkunov asked.
“Not my department, Colonel, but when it happens, you’ll see it here, live and in color.”
Ryan had gotten two hours of nap in the afternoon, while Arnie van Damm covered his appointments (the Chief of Staff needed his sleep, too, but like most people in the White House, he put the President’s needs before his own), and now he was watching TV, the feed from Ingrid Bergman.
“This is amazing,” he observed. “You could almost get on the phone and tell a guy where to go with his tank.”
“We try to avoid that, sir,” Mickey Moore said at once. In Vietnam it had been called the “squad leader in the sky” when battalion commanders had directed sergeants on their patrols, not always to the enlisted men’s benefit. The miracle of modern communications could also be a curse, with the expected effect that the people in harm’s way would ignore their radios or just turn the damned things off until they had something to say themselves.
Ryan nodded. He’d been a second lieutenant of Marines once, and though it hadn’t been for long, he remembered it as demanding work for a kid just out of college.
“Do the Chinese know we’re doing this?”
“Not as far as we can tell. If they did, they’d sure as hell try to take the Dark Star down, and we’d notice if they tried. That’s not easy, though. They’re damned