Red Storm Rising (1986) (5 page)

The Politburo reconvened at nine-thirty the next morning. The sky outside the double-paned windows was gray and curtained with the heavy snow that was beginning to fall again, adding to the half-meter already on the ground. There would be sledding tonight on the hills of Gorkiy Park, Sergetov thought. The snow would be cleared off the two frozen lakes for skating under the lights to the music of Tschaikovskiy and Prokofiev. Moscovites would laugh and drink their vodka and savor the cold, blissfully ignorant of what was about to be said here, of the turns that all of their lives would take.

The main body of the Politburo had adjourned at four the previous afternoon, and then the five men who made up the Defense Council had met alone. Not even all of the full Politburo members were privy to that decision-making body.

Overseeing them at the far end of the room was a full-length portrait of Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov—Lenin, the revolutionary saint of Soviet Communism, his domed forehead thrown back as though in a fresh breeze, his piercing eyes looking off toward the glorious future which his stern face confidently proclaimed, which the “science” of Marxism-Leninism called a historic inevitability. A glorious future. Which future? Sergetov asked himself. What has become of our Revolution? What has become of our Party? Did Comrade Ilych really mean it to be like this?

Sergetov looked at the General Secretary, the “young” man supposed by the West to be fully in charge, the man who was even now changing things. His accession to the highest post in the Party had been a surprise to some, Sergetov among them. The West still looked to him as hopefully as we once had, Sergetov thought. His own arrival in Moscow had changed that rapidly enough. Yet another broken dream. The man who had put a happy face on years of agricultural failure now applied his superficial charm to a larger arena. He was laboring mightily—anyone at this table would admit that—but his task was an impossible one. To get here he had been forced to make too many promises, too many deals with the old guard. Even the “young” men of fifty and sixty he’d added to the Politburo had their own ties to former regimes. Nothing had really changed.

The West never seemed to absorb the idea. Not since Khrushchev had one man held sway. One-man rule held dangers vividly remembered by the older generation of the Party. The younger men had heard the tales of the great purges under Stalin often enough to take the lesson to heart, and the Army had its own institutional memory of what Khrushchev had done to its hierarchy. In the Politburo, as in the jungle, the only rule was survival, and for all collective safety lay in collective rule. Because of this the men selected for the titular post of General Secretary were not elected so much for their personal dynamism as for their experience in the Party—an organization that did not reward people for standing out too distinctly from the crowd. Like Brezhnev, and Andropov, and Chernenko, the current chief of the Party lacked the power of personality to dominate this room with his will alone. He’d had to compromise to be in his chair, and he would have to compromise to remain there. The real power blocs were amorphous things, relationships among men, loyalties that changed with circumstance and knew only expediency. The real power lay within the Party itself.

The Party ruled all, but the Party was no longer the expression of one man. It had become a collection of interests represented here by twelve other men. Defense had its interest, the KGB, and Heavy Industry, and even Agriculture. Each interest held its own brand of power, and the chief of each allied himself with others in order to secure his own place. The General Secretary would try to change this, would gradually appoint men loyal to himself to the posts that death made vacant. Would he then learn, as his predecessors had, that loyalty so easily died around this table? For now, he still carried the burden of his own compromises. With his own men not yet fully in place, the General Secretary was only the foremost member of a group that could unseat him as easily as it had unseated Khrushchev. What would the West say if it learned that the “dynamic” General Secretary mainly served as executor for the decisions of others? Even now, he did not speak first.

“Comrades,” began the Defense Minister. “The Soviet Union must have oil, at least two hundred million tons more than we can produce. Such oil exists, only a few hundred kilometers from our border in the Persian Gulf—more oil than we will ever need. We have the ability to take it, of course. Inside of two weeks, we could assemble enough aircraft and airborne troops to swoop down on those oil fields and gobble them up.

“Unfortunately, there could not fail to be a violent Western response. Those same oil fields supply Western Europe, Japan, and to a lesser extent, America. The NATO countries do not have the ability to defend those fields with conventional means. The Americans have their Rapid Deployment Force, a hollow shell of headquarters and a few light troops. Even with their pre-positioned equipment at Diego Garcia, they could not hope to stop our airborne and mechanized forces. Were they to try, and they would have to try, their elite troops would be overwhelmed and exterminated in a few days—and they would be faced with a single alternative: nuclear weapons. This is a real risk that we cannot disregard. We know for a fact that American war plans call for nuclear weapons in this case. Such weapons are stored in quantity at Diego Garcia, and would almost certainly be used.

“Therefore, before we can seize the Persian Gulf, we must first do one other thing. We must eliminate NATO as a political and military force.”

Sergetov sat upright in his leather chair. What was this, what was he saying? He struggled to keep his face impassive as the Defense Minister continued.

“If NATO is first removed from the board, America will be in a most curious position. The United States will be able to meet its own energy needs from Western Hemisphere sources, removing the need to defend the Arab states, who are in any case not terribly popular with the American Jewish Zionist community.”

Did they really believe this, Sergetov wondered, did they actually believe the United States would sit on its hands?
What went on at the late meeting yesterday?

At last one other person shared his concern. “So, the only thing we have to do is conquer Western Europe, Comrade?” a candidate member asked. “Are these not the countries against whose conventional forces you warn us every year? Every year you tell us of the threat the massed NATO armies present to us, and now you say casually that we must conquer them? Excuse me, Comrade Defense Minister, but do not France and England have their own nuclear arsenals? And why would America not fulfill its treaty promise to use nuclear weapons in the defense of NATO?”

Sergetov was surprised that a junior member had put the issues so quickly on the table. He was more surprised that the Foreign Minister answered. So, another piece of the puzzle. But what did the KGB think of this? Why were they not represented here? The chairman was recovering from surgery, but there should have been someone here—unless that had been taken care of last night.

“Our objectives must be limited, and obviously so. This presents us with several political tasks. First, we must engender a feeling of security in America, to put them off guard until it is too late for them to react forcefully. Second, we must attempt to unravel the NATO alliance in a political sense.” The Foreign Minister ventured a rare smile. “As you know, the KGB has been working on such a plan for the past several years. It is now in its final form. I will outline it for you.”

He did so, and Sergetov nodded at its audacity and also with a new understanding of the power balance in this room. So, it was the KGB. He should have known. But would the rest of the Politburo fall in line? The minister went on, “You see how it would work. One piece after another would fall into place. Given these preconditions, the waters so thoroughly muddied, and the fact that we would proclaim our unwillingness to threaten directly the two independent NATO nuclear powers, we feel that the nuclear risk, while real, is less than the risk that we already face in our economy.”

Sergetov leaned back in his leather chair. So, there it was: war was less risky than a cold, hungry peace. It had been decided. Or had it? Might some combination of other Politburo members have the power or prestige to reverse that decision? Could he dare to speak out against this madness? Perhaps a judicious question first.

“Do we have the ability to defeat NATO?” He was chilled by the glib reply.

“Of course,” Defense answered. “What do you think we have an army for? We have already consulted with our senior commanders.”

And when you asked us last month for more steel for more new tanks, Comrade Defense Minister, was your excuse that NATO was too
weak? Sergetov asked himself angrily. What machinations had taken place? Have they even spoken with their military advisers yet, or had the Defense Minister exploited his vaunted personal expertise? Had the General Secretary allowed himself to be bullied by Defense? And by the Foreign Minister? Had he even objected? Was this how the decisions were made to decide the fate of nations? What would Vladimir Ilych have thought of this?

“Comrades, this is madness!” said Pyotr Bromkovskiy. The oldest man there, frail and past eighty, his conversation occasionally rambled about the idealistic times long before, when Communist Party members really believed that they were the leading wave of history. The Yezhovshchina purges had ended that. “Yes, we have a grave economic danger. Yes, we have a grave danger to the security of the State—but do we replace this with a greater danger? Consider what can happen—how long, Comrade Defense Minister, before you can initiate your conquest of NATO?”

“I am assured that we can have our army fully ready for combat operations in four months.”

“Four months. I presume that we will have fuel four months from now—enough fuel to begin a war!” Petya was old, but no one’s fool.

“Comrade Sergetov.” The General Secretary gestured down the table, dodging his responsibility yet again.

Which side to take? The young candidate member made a swift decision. “Inventories of light fuels—gasoline, diesel, et cetera—are high at the moment,” Sergetov had to admit. “We always use the cold-weather months—the time when usage of these fuels is lowest—to build up our stocks, and added to this are our strategic defense reserves, enough for forty-five—”

“Sixty!” insisted the Defense Minister.

“Forty-five days is a more realistic figure, Comrade.” Sergetov held his position. “My department has studied fuel consumption by military units as part of a program to increase the strategic fuel reserves, something neglected in past years. With savings in other consumption and certain industrial sacrifices, we might expand this to sixty days of war stocks, perhaps even seventy, plus giving you other stocks to expand training exercises. The near-term economic costs would be slight, but by midsummer this would change rapidly.” Sergetov paused, greatly disturbed at how easily he had gone along with the unspoken decision.
I have sold my soul . . . Or have I acted like a patriot? Have I become like the other men around this table? Or have I merely told the truth—and what is truth?
All he could be certain of, he told himself, is that he had survived. For now. “We do have the limited ability, as I told you yesterday, to restructure our distillate production. In this case, my staff feels that a nine-percent increase in the militarily important fuels can be accomplished—based on our reduced production. I caution, however, that my staff analysts also feel that all existing estimates of fuel usage in combat conditions are grossly optimistic.” A last, feeble attempt at protest.

“Give us the fuel, Mikhail Eduardovich,” the Defense Minister smiled coldly, “and we’ll see it is properly used. My analysts estimate that we can accomplish our goals in two weeks, perhaps less—but I will grant you the strength of the NATO armies, and double our estimates to thirty days. We will still have more than enough.”

“And what if NATO discovers our intentions?” old Petya demanded.

“They will not. Already we are preparing our
maskirovka,
our trickery. NATO is not a strong alliance. It cannot be. The ministers bicker over each country’s defense contribution. Their peoples are divided and soft. They cannot standardize their weapons, and because of it their supply situation is utter chaos. And their most important, most powerful member is separated from Europe by five thousand kilometers of ocean. The Soviet Union is only an overnight train ride from the German border. But, Petya, my old friend, I will answer your question. If everything fails, and our intentions are discovered, we can always stop, say that we were running an exercise, and return to peacetime conditions—and be no worse off than if we do nothing at all. We need strike only if all is ready. We can always draw back.”

Everyone at the table knew that was a lie, though a clever one, because no one had the courage to denounce it as such. What army had ever been mobilized to be called back? No one else spoke up to oppose the Defense Minister. Bromkovskiy rambled on for a few minutes, quoting Lenin’s stricture about endangering the home of World Socialism, but even that drew no response. The danger to the State—actually the danger to the Party and the Politburo—was manifest. It could not become graver. The alternative was war.

Ten minutes later, the Politburo voted. Sergetov and his eight fellow candidate members were mere spectators. The vote was eleven to two for war. The process had begun.