The Devil's Alternative

THE POLISH AIRLINES twin-jet dipped a wing over the wide sweep of the Dnieper River and settled into its final ap­proach to Borispil Airport outside Kiev, capital of the Ukraine. From his window seat, Andrew Drake looked down eagerly at the sprawling city beneath him. He was tense with excitement.

Along with the other hundred-plus package tourists from London who had staged through Warsaw earlier in the day, he queued nearly an hour for passport control and customs. At the immigration control he slipped his passport under the plate-glass window and waited. The man in the booth was in uniform, Border Guard uniform, with the green band around his cap and the sword-and-shield emblem of the KGB above its peak. He looked at the photo in the passport, then stared hard at Drake.

“An ... drev ... Drak?” he asked.

Drake smiled and bobbed his head.

“Andrew Drake,” he corrected gently. The immigration man glowered back. He examined the visa, issued in London, tore off the incoming half, and clipped the exit visa to the passport. Then he handed it back. Drake was in.

On the Intourist motor coach from the airport to the sev­enteen-story Lybid Hotel, he took stock again of his fellow passengers. About half were of Ukrainian extraction, excited and innocent, visiting the land of their fathers. The other half were of British stock, just curious tourists. All seemed to have British passports. Drake, with his English name, was part of the second group. He had given no indication he spoke flu­ent Ukrainian and passable Russian.

During the ride they met Ludmilla, their Intourist guide for the tour. She was a Russian, and spoke Russian to the driver, who, though a Ukrainian, replied in the same lan­guage. As the motor coach left the airport she smiled brightly and in reasonable English began to describe the tour ahead of them.

Drake glanced at his itinerary: two days in Kiev, trotting around the eleventh-century Cathedral of St. Sophia (“A wonderful example of Kievan-Rus architecture, where Prince Yaroslav the Wise is buried,” warbled Ludmilla from up front) and Golden Gate, not to mention Vladimir Hill, the State University, the Academy of Sciences, and the Botanical Gardens. No doubt, thought Drake bitterly, no mention would be made of the 1964 fire at the Academy Library, in which priceless manuscripts, books, and archives devoted to Ukrainian national literature, poetry, and culture had been destroyed; no mention that the fire brigade failed to arrive for three hours; no mention that the fire was set by the KGB itself as their answer to the nationalistic writings of “the Sixtiers.”

After Kiev, there would be a day trip by hydrofoil to Kanev, then a day in Ternopol, where a man called Miroslav Kaminsky would certainly not be a subject for discussion, and finally the tour would go on to Lvov.

As he had expected, he heard only Russian on the streets of the intensively russified capital city of Kiev. It was not un­til Kanev and Ternopol that he heard Ukrainian spoken ex­tensively. His heart sang to hear it spoken so widely by so many people, and his only regret was that he had to keep saying “I’m sorry, do you speak English?” But he would wait until he could visit the two addresses that he had memorized so well he could say them backward.

Five thousand miles away, the President of the United States was in conclave with his security adviser, Poklewski, Robert Benson of the CIA, and a third man, Myron Fletcher, chief analyst of Soviet grain affairs in the Department of Agricul­ture.

“Bob, are you sure beyond any reasonable doubt that Gen­eral Taylor’s Condor reconnaissance and your ground reports point to these figures?” Matthews asked, his eye running once again down the columns of numbers in front of him.

The report that his intelligence chief had presented to him via Stanislaw Poklewski five days earlier consisted of a break­down of the entire Soviet Union into one hundred grain-pro­ducing zones. From each zone a sample square, ten miles by ten, had been seen in close-up and its grain problems analyzed. From the hundred portraits, his experts had drawn up the nationwide grain forecast.

“Mr. President, if we err, it is on the side of caution, of giving the Soviets a better grain crop than they have any right to expect,” replied Benson.

The President looked across at the man from the Depart­ment of Agriculture.

“Dr. Fletcher, how does this break down in layman’s terms?”

“Well, sir, Mr. President, for a start, one has to deduct, at the very minimum, ten percent of the gross harvest to pro­duce a figure of usable grain. Some would say we should deduct twenty percent. This modest ten-percent figure is to account for moisture content, foreign matter like stones and grit, dust and earth, losses in transportation, and wastage through inadequate storage facilities, which we know they suffer from badly.

“Starting from there, one then has to deduct the tonnages the Soviets have to keep on the land itself, right in the coun­tryside, before any state procurements can be made to feed the industrial masses. You will find my table for this on the second page of my separate report.”

President Matthews flicked over the sheets before him and examined the table. It read:

1. Seed Grain. The tonnage the Soviets must put by for replanting next year, both for winter wheat and spring-sown wheat ... 10 million tons

2. Human Consumption. The tonnage that must be set aside to feed the masses who inhabit the rural areas, the state and collective farms, and all suburban units—from hamlets, through villages, up to towns of less than 5,000 population ... 28 million tons

3. Animal Feed. The tonnage that must be set aside for the feeding of the livestock through the winter months until the spring thaw ... 52 million tons

4. Irreducible Total ... 90 million tons

5. Representing a gross total, prior to a 10 percent unavoidable wastage deduction, of ... 100 million tons

“I would point out, Mr. President,” went on Fletcher, “that these are not generous figures. They are the absolute minima required before they start feeding the cities. If they cut down on the human rations, the peasants will simply consume the livestock, with or without permission. If they cut back on ani­mal feed, the livestock slaughter will be wholesale; they’ll have a meat glut in the winter, then a meat famine for three to four years.”

“Okay, Dr. Fletcher, I’ll buy that. Now what about their reserves?”

“We estimate they have a national reserve of thirty million tons. It is unheard of to use up the whole of it, but if they did, that would give them an extra thirty million tons. And they should have twenty million tons left over from this year’s crop available for the cities—a grand total for their cit­ies of fifty million.”

The President swung back to Benson.

“Bob, what do they have to have by way of state procure­ments to feed the urban millions?”

“Mr. President, 1977 was their worst year for a long time, the year they perpetrated ‘the Sting’ on us. They had a total crop of one hundred ninety-four million tons. They bought sixty-eight million tons from their own farms. They still needed to buy twenty million from us by subterfuge. Even in 1975, their worst year for a decade and a half, they needed seventy million tons for the cities. And that led to savage shortages. With a greater population now than then, the state must buy no less than eighty-five million tons.”

“Then,” concluded the President, “by your figures, even if they use the total of their national reserve, they are going to need thirty to thirty-five million tons of foreign grain?”

“Right, Mr. President,” cut in Poklewski. “Maybe even more. And we and the Canadians are the only people who are going to have it. Dr. Fletcher?”

The man from the Department of Agriculture nodded. “It appears North America is going to have a bumper crop this year. Maybe fifty million tons over domestic requirements for both us and Canada considered together.”

Minutes later, Dr. Fletcher was escorted out. The debate resumed. Poklewski pressed his point.

“Mr. President, this time we have to act. We have to re­quire a quid pro quo from them this time around.”

“Linkage?” asked the President suspiciously. “I know your thoughts on that, Stan. Last time it didn’t work; it made things worse. I will not have another repeat of the Jackson Amendment.”

All three men recalled the fate of that piece of legislation with little joy. At the end of 1974 Congress had passed a compromise trade-reform bill; its passage had been delayed by a controversial section that specified in effect that unless the Soviets went easier on the question of Russian-Jewish emigration to Israel, there would be no U.S. trade credits for the purchase of technology and industrial goods. The Polit­buro under Brezhnev had contemptuously rejected the pressure, launched a series of predominantly anti-Jewish show trials, and bought their requirements, with trade credits, from Britain, Germany, and Japan.

“The point about a nice little spot of blackmail,” Sir Nigel Irvine, who was in Washington in 1975, had remarked to Bob Benson, “is that you must be sure the victim simply cannot do without something that you have, and cannot acquire it anywhere else.”

Poklewski had learned of this remark from Benson and re­peated it to President Matthews, avoiding the word black­mail.

“Mr. President, this time around they cannot get their wheat elsewhere. Our wheat surplus is no longer a trading matter. It is a strategic weapon. It is worth ten squadrons of nuclear bombers. There is no way we would sell nuclear technology to Moscow for money. I urge you to invoke the Shannon Act.”

In the wake of the Sting of 1977, Congress had, finally and belatedly, in 1980 passed the Shannon Act. This said simply that, in any year, the federal government had the right to ex­ercise an option to buy the entire U.S. grain surplus at the going rate per ton at the time of the announcement that it wished to do so.

The grain speculators had hated it, but the farmers had gone along. The act smoothed out some of the wilder fluctua­tions in world grain prices. In years of glut, the farmers got prices for their grain that were too low; in years of shortage, the prices were exceptionally high. The Shannon Act ensured that if the government exercised its option the farmers would get a fair price but the speculators would be out of business. The act also gave the administration a gigantic new weapon in dealing with customer countries: the aggressive as well as the humble and poor.

“Very well,” said President Matthews, “I will invoke the Shannon Act. I will authorize the use of federal funds to buy the futures for the expected surplus of fifty million tons of grain.”

Poklewski was jubilant.

“You won’t regret it, Mr. President. This time, the Soviets will have to deal directly with your administration, not with middlemen. We have them over a barrel. There is nothing else they can do.”

Yefrem Vishnayev had a different opinion. At the outset of the Politburo meeting, he asked for the floor and got it.

“No one here, Comrades, denies that the famine that faces us is not acceptable. No one denies that the surplus foods lie in the decadent capitalist West. It has been suggested that the only thing we can do is to humble ourselves, possibly grant concessions that will reduce our military might and thereby delay the onward march of Marxism-Leninism in order to buy these surpluses to tide us over.

“Comrades, I disagree, and I ask you to join me in rejec­tion of the course of yielding to blackmail and betraying our great inspirator, Lenin. There is one other way—one other way in which we can obtain acceptance by the entire Soviet people of rigid rationing at the minimum-subsistence level, promote a nationwide upsurge of patriotism and self-sacrifice, and secure an imposition of that discipline without which we cannot get through the hunger that has to come.

“There is a way in which we can use what little harvest grain we shall cull this autumn, spin out the national reserve until the spring next year, use the meat from our herds and flocks in place of grain, and then, when all is used, turn to Western Europe, where the milk lakes are, where the beef-and-butter mountains are, where the national reserves of ten wealthy nations are.”

“And buy them?” asked Foreign Minister Rykov ironically.

“No, Comrade,” replied Vishnayev softly. “Take them. I yield the floor to Comrade Marshal Kerensky. He has a file he would wish each of us to examine.”

Twelve thick files were passed around. Kerensky kept his own and began reading aloud from it. Rudin left his un­opened in front of him and smoked steadily. Ivanenko also left his on the table and contemplated Kerensky. He and Rudin had known for four days what the file would contain. In col­laboration with Vishnayev, Kerensky had brought out of the General Staff’s safe the file for Plan Aleksandr, named after Field Marshal Aleksandr Suvorov, the great and never defeated Russian commander. Now the plan had been brought right up to date.

And it was impressive, as Kerensky spent the next two hours reading it During the following May the usual massive spring maneuvers of the Red Army in East Germany would be bigger than ever, but with a difference. These would be no maneuvers, but the real thing. On command, all thirty thou­sand tanks and armored personnel carriers, mobile guns and amphibious craft would swing westward, hammer across the Elbe, and plow into West Germany, heading for France and the Channel ports.

Ahead of them, fifty thousand paratroops would drop over fifty locations to take out the principal tactical nuclear air­fields of the French inside France and the Americans and British on German soil. Another hundred thousand would drop on the four countries of Scandinavia to control the capi­tal cities and main transportation arteries, with massive naval backup from offshore.

The military thrust would avoid the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, whose governments, all partners with the Euro-Communists in office, would be ordered by the Soviet Ambas­sador to stay out of the fight or perish by joining in. Within half a decade later, they would fall like ripe plums, anyway. Likewise Greece, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. Switzerland would be avoided, Austria used only as a through-route. Both would later be islands in a Soviet sea, and would not last long.

The primary zone of attack and occupation would be the three Benelux countries, France, and West Germany. Britain, as a prelude, would be crippled by strikes and confused by the extreme Left, which on instructions would mount an im­mediate clamor for nonintervention. London would be in­formed that if the nuclear Strike Command were used east of the Elbe, Britain would be wiped off the face of the map.

Throughout the entire operation the Soviet Union would be stridently demanding an immediate cease-fire in every capital in the world and in the United Nations, claiming the hostili­ties were local to West Germany, temporary, and caused en­tirely by a West German preemptive strike toward Berlin, a claim that most of the non-German European Left would be­lieve and support.

“And the United States, all this time?” Petrov interrupted. Kerensky looked irritated at being stopped in full flow after ninety minutes.

“The use of tactical nuclear weapons right across the face of Germany cannot be excluded,” pursued Kerensky, “but the overwhelming majority of them will destroy West Ger­many, East Germany, and Poland—no loss, of course, for the Soviet Union. Thanks to the weakness of Washington, there is no deployment of either Cruise missiles or neutron bombs. Soviet military casualties are estimated at between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand at the max­imum. But as two million men in all three services will be in­volved, such percentages will be acceptable.”

“Duration?” asked Ivanenko.

The point units of the forward mechanized armies will en­ter the French Channel ports one hundred hours after crossing the Elbe. At that point, of course, the cease-fire may be allowed to operate. The mopping up can take place under the cease-fire.”

“Is that time scale feasible?” asked Petryanov.

This time, Rudin cut in.

“Oh yes, it’s feasible,” he said mildly. Vishnayev shot him a suspicious look.

“I still have not had an answer to my question,” Petrov pointed out. “What about the United States? What about their nuclear strike forces? Not tactical missiles. Strategic missiles. The hydrogen-bomb warheads in their ICBMs, their bombers, and their submarines.”

The eyes around the table riveted on Vishnayev. He rose again.

“The American President must, at the outset, be given three solemn assurances in absolutely credible form,” he said. “One: that for her part the USSR will never be the first to use thermonuclear weapons. Two: that if the three hundred thousand American troops in Western Europe are committed to the fight, they must take their chances in conventional or tactical nuclear warfare with ours. Three: that in the event the United States resorts to ballistic missiles aimed at the So­viet Union, the top hundred cities of the United States will cease to exist.

“President Matthews, Comrades, will not trade New York for the decadence of Paris, nor Los Angeles for Frankfurt. There will be no American thermonuclear riposte.”

The silence was heavy as the perspectives sank in. The vast storehouse of food, including grain, of consumer goods and technology that was contained in Western Europe. The fall like ripe plums of Italy, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Greece, and Yugoslavia within a few years. The treasure trove of gold beneath the streets of Switzerland. The utter isolation of Brit­ain and Ireland off the new Soviet coast. The domination without a shot fired of the entire Arab bloc and Third World. It was a heady mixture.

“It’s a fine scenario,” said Rudin at last “But it all seems to be based on one assumption: that the United States will not rain her nuclear warheads on the Soviet Union if we promise not to let ours loose on her. I would be grateful to hear if Comrade Vishnayev has any corroboration for that confident declaration. In short, is it a proved fact or a fond hope?”

“More than a hope,” snapped Vishnayev. “A realistic calcu­lation. As capitalists and bourgeois nationalists, the Americans will always think of themselves first. They are paper tigers, weak and indecisive. Above all, when the prospect of losing their own lives faces them, they are cowards.”

“Are they indeed?” mused Rudin. “Well now, Comrades, let me attempt to sum up. Comrade Vishnayev’s scenario is realistic in every sense, but it all hangs on his hope—I beg his pardon, on his calculation—that the Americans will not re­spond with their heavy thermonuclear weapons. Had we ever believed this before, we would surely already nave completed the process of liberating the captive masses of Western Eu­rope from fascism-capitalism to Marxism-Leninism. Person­ally, I perceive no new element to justify the calculation of Comrade Vishnayev.

“However, neither he nor the Comrade Marshal has ever had any dealings with the Americans, or ever been in the West Personally, I have, and I disagree. Let us hear from Comrade Rykov.”

The elderly and veteran Foreign Minister was white-faced.

“All this smacks of Khrushchevism, as in the case of Cuba. I have spent thirty years in foreign affairs. Ambassadors around the world report to me, not to Comrade Vishnayev. None of them, not one—not one single analyst in my depart­ment has a single doubt that the American President would use the thermonuclear response on the Soviet Union. Nor do I. It is not a question of exchanging cities. He, too, can see that the outcome of such a war would be domination by the Soviet Union of almost the whole world. It would be the end of America as a superpower, as a power, as anything other than a nonentity. They would devastate the Soviet Union be­fore they yielded Western Europe and thence the world.”

“I would point out that if they did,” said Rudin, “we could not stop them. Our high-energy-particle laser beams from space satellites are not fully functional yet. One day we will no doubt be able to vaporize incoming rockets in inner space before they can reach us. But not yet The latest assessments of our experts—our experts, Comrade Vishnayev, not our op­timists—suggest a full-blown Anglo-American thermonuclear strike would take out one hundred million of our citizens—mostly Great Russians—and devastate sixty percent of the Soviet Union from Poland to the Urals. But to continue. Comrade Ivanenko, you have experience of the West. What do you say?”

“Unlike Comrades Vishnayev and Kerensky,” observed Ivanenko, “I control hundreds of agents throughout the capi­talist West. Their reports are constant I, too, have no doubt at all that the Americans would respond.”

“Then let me put it in a nutshell,” said Rudin brusquely. The time for sparring was over. “If we negotiate with the Americans for wheat we may have to accede to demands that could set us back by five years. If we tolerate the famine, we will probably be set back by ten years. If we launch a Eu­ropean war, we could be wiped out, certainly set back by twenty to forty years.

“I am not the theoretician that Comrade Vishnayev un­doubtedly is. But I seem to recall the teachings of Marx and Lenin are very firm on one point: that while the pursuit of the world rule of Marxism-Leninism must be pursued at ev­ery stage by every means, its progress should not be endan­gered by the incurring of foolish risks. I estimate this plan as being based on a foolish risk. Therefore I propose that we—”

“I propose a vote,” said Vishnayev softly.

So that was it. Not a vote of no confidence in him, thought Rudin. That would come later if he lost this round. The fac­tion fight was out in the open now. He had not had the feeling so clearly in years that he was fighting for his life. If he lost, there would be no graceful retirement, no retaining the villas and the privileges as Mikoyan had done. It would be ruin, exile, perhaps the bullet in the nape of the neck. But he kept his composure. He put his own motion first. One by one, the hands went up.

Rykov, Ivanenko, Petrov—all voted for him and the nego­tiation policy. There was hesitancy down the table. Who had Vishnayev got to? What had he promised them?

Stepanov and Shushkin raised their hands. Last, slowly, came Chavadze the Georgian. Rudin put the countermotion, for war in the spring. Vishnayev and Kerensky, of course, were for it. Komarov of Agriculture joined them. Bastard, thought Rudin, it was your bloody ministry that got us into this mess. Vishnayev must have persuaded the man that Ru­din was going to ruin him in any case, so he thought he had nothing to lose. You’re wrong, my friend, thought Rudin, face impassive, I’m going to have your entrails for this. Petryanov raised his hand. He’s been promised the prime ministership, thought Rudin. Vitautas the Balt and Mukhamed the Tajik also went with Vishnayev for war. The Tajik would know that if nuclear war came, the Orientals would rule over the ruins. The Lithuanian had been bought.

“Six for each proposal,” he said quietly. “And my own vote for the negotiations.”

Too close, he thought. Much too close.

It was sundown when the meeting dissolved. But the fac­tion fight, all knew, would now go on until it was resolved; no one could back away now, no one could stay neutral any­more.

It was not until the fifth day of the tour that the party ar­rived in Lvov and stayed at the Intourist Hotel. Up to this point, Drake had gone with all the guided tours on the itiner­ary, but this time he made an excuse that he had a headache and wished to stay in his room. As soon as the party left by motor coach for St. Nicholas Church, he changed into more casual clothes and slipped out of the hotel.

Kaminsky had told him the sort of clothes that would pass without attracting attention: socks with sandals over them, light trousers, not too smart, and an open-necked shirt of the cheaper variety. With a street map he set off on foot for the seedy, poor, working-class suburb of Levandivka. He had not the slightest doubt that the two men he sought would treat him with the profoundest suspicion, once he found them. And this was hardly surprising when one considered the family backgrounds and circumstances that had forged them. He recalled what Miroslav Kaminsky, lying in his Turkish hospital bed, had told him.

On September 29, 1966, near Kiev, at the gorge of Babi Yar, where over fifty thousand Jews had been slaughtered by the SS in Nazi-occupied Ukraine in 1941-42, the Ukraine’s foremost contemporary poet, Ivan Dzyuba, gave an address that was remarkable inasmuch as a Ukrainian Catholic was speaking out powerfully against anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism has always flourished in the Ukraine, and successive rulers—tsars, Stalinists, Nazis, Stalinists again, and their successors—have vigorously encouraged it to flourish.

Dzyuba’s long speech began as a seeming plea for remem­brance of the slaughtered Jews of Babi Yar, a straight con­demnation of Nazism and fascism. But as it developed, his theme began to encompass all those despotisms which, despite their technological triumphs, brutalize the human spirit and seek to persuade even the brutalized that this is normal.

“We should therefore judge each society,” he said, “not by its external technical achievements but by the position and meaning it gives to man, by the value it puts on human dig­nity and human conscience.”

By the time he reached this point, the Chekisti who had in­filtrated the silent crowd had realized the poet was not talking about Hitler’s Germany at all; he was talking about the Polit­buro’s Soviet Union. Shortly after the speech, he was arrested.

In the cellars of the local KGB barracks, the chief inter­rogator, the man who had at his beck and call the two hulks in the corners of the room, the ones gripping the heavy, three-foot-long rubber hoses, was a fast-rising young colonel of the Second Chief Directorate, sent in from Moscow. His name was Yuri Ivanenko.

But at the address at Babi Yar there had been, in the front row, standing next to their fathers, two small boys, age ten. They did not know each other then, and would meet and be­come firm friends only six years later on a building site. One was Lev Mishkin; the other was David Lazareff.

The presence of both the fathers of Mishkin and Lazareff at the meeting had also been noted, and when, years later, they applied for permission to emigrate to Israel, both were accused of anti-Soviet activities and drew long sentences in labor camps.

Their families lost their apartments, the sons any hope of attending a university. Though highly intelligent, they were destined for pick-and-shovel work. Now both twenty-six, these were the young men Drake sought among the hot and dusty byways of Levandivka.

It was at the second address that he found David Lazareff, who, after Drake had introduced himself, treated him with extreme suspicion. But he agreed to bring his friend Lev Mishkin to a rendezvous since Drake knew both their names, anyway.

That evening Drake met Mishkin, and the pair regarded him with something close to hostility. He told them the whole story of the escape and rescue of Miroslav Kaminsky, and his own background. The only proof he could produce was the photograph of himself and Kaminsky together, taken in the hospital room at Trabzon with a Polaroid camera by a nurs­ing orderly. Held up in front of them was that day’s edition of the local Turkish newspaper. Drake had brought the same newspaper as suitcase lining and showed it to them as proof of his story.

“Look,” he said finally, “if Miroslav had been washed up in Soviet territory and been taken by the KGB, if he had talked and revealed your names, and if I were from the KGB, I’d hardly be asking for your help.”

The two Jewish workers agreed to consider his request overnight. Unknown to Drake, both Mishkin and Lazareff had long shared an ideal close to his own—that of striking one single, powerful blow of revenge against the Kremlin hi­erarchy in their midst. But they were near to giving up, weighed down by the hopelessness of trying to do anything without outside help.

Impelled by their desire for an ally beyond the borders of the USSR, the two shook hands in the small hours of the morning and agreed to take the Anglo-Ukrainian into their confidence. The second meeting was that afternoon, Drake having skipped another guided tour. For safety they strolled through wide, unpaved lanes near the outskirts of the city, talking quietly in Ukrainian. They told Drake of their desire also to strike at Moscow in a single, deadly act.

“The question is—what?” said Drake. Lazareff, who was the more silent and more dominant of the pair, spoke.

“Ivanenko,” he said. “The most hated man in the Ukraine.”

“What about him?” asked Drake.

“Kill him.”

Drake stopped in his tracks and stared at the dark-haired, intense young man.

“You’d never get near him,” he said finally.

“Last year,” said Lazareff, “I was working on a job here in Lvov. I’m a house painter, right? We were redecorating the apartment of a Party bigwig. There was a little old woman staying with them. From Kiev. After she’d gone, the Party man’s wife mentioned who she was. Later I saw a letter post­marked Kiev in the letter box. I took it, and it was from the old woman. It had her address on it.”

“So who was she?” asked Drake.

“His mother.”

Drake considered the information. “You wouldn’t think people like that had mothers,” he said. “But you’d have to watch her flat for a long time before he might come to visit her.”

Lazareff shook his head. “She’s the bait,” he said, and out­lined his idea. Drake considered the magnitude of it.

Before coming to the Ukraine, he had envisaged the great single blow he had dreamed of delivering against the might of the Kremlin in many terms, but never this. To assassinate the head of the KGB would be to strike into the very center of the Politburo, to send hairline cracks running through every corner of the power structure.

“It might work,” he conceded.

If it did, he thought, it would be hushed up at once. But if the news ever got out, the effect on popular opinion, es­pecially in the Ukraine, would be traumatic.

“It could trigger the biggest uprising there has ever been here,” he said.

Lazareff nodded. Alone with his partner Mishkin, far away from outside help, he had evidently given the project a lot of thought.

“True,” he said.

“What equipment would you need?” asked Drake.

Lazareff told him. Drake nodded.

“It can all be acquired in the West,” he said. “But how to get it in?”

“Odessa,” cut in Mishkin. “I worked on the docks there for a while. The place is completely corrupt. The black market is thriving. Every Western ship brings seamen who do a vigor­ous illegal trade in Turkish leather jackets, suede coats, and denim jeans. We would meet you there. It is inside the Ukraine; we would not need internal passports.”

Before they parted, they agreed to the plan. Drake would acquire the equipment and bring it to Odessa by sea. He would alert Mishkin and Lazareff by a letter, posted inside the Soviet Union, well in advance of his own arrival. The wording would be innocent. The rendezvous in Odessa was to be a cafe that Mishkin knew from his days as a teenage laborer there.

“Two more things,” said Drake. “When it is over, the pub­licity for it, the worldwide announcement that it has been done, is vital—almost as important as the act itself. And that means that you personally must tell the world. Only you will have the details to convince the world of the truth. But that means you must escape from here to the West.”

“It goes without saying,” murmured Lazareff. “We are both Refuseniks. Like our fathers before us, we have tried to emigrate to Israel and have been refused. This time we will go, with or without permission. When this is over, we have to get to Israel. It is the only place we will ever be safe, ever again. Once there, we will tell the world what we have done and leave those bastards in the Kremlin and the KGB dis­credited in the eyes of their own people.”

“The other point follows from the first,” said Drake. “When it is done, you must let me know by coded letter or postcard. In case anything goes wrong with the escape. So that I can try to help get the news to the world.”

They agreed that an innocently worded postcard would be sent from Lvov to a poste restante address in London. With the last details memorized, they parted, and Drake rejoined his tour group.

Two days later Drake was back in London. The first thing he did was buy the world’s most comprehensive book on small arms. The second was to send a telegram to a friend in Canada, one of the best of that elite private list he had built up over the years of emigres who thought as he did of carry­ing their hatred to the enemy. The third was to begin preparations for a long-dormant plan to raise the needed funds by robbing a bank.

At the far end of Kutuzovsky Prospekt on the southeastern outskirts of Moscow, a driver pulling to the right off the main boulevard onto the Rublevo Road will come twenty kilo­meters later to the little village of Uspenskoye, in the heart of the weekend-villa country. In the great pine and birch forests around Uspenskoye lie such hamlets as Usovo and Zhukovka, where stand the country mansions of the Soviet elite. Just beyond Uspenskoye Bridge over the Moscow River is a beach where in summer the lesser-privileged but nevertheless very well off (they have their own cars) come from Moscow to bathe from the sandy beach.

The Western diplomats come here, too, and it is one of the rare places where a Westerner can be cheek by jowl with or­dinary Muscovite families. Even the routine KGB tailing of Western diplomats seems to let up on Sunday afternoons in high summer.

Adam Munro came here with a party of British Embassy staffers that Sunday afternoon, July 11, 1982. Some of them were married couples, some single and younger than he. Shortly before three, the whole party of them left their towels and picnic baskets among the trees, ran down the low bluff toward the sandy beach, and swam. When he came back, Munro picked up his rolled towel and began to dry himself. Something fell out of it.

He stooped to pick it up. It was a small pasteboard card, half the size of a postcard, white on both sides. On one side was typed, in Russian, the words: “Three kilometers north of here is an abandoned chapel in the woods. Meet me there in thirty minutes. Please. It is urgent.”

He maintained his smile as one of the embassy secretaries came over, laughing, to ask for a cigarette. While he lit it for her, his mind was working out all the angles he could think of. A dissident wanting to pass over the underground litera­ture? A load of trouble, that. A religious group wanting asylum in the embassy? The Americans had had that in 1978, and it had caused untold problems. A trap set by the KGB to identify the SIS man inside the embassy? Always possible. No ordinary commercial secretary would accept such an invita­tion, slipped into a rolled towel by someone who had evi­dently tailed him and watched from the surrounding woods. And yet it was too crude for the KGB. They would have set up a pretended defector in central Moscow with information to pass, arranged for secret photographs at the handover point. So who was the secret writer?

He dressed quickly, still undecided.

Finally he pulled on his shoes and made up his mind. If it was a trap, then he had received no message and was simply walking in the forest. To the disappointment of his hopeful secretary he set off alone. After a hundred yards he paused, took out his lighter and burned the card, grinding the ash into the carpet of pine needles.

The sun and his watch gave him due north, away from the riverbank, which faced south. After ten minutes he emerged on the side of a slope and saw the onion-shaped dome of a chapel two kilometers farther on across the valley. Seconds later he was back in the trees.

The forests around Moscow have dozens of such small chapels, once the worshiping places of the villagers, now mainly derelict, boarded up, deserted. The one he was ap­proaching stood in its own clearing among the trees, beside a derelict cemetery. At the edge of the clearing he stopped and surveyed the tiny church. He could see no one. Carefully he advanced into the open. He was a few yards from the sealed front door when he saw the figure standing in deep shadow under an archway. He stopped, and for minutes on end the two stared at each other.

There was really nothing to say, so he just said her name. “Valentina.”

She moved out of the shadow and replied, “Adam.”

Twenty-one years, he thought in wonderment She must be turned forty. She looked like thirty, still raven-haired, beauti­ful, and ineffably sad.

They sat on one of the tombstones and talked quietly of the old times. She told him she had returned from Berlin to Moscow a few months after their parting, and had continued to be a stenographer for the Party machine. At twenty-three she had married a young Army officer with good prospects. After seven years there had been a baby, and they had been happy, all three of them. Her husband’s career had flour­ished, for he had an uncle high in the Red Army, and patron­age is no different in the Soviet Union from anywhere else. The boy was now ten.

Five years before, her husband, having reached the rank of colonel at a young age, had been killed in a helicopter crash while surveying Red Chinese troop deployments along the Ussuri River in the Far East. To kill the grief she had gone back to work. Her husband’s uncle had used his influence to secure her good, highly placed work, bringing with it privi­leges in the form of special food shops, special restaurants, a better apartment, a private car—all the things that go with high rank in the Party machine.

Finally, two years before, after special clearance, she had been offered a post in the tiny, closed group of stenographers and typists, a subsection of the General Secretariat of the Central Committee, that is called the Politburo Secretariat.

Munro breathed deeply. That was high, very high, and very trusted.

“Who,” he asked, “is the uncle of your late husband?”

“Kerensky,” she murmured.

“Marshal Kerensky?” he asked. She nodded. Munro exhaled slowly. Kerensky, the ultrahawk. When he looked again at her face, the eyes were wet. She was blinking rapidly, on the verge of tears. On an impulse he put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against him. He smelled her hair, the same sweet odor that had made him feel both tender and excited two decades ago, in his youth.

“What’s the matter?” he asked gently.

“Oh, Adam, I’m so unhappy.”

“In God’s name, why? In your society you have every­thing.”

She shook her head slowly, then pulled away from him. She avoided his eye, gazing across the clearing into the woods.

“Adam, all my life, since I was a small girl, I believed. I truly believed. Even when we loved, I believed in the good­ness, the lightness, of socialism. Even in the hard times, the times of deprivation in my country, when the West had all the consumer riches and we had none, I believed in the jus­tice of the Communist ideal that we in Russia would one day bring to the world. It was an ideal that would give us all a world without fascism, without money-lust, without exploita­tion, without war.

“I was taught it, and I really believed it. It was more im­portant than you, than our love, than my husband and child. It meant as much to me as this country, Russia, which is part of my soul.”

Munro knew about the patriotism of the Russians toward their country, a fierce flame that would make them endure any suffering, any privation, any sacrifice, and which, when manipulated, would make them obey their Kremlin overlords without demur.

“What happened?” he asked quietly.

“They have betrayed it Are betraying it. My ideal, my people, and my country.”

“They?” he asked.

She was twisting her fingers until they looked as if they would come off.

“The Party chiefs,” she said bitterly. She spat out the Rus­sian slang word meaning “fat cats”: “The nachalstvo.”

Munro had twice witnessed a recantation. When a true be­liever loses the faith, the reversed fanaticism goes to strange extremes.

“I worshiped them, Adam. I respected them. I revered them. Now, for years, I have lived close to them all. I have lived in their shadow, taken their gifts, been showered with their privileges. I have seen them close up, in private; heard them talk about the people, whom they despise. They are rot­ten, Adam, corrupt and cruel. Everything they touch they turn to ashes.”

Munro swung one leg across the tombstone so he could face her, and took her in his arms. She was crying softly.

“I can’t go on, Adam, I can’t go on,” she murmured into his shoulder.

“All right, my darling, do you want me to try to get you out?”

He knew it would cost him his career, but this time he was not going to let her go. It would be worth it; everything would be worth it.

She pulled away, her face tear-streaked.

“I cannot. I cannot leave. I have Sasha to think about.”

He held her quietly for a while longer. His mind was rac­ing.

“How did you know I was in Moscow?” he asked care­fully.

She gave no hint of surprise at the question. It was in any case natural enough for him to ask it.

“Last month,” she said between sniffs, “I was taken to the ballet by a colleague from the office. We were in a box. When the lights were low, I thought I must be mistaken. But when they went up at intermission, I knew it was really you. I could not stay after that. I pleaded a headache and left quickly.”

She dabbed her eyes, the crying spell over.

“Adam,” she asked eventually, “did you marry?”

“Yes,” he said. “Long after Berlin. It didn’t work. We were divorced years ago.”

She managed a little smile. “I’m glad,” she said. “I’m glad there is no one else. That is not very logical, is it?”

He grinned back at her.

“No,” he said. “It is not. But it is nice to hear. Can we see each other? In the future?”

Her smile faded; there was a hunted look in her eyes. She shook her dark head.

“No, not very often, Adam,” she said. “I am trusted, privi­leged, but if a foreigner came to my apartment, it would soon be noticed and reported on. The same applies to your apart­ment. Diplomats are watched—you know that. Hotels are watched also; no apartments are for rent here without impos­sible formalities. It will be difficult, Adam, very difficult.”

“Valentina, you arranged this meeting. You took the initia­tive. Was it just for old times’ sake? If you do not like your life here, if you do not like the men you work for ... But if you cannot leave because of Sasha, then what is it you want?”

She composed herself and thought for a while. When she spoke, it was quite calmly.

“Adam, I want to try to stop them. I want to try to stop what they are doing. I suppose I have for several years now, but since I saw you at the Bolshoi, and remembered all the freedom we had in Berlin, I began thinking about it more and more. Now I am certain. Tell me if you can—is there an intelligence officer in your embassy?”

Munro was shaken. He had handled two defectors-in-place, one from the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, the other in Vi­enna. One had been motivated by a conversion from re­spect to hatred for his own regime, like Valentina; the other by bitterness at lack of promotion. The former had been the trickier to handle.

“I suppose so,” he said slowly. “I suppose there must be.”

Valentina rummaged in the shoulder bag on the pine needles by her feet. Having made up her mind, she was ap­parently determined to go through with her betrayal. She withdrew a thick, padded envelope.

“I want you to give this to him, Adam. Promise me you will never tell him who it came from. Please, Adam. I am frightened by what I am doing. I cannot trust anyone but you.”

“I promise,” he said. “But I have to see you again. I can’t Just see you walk away through the gap in the wall as I did last time.”

“No, I cannot do that again, either. But do not try to con­tact me at my apartment. It is in a walled compound for sen­ior functionaries, with a single gate in the wall and a policeman at it. Do not try to telephone me. The calls are monitored. And I will never meet anyone else from your em­bassy, not even the intelligence chief.”

“I agree,” said Munro. “But when can we meet again?”

She considered for a moment. “It is not always easy for me to get away. Sasha takes up most of my spare time. But I have my own car and I am not followed. Tomorrow I must go away for two weeks, but we can meet here, four Sundays from today.” She looked at her watch. “I must go, Adam. I am one of a house party at a dacha a few miles from here.”

He kissed her on the lips, the way it used to be. And it was as sweet as it had ever been. She rose and walked away across the clearing. When she reached the fringe of the trees, he called after her.

“Valentina, what is in this?” He held up the package.

She paused and turned.

“My job,” she said, “is to prepare the verbatim transcripts of the Politburo meetings, one for each member. And the di­gests for the candidate members. From the tape recordings. That is a copy of the recording of the meeting of June tenth.”

Then she was gone into the trees. Munro sat on the tomb­stone and looked down at the package.

“Bloody hell,” he said.