The Tashkent Crisis

by William Craig

  When she failed to answer, he continued, “I didn’t know you two were such good friends.”

  Mary Devereaux was confused. She wanted very much to tell someone that she was proud to be Randall’s mistress, that he slept with her nearly every night, that she hoped to marry him someday. But she realized she could not confide in Barnett because Bob had told her the newsman was unethical. She waggled a finger at Barnett and smiled sweetly: “We’re just here talking over business, Alex. He had to go back to the White House in a hurry, that’s all.”

  “What’s up?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” she replied ruefully.

  Barnett excused himself shortly and went to a phone. He left Mary Devereaux looking sadly into her third gin and tonic.

  In the shadows of the big trees, Alexander Barnett waited with his photographer. When the door to the west entrance opened briefly, the photographer pointed the infrared camera and zoomed across five hundred yards to focus on the emerging men. He clicked the shutter three times and then pulled the camera down from his face. “That’s all there are, I guess.” The two men went up the street to their car and drove to a processing lab of CBA.

  In thirty-five minutes, the photographer and Barnett were staring excitedly at the pictures laid out on a white cloth. Barnett picked up each one in turn and purred happily: “Old Sam Riordan himself, paying a social call on Bill Stark. Now what the hell would he be doing in the White House at midnight? Sam hasn’t been up past ten o’clock for twenty years, I bet.” Barnett tapped Riordan’s picture against his teeth and said: “There’s a very rotten smell here. Let’s see if we can smoke it out of them.” He went to a wall phone and put through a call to New York and the director of CBA News.

  Joe Safcek slept for hours in the uncomfortable cabin of the C-135. When he awoke, the neat farmland acres of Germany were underneath. Then the huge airfield at Frankfurt-on-Main appeared, and the jet landed and taxied past the beautiful terminal complex on the right side, where commercial planes were lined up at different gates. The C-135 pulled to the left and cut its engines before an old hangar. When Safcek and Gorlov emerged with Richter, four military policemen formed a bodyguard around them and escorted them into a lounge.

  Safcek was amused by the special convoy and said to Richter, “I feel like a VIP.”

  Richter answered: “You are. Their orders are to keep everyone away from you.” He left unsaid what further orders they had if anyone did approach the team.

  The three men sat down at a table and looked at a menu. The MPs got them what they ordered, and they ate in silence, surrounded by curious busboys and the four MPs, who watched stolidly while their charges finished their snacks. Karl Richter had constant refills on his coffee. Joe Safcek drank coffee and smoked two cigarettes. Gorlov asked for a tumbler of vodka and swallowed it at a gulp. Then the MPs took them back to the refueled plane. The doors closed, the engines roared, and the C-135 went back into the air. It headed southeast toward the Mediterranean.

  Thursday, September 12

  Marshal Moskanko and his three deputies, Marshals Bakunin, Omskuschin, and Fedoseyev, were forty miles northwest of the Soviet capital, holding a morning situation conference. They had entered a bungalow at the top of a hill and descended an elevator five hundred feet into the bowels of the earth, where the defense command for all Soviet military forces maintained headquarters. A labyrinth radiated from a central control room lined with electric maps listing all American offensive and defensive weapons systems in position. Moskanko and his deputies went immediately to a huge television screen which covered a fourteen-by-twenty-foot section of a side wall. They stared at the image, and the defense minister said, “They’re still on a war footing. Look at those bombers taking off.” The picture showed a long line of B-52 aircraft taxiing to the end of runways and sweeping down the long path into the sky. A Cosmos satellite hanging motionless over Torreon Airbase in Spain was relaying these indications of enemy readiness.

  “Torreon normally handles only twelve planes on a daily basis, but now we see at least twenty-four on the line,” the ascetic-looking Marshal Bakunin, master of the rocket forces, said in his precise manner. “Not only that but each SAC station is similarly beefed up. The missile sites are also on at least condition yellow, so they are ready to go within twelve minutes.”

  Moskanko nodded acknowledgment to Bakunin, who was not only a fellow marshal but his brother-in-law as well. The defense minister left the television screen to go into a white-walled office. He greeted a man in civilian clothes who deferred to him by standing until he was seated. Moskanko was brusque with his visitor. “What about Rudenko?”

  “He’s still alive at Lubianka. We’ve had Fedor working with him for three days, and the pig is stubborn. He has admitted nothing of real importance, though he did testify that he knew some people at the American Embassy. Rudenko says it was merely in the line of duty. When we confronted him with the microfilming equipment from his apartment, he said it had been planted there.”

  The man speaking was Vassili Baranov, deputy director of the Soviet state security police. The hawk-nosed director continued apologetically: “We don’t want to lose Rudenko before he tells us what we want to know. Fedor has had to be extremely careful with him.”

  Moskanko interrupted. “We must break him. Someone in our laser program gave him blueprints to pass on to the Americans. He could not just walk into the research center like a ghost. If you cannot do anything with your fists, use something else.”

  Vassili Baranov suggested sodium pentothal. The defense minister told him to arrange for it immediately, and the state security officer left by helicopter to execute this latest directive.

  Marshal Moskanko rejoined his deputies. They were in the map room, standing over a table cluttered with charts of the frontier in Europe. The stocky peasant Omskuschin was explaining the disposition of NATO forces in West Germany.

  “The Americans are in a terribly weakened position. Their forces there are down fifty-five percent from their peak in 1965, and, of course, their allies have not made up the loss over the years. I have two tank armies poised along the Elbe which can reach the English Channel in fourteen days. The West German army is the shield. Once we have pierced it, there is very little to hold us.”

  Moskanko interrupted. “You will not even have to fight your way through, comrade. When the American President realizes the position he is in, he will not resist. You will be able to walk to the Channel and pick flowers all the way.” The expansive Moskanko eased himself into a chair and smiled at his fellow marshals.

  “Omskuschin,” the defense minister continued, “I know how eager you are to test out your armored-warfare ideas on those flat plains, but you must prepare to be disappointed. Stark will fold up like an accordion, and your vehicles will continue to collect rust in their motor pools. It will not be like 1945 when you took your Stalin tanks into Berlin.”

  Omskuschin made a face at the defense minister, who laughed loudly and slammed the top of the table with his fist. “No, comrades, it will all fall into our laps without a man lost.”

  Marshal Bakunin did not smile at the remark. The bespectacled deputy stared moodily at the maps in front of him until Moskanko noticed his gloom.

  “A problem?”

  Bakunin stirred from his silence and turned his somber face to Moskanko. “Yes, a problem. I have been thinking of the one thing that could upset all our plans. What if the American Stark reacts differently from our expectations? What if his advisors convince him to fight? All indications show he would rather appease than face us. All indications show that the American people have lost their spirit, that they are divided among themselves and want to forget their commitments around the world. But, my dear friend, this is an entirely different situation. America is about to fall, and Stark may somehow find the strength to stand up to us. A rat scurries away until he is cornered, but then he fights to save himself from extinction. And we have not given Stark any alternative
to total surrender. He is up against a wall and might just attempt to bring it down on us along with himself.”

  Moskanko was angry. “What is wrong with you, Pavel Andreievich? Are you losing your nerve?”

  Bakunin flushed, but ignored his commander’s remark. “I only know what power I have at my fingertips. I have seen the bombs go off at the test centers. I was there the day we misjudged the force of one hydrogen weapon and it killed more than fifty officials who were too close. Knowing that, I still went along with you because I believed that Stark would capitulate without a struggle. But I will be frank to admit I have had trouble sleeping nights, wondering whether he just might not surrender, that he might come to believe that it is better to die like a man than to consign his people to our domination. Man is the most complex of all primates, and his predictability is always open to question.”

  The defense minister had gotten up, and he came around the table and put his arm around Bakunin’s shoulder.

  “I am sorry for what I said to you, Pavel Andreievich. Please forgive me. Such arguments are out of place in a friendship as long as ours, which goes all the way back to Frunze Academy.” Bakunin nodded grimly as Moskanko hastened to smooth over his insult.

  “You were called ‘the professor’ even there, Pavel Andreievich. Spending all your time reading instead of chasing the women. My sister was the only one who could bring your nose out of those damned books. When you married, I was certain you would spend the honeymoon in some library.” Moskanko laughed and Bakunin forced a smile.

  The defense minister went back to his chair and waited for his friend to continue, but Bakunin had lapsed into another moody silence.

  “You will see, Pavel Andreievich, it will turn out as I predicted. The Americans will not retaliate, and your rockets, like Omskuschin’s tanks, will collect rust where they lie.”

  “I hope you are right, Viktor Semyonovich,” Bakunin replied to his brother-in-law. “I have seen the power of my rockets, and knew that someday I might have to use them. But this is different. We are the aggressors in this situation. If the world goes up …”

  “It will not go up, I tell you. We will make it impossible for Stark to move in the next hours. We have a few more surprises that will render him absolutely harmless before the ultimatum expires.”

  The bespectacled Bakunin showed no interest in Moskanko’s remark as he got up and went out to monitor the state of the enemy’s defenses. Omskuschin and Fedoseyev watched him go and turned to Moskanko for a reaction. The defense minister shrugged.

  “He is too intelligent for his own good. He might just lose the debate he is having with his conscience. And that would not be good for us.”

  Thirty-five minutes after having left the defense center, Vassili Baranov arrived at the infamous Lubianka Prison. Lubianka rivaled the Bridge of Sighs in Venice as a place where men’s last hopes for life flickered and were extinguished. Baranov went to the second floor and nodded to a blue-uniformed guard who opened the gate to a cellblock. Baranov marched down the stone corridor and stopped before Cell 212. He looked in at the bed, where Grigor Rudenko lay inert. When the guard let Baranov in, he walked to the edge of the cot. Rudenko sensed his presence and rose up on an elbow. The secret police officer blanched when he saw the results of Fedor’s careful handling.

  “Rudenko, why don’t you cooperate?” pleaded the state security man, looking at his battered prisoner. “Then you can rest.”

  Grigor’s head rolled slightly before he summoned the will to answer. “Comrade, I have told your people everything I know.” He smiled crookedly at Baranov, who then saw the blood dribbling down his chin in tiny rivulets. Baranov looked closer in the bad light and saw Rudenko’s mouth. His teeth were broken and jagged, where Fedor’s fist had smashed into them time and again and left the victim with a shattered face.

  Baranov wasted no further time. He went to the door and muttered instructions to the guard. Shortly, two attendants brought a stretcher and lifted Rudenko onto it. As he lay with his face trailing over the edge of the cot, the prisoner spat blood onto the floor.

  They took him down the hall to a room that smelled of ether. A Tchaikovsky ballet was playing somewhere, and Rudenko tried to follow it through the waves of pain that engulfed him. He sank into a real bed with fresh sheets and gazed through his good eye at a pink ceiling. It reminded him strongly of home, where Tamara’s room had this feminine atmosphere. For a moment he mentally held her in his arms and kissed her cheek. Then a white form hovered over him and Baranov’s voice cut through the fog: “Give him the maximum, Senski.” The white form was pulling at his left sleeve, and then Rudenko felt something metallic burrowing into his arm.

  The white form spoke to him; “Now, Grigor, please count backward from ten with me. Ten, nine.” At the last second, Grigor sensed what they were doing and lashed out feebly with his arms. But then he was on a meadow with the morning dew still on the grass. A horse was cantering toward him, and he shouted to it, “Archer!” The horse slowed and stopped before him. Grigor jumped on its bare back and rode through the sunlight, his hair blowing wildly into his eyes.

  Beside him, another horse and rider appeared, and Karl Richter shouted: “For a date with Sheila,” and spurred ahead of Grigor who laughed excitedly and gave chase. The two boys went bounding over stone walls toward a red barn in the distance. At the gate to the stables, a girl with golden hair waited for them. She was jumping up and down and urging them toward her, and Grigor could see her teeth gleaming in the ruby mouth. He pulled Archer up before her and jumped off. Sheila came toward him and Grigor reached out to touch her hand …

  “Grigor, who gave you the blueprints?”

  “… Sheila, I just won a date with …”

  “Grigor, please tell us.”

  “You.” And he held her hands and looked into her beautiful eyes.

  “Who, Grigor?”

  “Professor Parchuk, my wife’s uncle. He gave them to me on September seventh.”

  “Why did he do it, Grigor?” and he kissed her on her ruby lips and felt her slim body cling to his. Karl Richter rode by, laughing, and said: “I’m going to shoot this old nag I’ve got. You and Sheila owe it all to him …”

  “Parchuk found out what the laser was going to be used for.”

  “Who else helped him?”

  “No one! No one helped him. He only came to me because he was desperate, and he trusted me completely.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  Sheila put her arm around him, and they walked with Karl to the main house, where Sheila’s mother had a breakfast of pancakes and bacon ready for them. Sheila’s eyes were twinkling with excitement and she tousled Grigor’s hair; Karl Richter was hugging Sheila’s mother who giggled and said, “Karl, I’m going to tell your father you’re going around bothering old ladies.” And they all laughed and Grigor sat beside Sheila.

  “Where, Grigor?”

  “At the GUM Department Store.”

  Another voice joined that of the white-coated man: “Enough … get me Tashkent on the special phone.”

  Grigor was walking again with Sheila, and the dew was soaking through their sneakers, and he was telling her he loved her, and Sheila was looking into his eyes happily.

  William Stark had taken a sleeping pill at 1 A.M., but it had not brought him sleep. He tossed about in the bed until Pamela woke up and laid her hand on his shoulder.

  Stark had been almost indifferent to her in the past two days. He had lied about the reason for delaying the trip to Bar Harbor, and she had been hurt when he explained that it was because of the pending passage of a conservation bill. Then she realized that the haunted look in his eyes hid a far more serious matter and she stopped pressing. Now in their bed, she asked again if she could help. President Stark lay against the pillow and poured out his turmoil to his wife of twenty-nine years. When he finished, she continued rubbing his back softly and tried to stop the fluttering in her own breast. Pamela was terrified not for hers
elf but for the man beside her, who was faced with an intolerable choice—destroy the world or surrender more than 200 million people. Worse, she knew she could not help him except by her presence, by her devotion to him. And he needed more than that. Pamela Stark pulled her husband closer, and he fell asleep in her arms.

  At 6:45 A.M., Leonard Thompson, the President’s valet, knocked on the door and came in with breakfast. The couple sat up in bed. The night’s conversation was an unmentioned presence between them. As a husband, Stark was relieved that he had confided in his wife. As the leader of the nation, he felt no let-up in his anxiety. And the malevolent influence of the laser continued to intrude into the Presidential bedroom. Almost thirty-two hours were gone; less than forty remained.

  The valet switched on the television for the morning news, and Stark listened halfheartedly to the supposed state of the world as seen from New York. The announcer was saying something about an important meeting in Washington, and then Stark saw a picture of Sam Riordan fill the screen. The announcer spoke of rumors circulating through the capital that some unforeseen situation must have prompted the director of the Central Intelligence Agency to spend an evening at the White House with the most important advisor in the government. The broadcast switched to Washington and the suave Alexander Barnett, who told viewers that he had personally witnessed the rendezvous the night before and had also seen Mr. Randall called away hurriedly from a restaurant to attend the conference. Barnett took off his glasses, looked into the camera, and asked: “Why has the President postponed his trip to Bar Harbor and why the hush-hush meetings at the White House late at night? The American people would like to know, I’m sure.”

  Bill Stark turned to his wife. “Any advice for a rainy day, dear?” She leaned over and kissed him on the stubble. He rose to meet the deluge.

  It was a special day in Washington for other reasons. The concerned members of the organization called Save Our Unborn Legions, popularly known as SOUL, were about to march through the city.