Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

On the Intourist motor coach from the airport to the sev­enteen-story Lybid Hotel, he took stock again of his fellow passengers. About half were of Ukrainian extraction, excited and innocent, visiting the land of their fathers. The other half were of British stock, just curious tourists. All seemed to have British passports. Drake, with his English name, was part of the second group. He had given no indication he spoke flu­ent Ukrainian and passable Russian.

During the ride they met Ludmilla, their Intourist guide for the tour. She was a Russian, and spoke Russian to the driver, who, though a Ukrainian, replied in the same lan­guage. As the motor coach left the airport she smiled brightly and in reasonable English began to describe the tour ahead of them.

Drake glanced at his itinerary: two days in Kiev, trotting around the eleventh-century Cathedral of St. Sophia (“A wonderful example of Kievan-Rus architecture, where Prince Yaroslav the Wise is buried,” warbled Ludmilla from up front) and Golden Gate, not to mention Vladimir Hill, the State University, the Academy of Sciences, and the Botanical Gardens. No doubt, thought Drake bitterly, no mention would be made of the 1964 fire at the Academy Library, in which priceless manuscripts, books, and archives devoted to Ukrainian national literature, poetry, and culture had been destroyed; no mention that the fire brigade failed to arrive for three hours; no mention that the fire was set by the KGB itself as their answer to the nationalistic writings of “the Sixtiers.”

After Kiev, there would be a day trip by hydrofoil to Kanev, then a day in Ternopol, where a man called Miroslav Kaminsky would certainly not be a subject for discussion, and finally the tour would go on to Lvov.

As he had expected, he heard only Russian on the streets of the intensively russified capital city of Kiev. It was not un­til Kanev and Ternopol that he heard Ukrainian spoken ex­tensively. His heart sang to hear it spoken so widely by so many people, and his only regret was that he had to keep saying “I’m sorry, do you speak English?” But he would wait until he could visit the two addresses that he had memorized so well he could say them backward.

Five thousand miles away, the President of the United States was in conclave with his security adviser, Poklewski, Robert Benson of the CIA, and a third man, Myron Fletcher, chief analyst of Soviet grain affairs in the Department of Agricul­ture.

“Bob, are you sure beyond any reasonable doubt that Gen­eral Taylor’s Condor reconnaissance and your ground reports point to these figures?” Matthews asked, his eye running once again down the columns of numbers in front of him.

The report that his intelligence chief had presented to him via Stanislaw Poklewski five days earlier consisted of a break­down of the entire Soviet Union into one hundred grain-pro­ducing zones. From each zone a sample square, ten miles by ten, had been seen in close-up and its grain problems analyzed. From the hundred portraits, his experts had drawn up the nationwide grain forecast.

“Mr. President, if we err, it is on the side of caution, of giving the Soviets a better grain crop than they have any right to expect,” replied Benson.

The President looked across at the man from the Depart­ment of Agriculture.

“Dr. Fletcher, how does this break down in layman’s terms?”

“Well, sir, Mr. President, for a start, one has to deduct, at the very minimum, ten percent of the gross harvest to pro­duce a figure of usable grain. Some would say we should deduct twenty percent. This modest ten-percent figure is to account for moisture content, foreign matter like stones and grit, dust and earth, losses in transportation, and wastage through inadequate storage facilities, which we know they suffer from badly.

“Starting from there, one then has to deduct the tonnages the Soviets have to keep on the land itself, right in the coun­tryside, before any state procurements can be made to feed the industrial masses. You will find my table for this on the second page of my separate report.”

President Matthews flicked over the sheets before him and examined the table. It read:

1. Seed Grain . The tonnage the Soviets must put by for replanting next year, both for winter wheat and spring-sown wheat ... 10 million tons

2. Human Consumption . The tonnage that must be set aside to feed the masses who inhabit the rural areas, the state and collective farms, and all suburban units—from hamlets, through villages, up to towns of less than 5,000 population ... 28 million tons

3. Animal Feed . The tonnage that must be set aside for the feeding of the livestock through the winter months until the spring thaw ... 52 million tons

4. Irreducible Total ... 90 million tons

5. Representing a gross total, prior to a 10 percent unavoidable wastage deduction, of ... 100 million tons

“I would point out, Mr. President,” went on Fletcher, “that these are not generous figures. They are the absolute minima required before they start feeding the cities. If they cut down on the human rations, the peasants will simply consume the livestock, with or without permission. If they cut back on ani­mal feed, the livestock slaughter will be wholesale; they’ll have a meat glut in the winter, then a meat famine for three to four years.”

“Okay, Dr. Fletcher, I’ll buy that. Now what about their reserves?”

“We estimate they have a national reserve of thirty million tons. It is unheard of to use up the whole of it, but if they did, that would give them an extra thirty million tons. And they should have twenty million tons left over from this year’s crop available for the cities—a grand total for their cit­ies of fifty million.”

The President swung back to Benson.

“Bob, what do they have to have by way of state procure­ments to feed the urban millions?”

“Mr. President, 1977 was their worst year for a long time, the year they perpetrated ‘the Sting’ on us. They had a total crop of one hundred ninety-four million tons. They bought sixty-eight million tons from their own farms. They still needed to buy twenty million from us by subterfuge. Even in 1975, their worst year for a decade and a half, they needed seventy million tons for the cities. And that led to savage shortages. With a greater population now than then, the state must buy no less than eighty-five million tons.”

“Then,” concluded the President, “by your figures, even if they use the total of their national reserve, they are going to need thirty to thirty-five million tons of foreign grain?”

“Right, Mr. President,” cut in Poklewski. “Maybe even more. And we and the Canadians are the only people who are going to have it. Dr. Fletcher?”

The man from the Department of Agriculture nodded. “It appears North America is going to have a bumper crop this year. Maybe fifty million tons over domestic requirements for both us and Canada considered together.”

Minutes later, Dr. Fletcher was escorted out. The debate resumed. Poklewski pressed his point.

“Mr. President, this time we have to act. We have to re­quire a quid pro quo from them this time around.”

“Linkage?” asked the President suspiciously. “I know your thoughts on that, Stan. Last time it didn’t work; it made things worse. I will not have another repeat of the Jackson Amendment.”

All three men recalled the fate of that piece of legislation with little joy. At the end of 1974 Congress had passed a compromise trade-reform bill; its passage had been delayed by a controversial section that specified in effect that unless the Soviets went easier on the question of Russian-Jewish emigration to Israel, there would be no U.S. trade credits for the purchase of technology and industrial goods. The Polit­buro under Brezhnev had contemptuously rejected the pressure, launched a series of predominantly anti-Jewish show trials, and bought their requirements, with trade credits, from Britain, Germany, and Japan.