The Tashkent Crisis

by William Craig

  Anatoly Serkin put the Beretta back in the drawer. He got up and walked toward his private bathroom. From the medicine cabinet he took down his shaving mirror and slipped the six-inch disk into the pocket of his smock. As Serkin left his office, he was humming the melody of Prokofiev’s Third Symphony.

  In the laser center’s infirmary, it was 8:50 A.M. when Colonel Kapitsa returned to Joe Safcek. He inquired solicitously about the American’s wound. The colonel had brought Safcek a gift, a freshly cut bouquet of yellow roses, which stood in a slim white vase beside the bed. Now the Russian offered Safcek a cigarette, which he accepted gratefully, and the two smoked without further conversation. Safcek enjoyed it greatly. He had almost forgotten his pain in his desire to inhale tobacco again. Though Martha had been after him for years to give it up, he would not. In his business, life was short enough and he had no intention of denying himself a pleasure so simple. When he thought of his present position, he was glad he had not. At best, he would spend years in a Soviet labor camp. At worst, he would be killed either by a firing squad or …

  Safcek wanted to ask the Russian if they had found his pistol, but he dared not show any undue interest. The Soviet officer finished his smoke and smiled at the American. Safcek stared into the weatherbeaten face and smiled back. “In your country, what do you do with agents who bungle missions?”

  The Russian laughed: “We give them one last chance. We send them to America and make them sell drugs. If they fail at that, we abandon them to the FBI.”

  Safcek had to laugh in spite of himself, and the Russian seemed pleased at his little joke. He scratched his ear while the laughter rumbled and died, then suddenly said: “Colonel Safcek, we have a problem. My men have scoured the fields and have not come up with your explosive material. We did find their container with that ingenious packing material but not the charges themselves. Now, would you mind going over the situation one more time with me? It’s important, as you can gather, that I find these little things as soon as possible. Our people are becoming very nervous wondering where they are.”

  He offered Safcek another cigarette, and Safcek noticed for the first time the shiny gold case he carried. The colonel seemed to have expensive tastes.

  Safcek blew smoke through his nostrils and wrinkled his brow. “I told you what I remembered, Colonel. Let’s see, we were near the lip of the gully. She had her rifle and knife with her. I had two pistols. Then I fell. The charges must have been somewhere between us.” Safcek sought for plausible details. “I remember,” he continued, “that she picked them out of the box while I went ahead to have a look. Colonel, they must be out there, near where she was.”

  “Are you sure you had twelve charges? Of course you are. I’m sorry I asked such a silly question. We found everything else you said was out there, and your story checks out except for the explosives. Annoying, isn’t it?”

  Joe Safcek was breathing heavily now, assured that the deadly pistol was somewhere within the perimeter and capable of being handled. He had to know more.

  “If I’m really lucky, Colonel, one of them will go off and set a fire here that will burn down the whole complex.”

  The secret police officer laughed uneasily. “I hope I can disappoint you on that score, my friend. But I do have the beautiful pistol in safe custody.”

  Safcek willed his face into expressionlessness.

  “As a connoisseur of firearms, I was immediately attracted to it. It’s a Colt .45, correct? I have seen one of those before. I think it is the type of weapon your police departments in th United States use as standard equipment. A very efficient tool, is it not?”

  Safcek nodded diffidently. “It’s all yours, Colonel. I guess I’ll have no further use for it.”

  The colonel continued: “Don’t worry about it. I take care of guns better than I do my own children. I have a special case in my office where I keep my collection. It will rest there as a memento of our friendship. When things settle down here, I intend to polish it and put it on a velvet cloth for all my aides to admire.”

  The colonel abruptly got up. He left several cigarettes on the bed, waved, and went out to look again for the missing plastique.

  Joe Safcek lit another smoke while he tried to figure out how he could get to the officers quarters and find the atomic bomb.

  By 10:10 P.M., the entire cabinet of the United States was inside the mountain in Maryland. Dug years before to protect the leaders of the nation in case of nuclear war, the enormous cavern was now the nerve center where the President could continue functioning while fully protected from enemy weapons. In his new Situation Room, William Stark kept abreast of the latest information from Intelligence.

  The Soviet fleet had been anchored fifteen miles east of Montauk since eight o’clock, and the lights of some of the vessels had been turned on as if celebrating a holiday. The fleet commander was evidently waiting for guests to arrive.

  In Cuba, a report had just come in that the members of the Soviet delegation had left their hotel and driven to the airport in Havana. The plane’s pilot had received clearance from airport officials for a course taking him directly north toward Florida and the American mainland. The same informant at the airport stated that several Soviet officials were talking openly about shopping for their wives and girl friends on Fifth Avenue.

  The situation map showed the disposition of every American unit in the world. It also showed those of the Soviet bloc. Nowhere on either side was any element in a Red Alert condition. Stark examined these unreal bits of data before he went into his office to weigh the decision to begin a nuclear war.

  In a corner of the room, Morris Farber sat writing furiously in a stenographer’s pad. On the brief flight from Washington to the mountain headquarters, Sam Riordan had revealed details of the past days to the astounded reporter. Riordan handed Farber the original of the Soviet ultimatum and detailed the subsequent Soviet actions to discredit Stark and pave the way for the use of the laser. The rest of the passengers in the helicopter had listened thoughtfully while Farber tried to write the story precisely as he heard it. He realized as a newsman that he was being given the most momentous story in history, but at the same time he wondered whether he would ever get a chance to print it. Later in the sanctuary of the underground White House, Morris Farber continued to record the nightmare. He would watch President Stark wrestle with the decision to kill millions of human beings.

  Stark could not sit still. In shirt sleeves, he wandered up and down the floor, pausing now and then to sip Scotch and soda. The drink was having no effect on him. He knew it would not. His tolerance for great quantities of liquor was already a legend in Washington, and alcohol never clouded his judgment.

  Riordan and Randall sat studying the latest intelligence reports.

  Martin Manson was down the hall, briefing the rest of the cabinet on the depressing chronology of events. The members were aghast at the knowledge they now possessed. Some asked openly why they had not been consulted earlier. While Manson tried to heal wounded spirits, in the President’s office, Stark suddenly asked: “Should we let Terhune in on this now?”

  Randall responded quickly: “What the hell for? The Vice-President’s in Manila. He can’t help us, and you know he’s argumentative in a conference situation, even long distance. He’d only get in the way.”

  “I know, but if things go downhill, he’ll be the last one to know.”

  “If things go downhill, it won’t matter a bit. He won’t have any country to come back to.”

  Stark did not feel like pressing the issue. He had never liked Terhune anyway. The man had been forced on him and ever since had proved to be an irascible adjutant, diametrically opposed to most of his programs. The decision had been made early to muzzle him, send him away on good-will trips and hope that Stark stayed healthy.

  Stark dropped the subject.

  Randall interrupted. “The UN adjourned without a final vote on censure.”

  Stark waved his fist. “Screw the U
N! It’s a goddamn disgrace! Let’s get back to reality.”

  The President now spoke with evident distaste: “We might as well discuss the possibility of surrender. I’ve been avoiding it for the past week, but it’s time I faced it and analyzed just what it means to this country.”

  Sam Riordan sipped his bourbon and branch water and watched Morris Farber scribbling furiously in the corner. Impeccably attired in a lightweight chocolate-brown suit, Robert Randall just sat quietly as the President began his purgative exercise.

  “It would be so simple. Just haul down the flag, send a hot line, and wait for their representatives. I can’t believe they would physically occupy this country. The logistics of it are too staggering. Is it possible once we gave in, the Russians would become more benign and leave us alone?”

  He looked for an answer from the advisors. Randall jumped in.

  “Did Hitler become more benign in victory? Did the Czechs get any great deal from the Russians when they decided on a new form of government? Unless I’m dead wrong about the American people, they won’t knuckle under to foreign domination any more than they did in 1775. Freedom is inbred now. That’s what makes us so different from the rest of the world. That’s why we’re more flexible, more creative, and bigger pains in the ass to our own establishment. The Russians will send occupation troops. I can’t see anything but hostages being killed every day, whole towns eventually being wiped out like Lidice, and all officers in the military being eliminated like the Poles were in the Katyn forest.

  “Stalin may be gone from Moscow, but those birds there now are obviously every bit as ruthless as he was. Only this time they’ve got the capacity to make the whole world a slave state. Even Hitler didn’t make it that big. It would be nice to believe that if we surrender, the Russians would merely defuse our capacity to make war and then leave us alone. But let’s face it, it wouldn’t work that way at all. The commissars would move in, the KGB would fan out, and we’d be in for a reign of terror worse than the Gestapo. We all know there’s very little difference between the old SS and the Soviet form of intimidation. The only people who don’t realize it are those in this country who have been radicalizing the campuses and the streets for the past ten years. Somehow they think Mao and Che and Ho were really wonderful men, all Don Quixotes fighting the entrenched horrors of capitalism. I even heard some professor on TV the other night saying that China was a Utopia, where human dignity was pre-eminent and the future a paradise for the workers. He forgot to mention the bodies that have floated down the river into Canton over the years, bodies of those who disagreed with the Party’s plans for the peasants. Mr. President, giving up this county to a totalitarian system would be signing the death warrants of those millions you’ll hope to spare by not going to war. You’re not solving anything. In the long run, the American people would be as good as dead. As slaves, they’d be living the life Solzhenitsyn wrote about and suffered for afterward. The Russians would not be generous with those who disagreed with their system. And except for some radicals and ultra-leftists in this country, no one would survive the transformation as a whole man or woman. We’d have sold out our country.”

  Randall stopped suddenly and reached for his own drink.

  Stark looked at him searchingly. “Bob, you’re saying I’d be committing a peculiar kind of murder by giving in. I’d be kidding myself I was saving the world while at the same time consigning everyone outside the Curtain to living in a giant concentration camp for the rest of his life.”

  Morris Farber wrote it all down and wished he had been able to call his wife one last time.

  “What about you, Sam? What do you think I should do?”

  The CIA director had no desire to make a speech. The others knew he would be loath to surrender and that he felt the nuclear strike from Turkey, if properly carried out, could annihilate the Soviet installation. But because the President had asked him, Riordan gave his opinion:

  “In an occupation we’d have the usual complement of collaborators with the enemy. Every nation had them, and, God knows, we’d be no exception. There are more would-be communists running around railing against the Establishment than I care to imagine. They’d welcome the deliverers with open arms until they realized the utopia they figured on was only the product of their fragile link with the real world. They would be shattered and destroyed by the very people to whom they pledged allegiance. But for me the major worry has to be the extreme right, the overzealous flag-wavers who would go into the hills and snipe at the occupiers. These elements would not give in peacefully, and they’d bring down the full wrath. These men would never forgive you for selling their birthright. They’d fight. And the Russians would crush them like mosquitoes. In the process, America could become a giant Auschwitz, a camp of dead and soon-to-die. The ones in the middle would suffer the same fate as the extremists, and every state would be a battleground. Even nuclear weapons might be used to snuff out the rebellion. So the question is, do we risk a holocaust now when we have the means to win, or at least bluff, or do we hand over the weapons and wait for the purge?”

  William Stark drained his Scotch and sat down.

  “Call a cabinet meeting right away.” He checked his watch. It was 10:24, fifty-four minutes to zero hour. “We’ll have a brief final discussion and go from there. I’ve got to have a few minutes to myself in the meantime.”

  Morris Farber had run out of paper. He went out into the map room, asked a colonel for a notebook and saw General Austin Roarke enter the chamber. Roarke strode purposefully toward the television screen and said in a loud voice: “So that’s where the bastard lies.” He pointed to the laser complex, caught in the giant eye of the Samos satellite, hovering eighty-seven miles above it. The general watched the picture carefully, noting the movement of trucks and the blatant display of SAM missiles around the perimeter. Shaking his head he murmured: “And we expected a man to blow that? Jesus, we must have been crazy. He was a dead man the minute we picked him.” The general nodded to his fellow members of the Joint Chiefs and walked into the Cabinet Room, where Martin Manson was detailing plans that could initiate World War III.

  In Moscow, the time was 6:30 A.M. The deadline would occur at 7:18. Marshal Moskanko, who had gone to the defense command northwest of the city, was calling Dr. Serkin’s office to make sure that the order to set the laser on Los Angeles had been carried out.

  The professor was not immediately available. His assistant Glasov told the defense minister that Serkin had not been in his office for five or ten minutes. The marshal roared: “Find him and tell him to call me.”

  Five hundred yards across the compound, Anatoly Serkin was in the laboratory talking to a bearded technician, who was standing in front of a display case containing samples of chemical solvents and by-products of research experiments. Serkin nodded absently as the man asked if the laser was ready for firing. He was searching the rows of bottles and vials, looking for a special object. As the technician watched curiously, Serkin opened the glass door and picked out a sample of colorless liquid.

  “What can you possibly want that tritium for, Professor?”

  Serkin pocketed the bottle, started to walk away, then stopped.

  “What did you say? I’m sorry, I’m so preoccupied with everything I didn’t hear you.”

  “I said, what on earth do you want with that tritium?”

  “Oh.” Serkin thought an instant. “I plan to do some experiments with it when things settle down around here. Just a silly idea I’ve been playing with.”

  Serkin waved hesitantly to the man and rushed out of the room. The technician shook his head and returned to his own work.

  In his office, Colonel Lavrenti Kapitsa of the Soviet secret police had taken off his boots to rest his feet. On duty since word had come to him of the capture of the American intruders, Kapitsa had been dividing his time between interrogating the remarkable Green Beret officer and supervising the search for the remaining plastique charges Safcek insisted he had c
arried with him. The imminent laser firing was less a cause for anxiety to the KGB officer than the presence of Bakunin. Though immensely pleased that his security staff had foiled the destruction of the laser, Kapitsa could not rest easy while the explosives were still at large.

  More important, Bakunin’s prodding and Kapitsa’s own instincts warned him that Safcek was keeping something from him, that the American was hiding an important detail of his mission.

  His feet propped up on his sofa, Kapitsa hefted the prized Colt .45 that Safcek had surrendered and was surprised at its weight in the butt. Noticing the black button on the side, the colonel suddenly got up and went to a wall bookcase. He brought down a thin red volume, the International Handgun Register, and leafed quickly to a picture of the Colt .45. It had no button on the butt.

  Kapitsa pushed his thumb against the lever on the bottom of the butt and tried to move the clip out, but it did not budge. He tried again, but it failed to give.

  The colonel balanced the gun once more in his hand and then slowly, carefully, laid it on the table and picked up the phone.

  “Get me Bruk.”

  Kapitsa’s hand shook as he lit a cigarette.

  “Bruk, come to my office quickly and bring a scanner with you.”

  The colonel hung up and blew a huge cloud of smoke across the desk. He sat down heavily on the sofa and stared hypnotically at his trophy lying on his desk.

  When Bruk arrived breathless, Kapitsa jumped up and motioned at the pistol. “Run your gadget over this.”

  The scientist took a pocket-sized implement from his smock, pressed a switch on it and slowly passed it over the gun. Kapitsa sucked in his breath as the small screen on top of the scanner suddenly lit up, revealing the outlines of a small sphere connected by wires to a tiny cylindrical object. The scientist was subdued. “It is some form of explosive device; that much is certain. Where did you get it?”

  “Never mind that. What kind of bomb is it? How powerful?”