Ian Slater: Arctic Front

It was at that moment that a dispatch rider, his arm bleeding, grimy uniform smudged with oil smoke, arrived and handed Chernko two messages from the new army HQ in the outer ring. The first message, from the Siberian capital city of Novosibirsk seventeen hundred miles to the east, beyond the natural barrier of the Ural Mountains, was short and to the point. If Moscow had surrendered, Siberia hadn’t. Furthermore, it had no intention of doing so. Why should it? asked the Siberian Central Committee in Novosibirsk. Traditionally when Siberians speaking podusham— “ from the heart”—spat out their contempt for “the West” they meant Moscow, which they distrusted as much as they did the U.S. Now the greatest collection of scientific minds in all the Russias, those of the Siberian mozgovity— “egghead”—city of Akademgorodok, just outside Novosibirsk, along with the Tartars and the twenty-nine other indigenous groups that made up the millions of Siberyaka, feared that with the mideast oil fields in a shambles from the war and still burning, the U.S., and particularly its resource-starved ally Japan, would take up where Moscow left off — sucking Siberia dry of her enormous natural wealth.

More than one and a half times the size of the entire United States (including Alaska and Hawaii), stretching for four thousand miles through nine time zones, from the Urals in the west through the space-launch stations on the steppes to the ICBM-studded granite fastness of Kamchatka Peninsula, Siberia’s natural and industrial might — and now its own army — would be more than a match for the Allies. From its mountains, endless taiga, across its endless steppes to the deep gorges of its two-thousand-mile-long river systems, Siberia harbored vast reserves of oil, iron ore, gold, coal, timber, diamonds, and hosts of other strategic minerals, as well as the world’s largest natural gas field at Novyy Urengoy adjacent to the Kara Sea.

The second message handed Chernko, from his KGB chief in Novokuznetsk — a Siberian industrial center 180 miles east of Novosibirsk — was the one he’d been waiting for. It contained the details of a plan conceived by the directors of the city’s giant Kuznetsky Metallurgical Kombinat, or KMK works. The conception was so daring, in Chernko’s opinion he was sure he could trade it for a promise from Novosibirsk not only to protect him from Siberian extremists but to afford him, albeit secretly, a leading role in the Siberian wartime government and assure his future after the Siberian victory. The plan from the KMK was, Chernko confessed to the major, nothing less than blestyashchiy— ”stunning.” It would at first maul then consume the Americans if they dared attack Sibir.

So read the shingle above Gen. Douglas Freeman’s headquarters in Minsk, which his aides were now in the process of taking down and packing for shipment back to the States. Freeman was a fighting general — of this the Pentagon, the president, and the Allied liaison commission in Washington had not the slightest doubt. At fifty-five he was the youngest four-star general in the U.S. Army — but not, as the State Department emphatically advised the White House, “diplomatic material.” His abilities, Foggy Bottom pointed out, lay in action, “not in the delicate business of helping Russia back on its feet.” The advisory memorandum from State quoted an interview that Freeman had, in State’s view, ill-advisedly given the Armed Forces Journal four months before in Europe. Freeman had declared unequivocally that “nobody seems awake to the fact that even in Gorbachev’s day the Soviet military had expanded, by getting rid of obsolete equipment and making it look as if it was reducing its forces”; that “in fact there were more mobile missile sites built during Gorbachev’s tenure than by any other Soviet leader since the Russian Revolution.” Which, Freeman had gone on to say just as unequivocally, “proves a sound military axiom, that you cannot trust any Commie son of a bitch as far as you can kick ‘im!” And that “what the American people have to understand is that, when you get right down to it, regardless of changing civilian leaders, it’s the Soviet military with which we will ultimately have to contend.”

The Joint Chiefs of Staff, albeit reluctantly, agreed with State, yet they knew it would be unpopular in middle America to recall the general, and with such haste. It would be especially unpopular with the troops Freeman had led on his now-legendary nighttime airborne raid on Pyongyang in North Korea, whose leader he called “Kim II Runt,” and with those he’d led in an equally spectacular outflanking movement on Europe’s northern plain, breaking out of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket — his armored columns racing ahead and breaching Moscow’s defenses. He was, however, too brusque for Washington — a soldier’s soldier — so that the Joint Chiefs of Staff felt they had no alternative than to agree with State in advising the president that it would be much “safer” for everyone to recall Freeman — to leave the peace to the experts.

At 7:14 a.m. the first car, a hand-tooled Zil limousine, weaved its way through the rabble-strewn snow and drew up in front of Dzerzhinsky Square, the two KGB door guards snapping to attention despite their weariness. A group of bleary-eyed and emaciated-looking army officers walking, or rather shuffling, up from the old Intourist Hotel through the ruins of Marx Prospect slowed to stare across the square. They managed to see two figures in civilian coats entering the Zil, the gray-uniformed chauffeur quickly checking the limousine’s side mirror, and the car moving off quickly yet quietly in the snow. Several of the young army officers saluted but weren’t sure whether it was the new president or not behind the black curtains. Seconds later a battered white Moskvich taxi, a four-door compact, swung into the curb and the officers across the square saw another figure, also in civilian garb, emerge from the old KGB building, the two guards coming to attention just as they had done for the Zil.

Inside the Zil, Chernko’s aide tried to hide his surprise, having expected Chernko to wait and board the battered Moskvich decoy rather than following him into the highly visible Zil. The major said nothing, busying himself dialling the “Patrul “— “Flying Squad,” the special motorcycle-and-car security unit that was to be less than a minute away from the director at all times. On occasion, however, particularly during the shelling, they’d taken as long as ten minutes. Immediate demotion followed. The major checked the squad’s position against his watch the moment the unit answered his phone call. He glanced across at Chernko. “They’re where they should be, Comrade Director. I mean, Mr. President.” The KGB boss said nothing. The driver was busy finding his way through the body- and rubble-strewn Ordynika Street south through Red Square onto Gorky Street. A surprising amount of Soviet BMD armored personnel carriers were evident following the surrender, all strangely quiet on the hard-packed snow. Chernko pressed the driver intercom button on his plush leather armrest. “We’ll go up Gertsen,” he instructed the chauffeur, “around by the U.S. A./Canada Institute. What’s left of it.”

“Yes, sir,” answered the chauffeur, and the limousine weaved through Manege Square past the alert military policeman, who had stopped all traffic the moment he’d seen the Zil in the outside VIP lane. The car turned right on Gertsen. The major was always tense at such moments. With Chernko you never knew. The director’s passion for security verged on the paranoid — a reflection of the fact that he himself had sent so many assassins abroad to hunt others. And there had always been the danger of Siberian separatists long agitating for autonomy from Moscow to run their own federation. Never varying your routine, Chernko knew, was the biggest single mistake, hence his proverki— “spot checks,” as he called them, on his flying squad. Despite the inconvenience it caused his own timetable, the major had to concede that such precautions were part of the reason Chernko was still alive to be chief of First and Second Directorate and now president.