Yashin never could resist dipping in a spoon. “The situation only grows more perilous with time, because every day increases the chance the Americans will break your system. How can you be sure they haven’t broken it already? How do we know they’re not poised to sweep all your people into a net?”
Rykov was patient. “If one agent’s cover is blown it won’t lead to others. That’s always the first rule when you set these things up.”
“They’ve had nearly twenty years to break it.”
“And they haven’t broken it, have they.”
“We don’t know that, Comrade.”
“I’d know it. Do you think I’m without sources in American Intelligence?”
“Do you think they’re without sources in yours?”
“They are where the Amergrad program is concerned. The Americans are adolescents when it comes to this sort of thing.”
“I don’t share your confidence. The risk of discovery is greater than the potential benefit. I suggest again that you draw up a plan for the withdrawal of the network.”
Rykov let the silence grow. Grigorenko was watching him keenly. Rykov had got the job he wanted; Grigorenko was Commanding General, GRU (combined Military Intelligence Services) but that to KGB was as provincial ballet was to Bolshoi. Only because of his close ties to Yashin and Premier Tsvetnoy was Grigorenko on the Presidium at all. And by infiltrating the American military complex, Rykov’s deep-cover team was encroaching on Grigorenko’s territory.
Rykov said, “I grant it isn’t foolproof. Nothing is foolproof. But our people are in a position to hamstring the enemy’s nuclear capacity if it comes to war. Can you say the same for any substitute you’re prepared to offer? No. As long as I’m capable of influencing decisions, my network will hold its position.”
As long as I’m capable of influencing decisions—the gauntlet had been dropped and Yashin sat there looking at it, deciding whether now was the time to pick it up, but knowing in the end that it wasn’t.
Yashin tugged at the flap of dry skin that sagged beneath his sharp jaw, and a wisp of smoke drifted free from the bowl of his pipe. The expressionless slits of eyes, the thin lips and very slightly shriveled face—behind the mask, Rykov was aware of the hatred. But Yashin wasn’t ready to expose it. He had the patience of a Russian peasant—and the deviousness. He would wait.
Yashin said finally, “We’ll keep the question under advisement. Let’s get to the reports. Marshal Grigorenko—has there been any change in the Mediterranean?”
“None to speak of. Benghazi wants to blackmail us into building an aviation-petrol refinery in Libya. Evidently the Libyan Army thinks it’s going to withhold commitment of those two Derna divisions to Cairo if we don’t agree to put in the refinery. We’ll get the official demand in due course.”
Alexai Strygin snorted. His voice gritted with sudden sarcasm. “Benghazi puts a high value on two divisions.”
Rykov let his mind drift while Grigorenko made his reports on the Hanoi situation and the Tanzanian dispute; in response to each, Strygin delivered himself of cliché-ridden dissertations to which Rykov paid little attention. He was thinking of the sight he had passed on his way here: the tomb where Colonel Yuri Gagarin was buried in the Kremlin wall.
The brief years of the Cosmonauts had been a kind of golden age and in the decade since, Russia had lost her lead in space because Russian leadership had knuckled under to popular demands for individual effete comforts at the expense of collective technological advances: the Russian middle class had clamored for refrigerators and central heating. History, forgetting those who had starved, would not forget those who dominated the world, nor those who put the first man on Mars. Russia’s revisionists had abandoned technological supremacy in exchange for slavish imitations of the gratifications of a dying capitalist society, and that very capitalism now threatened to destroy the Soviet Union. Rykov’s agents had reported hints of a new American multiple-warhead system which might deploy within eighteen months—did that suggest war was becoming remote from the American mind? And the American danger was remote by comparison with the two others: the decay of Russian vigor and the immediate and present threat from just beyond Russia’s own eastern underbelly.…
Strygin’s voice ran down and Yashin turned toward Rykov, whose face became attentive. Rykov wore the filter stub of his cigarette on his lower lip; he peeled it free and put it out. He spoke softly, without heat, delivering the routine analysis of the week’s developments, and he left one subject deliberately for the last. “Now I draw your attention to the reports we’ve submitted regularly on the China question.” He leaned forward in the chair and draped both hands over the handle of his erect cane.
Marshal Grigorenko leaned to one side in his chair to break wind slyly against the cushion. Strygin watched Rykov, his face rigid with suppressed feelings, knowing what was coming and disliking it. Yashin only waited politely.
“Every evidence leads to the same conclusion,” Rykov said. “The Maoists think we’ve gone soft, lost the determination to resist.”
Grigorenko sighed. “The paper tiger again. China can be swatted like a fly. They know that. They’ll make noise forever but there won’t be war, Viktor. You know there won’t be war.”
“On the contrary. To the Chinese, war is the inevitable historical necessity. It’s only a question of which of us will start it and when it will begin. On the answers to that question will depend the outcome of the war.”
Alexai Strygin said, “As always you overstate the case.”
“No.”
Strygin turned to Yashin. “Every week he comes to us with some new wives’ tale of Chinese perfidy which upon analysis becomes no more than a bee sting. But every time Comrade Rykov is stung by the bee he rushes to beat the hive with a club. The stings do no real harm but our friend wants to capitalize on them. He wants to make war on China and he will use any flimsy excuse to encourage it.”
Yashin did not interrupt and so Strygin continued: “I spent two years in China. I know their problems, and they are too many and too difficult for China to waste time and resources in a war she cannot win. We have more than enough Warsaw Pact troops along the border to discourage any serious challenge. Our nuclear capacity is incomparably greater than theirs. The Chinese have offered far more verbs than violence, and with good reason—if nothing else deters them, the Chinese must always know that any attack by them upon us would merely give the Americans the excuse they’ve been looking for to bury China.”
Drawing breath, Strygin glanced at Rykov and added in a harder voice, “As for the rest of Rykov’s debating points, I can only suggest he’s become the victim of the solipsism of his profession. His intellect craves to discover more information than espionage can supply. Spies will always guess at what they do not know, and the tendency is strong to use one’s brain not to arrive at the truth but to support the prejudices one began with. Remember it was the KGB which embarrassed us all by assuming the Arabs could defeat Israel in the 1967 six-day war.”
Rykov said mildly, “I was not the chief of KGB in 1967.”
“It would have been the same,” Strygin said. He went back to Yashin “Rykov has a Stalinist’s view of the world. I suppose it’s inevitable, in his profession, but it is for precisely that reason that he must keep his political notions to himself. We can no longer afford to have the KGB dictate national foreign policy. I suggest Comrade Rykov ought to concentrate on the gathering of information and leave the fighting of wars to the Army.”
Rykov flicked a cigarette against the back of his hand. After the echo of Strygin’s anger had subsided he glanced at Yashin. “I should like to reply to that.”
“Of course,” Yashin replied with the attitude of a man offering another enough rope to hang himself.
“In 1945,” Rykov said, looking from face to face, “Eisenhower asked Zhukov how the Russians cleared mine fields and Zhukov replied, ‘We march over them.’ Now that is the attitude of the Chinese today, arid I don’t believe we are capable of as much.”