The Tashkent Crisis

by William Craig

  General Stephen Austin Roarke was edgy. Still smarting from the rebuff handed him the previous evening by President Stark, Roarke had gone back to his quarters at Fort Myer, Virginia, and drunk three stiff bourbons. The tall, rawboned Texan, a widower, had paced the living room for some time until he finally fell into bed as dawn broke. Steve Roarke was a stubborn man, and as he rode to the White House a few hours later, he determined that he would continue to press his case with the Commander-in-Chief. It was his duty.

  CIA Director Sam Riordan had come to the conference loaded down with information. Still feeling that he had let Stark down, Riordan had gone right back to his office in the early morning and napped for two hours on a couch. At 5:30 A.M., Riordan had assembled his experts and compiled a mass of data for the President. Along with it, he brought Charlie Tarrant, his deputy, to the conference.

  Stark had weeded out unnecessary personnel for the morning briefing. Only Manson was there from the cabinet. Vice-President Richard Terhune, on a ten-day trip to Asia, had not been ordered back, to avoid arousing the suspicions of the press. Terhune was not even told of the peril.

  Professor Gerald Weinroth sat at the huge table nursing his ulcer. Weinroth’s cramps were no longer spasmodic; they now cut across his stomach like a knife. His face contorted, the owlish academician struggled to be attentive as Stark asked Riordan for further information.

  The CIA man went to an easel set up in a corner. Tarrant followed.

  “Here is the source of our trouble.” Riordan motioned to Tarrant, who placed a huge blowup of a building complex on the easel. “This is the latest Samos photograph of the Soviet research center north of Tashkent. It was taken at an altitude of eighty-seven miles on the morning of August twenty-sixth. As you can see, fourteen cars and trucks are parked near the main building, but otherwise there is no outward sign of life.” Stark and the others looked intently at the place that threatened their lives. “We’ve watched it grow from the foundation up over the past four years. Traffic in and out has been very sparse. At no time has there been any radio communications until …” and Riordan paused, “until yesterday when a single word was beamed out of there to Moscow, ‘Borodino,’ which we can only assume was a code for Victory. It was logged approximately two hours after the strike on the Israelis.”

  Riordan pointed to another photo, and Tarrant put it over the first. “Another research center near Sverdlovsk. Same general characteristics as Tashkent, same modus operandi over the past years, no radio messages at all. Also no heat emissions from this general vicinity.”

  A third photo went up. “Lastly, a relatively new location, as yet undetermined facility. This one is twenty-six miles east of Moscow and has been operating only a year. Smirnov himself was seen going in and out of there by one of our men—Rudenko, I believe. Rudenko went with Smirnov to inspect the latest Soviet contribution to world stability. But Rudenko never gave us anything out of this trip as far as hard intelligence is concerned. Now he’s been exposed, and we have no idea what he knew about the Soviet laser program.”

  Sam Riordan continued: “So far the only emissions are from Tashkent. That doesn’t mean they don’t have the other sites in readiness. Still, the whole thing is insane because they can’t have gotten that far ahead of us.”

  Stark interrupted his monologue: “Sam, it might be insane, but they nevertheless have at least one gun that works only too well. Murphy has reported in again from Tel Aviv. The atomic center there is still burning.”

  The President was irritable; he kept trying to blink the cobwebs away from his eyes. Nevertheless he was instantly sorry for being sharp with Riordan, knowing how Sam felt about the situation. Stark changed the tenor of the conversation.

  “Philip Bordine was with Erskine at Geneva, and he knew the Russian Darubin from years before at the embassy in Moscow. Bordine says Darubin was the one who talked Khrushchev into taking the chance with the missiles in Cuba. Do you remember him, Sam?”

  Riordan said, “Of course. He fell when Khrushchev did. We last heard of him working in Siberia as head of an electric power plant. If Krylov has him back in good graces, it would explain a lot. Darubin was the mastermind behind the attempt to achieve parity with us on missiles by installing them under our noses. He sold Khrushchev the deal and very nearly pulled it off. He would appeal to Krylov because he thinks the same, staking everything on one roll of the dice.”

  Riordan was silent for a moment, as though weighing the emergence of a new approach. “It’s entirely possible that the two of them cooked up this idea of facing us down with just one laser instead of waiting until they had twenty or thirty.” Riordan slammed his hand against the table. “Of course, it adds up. They tested the weapon twice and then Krylov and Darubin moved in on Smirnov. They undoubtedly got the army to back them up by convincing them that they had a golden opportunity to tip the scales once and for all. Like us in 1945, when we went after the Japanese without first stockpiling a number of bombs. One test in New Mexico and the next one in Japan. Darubin’s thought processes would work the same way today as they did in 1962. He’d still go for broke, especially after being stymied the first time.”

  Sam Riordan seemed pleased with his analysis and looked to the others for confirmation. Stark nodded: “That may be the key, Sam. He’s bluffing us down but with a helluva hole card, an ace!” Stark shook his head in bewilderment.

  Gerald Weinroth broke in: “Which complex do you think is the production facility for the weapons?”

  Riordan said, “The one near Moscow must be the one. Bigger buildings, nearer to railway lines, larger workers’ settlements. But it’s only a year old, and we haven’t seen anything come out of it yet.”

  Weinroth looked satisfied as he added: “From our knowledge, production on a finished weapon has to be six months minimum. Thus, the test firings could only lead to operational equipment by January at the earliest. They must have just one or perhaps two lasers at Tashkent and Sverdlovsk.”

  Weinroth forgot his ulcer for the moment. “Unfortunately it doesn’t matter. One or two lasers can still destroy us.” His voice was mournful. “They can reach Washington in less than thirty seconds and then swivel around to hit something else in minutes. In one hour, that damned machine could wipe out half our cities.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” General Roarke exploded. “Mr. President, I’ve been sitting here listening to talk about what the other side can do to us but no one asks what we can do to them. In the same amount of time we can put that country out of business. Moscow would go up within eight minutes. The Polaris is already waiting to hit more than five hundred silos and cities. We act as though we’re helpless, hapless, and castrated.”

  William Stark stared at Martin Manson’s mane of white hair. He was trying to control himself enough not to offend the speaker. Stark said icily: “Professor Weinroth, would you please give some statistics to this body on the results of a thermonuclear exchange.”

  Weinroth was only too happy to comply. He plunged into the results of such a nightmare. “In the first twenty minutes, one hundred and seven million Russians would be incinerated. Roughly, the same number of Americans would succumb, give or take ten million. I am leaving out those who would die of radiation fallout around the world in the next four weeks. That figure would approximate three hundred million. The net result of this exchange would be the deaths of more than five hundred million human beings, give or take, as I say, thirty millions.”

  Gerald Weinroth was enjoying Roarke’s discomfort. “All of this excludes the possibility of bombs falling on Europe and Asia by mistake or plan of either of the main protagonists. In that case, the death rate would exceed one billion.”

  Weinroth sat down.

  Roarke was not dismissed so lightly. The general lunged to his feet and snarled, “Professor, your figures are both impressive and correct. But you are ignoring one fact. We believe that it’s possible to deal the enemy the first blow and cripple his retaliatory strength within the first fift
een minutes. We’ve always planned for such a situation and are absolutely convinced that the Russians could only get off twenty-five percent of their missiles. Since some of those will be defective anyway, we’re really discussing the detonation of perhaps one hundred and fifty incoming warheads. And of those coming in, our Vanguard anti-missiles will knock out seventy-five to a hundred. So actual impact will occur in only fifty or so areas with a death rate in the range of twenty million, tops.” Roarke paused to look at the President, who was gazing at a new crack in the ceiling.

  “Now, Weinroth, those casualties are acceptable in order to eliminate the menace we have before us. And it sure beats the hell out of giving up this great country to those bastards.”

  Steve Roarke could not think of anything to add to his argument. He was perspiring from the emotions he had unlocked within himself. The general took out a handkerchief from his trousers and wiped his forehead and neck. No one said a word. Weinroth looked disgusted. Manson was stunned, unable to take in the magnitude of twenty million bodies piled one on top of another. Robert Randall thought: You dumb son of a bitch … I’ll bet you play home movies of the blast at Nagasaki for your friends.

  Steve Roarke thought of something else: “To guarantee success, we have to lull the Russians to sleep on this one. Let’s let them think we’re going to quit so that they’ll take their hand off the trigger. Then at the last minute, we can let the missiles go and get the few minutes lead time we need to hit the missiles in the silos. We always know where their subs are and we can use large-megaton warheads on them to cover the sea sector they’re in.”

  President Stark had had enough. “General Roarke, it’s your kind of thinking that has caused too many Americans to belittle the military over the past ten years. Goddamnit, when will your people get over the idea that you can solve the world’s problems by blowing it up every now and then? Vietnam proved that a military solution is not necessarily the answer. The Pentagon is still trying to recover from that fiasco. You cheerfully enunciate that only twenty million Americans will die in a nuclear war and that’s acceptable to you!”

  Roarke was furious. His eyes were slits burning into the Chief Executive’s.

  Stark pointed his finger at him, “Well, it’s not acceptable to me.”

  Stark was remembering his own past. “I was once a company commander in Korea. Headquarters ordered my regiment to go up Heartbreak Hill one more time. Everyone in the unit knew it was a crazy thing to do because the Chinese had not been bombed out of their holes and had gotten reinforcements while we bled on the slopes. But we went anyway, and it was the worst day of my life. I personally counted the casualties for over an hour. I saw my friends lying there without heads and with their stomachs scooped out. I counted a hundred and six bodies of men I had sent on a fool’s errand. Next day Headquarters sent in planes to soften the enemy up, and we took the hill in a matter of minutes. So when we talk about body counts I cannot be impervious to the sight of blood and the smell of putrefaction. I must have another answer to the problem we have here today.”

  An uneasy silence followed. Roarke’s stubborn chin mirrored tenacious belief in his plan. But the general was now content to let others pursue the solution. His seeds had been planted.

  Martin Manson tried to breach the gap. The Secretary of State felt that all possibilities in the Roarke proposal had not been fully aired. “Short of an all-out nuclear war, we do have another option, I believe. The laser is the difference between us. That threat is the only thing that alters the balance of power. If we can find some means to surgically excise that, it would neutralize Krylov’s ultimatum and make them back away for good.” Manson peered over his horn-rimmed glasses at General Roarke and asked: “In that case, General, what can you suggest to us?”

  Roarke answered quickly, “We could send in an SR-71 reconnaissance plane fitted with a couple of megaton bombs, and, even with a near miss, that place near Tashkent will be leveled. The SR-71 flies over two thousand miles an hour at one hundred thousand feet and could be in and out of Russia before they knew it. As far as we know, they have nothing that can even come close in it.”

  Stark continued: “But such a maneuver would probably lead to instant retaliation by the other side. When they record an overt trespass into their heartland, we have to figure they’ll think the United States has decided to fight. And God knows, when one or two hydrogen warheads detonate on their country, it would take a very cool head in Moscow to keep the beasts at bay.”

  Roarke flushed badly at this remark, and Stark hastened to cover the affront.

  “You couldn’t blame them for acting that way. By putting two and two together, they would have to believe the facts; an intruder plane had violated their airspace and within minutes dropped bombs on their country. The aggression would be too flagrant to confuse them, and their reactions would be, I would think, about what I would do if a Russian plane came down over Canada, was picked up on radar, and shortly thereafter blew up Chicago. I would mark it as a declaration of war.”

  The President smiled wanly at Roarke and added: “It certainly would solve the problem of the laser, General, but we’d be right back to the discussion of a body count in the hundreds of millions.”

  Robert Randall finally joined the dialogue. His incisive mind had picked something out of the confusion of ideas being sifted around the table.

  “Mr. President, I think we have found the germ of a strategy. Roarke’s theory is fraught with danger only because it is blatant. What we need to do is take out the laser by a subtle approach, a clandestine operation. Sam here could tell us if that’s feasible.”

  Riordan said: “You mean a ground operation?” When Randall nodded enthusiastically, Riordan said, “But how the hell can we get them in there? I don’t have anyone inside Russia capable of doing it, and if I did, I couldn’t get to them in time. Nor could I supply them with anything to make it work.”

  Randall was excited. The boyish-looking advisor exclaimed, “We have the men right here in America down at Fort Bragg. The Green Berets have been practicing this kind of thing for years. It’s their meat.”

  For the first time that morning, William Stark felt a surge of hope. Randall’s idea, though sketchy, offered some positive conditions lacking in Roarke’s strategy. He urged Randall on.

  “A small group of men might be able to penetrate the Soviet border and make its way to the area of Tashkent,” Randall improvised, “There it would have to work out the best possible manner of destroying the laser. I can’t pretend to know the best way now, but if they succeed, we have eliminated the danger, and the Russians will be hard pressed to start a war since none of our planes and missiles will be coming at them. In fact, we can order all our strategic weapons to stand down from alert.”

  Stark weighed the plusses and minuses. Roarke’s mouth was drawn into a grimace of distaste. Weinroth’s ulcer refused to quiet though its victim, like Stark, tried to analyze the chances of a coup by infiltrators. Sam Riordan was highly skeptical because he knew more than the others the odds against such a mission. Charlie Tarrant, at his right, fingered his Dacron summer suit and thought of the long list of men the CIA had sent into the Soviet Union who had never even performed one task before being discovered and killed.

  Martin Manson had no opinion either way. He was only interested in exploring the issue to the fullest. “Mr. President, we ought to weigh the balance sheet on this one. As Bob has said, this strike would avoid directly confronting the Soviets and spare us the horror of precipitating a war, and I think if it was effective it would spare any Russian leader the decision to launch an attack on this country. It would pretty well immobilize them unless, and here we can’t be sure, they’ve gone crazy. However, what are the real percentages in favor of this mission succeeding?”

  Sam Riordan had an answer. The director stood up and solemnly shook his head: “Gentlemen, I cannot imagine leaving the destiny of this nation to a band of men sent on a suicidal venture. Randall is not wro
ng to suggest it, for God knows, we have very little going for us. But they would be doomed from the start. The nearest point of penetration would be on the southern rim of Russia, and they would have to evade detection for hundreds of miles, then get access to what must be the most closely guarded region in the country. And they have to get there and accomplish the task within—what is it now?—about sixty-two hours. I can’t recommend it. To risk all on it would be madness on our part.”

  President Stark had lost his initial enthusiasm. The enormous difficulties in the plan were sobering.

  General Steve Roarke interrupted the President’s gloominess. “In Vietnam, our LURP teams went into North Vietnam regularly. Their mission was long-range reconnaissance of Charlie’s intentions. These teams went in by chopper and raised hell along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. They were very successful on the whole, but that was because they worked in their surroundings so well. The jungle became their ally, and, of course, they were able to use native forces who looked like the enemy and knew the countryside like the back of their hands. In this case, we would have men going in with no natural cover and unable to blend into the local population. Unless you fellows,” pointing to Riordan, “have a bunch of Russians holed up somewhere in Tashkent who love us more than Lenin.” Roarke shrugged his shoulders. “It’s just impossible to mount such an effort.”

  Stark was tempted to agree and move on to something more promising. But Sam Riordan was suddenly alert. “General, you just reminded me. In Germany we do have a group of men who love us more than Lenin. They’re members of the NTS, an expatriate outfit which spends its time fighting the system back in Russia. We’ve been working these people through the Curtain for years.”

  Riordan waited for some reaction. Stark’s was immediate. “How many of them would be able to do such a job as we have in mind?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll find out within an hour or two.”

  “Then see what you have and we’ll break for some coffee in the meantime.”