Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  “Perhaps we have,” Sonya muttered. “It would appear that the Red Army has exacted a heavy price for its dedication to Socialist Legality.”

  As Gorchenko’s speech continued in much the same bellicose vein, as he ranted against Kronkol and his cabal of traitors, and vilified the shade of Harry Carson, and denounced the genocidal machinations of the CIA, what had happened became all too horribly obvious.

  The Red Army might have given civil power back to the elected President, but he in return had had to cede control of the military situation to them, accept public responsibility himself for whatever they did next, and deliver this horrendous chest-pounding speech, the text of which no doubt had been negotiated with the generals word by word.

  When Gorchenko had worked himself up into a sufficient synthetic frenzy, he paused, took a sip of water, and stared straight ahead like an animated corpse as he delivered the dreadful words that the generals had put in his mouth.

  “As President of the Soviet Union, I demand that the United States remove its missiles from the Ukraine. Since no sovereign Ukrainian state exists, we can only regard these weapons as being in the hands of employees of the CIA on Soviet territory, and as such, an act of war against the USSR.”

  “Oh no . . ,” Franja gasped. “What’s he doing?”

  “What he’s been told to do, I’m very much afraid,” Sonya said somberly.

  “If the United States does not agree to remove its missiles within forty-eight hours, we . . . we . . .” Gorchenko seemed to be choking on his own words. “We . . . we will be forced to act accordingly.”

  There was a dreadful silence in the chamber. Not even the hairiest of Bears seemed ready to applaud that.

  “But we will do so in a responsible manner,” Gorchenko went on much more firmly, as if this was one part of the speech that had at least been a negotiated settlement. “We will not be the first to use nuclear weapons. We will let the Red Army settle matters with the Kronkol clique by conventional means on the ground. But should a single nuclear warhead explode on Soviet territory, our retaliation will be swift and total against everyone concerned.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Robert groaned, “it’s the same damn ultimatum!”

  “It’s the same damn situation, after all,” Sonya told him. “It’s one thing to hope for a miracle, but it’s another to expect it.”

  Constantin Gorchenko paused for a sip of water again, paused to change faces, and now he seemed to be the real Gorchenko, not the reader of someone else’s script.

  “But let us not speak only of the gathering darkness,” he said, “let us speak of lighting candles . . .”

  “What?”

  “There it is again!”

  Sonya leaned forward intently. There was no doubt about it, this was another enigmatic message to President Wolfowitz, coded in a language they had developed from afar, somehow, a language only the two of them seemed to understand, a language that enabled them to communicate something over the heads of their bureaucracies and military commands.

  “I call on you, President Wolfowitz, to light the first candle, to immediately announce the withdrawal of the Ukrainian missile sites from the protection of Battlestar America as a gesture toward peace,” Gorchenko said. “Show the traitors in the Ukraine that they now stand alone. And in return, I will light the second candle, and soon enough there will be no more dark.”

  And with that enigmatic statement, incredibly enough, he left the podium.

  “Second candle?”

  “What second candle?”

  “I don’t know,” Sonya muttered. “But somehow I earnestly hope that President Wolfowitz does.”

  WILL LAUNCH NUCLEAR ATTACK AT MILITARY TARGETS IF RED ARMY INVADES, KRONKOL DECLARES

  —Reuters

  UKRAINIAN MISSILE STRIKE WILL BE RESPONDED TO AS AMERICAN NUCLEAR ATTACK, BRONKSKY WARNS

  —Tass

  JOINT CHIEFS REPORTEDLY DEMAND PREEMPTIVE FIRST STRIKE

  —New York Times

  WILL LAUNCH ON WARNING, SAYS RED DEFENSE MINISTER

  —New York Daily News

  POPE BEGINS FAST FOR PEACE

  —L’Osservatore Romano

  SOVIET UNION ORDERS URBAN POPULATION TO SHELTERS

  —Agence France-Presse

  COOL NAT REFUSES TO DECLARE NATIONAL EMERGENCY, WILL ADDRESS THE WORLD

  —New York Post

  “What can he possibly do now, Bob?” Dad said.

  “Something that no one could ever imagine,” Bobby replied, repeating the very words Sara had left him with the last time he had managed to get a call through to New York.

  “Like what?” Franja said.

  Bobby sighed. “I can’t imagine what either,” he admitted.

  “But you played poker with this man . . . ,” Mom insisted. “What would he do now if this were a poker game? Not that it isn’t!”

  Bobby shrugged. “If I had ever been able to figure that out,” he said, “he wouldn’t have kept cleaning me out.”

  He could see that he had bucked up their spirits with this professed confidence in the card-shark magic of Nathan Wolfowitz, but Bobby couldn’t really see how Nat could turn up a winning hand with what he now had showing.

  Especially since Vadim Kronkol had raised wildly like a man who knew he was sitting on an ace-high straight flush.

  Only two hours before Wolfowitz’s scheduled speech, Kronkol had issued what he called his “final position,” without, apparently, any recognition of the sardonic graveyard humor implied.

  The Red Army now had twenty-four hours to pull back fifty kilometers from the Ukrainian border. If it didn’t, he would launch three missiles, each armed with five unstoppable nuclear warheads, at the troop formations, and another at the fleet off the coast. If the Soviet Union attempted to attack Ukrainian population centers, which was to say his own missile sites, he would launch everything he had at Russian population centers. If the Americans did not use Battlestar America to destroy any incoming Soviet missiles, the blood would be on their hands too.

  “That is how ready we are to die for our national independence,” he had declared coldly. “Who is ready to die to take it from us?”

  Bobby had seen Nat play this kind of hand many times before. The kind of hand where some mark had a four-card straight flush showing and was raising as if he had the missing card in the hole. If Wolfowitz was still in the game by the sixth card, it meant that he was sitting on it himself and therefore knew the raiser was bluffing.

  But this time, no matter what he was holding, Nat couldn’t drop out and wait for the next hand. If he didn’t win this one, there wasn’t going to be a next hand.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, speaking to you from the Oval Office in the White House, in Washington, D.C.”

  Nathan Wolfowitz wore a forest-green blazer, a white dress shirt, and a black string tie. He looked like a self-satisfied riverboat gambler about to rake in the pot, his eyes sparkling with that royal-flush glow. There was no doubt about it. No doubt at all.

  “You can relax now, folks, it’s all over but the shouting,” Bobby said, grinning from ear to ear.

  “How can you possibly say that?” Mom demanded.

  “Easy enough if you’ve ever had the misfortune of seeing that look across a poker table,” Bobby told her. “When he looks like that, it means he’s sitting on the winning hand and doesn’t care who knows it. The man has the cards.”

  “The Red Army has demanded that I retrieve our missiles from the Ukraine,” the President began, dispensing with the formalities in the style to which the world had become accustomed. “Believe me, I would if I could, but I can’t, so I won’t.”

  The President threw up his hands. “I’m not about to defend the policies of my not-so-illustrious predecessors. Thanks to the bird-brains we elected, we wrote the biggest rubber check in history, passed it off on our sometime-friends, and then stiffed them for it like the international deadbeats we now so notoriously are. We t
hen pissed away the loot building ourselves a chrome-plated white elephant called Battlestar America, dropping ourselves right back in the economic black hole we thought we had welshed our way out of. We’ve been propping up our hollow economy with a huge defense industry, and we’ve justified it all, at least on the funny-money balance sheet, by using our nuclear shield to hide behind while our bloated military machine found gainful employment propping up a series of puppet states and stooges in Latin America.”

  “I can’t believe he’s actually saying this!” Dad exclaimed.

  “Why not?” Bobby said grimly. “It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  “But . . . but he’s the President of the United States!”

  “So he is,” Bobby whispered. “So he is . . .”

  Wolfowitz shrugged again. “What can I tell you?” he said. “Our leaders have been a collection of boobs and unprincipled charlatans for two generations, and we elected them, starting with a former straight man to a chimpanzee, and ending up with the late lamented Mr. Carson, who dealt this mess.”

  Bobby’s head was spinning. Nat Wolfowitz wasn’t saying anything he hadn’t said a million times in Berkeley, he wasn’t saying anything that hadn’t been common table talk in Little Moscow. But this wasn’t the guru of Little Moscow, or the man who had run an impossible campaign for Congress because it was time for a futile gesture, or the perennial futile Presidential candidate.

  This was the President of the United States.

  But he was talking like the Nat Wolfowitz Bobby had last talked to in a White House toilet.

  And that, Bobby suddenly realized, was the source of the Wolfowitz magic. He didn’t care about his Presidential image. He didn’t have one. He wanted everyone to know that the guy sitting in the Oval Office was the guy who pissed in the White House toilet.

  And that was the most cunning Presidential image of all.

  President Wolfowitz’s eyes hardened. “And now here I am, forced to play the hand they’ve dealt me, just as Mr. Gorbachev was forced to play what he was dealt by seventy years of bad road, just as Mr. Gorchenko is forced to pick up the crap that he’s been dealt,” he said.

  “There ain’t no justice in this world, folks, except the justice that we make. So all we can do is forget the past, play the cards, and try to light some candles.”

  “And you’re sitting on the winning hand, aren’t you, Nat?” Bobby muttered aloud to the screen. He couldn’t see how, but he could see quite clearly that Wolfowitz knew the pot was going to be his. The look was unmistakable as he spread his hands palms down on the desktop and leaned toward the camera.

  “President Gorchenko has asked me to light the first candle,” Wolfowitz said. “He has asked me to place the Ukraine outside the nuclear umbrella of Battlestar America. That I could do. But it wouldn’t stop the Ukrainians from using their Slam-Dunk missiles against the Soviet Union and the Red Army, and if that happens, general nuclear hell will break loose.”

  Wolfowitz paused, made a show of scratching his head, and frowning, as if studying his cards and feigning perplexity. “So rather than just call, I think I’ll raise the ante high enough to separate the men from the boys and the boys from their toys.”

  “Here it comes, oh God, here it comes . . . ,” Bobby muttered.

  “Who am I to deny the protection of Battlestar America to anyone?” the President said. “I hereby extend it to cover the entire world, including the entire territories of the Soviet Union and the Ukraine. As of now, any missile launched against anyone anywhere in the world will be vaporized. And if anyone doesn’t think we can do it, they’re welcome to try. We’ve got enough ordnance in orbit to turn Mars into a parking lot, we’ve never had a chance to use it, and we’ve got a lot of good ol’ boys up there with twenty years’ of itchy trigger-fingers, just dying for a little target practice. And, oh yes, Mr. Kronkol, we are, after all, the people who programmed your guidance systems.”

  “My God, that’s brilliant!” Bobby cried.

  “Brilliant?” Mom said. “It guarantees that the Red Army will invade the Ukraine!”

  “As for what the Russians and the Ukrainians will now do to each other out in the nonnuclear alley, that’s not my job,” the President said. “Far be it from me to get in the middle of two other people’s divorce proceedings. But as a friend of the family with no further national interest in the outcome, I am tempted to offer some free advice.”

  He cocked his head to one side, shook it sadly. “Why are the two of you going to beat each other to bloody pulps?” he said. “Who wins what in the end? If the Ukrainians succeed in gaining their independence through glorious battle, they will then find themselves confronted with a Russian national state three times their size and in effective control of their transport net to the rest of Europe and controlled by outraged Bears in no mood to be friendly. If the Russians succeed in occupying the Ukraine by force, what they’ll have on their hands is what we’ve been doing to ourselves in Latin America.”

  He leaned back in his chair and looked at a point in space above the camera. “We’ve been trying to make Latin Americans love us by military force for a long time now, and what’s it gotten us? You go in thinking you’re gonna make out like a bandit with cheap raw materials and cheap labor and a captive market whose economy you control, but the cost of the occupation eats up all the profits, and the resistance eats holes in the local infrastructure, and you end up taking endless casualties for the privilege of subsidizing basket cases in the name of manifest destiny. Sound familiar? Isn’t that why Gorbachev cut the purse strings to his red-ink slave empire long years ago?”

  “He cannot really be this disingenuous, can he, Robert?” Mom said. “Surely he realizes that this is an essential matter of national sovereignty!”

  “So it really all comes down to the last recourse of the nation-state scoundrel, breast-beating noises about the sanctity of absolute national sovereignty,” the President said.

  Mom gasped.

  Bobby laughed.

  “Well, it no longer exists,” Nathan Wolfowitz said, smiling sweetly. “I’ve just taken it away.”

  He paused to let that sink in. “The United States of America has already eliminated the absolute sovereign right of any nation to use nuclear weapons against any other. We’ve got the power to do it, and we will, and that period of history is dead as the dodo. What the new world is to become, Mr. Gorchenko, is up to you now. I’ve lit my candle, now it’s time for you to light yours.”

  “Again?” Franja groaned. “He can’t leave it like this, can he?”

  “We’re all going to have to let go of some national sovereignty to save our asses,” Wolfowitz said. “Seems to me pissing contests over absolute national sovereignty are what got us where we now are. I ask the Russian and Ukrainian peoples to work themselves out a no-fault divorce by separating economic interdependence from national identity. I ask the Soviet government to give the Ukrainians enough national sovereignty to gain independent admission to Common Europe, and I ask the Republic of the Ukraine to cede enough economic sovereignty to some kind of central authority to keep from shooting itself in the economic foot. The petty details I leave up to you to work out. Just do it, okay? Make me happy.”

  “What?”

  “What on earth is he saying?” Mom muttered. “He’s asking for the impossible!”

  “And you do want to make me happy,” Wolfowitz said. “Because if you do, the United States of America will give up a piece of its own sovereignty to provide an example for the rest of the world. When, and only when, the Ukraine is admitted into membership in Common Europe via a resolution introduced by the Soviet government, the United States of America will apply for admission itself.”

  “That’s what he’s always wanted . . . ,” Bobby exclaimed. “That’s what we’ve all dreamed of.”

  “But it’s an impossible dream, Robert, America owes Common Europe far more money than it can ever repay!”

  “And you will want to admit us very ba
dly indeed,” Wolfowitz went on. “Because upon admission, the United States of America will cede control of Battlestar America to the Common European Parliament. We’ve just taken away everyone’s sovereign power to launch nuclear missiles, and we are ready to surrender that power to a community of nations, for neither are sovereign powers that the world can afford to have any single nation retain.”

  “They’ll never let him get away with this,” Dad stammered. “He’s . . . he’s giving it all away!”

  “Not if I know Nat Wolfowitz,” Bobby said.

  Wolfowitz leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “Of course there will be those who will demand that we cover the biggest rubber check in the history of the world as the price of admission.”

  He shrugged. “Well, what can I say, we don’t have the money,” he said. “And even if we did, we can’t afford to pauperize ourselves any further. It’s hard to say how much it all comes to, just as it’s hard to tote up the complete bill for Battlestar America. But I’ll bet the figures aren’t all that different.”

  Wolfowitz grinned, his eyes sparkled like a flush in diamonds. “So let’s just be mensches about it, shall we?” he said. “Let’s not nickel and dime each other like pikers. Let’s just say we hand over Battlestar America, and you forget about the abrogated debt, and we call it even. Isn’t that an offer you can’t afford to refuse?”

  He actually seemed to be choking back laughter.

  “I mean, after we’ve bankrupted ourselves to build the damn thing, you didn’t expect us to just give it away!”

  Bobby broke up. He laughed and laughed and laughed. He laughed until his sides ached. He laughed until he could laugh no more. He laughed as if the whole world was laughing with him.