Deep Cover

by Brian Garfield

  Rykov’s office was imposing, the result of baroque and melodramatic whims on the part of a predecessor. It was a long trip across a series of Oriental carpets to the desk. The huge windows, arched and crenellated, looked out across the vast sprawl of Moscow’s ancient low rooftops with their clustered chimney pots. The spire of Moscow University was a lean landmark against the gray sky. Here and there sprouted the dreary Stalin Wedding Cakes, sterile gray apartment towers with icings of snow.

  Rykov hung his things on the coat rack and, as always, lit a Pamir before he sat down and reached under the orange silk lampshade to switch on his work light. He thumbed through the stack of reports and memos on his desk and turned to his bank of telephones to begin the morning round of calls to district commanders and Controls. It took nearly an hour and left him waspishly frustrated; he had the weight of organization on him and he despised it. At times he also feared it: the temptation to surrender to it was great—to become lulled by routine.

  He pressed the button to summon his aide and almost immediately Andrei Bizenkev appeared. “Good morning, Comrade General.” It was his little joke: Rykov was a general by rank and pay but he disdained the title and preferred to be addressed as Comrade Minister. Andrei had always enjoyed needling him and Rykov had always enjoyed being needled because there was a part of him that recognized the grave danger in taking himself too seriously.

  The years had put a layer of fat on Andrei and pushed his hairline back so that he had become bookish and gentle in appearance. It was a deceit: in Rykov’s view Andrei was the second best Intelligence expert in the Soviet Union.

  Rykov separated out the Chinese signals and tossed the rest of the papers across the desk. “None of that requires our attention. Have the assistants answer the ones that need answering.”

  “Very good.” Andrei picked them up. “And the China dispatches?”

  “I’ll want to study them.”

  Andrei left without further talk. Rykov hardly heard the door close. He opened a drawer and picked out a pocket box of Drazhe candy drops, selected a lozenge and popped it into his cheek and spread the China decodes out on the desk. His mind picked up a word here and a phrase there and fitted them into a pattern while another part of him reviewed the meeting yesterday.

  They had met in Comrade Secretary Fyodor Yashin’s extravagant Kremlin office, each wall paneled in a different rare wood, an Imperial Russian Samovar tea service gleaming on a side tray.

  The room was huge and the chandeliers pushed at the gloom. String tendons held Yashin’s starched collar away from his neck but the lean hawked face was alert and hard. Yashin removed his rimless glasses. “Good day, Comrade.” His voice had become scratchy with age. He pointed the stem of his meerschaum toward the two men in wing chairs, Marshal Oleg Grigorenko and Alexai Strygin, who was Vice-Chairman of the Presidium and personal representative of Party boss Kazakov.

  They both stood up to greet Rykov.

  Grigorenko had gone tub-bellied and his face had put on so much flesh that all planes and angles had disappeared and it was hard to visualize any bone structure underneath. He spoke politely in his rumbling deep voice and there was a faint click as he brought his heels together.

  Alexai Strygin extended his hand and Rykov shook it quickly and firmly. One of the few modern changes of which Rykov approved was the substitution of the western handshake for the traditional bear hug. He and Strygin had known each other since boyhood: not enemies, but too cautious to be friends. Strygin was a small man with a Lenin beard and a half-bald head on which hair made a bushy line across the top from ear to ear. To some extent Strygin was a comfortable man, ambitious but secure in his position, and Rykov disliked comfortable men.

  Not since Khrushchev’s had a single pair of hands held all the reins of Soviet power. The policies of all the Russias were dictated by the twelve-man Presidium (Politburo) and in turn the Presidium was commanded by a troika of its members. Of those three men the best known was Marshal I. G. Tsvetnoy, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet and ostensible chief of state of the Soviet Union. Tsvetnoy was Zhukov’s heir and in the reshuffling that followed the Brezhnev-Kosygin regime the Army, always a key force in Russian politics, had showed enough muscle to elevate one of its own to the top position in Russian government. But the Stalin and Khrushchev years had taught the necessity of checks and balances and Tsvetnoy’s strength was delimited by the other two members. One of them, represented here by Strygin, was First Secretary of the Communist Party Mikhail Kazakov. The other, Secretary General of the Presidium and Premier of the Council of Ministers, was Yashin.

  Yashin’s was the least known face: he was not a public celebrity in Moscow and in Western countries very little was known about him. Yashin had seen to this because in spite of his vanities he disliked spotlights and always worked best behind the scenes …

  Yashin never could resist dipping in a spoon. “The situation only grows more perilous with time, because every day increases the chance the Americans will break your system. How can you be sure they haven’t broken it already? How do we know they’re not poised to sweep all your people into a net?”

  Rykov was patient. “If one agent’s cover is blown it won’t lead to others. That’s always the first rule when you set these things up.”

  “They’ve had nearly twenty years to break it.”

  “And they haven’t broken it, have they.”

  “We don’t know that, Comrade.”

  “I’d know it. Do you think I’m without sources in American Intelligence?”

  “Do you think they’re without sources in yours?”

  “They are where the Amergrad program is concerned. The Americans are adolescents when it comes to this sort of thing.”

  “I don’t share your confidence. The risk of discovery is greater than the potential benefit. I suggest again that you draw up a plan for the withdrawal of the network.”

  Rykov let the silence grow. Grigorenko was watching him keenly. Rykov had got the job he wanted; Grigorenko was Commanding General, GRU (combined Military Intelligence Services) but that to KGB was as provincial ballet was to Bolshoi. Only because of his close ties to Yashin and Premier Tsvetnoy was Grigorenko on the Presidium at all. And by infiltrating the American military complex, Rykov’s deep-cover team was encroaching on Grigorenko’s territory.

  Rykov said, “I grant it isn’t foolproof. Nothing is foolproof. But our people are in a position to hamstring the enemy’s nuclear capacity if it comes to war. Can you say the same for any substitute you’re prepared to offer? No. As long as I’m capable of influencing decisions, my network will hold its position.”

  As long as I’m capable of influencing decisions—the gauntlet had been dropped and Yashin sat there looking at it, deciding whether now was the time to pick it up, but knowing in the end that it wasn’t.

  Yashin tugged at the flap of dry skin that sagged beneath his sharp jaw, and a wisp of smoke drifted free from the bowl of his pipe. The expressionless slits of eyes, the thin lips and very slightly shriveled face—behind the mask, Rykov was aware of the hatred. But Yashin wasn’t ready to expose it. He had the patience of a Russian peasant—and the deviousness. He would wait.

  Yashin said finally, “We’ll keep the question under advisement. Let’s get to the reports. Marshal Grigorenko—has there been any change in the Mediterranean?”

  “None to speak of. Benghazi wants to blackmail us into building an aviation-petrol refinery in Libya. Evidently the Libyan Army thinks it’s going to withhold commitment of those two Derna divisions to Cairo if we don’t agree to put in the refinery. We’ll get the official demand in due course.”

  Alexai Strygin snorted. His voice gritted with sudden sarcasm. “Benghazi puts a high value on two divisions.”

  Rykov let his mind drift while Grigorenko made his reports on the Hanoi situation and the Tanzanian dispute; in response to each, Strygin delivered himself of cliché-ridden dissertations to which Rykov paid little attention. He was thinking of
the sight he had passed on his way here: the tomb where Colonel Yuri Gagarin was buried in the Kremlin wall.

  The brief years of the Cosmonauts had been a kind of golden age and in the decade since, Russia had lost her lead in space because Russian leadership had knuckled under to popular demands for individual effete comforts at the expense of collective technological advances: the Russian middle class had clamored for refrigerators and central heating. History, forgetting those who had starved, would not forget those who dominated the world, nor those who put the first man on Mars. Russia’s revisionists had abandoned technological supremacy in exchange for slavish imitations of the gratifications of a dying capitalist society, and that very capitalism now threatened to destroy the Soviet Union. Rykov’s agents had reported hints of a new American multiple-warhead system which might deploy within eighteen months—did that suggest war was becoming remote from the American mind? And the American danger was remote by comparison with the two others: the decay of Russian vigor and the immediate and present threat from just beyond Russia’s own eastern underbelly.…

  Strygin’s voice ran down and Yashin turned toward Rykov, whose face became attentive. Rykov wore the filter stub of his cigarette on his lower lip; he peeled it free and put it out. He spoke softly, without heat, delivering the routine analysis of the week’s developments, and he left one subject deliberately for the last. “Now I draw your attention to the reports we’ve submitted regularly on the China question.” He leaned forward in the chair and draped both hands over the handle of his erect cane.

  Marshal Grigorenko leaned to one side in his chair to break wind slyly against the cushion. Strygin watched Rykov, his face rigid with suppressed feelings, knowing what was coming and disliking it. Yashin only waited politely.

  “Every evidence leads to the same conclusion,” Rykov said. “The Maoists think we’ve gone soft, lost the determination to resist.”

  Grigorenko sighed. “The paper tiger again. China can be swatted like a fly. They know that. They’ll make noise forever but there won’t be war, Viktor. You know there won’t be war.”

  “On the contrary. To the Chinese, war is the inevitable historical necessity. It’s only a question of which of us will start it and when it will begin. On the answers to that question will depend the outcome of the war.”

  Alexai Strygin said, “As always you overstate the case.”

  “No.”

  Strygin turned to Yashin. “Every week he comes to us with some new wives’ tale of Chinese perfidy which upon analysis becomes no more than a bee sting. But every time Comrade Rykov is stung by the bee he rushes to beat the hive with a club. The stings do no real harm but our friend wants to capitalize on them. He wants to make war on China and he will use any flimsy excuse to encourage it.”

  Yashin did not interrupt and so Strygin continued: “I spent two years in China. I know their problems, and they are too many and too difficult for China to waste time and resources in a war she cannot win. We have more than enough Warsaw Pact troops along the border to discourage any serious challenge. Our nuclear capacity is incomparably greater than theirs. The Chinese have offered far more verbs than violence, and with good reason—if nothing else deters them, the Chinese must always know that any attack by them upon us would merely give the Americans the excuse they’ve been looking for to bury China.”

  Drawing breath, Strygin glanced at Rykov and added in a harder voice, “As for the rest of Rykov’s debating points, I can only suggest he’s become the victim of the solipsism of his profession. His intellect craves to discover more information than espionage can supply. Spies will always guess at what they do not know, and the tendency is strong to use one’s brain not to arrive at the truth but to support the prejudices one began with. Remember it was the KGB which embarrassed us all by assuming the Arabs could defeat Israel in the 1967 six-day war.”

  Rykov said mildly, “I was not the chief of KGB in 1967.”

  “It would have been the same,” Strygin said. He went back to Yashin “Rykov has a Stalinist’s view of the world. I suppose it’s inevitable, in his profession, but it is for precisely that reason that he must keep his political notions to himself. We can no longer afford to have the KGB dictate national foreign policy. I suggest Comrade Rykov ought to concentrate on the gathering of information and leave the fighting of wars to the Army.”

  Rykov flicked a cigarette against the back of his hand. After the echo of Strygin’s anger had subsided he glanced at Yashin. “I should like to reply to that.”

  “Of course,” Yashin replied with the attitude of a man offering another enough rope to hang himself.

  “In 1945,” Rykov said, looking from face to face, “Eisenhower asked Zhukov how the Russians cleared mine fields and Zhukov replied, ‘We march over them.’ Now that is the attitude of the Chinese today, arid I don’t believe we are capable of as much.”

  Grigorenko snapped, “The Russian soldier is no coward.”

  “The spirit of collective sacrifice requires more than courage, I think. It requires a national will.”

  “Stalinist claptrap,” Strygin said.

  “Evidently,” Rykov murmured, “I have made the mistake of fragmenting the evidence. Each week I come to you with bits and pieces, and each week you point out tome that they are merely bits and pieces. Quite so. Let me rectify the mistake: let’s look at the total picture.

  “Six hundred years ago the Mongols invaded Russia without warning. Since the 1600’s we have been fighting skirmishes with the Chinese along the Amur River. Until a hundred and fifty years ago the Mongols were still in possession of the Volga and Crimea regions and their rule imposed such oppression and ignorant backwardness on our people that today we still struggle to get out from under the memory and experience. Because of those little yellow bastards we’re two centuries behind and we simply sit here waiting for them to do the same thing again because Peking calls itself a Communist regime and we all tend to follow the stupid idea that the enemy of one’s enemies is perforce one’s friend.”

  Strygin sat upright. “That’s absurd. You’re confusing Chinese with Mongols.”

  “They’re all the same.”

  “No. Genghiz conquered Russia but the Chinese never have. Russia has never once made the kowtow of obeisance to China since Baikov’s mission to Peking three hundred years ago—but forget that. History’s always a good hiding place; it won’t argue back. Let’s talk about now.”

  “All right.” Rykov’s words fell heavily, dropped like shoes, spaced out: “Consider the evidence. The Chinese have enlarged their satellite-tracking station near Nanking, they’ve installed huge electronic complexes in the mountains in the Khentei, and they’re constantly expanding the nuclear facilities at Lop Nor, Paotow, and Lanchow. According to the figures I submitted last week they’ve stockpiled at least eight hundred hydrogen warheads of all sizes. Their missile program has grown faster than we anticipated and as you know they have an initial ICBM capability now sufficient to destroy almost half the major cities in the Soviet Union.”

  “Yes,” Strygin said, “but at what cost to themselves?”

  Rykov’s head turned. “They can sacrifice four hundred million men—more than our entire population—and still win. And they’ve no reluctance to do that, as long as the loyal Maoist elite survives. China has one billion people and they face a famine—in less than thirty years she’ll have two billion; today if there’s a bad crop year millions of them starve, and tomorrow even if it’s a good crop year millions of them will starve. Look at it, then: China has got to expand into new agricultural lands. Where’s she going to find them? In Japan or India or Indochina? Those areas are even more overcrowded than she is. No, she’s got to move into our underpopulated frontier regions.

  “To do that,” he finished in a different voice altogether, “the Maoists are willing to risk a nuclear exchange—precisely because they believe we are not willing to.”

  He spread his hands in the universally expressive gesture
.

  “Rubbish,” Alexai Strygin said.

  “Perhaps. But each year we spend debating the point gives the Chinese another year to close the gap in military strength.”

  Yashin said, “You’re saying we had better crush them while we still can.”

  “I’m saying that one day I’m going to report to you that the Chinese will start to push buttons within twenty-four hours and you are going to have to be ready to react instantly and without any more of this idiotic debating.”

  Strygin muttered, “As always Viktor ignores the political actualities.”

  “If we were justified in intervening in Czech affairs in 1968, there’s no reason we can’t apply the same doctrine to China.”

  Strygin uncrossed his legs. “He talks reasonably,” he said to Yashin, “but the premises aren’t reasonable. All this talk of preparedness is a smoke screen. We’re quite ready to repel any Chinese attack, nuclear or otherwise, and Viktor knows it and Peking knows it. No. He’s saying we ought to get ourselves in a frame of mind to hit them before they can hit us. He wants a Soviet blitzkrieg. Viktor and his friends carefully avoid mentioning the obvious critical factor that negates their whole position—the Americans are on the fence right now, maintaining detente with us and putting out feelers to China in the Warsaw talks, but if we attack China they’ll have their excuse to destroy us. Don’t forget the Pentagon is in the hands of generals who can’t tell one Communist from another; as far as they’re concerned Russia is stronger than China, therefore Russia ought to be whipped. We’re strong, but we’re not strong enough to fight China and America together.” And Strygin smiled like a schoolmaster.