The Sky is Falling td-63

by Warren Murphy

  It had started just a few days before. In his apartment at Saratov, a central farming city southwest of Moscow, Petrovich had received the first strange word. He had just finished waiting in line for a fresh batch of writing paper for his grandchild. He had retired the year before, and getting fresh paper had always been difficult when he no longer had access to military supplles. His wife was waiting in the apartment with a block leader of the party who had not even taken off his coat, but stood with his hat tapping his side and his feet tapping the floor.

  "His telephone has been ringing all day," said the retired colonel's wife, a round, sweet-faced woman. "Your command has called using my telephone," said the block leader.

  "They could not phone me, of course," said Petrovich, who had applied for a telephone in 1958.

  "There are other phones they could have used, but this is an emergency. You are to report to Evenki immediately. You have top priority on any aircraft in the area, any car to get you to the aircraft, any telephone line at your service."

  "Are you sure, me? What would they want an old man for?"

  "They want you. Now."

  "Is there a war? Where is there a war?"

  "I don't know. I don't even know who is running Mother Russia anymore. That they would rudely instruct a party member to act as a messenger is obscene. I could see it if there were a war. But nothing is happening."

  "Maybe something is wrong. Maybe something has failed. Maybe an entire missile army has blown itself up somewhere."

  "We would have heard," said the party member.

  "No. You would not have heard. Although there may have been a rebellion somewhere, and people have to be replaced."

  "Is that possible?" asked the party member.

  "No," said the retired colonel, shrugging. "It is not. Everyone who attends a missile is reliable to the extreme. They are all like me. We do what we are told, when we are told, and if we are lucky we get a telephone. If we are not, we settle for fresh writing paper. I take it the car to the airport is to be provided by you."

  The party member gave a short nod. The retired colonel hugged his sweet-faced wife and tried in his kiss to tell her how much he loved her, how good a wife she had been, in that remote case he did not come home again. The communication was perfect, and when she cried, no denial on his part would convince her it was only some silly bureaucratic mistake that had called him to Western Missile Command in Evenki.

  The party member carefully laid out plastic strips on the front seat of his black ZIL limousine, warning the retired colonel not to sit too heavily because the material underneath the plastic could wear. Petrovich felt like flinging the strips in the party member's face. But his wife might be vulnerable to this man's reprisals, so he only nodded dumbly. He even offered an apology to the self-important pip with the Communist party card and automobile and telephone and all the things that Communism had come to mean in the land where it was practiced longest.

  It was a very small airport, but the runways, like those of all commercial airports in Russia, were built to handle the newest, most powerful jets. They were not only long enough for anything that flew at that time, but for anything that might be flying in fifty years.

  The terminal building was virtually a shack. It was there that the nightmare began in earnest. There were young boys who had not yet shaved and old men from the original nuclear bomber commands. All of them had been called up like Petrovich.

  Every thirty seconds a loudspeaker above warned everyone to keep silent. When they boarded the plane for Evenki and Western Missile Command headquarters, they received another warning. This time in person, from an officer of an elite KGB unit with special patches on their especially expensive green uniforms. No unbuttoned shirts in that unit.

  "Soldiers of Mother Russia," the officer said, reading from a piece of paper as he stood in front of the airplane. "You are called in a dire time in the history of your people and in the history of your motherland. As much as it may be tempting to discuss what is happening with another soldier of the motherland, we must forbid it. Because of this ergergency, violators will be dealt with in the severest manner."

  The airplane was quiet. No one spoke. The jets hummed, the KGB officer left the compartment, and then everyone spoke.

  "It's war," said an old bombardier. "Got to be."

  "You are jumping to conclusions," said a young man whose face was smoother than the colonel's wife's. "No," said the old bombardier. "If it is not a war, we hear about the wonders of the Communist party and what it is doing for the people of Russia. But when they want the people to fight, they never mention the party. I remember the great patriotic war against the Nazis. It started with defending communism against fascism, and very quickly became Mother Russia against the Hun. When they want you to die, it's the motherland. When they want you to wait in line for some goods, it's the party."

  "Is he jumping to conclusions?" the young man asked the colonel.

  "If there is a war, he is not. If there is not, he is," said Petrovich with very Russian fatalism. "But look around. I think it is more important who is not here than who is here. I have not seen one active officer of a missile command."

  "In an emergency why would they call up all those who are less qualified?" said the old bombardier.

  Their question was answered with the nightmare. One did not need expertise in missile technology to use what they were all shown at Evenki.

  They drove through columns upon columns of trucks whose cargo was covered with tarpaulins. Guards stood by each truck. A missile-command officer entered each transport bus to insist that no one turn on anything. Some of the older retired officers' hearing aids were snatched away and smashed, leaving them helpless.

  They were herded into a shell of a building. A strange crude missile sat on a gun carriage on a stage. Ordinarily, to show how safe the missile was before arming, an instructor would stand on it. This time, he very gingerly walked up to the stage and stood on its very edge. He did not move.

  "Here she is," he said. He did not use a loudspeaker, and he spoke without yelling. Everyone leaned forward. Those whose hearing aids had been removed waited to be told later what was being said. They just looked at each other.

  "She has been designed so that you need exactly thirty seconds of additional training."

  There was a buzz in the room.

  "Please. Quiet. Most of your training with nuclear weapons-and she is nuclear, comrades, nuclear as hell-has been in the areas of safety and guidance. We will be using the old guidance systems which are not that accurate. We are making up for this with a warhead that had previously been discontinued. A dirty warhead. The big blasters. That's what she has got in her nose."

  And then, just before he got down from the stage, he added:

  "She's primed and loaded and ready to go."

  For a moment there was the silence of a blank universe and then even the youngest of cadets understood. Eleven months out of every training year had to do with all the safeguards to prevent an accidental nuclear war. The reason they needed no more training was that there were no safety devices.

  This new ugly weapon was the first nuclear weapon produced in any country without safeguards. The nickname being bandied about for it was the "raw button."

  You pressed the button and the missile went. It was like the trigger of a gun. So that was the reason active missile-command officers were not chosen. Any fool could use a first-strike weapon. There were only two choices. War or no war. And to produce something like this meant someone was sure of war, because moving these things was a nightmare.

  The weapons had no electronics whatsoever, and they wouldn't need much more aiming than an old cannon. They might hit anywhere, and the warhead was so big that it didn't matter. One warhead could take out an entire quarter-country. All the sender had to hit was North America. Mass murder.

  If Petrovich hadn't been so concerned about his wife he would have stepped down. But he had not. For a week now he had been drivi
ng incredibly slowly along the bad roads; now there were no roads. He faced bumpy hills, and slowed everything down to less than a mile an hour.

  His chart was equally crude. He would establish a new base, one that America could not have identified before because it would not exist until he created it. Then he would take rough aim, and according to his instructions, unless otherwise heard from, he would fire the missile at a specific time two weeks hence. He had been given an old Swiss winding watch so that he would not mistake the time. He was going to start World War III unless he was told not to.

  His movements did not go unnoticed by the CIA. It was not the missile itself that was detected from outer space, because it could have been one of the thousands of dummies the Russians had scattered over Siberia. Rather, it was the telephone communication from the retired colonel informing home base he was primed and ready.

  From the frequency and the analysis of the code, the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that another of the raw-button batteries had been activated.

  Harold W. Smith had privileged access to this information. And more. While the Russians were getting edgier, the President had received a protest from England about the violence attributed to one American agent. He passed it on to Smith, who provided a routine denial used in such instances. The first part was official, bemoaning any violence and offering to help the country in which multiple killings had occurred track down the perpetrator. Informally, the President added a little joke he used when Remo and Chiun were operating outside of the United States:

  "If you get their names, we'd like to hire them." The insinuation was that the protesting party had been misinformed, that people really couldn't do those sorts of things. It struck Smith at that time that his country's denial of a weapon threatening the ozone layer was quite similar to the normal cover used for Remo and Chiun. In other words, a lie. Russia had every good reason not to trust America. The truth sounded so much like the normal lie. He could almost understand Chiun's formula:

  "They see evil in their own evil."

  Of course, the House of Sinanju did not consider the bloodiest Russian czar, Ivan the Terrible, evil. That was because he paid them well. So what Chiun meant by evil and what the West might mean by evil were different things. Smith did not know what Chiun meant by evil, and that made Chiun's formula difficult to use.

  The red phone rang again. Smith answered it, glancing out through the one-way windows of Folcroft, that sanitarium in Rye, New York, that covered for the organization. It faced Long Island Sound, gray and bleak this autumn day. Normally the President's line rang three, perhaps four times in a year. This was the third time this day.

  "Here," said Smith.

  "I think the British believed us. But do you know what your operative did? He went around England collecting security personnel like baggage and then killed I don't know how many men in the Tower of London itself."

  "He's located the weapon."

  "Where?"

  "In the Chitibango province of San Gauta."

  "Another Central American problem. Damn. Maybe we should just bomb that province."

  "Wouldn't work, Mr. President."

  "Why not? In this instance you have to get the weapon and the people behind it. Just destroying one device won't do. It would be like trying to end an atomic threat by destroying one atomic bomb."

  "There is no good news out of Russia," said the President.

  "Are they close to launch? How much time do we have?" asked Smith.

  "They could launch now, with those damn raw buttons. They might have enough to do us in. But they're still building."

  "So we do have time," said Smith.

  "Until they get frightened enough."

  "When is that?"

  "Can you read a Russian mind?" said the President. "By the way, we also had to answer to the French on the head of the SDEC. What do the French have to do with this?"

  "Are you sure it's our people?" said Smith. "Word I've heard is that he was on some Russian hit list for something. Has been for years."

  "They'd like to get rid of him, we know. That's been established. The Russians sent in the Bulgarians some years ago, and then a Rumanian team for hire. Then they gave up. The way he was killed smells of your people."

  "What do you mean?" said Smith.

  "They're not looking for the person who killed him, but the machine. Some of his bones were fused."

  "Maybe one of ours," said Smith. He wondered if it were Chiun. Remo could do many things, but being in two places at the same time was not one of them.

  "These are dark days, Smith. I am glad we have you and your people," said the President. He did not know that neither of Smith's personnel was heading anywhere near the fluorocarbon gun.

  The generator was sitting in the Chemical Concepts of Massachusetts, Inc. complex off Route 128 outside of Boston, being prepared for another shot.

  The news was not good from any front. The Premier had asked Zemyatin to his dacha beyond the city to reassure select members of the Politburo that everything was in control, that Alexei, the Great One, was making the right moves.

  Zemyatin was brief and to the point.

  "We are not in control of events. We are still struggling to survive them."

  "Is it better or worse than it was at the beginning? I've got to have something to give my Politburo."

  "Do you mean when should you all go to your shelters?"

  "No. Good news. I want good news."

  "Then read Pravda. You will see that capitalism is falling on all fronts and we are gaining ground through the will of the masses."

  Zemyatin looked at the faces of the other old men. If he had time for pity he would have shown more of it. But he had no time. The old men looked as though they were staring into their own graves. Despite all the talk of being ready for war, none of them were. Despite all the talk of continuous war for the socialist revolution, they were comfortable old men in their dotage who were suddenly at war.

  No one spoke. There weren't even any questions. Zemyatin saw the chairman of all armed forces, an accountant by training, lift a trembling glass of vodka to his lips.

  Zemyatin turned and walked out. There were scars on his body and they did not make moving easy.

  What he had now was what he'd feared. A svstem so confident of its superiority that it had become useless. At almost every level there were ones like those old men, especially now when they could least afford it.

  The Premier and the rest of the Politburo would have been even more frightened if they had known that their vaunted KGB, the biggest, most efficient, most feared intelligence structure in the world, was underneath it all even worse than the other useless men in the Premier's dacha. A thin man with large wrists had beaten his way through all of them and taken back the one lead they had to the American weapon. This had happened quite naturally in the one other country where they felt most secure. This Zemyatin found out from his own men within the KGB, even before they tried to cover for themselves.

  Zemyatin knew that if his Russia were going to survive, he would have to make all those comfortable KGB boys much less comfortable. The world was not a fine desk from which you ordered someone killed. It was blood. And pain. And treachery. And very, very dangerous.

  Even as he entered 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, the massive concrete building in Moscow that was KGB headquarters, he felt the tiredness of combat. But this time there was a sense that events could not be turned. Zemyatin brought with him two old combat soldiers he could rely on to put a bullet in someone's head without arguing. Nothing fancy. Stick the gun in their faces and pull the trigger. He could reasonably expect everyone to follow his orders, but he was too tired now to work with people who might ask him questions.

  He went right to the British desk of the KGB and ordered the heads of other desks to be in the room. He ordered the general who had seen what had happened at the missile base to be there also.

  Assembled in this one office were forty-two generals. Zemvatin tol
d no one why they had been called. The young general in charge of the British desk tried to restrain his tension. He had phoned the field marshal just an hour earlier to report the minor difficulty encountered in England. The field marshal had hung up on the general after telling him he would be over soon. Stay there, had been the only order. All of them had been kept there for half a day. Good. Now the room buzzed with the upper echelon of the KGB. Some looked to Zemyatin, who sat in a chair with his two old friends behind him. Zemyatin said nothing, gathering his strength by drinking a glass of water.

  The conversation among the generals drifted to personal things. Zemyatin did nothing. He let their talk wander to all the things they thought were important: watches, dachas, special Western goods, the price of a woman in Yemen. Several were embarrassed to be standing near him, because no one took it upon himself to ask why they had been called. They all wanted someone else to do it.

  Finally Zemyatin nodded to one of the two old soldiers he had brought with him.

  "Anyone but this one," he said, pointing to the young general of the British desk. "I'll need him for a while," He said it so casually that no one seemed to notice. They continued talking. The shot rattled every eardrum in the room. It shivered the gilt on the chairs. The old soldier had taken a big-caliber pistol, still smoking acrid gunpowder now, and shot the brains out of the KGB officer closest to him, the one who had smiled when the old soldier approached.

  For just one moment there was incredible silence in the room. Everyone was stunned, everyone but Zemyatin and his old Russian infantrymen.

  "Hello," he said. "I am Alexei Zemyatin. I am sure most of you have heard of me in one way or another." The Great One had just gotten their attention.

  "We are engaged in a battle of survival of the motherland. This man has failed," he said, pointing to the young general sitting behind the desk. Little beads of perspiration now formed under the young general's immaculately combed hair, slick with Italian lotion. The young general gulped. Zemyatin wondered if he had ever seen a dead body before. The others were all wondering, of course, why the British desk officer had not been shot if the British desk had failed.