Russian Spring (86 page)

11:56

“Ignition and lift-off,” Dad droned, just as he always had when he watched live coverage of an ordinary space shot. His eyes were bright and fixated on the wall screen, and there was a weird little smile on his lips. Even
now
, Dad was still the same crazy space cadet, no doubt in some twisted way, he was enjoying this.

11:58

“Insertion and warhead bus ignition.”

11:59

“Warhead separation and—”

A blinding white light washed out the video image, followed immediately by an unguessable sound that blasted the audio into static. Another and another and another, too rapid to separate, and then the screen resolved into a fireball rising through a rolling gray cloud like a miniature nuclear mushroom and then five enormous overlapping thunderclaps as the microphones cleared to carry the secondary shock waves.

The cloud rose rapidly, dissipating quickly, raining debris across
the screen for a few moments before the awful results could be seen.

Where the onion-domed church had been at one end of the square there was now a jagged ruin. The Kremlin wall was a line of rubble. The center of the square was a huge irregularly shaped crater. Lenin’s tomb had had one of its corners blown off, and the stonework was a crumbling spiderweb of cracks, but, miraculously, it was more or less still standing.

Franja could not quite transfer the image of what she was seeing from her eyes into her brain. St. Basil’s destroyed. The Kremlin wall smashed to rubble. Lenin’s tomb cracked and crumbling. An enormous hole gouged in the center of the Russian heart. It was like a physical blow to her own breast. It took her long moments to catch her breath before she could even feel the pain.

“Well, it’s good to see that Vladimir Ilyich, at least, still knows how to be a survivor,” Mother stammered.

It was an idiot remark, but Franja understood it. What else was there to say at a moment like this?

Those vicious cretins in Kiev had no doubt sought to humiliate the Russian people, to terrorize them, to break their hearts, by choosing as a demonstration the obliteration of the center of their world and their spirit and their history.

But if the Ukrainians thought that would cow Russia into submission, they had made a fatal error that the whole world was about to pay for. No one who had been in Red Square the night of the Ukrainian secession could doubt that fear, reason, or even the dictates of sanity itself, would allow this evilly brilliant attempt at psychic castration to go unavenged.

“I would not want to be in Kiev or Odessa right now. . . ,” Franja said savagely, feeling the impulse to retaliate herself, even while knowing it was madness. But the generals of the Red Army, with the power to really do it in their hands, with Red Square a smoking ruin—

“Here comes the end of the world . . . ,” Mother whispered as Marshal Bronksky’s face replaced the awful spectacle. Bronksky himself looked like death in both senses of the term. His face was pale and drawn, his eyes blazing with fury, his jaws clenched tight in a futile attempt to choke back his obvious rage.

“We regard this unspeakable outrage as an act of war by the United States against the Soviet Union,” he growled in a voice hoarse with contained emotion. “We demand that the United States forthwith remove its missiles from the Ukraine. If it fails to accomplish this within forty-eight hours, we will launch a nuclear strike against both
the Ukrainian missiles and the United States, aimed not at military targets, but at population centers.”

“The man’s gone crazy!” Bobby exclaimed.

“On the contrary,” Mother said grimly, “under the circumstances, this is quite an impressive degree of statesmanlike restraint.”

Franja knew just what she meant.

ALL SOVIET FORCES ON FULL RED ALERT
AS WORLD AWAITS RESPONSE
OF PRESIDENT WOLFOWITZ

—Tass

Nathan Wolfowitz did not wait for forty-eight hours to reply to the Russian ultimatum. Bobby had to admire his timing, and somehow it also gave him hope. Wolfowitz waited till 6:00
P.M.
Paris time, 8:00
P.M.
in Moscow, right at the top of the prime-time
Vremya
news, when it was noon in New York and 9:00
A.M.
on the West Coast. Meaning that Nat was timing it to hit his maximum
European
audience.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

Nathan Wolfowitz sat behind his desk in the Oval Office. He was wearing a tan sports jacket with leather patches on the elbows and a white turtleneck. His hair was neatly combed. His eyes sparkled with the unreadable amusement, feigned or not, that Bobby had faced a thousand times across the poker table.

“I will dispense with the usual formalities,” President Wolfowitz said in a dry, cool voice. “In fact, I think I might as well dispense with
all
the formalities. In the name of the people of the United States, I apologize profoundly to the Soviet people before the world for the reckless stupidity of my pinheaded predecessor.”

“Incredible!”

“That’s Nathan Wolfowitz,” Bobby said, and somehow found himself heaving a sigh of premature relief.

“I convey the condolences of the American people for the damage done to the heart of their capital, and offer to rebuild it under Soviet supervision entirely at American expense.”

“He’s . . . he’s a genius!” Mom exclaimed.

“Now, I suppose I have to answer Marshal Bronksky’s ultimatum,” Wolfowitz drawled in quite another voice. “Well, unfortunately, I’m afraid there’s no way I
can do that, seeing as how there’s no way I can retrieve Harry Carson’s missiles from the Ukrainians without starting World War III myself.”

He shrugged. He threw up his hands. “What can I tell you, Marshal? I guess you’re just going to have to go ahead and launch your first strike against our population centers.”

“What?”

“The man’s gone mad!”

Nathan Wolfowitz’s eyes grew harder than Bobby had ever seen them. For the first time he realized deep in his gut that his one-time friend really
was
the President of the United States. And he suspected that much of the world felt the same. This was no Nat Wolfowitz that he had ever known. The game had changed the player.

“But
do
remember that we
have
bankrupted ourselves building a missile defense system with all the bells and whistles that our poor taxpayers’ money could possibly buy and then some. And after we swat down most of your missiles, we’re gonna be licking our wounds with most of our own strategic forces still intact, and everything neatly in place between here and the Moon.”

Wolfowitz leered theatrically at the camera, just as he had leered at Bobby when he was sitting on a full house and didn’t care who knew it.

“And we will
not
be amused,” Wolfowitz said. “Think about it, Marshal Bronksky. And, oh yes, do have a nice day.”

“This has been an address by the President of the United States, speaking from the White House in Washington, D.C.”

“And you better believe it!” Bobby cried jubilantly.

WOLFOWITZ FIRES HEAD OF CENTRAL SECURITY
AGENCY, VOWS NEVER TO APPOINT ANOTHER

—
New York Times

WOLFOMANIA SWEEPS EUROPE!

—
News of the World

NAT CANS DEFENSE SECRETARY, APPOINTS
CHAIRMAN OF JOINT CHIEFS TO SILENCE JINGOS
IN CONGRESS

—
New York Post

XXVIII

It was Bobby’s most improbable boyhood dream come true. Within a week, the long-despised Americans had become the heroes of the hour and the toast of Paris, and he had become StarNet’s star reporter.

Nathan Wolfowitz had done the impossible. He had faced down the Russian ultimatum and stabilized a situation on the very brink of nuclear war, while committing himself to nothing at all.

Four hours before the Soviet ultimatum was due to expire, Marshal Bronksky announced that the deadline would be extended through the Soviet election in order to allow the Soviet people to express their opinion on this grave matter of national survival. Under the circumstances, it was the best face he could put on things.

Nathan Wolfowitz praised his action and archly professed a policy of noninterference in the Soviet election, interfering quite artfully in the act of doing so.

“Anything I said now would be entirely counterproductive,” he declared. “It would only fan the flames of bug-brained nationalist passions and encourage the election of precisely the kind of irresponsible assholes who have gotten us into this mess in the first place. In the interests of sanity and world peace, I think I had better keep my opinions to myself, encourage like-minded Soviet citizens to vote early and often, and sit this one out.”

The Eurorussians went up seventeen points in the polls.

The Red Army moved more troops up to the Ukrainian border as a continued show of force. The Russians also detached a task force from their Baltic fleet and sent it steaming through the English Channel toward the Strait of Gibraltar.

It made for an impressively bellicose spot on each evening’s news, but optimists pointed out that the fact that it would take the task force ten days to arrive in the Black Sea off the Ukrainian coast could be taken as proof of Bronksky’s temporary restraint, since its arrival on the scene would be neatly timed to coincide with the date of the Soviet election.

Constantin Gorchenko praised the American President lavishly in a campaign speech in Leningrad as “a man after our own hearts” and “an American Gorbachev indeed.”

When asked to comment, President Wolfowitz shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and praised his “friend Constantin Gorchenko” for his “good taste.”

The Eurorussians went up another five points.

Wolfowitz T-shirts were everywhere. The most popular one showed the American President dressed as a matador, holding his cape behind him with one hand as he turned his back on a transfixed Russian bear, one finger of the other hand resting lightly on its fire-breathing nose.

Loathsome concoctions billed as authentic American cocktails appeared at fancy prices on the cartes of even the lowliest tabacs in Paris. Everyone wanted to eat hamburgers and Tex-Mex barbecue. Little American flag stick-ups went on sale all over St.-Germain and were plastered all over walls and lampposts and Métro hoardings. The Baseball Club de Paris made the national news. Someone pumped out a max-metal version of “God Bless America,” and it zoomed up the charts, followed closely by a rerelease of Jimi Hendrix’s notorious old cover of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“Gringomania,” as
Libé
dubbed it, had taken Paris by storm. There was hardly anything else in the newspapers. Serious intellectuals discussed it endlessly on talk shows. Restaurants and bars and novelty manufacturers cashed in big.

And so did Bobby. With the borders of the United States still
sealed and all flights in or out still grounded, he was one of only a handful of American journalists in Paris, and the only one StarNet had.

They ran him deliriously ragged covering everything from pointless speeches by government officials to pro-American Métro graffiti, from the riot at the Russian Embassy to Harry’s New York bar.

It was exhilarating, exhausting, and wonderful, but there was also something unsettlingly unreal about it. Here he was, zipping all over Paris to cover Gringomania, and here were the people of Paris, having, for all appearances, a high old time, as if they had been reunited with a long-lost lover, and all the while the clock was still ticking away toward midnight.

For despite the heady mood in the streets and cafés of Paris, despite all the Gringomania, when you really thought about it, not that anyone wanted to, President Wolfowitz had solved nothing.

The Ukrainians still had their missiles. The Russians gave no indication of backing down. Wolfowitz had really done nothing more than freeze-frame the crisis just as the wave of destruction had been about to crest, in the manner of the famous Hokusai painting, but the tidal wave of nuclear destruction still hung there towering over everyone’s head, waiting to come crashing down when the frame was unfrozen by the Russian election.

It was Gringomania indeed, or so it came to seem to Bobby, for it was not so much the real United States that Paris was feting, but the mythic America of his own boyhood longings, the America that had once been a beacon of light in another of Europe’s darkest hours, as if by believing hard enough in that long-lost America of the heart’s desire, the America that had liberated this land from the Nazi nightmare might be called forth from the mists of legend to roll back the night once more.

Bobby could feel it everywhere, immersed as he was in covering the amorphous story through human-interest features, and man-on-the-street interviews, and reports on demonstrations and politicians’ speeches. Whenever he identified himself as an American, he was kissed on both cheeks. Politicians’ press attachés whisked him inside for interviews the moment he flashed his StarNet badge. People bought him drinks.

It finally began to turn a little sour on Bobby. Were not these the same Parisians who had made his boyhood miserable? Who had burned the American flag and splattered the American Embassy, and indeed himself, with blood and shit?

“It’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that
An’ Tommy go away . . .”

And now here they were, with “God Bless America” at the top of the charts when the going got tough.

“But it’s thank you, Mr. Atkins,
When the band begins to play!”

It was with an eerie sense of déjà vu and a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach that he went to cover the march on the American Embassy.

As another such demonstration had so many years ago, this one also began assembling within sight of the main entrance to the Embassy compound, but that was where the similarity ended.

That demonstration had taken place in the afternoon. That crowd had been a surly mob, and the flics had stood aside and tried to become invisible.