The Threat

by David Poyer

  “Sik’in sin! She is your wife? You are damn lucky sailor.”

  “That’s true,” Dan said.

  A soldier held out a tray of vodkas, brandies, sliced cheese and sausage, and caviar. Gaponenko grabbed greedily. Dan rubbed his mouth, smelling the booze up close.

  “You here for conference? What you think of our average Russian house?” His former captor hooted, waving his glass at the masonry and chandeliers and architecture.

  “Very impressive.”

  “Germans destroyed it all. What could not evacuate, they destroyed. Blew up palace. Blew up hydraulic works. Melted statues. What you see here”—he swept a paw, and Dan saw he was quite drunk—“twenty years, but we build all again. Did you Americanyets really think we wanted another war?”

  “You were building a lot of missiles, too.”

  “Ah, only defend, only defend. Russians peace-loving people. There’s my boss. Let’s go meet my boss.”

  Grabbed around the neck, Dan was dragged willy-nilly into a ring that lurched unevenly to let him in. All as bombed as Gaponenko. The “boss” had three stars on his shoulder boards. Gaponenko called him viz admiralya. Dan caught his own name. Their eyes snapped to his when Gaponenko said, “On naznatye na White House tep’yer.” The boss—Yermakov—asked something. Gaponenko replied placatingly, but it didn’t seem to work. He shook his head at Dan, looking chastened.

  “So, you think you have defeated us,” the admiral said. He didn’t sound happy.

  “I think both sides have defeated war,” Dan said.

  The other officers guffawed when this was translated. But they sounded hostile. He was beginning to think this wasn’t a good idea when Yermakov snagged his sleeve. Dragged him close, and said in English better than Gaponenko’s, “You think you have defeated us. That there is only one great power now. But alone, you will become everyone’s target. This is the dialectic of history.”

  “We’ll be smart enough to tread lightly. But I don’t want to argue with you, sir.”

  “Don’t want to argue? Then listen! De Bari thinks he can threaten Russia. Make us destroy arms. Well. You can tell your people this president will not be so for long. Then we will step back into the light. Regain all we lost. We will not bow. We will restore the might of our armed services. Tell that to your people, so they do not make further mistakes.”

  Dan was confused until he realized that by “this president” the three-star must mean not De Bari, but Yeltsin. An aide put a restraining hand on the admiral’s arm. The senior officer shook it off. Raised his voice. “He will not be there! It is us you will have to deal with. You will learn this soon.”

  Gaponenko pulled him away. “The viz admiralya is very potted,” he said. “Too much khanyahk o eysse. Sorry to subject you to such no-culture behavior.”

  Dan said that was all right, but the captain begged Dan not to report the conversation. He didn’t want his boss to get in trouble. Dan nodded, half agreeing, and Gaponenko, looking worried, moved off.

  * * *

  He caught up to Blair and pried the hopefuls off her. It was getting late. But they were in one of the great palaces of the world. “Let’s go for a walk,” he pressed her. “See the gardens.”

  “It’s awfully cold out there.” But at last he got her into her coat.

  They walked beside a long pool, drained except for black ice at the bottom. The fountains were shrouded with canvas. The sea wind breathed of the imminence of Russian winter. He looked up and halted, watching gauzy draperies of delicate light ripple against the unwinking stars.

  “The aurora,” she said, and he made out her face, upturned, just barely visible in the unearthly fire.

  After a time he said, “I just had an interesting conversation.”

  They walked on, the wind buffeting them as he told her about it. “That sounds like something you should report,” she said.

  “I don’t think so. Some disappointed admiral shooting his mouth off?”

  Blair said she meant the reactions of the younger officers, the colonel types, when he’d threatened Yeltsin. “There’ve been rumors. Some of the bureaucrats are trying to persuade the generals to turn back the clock. Restore their privileges. That’s why I’m not sure De Bari’s going in the right direction, trying to downsize.”

  He blinked. “That’s administration policy, isn’t it?”

  “Just because it’s policy doesn’t mean I don’t have my doubts. Gerry Edwards thinks maybe it’d be better to wait a few years, make sure they’ve really changed.”

  “The veep? I hear he’s kind of out of step with the rest of the party.”

  “He’s out on the right wing, if there is a right wing. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s wrong.”

  Dan wasn’t really paying attention. He slipped his hand under heavy cloth, discovered within a velvet warmth. He nuzzled her ear. “Let’s go back to the hotel.”

  “You feel like it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, we have to try to find out.”

  “I don’t mean just that,” she said quietly. “I’ve been trying to bring this up for a while.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The worse things get, the less you say. Maybe that’s good at sea, but between two people, it’s counterproductive.”

  “Guilty.”

  “It’s not funny. We don’t have much time together. When we do, and I try to talk about something important, you dismiss it or change the subject. As if you’re embarrassed. Or don’t really care.” She looked out over the darkness. “I guess I’m just losing my illusions about us. And that’s not easy to deal with.”

  That hurt. “What’s important to me is you and Nan, and my duty to my country and the people I lead. Those are my priorities. If you’re talking about my career again, that comes out at around item five or six. It’s just not that all-fucking-important to me.”

  “You think it’s easy trying to close bases? Keep the machine running on less and less money, and the brass fighting me every step of the way? But since what happened on your ship … you’re someplace else. I’ve tried to not add to your problems. But there’s something going on I don’t understand.”

  He wanted to punch the stone wall. She didn’t understand at all. “I’m just trying to hold myself together, Blair. I have to control what I think, what I say. I feel guilty. I feel angry. If I just let it all hang out—”

  “I’m trying to allow for that. I know you’re trying not to take the drugs, and I respect that. And I guess not being able to … get it up, can’t be that great for a guy. Though obviously I have no idea. I certainly won’t find out from you.”

  “You want to dissolve the partnership, fucking tell me. Okay? I don’t want to be the last one to know.”

  “Yeah—you sound angry now. At least that’s real.”

  “It’s all real. It’s just that it’s not stuff you have to chew over and over.”

  “I just believe in talking about things instead of ignoring them. So, when you want to talk—well, come back and we’ll talk. But till then—there’s not much point to it. Is there?”

  Then she was gone. Gone from the sea-cold and silent shifting aurora, back toward the earthly glittering inside. Her heels tapping across stone laid back when Russia had been an autocracy. The property of one man. Before it had become the property of all.

  * * *

  “Testing. Testing. Can you hear us in back?”

  The conference hall at the Pribaltyskaya was not exactly crowded, but there was enough of an audience that he felt nervous. Then thought: Get real. After all you’ve been through, what’s a little public speaking? He and the other conferees took their seats, eyeing each other like strange dogs shoved into the same cage. The Ukrainian adjusted his little tricolor. Dan remembered White’s instructions, and adjusted his own banner so it was clearly visible. The reporters and photogs in the front row were focusing on him. The hot lights felt good.

  T
he heating in Blair’s room hadn’t worked very well, and the wind, whistling and buffeting the warped casements all night long, had made him dream of the sea. He’d been on some ship that was no ship he’d ever served on and at the same time all the ships he’d ever served on. He’d been the skipper. Running, for some terrible but unknown reason, at full speed through the fog. Filled with dread, waiting for the crash, the impact …

  Blair had been gone when he woke. He’d made it through another few pages of the briefing materials over a skimpy breakfast. The coffee was water-weak, and when he asked for more the waiter snorted in disbelief. So he felt both jumpy and not very alert. Two men were setting up a slide projector that looked as if it had been designed to bolt onto a tank.

  “I had expected Dr. Solas…?” offered a cultured Oxbridge accent from the seat next to him.

  “Not feeling well,” Dan said.

  “The czar’s revenge? I hear it’s going around.”

  He didn’t elaborate, not knowing if Solas’s affliction was public knowledge or not. “Dan Lenson. Stand-in, at short notice.” They shook hands.

  The chair opened with a long statement, which Dan was able to follow in simultaneous translation through earphones. Droningly factual, detailing what had existed and where, what had been destroyed or deactivated, what had been agreed on and what deferred to a later date. All nuclear weapons had been removed from Eastern Europe, the Baltic republics, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Unfortunately, Russia was undergoing a period of insecurity and economic instability and could offer little in the way of resources to her former republics.

  Dan had been stunned, reading through the materials, at how much the Soviets had left behind, and how little attention had been devoted to its security until very recently indeed. There’d been finger-pointing, but no action. The second speaker, from Belarus, was in that tradition. He sounded by turns apologetic and belligerent. The new republics had pressing challenges. The Russians had treated them as dumping grounds. The international community owed them recompense for their suffering.

  The chairman put his oar in here. Weapons had been based in the republics not to “protect Russia,” but to defend the entire state, which had then included the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. The other answered angrily; his country had been occupied, not defended. Nor had the Russians honored their promises to permit Belarus to monitor the destruction process, to guarantee weapons were really being destroyed.

  Dan cleared his throat, exchanging glances with the Briton, who interposed himself, attempting to move the discussion past recriminations. After muttered imprecations both sides subsided.

  Time for the U.S. statement. Which he had in front of him, in fourteen-point caps. Apparently Solas was nearsighted. The chairman got his name right introducing him, though someone had finessed his title to “Mr. Daniel V. Lenson, U.S. National Security Council, Liaison for Threat Reduction.” He read out eight minutes of bland assurances of how important reducing the nuclear threat was. Unlike the old man’s impassioned declamation the night before, this read like oatmeal. Still, it felt good, putting it on the record. It ended with the announcement that Washington was pledging $12.5 million to the destruction and removal program as part of the president’s Threat Reduction Initiative.

  The representative from Ukraine spoke next. She said serenely that all nuclear weapons would be gone from Ukrainian territory by the end of the current year. The quadripartite U.S.-Russian-Kazakh-Belarusian declaration to be signed as the capstone to parallel negotiations to this conference would underline that commitment.

  The tone changed when the delegate from Kazakhstan got the mike. He shouted directly at the chairman, in a threatening snarl. Dan watched faces alter as the translation filtered through the earphones.

  Kazakhstan had acquiesced in the Lisbon Protocol to relinquish all strategic weapons over a seven-year period. It had also agreed, in principle, to the removal of hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons on its territory. The Kazakh government had implemented robust security. Rumors of unguarded weapons were false. However, aid promised by Russia, the United States, and others had never come. Extensive areas of radiological contamination from tests and accidents remained, especially around Semipalatinsk. Thousands of citizens suffered from radiation-induced cancers. The materials in the warheads were valuable property. Nor had Russia honored promises to allow Kazakhs to ensure that evacuated weapons were really being destroyed. As had also been pointed out by his friend from Belarus.

  Therefore, President Nazarbayev had decided not to authorize the removal of the remaining R36M missiles from Kazakhstan. The country did not intend to use the weapons, but had to keep in mind its own security in an unstable region. Kazakhstan needed assistance and compensation, and a public apology for Russian actions there as well. Until these conditions were met, the missiles would stay. He spared a glare for Dan and the Chinese panelist too.

  Flipping through his references, Dan saw that the R36M was known in the West as the SS-18.

  With that knowledge came dread. A huge fourth-generation ICBM with ten one-megaton warheads, the R36M was bigger than the U.S. Peacekeeper and housed in deep, hardened silos. The M2 was a late-eighties variant, which meant they’d be both accurate and in decent shape.

  Kazakhstan had been left with 104 of them at the breakup. If it kept them, a poor, Islamic, and increasingly corrupt and authoritarian country would wield a massive and invulnerable nuclear arsenal for many years to come.

  He didn’t think this was a good idea, and judging by the silence after the Kazakh’s speech, no one else did either. The chairman looked furious but wasn’t saying a word. Looking along the table, Dan didn’t see anyone else reaching for the mike.

  Reluctantly, he pulled it toward him, reminding himself to speak calmly and to accuse no one of anything. To feel his way forward, the way he’d seen the State people doing in the other panels. They usually started off by rephrasing what somebody they disagreed with had said, in the passive voice.

  “The, uh … distinguished delegate from the Republic of Kazakhstan has advanced several reasons for abrogating his country’s obligations under the Lisbon Protocol, which was signed by President Nazarbayev signed”—he glanced at his notes—“three years ago. If I can summarize. They are, that assurances of foreign help in cleaning up contamination and to bring medical assistance to those ill as a result of testing activities have not been followed through on; that turning the weapons over would be divesting Kazakhstan of valuable resources; that they were not confident that weapons turned over were actually being destroyed; and finally, that retaining the weapons would enhance the republic’s security.”

  “And an apology,” murmured the Brit.

  “And an apology from the Russian Federation, successor state to the Soviet Union.”

  The Kazakh nodded briefly, arms folded.

  “With the chairman’s permission?” Dan glanced at the Russian general, who was sitting with arms folded too. No apologies from that quarter.

  He cleared his throat, wishing they had water to sip, to stall with, while he figured out what the hell he was doing. “Uh, addressing those issues one by one. First. Far from ameliorating the situation left behind by previous regimes, maintaining a nuclear force will soak up funds needed for those very tasks of decontamination and health care. Far from being valuable resources, though the fissionable materials may have a certain economic value, these advanced missiles and associated systems will probably prove a liability, not an asset, over the long run, because of maintenance costs.

  “Holding back weapons is not the way to assure yourself that those taken out of service will be destroyed. Working with the UN and other concerned agencies may be a better way to move toward that goal.

  “Finally, the idea that nuclear weapons bring ‘stability’ in some form may be a misapprehension. Certainly both Russia and the U.S. can testify to that outcome. Twenty thousand–plus warheads on either side didn’t seem to bring any more stability, or security,
than when there were a hundred. Or maybe, none.”

  He didn’t know how well the translators were keeping up. He couldn’t tell from the expressions in the front rows. His fellow panelists looked interested, though. So he took a breath and plunged on.

  “Yet the concern about security is real. It seems to me the way forward may be to address the delegate’s concerns in this area. Maybe we need to discuss a joint guarantee of his country’s security. Perhaps by the U.S., Russia, and possibly China as well.”

  After a moment of silence the Kazakh said something, which Dan got a moment later through the headphones: “A guarantee? From exactly what?”

  Dan referred to his briefing materials, having found a sentence he liked. “Against threats of use of nuclear weapons, threats of conventional force, threats of resort to force, and economic pressure.”

  He was not quite done with this sentence when he caught undisguised horror on the faces of both the British and the Chinese delegates. The Brit was whispering, “Not on your Nelly.” The Russian had gone white. The Kazakh was still sitting impassively, listening to the translation.

  Dan sucked in his breath, realizing he’d done something wrong, but not knowing what.

  Both the Chinese and the Kazakh were beginning to speak when his Oxbridge neighbor put in, having wrestled the mike out of Dan’s hands, “Of course, this is offered on a speculative basis, for discussion by the appropriate authorities. I believe that is all the United States’ participant is placing on the table. And Her Majesty’s government would no doubt be glad to assist in such discussions, in the interests of fostering mutual understanding. Should the responsible principals desire our participation.”

  Dan wasn’t stupid, so when their eyes switched back to him he said meekly, “Uh, that’s right. On a … speculative basis. For discussion by the appropriate authorities.”