“Mr. President, that region is mostly desert. The Russians don’t have anything out there except troops and the kinds of mobile tactical weapons that usually accompany an invasion force, so it’s hardly worth the candle. And I’m sure the Chinese won’t be any happier having their refineries melted down by an American warhead than if the Russians just annexed them.”
“Okay, Frank.” Faircliff smiled and put his hand on his son-inlaw’s shoulder. “It was just a fugitive thought. So I assume the gist of what you’re telling me is that there’s no way we can intervene directly?”
“That’s right. If it comes to a fight, the Chinese are on their own.”
“Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
. . . . .
But over the next few days it became apparent that it probably would come to that. Langley was like a madhouse; nearly all their best sources were reporting the same conclusion—Moscow had decided on some sort of final reckoning with the Chinese. They seemed to want a war.
It was dreary. George brought in batches of coded cables, all pointing in the same direction. “Usually it doesn’t work this neatly,” he said, slumping into a chair. “When all our finks start singing us the same sad song, it generally means that we’re having something planted on us. But these people are just too well placed; they couldn’t all have gone bad at once.”
“Are these the ones I wrote up in my famous report? You’re right; they’ve been too reliable for too long.”
Timmler nodded. “Precisely. So everybody in Russia must know about the invasion. I’m surprised we haven’t read about it in Pravda.”
“Have you checked with anybody else? Is everybody getting the same word?”
“You mean our continental allies?” There was a smile and a shake of the head, as if to say that all hope from that direction was long dead. “Don’t be naive. Nobody talks to us anymore. Since we got our lovely new charter and have to clear every move through half a dozen different congressional committees, nobody trusts us with the name of their cleaning lady. I don’t blame them a bit, but it’s an arrangement that makes the Kremlin very happy, let me tell you. They’ve even stopped sharing with each other for fear some of it might leak to us.”
“How very nice for Moscow.”
Austen got up from behind his desk because he was beginning to feel restless. He went to the small refrigerator concealed behind a panel in the wall and fetched himself a bottle of ginger ale.
“You want one?” he asked, holding it up by the neck, but Timmler shook his head. As far as anyone knew, George never drank anything except Sanka.
“Have you checked the satellite photos from the last China flyover? What kinds of numbers are we getting from there?”
“An augmented division.” Timmler shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, What did you expect? “Some air cover—they won’t need much against the Chinese. Lots of ground-to-ground stuff. I don’t think they’re taking the whole thing very seriously; that’s just a glorified raiding party they’ve put together for themselves.”
“And this is what’s got the Moscow operation all twitchy? An augmented division?” Austen frowned. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“I know—that’s what worries me. You hear one thing, you see another. I’ll always tend to believe the satellites over some disaffected bureaucrat. I just find it a little disturbing that all our Russian sources are having the same scary dream.” He raised his eyebrows and pantomimed a whistle.
“So you have the impression the Russians don’t plan to move in for keeps?” Austen asked, almost out of embarrassment. “I’ll settle for a best guess.”
“No, I don’t. I don’t know what they plan, but if they’re thinking of staying they’ll need to bring in more than they have so far, and there aren’t any signs of that. They’re not fools; it isn’t Soviet policy to send Custer off to the Little Bighorn. Whatever they’ve got in mind, it’ll be in and out. I give the whole thing three weeks, start to finish.”
As Austen poured his ginger ale into a glass, he found that his hands were shaking. His throat was even dry, as if his tongue might cleave to the roof of his mouth.
Three weeks. A little spat between a couple of communist countries who probably deserved each other. It hardly seemed like a good enough reason to blow up the world.
. . . . .
Almost as soon as he reached the garrison town of Noyon, eighty kilometers from the Chinese border, Rodian Prokofyich Serebryakov came down with a mild case of diarrhea. He had had a delicate stomach from childhood, and something of the kind happened to him at the beginning of every stretch of foreign duty. It was the food, of course, and the fact that the local soldiers who did the kitchen work could not be persuaded to wash their hands. It was misery while it lasted, but he knew he would be back to his duties within a few days.
After the first really bad day, when he felt confident enough about the state of his bowels to risk walking around a bit, he was struck by the oddly stable atmosphere of the place; it wasn’t a bit like a garrison readying itself for combat. The soldiers, even the thick-faced, imbecilic Mongolians, who could be counted on to desert at the first prospect of battle, were still being given twenty-four-hour passes and were still coming back well within the time, invariably drunk and frequently infected with the terrifying local venereal diseases against which nothing, apparently, could warn them. Even the officers paid little attention to anything except housekeeping concerns and the poor quality of the mail service. Except among the new arrivals, there weren’t even any rumors of mobilization. No one expected anything to happen.
The last time Serebryakov had been in this part of the world it was summer. The temperature was above forty centigrade before noon, and twice a day there were sandstorms from which escape was, as a practical matter, impossible. You would sit in the slat-board officers’ mess and watch that fine, bone-colored grit working its way across the floor in little undulating waves. It got into everything. The food, one’s ears, the folds of one’s underwear—life was a torment.
But it was just possible that the beginning of spring was worse. He had arrived on the fifteenth of March, and it rained the better part of each day of the week he had spent in camp. Everything seemed to be rotting, and the earth had been turned to mud with such perfect uniformity that the paths from one building to the next were covered with planks for people to walk on. In Russia, even in the dead of winter, it was at least theoretically possible to stay warm, but not here. Here you spent every moment soaked through to the skin; the very tent walls were spongy with damp. And worse, there was no distraction. There was nothing but your misery to assure you of your continued bodily existence. Dounia was right—it was time he retired.
Everything would have been supportable if he could have believed that, perhaps as soon as the rains stopped, they would move against China. . . But it was obvious that this was an army that would never see combat. It was not even intended to.
The fuel depot was clear enough evidence for anyone. Serebryakov was a tank commander; he had the hemorrhoids to prove it. And tanks do not run on Marxism and yak piss, so one of the first places he visited when his diarrhea subsided was the fuel depot.
The gasoline drums, approximately a fifteen-minute walk from the camp gate, were arranged in neat squares perhaps forty meters across, far enough away from each other so that a rocket fired into the middle of one square would not set them all off. All were in mud deep enough to cover your hand up to the wrist, and none were stacked; they would have made an easy target from the air.
Then, with the uncharming suddenness one came to expect in Mongolia, it began to rain. Serebryakov was about to begin running clumsily back to camp when something about the sound attracted his attention. The rain was coming down very hard, and it struck the gasoline drums with a decided ping. He stopped, went over to one, balanced his hands against the rim, and gave it a shake. It moved quite easily. Just to be sure, he tapped the side with his middle knuckle, going down almos
t to the ground. The thing was empty. A few moments of checking confirmed his suspicion—they all were empty.
All those hundreds of empty gasoline drums—just something to be seen by a satellite or a reconnaissance plane. There probably wasn’t enough gasoline available to move the whole division five hundred meters.
He walked back to camp through the rain, the mud sucking at his boots with sullen obstinacy, and mentally composed the letter to his sister that he would write as soon as he reached his tent.
Beloved Dounia, I think I may be home with you by the middle of summer. . .
. . . . .
By April Fools’ Day the policy of the United States government toward the impending Russian invasion of northwest China was fixed. And it had everybody, right up to the Secretary of State, shaking like a leaf.
Harry Towers, who had been a Professor of political science at the University of Michigan before President-elect Faircliff dragged him to Washington to run Foggy Bottom, was almost beside himself. “For God’s sake, Frank, what does he want to do, preside over the end of the world? Can’t you talk him out of this? He listens to you.”
The two men had left their cars and drivers behind and were walking along a stretch of the Potomac embankment, under the nervous eyes of their bodyguards, who kept a discreet forty feet behind. It had been a cold winter and it was still hanging on, so at six-fifteen in the morning they had the place pretty much to themselves. Neither of them had been anywhere near his home in the last thirty-six hours.
“I’ve been all over it with him,” Austen said resignedly. “He’s made up his mind. In two hours the Soviet ambassador gets called in to hear the ultimatum, and the President goes on television at noon. If the Russians cross over into China. . . Well, you know the scenario as well as I do.”
“But China? Jesus!” Towers swept his fingers through his gray, thinning hair in a way that suggested he really was interested simply in keeping his head from splitting open. “Carter let them get within four hundred miles of the Straits of Hormuz, and our response was to cut off their grain shipments and boycott the fucking Olympic Games. Now they want to blow up a couple of oil refineries so the Chinese won’t forget who they should be afraid of, and Faircliff proposes to start World War Three. What the hell do we care about the goddamned Chinese, Frank? Or is there something out there that I haven’t been told about?”
“No, Harry—there’s nothing out there but sand fleas and heavy crude. Even the Chinese could get along very well without it.”
“Then he really is mad.”
. . . . .
Austen instructed his driver to take him home. He had no more heart for the struggle; he simply wanted to get back to the familiar rooms of his own house, make himself some breakfast, and perhaps catch a few hours of sleep before he was once again called upon to bear witness to the unfolding of the final disaster.
He went upstairs and peeked through the open door of the master bedroom—where the master no longer had a bed—and saw that Dottie was still sound asleep. Why should she be anything else? It was only a few minutes after seven, her antihistamines had made her drowsy, and she hadn’t the faintest idea that the world wasn’t in the best of hands. Dottie was cynical about many things, but not about her father’s capacity to govern. He was a bastard, but he knew what he was doing. Austen wished to God he could believe that much.
He returned to the kitchen, fixed himself a glass of orange juice and three slices of buttered toast, and took them with him into what the real estate lady had called the “family room,” where he promptly fell asleep on the sofa.
“I didn’t want to wake you, but they said on the radio that Daddy was going to make some sort of announcement at noon.”
He opened his eyes and saw her sitting perched on the very edge of the sofa, her hand just touching his shoulder, and he understood at that moment what it was he had been looking for when he had come home.
“Right—thanks,” he said thickly, smiling and trying to wake up at the same time. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. He’s going to tell the country that we’re very likely going to war to protect our good friends the Chinese. I’m sure everyone will be delighted.”
“You don’t sound as if you approve.”
“I don’t, sweetheart.” He patted her cheek as he got up to turn on the television set. “But, you see, he doesn’t listen so good anymore.”
They sat down together, almost touching—it was closer than they had been to each other in perhaps five months—and waited through the last two minutes of some incomprehensible game show before NBC cut to a picture of the presidential seal and John Chancellor told them that the President of the United States was about to make an announcement that was billed by his aides as “of historic importance.”
Within ten seconds, there was Simon, sitting behind the prop desk in the White House media room, resting on his elbows with his hands folded in front of him. “My fellow Americans, I wish to speak to you this afternoon on a matter of grave national—indeed, international—importance. . .”
Jesus, Austen found himself thinking, who could have written this drivel for him?
“At this moment, along the Chinese-Mongolian border, the Soviet Union is massing elements of its Second Army, with the intention. . .”
It was very solemn, very presidential. Probably, if you weren’t familiar with the numbers, it was even very convincing. It was also scary; Faircliff was issuing an ultimatum, almost a dare. The Russians couldn’t possibly understand it as anything less than a threat of nuclear war.
“We must regard the territorial integrity of China as vital to our national interest. . .”
It was then that Austen became aware that Dottie had slipped her hand inside his arm; possibly she was unaware of it herself. He let it be and hoped she wouldn’t notice.
“And so now all that is left to us is to await events. I know that, until the current crisis is resolved, this country can rely on the courage and the patience—and the prayers—of all its citizens. Good afternoon, and God bless you all.”
Austen got up to turn the set off. He didn’t want to hear what the boys in the newsroom thought about Faircliff’s little fireside chat.
Above all, he didn’t want to see any instant replay. The whole thing—the announcement, the presentation, the text—looked and sounded like something that ham Diederich had pulled together when no one was watching. Simon had been awful. And, besides, it was too terrifying to bear thinking about.
“Does he mean it?” Dottie asked, looking up at him from the sofa, her brown eyes large and moist with perfectly understandable fear. Probably all over the country people had that same look on their faces.
“He means it. Welcome to the Faircliff administration.”
At that precise moment the telephone rang. There was a receiver on the coffee table, but it was three or four seconds before Austen could nerve himself to answer.
“Frank, is that you?” It was Timmler, of course.
“What is it, George? I’ll be over in ten minutes.”
“Relax—it isn’t about the China thing. I just had something interesting to tell you. Are you on a safe phone?”
No, he wasn’t. Only the telephone in his office was connected to the scrambler, but he wasn’t sure he could wait.
“Go ahead and tell me, George. Just be cautious.”
“Okay. You remember old Yegorov—our political prisoner emeritus? His nursing home was firebombed about four this morning.”
In one of the back rooms of Austen’s mind a light went on. He couldn’t have said why, but somehow George’s news struck him as terribly important.
“Did they get him?” he asked, wondering why he was so certain it had been an assassination attempt, aimed at that one single person. After all, there could be other explanations. “George, is he dead?”
“We aren’t sure, but we don’t think so. We also know he couldn’t have set the fire himself, but they haven’t yet found a body. They’re still look
ing.”
“I’ll be right there.”
III
What would come to be known as the “April Fools’ Crisis” was suddenly over. Within forty-eight hours satellite photos indicated that the Russian military concentration along the Chinese border was beginning to break up. Pravda, of course, denied that there had ever been any aggressive intent and painted the American President as an irresponsible warmonger, but the effect was simply to underline for everyone the indisputable fact that they had, indeed, backed down.
It was the Cuban missile crisis all over again. At home and abroad Simon Faircliff had become a hero, and if a few of the Western allies, and even a few members of his own government, wondered what could have possessed him to run such an enormous risk for a thousand square miles or so of remote Asian desert, their voices were drowned in the general applause. It was the beginning of Faircliff’s magic popularity; he seemed to have some special knack for making things turn out right.
But long before most people’s television sets had cooled down, before the country had even had time to absorb the shock of that first announcement, Frank Austen found himself with other things to worry about.
“They’re sure he wasn’t caught in the fire?”
George Timmler shook his head. “They’re not sure, but they don’t think so. They’ve got twenty-three bodies, and most of them have been identified. Yegorov isn’t among them.”
Timmler had called from a public telephone booth and came over in his own car to pick Austen up. It had started to rain; big, soft drops were falling against his windshield, and the tires made a swishing sound against the asphalt road. None of the trees had begun to put out leaves yet, but somehow that stretch of highway still managed to seem shaded, almost gloomy.
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