Sacrifice

by Graham Masterton

  Yeremenko walked to the door which opened into the corridor, and beckoned to one of his guards. The guard came clumping into the ante-room, and stood there with his machine gun in his hand, looking bewildered.

  ‘What is your name, boy?’ Yeremenko asked him.

  ‘Gorshkov, sir.’

  Yeremenko turned around to General Abramov, and smiled. ‘Comrade general, Private Gorshkov is to be your keeper for a while.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You are not to leave this room. Private Gorshkov will stand guard over you. If you attempt to escape. Private Gorshkov will shoot you. Do you understand that, Private Gorshkov?’

  The unhappy soldier nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

  Yeremenko jabbed a finger at Abramov, and said, ‘Just because he looks like a general. Private Gorshkov, just because he has scarlet and gold on his uniform, that does not make him any less of a traitor. So, don’t let him frighten you, with threats of what he will do to you. Don’t let him sweet-talk you, either. Your duty is to guard him, and guard him well, and if he tries to escape, to kill him.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Gorshkov, swallowing.

  Abramov called clearly, ‘Ivan!’

  Yeremenko turned.

  Abramov said, ‘This will be the death of you, Ivan, if you try to carry it any further.’

  ‘Byliny is mine, comrade,’ Yeremenko told him, in an expressionless voice.

  ‘Not any longer. And the Stavka have made substantial changes in tactics, now that the Bundeswehr is ready for us. They are all contained in my orders. Airborne drops of SPETSNAZ diversionary troops; new routes of attack. If you attempt to carry out the original manoeuvres, you will cause a disaster; both politically and strategically.’

  Yeremenko stood for a while holding the door-handle, his lips pursed tightly in thought. Then, without a word, he nodded, and walked back to the bustling, crowded strategy room, where his coffee was still hot.

  Colonel Khleschev looked around in surprise. ‘I understood that General Abramov was staying here, sir.’

  Yeremenko waved a dismissive hand. ‘He has just… gone to relieve himself. A long journey from Kiev.’

  He studied the map of the German border. Then he said, ‘He brought me the order that Operation Byliny was to start right away.’

  ‘Have the British and Americans been informed of this, sir?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, have the—’

  ‘Yes, yes. I heard you. Of course they have. But, we must start right away. At 0210 hours precisely. I want both Front Commanders connected through to headquarters for final orders. I also want to speak right away to General Lavochkin.’

  Yeremenko finished his coffee in quick, nervous gulps while telephones jangled and intelligence officers hurried in and out of the doors of the strategy room with sheaves of paper, like leaf-cutting ants hurrying in and out of their nest. His immediate staff hovered not too far away, always ready to advise and assist, but earlier in the evening Yeremenko had made it quite clear to them that Byliny was his night of glory, and that he was going to direct the launching of the great invasion single-handed.

  Strangely, he half-realized himself that the size and the scale of the invasion had gone to his head. He was quite aware now that what he was doing was both insubordinate and highly dangerous. He could only hope that the British and Americans would speed up their withdrawal, and not interpret the early start of Byliny as an act of treachery and aggression and try to fight back. Yeremenko’s armies would still prevail, of course, even if they did. Both British and American forces were packed up and ready to evacuate Europe, and were in no position to mount any organized retaliation. He cracked each of his knuckles in turn. In a way, he would relish a real battle. And he would make sure that he was ready for one, by ordering General Lavochkin to prepare his Rocket Armies with low-yield nuclear weapons.

  Any sign of retaliation from the Western forces, and he would lay a nuclear carpet across West Germany, from north to south, and devastate any attempt at opposition.

  The Defence Council had appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the Western Strategic Direction because he was efficient, because he was ruthless, because he would take Western Europe for them in less than a week. Well, whether they had changed their minds about his appointment or not, that was the result they were going to get.

  The alternative was too bleak to consider. If he meekly returned to Moscow, to face investigation into the disappearance of Marshal Golovanov, he knew exactly what would happen. Disgrace, demotion, and dismissal to Carpathia or Trans-Baykal. Even execution. The Defence Council were not kind to generals who fell from grace. When a general was in favour, his life in the Soviet Army was a rich one; with private dachas, plenty to drink, limousines, and scores of pretty girls. But when he was out of favour, he might just as well kill himself, and many did. The suicide rate among Soviet generals was one of the highest in the world, for any occupation, in any country.

  To take Europe was Yeremenko’s only chance of survival.

  It was 0158. Colonel Khleschev came up to Yeremenko and said, ‘Both Front Commanders are patched through to your telephone, sir.’

  Yeremenko picked up his phone, but all he could hear was static. ‘What’s this?’ he demanded.

  Khleschev looked unsettled. ‘Oh – we’ve been having trouble with that line all night, sir. Perhaps you’d better take the call in your private office.’

  Impatiently, Yeremenko stalked out of the strategy room. Junior officers stepped back and allowed him through like the parting of the Red Sea. Colonel Khleschev opened the swing doors for him, and then followed him with clattering shoes as he made his way back along the corridor to his own office.

  ‘I want that telephone repaired immediately!’ Yeremenko snapped.

  He pushed open his office door, and of course he should have known that the ‘faulty’ telephone was all a deceit, just to get him away from the strategy room. There, waiting for him in the lamplight, under the portrait of Marshal Kulik, was General Abramov, with two guards colonels who were unknown to Yeremenko, as well as Private Gorshkov with his machine-gun, and Major Grechko, Marshal Golovanov’s secretary.

  ‘Please, comrade commander-in-chief, come in,’ said General Abramov.

  Yeremenko walked slowly to the centre of the room. He took off his spectacles. Behind him. Colonel Khleschev closed the door.

  Major Grechko stepped forward, and saluted. ‘I have to tell you, sir, that you are relieved of your command of the Western Strategic Direction, and that you are under military arrest. I have instructions to take you back to Moscow immediately.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Yeremenko. ‘Whom can one trust?’

  Major Grechko didn’t attempt to answer that question. ‘I am an officer of the KGB, sir.’

  ‘It seems that I have failed, then, doesn’t it?’ said Yeremenko. ‘It seems as if the old bear caught up with me at last. Well, well.’

  ‘The interests of the Soviet Union and the interests of the Party must always come before personal ambition,’ Major Grechko recited. He was behaving like the perfect KGB officer, correct and smart and always ready with an ideological admonition. But also, in a way, he was behaving like the sheriff at the end of one of his favourite Westerns, summing up 90 minutes of gunplay with a well-honed moral.

  Privately, Grechko was deeply relieved that General Yeremenko had become so deranged. Grechko had been appointed to accompany Marshal Golovanov in order to double-check the surveillance that KGB field-agents kept on high-ranking Army officers. His failure to identify Inge Schültz as a double agent was going to land him in serious trouble, particularly since it had led to Marshal Golovanov’s abduction. With any luck, his rescue of General Abramov and his arrest of General Yeremenko would redeem him.

  ‘Time is short,’ said General Abramov. ‘Colonel, will you show me through to the strategy room, so that we can get Operation Byliny started on schedule?’

  Yeremenko said nothing as Ge
neral Abramov and his entourage left his office. Major Grechko stood in the lamplight, watching and waiting. ‘I understand that the helicopter is fuelled and ready, comrade general,’ he said at last.

  Yeremenko looked up. ‘It’s trust, isn’t it? It’s trust that’s lacking. I could never trust you, and you could never trust me. What kind of an Army is it, which spies on its own officers? If Golovanov had been allowed to indulge himself with whatever woman he wished, instead of a KGB agent, then perhaps none of this would ever have happened. We bring it on ourselves. We are twisted with suspicion. We see dybbiks under every bed.’

  He walked around his desk, and opened one drawer after another. There was nothing there he needed to keep. He had no souvenirs, no sentimental reminders; not so much as a pen-and-pencil set.

  ‘Suspicion is a disease,’ he said, without looking up. ‘A disease from which the Soviet Union has been suffering since the Revolution; and which will one day prove fatal.’

  Major Grechko said, ‘We’d better go, comrade general, before the air-traffic embargo is imposed.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Yeremenko.

  They left the office and walked along the corridor. At the far end, the large window that overlooked the front courtyard was just beginning to show the grey paleness of dawn. The building bristled with activity: doors swung open and shut; officers hurried from one room to another; computers whirred and clicked. Hardly anyone gave Grechko and Yeremenko a second glance. They were all too busy with the last few minutes of Operation Byliny.

  Yeremenko said, ‘If I tried to escape, what would you do?’

  ‘Escape?’ asked Major Grechko.

  ‘Yes. If I knocked you down, and ran, what would you do?’

  ‘I would chase after you, I suppose.’

  Yeremenko looked at him narrowly. ‘Would you shoot me?’

  Major Grechko said, ‘You’re not asking me to shoot you, are you? Because I won’t. I have instructions to take you back to Moscow, alive, and that’s what I intend to do.’

  Yeremenko said, ‘Watch me.’

  He tossed aside his spectacles, and he began to run. Major Grechko, startled, immediately began to run after him. But Yeremenko was fit and athletic, and more than anything else, determined. He ran down the corridor in his general’s uniform like an Olympic sprinter, arms pounding, and there was nothing that Grechko could do to keep up with him.

  ‘General!’ shouted Grechko, and slowed to a trot. Because what could Yeremenko possibly do? They had passed the stairs, and there was no way down from here except by lift. Yeremenko would have to wait for the lift to arrive, and that would be the end of it.

  It was only when Yeremenko pelted obliviously past the elevator doors that Grechko understood. His stomach lurched, and he started running again, but he knew that he was far too late. Yeremenko was sprinting towards the huge window at the front of the building, and it was quite obvious that he didn’t intend to stop.

  There was a railing along the bottom of the window, but Yeremenko dived at the glass head-first, with his arms by his side, clearing the railing by nearly a foot.

  The whole window burst, 400 square feet of plate-glass shattering into jagged stars and curving scimitars. Yeremenko, with blood spraying around him in a firework spiral of crimson droplets, fell through the sparkling fragments head downwards. He hit the shiny black hood of a Volga, parked outside, and lay spreadeagled across it, dying, his blood running from two severed arteries, neatly channelled into the car’s drainage system, and flowing on to the pavement.

  Major Grechko stood in the corridor staring at the shattered window. His mouth hung open, a stupefied puppet. He stood there for almost thirty seconds, and then the lift arrived on the third floor, and the doors opened just beside him. The lift was empty. Mechanically, he stepped into it, and pressed the button for the lobby.

  He had only two alternatives now, as far as he could see. Either to shoot himself, to get it over with; or to run. He stared at his pale ghostly face in the smeary metal sides of the lift car.

  The lift reached the lobby. He had decided: he would try and make a run for it. The borders would be open tonight, as Operation Byliny got under way. There would be darkness, confusion, and plenty of opportunities to get ahead of the main body of tanks and troops and ask for political asylum in the West. He didn’t even consider going back to KGB headquarters. What could he report? That had he not only been primarily responsible for the abduction of Marshal Golovanov, but that he had allowed General Yeremenko to commit suicide right in front of his eyes? Failures as serious as that meant the wall: and a firing-squad.

  The lift doors opened. Grechko was just about to step out, when Colonel Chuykov appeared, and said, ‘Grechko! Just the man!’ and grasped his shoulder.

  Grechko said, ‘Haven’t you seen? General Yeremenko—’

  ‘What?’ frowned Chuykov.

  ‘Outside,’ said Grechko. Chuykov looked around and saw a military ambulance speeding past the window.

  It was too late. Grechko knew that there was no chance of escape now. Chuykov would expect him to stay with him until everything was cleared up. He leaned against the wall beside the lift, and pressed his hand against his forehead.

  ‘What’s happened?’ asked Chuykov. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s a disease,’ said Grechko, under his breath.

  ‘A disease? Are you sick?’

  Grechko shook his head. ‘We’re all sick, all of us. What are we trying to do? And now we’re going to infect the rest of Europe.’

  Twenty-Three

  The President was back at the White House, eating a late supper of smoked turkey salad, when Chancellor Kress called him from Bonn for the last time. The call was later to become known as the ‘Turkey Talk’, and to cause the President considerable political embarrassment. But on the night of GRINGO and Operation Byliny, the forces at work in the world were enormous. All the accumulated powers of the past forty years were at last being exercised, on both sides, and the dangers were extreme.

  Chancellor Kress said, baldly, ‘You can deceive us no longer, Mr President. We understand completely what you have done. You have sacrificed a free Europe, in exchange for a secure America.’

  The President picked turkey out of his side teeth with his thumbnail, grimacing as he did so.

  ‘I think you’ve gotten hold of the wrong end of the rope here, Herr Chancellor.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Mr President. I am not a fool; even if I am reliant on the United States for much of my protection against the Soviet Union.’

  ‘Well,’ said the President, ruminatively, “you have to consider the greater forces of history, the push and the pull, as well as your own particular problems.’

  ‘All I want to know is whether you are really going to withdraw your forces in the face of a Soviet invasion. All I want to know is the truth.’

  The President sighed. ‘Let’s look at it this way, Herr Chancellor. For every action, you get a reaction, agreed? Now that happens in politics, as well as in science. So, during the World War Two, the Germans invaded Russia, and killed millions of Russians. Millions! Can you imagine their reaction to that? Can you imagine how they feel today? Oh, sure, they took over Eastern Europe; but that wasn’t enough to take the fear and the anger out of their system. Imagine if somebody knocked you down, and beat up on you; and all you got in return was $10 and the promise that it wouldn’t happen again. Well, you’d be pretty dissatisfied with that, wouldn’t you, after all you’d suffered, and you’d still be afraid that one day somebody was going to come back and beat up on you again? That’s exactly how the Soviets feel.’

  Chancellor Kress could scarcely control his frustration and his wrath. ‘Mr President! I didn’t call you for childish lectures on European politics, about which you seem to understand nothing at all. Nor did I call you to be reassured or patronized. I called you because huge Soviet armies have now amassed on our borders, because American forces appear to be right on the point of withdr
awing from the Federal Republic, without any sensible explanation, and in direct contravention of all NATO concordances, and because I have been given intelligence information from a highly-placed Soviet source which confirms what is already obvious. You have sold us down the river, Mr President. I believe that is the American expression for it.’

  The President was silent for a long time. Then he said, ‘Hold your horses for a moment, would you, Herr Chancellor?’ and pressed the button which muted his end of the call. He beckoned to Morton Lock, who was sitting on the opposite side of the Oval Office, leafing through intelligence reports.

  ‘Morton, how long before the Soviets start to roll?’

  ‘Fifty-eight minutes, sir.’

  The President released the mute button, and said, ‘Herr Chancellor? I’m sorry I kept you waiting. Listen, I’ve just been talking to my Joint Chiefs of Staff. Yes, of course. But what we’re trying to work out here is a question of balance. Balancing the world globally, do you see, rather than continue with the present system, which is unbalanced, and unfair, and which creates all kinds of tensions, not just between the West and the East, but in the Third World, too.’

  He took a drink of grapefruit juice, and then said, ‘I have to admit to you that we have been having secret talks with the Soviet Union over the question of reducing our military presence in Europe. Well, yes, you know that already. But what that will do is increase security in Asia, in South America, in Latin America, in Australia, and in Japan. The Soviets needed to feel that they were no longer directly threatened from Western Europe and that is precisely what we have conceded to them, in return for guarantees that they will no longer directly threaten the Western hemisphere.’

  Chancellor Kress said tautly, ‘Mr President, the Russians are going to invade us. The very minute your forces have gone, we will become a subjugate nation.’

  ‘Now, please,’ the President told him. ‘Just because the Soviet Army happen to be exercising their divisions close to the East German border – well, they do that quite often, don’t they? – I can’t see how that amounts to any specific threat.’