Fourth Protocol

by Frederick Forsyth

  The sudden switch of topic genuinely dumbfounded the professor. “Yes,” he conceded. “I do. So what?”

  “Let me explain,” suggested Karpov.

  On the other side of Europe, John Preston and his son were driving out of the Windsor Safari Park at the close of a warm spring day. “I’ve just got one call to make before we go home,” said Preston. “It’s not far and it shouldn’t take long. Have you ever been to Aldermaston.”

  The boy’s eyes opened wide. “The bomb factory?” he asked.

  “It’s not quite a bomb factory, “ Preston corrected, “it’s a research establishment.”

  “Gosh, no. Are we going there? Will they let us in?”

  “Well, they’ll let me in. You’ll have to wait in the car. But it won’t take long.” He turned north to cut into the M4 motorway.

  “Your son returned nine weeks ago from a visit to Canada, where he acted as one of the interpreters for a trade delegation,” Karpov began quietly.

  Krilov nodded. “So?”

  “While he was there, my own KR people noted that an attractive young person was spending a good deal of time—too much time, it was judged—trying to get into conversation with the members of our delegation, notably the younger members—secretaries, interpreters, and so forth. The person concerned was photographed and finally identified as an entrapment agent—American, not Canadian, and almost certainly employed by the CIA. As a result, that young agent was put under surveillance and was observed to set up a rendezvous with your son, Leonid, in a hotel room. Not to put too fine a point on it, the pair had a brief but torrid affair.”

  Professor Krilov’s face was mottled with rage. He seemed to have trouble enunciating his words. “How dare you. How dare you have the impertinence to come here and seek to subject me, a member of the Academy of Sciences and the Supreme Soviet, to crude blackmail. The Party will hear of this. You know the rule: only the Party can discipline the Party. You may be a general of the KGB, but you have overstepped your authority by a hundred miles, General Karpov.”

  Yevgeni Karpov sat as if humbled, staring at the table, as the professor went on.

  “So, my son screwed a foreign girl while in Canada. That the girl turned out to be an American was certainly something of which he was completely unaware. He was indiscreet, perhaps, but no more. Was he recruited by this CIA girl?”

  “No,” admitted Karpov.

  “Did he betray any state secrets?”

  “No.”

  “Then you have nothing, Comrade General, but a brief youthful indiscretion. He’ll be rebuked. But the rebuke for your counterintelligence people will be the greater. They should have warned him. As to the bedroom business, we are not so unworldly in the Soviet Union as you seem to think. Strong young men have been screwing girls since time began. ...”

  Karpov had opened his attaché case and produced a large photograph, one of a sheaf that lay inside the case, and placed it on the table. Professor Krilov stared at it, and his words died. The flush went out of his cheeks, draining away until his elderly face appeared gray in the lamplight. He shook his head several times.

  “I am sorry,” said Karpov very gently, “truly sorry. The surveillance was on the American boy, not on your son. It was not intended that it should come to this.”

  “I don’t believe it,” croaked the professor.

  “I have sons of my own,” murmured Karpov. “I believe I can understand, or try to understand, how you feel.”

  The academic sucked in his breath, rose, muttered, “Excuse me,” and left the room. Karpov sighed and replaced the photograph in his case. From down the corridor he heard the blare of jazz as a door opened, the sudden ending of the music, and voices, two voices, raised in anger. One was the roar of the father, the other a higher-pitched voice, as of a young man. The altercation ended with the sound of a slap. Seconds later, Professor Krilov reentered the room. He seated himself, eyes dull, shoulders sloping. “What are you going to do?” he whispered.

  Karpov sighed. “My duty is very clear. As you said, only the Party may discipline the Party. I should by rights hand over the report and the photographs to the Central Committee. You know the law. You know what they do to ‘golden boys.’ It’s five years without remission, and ‘severe regime.’ I’m afraid that word gets around in the camps. After that, the young man becomes—how shall I put it?—anybody’s property. A lad from a sheltered background would be hard put to survive that sort of thing.”

  “But—” prompted the professor.

  “But I can decide that there is a chance the CIA will seek to pursue the matter. I have that right. I can decide the Americans could become impatient and send their agent into the Soviet Union to resume contact with Leonid. I have the right to decide that the entrapment of your son could possibly be turned into an operation to trap a CIA agent. While waiting, I would be able to keep the file in my safe, and the waiting could take a very long time. I have that authority; in operational matters, yes, I have that authority.”

  “And the price?”

  “I think you know that.”

  “What do you want to know about Plan Aurora?”

  “Just start from the beginning.”

  Preston swung into the main gate at Aldermaston, found a slot in the visitors’ parking area, and got out of the car.

  “Sorry, Tommy, no farther for you. Just wait for me here. I hope I won’t be long.”

  He crossed in the dusk to the swinging doors and presented himself to the two men at the desk. They examined his ID card and rang Dr. Wynne-Evans, who sanctioned the visit to his office. It was three floors up. Preston was shown in and gestured to a seat facing Wynne-Evans’s desk.

  The scientist regarded him over his glasses. “May I ask where you got this little exhibit?” he inquired, pointing to the heavy, leadlike disk of metal, which now sat in a sealed glass jar.

  “It was taken from someone in Glasgow during the small hours of Thursday morning. What about the other two disks?”

  “Oh, they’re just ordinary aluminum, boyo. Nothing strange about them. Just used to keep this one safe and sound. This is the one that interests me.”

  “Do you know what it is?” asked Preston.

  Dr. Wynne-Evans seemed startled by the naiveté of the question. “Of course I know what it is,” he said. “It’s my job to know. It’s a disk of pure polonium.”

  Preston frowned. He had never heard of such a metal.

  “Well, it all started in early January with a memorandum submitted by Philby to the General Secretary, in which Philby maintained there existed within the British Labour Party a Hard Left wing that had grown so strong it was in a position to take over complete control of the Party machine more or less when it wished. That corresponds to my own view.”

  “And mine,” murmured Karpov.

  “Philby went further. He claimed that within the Hard Left wing there was a group, an inner kernel, of dedicated Marxist-Leninists who had framed an intention to do just that—not in the period before Britain’s next general election, but afterward, in the very wake of a Labour electoral victory. In short, to await the victory at the polls of Mr. Neil Kinnock and then to topple him from the Party leadership. His replacement would be Britain’s first Marxist-Leninist premier, who would institute a series of policies wholly in line with Soviet foreign and defense interests, most notably in the area of unilateral nuclear disarmament and the expulsion of all American forces.”

  “Feasible,” remarked Karpov, nodding. “So a committee of four of you were called together to advise on how this electoral victory could best be achieved?”

  Krilov looked up, surprised. “Yes. There were Philby, General Marchenko, myself, and Dr. Rogov.”

  “The chess grand master?”

  “And physicist,” added Krilov. “What we came up with was Plan Aurora, which would have been an act of massive destabilization of the British electorate by pushing millions toward a mood of determined unilateralism.”

  “Yo
u say ... would have?”

  “Yes. The plan was principally Rogov’s idea. He supported it strongly. Marchenko went along, with reservations. Philby—well, no one could tell what Philby was really thinking. Just kept nodding and smiling, waiting to see which way the wind blew.”

  “That’s Philby,” agreed Karpov. “And then you presented it?”

  “Yes. On March twelfth. I opposed the plan. The General Secretary agreed with me. He denounced it roundly, ordered all notes and files destroyed, and made all four of us swear never to mention the matter again under any circumstances.”

  “Tell me, why did you oppose it?”

  “It seemed to me reckless and dangerous. Apart from anything, it was in complete contravention of the Fourth Protocol. If that protocol is ever breached, God knows where the world will end up.”

  “The Fourth Protocol?”

  “Yes. To the international Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. You remember that, of course.”

  “One has to remember so much,” said Karpov gently. “Please remind me.”

  “I’ve never heard of polonium,” said Preston.

  “No, well, you probably wouldn’t have,” said Wynne-Evans. “I mean, you don’t find it hanging about on your workbench. It’s very rare.”

  “And what are its uses, Doctor?”

  “Well, it is occasionally—only very occasionally, mind—used in curative medicine. Was your man in Glasgow on his way to a medical conference or exhibition?”

  “No,” said Preston firmly, “he was in no way heading for a medical conference.”

  “Well, that would have accounted for a ten-percent possibility of what it was intended for—before you relieved him of his burden. Since he wasn’t going to a medical conference, I’m afraid that leaves the ninety-percent likelihood. Apart from these two functions, polonium has no known use on this planet.”

  “And the other use?”

  “Well, a disk of polonium this size will do nothing on its own. But if it is placed in close juxtaposition with a disk of another metal called lithium, the two combine to form an initiator.”

  “A what?”

  “An initiator.”

  “And what the hell, pray, is that?”

  “On July first, 1968,” said Professor Krilov, “the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was signed by the three (then) nuclear powers of the world, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union.

  “By that treaty the three signatory nations pledged themselves not to impart the technology or the matériel capable of enabling the construction of a nuclear weapon to any nation not then in possession of such technology or matériel. Do you recall that?”

  “Yes,” said Karpov, “I remember that much.”

  “Well, the signing ceremonies in Washington, London, and Moscow were attended by huge and worldwide publicity. A complete absence of publicity surrounded the later signing of four secret protocols to that treaty.

  “Each of the protocols foresaw the development of a possible future hazard, which was not then technically possible but which, it was then estimated, might one day become technically possible.

  “Over the years, the first three protocols passed into history, either because the hazard was established to be quite impossible or because an antidote was discovered as fast as the threat became reality. But by the early 1980s the Fourth Protocol, the most secret of them all, had become a living nightmare.”

  “What, exactly, did the Fourth Protocol envisage?” asked Karpov.

  Krilov sighed. “We relied on Dr. Rogov for this information. As you know, he is a nuclear physicist; that is his branch of science. The Fourth Protocol foresaw technological advances in the manufacture of nuclear bombs, mainly in the areas of miniaturization and simplification. This, apparently, is what has happened. In one area, the weapons have become infinitely more powerful, but more complex to construct and larger in size. Another branch of the science has gone the other way. The basic atomic bomb, which required a huge bomber for its delivery to Japan in 1945, can now be made small enough to go in a suitcase and simple enough to be assembled from a dozen prefabricated, milled and threaded components, like a child’s construction kit.”

  “And that is what the Fourth Protocol banned?”

  Krilov shook his head. “It went further. It forbade any of the signatory nations to introduce onto the territory of any nation a device in assembled or unassembled form by covert means, for detonation in, say, a rented house or flat in the heart of a city.”

  “No four-minute warning,” mused Karpov, “no radar detection of an incoming missile, no counter strike, no identification of the perpetrator. Just a megaton explosion from a basement bedsitter.”

  The professor nodded. “That’s right. That’s why I called it a living nightmare. The open societies of the West are more vulnerable, but we are none of us immune from smuggled artifacts. If the Fourth Protocol is ever breached, all those ranks of rockets and electronic countermeasures, indeed most of the military-industrial complex, become irrelevant.”

  “And that was what Plan Aurora had in mind.”

  Krilov nodded again. He seemed to clam up.

  “But since,” pursued Karpov, “it was all stopped and prohibited, the whole plan has become what, in the service, we call ‘archival.’ ”

  Krilov seemed to grasp at the word. “That’s right. It’s just archival now.”

  “But tell me what it would have meant,” Karpov pressed.

  “Well, the plan was to infiltrate into Britain a top-class Soviet agent who would act as the executive officer of Aurora. To him, using a variety of couriers, would have been smuggled the ten or so component parts of a small atomic bomb of about one-and-a-half-kilotons power.”

  “So small? The Hiroshima bomb was ten kilotons.”

  “It was not intended to cause huge damage. That would have canceled the general election. It was intended to create a supposed nuclear accident and panic the ten-percent ‘floating vote’ into supporting unilateral nuclear disarmament and voting at the polls for the only party pledged to unilateralism, the Labour Party.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Karpov. “Please go on.”

  “The device would have been detonated six days before polling day,” said the professor. “The place was vitally important. The one selected was the United States Air Force base at Bentwaters in Suffolk. Apparently, F-5 strike planes are based there and they carry small tactical nuclear devices for use against our massed tank divisions in the event of our invading Western Europe.”

  Karpov nodded. He knew Bentwaters, and the information was correct.

  “The executive officer,” Professor Krilov went on, “would have been ordered to take the assembled device by car to the very perimeter wire of the base in the small hours of the morning. The whole base, it seems, is in the heart of Rendlesham Forest. He would have set off the explosion just before dawn.

  “Because of the smallness of the device, damage would have been limited to the airbase itself, which would have been vaporized, along with Rendlesham Forest, three hamlets, a village, the foreshore, and a bird sanctuary. Since the base is right next to the Suffolk coast, the cloud of radioactive dust thrown up would have drifted on the prevailing west wind out over the North Sea. By the time it had reached the coast of Holland, ninety-five percent of it would have become inert or fallen into the sea. The intent was not to cause an ecological catastrophe but to provoke fear and a violent wave of hatred of America.”

  “They might not have believed it,” said Karpov. “A lot of things could have gone wrong. The executive officer could have been caught alive.”

  Professor Krilov shook his head. “Rogov had thought of all that. He had worked it out like a chess game. The officer in question would have been told that after pressing the button he had two hours on the timer to drive as far as he could. In fact the timer would have been a sealed unit, set for instant detonation.”

  Poor Petrofsky, thought Karpov. “And the credibility angle?” he a
sked.

  “On the evening of the same day as the explosion,” said Krilov, “a man, who is apparently a covert Soviet agent, would have flown to Prague and held an international press conference. That man is Dr. Nahum Wisser, an Israeli nuclear physicist. It seems he works for us.”

  General Karpov preserved his deadpan expression. “You amaze me,” he said. He was acquainted with Dr. Wisser’s file. The scientist had had a son on whom he doted. The youth had been a soldier in the Israeli Army, stationed in Beirut in 1982. When the Phalangists had devastated the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, the young Lieutenant Wisser had tried to intervene. He had been cut down by a bullet. Carefully constructed evidence had been presented to the grieving father, already a committed opponent of the Likud Party, that it had been an Israeli bullet that had killed his son. In his bitterness and rage, Dr. Wisser had swung a little further left and agreed to work for Russia.

  “Anyway,” Krilov continued, “Dr. Wisser would have claimed to the world that he had collaborated for years with the Americans, while on exchange visits, in the development of ultra-small nuclear warheads. This, it seems, is true. He would have gone on to say that he had repeatedly warned the Americans that these ultra-small warheads were not stable enough to permit deployment. The Americans had been impatient to deploy these new warheads because their small size permitted space to take on board extra fuel and thus to increase the range of their F-5s.

  “It was calculated that these claims, made on the day following the explosion, the fifth before the polling date, would turn the wave of anti-Americanism in Britain into a gale that not even the Conservatives could hope to stem.”

  Karpov nodded. “Yes, I believe it would have done that. Anything more from the fertile brain of Dr. Rogov?”

  “Much more,” said Krilov glumly. “He suggested that the American reaction would have been histrionic and violent denial. Thus, on the fourth day before polling, the General Secretary would have announced to the world that if the Americans intended to enter a period of insanity, that was their business. But he, for his part, had no alternative in the protection of the Soviet people but to put all our forces on red alert.