Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

If he were a spy, he thought, this was just how he would move through the city. Instead, he was the opposite of a spy. He was going to a meeting with his counterpart in the Ukrainian military, which was precisely what he was supposed to be doing, only they had to meet like spies because otherwise they were sure to be overheard by the Russians, who could be assumed to have listening and watching systems or paid informants in every government office in the city.

They would have met at the post office at Independence Square, or at the Khreschatyk Metro station, but everyone met there and the crowds were too big to make it possible to spot observers.

So instead Cole walked along Volodymyrska Street, took a winding, pointless route along Zolotovoritska, Reytarska, and Strilestska, only to cut back down Yaroslaviv Val to the Golden Gate, right by the Metro station that had brought him here. As far as he could tell, no one was following him. Of course, they wouldn't need to if they had followed Colonel Bohdanovich.

Bohdanovich was a good man, one of the best thinkers and strategists in the Ukrainian army, but he was far too young to have had any combat experience. He'd done observer duty here and there, so he had seen combat, but he hadn't actually fought. To Cole, that meant Bohdanovich didn't have the edginess that made a man truly watchful. Not until you'd had people shooting at you and lived through it did you acquire the habit of looking around you as if your life depended on it.

Then again, Bohdanovich knew the city and, unlike Cole, he could usually tell Russian operatives from Ukrainian civilians. Again, a matter of experience. Cole's training and experience had been in Middle Eastern theaters of war, unless you counted some serious combat in the District of Columbia and field operations in the mountains of Washington State during the brief Progressive Rebellion three years before. None of that prepared him to know anything about how Russian spies handled themselves in a country that they believed ought still to be part of the Russian Empire.

A sad empire it was these days. He had walked the streets of Moscow only the week before, and was constantly struck by the glumness of it all. Grim-faced shopkeepers gave perfunctory service to despairing customers, or so it seemed. Pedestrians all seemed to dread whatever destination they were heading for.

In Kiev, by contrast, there was a sense of eagerness. Though Russia itself began here, and Ukraine had been the breadbasket of the Russian Empire long before the Communists took over, this was a new country and it felt like it.

Was there such a thing as a national character? Cole believed there was, and Cessy Malich encouraged him. "When people band together in communities," she said, "they can't help but influence each other. In a happy community, individual sadnesses are soothed by the surrounding elan; in a sad one, individual triumph or relief is quickly dragged down to match the surrounding despair."

Nowhere was this clearer than here on the streets of Kiev. The city's buildings were generally as shoddy-built and decayed and polluted and ugly as in the rest of the former Communist countries, and it's not as if there were any great wealth to create architectural showplaces. But the people were bright-spirited. Flowers bloomed wherever they could be planted. Bright signs and displays demanded attention to shop windows. People nodded to one another, greeted one another, smiled.

It was contagious. Cole found himself smiling back at them. Initiating smiles of his own.

He spotted Bohdanovich standing on the corner of Lysenka and Prorizna, and to Cole's disgust the man was in uniform. Why not wear a nice flag while he was at it?

Cole walked up to him and started to greet him in Russian—there was no way Cole could learn all the distinctions between the Ukrainian and Russian languages just for this brief assignment—but Bohdanovich smiled in a vague way and cocked his head and then interrupted Cole.

"Ah, yes, the coffee shop on the corner of Franka and Yaroslav. Notice that I'm pointing the wrong way, so please start out in the direction I'm pointing and then take your time about meeting me there." Then Bohdanovich smi

led again and turned away.

Okay, so the guy wasn't an idiot after all. He was just a friendly officer that a stupid American tourist asked for directions. Only if there happened to be a Russian observer who recognized Cole and knew that he and Bohdanovich already knew each other would there be a problem, and if the Russians were already that on top of things, they might as well just invite them to the meeting.

In the coffee shop, Bohdanovich had already ordered borscht and coffee, and he waved Cole over to his table. They sat cornerwise against the wall, so they both had a view of the big window facing the street and so nobody could come up behind them.

"You're paying," said Bohdanovich in English.

"Happy to," said Cole.

"But you notice I still ordered cheap."

"The American taxpayer thanks you."

Then they got down to business, speaking softly in English.

Bohdanovich spilled salt across a small area of the table and drew a rough map of Ukraine on it, and they shared whatever information they had about Russian army bases and how quickly they could mobilize and get into Ukraine and after about twenty minutes of this they were both chuckling ruefully.

"So you're saying," said Bohdanovich, "that the best place for us to defend Ukraine from a Russian invasion is in Slovakia."

"Unless you want to try to blow all the bridges on the Dnieper, and how long would that hold them up? A day?"

Bohdanovich sighed. "At last I understand the hopeless bravery of the Polish army, defending against the Germans when there was no barrier to stop the blitzkrieg."

"All you have to do is hold on to the west, in the more mountainous country. Keep the army intact. Let the Russians occupy everything without resistance, bombing nothing, leaving the whole infrastructure intact. Then use small special ops groups you left behind to make their supply lines impossible while you counterattack in a place of your choosing."

"So many tanks."

"Tanks need gas. Make sure they can't find any between the Dnieper and the Russian border. Blow up every tanker truck that tries to make it through. Learn the lessons of Iraq."

"Ukrainians are not suicide bombers," said Bohdanovich.

"Of course not—it won't be terrorism, it'll be sabotage, and the Russians will never know where you're going to hit them."