“Cuba. East Germany—” Marchenko paused. “We were still able to get volunteers for SPETSNAZ for Afghanistan—”
“Afghanistan was a mistake,” said the air marshal. It was the party line; it had also cost the air marshal many pilots and put pay once and for all to the idea, as the Americans had learned in Vietnam, that air superiority alone could decide a war. Unless you dropped atomic bombs.
“Yes,” agreed Premier Suzlov, “but the colonel is correct. We did get volunteers despite the unpopularity of the war. And for SPETSNAZ.” He was referring to the toughest, most hazardous duty of all, the special forces.
“And,” said the colonel, pausing, a little more cautious, “we could offer some kind of inducement. Recognition by the state.” He meant bonuses, of course. Cash, coupons for the specialty stores normally open only to the Party.
Suzlov saw the heads nodding. Lenin would have understood perfectly. He was no fool, this colonel.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The moment NATO HQ in Brussels had heard that the North Korean army had crossed the DMZ, all units along the NATO front, from Jutland in the north to Austria in the south, went from normal “alert” status to “military vigilance.” If the Soviet-Warsaw Pact armies were to invade the West, there were three “most probable” points of entry. The first was the Fulda Gap. Here the end of the barbed wire East German funnel thrust into West Germany between Mount Fichtel Gebirge in the south and the Harz Mountains in the north, where Hitler had used thousands of SS-controlled slave laborers to build the V-2 rockets in the deep underground tunnels near Nordhausen. The second probable point of attack was in the far south near Burghausen on the Austrian-West German border, where tanks could race through the Hof Corridor, utilizing the plain about the Danube northeast of Munich. The third most probable point of entry was in the far north along the Elbe on the North German Plain. Here attacking forces would almost certainly try to isolate Jutland while racing to Hamburg and Bremerhaven to cut off the vital ports needed by NATO for the massive U.S. reinforcements, which after one week of war would have to start pouring in if NATO was to have any hope of stopping the Soviet-Warsaw Pact juggernaut.
It was clearly understood, as laid out in the UN Charter, that an attack on any of the sixteen NATO signatories would be considered by the United States as an attack upon it. It was possible, of course, that the Soviet-Warsaw Pact forces could attack all three points at once. This was considered highly unlikely, however, as even with the Soviets’ overwhelming numerical advantage of forty thousand main battle tanks against NATO’s twenty thousand, six combat soldiers to NATO’s one, it would mean the S-WP splitting their forces against the numerically inferior but mechanically superior NATO armor.
In Fulda Gap, fifty kilometers northeast of Fulda on the central German front, stood “Tower Alfa,” NATO’s forwardmost observation post along the “trace,” the fifty-yard-wide DMZ that stretched for 550 miles, separating the two Germanys. Here the Americans of the U.S. Fifth Army’s Blackstone Regiment had the responsibility of guarding the fifteen miles of the arrowhead-shaped sector.
Not far back from the tower, in the platoon hut, they had been through the routine quite literally a thousand times, snatching up rifles on the double, the white and turquoise walls of the hut a blur as they raced out to man the machine-gun posts and the M-1s, never knowing when the choking “horn” sounding the jump from normal “alert” to “military vigilance” to “reinforced alert” and finally to “general alert” meant a drill or the real thing. But the American’s were always keen no matter how many times they’d been through it, as mindful as Hans Meir, the Wermacht liaison officer serving with them, that if the Russian T-90s came bursting through the Gap, the men at Alfa would be at the point of maximum danger, that a world war might stop or proceed, depending on the swiftness and the bravery of their response. Meir had never forgotten his grandfather telling him how if just one officer, one man, had stood firm on the bridge across the Rhine in that fateful summer of ‘36, World War II might never have begun, Hitler having secretly ordered his men not to proceed if resistance was met. After that, Meir’s grandfather had explained, it was all downhill to Munich.
Being stationed at Alfa, therefore, was an awesome responsibility for young men, and their commander, Lieutenant General Sutherland, never tired of telling them that their greatest danger lay not in the “bean count,” the two-to-one numerical superiority of the Russians and Warsaw Pack armies in men, tanks, and aircraft, a count used to get U.S. congressmen to vote for better, more sophisticated weapons, but in the very dullness of the Alfa routine, the general constantly lecturing them on the need to be ready. When they had heard of the NKA invasion, however, and the continuing debacle of American arms in South Korea, General Sutherland said no more. The sight of their flag burning on jubilant East German television was enough.
For Hans Meir the threat was more pronounced, for while his parents lived in West Germany, in Frankfurt, only seventy miles southwest of the Fulda Gap, his sister, her husband, and two children whom he had never met still lived in East Berlin, a hundred miles northeast of Fulda. Meir knew that if war ever did break out, the vast sea of the Soviet-WP armies would immediately close the lonely, narrow one-hundred-mile-long corridor that ran from West Germany to the “island” of West Berlin. Hunkered down in the most forward machine-gun post by the lonely, cream-colored watchtower overlooking the pleasant, rolling countryside beyond Fulda Gap, Hans Meir prayed, though he was not sure whether he believed in God or not, that the Korea-Sache— “Korean business,” as they were calling it-would soon be over, that tempers would cool, logic applied. As darkness descended over the “trace,” he saw the lights of East German farms come on like tiny stars in another universe.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A long, shiny black Zil swept out of Sheremetyevo Airport in a gray dawn, heading south through the Green Belt before reaching Moscow’s outer ring, passing through the flickering sunlight of the Garden Ring Road, arriving a half hour later in Dzerzhinsky Square outside the Children’s World. The route was a small variation in Director Chernko’s routine, for normally the head of the six-hundred-thousand-man KGB would have been driven either to the front of, or behind, the ocher-colored facade of Number 2 Dzerzhinsky Square. Chernko preferred the older seven-story All-Russian Insurance Company building fronting on Lubyanka Prison rather than the ugly, modern headquarters in the suburbs. Chernko did not intend to make any mistakes, and small changes in his arrival routine were part of his plan to keep any potential assassin off balance. He knew that to confound madmen wanting to kill you was a difficult thing even in the USSR, but there was no point in helping them. Besides, it was a good example to set for those of his agents still in training. Variation in standard procedure was the most difficult thing to imbue a good agent with. After all, they’d been brought up in a world of apparatchiks, “bureaucrats,” for whom conformity to the rigid system was safety. And there was another good reason for obeying strict procedure: Orthodoxy, in terms of chain of command and basic trade craft, was essential if the First Directorate’s one hundred thousand agents abroad were to function with any discipline. But now, summoned home for an “extraordinary” meeting of the Politburo when the Korean War broke while he was attending a high-level USSR-U.S. “peace study group” in Zurich, Chernko knew that if his supposition about what the Politburo meeting would be about was correct, then the agents he wanted now would be the most unorthodox, the most willing to adapt to quickly changing circumstances. Indeed, the first order the tall, ascetic-looking Chernko gave his aide, upon reaching his seventh-floor office, was to bring the files of all operatives in CANUS — Canada and the United States — who had been “disciplined” in the last two years for exceeding their authority and/or violating “operational procedure.” As the major went to “Records” on the fourth floor, Chernko pressed the buzzer for tea. The Swiss could make superb coffee, but their tea — it was as weak as a congressman’s principles. Chernko liked his tea “so dark,” he had told his staff, that “I can fill my fountain pen with it.” When it arrived on a silver salver, he took a cube of hard sugar, placed it between tobacco-stained teeth, and sipped the steaming brew, glad to be home, looking out over the square.