Well, then, I too have a plan.
The Chaika crawled past the Moskva Hotel. Rykov sat drawn into himself with his fist locked over the clubbed handle of his walking stick. His scowl was filled with weltschmerz. They were never going to get a full and clear-cut revelation of precise plans from the Chinese, a people whose politics had been steeped in secrecy and intrigue and prestidigitatious misdirection for thousands of years.
Rykov was chief of KGB for the excellent reason that he had not only a brilliant mind but also the peculiar intuitive genius it took to bridge the rational gap between two separate clues that could appear to have no logical connection. And he was getting his clues every day from his mother-daughter team in Peking. In Beria’s day one word from the KGB would have been enough to galvanize the Soviet Far Eastern forces into intensive war preparations. But today there was no one with initiative enough to commit the nation to an attitude of preemptive self-defense. The ruling troika contained three men none of whom dared move before the others, and as a result there was no capability for instant reaction or decisive policy-making. They blundered into situations and they lacked a clear and single will.
He had thrashed it out with them singly and by twos and in group, and it was always the same. They were afraid of one another. They were afraid of making a mistake. They were above all afraid of the United States: “If we attack China the United States will come into it against us, on China’s side. We can’t afford that.” Over and over again. In the first place it was a dubious supposition: Washington, forewarned but not given enough time to react, might stay out of it altogether. But assuming it was true (and it probably was): there was still a way to forestall it.
Last night he had asked Kazakov, “Suppose I could guarantee that in the event of a war between China and the USSR the United States will come in as our ally. Regardless of who started the war. In that event what would you say?”
But Kazakov like the others had berated him for his primitive militarism: “You are living in the past, Viktor. Can you not comprehend the devastation of a nuclear exchange? Wars must be confined to limited conventional scope and total war must be avoided at whatever cost.”
“Suppose the United States were to initiate a preemptive nuclear strike against China. What then?”
“You talk impossibilities, Viktor.”
At ten minutes to three the Chaika reached the big gray building and Rykov walked across the curb and entered his kingdom with a dusting of snow on his hat and shoulders. It matted itself and melted slowly as he limped along the corridor taking the uneasy salutes of subordinates. A major wearing stars on his red epaulets stopped him in the hall to talk about the reemergence of the samizdat magazine Novy Mir and Rykov brushed him aside. The samizdat publications were vile and seditious and it was KGB’s job to suppress them but in recent years it had become like trying to stamp out armies of ants with a boot heel. Samizdat, the underground press, mimeographed and circulated surreptitiously from hand to hand, denigrated the nation and the Party. Some of them had Western assistance. They promulgated the kind of dissidence that had weakened the Russian will and threatened to crumble Russia’s inner strengths. Some of the writers whose work appeared anonymously in samizdat were clever young intellectuals whom the state had feted as cultural heroes—ingrates, traitors, dupes. Rykov was catching up with them one by one but the flood seemed endless. The big Minsk-32 computers analyzed samizdat texts for frequency-of-words and rhythm-of-style to pinpoint the identity of the anonymous authors and in time Rykov always ran them down, but the monster had infinite heads; it was impossible to decapitate it.
It was a grave issue but today he had no time for it—he left the major standing flatfooted in the corridor and limped on toward the lifts. In the bullpens paper tapes writhed on the floors, spilled by automatic typing recorders and decoders. The lift took him up to his own floor; it was quiet here. He went into the great office, hung up his things, sat down at his desk and punched Andrei’s intercom line. “Has the Marshal arrived yet?”
“No. He’s due in five minutes.”
“Bring him straight in.” Rykov switched the machine off and closed his eyes, the better to concentrate his thoughts.
Marshal Grigorenko’s flat beefy face was closed up tight: he distrusted Rykov always.
Andrei ushered Grigorenko into the office and Rykov, as he got up to greet the Marshal, motioned to Andrei to stay.
He got right down to it. “Even at the top of one’s profession there are always men who can destroy you and subordinates who can plot intrigues against you. We’re none of us beyond accountability.”
“Just so,” Grigorenko said.
Rykov said, “You have your own agents in the Chinese People’s Army. What do they tell you?”
“Is KGB now begging the help of GRU?”
“If your information is the same as mine then we must act, Oleg. You must see that.”
“Act how? It isn’t our place to make policy.”
“Please don’t avoid the question. Is your information as alarming as mine?”
“I haven’t seen yours, Comrade.”
“You’ve seen what I’ve presented to Kazakov and Yashin and Tsvetnoy and Strygin. Chug Po and Lo Kai-teh are already fighting between themselves to decide which of them will become chief of state for the new Chinese republic of Mongolia. Fei Yung-tse has already staked out eastern Siberia for himself. The Chinese Cabinet ministers are dividing up the spoils before a shot has been fired; surely you can’t believe they’re only playing hypothetical war games as Comrade Strygin insists? Yuan Tung actually sought to employ one of my own agents to obtain the latest defense charts of Vladivostock—you’ve seen that report. The Seventeenth Chinese Army has been moving into underground shelters a battalion at a time at Hulun. Practice exercises? Strygin is blind because he wants not to see—but you and I can’t afford that luxury. Oleg, it is you and I who will be purged when the war is over and the troika seeks scapegoats to punish.”
“Go on.”
At least he had the big oaf’s attention. “In the mountains east of Ulan Bator six of China’s most senior and experienced missile scientists have surfaced with full-scale staffs. Rail shipments into all those forward offensive-missile-site areas have quadrupled in the past week. They’ve moved two hundred long-range heavy bombers into the Lop Nor area. General Chi Thian has stockpiled enough food and matériel in underground lead-lined bunkers to keep his army fed and equipped in their bomb shelters for two months without resupply. You’ve seen it all.”
“And what is it you want of me?”
“There’s going to be a war. Is GRU ready for it?”
Grigorenko sat with hands on knees, the weight of his belly sagging against his thighs. “You can be sure we are ready. Three-quarters of a million men, seventy Warsaw Pact divisions deployed along the border.”
“And three million Chinese facing them.”
“We have ten missiles for their one.”
“Russia has been defeated by the Tartar hordes of Genghiz Khan, the Swedes, the Poles, the Japanese—beaten by everyone, because we’ve always been too slow to react, always been too backward.”
“Comrade, they haven’t made a single move toward breaking off diplomatic relations. They’re only shaking a fist at us, hoping we’ll back away from the contested frontier areas rather than risk war. If they seriously intended to bomb us, surely they wouldn’t be so obvious about it.”
It was the troika line, straight out of Agitprop and Pravda and Izvestia. They were all desperately anxious to believe it was only a Chinese bluff. If you wanted badly enough to believe a thing, you did believe it.