The Devil's Alternative (17 page)

By midnight, in the silence of his flat, he had read them all a dozen times. The next Wednesday, they went in the Messenger’s wrist-chained briefcase to London, wax-sealed in a stout envelope and coded for the SIS liaison man at the Foreign Office only.

The glass doors leading to the Rose Garden were tightly shut, and only the whir of the air conditioner broke the silence in the Oval Office of the White House. The balmy days of June were long gone, and the steamy heat of a Washington August forbade open doors and windows.

Around the building on the Pennsylvania Avenue side, the tourists, damp and hot, admired the familiar aspect of the White House front entrance, with its pillars, flag, and curved driveway, or queued for the guided tour of this most holy of American holies. None of them would penetrate to the tiny West Wing building where President Matthews sat in conclave with his advisers.

In front of his desk were Stanislaw Poklewski and Robert Benson. They had been joined by the Secretary of State, David Lawrence, a Boston lawyer and pillar of the East Coast establishment.

President Matthews flicked the file in front of him closed. He had long since devoured the first Politburo transcript, translated into English; what he had just finished reading was his experts’ evaluation of it.

“Bob, you were remarkably close with your estimate of a shortfall of thirty million tons,” he said. “Now it appears they are going to be fifty to fifty-five million tons short this fall. And you have no doubt this transcript comes right from inside the Politburo?”

“Mr. President, we’ve checked it out every way. The voices are real; the traces of excessive lindane in the root of the wheat plant are real; the hatchet job inside the Soviet Agriculture Ministry is real. We don’t believe there is room for any substantive doubt that tape recording was of the Politburo in session.”

“We have to handle this right,” mused the President. “There must be no way we make a miscalculation on this one. There has never been an opportunity like it.”

“Mr. President,” said Poklewski, “this means the Soviets are not facing severe shortages, as we supposed when you invoked the Shannon Act last month. They are facing a famine.

Unknowingly he was echoing the words of Petrov in the Kremlin two months earlier in his aside to Ivanenko, which had not been on the tape. President Matthews nodded slowly.

“We can’t disagree with that, Stan. The question is, what do we do about it?”

“Let them have their famine,” said Poklewski. “This is the biggest mistake they have made since Stalin refused to believe Western warnings about the Nazi buildup on his frontier in the spring of 1941. This time, the enemy is within. So let them work it out in their own way.”

“David?” asked the President of his Secretary of State.

Lawrence shook his head. The differences of opinion between the arch-hawk Poklewski and the cautious Bostonian were legendary.

“I disagree, Mr. President,” he said at length. “Firstly, I don’t think we have examined deeply enough the possible permutations of what might happen if the Soviet Union were plunged into chaos next spring. As I see it, it is more than simply a question of letting the Soviets stew in their own juice. There are massive implications on a worldwide basis consequent on such a phenomenon.”

“Bob?” asked President Matthews. His Director of Central Intelligence was lost in thought.

“We have the time, Mr. President,” he said. “They know you invoked the Shannon Act last month. They know that if they want the grain, they have to come to you. As David says, we really should examine the perspectives consequent upon a famine across the Soviet Union. We can do that as of now. Sooner or later, the Kremlin has to make a play. When they do, we have all the cards. We know how bad their predicament is; they don’t know we know. We have the wheat, we have the Condors, we have the Nightingale, and we have the time. We hold all the aces this time. No need to decide yet which way to play them.”

Lawrence nodded and regarded Benson with new respect. Poklewski shrugged. President Matthews made up his mind.

“Stan, as of now I want you to put together an ad hoc group within the National Security Council. I want it small, and absolutely secret. You, Bob, and David here. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretaries of Defense, the Treasury, and Agriculture. I want to know what will happen, worldwide, if the Soviet Union starves. I need to know, and soon.”

One of the telephones on his desk rang. It was the direct line to the State Department. President Matthews looked inquiringly at David Lawrence.

“Are you calling me, David?” he asked with a smile.

The Secretary of State rose and took the machine off its hook. He listened for several minutes, then replaced the receiver.

“Mr. President, the pace is speeding up. Two hours ago in Moscow, Foreign Minister Rykov summoned Ambassador Donaldson to the Foreign Ministry. On behalf of the Soviet government he has proposed the sale by the United States to the Soviet Union by next spring of fifty-five million tons of mixed cereal grains.”

For several moments only the ormolu carriage clock above the marble fireplace could be heard in the Oval Office.

“What did Ambassador Donaldson reply?” asked the President.

“Of course, that the request would be passed on to Washington for consideration,” said Lawrence, “and that no doubt your answer would be forthcoming in due course.”

“Gentlemen,” said the President, “I need those answers, and I need them fast. I can hold my answer for four weeks at the outside, but by September fifteenth at the latest I shall have to reply. When I do, I shall want to know what we are handling here. Every possibility.”

“Mr. President, within a few days we may be receiving a second package of information from the Nightingale. That could give an indication of the way the Kremlin sees the same problem.”

President Matthews nodded. “Bob, if and when it comes, I would like it decoded and on my desk immediately.”

As the presidential meeting broke up in the dusk of Washington, it was already long after dark in Britain. Police records later showed that scores of burglaries and break-ins had taken place during the night of August 11, but down in Somerset the one that most disturbed the police was the theft from a sporting-gun shop in the pleasant country town of Taunton.

The thieves had evidently visited the shop in the daylight hours during the previous day or so, for the alarm had been neatly cut by someone who had spotted where the cable ran. With the alarm system out of commission, the thieves had used powerful bolt cutters on the window grille in the back alley that ran behind the shop.

The place had not been ransacked, and the usual haul, shotguns for the holding up of banks, had not been taken. What was missing, the proprietor confirmed, was a single hunting rifle, one of his finest, a Finnish-made Sako Hornet .22, a highly accurate precision piece. Also gone were two boxes of shells for the rifle, soft-nosed 45-grain hollow-point Remingtons, capable of high velocity, great penetration, and considerable distortion on impact.

In his flat in Bayswater, Andrew Drake sat with Miroslav Kaminsky and Azamat Krim and gazed at their haul laid out on the sitting-room table; it consisted of two handguns, each with two magazines fully loaded, the rifle with two boxes of shells, and the image intensifier.

There are two basic types of night-sight, the infrared scope and the intensifier. Men who shoot by night tend to prefer the latter, and Krim, with his Western Canadian hunting background and three years with the Canadian paratroopers, had chosen well.

The infrared sight is based on the principle of sending a beam of infrared light down the line of fire to illuminate the target, which appears in the sight as a greenish outline. But because it emits light, even a light invisible to the naked eye, the infrared sight requires a power source. The image intensifier works on the principle of gathering all those tiny elements of light that are present in a “dark” environment, and concentrating them, as the gigantic retina of a barn owl’s eye can concentrate what little light there is and see a moving mouse where a human eye would detect nothing. It needs no power source.

Originally developed for military purposes, the small, hand-held image intensifiers had by the late seventies come to interest the vast American security industry and were of use to factory guards and others. Soon they were sold commercially. By the early eighties the larger versions, capable of being mounted atop a rifle barrel, were also purchasable in America for cash across the counter. It was one of these that Azamat Krim had bought.

The rifle already had grooves along the upper side of its barrel to take a telescopic sight for target practice. Working with a file and a vise screwed to the edge of the kitchen table, Krim began to convert the clips of the image intensifier to fit into these grooves.

While Krim was working, Barry Ferndale paid a visit to the United States Embassy, a mile away in Grosvenor Square. By prearrangement he was visiting the head of the CIA operation in London, who was ostensibly a diplomat attached to his country’s embassy staff.

The meeting was brief and cordial. Ferndale removed from his briefcase a wad of papers and handed them over.

“Fresh from the presses, my dear fellow,” he told the American. “Rather a lot, I’m afraid. These Russians do tend to talk, don’t they? Anyway, best of luck.”

The papers were the Nightingale’s second delivery, and already in translation into English. The American knew he would have to encode them himself, and send them himself. No one else would see them. He thanked Ferndale and settled down to a long night of hard work.

He was not the only man who slept little that night. Far away in the city of Ternopol in the Ukraine, a plainclothes agent of the KGB left the noncommissioned officers club and commissary beside the KGB barracks and began to walk home. He was not of the rank to rate a staff car, and his own private vehicle was parked near his house. He did not mind; it was a warm and pleasant night, and he had had a convivial evening with his colleagues in the club.

Which was probably why he failed to notice the two figures in the doorway across the street who seemed to be watching the club entrance and who nodded to each other.

It was after midnight, and Ternopol, even in a warm August, has no nightlife to speak of. The secret policeman’s path took him away from the main streets and into the sprawl of Shevchenko Park, where the trees in full leaf almost covered the narrow pathways. It was the longest shortcut he ever took. Halfway across the park there was a scuttling of feet behind him; he half turned, took the blow from the blackjack that had been aimed at the back of his head on the temple, and went down in a heap.

It was nearly dawn before he recovered. He had been dragged into a tangle of bushes and robbed of his wallet, money, keys, ration card, and I.D. card. Police and KGB inquires continued for several weeks into this most unaccustomed mugging, but no culprits were discovered. In fact, both assailants had been on the first dawn train out of Ternopol and were back in their homes in Lvov.

President Matthews chaired the meeting of the ad hoc committee that considered the Nightingale’s second package, and it was a subdued meeting.

“My analysts have already come up with some possibilities consequent upon a famine in the Soviet Union next winter and spring,” Benson told the seven men in the Oval Office, “but I don’t think any one of them would have dared go as far as the Politburo themselves have done in predicting a pandemic breakdown of law and order. It’s unheard of in the Soviet Union.”

“That’s true of my people, too,” agreed David Lawrence of the State Department. “They’re talking here about the KGB’s not being able to hold the line. I don’t think we could have gone that far in our prognosis.”

“So what answer do I give Maxim Rudin to his request to purchase fifty-five million tons of grain?” asked the President.

“Mr. President, tell him ‘No,’ ” urged Poklewski. “We have here an opportunity that has never occurred before and may never occur again. You have Maxim Rudin and the whole Politburo in the palm of your hand. For two decades successive administrations have bailed the Soviets out every time they have gotten into problems with their economy. Every time, they have come back more aggressive than ever. Every time they have responded by pushing further with their involvement in Africa, Asia, Latin America. Every time, the Third World has been encouraged to believe the Soviets have recovered from their setbacks through their own efforts, that the Marxist economic system works. This time, the world can be shown beyond a doubt that the Marxist economic system does not work and never will. This time, I urge you to screw the lid down tight, real tight. You can demand a concession for every ton of wheat. You can require them to get out of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. And if Rudin won’t, you can bring him down.”

“Would this”—President Matthews tapped the Nightingale report in front of him—“bring Rudin down?”

David Lawrence answered, and no one disagreed with him.

“If what is described in here by the members of the Politburo themselves actually happened inside the Soviet Union, yes, Rudin would fall in disgrace, as Khrushchev fell,” he said.

“Then use the power,” urged Poklewski. “Use it. Rudin has run out of options. He has no alternative but to agree to your terms. If he won’t, topple him.”

“And the successor—” began the President.

“Will have seen what happened to Rudin, and will learn his lesson from that. Any successor will have to agree to the terms we lay down.”

President Matthews sought the views of the rest of the meeting. All but Lawrence and Benson agreed with Poklewski. President Matthews made his decision; the hawks had won.

The Soviet Foreign Ministry is one of seven near-identical buildings of the wedding-cake architectural style that Stalin favored: neo-Gothic as put together by a mad
pâtissier
in brown sandstone, and standing on Smolensky Boulevard, on the corner of Arbat.

On the penultimate day of the month, the Fleetwood Brougham Cadillac of the American Ambassador to Moscow hissed into the parking bay before the main doors, and Myron Donaldson was escorted to the plush fourth-floor office of Dmitri Rykov, the Soviet Foreign Minister. They knew each other well; before coming to Moscow, Ambassador Donaldson had done a spell at the United Nations, where Dmitri Rykov was a well-known figure. Frequently they had drunk friendly toasts there together, and here in Moscow also. But today’s meeting was formal. Donaldson was attended by his deputy chief of mission, and Rykov by five senior officials.