The Cardinal of the Kremlin

by Tom Clancy

“Emilio?” The senior visitor gestured at Ortiz, who produced a map and a diagram.

  “This site has been under construction since 1983. We were surprised that the Russians would build so important a facility so near to the borders of Afghanistan.”

  “In 1983, they still thought they would win,” the Archer observed darkly. The idea that they’d felt that way was taken as an insult. He noted the position on the map, the mountaintop nearly surrounded by a sweeping loop of the Vakhsh River. He saw immediately why it was there. The power dam at Nurek was only a few kilometers away. The Archer knew more than he let on. He knew what lasers were, and a little of how they operated. He knew that their light was dangerous, that it could blind ...

  It destroyed a satellite? Hundreds of kilometers up in space, higher than airplanes could fly ... what could it do to people on the ground ... perhaps they’d built so close to his country for another reason ...

  “So you merely saw the light? You have heard no stories about such a place, no stories of strange lights in the sky?”

  The Archer shook his head. “No, only the one time.” He saw the visitors exchange looks of disappointment.

  “Well, that does not matter. I am permitted to offer you the thanks of my government. Three truckloads of weapons are coming to your band. If there is anything else you need, we will try to get it for you.”

  The Archer nodded soberly. He’d expected a great reward for the delivery of the Soviet officer, then been disappointed at his death. But these men had not visited him about that. It was all about the documents and the light—was this place so important that the death of the Russian was considered trivial? Were the Americans actually afraid of it?

  And if they were fearful, how should he feel?

  “No, Arthur, I don’t like it,” the President said tentatively. Judge Moore pressed the attack.

  “Mr. President, we are aware of Narmonov’s political difficulties. The disappearance of our agent will not have any more of an effect than his arrest by the KGB, possibly less. After all, the KGB can’t very well raise too much of a ruckus if they let him slip away,” the DCI pointed out.

  “It’s still too great a risk,” Jeffrey Pelt said. “We have a historic opportunity with Narmonov. He really wants to make fundamental changes in their system—hell, your people are the ones who made the assessment.”

  We had this chance before and blew it, during the Kennedy Administration, Moore thought. But Khrushchev fell, and we had twenty years of Party hacks. Now there may be another chance. You’re afraid we might never get another opportunity as good as this one. Well, that’s one way to look at it, he admitted to himself.

  “Jeff, his position will not be affected any more by extracting our man than by his capture—”

  “If they’re on to him, why haven’t they grabbed him already?” Pelt demanded. “What if you’re overreacting?”

  “This man has been working for us over thirty years—thirty years! Do you know the risks he’s run for us, the information we’ve gotten from him? Can you appreciate the frustration he’s felt the times we ignored his advice? Can you imagine what it’s like to live with a death sentence for thirty years? If we abandon the man, what’s this country all about?” Moore said with quiet determination. The President was a man who could always be swayed by arguments based on principle.

  “And if we topple Narmonov in the process?” Pelt demanded. “What if Alexandrov’s clique does take over, and it’s back to the bad old days all over again—more tension, more arms races? How do we explain to the American people that we sacrificed this opportunity for the life of one man?”

  “For one thing, they’d never know unless somebody leaked it,” the DCI replied coldly. “The Russians wouldn’t make it all public, and you know that. For another, how would we explain throwing this man away like a used Kleenex?”

  “They wouldn’t know that either, unless somebody leaked it,” Pelt answered in an equally cold voice.

  The President stirred. His first instinct had been to put the extraction operation on hold. How could he explain any of this? Either by an act of commission or omission, they were discussing the best way to prevent something unfavorable from happening to America’s principal enemy. But you can’t even say that in public, the President reflected. If you said out loud that the Russians are our enemy, the papers would throw a fit. The Soviets have thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at us, but we can’t risk offending their sensibilities ...

  He remembered his two face-to-face meetings with the man, Andrey Il’ych Narmonov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Younger than he was, the President reflected. Their initial conversations had been cautious, each man feeling out the other, looking both for weaknesses and common ground, for advantage and compromise. A man with a mission, a man who probably did wish to change things, the President thought—

  But is that a good thing? What if he did decentralize their economy, introduce market forces, give them a little freedom—not much, of course, but enough to get things moving? Quite a few people were warning him about that possibility: Imagine a country with the Soviets’ political will, backed up by an economy that could deliver quality goods both in the civilian and military sectors. Would it make the Russian people believe again in their system; would it revive the sense of mission that they’d had in the 1930s? We might be faced with a more dangerous enemy than ever before.

  On the other side, he was told that there is no such thing as a little freedom—one could ask Duvalier of Haiti, Marcos of the Philippines, or the ghost of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The momentum of events could bring the Soviet Union out of the dark ages and into the 20th-century era of political thought. It might take a generation, perhaps two, but what if the country did start to evolve into something approaching a liberal state? There was another lesson of history : Liberal democracies don’t make war on one another.

  Some choice I have, the President thought. I can be remembered as the regressive idiot who reinstated the Cold War in all its grim majesty—or the Pollyanna who expected the leopard to change its spots, only to find that it had grown bigger, sharper fangs. Jesus, he told himself as he stared at his two interlocutors, I’m not thinking about success at all, only the consequences of failure.

  That’s one area in which America and Russia have paralleled their history—our postwar governments have never lived up to the expectations of our people, have they? I’m the President, I’m supposed to know what the Right Thing is. That’s why the people elected me. That’s what they’re paying me for. God, if they only knew what frauds we all are. We’re not talking about how to succeed. We’re talking about who’ll leak the reason for the failure of policy. Right here in the Oval Office, we’re discussing who’ll get the blame if something we haven’t yet decided upon doesn’t work.

  “Who knows about this?”

  Judge Moore held his hands out. “Admiral Greer, Bob Ritter, and me at CIA. A few field personnel know about the proposed operation—we had to send out the heads-up signal—but they do not know the political issues, and never will. They don’t need to know. Aside from that, only we three at the Agency have the entire picture. Add you, sir, and Dr. Pelt, and that makes five.”

  “And already we’re talking about leaks! Goddamn it!” the President swore with surprising passion. “How did we ever get so screwed up as this!”

  Everyone sobered up. There was nothing like a presidential curse to settle people down. He looked at Moore and Pelt, his chief intelligence advisor, and his national-security advisor. One was pleading for the life of a man who had served America faithfully and well, at peril of his life; the other took the long, cold look at the realpolitik and saw a historic opportunity more important than any single human life.

  “Arthur, you’re saying that this agent—and I don’t even want to know his name—has been giving us critically important data for thirty years, up to and including this laser project that the Russians have operating; you say that he is p
robably in danger, and it’s time to run the risk of getting him out of there, that we have a moral obligation to do so.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “And you, Jeff, you say that the timing’s bad, that the revelation of a leak so high up in their government could endanger Narmonov politically, could topple him from his leadership position and replace him with a government less attractive to us.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “And if this man dies because we haven’t helped him?”

  “We would lose important information,” Moore said. “And it might have no tangible difference in its effect on Narmonov. And we’d be betraying a trust to a man who has served us faithfully and well for thirty years.”

  “Jeff, can you live with that?” the President asked his national-security advisor.

  “Yes, sir, I can live with that. I don’t like it but I can live with it. With Narmonov we have already gotten an agreement on intermediate nuclear arms, and we have a chance at one on strategic forces.”

  It’s like being a judge. Here I have two advocates who believe fully in their positions. I wonder if their principles would be quite so firm if they were in my chair, if they had to make the decision?

  But they didn’t run for President.

  This agent’s been serving the United States since I was a junior prosecutor handling whores in night court.

  Narmonov may be the best chance we’ve had for world peace since God knows when.

  The President stood and walked to the windows behind his desk. They were very thick, to protect him from people with guns. They could not protect him against the duties of his office. He looked at the south lawn, but found no answers. He turned back.

  “I don’t know. Arthur, you can get your assets in place, but I want your word that nothing will happen without my authorization. No mistakes, no initiative, no action at all without my say-so. I’m going to need time on this one. We have time, don’t we?”

  “Yes, sir. It will take several more days before we have the pieces in place.”

  “I’ll let you know when I make my decision.” He shook hands with both men and watched them leave. The President had five more minutes before his next appointment, and used the time to visit the bathroom that adjoins the office. He wondered if there were any underlying symbolism in the act of washing his hands, or did he just want the excuse to look at himself in the mirror? And you’re supposed to be the man with all the fucking answers! the image told him. You don’t even know why you went to the bathroom! The President smiled at that. It was funny, funny in a way that few other men would ever understand.

  “So what the hell do I tell Foley?” Ritter snapped twenty minutes later.

  “Back off, Bob,” Moore warned. “He’s thinking about it. We don’t need an immediate decision, and a ‘maybe’ beats hell out of a ‘no.’”

  “Sorry, Arthur. It’s just that—damn it, I’ve tried to get him to come out before. We can’t let this man go down.”

  “I’m sure he won’t make a final decision until I’ve had a chance to talk with him again. For the moment, tell Foley to continue the mission. And I want a fresh look at Narmonov’s political vulnerability. I get the impression that Alexandrov may be on the way out—he’s too old to take over from the current man; the Politburo wouldn’t stand for replacing a relatively young man with an old one, not after the death parade they had a few years back. Who does that leave?”

  “Gerasimov,” Ritter said at once. “Two others may be in the running, but he’s the ambitious one. Ruthless, but very, very smooth. The Party bureaucracy likes him because he did such a nice job on the dissidents. And if he wants to make a move, it’ll have to be pretty soon. If the arms agreement goes through, Narmonov gains a lot of prestige, and the political clout that goes with it. If Alexandrov isn’t careful, he’ll miss the boat entirely, get moved out himself, and Narmonov will have his seat nice and safe for years.”

  “That’ll take at least five years to accomplish,” Admiral Greer noted, speaking for the first time. “He may not have five years. We do have those indications that Alexandrov may be on the way out. If that’s more than a rumor, it might force his hand.”

  Judge Moore looked up at the ceiling. “It sure would be easier to deal with the bastards if they had a predictable way of running things.” Of course, we have it, and they can’t predict us.

  “Cheer up, Arthur,” Greer said. “If the world made sense, we’d all have to find honest work.”

  14.

  Changes

  PASSAGE through the Kattegat is a tricky affair for a submarine, doubly so when it is necessary to be covert. The water is shallow there, too shallow to run submerged. The channels can be tricky in daylight. They are worse at night, and worse still without a pilot. Since Dallas’ passage was supposedly a secret one, a pilot was out of the question.

  Mancuso rode the bridge. Below, his navigator sweated at the chart table while a chief quartermaster manned the periscope and called out bearings to various landmarks. They couldn’t even use radar to help with navigation, but the periscope had a low-light amplifier, which didn’t quite turn night to day, but at least made the starless darkness look like twilight. The weather was a gift, with low clouds and sleet that restricted visibility just enough that the low, dark shape of the 688-class submarine would be difficult to spot from land. The Danish Navy knew of the submarine’s transit, and had a few small craft out to ward off any possible snoopers—there were none—but aside from that, Dallas was on her own.

  “Ship on the port bow,” a lookout called.

  “I got him,” Mancuso answered at once. He held a pistol-like light-amplifying scope and saw the medium-sized container ship. The odds, he thought, made it an East Bloc vessel. Within a minute, the course and speed of the inbound ship were plotted, with a CPA—Closest Point of Approach—of seven hundred yards. The Captain swore and gave his orders.

  Dallas had her running lights on—the Danes had insisted on it. The rotating amber one above the masthead light marked her positively as a submarine. Aft, a seaman struck down the American flag and replaced it with a Danish one.

  “Everybody look Scandinavian,” Mancuso noted wryly.

  “Ja-ja, Kept’n,” a junior officer chuckled in the darkness. It would be hard for him. He was black. “Slow bearing change on our friend. He isn’t altering course that I can tell, sir. Look—”

  “Yeah, I see ’em.” Two of the Danish craft were racing forward to interpose themselves between the container ship and Dallas. Mancuso thought that would help. All cats are gray at night, and a submarine on the surface looks like ... a submarine on the surface, a black shape with a vertical sail.

  “I think she’s Polish,” the Lieutenant observed. “Yeah, I got the funnel now. Maersk Line.”

  The two ships closed at a rate of a half a mile per minute. Mancuso turned to watch, keeping his scope on the ship’s bridge. He saw no special activity. Well, it was three in the morning. The bridge crew had a tough navigating job to do, and probably their interest in his submarine was the same as his main interest in their merchantman—please don’t hit me, you idiot. It was over surprisingly fast, and then he was staring at her stern light. It occurred to Mancuso that having the lights on was probably a good idea. If they’d been blacked out and then spotted, greater notice might have been taken.

  They were in the Baltic Sea proper an hour later, on a course of zero-six-five, using the deepest water they could find as Dallas picked her way east. Mancuso took the navigator into his stateroom and together they plotted the best approach to, and the safest place on, the Soviet coast. When they’d selected it, Mr. Clark joined them, and together the three discussed the delicate part of the mission.

  In an ideal world, Vatutin thought wryly, they would take their worries to the Defense Minister, and he would cooperate fully with the KGB investigation. But the world was not ideal. In addition to the expected institutional rivalries, Yazov was in the pocket of the General S
ecretary and knew of the differences of opinion between Gerasimov and Narmonov. No, the Defense Minister would either take over the entire investigation through his own security arm, or use his political power to close the case entirely, lest KGB disgrace Yazov himself for having a traitor for an aide, and so endanger Narmonov.

  If Narmonov fell, at best the Defense Minister would go back to being the Soviet Army’s chief of personnel; more likely, he’d be retired in quiet humiliation after the removal of his patron. Even if the General Secretary managed to survive the crisis, Yazov would be the sacrificial goat, just as Sokolov had been so recently. What choice did Yazov have?

  The Defense Minister was also a man with a mission. Under the cover of the “restructuring” initiative of the General Secretary, Yazov hoped to use his knowledge of the officer corps to remake the Soviet Army—in the hope, supposedly, of professionalizing the entire military community. Narmonov said that he wanted to save the Soviet economy, but no less an authority than Alexandrov, the high priest of Marxism-Leninism, said that he was destroying the purity of the Party itself. Yazov wanted to rebuild the military from the ground up. It would also have the effect, Vatutin thought, of making the Army personally loyal to Narmonov.

  That worried Vatutin. Historically, the Party had used the KGB to keep the military under control. After all, the military had all the guns, and if it ever awoke to its power and felt the loosening of Party control ... it was too painful a concept on which to dwell. An army loyal exclusively to the General Secretary rather than the Party itself was even more painful to Vatutin, since it would change the relationship the KGB had to Soviet society as a whole. There could then be no check on the General Secretary. With the military behind him, he could break KGB to his will and use it to “restructure” the entire Party. He would have the power of another Stalin.

  How did I ever start along this line? Vatutin asked himself. I’m a counterintelligence officer, not a Party theorist. For all his life, Colonel Vatutin had never dwelt on the Big Issues of his country. He’d trusted his superiors to handle the major decisions and allow him to handle the small details. No longer. By being taken into Chairman Gerasimov’s confidence he was now inextricably allied with the man. It had happened so easily! Virtually overnight—you have to be noticed to get general’s stars, he thought with a sardonic smile. You always wanted to get noticed. So, Klementi Vladimirovich, you got yourself noticed all right. Now look where you are!