had whitened from underneath to give the office the sort of pallor expected in a yellow-fever ward.
The senior officer was a Marine colonel named Chuck Lowe, who had watched the moving-in process with a silent resentment that Bob only understood when the man got to his feet.
"I may never make it to the head now," Lowe grumped, sticking his cast around the corner of his desk. They shook hands.
"What happened to the leg, Colonel?"
"Mountain Warfare School out in California, day after Christmas, skiing on my own Goddamned time. The docs say you should never break the tibia close to the bottom," Lowe explained with an ironic smile. "And you never get used to the itching. Should have this thing off in another three or four weeks. Then I have to get used to running again. You know, I spent three years trying to break my ass out of intel, then I finally get my Goddamned regiment, and this happens. Welcome aboard, Toland. Why don't you grab us both a cup of coffee?"
There was a pot atop the farthest filing cabinet. The other three officers, Lowe explained, were giving a briefing.
"I saw the write-up you gave CINCLANT. Interesting stuff. What do you think Ivan's up to?"
"It looks like he's increasing readiness across the board, Colonel--"
"In here, you can call me Chuck."
"Fine--I'm Bob."
"You do signal intelligence at NSA, right? You're one of the satellite specialists, I heard."
Toland nodded. "Ours and theirs, mostly ours. I see photos from time to time, but mostly I do signals work. That's how we twigged to the report on the four colonels. There has also been a fair amount of operational maneuvering done, more than usual for this time of year. Ivan's been a little freer with how his tankers drive around, too, less concern about running a battalion across a plowed field, for example."
"And you're supposed to have a look at anything that's unusual, no matter how dumb it seems, right? That gives you a pretty wide brief, doesn't it? We got something interesting along those lines from DIA. Have a look at these." Lowe pulled a pair of eight-by-ten photographs from a manila envelope and handed them to Toland. They seemed to show the same parcel of land, but from slightly different angles and different times of year. In the upper left corner was a pair of isbas, the crude huts of Russian peasant life. Toland looked up.
"Collective farm?"
"Yeah. Number 1196, a little one about two hundred klicks northwest of Moscow. Tell me what's different between the two."
Toland looked back at the photos. In one was a straight line of fenced gardens, perhaps an acre each. In the other he could see a new fence for four of the patches, and one patch whose fenced area had been roughly doubled.
"A colonel--army-type--I used to work with sent me these. Thought I'd find it amusing. I grew up on a corn farm in Iowa, you see."
"So Ivan's increasing the private patches for the farmers to work on their own, eh?"
"Looks that way."
"Hasn't been announced, has it? I haven't read anything about it." Toland didn't read the government's secret in-house publication, National Intelligence Digest, but the NSA cafeteria gossip usually covered harmless stuff like this. Intelligence types talked shop as much as any others.
Lowe shook his head slightly. "Nope, and that's a little odd. It's something they should announce. The papers would call that another sure sign of the 'liberalization trend' we've been seeing."
"Just this one farm, maybe?"
"As a matter of fact, they've seen the same thing at five other places. But we don't generally use our reconsats for this sort of thing. They got this on a slow news day, I suppose. The important stuff must have been covered by clouds." Toland nodded agreement. The reconnaissance satellites were used to evaluate Soviet grain crops, but that happened later in the year. The Russians knew it also, since it had been in the open press for over a decade, explaining why there was a team of agronomists in the U.S. Department of Agriculture with Special Intelligence-Compartmented security clearance."
"Kind of late in the season to do that, isn't it? I mean, will it do any good to give 'em this land this time of year?"
"I got these a week ago. I think they're a little older than that. This is about the time most of their farms start planting. It stays cold there quite a long time, remember, but the high latitudes make up for it with longer summer