Red Storm Rising

2. Odd Man In

Mikhail Eduardovich Sergetov never had a chance to read the wire service report. Summoned from his official dacha in the birch forests surrounding Moscow, he'd flown at once to Nizhnevartovsk and stayed for only ten hours before being recalled to make his report in Moscow. Three months on the job, he thought, sitting in the empty forward cabin of the IL-86 airliner, and this has to happen!

His two principal deputies, a pair of skilled young engineers, had been left behind and were trying even now to make sense of the chaos, to save what could be saved, as he reviewed his notes for the Politburo meeting later in the day. Three hundred men were known to have died fighting the fire, and, miraculously, fewer than two hundred citizens in the city of Nizhnevartovsk. That was unfortunate, but not a matter of great significance except insofar as those trained men killed would eventually have to be replaced by other trained men drawn from the staffs of other large refineries.

The refinery was almost totally destroyed. Reconstruction would take a minimum of two to three years, and would account for a sizable percentage of national steel pipe production, plus all the other specialty items unique to a facility of this type: Fifteen thousand million rubles. And how much of the special equipment would have to be purchased from foreign sources-how much precious hard currency and gold would be wasted?

And that was the good news.

The bad news: the fire that had engulfed the production field had totally destroyed the welltops. Time to replace: at least thirty-six months!

Thirty-six months, Sergetov reflected bleakly, if we can divert the drill rigs and crews to redrill every damned well and at the same time rebuild the EOR systems. For a minimum of eighteen months the Soviet Union will have an enormous shortfall in oil production. Probably more like thirty months. What will happen to our economy?

He pulled a pad of lined paper from his briefcase and began to make some calculations. It was a three-hour flight, and Sergetov did not notice it was over until the pilot came back to announce they had landed.

He looked with squinted eyes at the snow-covered landscape of Vnukovo-2, the VIP-only airport outside of Moscow, and walked alone down the boarding stairs to a waiting ZIL limousine. The car sped off at once, without stopping at any of the security checkpoints. The shivering militia officers snapped to attention as the ZIL passed, then returned to the business of keeping warm in the subzero temperatures. The sun was bright, the sky clear but for some thin, high clouds. Sergetov looked vacantly out the windows, his mind mulling over figures he had already rechecked a half-dozen times. The Politburo was waiting for him, his KGB driver told him.

Sergetov had been a "candidate," or nonvoting member, of the Politburo for just six months, which meant that, along with his eight other junior colleagues, he advised the thirteen men who alone made the decisions that mattered in the Soviet Union. His portfolio was energy production and distribution. He had held that post since September, and was only beginning to establish his plan for a total reorganization of the seven regional and all-union ministries that handled energy functions-and predictably spent most of their time battling one another-into a full department that reported directly to the Politburo and Party Secretariat, instead of having to work through the Council of Ministers bureaucracy. He briefly closed his eyes to thank God-there might be one, he reasoned-that his first recommendation, delivered only a month earlier, had concerned security and political reliability in many of the fields. He had specifically recommended further Russification of the largely "foreign" workforce. For this reason, he did not fear for his own career, which up to now had been an uninterrupted success story. He shrugged. The task he was about to face would decide his future in any case. And perhaps his country's.

The ZIL proceeded down Leningradskiy Prospekt, which turned into Gor'kogo, the limousine speeding through the center lane that policemen kept clear of traffic for the exclusive use of the vlasti. They motored past the Intourist Hotel into Red Square, and finally approached the Kremlin gate. Here the driver did stop for the security checks, three of them, conducted by KGB troops and soldiers of the Taman Guards. Five minutes later the limousine pulled to the door of the Council of Ministers building, the sole modern structure in the fortress. The guards here knew Sergetov by sight, and saluted crisply as they held open the door so that his exposure to the freezing temperatures would last but a brief span of seconds.

The Politburo had been holding it's meetings in this fourth-floor room for only a month while their usual quarters, in the old Arsenal building were undergoing a belated renovation. The older men grumbled at the loss of the old Czarist comforts, but Sergetov preferred the modernity. About time, he thought, that the men of the Party surrounded themselves, with the works of socialism instead of the moldy trappings of the Romanovs.

The room was deathly quiet as he entered. Had this been in the Arsenal, the fifty-four year old technocrat reflected, the atmosphere would have been altogether like a funeral-and there had been all too many of those. Slowly, the Party was running out of the old men who had survived Stalin's terror, and the current crop of members, all "young" men in their fifties or early sixties, was finally being heard. The guard was being changed. Too slowly-too damned slowly-for Sergetov and his generation of Party leaders, despite the new General Secretary. The man was already a grandfather. It sometimes seemed to Sergetov that by the time these old men were gone, he'd be one himself. But looking around this room now, he felt young enough.

"Good day, Comrades," Sergetov said, handing his coat to an aide, who withdrew at once, closing the doors behind him. The other men moved at once to their seats. Sergetov took his, halfway down the right side.

The Party General Secretary brought the meeting to order. His voice was controlled and businesslike. "Comrade Sergetov, you may begin your report. First, we wish to hear your explanation of exactly what happened."

"Comrades, at approximately twenty-three hundred hours yesterday, Moscow Time, three armed men entered the central control complex of the Nizhnevartovsk oil complex and committed a highly sophisticated act of sabotage."

"Who were they?" the Defense Minister asked sharply.

"We only have identification for two of them. One of the bandits was a staff electrician. The third"-Sergetov pulled the ID card from his pocket and tossed it on the table-was Senior Engineer I.M. Tolkaze. He evidently used his expert knowledge of the control systems to initiate a massive fire which spread rapidly before high winds. A security team of ten KGB border guards responded at once to the alarm. The one traitor still unidentified killed or wounded five of these with a rifle taken from the building guard, who was also shot. I must say, having interviewed the KGB sergeant-the lieutenant was killed leading his men-that the border guards responded quickly and well. They killed the traitors within minutes, but were unable to prevent the complete destruction of the facility, both the refinery and production fields."

"And if the guards responded so fast, how then did they fail to prevent this act?" the Defense Minister demanded angrily, He examined the photographic, pass with palpable hatred in his eyes "What was this black-ass Muslim doing there in the first place?"

"Comrade, work in the Siberian fields is arduous, and we have had serious difficulties in filling the posts we have there. My predecessor decided to conscnpt experienced oil-field workers from the Baku region to Siberia. This was madness. You will recall that my first recommend last year was to change this policy."

"We have noted it, Mikhail Eduardovich," the Chairman said. "Go on."

"The guard post records all telephone and radio traffic. The response team was moving in under two minutes. Unfortunately, the guard post is located adjacent to the original control building. The current building was constructed three kilometers away when new computerized control equipment was obtained from the West two years ago. A new guard post was also supposed to have been built, and the proper materials were allocated for this purpose. It would appear that these building materials were misappropriated by the complex director and local Party secretary, for the purpose of building dachas on the river a few kilometers away. Both of these men have been arrested by my order, for crimes against the State," Sergetov reported matter-of-factly. There was no reaction around the table. By unspoken consensus, those two men were sentenced to death; the formalities would be worked out by the proper ministries. Sergetov continued: "I have already ordered greatly increased security at all petroleum sites. Also on my orders, the families of the two known traitors have been arrested at their homes outside Baku and are being rigorously interrogated by State Security, along with all who knew and worked with them.

"Before the border guards were able to kill the traitors, they were able to sabotage the oil-field control systems in such a way as to create a massive conflagration. They were also able to wreck the control equipment so that even if the guard troops had been able to get a crew of engineers in to restore control, it is unlikely that anything would have been saved. The KGB troops were forced to evacuate the building, which was later consumed by the fire. There was nothing more they could have done." Sergetov remembered the sergeant's badly burned face. the tears flowing down over the blisters as he told his story.

"The fire brigade?" the General Secretary asked.

"More than half of them died fighting the fire," Sergetov replied. "Along with over a hundred citizens who joined the battle to save the complex. Truly there is no blame to be assessed here, Comrade. Once this bastard. Tolkaze began his devil's work, it would have been as easy to control an earthquake. For the most part, the fire has been put out by now, due to the fact that most of the fuels stored in the refinery were consumed in about five hours; also because of the destruction of the wellheads in the oil field."

"But how was this catastrophe possible?" a senior member asked. Sergetov was surprised by the quiet mood in the room. Had they met and discussed this affair already?

"My report of December 20 described the dangers here. This room quite literally controlled the pumps and valves for over a hundred square kilometers. The same is true of all of our large oil complexes. From the nerve center, a man familiar with control procedures could manipulate the various systems throughout the field at will, causing the entire complex quite simply to self-destruct. Tolkaze had such skill. He was an Azerbaijani chosen for special treatment for his intelligence and supposed loyalty, an honor student educated at Moscow State University and a member in good standing of the local Party. It would also seem that he was a religious fanatic capable of astounding treachery. All the people killed in the control room were friends of his-or so they thought. After fifteen years in the Party, a good salary, the professional respect of his comrades, even his own automobile, his last words were a shrill cry to Allah," Sergetov said dryly. "The reliability of people from that region cannot be accurately predicted, Comrades."

The Defense Minister nodded again. "So, what effect will this have on oil production?" Half the men at the table leaned forward to hear Sergetov's answer:

"Comrades, we have lost thirty-four percent of our total crude oil production for a period of at least one year, possibly as many as three." Sergetov looked up from his notes to see the impassive faces cringe as though from a slap. "It will be necessary to redrill every production well and finally reconstruct the pipelines from the fields to the refinery and elsewhere. The concurrent loss of the refinery is serious, but not an immediate concern since the refinery can be rebuilt, and in any case represents less than a seventh of our total refining capacity. The major injury to our economy will come from the loss of our crude oil production.

"In real terms, due to the chemical makeup of the Nizhnevartovsk oil, the net total production loss understates the actual impact on our economy. Siberian oil is 'light, sweet' crude, which means that it contains a disproportionately large amount of the most valuable fractions-those which we use to make gasoline, kerosene, and diesel fuel, for example. The net loss in these particular areas is forty-four percent of our gasoline production, forty-eight percent of kerosene, and fifty percent of diesel. These figures are rough calculations I made on the flight back, but they should be accurate to within two percent. My staff will have more precise figures ready in a day or so."

"Half?" the General Secretary asked quietly.

"Correct, Comrade," Sergetov responded.

"And how long to restore production?"

"Comrade General Secretary, if we bring in every drilling rig and operate them around the clock, my rough estimate is that we can begin to restore production in twelve months. Clearing the site of wreckage will take at least three months, and another three will be needed to relocate our equipment and commence drilling operations. Since we have exact information for well locations and depths, the usual element of uncertainty is not part of the equation. Within a year-that is, six months after we commence the redrilling-we will begin to bring the production wells back on stream, and full restoration of the wells will be achieved within two more years. While all this is going on, we will need to replace the EOR equipment also-"

"And what might that be?" Defense asked.

"Enhanced Oil Recovery systems, Comrade Minister. Had these been relatively new wells, pressurized from underground gas, the fires might have lasted for weeks. As you know, Comrades, these are wells from which a good deal of oil has already been extracted. To enhance production we have been pumping water into the wells, which has the effect of forcing more oil out. It may also have had the effect of damaging the oil bearing strata. This is something our geologists are even now attempting to evaluate. As it was, when power was lost, the force driving the oil from the ground was removed, and the fires in the production fields rapidly began to run out of fuel. They were for the most part dying out when my flight left for Moscow."

"So even three years from now production may not be completely restored?" the Minister of the Interior asked.

"Correct, Comrade Minister. There is simply no scientific basis for making an estimate of total production. The situation we have here has never happened before, either in the West or the East. We can drill some test wells in the next two or three months that will give us some indications. The staff engineers I left behind are making arrangements to begin the process as quickly as possible with equipment already at the site."

"Very well," the General Secretary nodded. "The next question is how long the country can operate on this basis."

Sergetov went back to his notes. "Comrades, there is no denying that this is a disaster of unprecedented scale for our economy. The winter has drawn down our heavy oil inventories more than usual. Certain energy expenditures must remain relatively intact. Electrical power generation last year, for example, accounted for thirty-eight percent of our oil products, far more than planned, due to past disappointments in coal and gas production, which we had expected to reduce oil demand. The coal industry will require at least five years to restore due to failures in modernization. And gas drilling operations are currently slowed by environmental conditions. For technical reasons it is extremely hard to operate such equipment in extreme cold weather-"

"So make those lazy bastards on the drilling crews work harder!" suggested the chief of the Moscow Party.

"It is not the workers, Comrade." Sergetov sighed. "It is the machines. Cold temperature affects metal more than men. Tools and equipment break simply because they are brittle with cold. Weather conditions make resupply of spare parts to the camps more difficult. Marxism-Leninism cannot dictate the weather."

"How difficult would it be to conceal the drilling operations?" Defense asked.

Sergetov was surprised. "Difficult? No, Comrade Minister, impossible. How can one conceal several hundred drilling rigs, each twenty to forty meters high? One might as easily attempt to conceal Plesetsk's missile launch complexes." Sergetov noticed for the first time the glances being exchanged by Defense and the General Secretary.

"Then we must reduce the consumption of oil by the electrical industry," the General Secretary pronounced.

"Comrades, allow me to give you some rough figures on the way in which we consume our oil products. Please understand that I am going from memory, since the annual departmental report is in the process of formulation at this time.

"Last year we produced 589 million tons of crude oil. This fell short of planned production by thirty-two million tons, and the amount actually produced was only possible due to the artificial measures that I have already discussed. Roughly half of that production was semirefined into mazut, or heavy fuel oil, for use in electrical power plants, factory boilers, and the like. Most of this oil simply cannot be used otherwise, since we have only three-excuse me, now only two-refineries with the sophisticated catalytic cracking chambers needed to refine heavy oil into light distillate products.

"The fuels we produce serve our economy in many ways. As we have already seen, thirty-eight percent goes for electrical and other forms of power generation, and fortunately much of this is mazut. Of the lighter fuels — diesel, gasoline, and kerosene- agricultural production and the food industries, transportation of goods and commodities, public consumption and passenger transportation, and finally military uses, these alone absorbed more than half of last year's production. In other words, Comrades, with the loss of the Nizhnevartovsk field the end users I just mentioned account for more than we are able to produce, leaving nothing at all for metallurgy, heavy machinery, chemical, and construction uses, not to mention what we customarily export to our fraternal socialist allies in Eastern Europe and throughout the world.

"To answer your specific question, Comrade General Secretary, we can make perhaps a modest reduction in the use of light oils in electrical power usage, but even now we have a serious shortfall in electric power production, resulting in occasional brownouts and complete power outages. Further cuts in power generation will adversely affect such crucial State activities as factory production and rail transport. You will recall that three years ago we experimented with altering the voltage of generated power to conserve fuels, and this resulted in damage to electric motors throughout the Donets industrial basin."

"What about coal and gas?"

"Comrade General Secretary, coal production is already sixteen percent below planned output, and getting worse, which has caused conversion of many coal-fired boilers and power plants to oil. Moreover, the conversion of such facilities from oil back to coal is costly and time consuming. Conversion to gas is a much more attractive and cheaper alternative that we have been vigorously pursuing. Gas production is also under-plan, but it is improving. We had expected to exceed planned targets later this year. Here we must also account for the fact that much of our gas goes to Western Europe. It is from this that we gain Western currency with which to purchase foreign oil, and, of course, foreign grain."

The Politburo member in charge of agriculture winced at this reference. How many men, Sergetov wondered, had been done in by their inability to make the Soviet agricultural industry perform? Not the current General Secretary, of course, who had somehow managed to advance despite his failures there. But good Marxists weren't supposed to believe in miracles. His elevation to the titular chairmanship had had its own price, one which Sergetov was only beginning to understand.

"So, what is your solution, Mikhail Eduardovich?" the Defense Minister inquired with unsettling solicitude.

"Comrades, we must bear this burden as best we can, improving efficiency at every level of our economy." Sergetov didn't bother talking about increasing imports of oil. The shortfall he had explained would result in more than a thirtyfold increase in imports, and hard currency reserves would scarcely allow a doubling of foreign oil purchases. "We will need to increase production and quality control at the Barricade drilling rig factory in Volgograd, and to purchase more drilling equipment from the West so that we can expand exploration and exploitation of known fields. And we need to expand our construction of nuclear reactor plants. To conserve what production we do have, we can restrict supplies available to trucks and personal automobiles-there is much waste in this sector, as we all know, perhaps as much as a third of total usage. We can temporarily reduce the amount of fuel consumed by the military, and perhaps also divert some heavy machine production from military hardware to necessary industrial areas. We face three very hard years-but only three," Sergetov summarized on an upbeat note.

"Comrade, your experience in foreign and defense areas is slim, no?" the Defense Minister asked.

"I have never pretended otherwise, Comrade Minister," Sergetov answered warily.

"Then I will tell you why this situation is unacceptable. If we do what you suggest, the West will learn of our crisis. Increased purchases of oil production equipment and unconcealable signs of activity at Nizhnevartovsk will demonstrate to them all too clearly what is happening here. That will make us vulnerable in their eyes. Such vulnerability will be exploited. And, at the same time"-he pounded his fist on the heavy oak table- "you propose reducing the fuel available to the forces who defend us against the West!"

"Comrade Defense Minister, I am an engineer, not a soldier. You asked me for a technical evaluation, and I gave it." Sergetov kept his voice reasonable. "This situation is very serious, but it does not, for example, affect our Strategic Rocket Forces. Cannot they alone shield us against the Imperialists during our recovery period?" Why else had they been built? Sergetov asked himself All that money sunk into unproductive holes. Wasn't it enough to be able to kill the West ten times over? Why twenty times? And now this wasn't enough?

"And it has not occurred to you that the West will not allow us to purchase what we need?" the Party theoretician asked.

"When have the capitalists refused to sell us-"

"When have the capitalists had such a weapon to use against us?" the General Secretary observed. "For the first time, the West has the ability to strangle us in a single year. What if now they also prevent our purchase of grain?"

Sergetov hadn't considered that. With yet another disappointing grain harvest, the seventh out of the last eleven years, the Soviet Union needed to make massive purchases of wheat. And this year America and Canada were the only reliable sources. Bad weather in the Southern Hemisphere had damaged Argentina's harvest, and to a lesser extent Australia's, while the U.S. and Canada had enjoyed their customary record crops. Negotiations were even now under way in Washington and Ottawa to secure such a purchase, and the Americans were making no trouble at all, except that the high value of the dollar made their grain disproportionately expensive. But that grain would take months to ship. How easy would it be, Sergetov wondered, for "technical difficulties" in the grain ports of New Orleans and Baltimore to slow or even stop shipments entirely at a crucial moment?

He looked around the table. Twenty-two men, of whom only thirteen really decided matters-and one of those was missing-were silently contemplating the prospect of over two hundred fifty million Soviet workers and peasants, all hungry and in the dark, at the same time that the troops of the Red Army, the Ministry of the Interior, and the KGB found their own fuel supplies-and because of it, their training and mobility-restricted.

The men of the Politburo were among the most powerful in the world, far more so than any of their Western counterparts. They answered to no one, not the Central Committee of the Communist Party, not the Supreme Soviet, certainly not the people of their nation. These men had not walked on the streets of Moscow for years, but been whisked by chauffeured, handmade cars to and from their luxury apartments within Moscow, or to their ceremonial dachas outside the city. They shopped, if at all, in guarded stores restricted to the elite, were served by doctors in clinics established only for the elite. Because of all this, these men regarded themselves as masters of their destiny.

It was only now beginning to strike them that like all men, they too were subject to a fate which their immense personal power merely made all the more intractable.

Around them was a country whose citizens were poorly fed and poorly housed, whose only abundant commodities were the painted signs and slogans praising Soviet Progress and Solidarity. Some of the men at this table actually believed those slogans, Sergetov knew. Sometimes he still did, mainly in homage to his idealistic youth. But Soviet Progress had not fed their nation, and how long would Soviet Solidarity endure in the hearts of people hungry, cold, in the dark? Would they be proud of the missiles in the Siberian forests then? Of the thousands of tanks and guns produced every year? Would they then look to the sky that held a Salyut space station and feel inspired-or would they wonder what kind of food was being eaten by that elite? Less than a year before, Sergetov had been a regional Party chieftain, and in Leningrad he had been careful to listen to his own staff people's description of the jokes and grumblings in the lines which people endured for two loaves of bread, or toothpaste, or shoes. Detached even then from the harsher realities of life in the Soviet Union, he had often wondered if one day the burden of the ordinary worker would become too heavy to endure. How would he have known then? How would he know now? Would the older men here ever know?

Narod, they called it, a masculine noun that was nonetheless raped in every sense: the masses, the faceless collection of men and women who toiled every day in Moscow and throughout the nation in factories and on collective farms, their thoughts hidden behind unsmiling masks. The members of the Politburo told themselves that these workers and peasants did not grudge their leaders the luxuries that accompanied responsibility. After all, life in the country had improved in measurable terms. That was the compact. But the compact was about to be broken. What might happen then? Nicholas II had not known. These men did.

The Defense Minister broke the silence. "We must obtain more oil. It is as simple as that. The alternative is a crippled economy, hungry citizens, and reduced defense capacity. The consequences of which are not acceptable."

"We cannot purchase oil," a candidate member pointed out.

"Then we must take it."

Bob Toland frowned at his spice cake. I shouldn't be eating dessert, the intelligence analyst reminded himself. But the National Security Agency commissary served this only once a week, and spice cake was his favorite, and it was only about two hundred calories. That was all. An extra five minutes on the exercise bike when he got home.

"What did you think of that article in the paper, Bob?" a co-worker asked.

"The oil-field thing?" Toland rechecked the man's security badge. He wasn't cleared for satellite intelligence. "Sounds like they had themselves quite a fire."

"You didn't see anything official on it?"

"Let's just say that the leak in the papers came from a higher security clearance than I have."

"Top Secret-Press?" Both men laughed.

"Something like that. The story had information that I haven't seen," Toland said, speaking the truth, mostly. The fire was out, and people in his department had been speculating on how Ivan had put it out so fast. "Shouldn't hurt them too bad. I mean, they don't have millions of people taking to the road on summer vacations, do they"

"Not hardly. How's the cake?"

"Not bad." Toland smiled, already wondering if he needed the extra time on the bike.

The Politburo reconvened at nine-thirty the next morning. The sky outside the double-paned windows was gray and curtained with the heavy snow that was beginning to fall again, adding to the half-meter already on the ground. There would be sledding tonight on the hills of Gorkiy Park, Sergetov thought. The snow would be cleared off the two frozen lakes for skating under the lights to the music of Tschaikovskiy and Prokofiev. Moscovites would laugh and drink their vodka and savor the cold, blissfully ignorant of what was about to be said here, of the turns that all of their lives would take.

The main body of the Politburo had adjourned at four the previous afternoon, and then the five men who made up the Defense Council had met alone. Not even all of the full Politburo members were privy to that decision-making body.

Overseeing them at the far end of the room was a full-length portrait of Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov-Lenin, the revolutionary saint of Soviet Communism, his domed forehead thrown back as though in a fresh breeze, his piercing eyes looking off toward the glorious future which his stern face confidently proclaimed, which the "science" of Marxism-Leninism called an historic inevitability. A glorious future. Which future? Sergetov asked himself. What has become of our Revolution? What has become of our Party? Did Comrade Ilych really mean it to be like this?

Sergetov looked at the General Secretary, the "young" man supposed by the West to be fully in charge, the man who was even now changing things. His accession to the highest post in the Party had been a surprise to some, Sergetov among them. The West still looked to him as hopefully as we once had, Sergetov thought. His own arrival in Moscow had changed that rapidly enough. Yet another broken dream. The man who had put a happy face on years of agricultural failure now applied his superficial charm to a larger arena. He was laboring mightily-anyone at this table would admit that-but his task was an impossible one. To get here he had been forced to make too many promises, too many deals with the old guard. Even the "young" men of fifty and sixty he'd added to the Politburo had their own ties to former regimes. Nothing had really changed.

The West never seemed to absorb the idea. Not since Khrushchev had one man held sway. One-man rule held dangers vividly remembered by the older generation of the Party. The younger men had heard the tales of the great purges under Stalin often enough to take the lesson to heart, and the Army had its own institutional memory of what Khrushchev had done to its hierarchy. In the Politburo, as in the jungle, the only rule was survival, and for all collective safety lay in collective rule. Because of this the men selected for the titular post of General Secretary were not elected so much for their personal dynamism as for their experience in the Party — an organization that did not reward people for standing out too distinctly from the crowd. Like Brezhnev, and Andropov, and Chemenko, the current chief of the Party lacked the power of personality to dominate this room with his will alone. He'd had to compromise to be in his chair, and he would have to compromise to remain there. The real power blocs were amorphous things, relationships among men, loyalties that changed with circumstance and knew only expediency. The real power lay within the Party itself.

The Party ruled all, but the Party was no longer the expression of one man. It had become a collection of interests represented here by twelve other men. Defense had its interest, the KGB, and Heavy Industry, and even Agriculture. Each interest held its own brand of power, and the chief of each allied himself with others in order to secure his own place. The General Secretary would try to change this, would gradually appoint men loyal to himself to the posts that death made vacant. Would he then learn, as his predecessors had, that loyalty so easily died around this table? For now, he still carried the burden of his own compromises. With his own men not yet fully in place, the General Secretary was only the foremost member of a group that could unseat him as easily as it had unseated Khrushchev. What would the West say if it learned that the "dynamic" General Secretary mainly served as executor for the decisions of others? Even now, he did not speak first.

"Comrades," began the Defense Minister. "The Soviet Union must have oil, at least two hundred million tons more than we can produce. Such oil exists, only a few hundred kilometers from our border in the Persian Gulf-more oil than we will ever need. We have the ability to take it, of course. Inside of two weeks, we could assemble enough aircraft and airborne troops to swoop down on those oil fields and gobble them up.

"Unfortunately, there could not fail to be a violent Western response. Those same oil fields supply Western Europe, Japan, and to a lesser extent, America. The NATO countries do not have the ability to defend those fields with conventional means. The Americans have their Rapid Deployment Force, a hollow shell of headquarters and a few light troops. Even with their pre-positioned equipment at Diego Garcia, they could not hope to stop our airborne and mechanized forces. Were they to try, and they would have to try, their elite troops would be overwhelmed and exterminated in a few days-and they would be faced with a single alternative: nuclear weapons. This is a real risk that we cannot disregard. We know for a fact that American war plans call for nuclear weapons in this case. Such weapons are stored in quantity at Diego Garcia, and would almost certainly be used.

"Therefore, before we can seize the Persian Gulf, we must first do one other thing. We must eliminate NATO as a political and military force."

Sergetov sat upright in his leather chair. What was this, what was he saying? He struggled to keep his face impassive as the Defense Minister continued.

"If NATO is first removed from the board, America will be in a most curious position. The United States will be able to meet its own energy needs from Western Hemisphere sources, removing the need to defend the Arab states, who are in any case not terribly popular with the American Jewish Zionist community."

Did they really believe this, Sergetov wondered, did they actually believe the United States would sit on its hands? What went on at the late meeting yesterday?

At last one other person shared his concern. "So, the only thing we have to do is conquer Western Europe, Comrade?" a candidate member asked. "Are these not the countries against whose conventional forces you warn us every year? Every year you tell us of the threat the massed NATO armies present to us, and now you say casually that we must conquer them? Excuse me, Comrade Defense Minister, but do not France and England have their own nuclear arsenals? And why would America not fulfill. its treaty promise to use nuclear weapons in the defense of NATO?"

Sergetov was surprised that a junior member had put the issues so quickly on the table. He was more surprised that the Foreign Minister answered. So, another piece of the puzzle. But what did the KGB think of this? Why were they not represented here? The chairman was recovering from surgery, but there should have been someone here-unless that had been taken care of last night.

"Our objectives must be limited, and obviously so. This presents us with several political tasks. First, we must engender a feeling of security in America, to put them off guard until it is too late for them to react forcefully. Second, we must attempt to unravel the NATO alliance in a political sense." The Foreign Minister ventured a rare smile. "As you know, the KGB has been working on such a plan for the past several years. It is now in its final form. I will outline it for you."

He did so, and Sergetov nodded at its audacity and also with a new understanding of the power balance in this room. So, it was the KGB. He should have known. But would the rest of the Politburo fall in line? The minister went on, "You see how it would work. One piece after another would fall into place. Given these preconditions, the waters so thoroughly muddied, and the fact that we would proclaim our unwillingness to threaten directly the two independent NATO nuclear powers, we feel that the nuclear risk, while real, is less than the risk that we already face in our economy."

Sergetov leaned back in his leather chair. So, there it was: war was less risky than a cold, hungry peace. It had been decided. Or had it? Might some combination of other Politburo members have the power or prestige to reverse that decision? Could he dare to speak out against this madness? Perhaps a judicious question first.

"Do we have the ability to defeat NATO?" He was chilled by the glib reply.

"Of course," Defense answered. "What do you think we have an army for? We have already consulted with our senior commanders."

And when you asked us last month for more steel for more new tanks, Comrade Defense Minister, was your excuse that NATO was too weak? Sergetov asked himself angrily. What machinations had taken place? Have they even spoken with their military advisers yet, or had the Defense Minister exploited his vaunted personal expertise? Had the General Secretary allowed himself to be bullied by Defense? And by the Foreign Minister? Had he even objected? Was this how the decisions were made to decide the fate of nations? What would Vladimir Ilych have thought of this?

"Comrades, this is madness!" said Pyotr Bromkovskiy. The oldest man there, frail and past eighty, his conversation occasionally rambled about the idealistic times long before, when Communist Party members really believed that they were the leading wave of history. The Yezhovshchina purges had ended that. "Yes, we have a grave economic danger. Yes, we have a grave danger to the security of the State-but do we replace this with a greater danger? Consider what can happen-how long, Comrade Defense Minister, before you can initiate your conquest of NATO?"

"I am assured that we can have our army fully ready for combat operations in four months."

"Four months. I presume that we will have fuel four months from now — enough fuel to begin a war!" Petya was old, but no one's fool.

"Comrade Sergetov." The General Secretary gestured down the table, dodging his responsibility yet again.

Which side to take? The young candidate member made a swift decision. "Inventories of light fuels-gasoline, diesel, et cetera-are high at the moment," Sergetov had to admit. "We always use the cold-weather months-the time when usage of these fuels is lowest-to build up our stocks, and added to this are our strategic defense reserves, enough for forty-five-"

"Sixty!" insisted the Defense Minister.

"Forty-five days is a more realistic figure, Comrade." Sergetov held his position. "My department has studied fuel consumption by military units as part of a program to increase the strategic fuel reserves, something neglected in past years. With savings in other consumption and certain industrial sacrifices, we might expand this to sixty days of war stocks, perhaps even seventy, plus giving you other stocks to expand training exercises. The near-term economic costs would be slight, but by midsummer this would change rapidly." Sergetov paused, greatly disturbed at how easily he had gone along with the unspoken decision. I have sold my soul… Or have I acted like a patriot? Have I become like the other men around this ' table? Or have I merely told the truth-and what is truth? All he could be certain of, he told himself, is that he had survived. For now. "We do have the limited ability, as I told you yesterday, to restructure our distillate production. In this case, my staff feels that a nine-percent increase in the militarily important fuels can be accomplished-based on our reduced production. I caution, however, that my staff analysts also feel that all existing estimates of fuel usage in combat conditions are grossly optimistic." A last, feeble attempt at protest.

"Give us the fuel, Mikhail Eduardovich," the Defense Minister smiled coldly, "and we'll see it is properly used. My analysts estimate that we can accomplish our goals in two weeks, perhaps less-but I will grant you the strength of the NATO armies, and double our estimates to thirty days. We will still have more than enough."

"And what if NATO discovers our intentions?" old Petya demanded.

"They will not. Already we are preparing our maskirovka, our trickery. NATO is not a strong alliance. It cannot be. The ministers bicker over each country's defense contribution. Their peoples are divided and soft* They cannot standardize their weapons, and because of it their supply situation is utter chaos. And their most important, most powerful member is separated from Europe by five thousand kilometers of ocean. The Soviet Union is only an overnight train ride from the German border. But, Petya, my old friend, I will answer your question. If everything fails, and our intentions are discovered, we can always stop, say that we were running an exercise, and return to peacetime conditions-and be no worse off than if we do nothing at all. We need strike only if all is ready. We can always draw back."

Everyone at the table knew that was a he, though a clever one, because no one had the courage to denounce it as such. What army had ever been mobilized to be called back? No one else spoke up to oppose the Defense Minister. Bromkovskiy rambled on for a few minutes, quoting Lenin's stricture about endangering the home of World Socialism, but even that drew no response. The danger to the State-actually the danger to the Party and the Politburo-was manifest. It could not become graver. The alternative was war.

Ten minutes later, the Politburo voted. Sergetov and his eight fellow candidate members were mere spectators. The vote was eleven to two for war. The process had begun.