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.”
“What is happening there?” asked Matthews.
“Something odd, sir. Something strange is happening to the Soviet grain crop. All this remaining sixty percent is spring wheat, put down as seed in March and April after the thaw. It should be coming up sweet and green by now. It’s coming up stunted, sparse, sporadic, as if it had been hit by some kind of blight.”
“Weather again?” asked Matthews.
“No. They had a damp winter and spring over this area, but nothing serious. Now that the sun has come out, the weather is perfect—warm and dry.”
“How widespread is this ... blight?”
Benson came in again. “We don’t know, Mr. President. We have maybe fifty samples of film of this particular problem. We tend to focus on military concentrations, of course—troop movements, new rocket bases, arms factories. But what we have indicates it must be pretty widespread.”
“So what are you after?”
“What we’d like,” resumed Poklewski, “is your go-ahead to spend a lot more time on this problem, find out just how big it is for the Soviets. It will mean trying to send in delegations, businessmen. Diverting a lot of space surveillance from non-priority tasks. We believe it is in America’s vital interest to find out just exactly what it is that Moscow is going to have to handle here.”
Matthews considered and glanced at his watch. He had a troop of ecologists due to greet him and present him with yet another plaque in ten minutes. Then there was the Attorney General before lunch about the new labor legislation. He rose.
“Very well, gentlemen, you have it. By my authority. This is one I think we need to know. But I want an answer within thirty days.”
General Carl Taylor sat in the seventh-floor office of Robert Benson, the Director of Central Intelligence, or DCI, ten days later and gazed down at his own report, clipped to a large sheaf of photo stills, that lay on the low coffee table in front of him.
“It’s a funny one, Bob. I can’t figure it out,” he said.
Benson turned away from the great, sweeping picture windows that form one entire wall of the DCI’s office at Langley, Virginia, and face out north by northwest across vistas of trees toward the invisible Potomac River. Like his predecessors, he loved that view, particularly in late spring and early summer, when the woodlands are a wash of tender green. He took his seat on the low settee across the coffee table from Taylor.
“Neither can my grain experts, Carl. And I don’t want to go to the Department of Agriculture. Whatever is going on over there in Russia, publicity is the last thing we need, and if I bring in outsiders, it’ll be in the papers within a week. So what have you got?”
“Well, the photos show the blight, or whatever it is, is not pandemic,” said Taylor. “It’s not even regional. That’s the twister. If the cause were climatic, there’d be weather phenomena to explain it. There aren’t any. If it were a straight disease of the crop, it would be at least regional. If it were parasite-caused, the same would apply. But it’s haphazard. There are stands of strong, healthy, growing wheat right alongside the affected acreage. The Condor reconnaissance shows no logical pattern at all. How about you?”
Benson nodded in agreement.
“It’s illogical, all right. I’ve put a couple of assets in on the ground, but they haven’t reported back yet. The Soviet press has said nothing. My own agronomy boys have been over your photos backwards and forwards. All they can come up with is some blight of the seed or in the earth. But they can’t figure the haphazard nature of it all, either. It fits no known pattern. But the important thing is I have to produce some kind of estimate for the President for the total probable Soviet grain harvest next September and October. And I have to produce it soon.”
“There’s no way I can photograph every damn stand of wheat and barley in the Soviet Union, even with Condor,” said Taylor. “It would take months. Can you give me that?”
“Not a chance,” said Benson. “I need information about the troop movements along the China border, the buildup opposite Turkey and Iran. I need a constant watch on the Red Army deployments in East Germany and the locations of the new SS-twenties behind the Urals.”
“Then I can only come up with a percentage figure based on what we have photographed to date, and extrapolate for a Soviet-wide figure,” said Taylor.
“It’s got to be accurate,” said Benson. “I don’t want a repeat of 1977.”
Taylor winced at the memory, even though he had not been Director of the NRO in that year. In 1977 the American intelligence machine had been fooled by a gigantic Soviet confidence trick. Throughout the summer, all the experts of the CIA and the Department of Agriculture had been telling the President the Soviet grain crop would reach around 215 million metric tons. Agriculture delegates visiting Russia had been shown fields of fine, healthy wheat; in fact, these had been the exceptions. Photoreconnaissance analysis had been faulty. In the autumn the then Soviet President, Leonid Brezhnev, had calmly announced the Soviet crop would be only 194 million tons.