Executive orders - Tom Clancy [49]
Times had changed with the demise of the Soviet Union, but the mission of the NTC had not. The OpFor had recently been enlarged to three battalions-now called squadrons, because the unit had assumed the identity of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the Blackhorse Cav-and simulated brigade or larger enemy formations. The only real concession to the new political world was that they didn't call themselves Russians anymore. Now they were Krasnovians, a word, however, derived from krasny, Russian for red.
General-Lieutenant Gennady Iosefovich Bondarenko knew most of this-the turtle bordello was something on which he'd not been briefed; his initial tour of the base had taken care of that, however-and was as excited as he had ever been.
You started in Signal Corps? Diggs asked. The base commander was terse of speech and efficient of movement, dressed in desert-camouflage fatigues called chocolate chip from their pattern. He, too, had been fully briefed, though, like his visitor, he had to pretend that he hadn't been,
Correct. Bondarenko nodded. But I kept getting into trouble. First Afghanistan, then when the Mudje raided into Soviet Union. They attacked a defense-research facility in Tadzhik when I was visitor there. Brave fighters, but unevenly led. We managed to hold them off, the Russian reported in a studied monotone. Diggs could see the decorations that had resulted; he had commanded a cavalry squadron leading Barry McCaffrey's 24th Mechanized Infantry Division in a wild ride on the American left during Desert Storm, then gone on to command the 10th Buffalo ACR, still based in the Negev Desert, as part of America's commitment to Israeli security. Both men were forty-nine. Both had smelled the smoke. Both were on the way up.
You have country like this at home? Diggs asked.
We have every sort of terrain you can imagine. It makes training a challenge, especially today. There, he said. It's started.
The first group of tanks was rolling now, down a broad, U-shaped pass called the Valley of Death. The sun was setting behind the brown-colored mountains, and darkness came rapidly here. Scuttling around also were the HMMWVs of the observer-controllers, the gods of the NTC, who watched everything and graded what they saw as coldly as Death himself. The NTC was the world's most exciting school. The two generals could have observed the battle back at base headquarters in a place called the Star Wars Room. Every vehicle was wired, transmitting its location, direction of movement, and when the time came, where it was shooting and whether it scored a hit or not. From that data, the computers at Star Wars sent out signals, telling people when they had died, though rarely why. That fact they learned later from the observer-controllers. The generals didn't want to watch computer screens, however-Bondarenko's staff officers were doing that, but the place for their general was here. Every battlefield had a smell, and generals had to have the nose for it.
Your instrumentation is like something from a science novel.
Diggs shrugged. Not much changed from fifteen years ago. We have more TV cameras on the hilltops now, though. America would be selling much of that technology to the Russians. That was a little hard for Diggs to accept. He'd been too young for Vietnam. His was the first generation of flag officers to have avoided that entanglement. But Diggs had grown up with one reality in his life: fighting the Russians in Germany. A cavalry officer for his entire career, he'd trained