Russian Spring (85 page)

“. . . called for the expulsion of the illegal Soviet regime . . .”

“Oh, Jerry, aren’t things bad enough, without having to dwell on . . . on . . .”

“. . . declared that he would give the Red Army his answer within the hour . . .”

“On death?” Father said quite calmly. “No one likes to talk about it. No one likes to think about it. And no one really believes it’s going to happen to him. But I’ve
had
to think about it. And now the whole world is being forced to think about it. The difference is that I’ve had plenty of time to consider the options.”

“. . . apparently refused another request by the Pentagon to place the United States under martial law . . .”

“Options?”
Mother cried. “How can you talk about options?”

“There are always options,” Father persisted. “You can kid yourself
that it’s never going to happen to you, or you can face reality and make the best of it.”

“Make the best of it!”

“If you face the fact that the story of your life is going to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, well, then you know that what really counts is whether you can write the story that you want to in the time you’ve got.”

“These are the cards, kiddo, all you can do is play them,” Bobby muttered.

“What?” Franja said.

“Something Nat Wolfowitz used to say at the poker table, Franja.”

“. . . agreed to broadcast the Ukrainian leader’s speech worldwide despite Moscow’s protest . . .”

Somehow Franja found herself taking a certain comfort in the thought that Nathan Wolfowitz had the same vision of reality as her father, for Father’s courage in the face of his own death was not at all macabre or morbid.
Everyone
was in Father’s position right now, and they all had something to learn from the way Jerry Reed was facing it.

In that moment, she found her father reminding her of Nikolai Smirnov. What a shame that these two real heroes had never met. How well they would have understood each other!

“For God’s sake, Mother, can’t you see that he’s right?” Franja found herself saying. “What are we supposed to do, sit around pretending none of this is happening, or try to do the best we can for each other in however much time we have left?”

“Franja—”

“Listen to Franja, Mom, she’s making good sense,” Bobby broke in unexpectedly with words that Franja had never expected to hear. And he actually put a supportive hand on her shoulder.

“All his life, Father has wanted to build his Grand Tour Navette and see the other side of the gravity well,” Franja went on, feeling an unexpected strength and clarity filling her at the touch of Bobby’s truly brotherly hand.

“Well, they took his project away from him, and then the accident took away his spaceship ride too. And it’s in your power to give that much back to him, or at least to try. He’s not your child, Mother. He’s got a right to live for his own dream. Or if it comes down to it, to die for it.”

“I don’t want him to die!” Mother cried. “How can you expect me to let him kill himself?”

“But I won’t be killing myself,” Father said. “I’ll have my happy ending, and then I’ll just go to sleep for a while until it’s time for the sequel.”

Mother sighed. Her eyes grew cooler and her voice hardened a tone. “You really think I don’t know what the three of you are doing? None of you really believes in this death-suspension nonsense! You’re all just pretending you do to make me believe it! It’s all just a silly conspiracy!”

“It’s not nonsense, Sonya, it’s scientifically—”

“No, Dad,” Bobby said, “let’s stop insulting each other’s intelligence. It’s a long shot in the dark, it’s pulling to an inside straight, it’s the only hope there is, but that’s
all
that it is.”

His face softened, became tender, as he smiled at Mother with a gentleness of which Franja would never have believed he was capable. “Yeah, it’s a conspiracy, Mom, but it’s a
loving
conspiracy. Things being what they are, don’t you really think it’s time you joined it?”

My God, little brother, Franja thought, you really
have
become a man!

Mother’s face softened, her eyes misted over, she sighed, she shrugged. “You three just believe in this because you’re crazy,” she said softly. Then she smiled a faint little smile. “So all right, all right, now you can call me crazy too.”

“You’ll do it, Sonya?” Father said. “You’ll really do it for me?”

“I’ll start talking to Tass about it tomorrow,” Mother told him. “If there is a tomorrow . . .”

“I could try to contact StarNet, there’s a good feature story in this, and maybe we can sell them the—”

“. . . live, from Kiev, where Vadim Kronkol is about to reply to the Soviet ultimatum. . . .”

Bobby froze. They all did. For Vadim Kronkol’s face had appeared on the tiny TV screen, a sudden sinister apparition from the world outside.

“Oh my God, this is it!” Mother cried.

“Turn it up!”

Father reached out and turned up the volume, and they all pulled their chairs closer to the TV set.

“. . . have shown their true faces . . .”

Horribly enough, there was no fear at all visible on the Ukrainian President’s face; instead his fierce blue eyes blazed defiance, his full lips seemed to be savoring each word as he spat it out.

“The people of the Ukraine will not be denied their national destiny by a cabal of generals in Moscow! It is time the Russian imperialists learned the limits of their power. It is time they finally understood the determination of the Ukrainian people to free themselves once and for all from the rule of the Russians.”

“Jesus Christ,” Bobby moaned, “he’s foaming at the mouth!”

“We defy the generals in Moscow! We defy the Red Army! We defy the Russian imperialists!”

Kronkol stared silently and grimly into the camera for a moment, glowering and grimacing like the fascist maniac that he was, like someone who could feel the hatred he was calling down upon himself and was fattening his ego on it like a vampire toad.

And then his lips parted in the most chillingly triumphant smile.

“But before they think to defy
us
,” he said, “let them see what will happen to Moscow and Leningrad and their beloved Russia the moment the first Red Army boot desecrates sacred Ukrainian soil! Let them see what our American friends have given us in our hour of need!”

Suddenly there appeared on the screen the silhouette of a sleek slim missile. The camera pulled back as it slowly panned down it.

The missile stood erect in some kind of parkland. The camera panned around to show two more missiles on either side of it, revealing, as it moved, the shapes of buildings ringing the missile site.

The coverage cut to another missile site, this one in a church courtyard. And another in the middle of a traffic circle. And another and another and another.

“Oh no,” Father muttered.

“What is it, Father?” Franja said. His face had turned ashen. He looked like he had just seen the end of the world.

“Those are Slam-Dunk missiles!” Jerry moaned. “They’re fucking Slam-Dunk missiles!”

God, they were elegant, the latest triumph of an American aerospace technology long since given over to the black science of destruction.

The details were secret, but Jerry knew the conceptual design, and the concept, he had to admit even now, was brilliant.

There were five warheads on the bus atop the Slam-Dunk missile. Small ones, maybe two hundred kilotons apiece. These weren’t city-killers, they were decapitation weapons, designed to take out command centers, government bunkers, selected missile sites, system control radars, launching facilities.

First-strike weapons, designed to penetrate defenses before anyone even knew they were coming.

In terms of throw-weight, the boosters were vastly overpowered to sprint the payload up to about fifty miles at blinding speed, giving less than a three-minute window to boost-phase interceptors. At the apogee of this steep, short parabola, the warhead bus separated. The
bus itself was powered, blasting itself along the suborbital curve just under escape velocity until it was in position for separation, moving too fast for orbital interceptors to lock on.

It didn’t matter that this moved the bus up to about a hundred miles before the warheads separated, for the warheads were
also
powered. They didn’t just reenter the atmosphere and jig and jag as they fell onto their targets at mere terminal velocity. They came straight down at incredible speed—protected from incineration by their own shaped shock wave and by an ablative superconductor-cooled heat shield—with enough kinetic energy to vaporize twenty feet of concrete even if the detonator malfunctioned.

“. . . ten missiles, each with five two-hundred-kiloton fusion warheads . . .”

“What’s wrong, Jerry?” Sonya cried. “A minute ago, you were all brave talk, and now you look like you’ve seen your own ghost.”

“Those are Slam-Dunk missiles. Starblitz weapons. They go up like a bat out of hell, and they come down at a thousand miles a second.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we can’t stop them, Mother,” Franja told her.

“That’s right,” Jerry said. “The Russians have nothing that can stop them. There’s no time for a boost-phase detection-intercept cycle. Once the warheads separate, it’s only seconds to impact. The only chance is to get the bus between injection and separation, and between the Ukraine and Moscow, that’s maybe a sixty-second window. Battlestar America, just maybe. What the Russians have, never.”

“. . . as assurance to the world that these missiles are strictly defensive, and as proof positive to the Russian imperialists of the dedication of the Ukrainian people to their national destiny, we have placed these missiles in the midst of our major population centers, where any attempted preemptive nuclear strike at these purely defensive missiles will result in the deaths of millions of our own people. . . .”

“Shit, that’s diabolical!” Bobby moaned.

“The man is crazy!”

“Like a fox,” Sonya said grimly.

“. . . to die for our national independence if need be! We will fire these missiles at Russian population centers if and only if the Red Army crosses our border. We say to the generals in Moscow, we have made our decision, now you must make yours. Invade the Ukraine at the cost of millions of Russian lives. Attempt to preempt us and bring on a general holocaust. Or let us have our freedom and accept us as a member of a fraternal Europe, not of nation-states or empires, but of free and independent peoples!”

Vadim Kronkol held a heroic pose for a long moment to let it all sink in, and then he spoke again, this time in much lower tones of sly insinuation.

“In the interests of peace and humanity, and in order to make the best effort possible to prevent a nuclear catastrophe that nobody really wants, we have sacrificed one tenth of our national deterrent to arrange a nonlethal demonstration. At eleven fifty-six tomorrow morning, Moscow time, we will launch a missile carrying five warheads containing not nuclear explosives but honest Ukrainian pig manure. At approximately noon, Moscow time, our fraternal donations of fertilizer will be delivered to Red Square.”

Kronkol smiled sweetly at the camera. “We invite the generals in Moscow to get in some target practice at our expense. We have given you the launch time and the trajectory. Let’s see how well you do in ideal conditions against dummy warheads. It should give you some idea of how you will fare if you force us to use these weapons in earnest.”

“. . . still no further word from the Red Army Central Command, while in Washington, President Nathan Wolfowitz still refuses to clarify the bizarre response to the Russian ultimatum that has so shocked an already-stunned world.”

—CNN

“What do you think, Dad?” Bobby said. “Is there any chance at all?”

Dad shook his head. “If they get one out of five, it’ll be a miracle,” he said.

They had all stayed up till late in the night, transfixed by the wall screen. At any moment, the Russians might attempt a nuclear strike on the Ukrainian missile sites. Or the Russians might capitulate. If Dad was right, and when it came to this stuff, it was hard to believe he could be wrong, Bobby certainly knew that
he
would do one thing or the other if he were Marshal Bronksky.

But all during the world’s long night vigil, neither had happened. Bronksky issued a short statement accusing the United States of nuclear blackmail. He demanded to know what President Wolfowitz was going to do when the Ukrainians fired their missile. He warned that if Kronkol was lying and live warheads exploded on Soviet territory, it would be taken as an act of war on the part of the United States and “dealt with accordingly.”

Nearly two hours of talking heads later, Nathan Wolfowitz had used a photo opportunity to give a one-sentence answer that only seemed to make matters worse.

“Mr. President, Marshal Bronksky wants to know what you’re going to do when the Ukrainians fire their dummy warheads at Moscow!”

Nathan Wolfowitz had smiled sardonically and shrugged his shoulders. “Like the rest of the world,” he said, “I think I’ll just sit back with a six-pack and watch the big game on television.”

The reporters had been appalled, and so had everyone else, to judge by the rest of the night’s commentary, but Bobby had been mightily relieved, though he couldn’t make anyone who hadn’t known the man understand why.

That
was the real Nathan Wolfowitz, playing the awful hand he had been dealt with a perfect poker face.

Bobby didn’t envy Wolfowitz the hand of cards he had to play one little bit. But still less did he envy the marks who were now playing against him.

And now here they were again, gathered in the living room before the wall screen, with a long-range TV camera far away atop a Tverskaya Street skyscraper holding a panoramic shot on Red Square while a white digital insert ticked off the minutes and seconds till noon.

The huge square was eerily deserted under the bright noontime sun. Nothing moved but a flag waving above the empty buildings behind the Kremlin wall and pigeons too stupid to realize they were scavenging on ground zero.