Garishenko’s group had devised a guerrilla strategy of resistance. When Naya noted, impartially, that the rebels had no bullets and no guns, Garishenko replied with logic that they had the capacity to make such things. Garishenko also said the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States would help supply arms covertly.
Garishenko had won the game and lost the war. He had isolated the Russian divisions in the few cities of Afghanistan, but the results were not accepted at the highest levels.
There had been a party after the Kabul games. Even Garishenko, who was thought something of a leper by some members of the college staff because of his moodiness and his official position as “the man against,” had been invited to the party. It was held in one of the large private dining rooms that Moscow’s restaurants have for party functionaries who cannot be seen eating too much or drinking too freely in front of the proletariat.
At the party, Warnov — who was senior to Garishenko, but whom Garishenko considered a fool — had embraced him drunkenly and laughed and congratulated him on the fine job he had done in the games.
“But you see, my dear Alexei, the games are still games, still in the stage of being experiments.”
“The games are the result of Bronsky’s methodology,” Garishenko had said coldly. He was not drunk, though he always drank too much; something in the room, in the patronizing smiles of the others, had made him cold.
“Yes, yes, and a brilliant man he was, but you see, the Marxist-Leninist models in the program were not sufficient. You underestimated from the first the spirit of the Afghans to accept peace and to continue to—”
”The Afghans have driven out invaders for twenty centuries, from the Chinese to the British. There is no reason to assume their response will be any different to us.”
“But we do not come to conquer them,” Warnov had said, still smiling drunkenly. “We come as comrades and fellow workers in a struggle for equality.”
And Garishenko had known that night, from the drunken comments of Warnov and the others, that the results of the game had been rejected; more, that the game was a test for the invasion of Afghanistan, and though Garishenko had won, the game had lost.
They did not trust him. Not then; not now. If the computer called Naya was not sufficiently Marxist in its thinking, then perhaps Garishenko was not sufficiently Marxist as well.
The invasion of Afghanistan had followed the computer game, and after three years, the Red Army found itself isolated in that far, barren country, not winning the war and not losing it.
No one thought to suggest that Garishenko had been right and that the games had been an accurate projection of reality.
And now this new game, whimsically called “Paris.” The proposal for the game had not come from the senior staff of the army or the staff of the Frunze War College. That in itself made the game unusual.
And three months before the game began, while Garishenko and his staff of nine were culling Western documents for information to place in the computer, Garishenko had been visited by a man named Lenovich.
The visit had come on Sunday morning, when he was alone in his apartment in the block two miles south of the War College. Katharin, with whom he lived, had been visiting her relatives in Leningrad.
The visitor was one of those men who spoke softly and whose faces never showed emotion. It was not a trait of race but of training; men who did not admit they were part of the KGB.
The man named Lenovich had questioned Garishenko for a long time about the computer and about the Bronsky index.
The questions had been polite but thorough. Only after an hour did Garishenko finally begin to believe they related to the game that would be played, the game of the invasion of Western Europe called “Paris.”
“And, Comrade General, how did you evaluate the election of François Mitterand in 1981? I mean, as a factor to the games.”
“Everything to be related in the games was put into Naya,” Garishenko said carefully.
“Of course, of course. But what was related?”
“In what sense?” Garishenko asked, pushing the question off as though it were an invader.
“In the sense that the victory of the Left, even of the Socialist Mitterand, shows the rising tide of sentiment for the policies of—”
“That is one interpretation, Comrade. It could also be noted that not much was changed in the election except that the Communist Party in France lost considerable power.”
“It is only one election,” the man named Lenovich had said.
“Exactly.”
The KGB man had gone on to other questions, but the questioning always circled back to Paris, to the politics of the French, to the idea of what the French response would be to any invasion of Western Europe.
“Naya has not told us yet. We haven’t entered all the raw data,” Garishenko had said.
“Yes, yes. But you must remember that the philosophy of Marxism and Leninism must be adhered to in evaluating all such data.”
“That is how Naya is programmed; that is what Bronsky invented.”
“Yes, yes, but the results have not always been satisfactory, have they?”
Garishenko had become a little angry. “Do you mean in the computer game? Or in the field of battle?”
“Do you refer to Kabul?”
“Do you refer to anything else?”
“Comrade, the purpose of Naya is to improve the position of the Red Army, not to serve personal vanity or ambitions.”
“Whose vanity or ambition? I do as I am told. I am designated as the Opponent. I will do the best I can, so that my army and my country are not misled by self-delusion into thinking they can win wars they cannot win.”
“Naya is only a machine, after all,” Lenovich had said.
“Yes. But you speak of it more as a god. Naya can only weigh the possibilities, explore the probable. It can only be as good as the program fed to it.”
“Yes, Comrade General. It is well to remember that.”
The last words had lingered in Garishenko’s memory all during the weeks that followed. But he would not be bullied about the games; he would not do less than he was capable of doing.
The subordinate who was NATO field commander passed across a series of orders he had just fed into Naya. The games took several actual days because each possibility of troop movements was played again and again by the opposing sides.
In another windowless part of the labyrinthine bunker, a staff was assembled playing the game for the Warsaw Pact countries. In yet another hidden part was the Game Master, who judged verbal disputes that arose among the participants based on his own, neutral reading of Naya.
“…Element 3 of the Z7 and Z8, U.S. Third Armored Division, engaged at Baden-Baden, will withdraw 0312 hours across Sector Z for rendezvous at Zebra 7 slash Arctic 5 with repositioned 8 element of Sector 12. Fallback positions 93 and 94 in Sector Scotland slash Tango will be occupied at—”
He read the numbers, movements, orders quickly; they were not numbers or games to him. He clearly saw men moving across the muddy face of the German midlands in late spring, falling back, cursing as they hacked their way up the long slope to Sector 93, where he saw a real village occupied by real people frightened by the approaching sounds of war. At night, deep in the self-induced stupor of vodka, he could see the faces of the American troops he moved so coldly in his orders of battle to Naya: He could see their weary faces beneath the helmets, see the blood seeping through the rough white bandages of the walking wounded, see the twisted bodies caught and frozen in the agony of sudden death. He could see the dull shimmer of a thousand rifles in the morning sun.
The first move of the war game called “Paris” had been given to the East fifty-one hours before.