Tom Clancy, Martin Greenberg, Jerome Preisler
Politika
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jerome Preisler for his valuable contribution to the preparation of the manuscript. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Larry Segriff, Denise Little, John Heifers, Robert Youdelman, Esq., Tom Mallon, Esq., the wonderful people at The Putnam Berkley Group, including Phyllis Grann, David Shanks, and Tom Colgan, and Doug Littlejohns, Frank Boosman, Jim Van Verth, Doug Oglesby, the rest of the Politika team, and the other fine folks at Red Storm Entertainment. As always, I would like to thank Robert Gottlieb of the William Morris Agency, my agent and friend. But most important, it is for you, my readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.
— Tom Clancy
ONE
Headaches, vodka, and aspirin; aspirin, vodka, and headaches.
The combination was enough to make anyone reel, President Boris Yeltsin thought, massaging his temple with one hand as he popped three tablets into his mouth with the other.
He reached for the glass on his desk and took a long drink, then silently began counting to thirty, swishing the vodka in his mouth to dissolve the aspirins.
Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, swallow. He put down the glass, lowered his head, and pressed his palms into his eyes. And then waited.
After a little while the pain in his head eased. Not as much as on previous days, however. Not nearly. And he still felt some dizziness. Soon he would have to add another tablet to his home remedy. Four to a swallow. Or perhaps he would experiment. Increase the amount of vodka, chase down the medicine with a good, clean shot. Certainly that would make things more palatable. Still, one had to wonder about certain things. Was it possible to overdose on aspirin and alcohol? And where would it lead? Actually, he already knew that. Perhaps, before it was all over, he would again turn on the television news and see himself dancing foolishly to rock and roll music at a campaign stop, behaving for all the world like some drunken teenager.
Yeltsin sat there at his desk with his eyes closed, the curtains drawn over his windows to block out the sunlight pouring in over the high east wall of Red Square. He wondered what the headaches, dizziness and early morning drinking said about the general state of his health. Certainly nothing good. And why not be expansive and think about its meaning vis-à-vis the state of the body politic? If, as he believed, the power of an elected president was largely symbolic in the modern world, how might the declining condition of a man who held that position be interpreted? A man who had scarcely had so much as a cold — and never had a drink during the day — in his entire life before taking office was now a man who had lost his appetite for sex but arose from bed each morning with an irresistible lust for his vodka. A man who had already spent too much time under the surgeon’s knife, he thought, absently rubbing the scar left by his last bypass surgery.
Yeltsin straightened, opened his eyes. The bookcase opposite his desk doubled and trebled in his vision. He took a deep breath, blinking twice, but the room remained unfocused. Dear heaven, he felt ugly. Much of it, he knew, was due to the pressures of dealing with Korsikov and Pedachenko. Especially the latter. He had been infecting the nation with his rhetoric for some time… and the infection had been spreading more rapidly than ever since he’d acquired a televised platform from which to promote his extremist views. What would happen if the situation in the southern agricultural areas worsened? It was one thing for Pedachenko to rail about the corrupting influence of Western dollars, and the threat that he believed NATO — and especially the Founding Act — represented to Russian interests. These were abstractions to his audience. But hunger was another matter. Everyone was capable of understanding it. And it would not be assuaged by calming words from political rivals. Pedachenko was clever and opportunistic. He knew which buttons to push. And there was no escaping his charisma. If the dreadful projections being made about the crop failure were even close to accurate…
Yeltsin jettisoned the thought before it could complete itself. He capped off the vodka, put it into his bottom drawer. At any minute the lights on his phone would begin to flash. His aides would arrive with their file folders and summary briefings. He would be presented with a multitude of problems, many requiring his immediate attention. Be given documents to read and sign.
He needed to pull himself together.
He stretched his legs, pushed back his chair, and stood. The bookshelf swelled in his eyes again. He put his hand on the edge of the desk to steady himself and waited. This time the blurriness didn’t subside. He waited some more, perspiring now, queasy and light-headed. He could hear his heart beating in his ears. The collar of his shirt suddenly seemed much too tight. It was as if all the air pressure had been let out of the room.
What was wrong with him?
He reached out for his phone console, thinking he would have to cancel his appointments for the next several hours. He needed to rest.
But before Yeltsin could push the intercom button, the pain tore through his head in a blinding, jaggedly excruciating white bolt that made him stagger back from the desk, his eyes wide and bulging, his hands flying to his temples as if to keep them from blowing apart. Groaning and terrified, he propelled himself toward the phone, literally dove across the desk for it.
His fingers were still fumbling for it when the seizures came on. He began helplessly thrashing around on the desktop, then rolled to the floor, his arms flapping with uncontrollable spasms, his hands hooked into claws.
Yeltsin was already falling into a coma when he was discovered by his secretary ten minutes later.
Two hours after that, agitated doctors at Michurinsky Hospital pronounced the President of the Russian Federation dead.
TWO
For the longest time, Roger Gordian had been uncomfortable hearing the word “visionary” precede his name when people talked about him in the media, or introduced him at lectures and business functions. But he’d gradually acknowledged that everybody got labeled and that some labels were more useful than others. Heavyhitters in Congress didn’t make certified visionaries languish in their waiting rooms. Military procurement officials paid closer attention to their ideas than those of someone with a reputation as an ordinary fellow with a little intelligence, a strong work ethic and some old-fashioned, Wisconsin-bred entrepreneurial zeal. There was the way he saw himself, and the way other people saw him, and both had their own sort of validity. He ran with what best served his goals.
None of which meant Gordian was inclined toward false modesty. He was proud of his success. It had taken him just five years to turn Tech-Electric, a failing electronics firm that he’d bought for a song in 1979, into a leading manufacturer of business and personal computer products. By the early eighties his company, rechristened UpLink International, had become a major government contractor specializing in satellite reconnaissance technology. Toward the end of that decade his heavy investment in research and development, and his commitment to designing a complete intelligence system for the expanding military of that era, had resulted in GAPSFREE, the fastest and most accurate recon tech on the worldwide market, and the most advanced guidance system for missiles and precision guided munitions ever devised. And all that was before he’d diversified his holdings…
Still, you had to keep things in perspective, Gordian thought. Despite twenty years of professional accomplishments, he apparently still didn’t know how to make a marriage work. Or maybe that was something he’d forgotten along the way, as his wife Ashley believed.