“I’m not going to read this tonight, Michael. You’d better give me an overview of what you’ve come up with,” the President said. He was an old man, and although he normally looked years younger than his age, this evening he seemed wan, tired.
“In a nutshell, Mr. President, the Russians are preparing seemingly every square inch of their land for planting.”
“Planting?” The president looked up from the dozens of photographs.
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t mean to seem cavalier about this, but so what? Don’t they do that every spring?”
“Not to this extent, Mr. President. What they are doing amounts to the most massive agrarian reform in the history of mankind.”
The President ran a hand across his forehead. He seemed vexed, and McCandless suddenly was very uncomfortable. “Give me the upshot.”
“The results could be devastating not only to our farmers, but to the entire world economy. If the weather holds, they’ll have massive surpluses.”
The President sat back in his thickly padded leather chair. “If the weather holds. If they actually plant the acres you say they’ve prepared. If they can harvest such a massive crop. If they can distribute it.” He shook his head.
“I’m worried, Mr. President. We’ve had our troubles in the Middle East and now in Central and South America. Such surpluses could be a political bombshell.”
“I’m worried, too, Michael,” the President said, getting to his feet. “And I want to thank you for coming to me with this. I’ll look it over in the next few days and get back to you. We’ll probably get Curtis Lundgren in on it. Meanwhile, I want you to keep on top of things.”
“Yes, sir,” McCandless said, disappointed. He had tried.
When he was gone, the President’s National Security adviser, Sidney Wellerman, came in.
“What was McCandless all het up about this time?”
“The Russians have given their farmers carte blanche, and he’s worried about surpluses.”
Wellerman’s right eyebrow rose as he slumped down in a chair across the desk from the President. He eyed the photographs and report. “Ship it over to Lundgren. He’ll love it. Meanwhile, have you had a chance to look over the material I brought you this afternoon?”
The President nodded tiredly. “Do we get the rest of the Cabinet in on this?”
Wellerman shrugged. “Not yet, I don’t think. But something big is happening, or is about to happen. Lycoming tells me that the Russians haven’t had such a run on hard Western currencies since 1981, when they needed operational funds to hit Afghanistan.”
“Give me the bottom line, Sid.”
“No way of telling for sure, but the run’ll be in the billions of dollars, unless I miss my guess.”
“What the hell do they need it for?”
“The sixty-four-dollar question, Mr. President.”
1
No one had all the pieces to the puzzle, certainly not that summer. Afterward, though, when conversations came around to Kenneth Newman’s response to the summons from the Russians, there were those who said it was due in large measure to his frustration at the time.
Other, less charitable souls, who perhaps didn’t know Newman quite as well, simply shrugged it off, saying that Newman was “the Marauder” after all. The man could hardly not respond as and when he had.
Some people who did not know Newman at all, except by reputation, maintained that Newman’s response wasn’t significant. Anyone could have done what he had. The fact that the Russians called at all, was the sole important factor.
The people who were charged with picking up the pieces didn’t give a tinker’s damn about the puzzle. They were more interested in repairing the damage.
But the very few who were in the know pointed to a certain dark, brooding Friday evening in Moscow, when two incidents inseparably bonded the lives of two diametrically opposed Russians with that of Newman.
The weather had been almost too warm all week, culminating in a record high for June second of eighty degrees Fahrenheit. It was still in the seventies, with a humidity to match, when Colonel Vadim Leonid Turalin stepped outside the service entrance and cautiously sniffed the air. He was a small, intense man, not given to hurrying under any conditions, especially in such warmth, so he lingered by the door for a moment. His eyes were large and very dark — penetrating, his peers said — and his complexion swarthy. He was dressed in uniform.
The two guards on the door snapped to attention, but he ignored them. He strode across the Lubyanka courtyard and passed the black statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, which was the forerunner of the KGB.
Turalin was in a foul mood. Over the past weeks he had been getting the distinct impression that his department was being interfered with. And he did not like it. From the beginning of his career with the GRU, and more recently with the Komitet, Turalin had always been a hard man, in the parlance, but an accurate one. He brooked absolutely no meddling by outsiders, either above or below him in rank.
In his mind at this moment was the nagging concern that whoever was looking over his shoulder was doing so as a direct result of the operation he had begun putting in place more than two years ago.
“From flights of fancy to the harshness of reality is often an unbridgeable gap,” they had been taught at 101 School. “Often the simple idea, put in place with ease, will have the most telling effects.”
The rear door of a Zil limousine opened as he approached, and a tall, heavy-set man, dressed in civilian clothes, climbed out.
“Good evening, Comrade Colonel,” he said. His voice, like his manner, seemed oily.
One of Brezhnev’s aides, Turalin thought, but he wasn’t sure. “It was you who telephoned?”
“My office, but permit me to introduce myself. I am Shumayev. Anatoli Andreyevich.” He held out a pudgy hand. Turalin ignored it.
“What do you want with me this evening?”
Shumayev smiled, then stepped aside, motioning for Turalin to get in the car.
When a summons came, one never refused it. Turalin nodded and climbed in. Shumayev joined him, and a few minutes later their driver was heading briskly out Yaroslavskoye Road. An army jeep joined them as an escort.
Shumayev poured a small glass of vodka from his flask and handed it to Turalin. Then he poured himself one and raised his glass in toast.
“To operation…” He hesitated a moment. “Is there a name for your plan?”
Turalin drank his vodka and put the glass back in its slot on the seatback rack. “What is this all about, Comrade Shumayev?” he snapped. “Why have you come for me like this?”
As chief administrator for the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, Turalin enjoyed a certain power within the Soviet hierarchy. But his long, hard years with the Komitet, and his reputation for being an unpleasant man, lent him even greater power.
It was said of him, although certainly never to his face, that he was a man with an iron will, steel muscles, a heart of granite, and the mind of a computer.
His wife had never been seen at any Party functions, nor had his three children, who were stowed away at school in Leningrad all but the summer months.