by Tom Clancy
“But they can’t control the rumors that come across the border,” said Ritter. “And the stories their soldiers tell when they come home from service there—and in Germany, and in Czechoslovakia, and in Hungary, and what they hear on Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.” CIA controlled the first of those outlets directly, and, while the other was theoretically almost independent, that was a fiction nobody believed. Ritter himself had a great deal of input on both propaganda arms of the American government. The Russians understood and respected good agitprop.
“How squeezed do you suppose they feel?” Moore wondered aloud.
“Just two or three years ago, they thought they were on the crest of the wave,” Greer announced. “Our economy was in the toilet with inflation and we had gas lines, the Iran mess. They’d just got Nicaragua to drop into their lap. Our national morale was bad, and . . .”
“Well, that’s changing, thank God,” Moore went on for him. “Full reversal?” he asked. It was too much to hope for, but at heart Arthur Moore was an optimist—otherwise, how could he be DCI?
“We’re heading that way, Arthur,” Ritter said. “They’re slow to catch on. They are not the most agile of thinkers. That’s their greatest weakness. The top dogs are wedded to their ideology to the point that they can’t see around it. You know, we can hurt these bastards—hurt ’em bad—if we can analyze their weaknesses thoroughly and come up with a way to exploit them.”
“You really think so, Bob?” the DDI asked.
“I don’t think it—I damned well know it!” the DDO shot back. “They are vulnerable, and best of all, they don’t yet know that they are vulnerable. It’s time to do something. We’ve got a President now who’ll back our play if we can come up with something good enough for him to invest his political capital. Congress is so afraid of him, they won’t stand in the way.”
“Robert,” the DCI said, “it sounds to me like you’ve got something rattling up your sleeve.”
Ritter thought for a few seconds before going on. “Yes, Arthur, I do. I’ve been thinking about this since they brought me in from the field eleven years ago. I haven’t written a single word of it down.” He didn’t have to explain why. Congress could subpoena any piece of paper in the building—well, almost any piece—but not something carried only in a man’s mind. But perhaps this was the time to set it down. “What is the Soviets’ fondest wish?”
“To bring us down,” Moore answered. That didn’t exactly require a Nobel-class intellect.
“Okay, what is our fondest wish?”
Greer took that one. “We aren’t allowed to think in those terms. We want to find a modus vivendi with them.” That was what The New York Times said, anyway, and wasn’t that the voice of the nation? “Okay, Bob. Spit it out.”
“How do we attack them?” Ritter asked. “And by that I mean nail the bastards right where they live, hurt them—”
“Bring them down?” Moore asked.
“Why the hell not?” Ritter demanded.
“Is it possible?” the DCI asked, interested that Ritter was thinking along such lines.
“Well, Arthur, if they can aim that big a gun at us, why can’t we do it to them?” Ritter had the bit in his teeth now. “They send money into political groups in our country to try and make it hard on our political process. They have antinuclear demonstrations all across Europe, calling to eliminate our Theater Nuclear Weapons while they rebuild theirs. We can’t even leak what we know about that to the media—”
“And if we did, the media wouldn’t print it,” Moore observed. After all, the media didn’t like nuclear weapons either, though it was willing to tolerate Soviet weapons because they, for one reason or another, were not destabilizing. What Ritter really wanted to do, he feared, was to see if the Soviets had influence on the American mass media. But even if it did, such an investigation would bear only poisoned fruit. The media held on to their vision of its integrity and balance as a miser held his hoard. But they knew without having the evidence that KGB did have some power over the American media, because it was so easy to establish and exercise. Flatter them, let them in on supposed secrets, and then become a trusted source. But did the Soviets know how dangerous a game that could be? The American news media did have a few core beliefs, and tampering with them was like tinkering with a live bomb. One wrong move could be expensive. No one in this Seventh-Floor office was under much illusion about the genius of the Russian intelligence service. It had skilled people, certainly, and trained them thoroughly and well, but KGB also had its weaknesses. Like the society it served, KGB applied a political template to reality, and largely ignored the information that didn’t match up with the holes. And so, after months, even years, of painstaking planning and preparation, they often had operations go bad because one of their officers had decided that life in the land of the enemy wasn’t quite so bad as it was portrayed. The cure for a lie was always the truth. It just had a way of smacking you in the face, and the smarter you were, the worse it hurt.
“That’s not important,” Ritter said, surprising both his colleagues.
“Okay, keep going,” Moore ordered.
“What we need to do is examine their vulnerabilities and attack them—with the objective of destabilizing their entire country.”
“That’s a very tall order, Robert,” Moore observed.
“You take an ambition pill, Bob?” Greer asked, intrigued even so. “Our political masters will blanch at that large an objective.”
“Oh, I know.” Ritter held up his hands. “Oh, no, we mustn’t hurt them. They might nuke us. Come on, they’re a hell of a lot less likely to lash out than we are. People, they are afraid of us, a lot more than we are of them. They are afraid of Poland, for Christ’s sake. Why? Because there’s a disease in Poland that their own people might catch. It’s called rising expectations. And rising expectations are the one thing they can’t satisfy. Their economy is as stagnant as stump water. If we give them a little push . . .”
“ ‘All we have to do is kick in the door, and the whole rotten structure will collapse,’ ” Moore quoted. “That’s been said before, but Adolf had himself a nasty little surprise when the snow started falling.”
“He was an idiot who didn’t read his Machiavelli,” Ritter retorted. “First, you conquer ’em, then you murder ’em. Why give them warning?”
“Whereas our current adversaries could have taught old Niccolò a lesson or two,” Greer agreed. “Okay, Bob, exactly what do you propose?”
“A systematic examination of Soviet weaknesses with an eye to exploitation. In simplest terms, we investigate the possible shape of a plan to cause great discomfort to our enemy.”
“Hell, we ought to be doing that all the time anyway,” Moore said, agreeing at once with the concept. “James?”
“I have no problem with it. I can get a team together in my shop to toss some ideas together.”
“Not the usual suspects,” the DDO urged. “We’ll never get anything useful from the regular crew. It’s time to think way the hell outside the usual box.”
Greer thought about that for a moment, then nodded agreement. “Okay, I’ll do the picking. Special project. Pick a name for it?”
“How about INFECTION?” Ritter asked.
“And if it turns into an operation, call it PLAGUE?” the DDI asked with a laugh.
Moore shared in the chuckle. “No, I’ve got it. MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. Something from Poe sounds about right to me.”
“This is really about having the DO take over the DI, isn’t it?” Greer thought aloud.
It wasn’t a serious undertaking yet, just an interesting academic exercise, the same way a corporate trader might look into the fundamental strengths and weaknesses of a company he might want to take over . . . and then, if the circumstances justified, break it up for parts. No, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was the center of their professional world, the Bobby Lee to their Army of the Potomac, the New York Yankees to their Boston Red Sox
. Defeating them, however attractive a dream it might be, was little more than that, a dream.
Even so, Judge Arthur Moore approved of that sort of thinking. If man’s reach didn’t exceed his grasp, then what the hell was heaven for?
APPROACHING TWENTY-THREE hours in Moscow, Andropov was enjoying a cigarette—an American Marlboro, in fact—and sipping at his vodka, the premium Starka brand, which was brown like American bourbon. On the record player was another American product, an LP of Louis Armstrong on the trumpet, blowing some superb New Orleans jazz. Like many Russians, the Chairman of the KGB regarded blacks as little more than monkey cannibals, but the ones in America had invented their own fine art form. He knew that he ought to have been a devotee of Borodin or one of the other classical Russian composers, but there was just something about the vitality of American jazz that rang some sort of bell in his mind.
But the music was merely an aid for thinking. Yuriy Vladimirovich Andropov had heavy brows over his brown eyes and a lantern jaw suggestive of another ethnic origin, but his mind was entirely Russian, which meant part Byzantine, part Tartar, part Mongol, and all focused on achieving his own goals. Of these he had many, but above all: He wanted to be the leader of his country. Someone had to save it, and he knew exactly how much it needed saving. One of the advantages of being Chairman of the Committee for State Security was that few things were secret from him, and this in a society that was replete with lies, where lies were indeed the highest of art forms. This was especially true of the Soviet economy. The command-driven structure of that flaccid colossus meant that every factory—and every factory manager—had a production goal that both it and he had to meet. The goals might or might not be realistic. That didn’t matter. What did matter was that their enforcement was draconian. Not as draconian as they’d once been, of course. In the 1930s and ’40s, failure to meet the goal set forth in The Plan could mean death right here in this very building, because those who failed to meet The Plan were “wreckers,” saboteurs, enemies of the state, traitors in a nation where state treason was a crime worse than any other, and so demanded a penalty worse than any other, usually a .44-caliber bullet from one of the old Smith & Wesson revolvers the czars had purchased from America.
As a result, factory managers had learned that if they couldn’t meet The Plan’s expectations in fact, they’d do so on paper, thus prolonging both their lives and the perks of their office. The facts of their failure were usually lost in the elephantine bureaucracy that had been inherited from the czars and then nurtured to further growth under Marxism-Leninism. His own agency had a lot of that same tendency, Andropov knew. He could say something, even thunder out the words, but that didn’t mean that any real result had to happen. Sometimes it did—indeed, fairly often of late, because Yuriy Vladimirovich kept his own personal notes and would follow up a week or so later. And, gradually, his agency was learning to change.
But there was no changing the fact that obfuscation was the foil of even his brand of ruthlessness. Even Stalin reborn could not change that—and nobody wanted Stalin reborn. Institutional obfuscation had reached all the way to the summit of the Party hierarchy. The Politburo was no more decisive than the management staff of State Farm “Sunrise.” No one had learned efficiency, he’d observed on his climb to the top of the heap, and as a result a great deal happened with a wink and a nod, with an understanding that it really wasn’t all that important.
And because so little progress actually happened, it devolved on him and KGB to make right all the things that went wrong. If the organs of the State could not come up with what the State needed, then KGB had to go steal it from those who did have it. Andropov’s spy agency, and its sister service, the military’s GRU, stole all manner of weapons designs from the West. They were so efficient, he thought with a grunt, that Soviet pilots occasionally died from the same design defects that had killed American pilots years before.
And that was the rub. However efficient KGB was, its most stirring successes merely guaranteed that his country’s military was five years behind the West at best. And the one thing he and his field officers couldn’t steal from the West was the quality control in their industries that made advanced weapons possible. How many times, he wondered, had his people secured designs from America and elsewhere only to learn that his country simply could not replicate them?
And that was what he had to fix. The mythical tasks of Hercules seemed trivial in comparison, Andropov told himself, stubbing out his cigarette. Transform his nation? In Red Square, they kept the mummy of Lenin as some sort of Communistic god, the relic of the man who had transformed Russia from a backward monarchic state into . . . a backward socialist state. The Moscow government expressed contempt for any countries that tried to combine socialism with capitalism—except for one little thing: KGB tried to steal from them, too. The West rarely shed blood and treasure to find out about Soviet weapons—except to find out what was wrong with them. The Western intelligence services did their best to frighten their parent governments, proclaiming every new Soviet weapon to be Satan’s own tool of destruction, but then they later found out that the Soviet tiger wore lead boots, and couldn’t catch the deer, however frightening the tiger’s teeth might appear. Whatever original ideas Russian scientists did come up with—and there were many of them—were duly stolen and converted by the West into instruments that actually worked.
The design bureaus made their promises to the military and to the Politburo. They told them how their new systems would improve, with just a little more funding . . . Hah! And all the time, this new American president was doing what his predecessors hadn’t: He was feeding his tiger. The American industrial monster was eating raw red meat, and actually manufacturing in numbers the weapons they’d developed over the preceding decade. His field officers and their agents reported that morale in the American military was rising for the first time in a generation. Their Army in particular was training on increased tempos, and their new weapons . . .
. . . Not that the Politburo believed him when he told them. Its members were too insular, they were unexposed to the real world beyond the Soviet frontiers. They assumed that all the world was more or less like it was here, in accord with the political theories of Lenin—written sixty years ago! As if the world hadn’t changed at all since then! Yuriy Vladimirovich raged silently. He expended enormous funds to find out what was happening in the world, had the data run through exquisitely trained and qualified experts, presented superbly organized reports to the old men who sat around that oaken table—and still they didn’t listen!
And then there was the current problem.
This is how it will start, Andropov told himself, with another long sip of his Starka. It takes only one person, if it’s the right person. Being the right person meant that people listened, paid attention to his words and deeds. And some people just got that sort of attention.
And those were the ones you had to be afraid of . . .
Karol, Karol, why must you make such trouble?
And trouble it would be if he took the action he threatened. The letter he’d sent to Warsaw hadn’t been just for those lackeys in Warsaw—he had to have known where it would end up. He was no fool. In fact, he was as shrewd as any political figure Yuriy had ever known. You couldn’t be a Catholic clergyman in a communist country and rise to the very pinnacle of the world’s largest church, to be their General Secretary, even, without knowing how to operate the levers of power. But his post went back nearly two thousand years, if you happened to believe all that nonsense—well, maybe so. The age of the Roman church was an objective fact, wasn’t it? Historical facts were historical facts, but that didn’t make the belief structure underneath it any more valid than Marx said it was—or wasn’t, to be more precise. Yuriy Vladimirovich had never considered belief in God to make any more sense than belief in Marx and Engels. But he knew that everyone had to believe in something, not because it was true, but because it in itself was a source of power. Lesser people, t
he ones who needed to be told what to do, had to believe in something larger than themselves. Primitives living in the remaining jungles of the world still heard in the thunder, not just the clash of hot air and cold, but the voice of some living thing. Why? Because they knew they were weaklings in a strong world, and they thought they could influence whatever deity controlled them with slaughtered pigs or even slaughtered children, and those who controlled that influence then acquired the power to shape their society. Power was its own currency. Some Great Men used it to gain comfort, or women—one of his own predecessors here at KGB had used it to get women, actually young girls, but Yuriy Vladimirovich did not share that particular vice. No, power was enough in and of itself. A man could bask in it as a cat warmed itself by a fire, with the simple enjoyment that came from having it close by, knowing that he enjoyed the ability to rule others, to bring death or comfort to those who served him, who pleased him with their obeisance and their fawning acknowledgment that he was greater than they.
There was more to it, of course. You had to do something with that power. You had to leave footprints in the sands of time. Good or bad, it didn’t matter, just so they were large enough to command notice. In his case, a whole country needed his direction because, of all the men on the Politburo, only he could see what needed to be done. Only he could chart the course his nation needed to follow. And if he did it right, then he would be remembered. He knew that someday his life would end. In Andropov’s case, it was a liver ailment. He ought not to drink his vodka, but with power also came the absolute right to choose his own path. No other man could tell him what to do. His latent intelligence knew that this was not always the wise thing to do, but Great Men did not listen to lesser men, and he considered himself the foremost of the former. Was not his force of will strong enough to define the world in which he lived? Of course it was, and so he had the occasional drink or two, or sometimes three, in the evening. Even more at official dinners. His country had long since passed beyond the point of rule by a single man—that had ended thirty years before with the passing of “Koba,” Josef Vissarionovich Stalin, who’d ruled with a ruthlessness to make Ivan the Terrible quake in his boots. No, that sort of power was too dangerous to ruler and ruled. Stalin had made as many errors as good judgments, and as useful as the latter had been, the former had very nearly doomed the Soviet Union to perpetual backwardness—and, in fact, by creating the world’s most formidable bureaucracy, he’d largely foresworn progress for his nation.