The Ten Thousand (67 page)

Seeing Cole’s action, the soldier had managed to turn his head enough to see that she was in trouble.

With every ounce of strength he had left, he pushed away Cole’s parka, grabbed the dressing with his left hand again and pushed it as tight against his abdomen as he could. With his right hand he reached down to his side, grabbed the M-16 rifle that had been lying there, and laid it across his lap.

The German who had been in the lead had also seen Cole’s reaction and, looking over to where she had turned her head, saw the wounded black soldier, now preparing to bring his rifle to bear. The German, seeing that he himself was in danger, swung the muzzle of his rifle away from Cole, took a quick aim at the black soldier, and fired a short three-round burst.

At that range, the German’s volley found its mark. Cole watched in horror as the first round struck the black soldier’s left shoulder. The second round, due to the climb of the German’s rifle muzzle, hit the soldier in the head. With the muzzle still climbing as the third round left the barrel, the bullet hit the tree just above the soldier’s head. But Cole didn’t see that. After watching his head jerk after being hit by the second round, his lifeless eyes rolling back into his head, Cole dropped the two aid kits she held, turned, and fled back into the woods followed by random shots from both Germans that missed her but kept her going.

When she finally stopped running, Cole found herself alone again, lost in the woods and more frightened than ever. What shreds of rationality she had managed to hold to until that morning were now gone. Dripping with sweat from her exertions but with no parka to protect her from the chilling winds that began to sweep through the woods, Cole slowly began to wander about without any thought, without any purpose. Only total physical exhaustion stopped her. At the end of her strength, Cole simply dropped onto the ground, curled up into the fetal position, and went to sleep.

It wouldn’t be until the spring, when the forests shone in a wild blaze of lush greens and vibrant colors and the last of the melting snows had long disappeared, that Hilary Cole’s body would be found.

“The chances of pulling this off, Madam President, are almost nonexistent. There’s just no way in hell I can support you in this.”

Peter Soares’s reaction didn’t surprise Abigail Wilson. For days, despite the fact that he was still her Secretary of State, Soares had been looking for a way to distance himself from Wilson’s administration.

That he was using her recent decisions as a pretext for leaving it was both logical and, after his recent lack of support for her, a relief. “Do you, Mr. Secretary, see any reasonable alternatives?”

Like a slap in the face, Wilson’s response caused Soares to recoil. The expression on his face changed in an instant from one of anger to a blank, almost embarrassed look.

Without asking for an explanation or making even the slightest effort to pursue the subject with him, Wilson looked down at some papers before her. There was, as she began to speak, the slightest hint of satisfaction on her face. “I find it strange, Mr. Secretary, that the same man who less than a month ago came into this very room and campaigned vigorously for this administration to invade a sovereign nation in pursuit of a more ambitious objective should, in the throes of an international crisis, back away from an operation which is aimed at doing nothing more than saving the lives of our fellow countrymen. This just doesn’t make sense to me.”

Soares resented having Wilson turn on him like this. He had watched her treat other men of power as if they were children, embarrassing them and making them so angry that they reacted in a manner that made them look like fools. In the past he had enjoyed watching his political enemies squirm under Wilson’s subtle and manipulative attacks. He had on many occasions engineered such scenes during Wilson’s climb to power. Now that he had become the target of just such a setup, Soares couldn’t deal with it. “Madam President, I will let the American voters be
my
judge.”

That Soares at a time like this should put this issue into political terms was to her distasteful. How could someone, she wondered, even think about elections and politics when the lives of Americans and the role of the United States as the leader of the free world hung in the balance? There were times, Wilson believed, when leadership, true leadership, demanded that hard decisions be made, political consequences be damned. Leaning forward with her arms resting on the table and her hands joined before her, Wilson responded with a voice that was clear and confident. “I, Peter, will trust to God to be my judge.”

From the end of the table, Ed Lewis, who had been watching this outbreak building up for several minutes, finally added his own fuel to the flames that Soares was fanning. “You do understand, Mr.

Secretary, that both the British and the French, not to mention the rest of
NATO
, agreed to support our expanded operations in Germany only if we would go in and secure the nuclear weapons that we lost control of after your failed adventure. Though we would have preferred to wait until the Tenth Corps had made it to the coast, it was decided that? ”

With fire in his eyes, Soares leaned across the table and turned to face Lewis. “Who in the hell do you think you are, you little bastard, to come in here with these half-assed schemes and act as if you were the Secretary of State?”

Unable to resist the opportunity to take a slap at Soares, Lewis leaned back in his chair and smiled.

“Well, it seemed to me, Mr. Secretary, that someone needed to act like the Secretary of State.”

With that, Soares’s face flushed with rage. Before Wilson could say anything, he was on his feet and shaking his fist at Lewis. “You bastard! You little slimy bastard!”

Wilson, upset by Soares’s reaction, slammed the flat of her hand down on the table. “MR.

SECRETARY! I will not have this meeting turned into a locker-room brawl. Now sit down and let’s get on with this. There is much to do.”

Eyes still wild, Soares turned on Wilson. “If there’s more to be done here, you’ll do it without me. My resignation will be on your desk within the hour.”

With the measured control that had seen her through tough elections and had made her an effective governor, Wilson pushed her anger aside. Without any hint of disappointment or regret, she looked up at Soares. “I am sincerely sorry that you find it necessary to leave this administration _at this time.” _ Her emphasis was lost on Soares. Instead, he stood, growing madder by the minute as this woman sat there barely concealing a smile, talking to him in this manner. Still he let her finish. “I cannot tell you how much your wise counsel and support in the past have meant to me. For that I thank you. I do, however, understand your position on this matter and accept your resignation.” Then, as if the whole incident had never happened and Soares was no longer in the room, Wilson turned to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Now, General, you were saying that General Malin has accepted Operation En Passant as reasonable and is already taking steps to prepare his corps for their role?”

Without so much as a second glance at Soares, the Chairman responded to Wilson. “Yes, Madam President, he has. I was on the phone to him just before we adjourned and …”

While the general spoke and everyone at the table listened, Soares realized that somehow, somewhere, he had lost control. He had suddenly fallen from being the power behind the throne to becoming an object of scorn. As the conversation went from one member of the Security Council to another, Soares’s heart sank. He had for the moment lost. Now all that remained was to play out this hand, sit back, and watch what happened, hoping that somewhere along the line Wilson would stumble and leave him free of stain to pick up the party’s political leadership and in a few years nomination for President. Without another word and with no one except Ed Lewis paying any attention to him, Soares left the room.

[ * ]

There was a light knock on the door, followed by the appearance of his aide’s head. “General Malin, General Prentice has returned, sir.”

Malin, who had been mechanically reading a stack of messages and requests for information with no great enthusiasm, looked up. “Great. Tell him I would like to see him as soon as possible, if not sooner.”

Then he added, “And tell the chief I need to see him after I finish with General Prentice.”

Knowing that the first thing the corps chief of staff would ask was if the aide knew why Malin wanted to see him, the aide asked, “Sir, any particular subject you want to discuss with the chief?”

With a sweep of his hand across the scattered messages and reports sitting on his desk, Malin grunted. “Yeah. I want him to do something about all this bullshit the Pentagon dumped on us after we reopened our channels with them. Half of this stuff is pure crap that has no relevance to what we’re doing, and I have no intention of providing a response.”

The aide, who had organized the general’s incoming correspondence, knew exactly what Malin was talking about. Though “officially” the Tenth Corps had severed communications with the National Command Authority when Malin had declared himself a renegade and begun his march north through Germany, selected channels had been maintained. In this manner, intelligence from the Defense Intelligence Agency freely flowed into the Tenth Corps and had given Malin information he needed that his own corps couldn’t gather. Since this intelligence was sent out over a network that the Tenth Corps, like all the other major American commands scattered across the world, had access to, there was no compromise of Wilson’s administration. The only direct two-way communication was between Malin himself and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and was limited to a single phone conversation made each evening after Malin had received his last formal update for the day. This timing allowed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs to report to the President in the late afternoon every day. The number of people who were involved in this chain was held to the bare minimum. Though no one had any doubt that the Wilson-Lewis-Malin conspiracy would eventually come to light, the longer they maintained the renegade corps commander story, the better, especially when dealing with other nations.

The commencement of hostilities, the refusal of the German Chancellor to open reasonable negotiations with Wilson, and the internal German conflict, with the Parliament demanding that Ruff accept a UN-mediated armistice and his refusal to do so, had altered the international political landscape.

Careful manipulation of the stories fed to the media and well-worded press releases, not to mention round-the-clock discussions with members of
NATO
, were slowly shifting popular and official thinking.

Malin, rather than being an insane and uncontrolled maverick, was now being viewed by many as a hero, a man with the foresight and courage to stand up against an aggressive and resurgent German leader bent on altering the political, military, and nuclear balance in Europe. This, coupled with Wilson’s pledge to the American public that she would not sit idle while the Germans destroyed the Tenth Corps, allowed her to broaden the conflict with the consent of the American public and all major
NATO
allies.

Hence, the commitment of the 17th Airborne to secure Bremerhaven, round-the-clock air cover from bases in Great Britain, and the dispatching of a Marine expeditionary force to the Baltic to threaten the German coast became possible. Along with these operations came the opening of all communications nets and channels, followed by a virtual avalanche of messages, requests for information, directives, and helpful advice from Pentagon staff officers who were far removed from the trauma of the battlefield.

Tasked with updating their own charts and briefings, well-meaning Pentagon staff officers immediately inundated the Tenth Corps staff with message after message requesting information that the Tenth Corps staff had no need to accumulate or track. The Tenth Corps staff, which had been quite happy to operate as an independent entity, free from the curse of modern communications that allowed higher headquarters to talk to practically anyone, soon found itself in danger of being paralyzed by these requests.

All these requests came on top of the need to deal with the current battle, the drafting of new plans that would incorporate other American units coming into the theater, and the necessity of moving every twelve to twenty-four hours. When faced with the imperatives of dealing with the current battle and preparing for the next, the staff of the Tenth Corps, almost to a man, ignored the requests for information and the advice from Washington. When this happened, the well-meaning Washington staff officer informed his commander, who had tasked him to get the information, that the Tenth Corps was not cooperating. The higher-ranking officer in Washington in turn sent a message to a higher-ranking staff officer on the Tenth Corps staff repeating the request. The higher-ranking officer in Germany, with no more time to deal with outside requests than his subordinate, did as his subordinate had done; he ignored the request. Back in Washington this started a whole new chain of calls, message generation, etc., until finally almost all requests for information were being addressed to General Malin himself. It was a system gone berserk, and Malin intended to stop it.

He had to, for important orders and information were being crowded off the communications channels by mindless correspondence. Operation En Passant, a directive signed by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff himself, had been lost in the flood of lesser messages. It wasn’t until the Chairman called Malin and asked for Malin’s opinion on the operation that Malin, who had still not seen the directive and was therefore caught off guard, began to appreciate the seriousness of the communications glut. Even Malin’s chief of operations, Brigadier General Jerry Prentice, was unaware of Operation En Passant. A quick search found that the message was still waiting patiently in an electronic computer queue in Washington for its turn to be bounced off a satellite and down to the Tenth Corps.