Buikov reported from inside the gun turret. “The fox and the gardener approach, Comrade Captain.”
“Leave them be for the moment, Boris Yevgeniyevich.”
“As you say, Comrade Captain.” Buikov was comfortable with the no-shoot rule, for once.
How much farther to the reconnaissance screen?” Peng asked.
“Two more kilometers,” Ge replied over the radio. “But that might not be a good idea.”
“Ge, have you turned into an old woman?” Peng asked lightly.
“Comrade, it is the job of lieutenants to find the enemy, not the job of senior generals,” the division commander replied in a reasonable voice.
“Is there any reason to believe the enemy is nearby?”
“We are in Russia, Peng. They’re here somewhere.”
“He is correct, Comrade General,” Colonel Wa Cheng-gong pointed out to his commander.
“Rubbish. Go forward. Tell the reconnaissance element to stop and await us,” Peng ordered. “A good commander leads from the front!” he announced over the radio.
“Oh, shit,” Ge observed in his tank. “Peng wants to show off his ji-ji. Move out,” he ordered his driver, a captain (his entire crew was made of officers). “Let’s lead the emperor to the recon screen.”
The brand-new T-98 tank surged forward, throwing up two rooster tails of dirt as it accelerated. General Ge was in the commander’s hatch, with a major acting as gunner, a duty he practiced diligently because it was his job to keep his general alive in the event of contact with the enemy. For the moment, it meant going ahead of the senior general with blood in his eye.
Why did they stop?” Buikov asked. The PLA tracks had suddenly halted nine hundred meters off, all five of them, and now the crews dismounted, manifestly to take a stretch, and five of them lit up smokes.
“They must be waiting for something,” the captain thought aloud. Then he got on the radio. “GREEN WOLF here, the enemy has halted about a kilometer south of us. They’re just sitting still.”
“Have they seen you?”
“No, they’ve dismounted to take a piss, looks like, just standing there. We have them in range, but I don’t want to shoot until they’re closer,” Aleksandrov reported.
“Very well, take your time. There’s no hurry here. They’re walking into the parlor very nicely.”
“Understood. Out.” He set the mike down. “Is it time for morning break?”
“They haven’t been doing that the last four days, Comrade Captain,” Buikov reminded his boss.
“They appear relaxed enough.”
“I could kill any of them now,” Gogol said, “but they’re all privates, except for that one ...”
“That’s the fox. He’s a lieutenant, likes to run around a lot. The other officer’s the gardener. He likes playing with plants,” Buikov told the old man.
“Killing a lieutenant’s not much better than killing a corporal,” Gogol observed. “There’s too many of them.”
“What’s this?” Buikov said from his gunner’s seat. “Tank, enemy tank coming around the left edge, range five thousand.”
“I see it!” Aleksandrov reported. “... Just one? Only one tank—oh, all right, there’s a carrier with it—”
“It’s a command track, look at all those antennas!” Buikov called.
The gunner’s sight was more powerful than Aleksandrov’s binoculars. The captain couldn’t confirm that for another minute or so. “Oh, yes, that’s a command track, all right. I wonder who’s in it ... ”
There they are,” the driver called back. ”The reconnaissance section, two kilometers ahead, Comrade General.”
“Excellent,” Peng observed. Standing up to look out of the top of his command track with his binoculars, good Japanese ones from Nikon. There was Ge in his command tank, thirty meters off to the right, protecting him as though he were a good dog outside the palace of some ancient nobleman. Peng couldn’t see anything to be concerned about. It was a clear day, with some puffy white clouds at three thousand meters or so. If there were American fighters up there, he wasn’t going to worry about them. Besides, they’d done no ground-attacking that he’d heard about, except to hit those bridges back at Harbin, and one might as well attack a mountain as those things, Peng was sure. He had to hold on to the sill of the hatch lest the pitching of the vehicle smash him against it—it was a track specially modified for senior officers, but no one had thought to make it
safer to stand in, he thought sourly. He wasn’t some peasant-private who could smash his head with no consequence ... Well, in any case, it was a good day to be a soldier, in the field leading his men. A fair day, and no enemy in sight.
“Pull up alongside the reconnaissance track,” he