“Life’s a bitch, Scott,” Winston advised.

SecState smiled. “Okay, duly noted. Let me see what Jack says. So, how’s the market doing?”

“Still pretty healthy. Price/earnings ratios are still a little outrageous, but profits are generally up, inflation is under control, and the investment community is nice and comfy. The Fed Chairman is keeping a nice, even strain on monetary policy. We’re going to get the changes we want in the tax code. So, things look pretty good. It’s always easier to steer the ship in calm seas, y’know?”

Adler grimaced. “Yeah, I’ll have to try that sometime.” But he had marching orders to lay on a typhoon. This would get interesting.

“So, how’s readiness?” General Diggs asked his assembled officers.

“Could be better,” the colonel commanding 1st Brigade admitted. “We’ve been short lately on funds for training. We have the hardware, and we have the soldiers, and we spend a lot of time in the simulators, but that’s not the same as going out in the dirt with our tracks.” There was general nodding on that point.

“It’s a problem for me, sir,” said Lieutenant Colonel Angelo Giusti, who commanded 1st Squadron, 4th Armored Cavalry Regiment. Known within the Army as the Quarter Horse for the lst/4th unit designator, it was the division reconnaissance screen, and its commander reported directly to the commanding general of First Tanks instead of through a brigade commander. “I can’t get my people out, and it’s hard to train for reconnaissance in the kazerne. The local farmers get kinda irate when we crunch through their fields, and so we have to pretend we can do recon from hard-surface roads. Well, sir, we can’t, and that bothers me some.”

There was no denying the fact that driving armored vehicles across a cornfield was tough on the corn, and while the U.S. Army trailed every tactical formation with a Hummer whose passengers came with a big checkbook to pay for the damage, the Germans were a tidy people, and Yankee dollars didn’t always compensate for the suddenly untidy fields. It had been easier when the Red Army had been right on the other side of the fence, threatening death and destruction on West Germany, but Germany was now one sovereign country, and the Russians were now on the far side of Poland, and a lot less threatening than they’d once been. There were a few places where large formations could exercise, but those were as fully booked as the prettiest debutante’s dance card at the cotillion, and so the Quarter Horse spent too much time in simulators, too.

“Okay,” Diggs said. “The good news is that we’re going to profit from the new federal budget. We have lots more funds to train with, and we can start using them in twelve days. Colonel Masterman, do you have some ways for us to spend it?”

“Well, General, I think I might come up with something. Can we pretend that it’s nineteen-eighty-three again?” At the height of the Cold War, Seventh Army had trained to as fine an edge as any army in history, a fact ultimately demonstrated in Iraq rather than in Germany, but with spectacular effect. Nineteen eighty-three had been the year the increased funding had first taken real effect, a fact noted fully by the KGB and GRU intelligence officers, who’d thought until that time that the Red Army might have had a chance to defeat NATO. By 1984, even the most optimistic Russian officers fell off that bandwagon for all time. If they could reestablish that training regimen, the assembled officers all knew they’d have a bunch of happy soldiers, because, though training is hard work, it is what the troops had signed up for. A soldier in the field is most often a happy soldier.

“Colonel Masterman, the answer to your question is, Yes. Back to my original question. How’s readiness?”

“We’re at about eighty-five percent,” 2nd Brigade estimated. “Probably ninety or so for the artillery-”

“Thank you, Colonel, and I agree,” the colonel commanding divisional artillery interjected.

“But we all know how easy life is for the cannoncockers,” 2nd Brigade added as a barb.

“Aviation?” Diggs asked next.

“Sir, my people are within three weeks of being at a hundred percent. Fortunately, we don’t squash anybody’s corn when we’re up practicing. My only complaint is that it’s too easy for my people to track tanks on the ground if they’re road-bound, and a little more realistic practice wouldn’t hurt, but, sir, I’ll put my aviators up against anyone in this man’s army, especially my Apache drivers.” The “snake” drivers enjoyed a diet of raw meat and human babies. The problems they’d had in Yugoslavia a few years earlier had alarmed a lot of people, and the aviation community had cleaned up its act with alacrity.

“Okay, so you’re all in pretty good shape, but you won’t mind sharpening the edge up a little, eh?” Diggs asked, and got the nods he expected. He’d read up on all his senior officers on the flight across the pond. There was little in the way of dead wood here. The Army had less trouble than the other services in holding on to good people. The airlines didn’t try to hire tank commanders away from 1st Armored, though they were always trying to steal fighter and other pilots from the Air Force, and while police forces loved to hire experienced infantrymen, his division had only about fifteen hundred of them, which was the one structural weakness in an armored division: not enough people with rifles and bayonets. An American tank division was superbly organized to take ground-to immolate everyone who happened to be on real estate they wanted-but not so well equipped to hold the ground they overran. The United States Army had never been an army of conquest. Indeed, its ethos has always been liberation, and part and parcel of that was the expectation that the people who lived there would be of assistance, or at least show gratitude for their deliverance, rather than hostility. It was so much a part of the American military’s history that its senior members rarely, if ever, thought about other possibilities. Vietnam was too far in the past now. Even Diggs had been too young for that conflict, and though he’d been told how lucky he was to have missed it, it was something he almost never thought about. Vietnam had not been his war, and he didn’t really want to know about light infantry in the jungle. He was a cavalryman, and his idea of combat was tanks and Bradleys on open ground.

“Okay, gentlemen. I’ll want to meet with all of you individually in the next few days. Then I need to come out and see your outfits. You will find that I’m a fairly easy guy to work for”-by which he meant that he wasn’t a screamer, as some general officers were; he demanded excellence as much as anyone else, but he didn’t think ripping a man’s head off in public was a good way to achieve it-”and I know you’re all pretty good. In six months or less, I want this division ready to deal with anything that might come down the road. I mean anything at all.”

Who might that be, Colonel Masterman mused to himself, the Germans? It might be a little harder to motivate the troops, given the total absence of a credible threat, but the sheer joy of soldiering was not all that much different from the kick associated with football. For the right guy, it was just plain fun to play in the mud with the big toys, and after a while, they started wondering what the real thing might be like. There was a leavening of troops in First Tanks from the 10th and 11th Cavalry Regiments who’d fought the previous year in Saudi Arabia, and like all soldiers, they told their stories. But few of the stories were unhappy ones. Mainly they expounded on how much like training it had been, and referred to their then-enemies as “poor, dumb raghead sunsabitches” who’d been, in the final analysis, unworthy of their steel. But that just made them swagger a little more. A winning war leaves only good memories for the most part, especially a short winning war. Drinks would be hoisted, and the names of the lost would be invoked with sadness and respect, but the overall experience had not been a bad one for the soldiers involved.