The Devil's Alternative (3 page)

“There are two men,” he said at last. “They were not blown when my group was destroyed, and no one knew of them. I had met them only a few months earlier.”

“But they are Ukrainians, and partisans?” asked Drake eagerly.

“Yes, they are Ukrainians. But that is not their primary motivation. Their people, too, have suffered. Their fathers, like mine, have been for ten years in the labor camps, but for a different reason. They are Jews.”

“But do they hate Moscow?” asked Drake. “Do they, too, want to strike against the Kremlin?” “Yes, they hate Moscow,” replied Kaminsky. “As much as you or I. Their inspiration seems to be

a thing called the Jewish Defense League. They heard about it on the radio. It seems their philosophy, like ours, is to begin to strike back, not to take any more persecution lying down.”

“Then let me make contact with them,” urged Drake.

The following morning, Drake flew back to London with the names and addresses in Lvov of the two young Jewish partisans. Within two weeks he had subscribed to a package tour run by Intourist for early July, visiting Kiev, Ternopol, and Lvov. He also quit his job and withdrew his life savings in cash.

Unnoticed by anyone, Andrew Drake, born Andriy Drach, was going to his private war—against the Kremlin.

CHAPTER ONE

A GENTLY WARMING SUN shone down on Washington that middle of May, bringing the first shirt sleeves to the streets and the first rich red roses to the garden outside the French windows of the Oval Office in the White House. But though the windows were open and the fresh smells of grass and flowers wafted into the private sanctum of the most powerful official in the world, the attention of the four men present was focused upon other plants in a far and foreign country.

President William Matthews sat where American presidents have always sat—his back to the south wall of the room, facing northward across a wide antique desk toward the classical marble fireplace that dominates the north wall. His chair, unlike that of most of his predecessors, who had favored personalized, made-to-measure seating, was a factory-made, high-backed swivel chair of the kind any senior corporate executive might have. For “Bill” Matthews, as he insisted his publicity posters call him, had always through his successive and successful election campaigns stressed his ordinary, down-home personal tastes in clothing, food, and creature comforts. The chair, therefore, which could be seen by the scores of delegates he liked to welcome personally into the Oval Office, was not luxurious. The fine antique desk, he was at pains to point out, he had inherited, and it had become part of the precious tradition of the White House. That went down well.

But there Bill Matthews drew the line. When he was in conclave with his senior advisers, the “Bill” that his humblest constituent could call him to his face became the formal “Mr. President.” He also dropped the nice-guy tone of voice and the rumpled bird-dog grin that had originally gulled the voters into putting the boy-next-door into the White House. He was not the boy-next- door, and his advisers knew it; he was the man at the top.

Seated in upright armchairs across the desk from the President were the three men who had asked to see him alone that morning. Closest to him in personal terms was his Assistant for National Security Affairs. Variously referred to in the environs of the West Wing and the Executive Office Building as “the Doctor” or “that damned Polack,” the sharp-faced Stanislaw Poklewski was sometimes disliked but never underestimated.

They made a strange pair, to be so close: the blond white Anglo-Saxon Protestant from the Midwest, and the dark, taciturn, devout Roman Catholic who had come over from Krakow as a small boy. But what Bill Matthews lacked in understanding of the tortuous psychologies of Europeans in general and Slavs in particular could be made up by the Jesuit-educated calculating machine who always had his ear. There were two other reasons why Poklewski appealed to him: he was ferociously loyal, and he had no political ambitions outside the shadow of Bill Matthews. But there was one reservation: Matthews always had to balance the Doctor’s suspicious dislike of the men of Moscow with the more urbane assessments of his Boston-born Secretary of State.

The Secretary was not present that morning at the meeting asked for personally by Poklewski. The other two men on the chairs in front of the desk were Robert Benson, Director of the Central

Intelligence Agency, and Carl Taylor.

It has frequently been written that America’s National Security Agency is the body responsible for all electronic espionage. It is a popular idea but not true. The NSA is responsible for that portion of electronic surveillance and espionage conducted outside the United States on her behalf that has to do with listening: wiretapping, radio monitoring, and, above all, the plucking out of the ether of literally billions of words a day in hundreds of dialects and languages for recording, decoding, translating, and analyzing. But not spy satellites. The
visual
surveillance of the globe by cameras mounted in airplanes and, more important, in space satellites has always been the preserve of the National Reconnaissance Office, a joint U.S. Air Force-CIA operation. Carl Taylor was its Director, and he was a two-star general in Air Force Intelligence.

The President shuffled together the pile of high-definition photographs on his desk and handed them back to Taylor, who rose to accept them and placed them back in his briefcase.

“All right, gentlemen,” Matthews said slowly, “so you have shown me that the wheat crop in a small portion of the Soviet Union, maybe even only in the few acres shown in these pictures, is coming up defective. What does it prove?”

Poklewski glanced across at Taylor and nodded. Taylor cleared his throat.

“Mr. President, I’ve taken the liberty of setting up a screening of what is coming in right now from one of our Condor satellites. Would you care to see it?”

Matthews nodded and watched Taylor cross to the bank of television sets placed in the curving west wall below the bookcases, which had been specially remodeled to accept the console of TV sets. When non-security-cleared deputations were in the room, the new row of TV screens was covered by sliding teak doors. Taylor turned on the extreme left-hand set and returned to the President’s desk. He detached one of the six telephones from its cradle, dialed a number, and said simply, “Screen it.”

President Matthews knew about the Condor satellites. Flying higher than anything before, using cameras of a sophistication that could show a close-up of a human fingernail from two hundred miles up, through fog, rain, hail, snow, cloud, and night, the Condors were the latest and the best.

Back in the seventies, photographic surveillance, though good, had been slow, mainly because each cartridge of exposed film had to be ejected from the satellite at specific positions, free-fall to earth in protective coverings, be retrieved with the aid of bleepers and tracing devices, be air- freighted to the NRO’s central laboratories, be developed and screened. Only when the satellite was within that arc of flight which permitted a direct line between it and the United States or one of the American-controlled tracking stations could simultaneous TV transmissions take place. But when the satellite passed close over the Soviet Union, the curve of the earth’s surface baffled direct reception, so the watchers had to wait until it came around again.

Then, in the summer of 1978, the scientists cracked the problem with the Parabola Game. Their computers devised a cat’s cradle of infinite complexity for the flight tracks of half a dozen space cameras around the globe’s surface, to this end: whichever spy-in-the-sky the White House wanted to tap into could be ordered by signal to begin transmitting what it was seeing, and throw the

images in a low-parabola arc to another satellite that was not out of vision. The second bird would throw the image on again, to a third satellite, and so on, like basketball players tossing the ball from fingertip to fingertip while they run. When the needed images were caught by a satellite over the United States, they could be beamed back down to NRO headquarters, and from there be patched through to the Oval Office.

The satellites were traveling at over forty thousand miles per hour; the globe was spinning with the hours, tilting with the seasons. The number of computations and permutations was astronomical, but the computers solved them. By 1980, at the touch of a button, the President had twenty-four-hour access by simultaneous transmission to every square inch of the world’s surface. Sometimes it bothered him. It never bothered Poklewski; he had been brought up on the idea of the exposition of all private thoughts and actions in the confessional. The Condors were like confessionals, with himself as the priest he had once nearly become.

As the screen flickered into life, General Taylor spread a map of the Soviet Union on the President’s desk and pointed with a forefinger.

“What you are seeing, Mr. President, is coming to you from Condor Five, tracking here, northeastward, between Saratov and Perm, across the black-earth country.”

Matthews raised his gaze to the screen. Great tracts of land were unrolling slowly down the screen from top to bottom, a swath about twenty miles broad. The land looked bare, as in autumn after the harvest. Taylor muttered a few instructions into the telephone. Seconds later, the view concentrated, closing to a band barely five miles wide. A small group of peasant shacks—wooden- plank isbas, no doubt—lost in the infinity of the steppe, drifted past on the left of the screen. The line of a road entered the picture, stayed center for a few uncertain moments, then drifted offscreen. Taylor muttered again; the picture closed to a track a hundred yards wide. Definition was better. A man leading a horse across the vast expanse of steppe came and went.

“Slow it down,” instructed Taylor into the telephone. The ground beneath the cameras passed less quickly. High in space, the Condor satellite was still on track at the same height and speed; inside the NRO’s laboratories the images were being narrowed and slowed. The picture came closer, slower. Against the bole of a lone tree, a Russian peasant slowly unbuttoned his fly. President Matthews was not a scientist and never ceased to be amazed at the possibilities of advanced technology. He was, he reminded himself, sitting in a warm office on a late spring morning in Washington, watching a man urinate somewhere in the shadow of the Ural mountain range. The peasant passed slowly out of vision toward the bottom of the screen. The image coming up was of a wheat field, many hundreds of acres abroad.

“And freeze,” instructed Taylor into the telephone. The picture slowly stopped moving and held.

“Close up,” said Taylor.

The picture came closer and closer until the entire yard-square screen was filled with twenty separate stalks of young wheat. Each looked frail, listless, bedraggled. Matthews had seen them like this in the dust bowls of the Midwest he had known in his boyhood, fifty years before.

“Stan,” said the President.

Poklewski, who had asked for the meeting and the screening, chose his words carefully.

“Mr. President, the Soviet Union has a total grain target this year or two hundred forty million metric tons. Now, this breaks down into goal targets of one hundred twenty million tons of wheat, sixty million of barley, fourteen million of oats, fourteen million of corn, twelve million of rye, and the remaining twenty million of a mixture of rice, millet, buckwheat, and leguminous grams. The giants of the crop are wheat and barley.”

He rose and came around the desk to where the map of the Soviet Union was still spread. Taylor flicked off the television and resumed his seat.

“About forty percent of the annual Soviet grain crop, or approximately one hundred million tons, comes from here, in the Ukraine and the Kuban area of the southern RSFSR,” Poklewski continued, indicating the areas on the map. “And it is all winter wheat. That is, it’s planted in September and October. It has reached the stage of young shoots by November, when the first snows come. The snows cover the shoots and protect them from the bitter frosts of December and January.”

Poklewski turned and paced away from the desk to the curved ceiling-to-floor windows behind the presidential chair. He had this habit of pacing when he talked.

The Pennsylvania Avenue observer cannot actually see the Oval Office, tucked away at the back of the tiny West Whig building, but because the tops of these south-facing tall windows to the office can just be observed from the Washington Monument, a thousand yards away, they have long been fitted with six-inch-thick, green-tinted bulletproof glass just in case a sniper near the monument might care to try a long shot. As Poklewski reached the windows, the aquamarine- tinted light coming through them cast a deeper pallor across his already pale face.

He turned and walked back, just as Matthews was preparing to swing his chair around to keep him in vision.

“Last December, the whole of the Ukraine and the Kuban Steppe were subjected to a freak thaw during the early days of the month. They’ve had them before, but never as warm. A great wave of warm southern air swept in off the Black Sea and the Bosporus and rolled northeastward over the Ukraine and the Kuban region. It lasted a week and melted the first coverings of snow, about six inches deep, to water. The young wheat and barley stems were exposed. Ten days later, as if to compensate, the same freak weather patterns hammered the whole area with frosts going fifteen, even twenty degrees, below zero.”

“Which did the wheat no good at all,” suggested the President.

“Mr. President,” interjected Robert Benson of the CIA, “our best agricultural experts have estimated the Soviets will be lucky if they salvage fifty percent of that Ukrainian and Kuban crop. The damage was massive and irreparable.”

“So that is what you have been showing me?” asked Matthews.

“No, sir,” said Poklewski. “That is the point of this meeting. The other sixty percent of the Soviet crop, nigh on one hundred forty million tons, comes from the great tracts of the Virgin Lands in Kazakhstan, first put under the plow by Khrushchev in the middle fifties, and the black-earth country, butting up against the Urals. A small portion comes from across the mountains in Siberia. That is what we have been showing you.”