The Tashkent Crisis

by William Craig

  He gaveled the noisy delegates into silence and, in the ensuing quiet, looked at Zarov to continue. Zarov’s face was triumphant.

  “Mr. Secretary, I relinquish my chair to my esteemed colleague, Secretary Darubin.”

  The Second Secretary of the Soviet Presidium rose slowly and faced the rostrum. Dressed in an expensive Savile Row suit, gray with an almost indistinguishable pinstripe running through it, he looked like a prosperous Wall Street broker.

  “Mr. Secretary, I beg you to forgive my intrusion into the deliberations of this august body. I have flown from Moscow to present the Soviet Union’s answer to a situation so appallingly brutal as to defy comparison even with memories of Hitler.”

  Across the nation, some television stations had ended their coverage of the Security Council session to resume their regular prime-time fare of Westerns and situation comedies. But most of the audience remained for Darubin’s speech.

  In Washington, President William Stark was sitting with Randall and Sam Riordan as they fitfully watched Mikhail Darubin continue his indictment.

  “The final proof of our suspicions came to us only a few days ago and in a strange way. I was called to Geneva to meet with a representative of the present American government. Ostensibly, he came to discuss further stages of the disarmament negotiations, which, as you know, we have been pursuing zealously. Instead, the man told us a story that confirmed our worst fears and has brought me here this evening. I would like to have you share now in that conversation. Because of a prior agreement with the man, we were able to record his words so that no doubt would linger in anyone’s mind as to the veracity of the charge we make against President William Stark. His own subordinate’s words will convict him before the world court.”

  Darubin turned and nodded to an aide, who pulled a tape recorder from under the desk and carried it to the desk of Secretary General Svendsen. The aide pushed a button and then retired to the Soviet section.

  The tape whirred for several seconds, and then the voice of the dead Clifford Erskine filled the room.

  “I am sure you realize, Mr. Darubin, I am a devoted American, but I am sickened at the thought of my country’s diabolical plan.”

  Darubin was very pleased with his handiwork. It had been his idea to tape Erskine’s voice secretly in Geneva and then splice words and phrases into an incriminating statement. Delegates who had known Erskine were sitting in bewildered silence, listening to every syllable issuing from the machine. Even Ronald Carlson had dropped his attitude of feigned indifference. He stared at the instrument in dismay.

  “I have come to Geneva to warn you. President Stark and his advisors plan to destroy the Soviet Union, using atomic weapons on your cities and missile sites.”

  In the oval office, William Stark just stared at the television screen in amazement. When Randall tried to speak, the President waved him into silence.

  Clifford Erskine had come to life again.

  “As a sane man, I could not live with the thought that I had not tried to prevent the deaths of millions of innocent people.”

  It was over. The machine turned for a few seconds and then clicked to a sudden stop. The chamber was silent. Darubin rose once again from his seat and addressed Arndt Svendsen.

  “And now, for the last measure of proof that the Americans are plotting against us. Once before, in May of 1960, my government was forced to expose publicly an infamous act by the government of the United States. At that time, Comrade Khrushchev revealed to a shocked world that he had in custody an American U-2 spy plane and the spy plane pilot, Francis Gary Powers. I have just been informed by my colleagues in Moscow that we have foiled an attempt by American spy personnel to infiltrate and destroy one of our defense centers. We have the leader of that group, Colonel Joseph Safcek, Green Berets, serial number 0-1926112. Safcek has confessed everything about his mission and has directly implicated the President of the United States.”

  The gallery erupted. The delegates stared at the United States ambassador whose face was in his hands. His eyes were riveted on the tops of his shiny black shoes. Ronald Carlson was reminding himself to resign the next day for allowing William Stark to strand him out on the limb of ignorance.

  “In conclusion, Mr. Secretary,” Darubin was going on despite the clamor, which quickly subsided now. “In conclusion, I would like to state our position on this matter. We have no intention on being caught by surprise by the imperialist forces. If we detect the slightest sign of further hostile action toward us at any time within the next twenty-four hours, we shall retaliate with maximum power. This is not a threat. It is merely a statement of fact. We cannot be held responsible for what might happen since the burden of guilt lies heavily on Washington. The decision for war or peace lies in the White House.”

  Darubin inclined his head slightly toward Svendsen, gathered up his papers, and strode away from the desk. Followed by Zarov and others, he marched determinedly through the opened door and disappeared, leaving bedlam in his wake.

  The Security Council degenerated into an impassioned scramble for attention. Ronald Carlson tried to get the floor but was surrounded by a milling throng of officials, demanding his private response.

  In the streets outside the United Nations Building, pickets carrying transistor radios had heard the news from inside and instantly organized a raucous demonstration before the gates on First Avenue. Screaming “Impeach Stark” and “Fascist Pigs,” hundreds of men and women walked back and forth in the humid night air. The police firmly held the crowd to the narrow path they had been assigned on the sidewalk, and the parade was kept within bounds. Television cameras brought the scene to the millions who had witnessed the confrontation. Most Americans were still dubious about the Russians, but they had been stunned by the spy revelation after being shaken by the voice of the dead secretary, who had persuasively condemned the President of the United States.

  Washington, D.C., was free of crime for the first time in years. Except for a few government employees and embassy officials, the only pedestrians were army troops patrolling in mournful silence. Under the street lights they looked like a ghost battalion, seeking comfort in one another’s company, smoking cigarettes, and listening for footfalls in the night. They prowled empty avenues in pairs looking constantly for signs of looters. But no one roamed the streets. The city was truly deserted, a tribute to William Stark’s planning and the specter of further catastrophe.

  Near the Union Station, firemen had finally left the two-block area where the pipeline had burst. Only the scars of the disaster remained.

  At the White House, the President had not fully recovered from the Soviet stratagem at the United Nations. Staggered at the audacious use of the doctored Clifford Erskine tape almost as much as at the irrevocable news of Safcek’s failure, Stark felt increasingly like the fly caught in the spider’s web. The more he maneuvered, the tighter the enemy drew the net around him.

  He finally excused himself from his advisors and walked into the bathroom. When he poured a cup of water, the liquid spilled over his coat, and he had to hold the cup in both hands to get a drink. In the mirror, his face was chalk white and beaded with sweat.

  The President sagged down onto the edge of the bathtub and put his head down onto his arms. His stomach quivered, and his body started to shake uncontrollably. He suddenly knew why. It was simply fear, fear of the next hours and the decisions he had to make. He remembered Korea and the same reaction when the Chinese caught him in the open and laid in fifteen rounds. He had clawed with his bare hands into the dirt to escape the terrible noise and the screaming scraps of metal that searched for him. When it was over, he had begun to shake, and it was hours before he could function again.

  Stark sat on the edge of the tub and thought of Harry Truman, who said, “The buck stops here.” He thought of his responsibility to the people—the farmers and the South, the liberals, and even the radicals. The President thought of them and wondered whether they were all worth saving, whether t
he human race wasn’t just a collection of muck dredged up from some prehistoric sewer to pollute the planet. The President recalled his continuing problems with the polarized society, consumed by its insecurities and prejudices: the peace-and-love people who held their fingers spread out in their special salute and were fully capable of ramming those same fingers up your ass if you didn’t agree with their ideas, and their smug and equally righteous opponents who professed great morality while clawing their way to affluence. They were all flawed and unable to recognize it in the mirror.

  William Stark thought of the nation he was supposed to save from the barbarians. “Christ, we’re all barbarians.”

  The voice of Sam Riordan broke into his reverie. The CIA director was calling him out to the teletype. Stark splashed some cold water on his eyes and stepped out to face his duty.

  By 9 P.M., New York time, the one hundred and seventy-six Soviet Embassy and consulate officials who had assembled around the Darubin visit had not left for Kennedy International Airport. Instead, they had gathered to celebrate at the building that housed the Soviet Mission to the United Nations, there to wait the remaining two hours and eighteen minutes until the ultimatum expired. Mikhail Ivanovich Darubin was jubilant over his success at the UN. He patted the tape recorder beside him and offered a toast: “To Mr. Clifford Erskine, our Number One spy—and to Colonel Safcek.”

  Loud laughter accompanied the remark, and Darubin leaned back to savor his spectacular triumph. He knew Stark would be unable to rebut the charges. With the laser facing him down, Stark would be forced to surrender without a fight. The Soviets had boxed him in, and the President could not accept the onus of guilt for launching a nuclear war that would kill millions.

  Darubin made his way to the building’s communications room and ordered a message sent to Moskanko. The radio operator hesitated: “Sir, this channel will be monitored. Do you want me to code it?”

  Flushed with success, Darubin wrote down a few words. “Send this in the clear. They’ll never know what I mean.” Addressed to Uncle Vanya, it said: “Dinner party a success. Chicken plucked skillfully.”

  His cup of mischief running over, Darubin weaved back to the celebration, which looked more and more like an election-night party for a landslide winner. Sinking into his chair, he reached for champagne to wash down his black bread and caviar.

  In the Kremlin, Marshal Moskanko’s forehead furrowed as he read the cablegram. Darubin may have performed brilliantly at the UN and plucked the chicken skillfully, but Moskanko could not share his effervescence, nor did he really approve of it.

  The capture of the officer Safcek had made the defense minister uneasy. He had not thought the Americans would send in a ground team to destroy the laser works, and the marshal had begun to wonder whether Stark was finished. Nor had the hot-line bluff about the American laser given him any comfort. Perhaps it was Stark’s final gambit, but the defense minister was no longer sure. He unbuttoned his tunic and began to write out a hot-line message for transmission. When he finished, he sent another message to Serkin in Tashkent.

  The hot line gave William Stark the answer he feared. Moskanko had not believed his bluff about the laser:

  … WE WOULD ADVISE YOU TO CONCENTRATE EFFORTS ON COMPLYING WITH ULTIMATUM IN TWO HOURS. THE TIME HAS COME FOR SERIOUS CONSIDERATION OF REPERCUSSIONS IN THE EVENT YOU FAIL TO RECOGNIZE IMPOSSIBILITY OF YOUR POSITION.

  V. KRYLOV

  Stark went to Pamela and told her to join him at the helicopter pad on the South Lawn in fifteen minutes. She did not ask what had happened in the past few hours. His face warned her that her husband was reaching the limits of his endurance. With Safcek’s failure, with Darubin having laid the groundwork for the Soviet attack, the President was coming swiftly to the decision he had hoped to avoid. On the runway at Incirclik, Turkey, the SR-71 was fueled and armed, the pilot waiting word from General Ellington to take it across the Soviet border. Stark knew he had only one other choice: surrender. All this was in his eyes as he smiled at Pamela sadly and left for the Oval Room and a last-minute check.

  Robert Randall gripped a suitcase in his right hand as he walked briskly into the nearly vacant press room. Morris Farber of The New York Times was curled up on a couch and did not hear the foreign-policy advisor approach. Randall called gently: “Morris, up and at ’em.” Farber came up with a start, shaking his head. A little sheepishly, he offered: “Got pretty dull around here. No one will talk to me.”

  Randall came to the point quickly. “Where’s your family, Morris?”

  “My wife’s in New York visiting the folks, and the kids are in school in Virginia. Why? What’s going on?”

  “We want you to come with us. The President’s going on a little ride, and we’d like you as a witness to the next few hours. Sort of our own historian. OK?”

  Farber was wide awake. “Sure, let’s go. But I have to call the bureau to let them know.”

  “No, you can’t. Sorry, but that’s the way it has to be. You’ll understand later when we fill you in on all the sad details.”

  The mystified and apprehensive newspaperman followed Robert Randall from the press room through winding corridors and rooms to the South Lawn, where a Marine helicopter sat, its lights blinking. Another chopper was making an approach from the direction of the Capitol. William and Pamela Stark hurried out from the White House and ran up the gangway. Sam Riordan and Martin Manson followed. Randall waved his hand for Farber to come along, and the two men joined the passengers in the cramped quarters. At 9:35 P.M., an hour and forty-three minutes before the end, the helicopter lifted into the sky and headed northwest over the city. Down below, very few headlights marred the blackness of the main streets. The lights at the base of the Washington Monument burned brightly, but no one was there to look up at the shaft’s grandeur. The massed flags surrounding the shrine waved listlessly in the warm air. In Lafayette Park, across from the White House, there was no one to see the figure of a man hanging by his own belt from the limb of a stout tree. His neck broken, Commissioner Herbert Markle had stilled the voice of his conscience.

  In the helicopter, Morris Farber stared at the people with him and wondered what the hell was going on.

  In Tashkent, Dr. Anatoly Serkin was by now a desperately unhappy man. He had spent much of the night beside the laser gun going over the final checklist of components. There had been a flurry of excitement on the grounds just before two, but no one had bothered to inform him what it was about. Even the director learned from the state security police at the complex only what they wanted him to learn. Then, between 6 and 7 A.M. had come Moskanko’s calls. Now at 8:35 A.M., he held in his hand the latest message from the Kremlin.

  CHANGE TARGET FROM WASHINGTON TO LOS ANGELES. WITH WASHINGTON EVACUATED, DEMONSTRATION NECESSARY OF EFFECT ON LARGE POPULATION. INITIATION ORDER WILL COME FROM ME ALONE.

  MOSKANKO

  Serkin was sickened. The men who directed him had already broken Parchuk. They had made Serkin a murderer of Jews in the Middle East. Now he was being ordered to incinerate several million people half a world away.

  Serkin sat immobile. Then with a jerky motion, he reached into his desk and pulled out a Beretta. For a long moment, he looked straight into the pistol’s short barrel. He was startled by a knock on his office door. Hastily, Serkin slipped the gun back into a drawer.

  “Come in,” he called, and one of his assistants entered. “What do you want, Glasov?”

  “Sir, you rang for me ten minutes ago.”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sorry. We’ll need new coordinates—for Los Angeles in the state of California.”

  Glasov left. Serkin reached again for the drawer. He was not afraid to die, but he wondered how his family would survive. Could Nadia manage?

  The physicist remembered how difficult it had been for him to face his family since the weapon had been turned upon human beings. The Presidium was using him as a puppet, to kill in its name. The death of an American city would make Serkin equal to Hitler
in his own eyes, and for that he would have to answer to his fellow man or his God.

  He looked steadily into the barrel of the automatic and moved his finger over the trigger. Bringing the gun up to his face, he steadied it between his eyes. The muzzle was cold and impersonal; the bullets inside merely waited to be unlocked and sped on their mission. It was so simple. The master bending the slave to his will. Serkin thought of the deadly comparison between himself and the gun. Once an explorer, an adventurer into new realms of pure science, he was now merely the tool of earthbound masters.

  “That’s our curse, my dear friend,” Parchuk had said one memorable night during those happy years when they would sit after dinner, listening to music and talking of books and science. “Every time we have the exquisite pleasure of discovery, we become victims of the basic lusts of man, which warp and defame our achievements. I could never be a party to such a calamity.”

  Parchuk had been unusually animated that night as he talked about an exciting development. At the latest conference of the International Physics Society in Paris, French researchers had disclosed that they had been able to initiate a controlled explosion and energy release of the plentiful isotope, tritium, a by-product of hydrogen that is distilled from water. By concentrating an intense laser beam on a tiny bottle containing the isotope, the Frenchmen had managed to release its energy for a brief instant.

  Parchuk’s face had beamed as he explored the implications.

  “Just imagine, Anatoly, man will be able to drive his cars on minute quantities of tritium. Homes can be fueled with it. It’s so abundant that we can revolutionize the daily life of every human being.”

  Serkin had agreed, but he cautioned: “You know the dangers, too, though. Any fool can rig up a distillery in his backyard and convert water into this isotope. Sooner or later, he can have the equivalent of an atomic bomb hidden away in his cellar.”