Someone Else's War: A Novel of Russia and America Read online

CHAPTER ONE, WASHINGTON, DC, DECEMBER 1993: GETMANOV

  It had started at an arms show, a military-industrial, hyper-globalized extravaganza, back in DC, in the cold and crystalline early December of 1993. A megalithic monster of an arms show, taking over both the Woodley Road Sheraton-Park and the Omni Shoreham just down the street, sponsored by a consortium of corporations and trade associations, with just about every arms maker in the Western World, and some from beyond, setting up booths.

  There were no real weapons at the booths, of course. There were just glossy brochures and plastic models and posters touting “Freedom Isn’t Free”-type sloganeering and free tote bags with corporate logos, handed out by young women whose honed attractiveness was a weapon in itself. People wandered in and out, some in uniform, some government civilians in the professional attire of their agencies—between the neckwear and shirt collars and degrees of paunch and slouch, you can always tell who works where. Mainstream media betrayed themselves by notebooks and frenetic scribblings, by micro-cassette recorders, and by arrogance. Left-wing types exuded fastidious distaste, ineptly feigned to cover their fascination. Prime contractors seemed indifferently at home. Subcontractors and vendors seemed earnest. Others, Dr. Olivia Lathrop Tolchin among them, came and went nondescriptly. Some of them, you wouldn’t look at twice until after you’d looked twice. Some of them mattered.

  Those who mattered didn’t spend much time in the exhibition halls. The real business occurred in the bars and restaurants, in the hotel hospitality suites, and in other rooms rented for other purposes, among people who, sometimes, would not or could not have met anywhere else. Arms shows specialized in fortuitous encounters, carefully arranged and rehearsed by at least one of the parties involved.

  Olivia’s primary field, her scientific and engineering passion since graduate school, was sensors. Her fascination was with tactical ground combat sensors, with making them small and rugged and cheap. At least that had been her intellectual love until 1988, when she’d been eased out of her job in a sensor project at the Army’s Engineering Center, Fort Belvoir, Virginia, about twenty miles south of the capital, down Interstate-95. No clear reasons had been given, although there were hints of displeasure at the Department of the Army, i.e., the Pentagon level. The dismissal had come with another hint, one designed to head off potential future ugliness such as lawsuits or going to the media. There was an opening for her elsewhere, also working with sensors and at a significant salary increase, should she care to apply. She cared to apply, and had since worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a well-groomed, desolate place that had birthed the atomic bomb but now was given to What’s-the-hurry?

  Her current project, a venerable missile defense affair, legacy of Ronald Reagan’s crafty enthusiasms and of other moribund ventures, some dating back to the 1950s, was always six months from some significant breakthrough or other. It was, like most of the rest of the lab, a place that was always going to succeed, but never succeeding. She’d taken it as an interim, as a possible stepping stone to something dynamic. Her hope was to be left more or less alone to accomplish some sort of technological spin-off, military or civilian, that would lead to serious work elsewhere. But in the manner of most American missile defense projects, it had turned out to be a place where real accomplishment was neither required nor welcomed. Young engineers were expected first to accede to and then to develop the bad habits of their elders. In time, this could make you unemployable anywhere else. But it hadn’t happened to Olivia yet, and she was determined that it wouldn’t.

  Three companies had invited her to attend the arms show, one on the basis of a recent journal article she’d published, the other two because they knew of her work and had learned that the first had invited her. She held no great expectations for the trip, but why not? Washington DC, all expenses paid. She’d spent time in the city, but less than she’d hoped for, when she’d been at Belvoir. And nothing was doing at the lab. She wouldn’t be missed. Not professionally and not personally.

  She’d spent part of the conference in those interviews, coming away unimpressed and wondering if she’d been too open about what she wanted most: a job with the freedom to think and create. But she’d seen enough of the for-profit defense technology world to know that she had no desire to give up the relative placidity of a national lab, which at least never had to worry about quarterly earnings statements, for the world of suborning and being suborned by the Pentagon.

  Her interviewers had sensed it. She hadn’t been rejected or turned away overtly, just dismissed with a thin smile and a casual “We’ll be in touch” that reeked of “Smart, but doesn’t understand how these things work. Not a team player.” Dismissed three times. But also, she knew, still under consideration. The clowns they sent to do the initial screening had no hiring authority. And those who knew anything at all about where sensor development was going, or should go, knew of her.

  Interviews over, she worked at killing time. The exhibition halls were garish, the lectures simplistic, the male clientele on its ludicrous best behavior regarding women. The officers in uniform, especially. Tailhook, the notorious 1991 naval aviators’ convention where women by the scores had been harassed and assaulted, was still in deadly legal and political aftermath. The military had instructed its men to avoid anything that might lead to anything that might lead to anything that might be actionable, or give the appearance thereof. Civilian agencies had done the same. The men at the arms show, the American men especially, seemed terrified of her.

  Their problem. Not hers.

  Late afternoon of the third and final day. Olivia was tired and bored. The touristy things she’d planned hadn’t happened. Most notably a trip to the Holocaust Museum. Her father had donated money to it, and some unspecified memento, in memory of his family and in some small tribute to the fact that he’d survived. But Olivia hadn’t gone, if only because the trip might have answered some of the questions she’d never dared ask. It was also now too late in the day. She was hungry but unwilling to subject herself to the bars or fight the crowds at the local restaurants for the pleasure of dining alone. Room service depressed her even more, as did the occasional waiter who suggested that if she were in the mood for company…

  So she roamed the hospitality suites, not caring whose they were, looking only for a decent glass of wine and something to eat. She found one suite, half-filled with middle-aged men wearing large stomachs, Rolex watches, and expensive suits. She helped herself to wine and a plate, picked up a few things from the buffet, then found a corner seat with a tiny table. The wine she recognized as a passable Washington State merlot. Cheese and crackers, she realized somewhat later, while chewing. It was cheese and crackers. She was wearier than she thought. Some kind of cheese and some kind of crackers.

  Olivia let herself stand down, let the wine infuse her with lassitude. The pain from the Cessna crash was still there, would always be there, but she was beginning to realize that it simply was what it was. Abstractly, she realized for the first time that she could, in fact, be OK with the pain. It didn’t have to translate to suffering. It was a pleasant realization, she thought as she watched the stout men with the Rolexes or, even worse, preposterously complex watches more useful on a Green Beret mission than at a Beltway sales fest. Several new men, younger and taut, wandered purposefully in. Colonels, still on active duty after the Cold War’s demise and the military downsizing, still hoping for jobs in the civilian defense sector. A shrinking sector, Olivia knew. Not good if you’re suddenly decreed an excess colonel, still paying child support from the first marriage and wondering how to send the second batch of kids through college. She smiled inwardly, giving silent thanks for all the problems that she didn’t have.

  She was not expecting the harsh, imperious man who sat down in front of her, across her tiny table. He was older, not tall but massively built, with a body that should have gone to fat but hadn’t. His face was granite, with deep brown eyes that were alive and twinkling. It was
not an American face. He didn’t have to open his mouth for her to know that. His eyes weren’t American eyes. Not smooth, not suave, nor glaring as though everything in the world that wasn’t his constituted a personal affront. Nor did he seem interested in wine or lassitude or female companionship. He was blunt and commanding and he looked at her very, very steadily for a long time, obviously sizing her up, though for what purpose, she could not tell. She feared neither him nor his purpose, felt only an abstract respect, sensing that, whatever else this man was or turned out to be, he’d earned that respect.

  It had been a while since she’d had that response to a man. It was…pleasant.

  Olivia was a tall woman, five feet, eight inches. She had the lean, muscular build of a life-long weight-lifter and runner and was very angular, especially in her lower back and pelvis, which since the crash were as much metal as bone. She wore a man’s navy pinstripe suit, tailored to fit, over a pale ecru silk blouse. Her hair had once been her mother’s sun-through-honey brown, falling in loose waves to her shoulders. Two weeks in the hospital had leached so much color from it that it was now the finest platinum, and there was a hard, worn beauty to her face and eyes. Not bitter, not unkind, not challenging or angry. Just very, very hard. In her own way, she knew, hers was a face as hard as his.

  “Have we met before?” she asked courteously, eliding the sir that she knew he was accustomed to and deserved. Then she held his gaze with a waiting patience.

  The man knew, too. And a strange feeling returned, from when first his wife had told him about her and he’d read the dossier she’d prepared for him and determined that this meeting would come to pass someday. The strange feeling was sorrow. Sorrow for her. In a just America, she would be loved and respected and loaded with honors. In her world as it was, she was a reasonably well-paid, utterly marginalized pariah, working for a worn-out national lab on a pointless Defense Department project. And yet she bore it with nobility. How she might bear that which his own country might someday inflict upon her, should he succeed with her, he chose for the moment not to consider. He only knew that as soon as he opened his mouth, she would be able to place his accent. And just as clearly, he knew that games, any games, any attempt at Cold War James Bond shaken, not stirred seductive insincerity, would get him a glacial smile and a contemptuous dismissal.

  So Yuri Mikhailovich Getmanov simply put his business card, English side up, on the table between them.

  Cultural Attaché

  Embassy of the Russian Federation

  2650 Wisconsin Avenue NW

  Washington DC 20007

  Phone 202/298-5700

  Fax 202/298-5735

  She flipped it over. The same thing in Russian. She read it aloud in Russian. He smiled at her American training, awkward accent, and the rhythm that told him she knew the language, but had never really used it in life.

  What the card didn’t say in either language: Major General, Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, the GRU.

  Getmanov could see her considering the missing information. Then he felt her eyes on his face again, eyes the most unfair shade of blue he had ever seen, her grim, sensuous mouth fighting to suppress laughter before she addressed him. “You may be the only man here who is willing to be seen with me in public. Tailhook seems to have inhibited them.”

  “But you are being courted. By companies looking for engineers. Are they offering you the sun, moon, and stars?”

  She paused, astonished that he should know that, yet also not astonished. Astonished that he should be so direct. But also not astonished. Alarmed but also curious, she chose to accept the conversation that had begun, as though it were entirely proper and unexceptional. She would play along. For now. “They’re offering nothing at the moment. The initial interviews were a pain. I guess they weren’t ready for me. But I suspect they’ll be back and the offers will come.”

  “Offering a lot?”

  “A lot more than I’m making now. Probably.”

  “Including autonomy?”

  “Heavens, no,” she answered, thinking that this conversation, in some ways so utterly preposterous, also seemed so natural. This had a quality of dignity, of two serious people speaking to each other with genuine respect. How attractive to someone starving for seriousness. Startled by her words, yet no longer surprised, she responded, “This isn’t about hiring me to be free to produce. It’s about buying me out. It’s about they’re thinking they’ll be able to use me someday to sell to the government for zillions what I would give the government for far less, right now. It’s about having me to sit on.”

  “Sit on?”

  Olivia smiled a bit. “Having me in private storage.”

  “Are you going to let them buy you out?”

  “I’m considering it. Easier. More money. Better labs and staff. But as I said, the first contacts weren’t exactly according to their script. We’ll see.”

  “And you’re considering selling yourself to the highest bidder? I know from your published record that you’re well-regarded. Professionally.”

  She nodded at what he didn’t add. Then she chose, no, found herself doing something she almost never did. Talk about herself. “At thirty-three, I have done this work since I first fell in love with sensor science in graduate school, and I have even seen some progress. Unfortunately, government contracts are not always awarded to those who want progress, or who want successes that might endanger other projects. Defense contracts these days are regarded as manna from heaven, and are nearly as rare. If you have one, not succeeding too fast can be worth a lot.”

  “And you could help them in that endeavor?”

  “I could.”

  “So that’s a way of telling me you can almost name your price with any of them.”

  “Almost. Maybe.”

  “But a better life than your current employment?”

  “I have been with four projects at Los Alamos, one killed, one stillborn, one aborted, and one that refuses to die. I say, ‘OK, now what?’ They say, ‘Don’t worry. Now please go back to your office.’”

  “And you say?”

  “Nothing, usually. Tormenting the weak gives me no pleasure. I just sometimes wish they’d be more honest about it. I’m primarily an engineer, not a basic researcher or theoretician, although I do some of that, too. I just want to look at something real someday and be able to say, I did that, and it mattered. I can see myself becoming a very hard, bitter woman if this goes on too much longer. I don’t really care to end up like that.”

  “Hardness and bitterness are not the same things, Doctor Tolchin. Bitterness, like cruelty, is never a virtue. Hardness, almost always.”

  The gaze she fixed upon him was so piercingly intense that he found himself blinking. By the standards of his craft, of any initial approach, he had been too forthcoming. He’d revealed something of himself. But so had she. She had told him nothing specific about what she did, only assumed that he had some idea, and then had shown him her morality. For that, he had offered the essence of the morality that had sustained him through thirty-five years’ service to his country during the Cold War and its bewildering aftermath, to which he had so far adjusted.

  “I didn’t say that,” he murmured, almost to himself.

  “About the differences between hardness and bitterness and cruelty? I am afraid you did. But we will forget that you did.”

  “Why should we?”

  “I could say that we’re both getting a bit too open. But let me answer a question with a question. Does your wife know where you are and what you do for a living?”

  Getmanov smiled warmly. “Yes, of course she knows what I do. As for where I am, before I came, she made me promise not to dally with such American women as I might by chance encounter.”

  “This is not a chance encounter.”

  “No, but the promise still applies. I love my wife very much. I am also afraid of her. However,
I repeat myself, as she is a Russian woman, even if somewhat too taken with the American habit of, I believe you call it, shopping. But no matter. She deserves it. As a Russian woman, she is not always given the honor she deserves. Professional as well as personal.”

  “What does she do?”

  “Did. She abandoned a promising career as an aeronautical engineer to follow me into the diplomatic world some years ago. She was also a pilot, a believer that one must experience for oneself that which one creates.”

  “And she still reads Aviation Week.”

  “Cover to cover. What makes you ask that?”

  “The magazine is a legendary purveyor of sensitive, sometimes highly classified information. Does she send you memos about what she reads?”

  Getmanov made his decision. “Not to me personally. I wouldn’t understand them. However, her memos do find their way elsewhere.” He leaned forward and noted she did not move back. “One of the great advantages of being married to an engineer is that they speak plainly and expect the same. I know your work. You’d be surprised how many people do. Your reputation, as they say, precedes you. You’re known for coming in under budget, ahead of schedule, and exceeding the specs. For which you are not always liked. I know that you took Russian to fulfill a language requirement, way back in college, because it was a challenge, in a way French and German no longer were. I know you stayed with it through graduate school and beyond. I know you started reading our technical literature when you could barely master your own and now are very conversant in that aspect of my language. I know you were badly hurt in a small-plane accident. I know you were told you weren’t going to walk again and a year after finishing rehab, you’re not yet running again but you are hiking. I know you settled out of court for several hundred thousand dollars from the Santa Fe attorney who was your student pilot and who falsified his flight physical by neglecting to mention to you or your Federal Aviation Administration that he was epileptic. You’ve flown a few times since, just to prove you could, but no more. I also know that your lover of several years left you because of his unwillingness to tolerate the damage caused by the accident. He was a moral coward and you are well rid of him.”

  She offered him the bright, defensive smile you might offer a somewhat dim child who has said something unexpectedly and painfully astute. “So you read the profile on me in Defense Weekly. Good for you.”

  “Also the article from which it was plagiarized. The inspirational—pardon the cliché, they meant it as such, no doubt—piece in the Los Alamos National Lab’s Connections. The bit about your boyfriend, we surmised from that nasty notation about your being ‘newly available.’ Tolstoy, I believe, once wrote that every happy family is alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Los Alamos seems uniquely unhappy these days.”

  The only thing that bothered her, she thought with some detachment, was that he knew that she had stopped flying. That hadn’t been printed. But that no longer mattered. “Why do you say I’ve stopped flying?”

  “Because you have. Would you also like me to tell you what your present clearances are?”

  Olivia showed her teeth a little. It was time to return to reality. “I’m going to assume that if you know my clearances, you also know that I’m legally and morally obligated to report this conversation.”

  “I also know that, at your level, you’re entitled to exercise a certain discretion in taking this conversation where it may go. The better to report it later, of course.” He gestured contemptuously at the room. “I could probably find out at least as much about any man here.”

  “If you wanted to.”

  “If I needed to. But I don’t want to and don’t need to. Why bother? Look at the officers who clutter this ridiculous little party. Colonels looking for jobs, trading on their contacts. You know as well as I do, a colonel’s contacts are good for about five years. If that. These men get hired, used up, and thrown away because contacts are all they have to offer. Your brain is good for the rest of your lifetime. Most of these colonels know little. You know a great deal.”

  “I know that, if I chose to be melodramatic, continuing this conversation may change my life.” She paused, feeling what she had just said, start to sink in. Then: “What do you want…General?”

  Getmanov nodded slightly. “How did you surmise?”

  “You look like you should be wearing a uniform.”

  He nodded again. “Major General Getmanov. By present posting, which shall also be my last before retirement, cultural attaché and, if I may add, graduate of the old Soviet Institute of USA and Canadian Studies. What do I want? Something quite simple, really. The Cold War is over. We Russians are not going to fight you Americans. Perhaps we always knew that it would never come to that. I did. I sometimes think that we had an agreement. Only one side could go crazy at a time. You did in Vietnam. We did in Afghanistan. But our countries have never fought—not seriously—and it is to be hoped, we never do. However...” he paused, “however secure you may feel yourselves to be, now that we’ve deprived you of your most beloved enemy, we are not secure. We are far from secure. We are, indeed, in great and serious trouble. We need people to help us rebuild the military that we will never use against you or your friends. We are decades behind you in miniaturization and precision guidance, not to mention sensor capabilities. Items our military now desperately needs. That means, we need persons such as yourself. Desperately.”

  “And why?” Olivia asked in a low, deliberate voice, “should I wish to respond to your desperation?”

  “Because we have enemies in common. You’ll realize they’re enemies only on the day they force you to it. We haven’t any such luxury.”

  Getmanov took out a fountain pen, bulky yet elegant, wrote a number on his card, then pushed it towards her. “I say again. We’re no longer enemies. We’re not yet friends. I hope to God that someday we are. That’s my cell number. I live in Chevy Chase, but I’ve taken a room here for the night. My wife knows I won’t betray her. Call me if you want your work to matter.”

  Olivia said nothing. Getmanov nodded courteously to her, rose, and walked away.