PART THREE
Souvenirs
They will supply us with the materials and technology which we lack and will restore our military industry, which we need for our future victorious attacks upon our suppliers. In other words, they will work hard in order to prepare their own suicide.
23
General Garishenko entered the dimly lit room and looked around quickly. There were nine others in the room, and each face was lit by a single lamp set on the long conference table. Ten lamps, nine faces. General Garishenko took the empty leather chair near the head of the table and turned on the lamp.
Beneath the circles of lights were ten copies of the report, each covered with a plastic sleeve. No one had moved to open the report; no one had spoken since entering the room. This meeting was so extraordinary that Garishenko had had no inkling of it. In a state that worshipped secrecy, the existence of this group and this meeting had not been hinted at except in the highest reaches of the bureaucracy.
The room was without windows because it was the end room of a basement corridor that had been built fifteen years ago at the rear entrance of Lubyanka Prison, which itself was part of the complex of buildings on the square controlled by the Committee for State Security, which included the GRU, the military branch of the KGB, and the Committee for External Observation and Resolution, the covert operations arm of the civilian branch of the KGB.
Garishenko looked around again in the silence of the dark room and recognized only a few faces. One was General Warnov. Another was Supreme General Karoshenkovich. He did not recognize the man at the head of the table who would chair the meeting.
“Some of you are known to each other. Some are not. There will be four such meetings, with four different groups within the Presidium. I am permitted to speak with the authority of the first secretary. I am Gogol.”
Gogol. The director of the Committee for External Observation and Resolution. Not his name, of course, but one of the names used for the anonymous mandarins who actually directed operations within the KGB. Gogol was the keeper of the dead souls, of the secrets within secrets buried deep in the collective mind of the Soviet state. Gogol was never referred to except in whispers among friends, and it was a tribute to the man who was Gogol that he always knew what was said of him.
“General Garishenko.”
Garishenko looked steadily at the wizened face of Gogol. In the dim light, he was difficult to see clearly; he might have been an illusion except for the clear sound of the dry voice. His face had vaguely Oriental features, he might have come from Soviet Asia.
“You found the responses of Naya to be difficult during the war games concluded,” Gogol said quietly. His voice was like the sound of dry papers rusting in a dry, desert wind. His voice was hollow, almost ghostlike; when he spoke, his lips drew back slowly from his dry mouth, revealing small, sharp, extremely white teeth.
“I did not find Naya to be difficult,” Garishenko said slowly, his voice carrying a stubborn edge. “I found Naya to be wrong. I programmed the computer and the responses were not credible.”
“And so the game was lost. Some would say it was your ego that made those charges after the game.”
“I beg your pardon, Comrade. I made these accusations during the games, but the Game Master would not entertain them.”
“And who was the Game Master?”
“I don’t know. That is never known.”
“I. I was the Game Master, General Garishenko.”
“Then why would you not accept my protests?” Garishenko said. His voice carried conviction; some would have said he had been in the West too long, that he had programmed the responses of the West for too long and that he had learned to speak out of place.
“Because there was a game within the game,” Gogol said, smiling again. His eyes seemed liquid in the small circle of light that exaggerated and distorted the features of his faintly yellowish face.
“I don’t understand.”
“‘Hurricane.’ That is the force that NATO has planned for ten years to repel the Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Hurricane was the plan completed within five years of General de Gaulle’s decision to commit France to a separate force and a separate policy, apart from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”
Garishenko listened with partial attention as Gogol recited the history of Hurricane; he knew all about Hurricane, but there was a sense that others in the room did not.
“In 1980, when it was necessary to redirect the political and economic forces of Poland after the temporary anarchy of the Solidarity experience, new calculations were made by the research bureau of the committee based on the Western response to those reforms.”
Gogol paused and looked around the room. “The first page summarizes the Western response. It was uneven at best. The United States, predictably, was belligerent in tone, but without substance because the Western alliance was fragmented.”
Garishenko looked at the page of summaries hidden beneath the plastic sleeve. Old history, he thought; Gogol is preparing a case like a lawyer. But what was the case?
“Two factors were calculated by the research bureau to further fragment the Western alliance. The first is the existence of the natural gas pipeline which our country will construct from the Siberian fields to Western Europe. It is to be financed by the West, and the states of the West have already agreed to this; it is to be constructed in time to tip the balance of energy power away from the Middle East to the Soviet Socialist Republics by 1995.
“And the second factor. What do you suppose it was, General Garishenko?”
Across the table, Warnov stared at Alexei. They all stared at him from their circles of light, like disembodied heads at a meeting of ghouls.
“The election of François Mitterand as president of France,” Garishenko said, realizing for the first time where the meeting was leading, realizing why Naya had not worked, realizing how close events had been forced to a conclusion. He had been a mere cog, a toy of the gods who had known the outcome of the war game called “Paris” long before it was played.
“Correct, Comrade. Exactly.” The whispery dry voice continued:
“The United States is at the point of losing Europe for the West. Not that it will fall into our orbit immediately, but the influence of the United States has reached a critical point. One more step, and it will fall from the ledge. Force Hurricane will be shattered without a shot being fired.”
Garishenko, without permission, turned the page and read quickly.
Gogol noticed and smiled. “Do you see now, Alexei?”
“Coup d’état,” Garishenko said in his precise French. “The assassination of Mitterand and his ministers by agents provocateurs of the United States.”
“Of the Central Intelligence Agency, to be exact.”
Gogol smiled. There was an audible gasp in the closed room. “In three days, on the sixth of June, President Mitterand will go to Normandy to again walk along the paths where the Allied forces invaded Europe in 1944. He has done this often and it is officially planned.
“At the same time, American agents will attempt an unsuccessful assassination of Georges Marchais, the chairman of the French Communist Party. And they will strike, with more success, at Mitterand. NATO forces have already been on alert in Europe since our successful tampering with the American intelligence agency’s computer apparatus, the so-called Tinkertoy machine.”
“And Tinkertoy is the sister of Naya,” Garishenko said suddenly.