The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [218]
Bondarenko: "He's been out here so long, maybe he likes the idea of Chinese food."
"General, I was out here as a lieutenant," Aliyev said. "I remember the political officers telling us that the Chinese had increased the length of the bayonets on their AK-47s to get through the extra fat layer we'd grown after discarding true Marxism-Leninism and eating too much."
"Really?" Bondarenko asked.
"That is the truth, Gennady Iosifovich."
"So, what do we know of the PLA?"
"There are a lot of them, and they've been training seriously for about four years now, much harder than we've been doing."
"They can afford to," Bondarenko observed sourly. The other thing he'd learned on arriving was how thin the cupboard was for funds and training equipment. But it wasn't totally bleak. He had stores of consumable supplies that had been stocked and piled for three generations. There was a virtual mountain of shells for the 100-mm guns on his many—and long-since obsolete—T-54/55 tanks, for example, and a sea of diesel fuel hidden away in underground tanks too numerous to count. The one thing he had in the Far East Military District was infrastructure, built up by the Soviet Union over generations of institutional paranoia. But that wasn't the same as an army to command.
"What about aviation?"
"Mainly grounded," Aliyev answered glumly. "Parts problems. We used up so much in Chechnya that there isn't enough to go around, and the Western District still has first call."
"Oh? Our political leadership expects the Poles to invade us?"
"That's the direction Germany is in," the G-3 pointed out.
"I've been fighting that out with the High Command for three years," Bondarenko growled, thinking of his time as chief of operations for the entire Russian army. "People would rather listen to themselves than to others with the voice of reason." He looked up at Aliyev. "And if the Chinese come?"
The theater operations officer shrugged. "Then we have a problem."
Bondarenko remembered the maps. It wasn't all that far to the new gold strike … and the ever-industrious army engineers were building the damned roads to it …
"Tomorrow, Andrey Petrovich. Tomorrow we start drawing up a training regimen for the whole command," CINC-FAR EAST told his own G-3.
CHAPTER 27—Transportation
Diggs didn't entirely like what he saw, but it wasn't all that unexpected. A battalion of Colonel Lisle's 2nd Brigade was out there, maneuvering through the exercise area—clumsily, Diggs thought. He had to amend his thoughts, of course. This wasn't the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, and Lisle's 2nd Brigade wasn't the 11th ACR, whose troopers were out there training practically every day, and as a result knew soldiering about as well as a surgeon knew cutting. No, 1st Armored Division had turned into a garrison force since the demise of the Soviet Union, and all that wasted time in what was left of Yugoslavia, trying to be "peacekeepers," hadn't sharpened their war-fighting skills. That was a term Diggs hated. Peacekeepers be damned, the general thought, they were supposed to be soldiers, not policemen in battle dress uniform. The opposing force here was a German brigade, and by the looks of it, a pretty good one, with their Leopard-11 tanks. Well, the Germans had soldiering in their genetic code somewhere, but they weren't any better trained than Americans, and training was the difference between some ignorant damned civilian and a soldier. Training meant knowing where to look and what to do when you saw something there. Training meant knowing what the tank to your left was going to do without having to look. Training meant knowing how to fix your tank or Bradley when something broke. Training eventually meant pride, because with training came confidence, the sure knowledge that you were the baddest motherfucker in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and you didn't have to fear no evil at all.
Colonel Boyle was flying the UH-60A in which Diggs was riding. Diggs was in the