On Broken Wings (42 page)

He shook his head again. "No. I knew what your fighting skills would be. I wanted to see how much self-control you had. I can't believe Louis didn't at least try to prepare you for that."

He did.

Loughlin sat back. "We've talked about objectives already. How does an objective differ from a motive?"

"What?"

"Think, Christine. Did Louis ever give you any crime fiction to read? Detective stories? Murder mysteries?"

"Well, yes. He wasn't too big on it, but there was some."

"And what was the mantra the detectives were always chanting? What was their investigation intended to discover?"

She thought a moment. "Motive, means, and opportunity."

He nodded. "We can pass on means and opportunity for now. That's tactics. Motive is the 'why' of a criminal act. Where does it reside? Inside the criminal, among his desires, fears and
emotions
, or outside, in the
objective
world that he shares with the rest of us?"

The words acted like seed crystals upon her swirling thoughts. She watched the growth of a logical structure of emotion, decision, planning and tactical execution in her mind's eye as if it were a skyscraper being built at fantastic speed.

"Louis learned this from you, didn't he?" Her heart accelerated. "To use just the right words to unlock someone else's thoughts, and then let him go the rest of the way himself?"

Loughlin nodded. "Was he good at it?"

She fought down a rush of grief. "You'd have been proud of him."

Loughlin rose from his seat without warning, walked to the far end of the trailer, and regarded the forest beyond.

"I was, Christine. Never doubt it."

He returned to the table and reseated himself.

"We begin."

***

She learned.

At first it was frustrating, even maddening. What Loughlin was trying to teach her was to set aside her own desires and climb inside the mind of her adversary. It did not come as naturally as her fighting skills had.

"Of all the musts and must-nots of warfare, this one is paramount:
you must conceal your motives
. Unless he is insignificant in comparison to you, once your opponent knows your motives, he'll be able to defeat you. He'll probably even have a choice of ways to do it.

"You must move heaven and earth, if necessary, to discover your opponent's motives. His tactics will be determined by them. If his motives change, his tactics will follow. There lies your opportunity, if you can get him to adopt tactics unsuitable to the conflict. Of course, he could try to do the same to you."

"What's the countermeasure?"

"Constancy. Refusal to let yourself be diverted. Of course, that can be a trap, too. Motive is partly determined by objectives. If your adversary's situation changes but his objectives remain the same, he could find himself committed to paying an exorbitant price for something that's become worthless."

"And that's the time to stop playing with his head?"

His grin was ice-cold. "You have a gift."

He drew her into strategic studies up a gradually steepening road. There were tools of thought and communication she had to master before they could do anything but talk in generalities: map reading, map drawing, logistics, time projections, threat and ally assessment, horizon analysis, minimax and mainchance planning, and many more. They challenged her intelligence and organizational skills in unexpected ways.

"Be careful not to fool yourself with your own tools. A map is a useful thing, but it hides details that can change the whole complexion of a campaign. Look here." Malcolm pointed to green-shaded bands labeled
Alsace
and
Lorraine
. "It doesn't look any different from the areas around it, does it?"

"From which I infer that it was different."

"Very different. Heavy forestation, few major roads, and uphill going east. An attacker's logistical nightmare, especially from the western side. Probably the best defender's territory anywhere in Europe. The French thought they could penetrate the German defenses here before the Germans swept down on Paris. The path from Paris to Berlin through Alsace and Lorraine is visibly shorter than the path from Berlin to Paris through Belgium. They were very, very wrong."

"How long did it take them to figure out that they'd been had?"

He grinned without humor. "One month. By which time they had lost the northern quarter of their territory and were committed to a four-year war that cost them two million men."

"Didn't anyone know about this beforehand?"

He nodded. "Yes. Schlieffen and the Germans. They knew that the French emphasis would be on reclaiming the provinces they'd lost in 1870. It was a motive burned deeply into the French General Staff, and it worked entirely in the Germans' favor." He snorted. "Of course, the Germans eventually forgot what they were doing, too."

Not all of the problems he posed were from history. Some were so obviously composed exercises that it took everything she had not to laugh out loud at their artificiality. Yet he took them seriously, and insisted that she do so as well.

"Now, the Bruxists have heavy defenses here and here, made up of mobile glomenators, along the major roads leading to the thing works, but only light anti-zark shields to defend their coastlines. You could try to punch through those defenses overland, or you could put your fresnoid projectors on sea platforms, try the Brux-Wazznia channel and come in from their northern coast." He indicated the two lines of approach on the map with light sweeps of pencil. "Which is it to be?"

She studied the map. "The channel seems like a higher percentage choice."

He threw his pencil down. "Have you learned so little? You're ready to send your best weapons down a narrow channel guarded by alerted Wazznian dragoons that have as much to lose as the Bruxists if you should punch through? And remember, those glomenators are
mobile
. The Wazznians only have to hold you up long enough for them to get here!"

"Well?" She blushed.

"Well what? Why are the Bruxists guarding the thing factory so carefully? Why is it your objective?"

She glanced at her planning tables. "The things are an essential component of blivet manufacture, and without blivets, their whole war effort will fall apart."

He hunched over and peered at her as if she'd stopped in mid-sentence. "And mightn't there be another essential component of the blivets? Something that might be easier to take out of play, such as gizmos? Have you even
asked
where the gizmos are made?" He sat back in his chair and grinned. "Always look for alternatives, Christine. When you let your adversary define your choices, you're accepting defeat on the installment plan."

At first, they met only on Sunday afternoons. She spent a good fraction of her personal time during the week mulling over the problems he'd posed the previous Sunday, hoping to have solutions ready for their next meeting. As fall shaded into winter, her progress at strategic analysis accelerated, and he began to push her harder and faster. By mid-November she was reporting to him on Tuesday and Thursday evenings as well. In December she began to bring Boomer with her, so that the Newfoundland wouldn't have to spend so many evenings alone. Fortunately, Loughlin and Boomer took to one another.

The work absorbed her. Between Onteora Aviation and Loughlin's impromptu school for young generals, time was lacking for everything else. Her contacts with Helen dwindled under the pressure of this new and compelling involvement. Sometimes a whole week would go by without a phone call passing between them. She resolved to address it, but it slipped her mind again and again.

Loughlin remained distant. Louis had been right: his was not a personality that was easy to love. His knowledge of warfare was limitless, and his pride in it was well deserved, but the flinty reserve that went along with it was hard to penetrate. She often had the feeling that anything she learned about him was against his will.

She grew to love the games, the complexity of them, the exhilaration of matching her mental powers and growing understanding against problems spread out in space and time and involving a thousand different logistical and tactical factors. It took her a while to realize that, as much as he knew about it, he didn't love it, not in the slightest.

"Next problem. No maps or planning tables this time. You're the commander of an attacking expeditionary force. Suppose the defenders here have a positional advantage, which allows them to repel any attack at ruinous cost to the attacker. However, it only works in defense, so they mount no counterattacks. Moreover, they don't appear to be interested in counterattack, and you have nothing to tempt them with. What do you do?"

She pondered. "Well, I don't attack here, that's for sure."

He snorted. "You think it's always that simple? Maybe there are no tactical alternatives. Imagine that the General Staff disagrees with you about the impossibility of a successful assault, only you
know
that you're right and just can't demonstrate it without slaughtering a quarter million of your own men. Imagine that you have political pressure building up on your shoulders." Anger crackled through the words. "The people at home are demanding a quick end to the war and the return of their sons. The Emperor has already speculated openly about whether it might be time to replace you. Your troops trust you and will do whatever you say. It's worse: your troops can't imagine what's holding you up. They want to charge across the desert and annihilate those Godless devils, and they're perfectly sure they can do it."

She grimaced. "You're talking about a no-win scenario. I've been charged with delivering a tactical success from a situation that doesn't allow one, and nobody knows it but me."

"Exactly."

"Well, what
should
I do?"

He raised his fists over his head as if to smash them against the table, and held them there. After a moment he seemed to recover himself, and brought his hands down before him, staring at them as if he wished they belonged to someone else.

"I don't know." His voice was bleak. He turned his hands over and stared at his palms, then joined them in a trembling grip. "I didn't know then, and I don't know now."

"What?"

"Never mind."

====

Chapter
38

Terry Arkham turned into the entrance to Christine's cubicle in his usual head-down, charging fashion and came to a shuddering stop, his carefully composed opening line forgotten. The world's largest, blackest, shaggiest dog lay right next to her desk chair. On his arrival it stood and interposed itself between him and Christine, eyeing him without welcome and emitting a faint growl.

Arkham stood still. Sweat broke out all over his body at once. He'd never gotten along well with dogs, and feared even the smallest ones. This animal could have been mistaken for a small bear. Christine hadn't noticed that she had a visitor.

"Chris?"

She gave a start, then swiveled to face him. "Yes, Terry?"

"Is he...friendly?"

She grinned down at the dog. "Oh, yeah. Gentlest creature in the world. Sit, Boomer!" The dog sat at once, but its eyes remained fixed on Arkham. "What can I do for you?"

You can take that monster out of here and put it in the San Diego Zoo.
"Well, I had a little news today, and I thought it might interest you."

She faced him with an expression of polite interest. He moved toward her guest chair, then stopped. "Will Boomer get upset if I sit down?"

She chuckled. "No, he's a good dog, I promise you. I just don't like for him to be alone all day, and Rolf said it would be okay to keep him here, as long as he stays in my cubicle."

He settled into her guest chair, his nerves still jitterbugging. "Rolf's a nice guy."

"Sure is. What was your news?"

He forced a smile. "Well, the Navy approved the report on my feasibility study yesterday, and Roger authorized me to add three people to my team for the full-scale development work. Since you were so, ah, helpful about that problem I had a few weeks ago, I thought I'd tell you first, see if you might be interested in getting in deeper."

She nodded. "Thank you. What's involved?"

He slid forward to the edge of the chair. "A lot of the same stuff you've already seen. Some of it might even mate up with the work you've been doing for Svenson, except that it would be in a tactical environment instead of a simulation."

He started to tell her about the enormous importance of the project in the airborne intelligence world, how extensive the funding was likely to be, how many years the development project could stretch into the future, the prestige its participants would acquire within the company. He'd gotten about fifteen seconds into his spiel when she interrupted him.