“It never was, was it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Jaime, you never got a commission in the Army and you never worked your way above the subaltern level in the Agency.”
“So I ain’t got a whole lot of ambition. So what?”
“You don’t need ambition, Jaime. You just need to get yourself together. You want to figure out where your loyalties are. You’ve never wanted responsibilities and you’ve never wanted to take initiative. You always had to have somebody hand out the assignments—tell you what to do.”
“Okay, there’s chiefs and Innuns. Everybody can’t be a chief.”
“You could. Any time you decided to get off the fence.”
“George, I haven’t got time for a fifty-dollar-an-hour consultation.”
“This is for free. Belsky’s dropped a responsibility in your lap and you’ve got to decide whether or not you’re going to accept it. And you’ve got to think about something bigger than yourself when you weigh it out.”
“Oh Jesus. Now you’re waving the fucking flag at me.”
“You’re the only one who can get to him.”
“I didn’t ask for it.”
“Jaime, you didn’t ask to be born.”
“The answer’s still no. It ain’t my job.”
“Then think about this. Belsky knows your face. He’s got some connection with Ross Trumble and you’re also involved in something that Trumble’s involved in—the Phaeton project. It’s not unlikely you’ll cross Belsky’s path again. But in the meantime he’s not going to ignore the meeting you had. He won’t be able to let it alone, he’ll pick at it until he finds out what you were doing at the house and who you are and who you work for. He’ll find out you’re on Senator Forrester’s staff and he’ll decide there’s a chance you didn’t report the meeting to anybody else. You see what that could lead to? He’ll want to cover his tracks and he may decide he can do it by silencing you.”
“I’ve been shot at before.”
“What about Senator Forrester? You want him shot at too?”
“You bastard,” Spode said wearily.
“Belsky will look for you, Jaime. It’s not my fault, it’s just a fact. He’s going to look for you anyway so you may as well let him find you, because that’s the best way for us to find him.”
Spode sagged into the chair with the phone against his ear. “All right, George. Let’s have all of it.”
“We’ll put people on Trumble to try to find out what connection he’s got with Belsky. I’ll keep you up to date. We’ll put some men on Forrester to cover him. Is there any intermediary you usually report to on the staff or do you work direct with Forrester?”
“I work with him. Sometimes Lester Suffield’s in on it—the Senator’s aide.”
“All right. We’ll do the legwork. Maybe Belsky’s registered somewhere under the Meldon Kemp name—we’ll cover that. I’ll have Art put one or two people on you so you won’t have to feel too exposed.”
“Tell them not to get in my way. I hate tripping over eager beavers.”
“I wouldn’t use second-string people on this, Jaime. You know better than that.”
“Just keep them out of my hair,” Spode said with a good deal of force. “Tell them to stay out of my goddamn bathroom. I don’t like being spied on when I crap.”
“Look, we’ve been over all that before and I’ve apologized to you before. It was a mixup with the FBI, some crank anonymous accusation, and it shouldn’t have happened.”
“You’re damn right it shouldn’t.” Somebody had written a letter saying he was a fag and all the departments from FBI to the Agency were paranoid on that subject. Spode tightened his dark face into a savage grin. “Suppose I was a faggot, George?”
“Shut up and get to work.”
“Yeah.” He hung up and glanced at Belsky’s automatic pistol on the table and called back through the house. When Art Miller appeared Spode said, “I’ll see you. You may as well hang on to that iron. Might find out who it was registered to.”
“You back on the team, Jaime?”
“Let’s just say I’m free-lancing on a one-shot contract. The day I sign onto you guys’ payroll again is the day you better have me inspected for rabies.” He turned to the door. “You know my phone number,” he said morosely by way of parting, and went.
Chapter Ten
Friday in Moscow the snow was falling as if dumped out of shovels and scattered by big-bladed fans. The Chaika moved along the Official Cars Only lanes with its wipers thumping, snow building into little cakes in the lower corners of the windshield. Inside the car Rykov felt overheated, partly because of his overcoat and partly because of the big meal he had put under his belt at the Aragvi.
He had stuffed himself to the belching point with canakhi and shashlik and Georgian tea and watched Yashin pick at his chakhokhbili; the sword dancer had whirled by, fast pirouettes with the sword pointed at his own body, and the music had been high and frantic, and through it all Yashin had maintained his ascetic detachment and infuriated Rykov. Men without passions were abominations.
At the height of the featured dance Yashin had removed his rimless glasses to polish them. “My dear Viktor, surely you know the old Japanese proverb, ‘You can see another’s arse but not your own.’” The wintry glance, never quite a smile. “What you propose is a Carthaginian peace. Annihilation of peoples. Really I think you need a rest.”
“Comrade First Secretary, the news from China—”
“I have seen all your evidences and I am not impressed. Xenophobia is the root of the Chinese character, but there’s no reason for us to have it—it is not a communicable disease. Viktor, you suffer from messianic fantasies, you wish to think of yourself as the supreme player in an immense global chess game, you are obsessed by the notion that if power is disused it may atrophy and therefore it must be exercised—and since we are not at war with anyone at the moment we must go to war with someone.”
But the dark winter of Asia was ending; the Chinese war machine stirred with rumbling vibration; there were no responsible leaders to halt it: China was a country which boasted of its ancient civilization yet remained politically adolescent, full of immature ambitions to achieve rule over all of Asia. Yashin had rested his case on the supremacy of the Soviet retaliatory plan and that was that. In the Kremlin they made a Plan and the Plan was all, the Plan was always right and invincible, only people could be mistaken, and if people made mistakes they were punished. Yashin’s plan was the wrong plan and when it proved wrong Yashin would be punished—but that was no satisfaction: that would be too late.
Well, then, I too have a plan.
The Chaika crawled past the Moskva Hotel. Rykov sat drawn into himself with his fist locked over the clubbed handle of his walking stick. His scowl was filled with weltschmerz. They were never going to get a full and clear-cut revelation of precise plans from the Chinese, a people whose politics had been steeped in secrecy and intrigue and prestidigitatious misdirection for thousands of years.
Rykov was chief of KGB for the excellent reason that he had not only a brilliant mind but also the peculiar intuitive genius it took to bridge the rational gap between two separate clues that could appear to have no logical connection. And he was getting his clues every day from his mother-daughter team in Peking. In Beria’s day one word from the KGB would have been enough to galvanize the Soviet Far Eastern forces into intensive war preparations. But today there was no one with initiative enough to commit the nation to an attitude of preemptive self-defense. The ruling troika contained three men none of whom dared move before the others, and as a result there was no capability for instant reaction or decisive policy-making. They blundered into situations and they lacked a clear and single will.
He had thrashed it out with them singly and by twos and in group, and it was always the same. They were afraid of one another. They were afraid of making a mistake. They were above all afraid of the United States: “If we a
ttack China the United States will come into it against us, on China’s side. We can’t afford that.” Over and over again. In the first place it was a dubious supposition: Washington, forewarned but not given enough time to react, might stay out of it altogether. But assuming it was true (and it probably was): there was still a way to forestall it.
Last night he had asked Kazakov, “Suppose I could guarantee that in the event of a war between China and the USSR the United States will come in as our ally. Regardless of who started the war. In that event what would you say?”
But Kazakov like the others had berated him for his primitive militarism: “You are living in the past, Viktor. Can you not comprehend the devastation of a nuclear exchange? Wars must be confined to limited conventional scope and total war must be avoided at whatever cost.”
“Suppose the United States were to initiate a preemptive nuclear strike against China. What then?”
“You talk impossibilities, Viktor.”
At ten minutes to three the Chaika reached the big gray building and Rykov walked across the curb and entered his kingdom with a dusting of snow on his hat and shoulders. It matted itself and melted slowly as he limped along the corridor taking the uneasy salutes of subordinates. A major wearing stars on his red epaulets stopped him in the hall to talk about the reemergence of the samizdat magazine Novy Mir and Rykov brushed him aside. The samizdat publications were vile and seditious and it was KGB’s job to suppress them but in recent years it had become like trying to stamp out armies of ants with a boot heel. Samizdat, the underground press, mimeographed and circulated surreptitiously from hand to hand, denigrated the nation and the Party. Some of them had Western assistance. They promulgated the kind of dissidence that had weakened the Russian will and threatened to crumble Russia’s inner strengths. Some of the writers whose work appeared anonymously in samizdat were clever young intellectuals whom the state had feted as cultural heroes—ingrates, traitors, dupes. Rykov was catching up with them one by one but the flood seemed endless. The big Minsk-32 computers analyzed samizdat texts for frequency-of-words and rhythm-of-style to pinpoint the identity of the anonymous authors and in time Rykov always ran them down, but the monster had infinite heads; it was impossible to decapitate it.
It was a grave issue but today he had no time for it—he left the major standing flatfooted in the corridor and limped on toward the lifts. In the bullpens paper tapes writhed on the floors, spilled by automatic typing recorders and decoders. The lift took him up to his own floor; it was quiet here. He went into the great office, hung up his things, sat down at his desk and punched Andrei’s intercom line. “Has the Marshal arrived yet?”
“No. He’s due in five minutes.”
“Bring him straight in.” Rykov switched the machine off and closed his eyes, the better to concentrate his thoughts.
Marshal Grigorenko’s flat beefy face was closed up tight: he distrusted Rykov always.
Andrei ushered Grigorenko into the office and Rykov, as he got up to greet the Marshal, motioned to Andrei to stay.
He got right down to it. “Even at the top of one’s profession there are always men who can destroy you and subordinates who can plot intrigues against you. We’re none of us beyond accountability.”
“Just so,” Grigorenko said.
Rykov said, “You have your own agents in the Chinese People’s Army. What do they tell you?”
“Is KGB now begging the help of GRU?”
“If your information is the same as mine then we must act, Oleg. You must see that.”
“Act how? It isn’t our place to make policy.”
“Please don’t avoid the question. Is your information as alarming as mine?”
“I haven’t seen yours, Comrade.”
“You’ve seen what I’ve presented to Kazakov and Yashin and Tsvetnoy and Strygin. Chug Po and Lo Kai-teh are already fighting between themselves to decide which of them will become chief of state for the new Chinese republic of Mongolia. Fei Yung-tse has already staked out eastern Siberia for himself. The Chinese Cabinet ministers are dividing up the spoils before a shot has been fired; surely you can’t believe they’re only playing hypothetical war games as Comrade Strygin insists? Yuan Tung actually sought to employ one of my own agents to obtain the latest defense charts of Vladivostock—you’ve seen that report. The Seventeenth Chinese Army has been moving into underground shelters a battalion at a time at Hulun. Practice exercises? Strygin is blind because he wants not to see—but you and I can’t afford that luxury. Oleg, it is you and I who will be purged when the war is over and the troika seeks scapegoats to punish.”
“Go on.”
At least he had the big oaf’s attention. “In the mountains east of Ulan Bator six of China’s most senior and experienced missile scientists have surfaced with full-scale staffs. Rail shipments into all those forward offensive-missile-site areas have quadrupled in the past week. They’ve moved two hundred long-range heavy bombers into the Lop Nor area. General Chi Thian has stockpiled enough food and matériel in underground lead-lined bunkers to keep his army fed and equipped in their bomb shelters for two months without resupply. You’ve seen it all.”
“And what is it you want of me?”
“There’s going to be a war. Is GRU ready for it?”
Grigorenko sat with hands on knees, the weight of his belly sagging against his thighs. “You can be sure we are ready. Three-quarters of a million men, seventy Warsaw Pact divisions deployed along the border.”
“And three million Chinese facing them.”
“We have ten missiles for their one.”
“Russia has been defeated by the Tartar hordes of Genghiz Khan, the Swedes, the Poles, the Japanese—beaten by everyone, because we’ve always been too slow to react, always been too backward.”
“Comrade, they haven’t made a single move toward breaking off diplomatic relations. They’re only shaking a fist at us, hoping we’ll back away from the contested frontier areas rather than risk war. If they seriously intended to bomb us, surely they wouldn’t be so obvious about it.”
It was the troika line, straight out of Agitprop and Pravda and Izvestia. They were all desperately anxious to believe it was only a Chinese bluff. If you wanted badly enough to believe a thing, you did believe it.
Rykov said, “But let’s assume that they are in fact ready to attack us. Assume further that they do attack. Take an arbitrary date—Sunday the seventh of April. Two days from today. GRU carries a heavy responsibility for defense. Are you ready for that?”
The Marshal rubbed his chin. “You’re talking foolishness,” he said disagreeably.
“It’s only a hypothetical question. Answer it.”
“You know full well our nuclear bases are ready at all times to retaliate instantly.”
“Yes. To rain nuclear missiles on China’s major cities and missile bases—but suppose China’s missiles have already been fired and the central Maoist elite has fled the cities and is holed up in bombproof shelters under the mountains of Lushan in central China. So our retaliation does nothing more than kill off a few hundred million of the little yellow bastards, which does no great injury since they’re over-populated anyhow. And when both sides have exhausted their nuclear arsenals the Chinese ultimate weapon comes into play—the individual footsoldier. Chinese tanks roll into Mongolia and Siberia. Chinese troops invade Soviet territory and overrun our bases. They have three times our manpower—ten times our manpower if we restrict the discussion to our forces in the Far East. Now I’m asking you, are we prepared for that?”
“You’re saying footsoldiers will be able to fight effectively over territory that has been devastated by nuclear weapons.”
“Not necessarily. The missiles of both sides are aimed primarily at cities and military concentrations.”
“You forget fallout.”
“One has to assume that life goes on. You’re evading me, Comrade Marshal. Why?”
“Because I think your hypothesis is untenable.�
��
“Just for one moment assume it isn’t. Then what is your answer?”
“You’re trying to goad me into admitting we’re in an unsatisfactory state of war preparation. It isn’t true. Our troops are better equipped than theirs, better trained, better led.”
“That’s not the issue. The issue is their level of alertness. The speed with which they can be mobilized. In the event the Chinese launch a full-scale invasion forty-eight hours from now, will our forces be able to respond swiftly enough to stop the Chinese in their tracks and fling them back into China? That’s the only question I’m asking you, and it’s the only question you haven’t answered.”
“I can only answer it by saying that if war comes, it won’t come in the way you postulate.”
“In other words our troops are prepared to counteract any small-scale exploratory probes the Chinese may send into the disputed territories, but if it came to an all-out invasion we would not be ready to repel it.”
“That’s not what I mean either.”
“Then say what you mean.”
Grigorenko leaned forward. “You’re trying to trap me. If China rains nuclear missiles on us they will not follow it up by invading Soviet territory with ground troops. They will wait for us to invade them, because that’s the way they have always fought. China swallows all its invaders. China has never invaded alien territory.”
“I submit Tibet.”
“A triviality, and beside the point. My information confirms that in the unlikely event of wholesale war between our countries the Chinese will simply wait to ensnare us in their net. On their own home ground they can defeat us. On our ground they can’t. They know that. They won’t invade. Now on those terms I can answer your question: yes, we are prepared for it. We are prepared for the Chinese to invite us to penetrate their frontiers with mass armies. Our preparation is in the nature of rejecting the Chinese invitation. If war comes we will not make the mistake of marching our armies into China’s rural countryside. We will not allow them to draw us into their brand of fighting where every Chinese farmer becomes a guerrilla resistance soldier. We will spearhead directly into their centers of industrial production and military communications. We will destroy their productivity and smash their industry and then we will withdraw to our own borders and wait for them to sign a peace.”
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