Frederick Forsyth - The Devil's Alternative

“Mr. President, you’ve got it,” said Stanislaw Poklewski. “You can buy that surplus any time you wish at July’s price. Bearing in mind the progress at the Castletown talks, the House Appropriations Committee will not stand in your way.”

“I should hope not,” said the President. “If we succeed at Castletown, the reductions in defense expenditures will more than compensate for the commercial losses on the grains. What about the Soviet crop?”

“We’re working on it,” said Bob Benson. “The Condors are sweeping right across the Soviet Union, and our analysts are working out the yields of harvested grain, region by region. We should have a report for you in a week. We can correlate that with reports from our people on the ground over there, and give a pretty accurate figure—to within five percent, any­way.”

“As soon as you can,” said President Matthews. “I need to know the exact Soviet position in every area. That includes the Politburo reaction to their own grain harvest. I need to know their strengths and their weaknesses. Please get them for me, Bob.”

No one in the Ukraine that winter would be likely to forget the sweeps by the KGB and militia against those in whom the slightest hint of nationalist sentiment could be detected.

While Colonel Kukushkin’s two detectives carefully inter­viewed the pedestrians in Sverdlov Street the night Ivanenko’s mother had been run down, meticulously took to pieces the stolen car that had performed the hit-and-run job on the old lady, and pored over the rifle, the image intensifier, and the area surrounding the hospital annex, General Abrassov went for the nationalists.

Hundreds were detained in Kiev, Ternopol, Lvov, Kanev, Rovno, Zhitomir, and Vinnitsa. The local KGB, supported by teams from Moscow, carried out the interrogations, ostensibly concerned with sporadic outbreaks of hooliganism such as the mugging of the KGB plainclothes man in August in Terno­pol. Some of the senior interrogators were permitted to know their inquiries also concerned the firing of a shot in Kiev in late October, but no more.

In the seedy Lvov working-class district of Levandivka that November, David Lazareff and Lev Mishkin strolled through the snowy streets during one of their rare meetings. Because the fathers of both had been taken away to the camps, they knew time would run out for them eventually also. The word Jew was stamped on the identity card of each, as on those of every one of the Soviet Union’s three million Jews. Sooner or later, the spotlight of the KGB must swing away from the na­tionalists to the Jews. Nothing ever changes that much in the Soviet Union.

“I posted the card to Andriy Drach yesterday, confirming the success of the first objective,” said Mishkin. “How are things with you?”

“So far, so good,” said Lazareff. “Perhaps things will ease off soon.”

“Not this time, I think,” said Mishkin. “We have to make our break soon if we are going to at all. The ports are out. It has to be by air. Same place next week. I’ll see what I can discover about the airport.”

Far away to the north of them an S.A.S. jumbo jet thun­dered on its polar route from Stockholm to Tokyo. Among its first-class passengers it bore Captain Thor Larsen toward his new command.

Maxim Rudin’s report to the Politburo was delivered in his gravelly voice, without frills. But no histrionics in the world could have kept his audience more absorbed, nor their reac­tion more stunned. Since an Army officer had emptied a handgun at the limousine of Leonid Brezhnev as he passed through the Kremlin’s Borovitsky Gate a decade before, the specter of the lone man with a gun penetrating the walls of security around the hierarchs had persisted. Now it had come out of conjecture to sit and stare at them from their own green baize table.

This time, the room was empty of secretaries. No tape recorders turned on the corner table. No aides, no stenograph­ers were present. When he had finished, Rudin handed the floor to Petrov, who described the elaborate measures taken to mask the outrage, and the secret steps then in progress to identify and eliminate the killers after they had revealed all their accomplices.

“But you have not found them yet?” snapped Stepanov.

“It is only five days since the attack,” said Petrov evenly. “No, not yet. They will be caught, of course. They cannot es­cape, whoever they are. When they are caught, they will re­veal every last one of those who helped them. General Abrassov will see to that. Then every last person who knows what happened that night on Rosa Luxemburg Street, wher­ever they may be hiding, will be eliminated. There will be no trace left.”

“And in the meantime?” asked Komarov.

“In the meantime,” said Rudin, “it must be maintained with unbreakable solidarity that Comrade Yuri Ivanenko has sustained a massive heart attack and is under intensive care. Let us be clear on one thing. The Soviet Union cannot and will not tolerate the public humiliation of the world’s ever being allowed to know what happened on Rosa Luxemburg Street. There are no Lee Harvey Oswald’s in Russia, and never will be.”

There was a murmur of assent. No one was prepared to disagree with Rudin’s assessment.

“With respect, Comrade Secretary-General,” Petrov cut in, “while the catastrophe of such news leaking abroad cannot be overestimated, there is another aspect, equally serious. If this news leaked out, the rumors would begin among our own population. Before long they would be more than rumors. The effect internally I leave to your imagination.”

They all knew how closely the maintenance of public order was linked to a belief in the impregnability and invincibility of the KGB.

“If this news leaked out,” said Chavadze the Georgian slowly, “and even more so if the perpetrators escaped, the ef­fect would be as bad as that of the grain famine.”

“They cannot escape,” said Petrov sharply. “They must not. They shall not.”

“Then who are they?” growled Kerensky.

“We do not yet know, Comrade Marshal,” replied Petrov, “but we will.”

“But it was a Western gun,” insisted Shushkin. “Could the West be behind this?”

“I think it almost impossible,” said Rykov. “No Western government, no Third World government, would be crazy enough to support such an outrage, in the same way as we had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination. emigres, possibly. Anti-Soviet fanatics, possibly. But not governments.”

“emigre groups abroad are also being investigated,” said Petrov. “But discreetly. We have most of them penetrated. So far, nothing has come in. The rifle, ammunition, and night-sight are all of Western make. They are all commercially pur­chasable in the West. That they were smuggled in is beyond doubt. Which means either the users brought them in, or they had outside help. General Abrassov agrees with me that the primary requirement is to find the users, who will reveal their suppliers. Department V will take over from there.”

Yefrem Vishnayev watched the proceedings with keen in­terest but took little part. Kerensky expressed the dissatisfac­tion of the dissident group instead. Neither sought a further vote on the choice of the Castletown talks or a war in 1983. Both knew that in the event of a tie, the Chairman’s vote would prevail. Rudin had come one step nearer to falling but was not finished yet.

The meeting agreed that the announcement should be made, only within the KGB and the upper echelons of the Party machine, that Yuri Ivanenko had suffered a heart at­tack and been hospitalized. When the killers had been iden­tified and they and their aides had been eliminated, Ivanenko would quietly expire from his illness.

Rudin was about to summon the secretaries to the chamber for the resumption of the usual Politburo meeting when Stepanov, who had originally voted for Rudin and negotiations with the United States, raised his hand.