The Devil's Alternative (21 page)

“There are two points we should be clear on before we decide whether to talk or not,” said Rudin. “One is that the Politburo will be kept fully informed at every stage, so if the moment comes when the price is too high, this council will have the right to abort the conference and I will defer to Comrade Vishnayev and his plan for a war in the spring. The second is that no concession we may make to secure the wheat need necessarily obtain for very long after the deliveries have taken place.”

There were several grins around the table. This was the sort of realpolitik the Politburo was much more accustomed to, as they had shown in transforming the old Helsinki Agreement on détente into a farce.

“Very well,” said Vishnayev, “but I think we should lay down the exact parameters of our negotiating teams’ authority to concede points.”

“I have no objection to that,” said Rudin.

The meeting continued on this theme for an hour and a half. Rudin got his vote to proceed, by the same margin as before, seven against six.

On the last day of the month, Andrew Drake stood in the shade of a crane and watched the
Sanadria
battening down her hatches. Conspicuous on deck she had Vac-U-Vators for Odessa, powerful suction machines, like vacuum cleaners, for sucking wheat out of the hold of a ship and straight into a grain elevator. The Soviet Union must be trying to improve her grain-unloading capacity, he mused, though he did not know why. Below the weather deck were forklift trucks for Istanbul and agricultural machinery for Varna in Bulgaria, part of a transshipment cargo that had come in from America as far as Piraeus.

He watched the agent’s water clerk leave the ship, giving Captain Thanos a last shake of the hand. Thanos scanned the pier and made out the figure of Drake loping toward him, his kit bag over one shoulder and his suitcase
in
the other hand.

In the captain’s day cabin, Drake handed over his passport and vaccination certificates. He signed the ship’s articles and became a member of the deck crew. While he was down below stowing his gear, Captain Thanos entered his name in the ship’s crew list just before the Greek immigration officer came on board. The two men had the usual drink together.

“There’s an extra crewman,” said Thanos, as if in passing. The immigration officer scanned the list and the pile of seaman’s books and passports in front of him. Most were Greek, but there were six others, non-Greek. Drake’s British passport stood out The immigration officer selected it and riffled through the pages. A fifty-dollar bill fell out.

“An out-of-work,” said Thanos, “trying to get to Turkey and head for the East. Thought you’d be glad to be rid of him.”

Five minutes later the crew’s identity documents had been returned to their wooden tray and the vessel’s papers stamped for outward clearance. Daylight was fading as her ropes were cast off, and
Sanadria
slipped away from her berth and headed south before turning northeast for the Dardanelles.

Below decks, the crew were grouping around the greasy messroom table. One of them was hoping no one would look under his mattress, where the Sako Hornet rifle was stored. In Moscow his target was sitting down to an excellent supper.

CHAPTER SEVEN

WHILE HIGH-RANKING and secret men launched themselves into a flurry of activity in Washington and Moscow, the old
Sanadria
thumped her way impassively northeast toward the Dardanelles and Istanbul.

On the second day, Drake watched the bare brown hills of Gallipoli slide by, and the sea dividing European and Asian Turkey widen into the Sea of Marmara. Captain Thanos, who knew these waters like his own backyard on Chios, was doing his own pilotage.

Two Soviet cruisers steamed past them, heading from Sebastopol out to the Mediterranean to shadow the U.S. Sixth Fleet maneuvers. Just after sundown the twinkling lights of Istanbul and the Galata Bridge spanning the Bosporus came into view. The
Sanadria
anchored for the night and entered port at Istanbul the following morning.

While the forklift trucks were being unloaded, Andrew Drake secured his passport from Captain Thanos and slipped ashore. He met Miroslav Kaminsky at an agreed rendezvous in central Istanbul and took delivery of a large bundle of sheepskin and suede coats and jackets. When he returned to the ship, Captain Thanos raised an eyebrow.

“You aiming to keep your girl friend warm?” he asked. Drake shook his head and smiled.

“The crew tell me half the seamen bring these ashore in Odessa,” he said. “I thought it would be the best way to bring my own package.”

The Greek captain was not surprised. He knew half a dozen of his own seamen would be bringing such luggage back to the ship with them, to trade the fashionable coats and blue jeans for five times their buying price to the black-marketeers of Odessa.

Thirty hours later the
Sanadria
cleared the Bosporus, watched the Golden Horn drop away astern, and chugged north for Bulgaria with her tractors.

Due west of Dublin lies County Kildare, site of the Irish horse-racing center at the Curragh and of the sleepy market town of Celbridge. On the outskirts of Celbridge stands the largest and finest Palladian stately home in the land, Castletown House. With the agreement of the American and Soviet ambassadors, the Irish government had proposed Castletown as the venue for the disarmament conference.

For a week, teams of painters, plasterers, electricians, and gardeners had been at work night and day putting the final touches to the two rooms that would hold the twin conferences, though no one knew what the second conference would be for.

The facade of the main house alone is 142 feet wide, and from each corner covered and pillared corridors lead away to further quarters. One of these wing blocks contains the kitchens and staff apartments, and it was here the American security force would be quartered; the other block contains the stables, with more apartments above them, and here the Russian bodyguards would live.

The principal house would act as both conference center and home for the subordinate diplomats, who would inhabit the numerous guest rooms and suites on the top floor. Only the two principal negotiators and their immediate aides would return each night to their respective embassies, equipped as they were with facilities for coded communications with Washington and

Moscow.

This time there was to be no secrecy, save in the matter of the secondary conference. Before a blaze of world publicity the two foreign ministers, David Lawrence and Dmitri Rykov, arrived in Dublin and were greeted by the Irish President and Premier. After the habitual televised handshaking and toasting, they left Dublin in twin cavalcades for Castletown.

At midday on October 8, the two statesmen and their twenty advisers entered the vast Long Gallery, decorated in Wedgwood blue in the Pompeian manner and 140 feet long. Most of the center of the hall was taken up with the gleaming Georgian table, down each side of which the delegations seated themselves. Flanking each foreign minister were experts in defense, weapons systems, nuclear technology, inner space, and armored warfare.

The two statesmen knew they were there only to open the conference formally. After the opening and the agreement of agenda, each would fly home to leave the talks in the hands of the delegation leaders, Professor Ivan I. Sokolov for the Soviets and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Edwin J. Campbell for the Americans.

The remaining rooms on this floor were given over to the stenographers, typists, and researchers.

One floor below, at ground level, in the great dining room of Castletown, with drapes drawn to mute the autumn sunshine pouring onto the southeastern face of the mansion, the secondary conference quietly filed in to take their places. These were mainly technologists: experts in grain, oil, computers, and industrial plants.

Upstairs, Dmitri Rykov and David Lawrence each made a short address of welcome to the opposing delegation and expressed the hope and the confidence that the conference would succeed in diminishing the problems of a beleaguered and frightened world. Then they adjourned for lunch.

After lunch Professor Sokolov had a private conference with Rykov before the latter’s departure for Moscow.

“You know our position, Comrade Professor,” said Rykov. “Frankly, it is not a good one. The Americans will go for everything they can get. Your job is to fight every step of the way to minimize our concessions. But we must have that grain. Nevertheless, every concession on arms levels and deployment patterns in Eastern Europe must be referred back to Moscow. This is because the Politburo insists on being involved in approval or rejection in the sensitive areas.”

He forbore to say that the sensitive areas were those that might impede a future Soviet strike into Western Europe, or that Maxim Rudin’s political career hung by a thread.

In another drawing room at the opposite end of Castletown—a room that, like Rykov’s, had been swept by his own electronics experts for possible “bugs”—David Lawrence was conferring with Edwin Campbell.

“It’s all yours, Ed. This won’t be like Geneva. The Soviet problems won’t permit endless delays, adjournments, and referring back to Moscow for weeks on end. I estimate they have to have an agreement with us within six months. Either that or they don’t get the grain.

“On the other hand, Sokolov will fight every inch of the way. We know each concession on arms will have to be referred to Moscow, but Moscow will have to decide fast one way or the other, or else the time will run out.

“One last thing. We know Maxim Rudin cannot be pushed too far. If he is, he could fall. But if he doesn’t get the wheat, he could fall, too. The trick will be to find the balance; to get the maximum concessions without provoking a revolt in the Politburo.”

Campbell removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. He had spent four years commuting from Washington to Geneva on the so-far-abortive SALT talks, and he was no

newcomer to the problems of trying to negotiate with Russians.

“Hell, David, that sounds fine. But you know how they give nothing of their own inner position away. It would be a hell of a help to know just how far they can be pushed, and where the stop line lies.”

David Lawrence opened his attaché case and withdrew a sheaf of papers. He proffered them to Campbell.

“What are these?” asked Campbell. Lawrence chose his words carefully.

“Nine days ago in Moscow the full Politburo authorized Maxim Rudin and Dmitri Rykov to begin these talks. But only by a vote of seven against six. There’s a dissident faction inside the Politburo that wishes to abort the talks and bring Rudin down. After the agreement the Politburo laid out the exact parameters of what Professor Sokolov could or could not concede, what the Politburo would or would not allow Rudin to grant. Go beyond the parameters and Rudin could be toppled. If that happened, we would have bad, very bad, problems.”

“So what are the papers?” asked Campbell, holding the sheaf in his hands.

“They came in from London last night,” said Lawrence. “They are the verbatim transcript of that Politburo meeting.”

Campbell stared at them in amazement.

“Jesus,” he breathed, “we can dictate our own terms.”

“Not quite,” corrected Lawrence. “We can require the maximum that the moderate faction inside the Politburo can get away with. Insist on more and we could be eating ashes.”

The visit of the British Prime Minister and her Foreign Secretary to Washington two days later was described in the press as being informal. Ostensibly, Britain’s first woman premier was to address a major meeting of the English-Speaking Union and take the opportunity of paying a courtesy call on the President of the United States.

But the crux of the latter came in the Oval Office, where President Bill Matthews, flanked by his national security adviser, Stanislaw Poklewski, and his Secretary of State, David Lawrence, gave the British visitors an exhaustive briefing on the hopeful start of the Castletown conference. The agenda, reported President Matthews, had been agreed to with unusual alacrity. At least three main areas for future discussion had been defined between the two teams, with a minimal presence of the usual Soviet objections to every dot and comma.

President Matthews expressed the hope that, after years of frustration, a comprehensive limitation of arms levels and troop deployments along the Iron Curtain from the Baltic to the Aegean could well emerge from Castletown.

The crunch came as the meeting between the two heads of government closed.

“We regard it as vital, ma’am, that the inside information of which we are in possession, and without which the conference could well fail, continue to reach us.”

“You mean the Nightingale,” said the British Premier crisply.

“Yes, ma’am, I do,” said Matthews. “We regard it as indispensable that the Nightingale continue to operate.”

“I understand your point, Mr. President,” she answered calmly. “But I believe that the hazard levels of that operation are very high. I do not dictate to Sir Nigel Irvine what he shall or shall not do in the running of his service. I have too much respect for his judgment for that. But I will do what I can.”

It was not until the traditional ceremony in front of the principal facade of the White House of seeing the British visitors into their limousines and smiling for the cameras was complete that

Stanislaw Poklewski could give vent to his feelings.

“There’s no hazard to a Russian agent in the world that compares with the success or failure of the Castletown talks,” he said.

“I agree,” said Bill Matthews, “but I understand from Bob Benson the hazard lies in the exposure of the Nightingale at this point. If that happened, and he were caught, the Politburo would learn what had been passed over. If that happened, they would shut off at Castletown. So the Nightingale either has to be silenced or brought out, but neither until we have a treaty sewn up and signed. And that could be six months yet.”

That same evening, while the sun was still shining on Washington, it was setting over the port of Odessa as the
Sanadria
dropped anchor in the roads. When the clatter of the anchor cable had ceased, silence fell on the freighter, broken only by the low humming of the generators in the engine room and the hiss of escaping steam on deck. Andrew Drake leaned on the fo’c’sle rail, watching the lights of the port and city twinkle into life.