“How can I believe that?”
“Madame, he is an intelligence agent. He has no propaganda value. When we kidnap an American general or a diplomat, at least it draws the attention of the masses to the American presence here. Who does not love to see an American brought low from his place of power? But an American spy? The agencies would disavow him and say he was not a spy, that he was a journalist or a tourist or some other occupation that does not interest the mass of people.”
“So you would kidnap him. And question him. And then kill him.”
“Certainly, madame. We would never let him go.” The voice was soft, rushing like ice along a river in spring. She felt cold at his words but was determined not to show her fear.
“But if I can determine his mission…”
“Yes. Now you see, madame.”
“Yes,” she said.
Le Coq stepped into the light again. “You see, it is your responsibility.”
And she realized, more profoundly than Le Coq, that Manning’s life was in her hands.
10
All the previous day, the probes by elements of the Czech and Polish army divisions had sliced deeply into the southern and central sections of West Germany. The probes had been devastating — a large section of the restored center of Nuremberg had been destroyed by a Czech artillery battalion — but in the end, the Warsaw battalions had been stopped dead. During the night, when the generals of the East were congratulating themselves with wine and vodka in the buffet room at the central building, General Garishenko had ordered a new series of combination moves, including a daring penetration across the Czech supply lines by only a brigade from the 101st Airborne Division of the United States. In the morning, when the war resumed, it had been successful.
“Do you see? Do you see, Vasili Dmitrovich?”
General Garishenko could not contain his enthusiasm; all the months of study of the work of the Allied commanders, particularly over this same European ground in World War II, had paid off with the surprise drop by the United States airborne soldiers behind the Czech lines.
But Vasili, who was a captain seasoned by his work both within the Frunze War College and in the field in Afghanistan, could not be enthusiastic. He detested the idea of the war games played on computers; he detested the paper victories and the hollow flat result summaries flashed on the terminals. There was no real war, no blood, no smell of death and reeking flesh, no earth to win by inches, no clank of armor or bite of tank treads across the wet spring grounds; it was reduced to a game, and real war could not be reduced.
Still, Vasili said nothing; it was not wise to refuse promotions, even into sections of the army where no fighting was ever done.
“I cannot believe they didn’t anticipate the orders,” Vasili said at last.
“But they didn’t, they never do, the strategy always remains conventional when the unconventional action is taken. They are the invaders, and from that act of daring they devise the most pedestrian strategy,” Garishenko said.
“I still am waiting for the counterstroke,” the younger man said with something like sullenness.
Garishenko smiled at him suddenly. “Poor Vasili. You have been picked to be on the wrong side. You cannot work up enthusiasm for our cause.”
“Our cause?” The voice was sharp.
“In the game,” Garishenko said, a smile still frozen on his small, round face. “We must do the best we can, you know, even if it is our lot to be the NATO forces. The validity of the games depends on it.”
“Perhaps I am not suited to such games,” the younger man said. He had a thick neck and a broad, Slavic face and dark hair; his appearance was almost brutish, but he was considered one of the best young commanders in the Red Army, and it was thought that some experience with computer planning, as well as working with General Alexei Ilyich Garishenko, would round his continuing education.
They were seated in a bunker beneath the ground of Frunze War College in the southwest section of Moscow, not far from the Indian embassy. The bunker was without windows, without any season beyond the walls of the gray room. The walls were made of concrete blocks, sealed against the deep frost line of a Moscow winter and the sudden violent spring, when water seeped deep into the earth. The room was official, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. The desks were gray, the chairs gray, the carpet made of some nonspecific fiber from a nonspecific source, of a nonspecific color. Summer and winter, the air conditioning and heating exchangers hummed steadily and kept the buildings connected beneath the war college grounds at a constant temperature of seventy-two degrees with forty percent humidity. The care taken with the heating system was not for the comfort of the generals and students and technicians who devised the games and worked on the computers; it was for Naya herself, a lighthearted nickname given to the complex computer that was the heart of the war games.
Garishenko had added a single personal touch to the room: his own oiled walnut desk, imported from England at his own expense. The permanence of the desk in the underground room gave testimony to the permanence of General Garishenko in the games.
War games had been played on computer models for nearly sixteen years.
The games had originally been worked from a prototype developed by an American corporation in California, not far from Palo Alto. The California firm had devised it to plan competitive strategy for multinational corporations in the American and international marketplaces.
The Committee for State Security’s special section — called the Committee for External Observation and Resolution — had simply stolen the program by bribing two young engineers working with the firm.
But then Bronsky had come into the plan. He was a brilliant mathematician and computer analyst who spent four years adapting the basic methodology for the new games and refining it to reflect a Marxist-Leninist view of history.
Garishenko, then a young army major, had been assigned to work with Bronsky as the games were devised. The games had liberated him, had given him promotions, had made him — since Bronsky’s death — a leading exponent of the game theories in Moscow’s government. But the games had also chained him to the life of a permanent outsider, even in the ranks of the army. He was the “against” man, he was the quibbler, he was the perpetual opponent in the games to those who devised new military strategies and tested them against Garishenko’s skill and the impartiality of Naya.
Bronsky had devised the games from the bare roots of troop strengths, military hardware estimates, the logic of troop movements, and conventional strategy devised in such places as NATO headquarters at Brussels, at the National War College of the United States in Virginia, and at Heath House in London. But Bronsky had added a peculiar touch of genius that had entranced the government hierarchy from the first. Formally, the Bronsky touch was known as “The Index of Western Proletarian Discontent.” Bronsky had delved into the raw statistical data of the West to find such mundane things as inflation rates, unemployment rates, frequency of urban riots, national opinion poll attitudes on matters such as race relations, religion, and a sampling on the basic optimism or pessimism that was the stuff of Sunday newspaper supplements.
The Bronsky index reflected a reality, but reality seen through the eyes of the Marxist philosopher.
The completed model, with all of the variations devised by Bronsky, had first been employed in a war-potential situation in the matter of Afghanistan. The game was coded “Kabul.”
Garishenko had commanded the team that calculated the response of the Afghan peasantry to a Soviet invasion to prop up the ineffectual government of that country.