Ian Slater: World in Flames

On the far eastern front, the Soviet navy had assured Marchenko and the other members of the Politburo that it was working as fast as possible, including using forced-labor battalions from the hitherto upstart Baltic republics and the troublesome minority groups on the Sino-Soviet border regions near Vladivostok, readying to launch a hitherto undreamt-of and highly secret submarine offensive against the U.S. West Coast. But until the two new subs were ready — another two months — the NATO convoys to the Aleutians, the Soviet admirals conceded, while sustaining heavy losses, would not be stopped. Momentarily oblivious to his surroundings, Marchenko had stopped walking in the garden, the blizzard swirling about him stinging his face as he realized he was going to have to make the most humiliating decision of his life. With the Soviet army withdrawing on the European front, the air battle over Europe, like the air war over the Aleutians, in uncertain flux, and the navy’s promises not realizable for at least two, possibly four, months, the minister of war knew that only one man, Vladimir Chernko, head of the Committee for State Security, and whom Marchenko detested, could help remedy the crisis in Western Europe.

The feud between the short, stocky Marchenko and the tall, steely-eyed Chernko, whose ambition was to become president, had begun in what the Committee for State Security, the KGB, had called its vershina, or “high summer,” of the West’s honeymoon with Gorbachev. The British, as usual, had been standoffish, the Germans willing to accept Gorbachev’s line in return for Moscow’s support of reunification, and the Americans, Chernko said, gullible and deluded, wanting everyone to be happy, believing you could fix everything that was wrong in the world with goodwill and Yankee know-how. Chernko had served under Vladimir Kryuchkov, whom Gorbachev in 1988 had ordered to launch a massive industrial and military espionage offensive against the West in order to save millions of rubles for perestroika, rubles that would otherwise have to be spent for weapons and technological catch-up with the West. It was much easier to steal or buy Western technological secrets.

Under Chernko’s direction, the KGB had outdone Madison Avenue in its new image making, even going so far as to invite American counterparts from the CIA to “tour” the old Dzherzinsky Square headquarters and the new offices in the outer ring. In an effort to convince the world of just how reformed the KGB was, Chernko made highly publicized arrests in the Gorbachev years of certain “outlaw elements” among the Soviet elite who had “illegally profited” at the expense of the Soviet people. Chernko promised they would be severely “disciplined.” One of those so punished was Kiril Marchenko’s brother, Fyodor, accused of “profiteering” in one of the now-not-so-secret party specialty stores. As far as Kiril could find out, Fyodor had been chosen at random by Chernko. Publicly accused by Chernko, he was tried and sentenced to fifteen years, reduced to five as a humanitarian “gesture” by Gorbachev’s administration. Chernko had meanwhile been featured on the cover of Time magazine as being typical of the “new breed in the KGB”—technocrats “more interested in rooting out inefficiency at home than in spying abroad.” Fyodor Marchenko hung himself after one month in Lefortevo Prison. Kiril Marchenko remembered that Chernko had sent flowers.

“Comrade Marchenko!”

Marchenko turned to see one of the Kremlin’s guards, ruddy-faced, his breath coming out like a hot tap in the icy air, the red piping on his bluish-gray greatcoat ruby-colored like thin lines of blood, the pea-sized snow bouncing off his fur-lined cap.

“Yes?” answered Marchenko irritably. “What is it?”

“The STAVKA meeting, Comrade. It is about to reconvene.”

Marchenko looked nonplussed at the guard. “But it is—” he glanced at his watch “—not yet one a.m. The adjournment was for another—” Marchenko saw that the second hand on his watch had stopped. His father, who had died in one of the gulags that were supposed to have disappeared under Gorbachev, had once told him that when a man’s watch stops, it is a warning his life is in imminent danger. Of course, Marchenko knew it was a ridiculous peasant superstition of his father’s. Nevertheless, in his present mood, it jolted him, and he resolved that, unpalatable as it was, he would have to ask — beg, if necessary, Chernko to help him deal a death blow to the NATO advance which had become embodied by one man: the American, Freeman. After all, it had been Chernko who had successfully purged the Politburo of Siberian separatists who hated Moscow as much as they hated America and who had been plotting to overthrow Suzlov. It was also Chernko who had come up with the idea of sending SPETS commandos, dressed in captured American uniforms, to infiltrate the NATO lines and sow confusion among the Allied troops in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. What Marchenko needed now was someone with the training to again pose as an American or some other NATO officer but who could penetrate right through to Freeman’s headquarters and kill the American general. Perhaps, thought Marchenko, it could be done in the same way as some of Chernko’s men already “in place” overseas had been ordered, as well as carrying out sabotage, to track down and “eliminate” the commanders of America’s weapons of last resort, the Sea Wolf nuclear subs. If Chernko would support such an audacious plan, then Marchenko would support Chernko in his bid for the presidency, if and when President Suzlov was replaced or died — whichever came first. “If you mean to get ahead in this world,” Marchenko could still hear his father say, “you must swallow your pride now and then.” Kiril Marchenko told himself it was time he did so, to ask Chernko’s help, not only for himself but for Mother Russia— for his family.

As he headed back for the STAVKA meeting in the Council of Ministers, Marchenko saw that the guard, about his son Sergei’s age, could very well be his guard in some godforsaken prison in the Transbaikal if he, Kiril Marchenko, didn’t quickly restore his own reputation in the Politburo and STAVKA.

“You ever been to the Far Eastern Theater?” he asked the guard. “To Khabarovsk?”

“No, Comrade General.”

“You’re lucky then,” replied Marchenko morosely, a sudden flurry of snow swirling about him. “It’s much colder than here. My son tells me that in Khabarovsk, the winds come all the way down from the Kara Sea — the prisoners have to dig through the ice of the Amur River so they can fish. The trouble is, the ice is jagged, you see — not at all smooth and flat as some people imagine. Chaotic — going this way and that at impossible angles.”

The guard was feeling nervous — it was highly unusual for a general to be conversing in such a way with a mere private, especially the celebrated general who was minister of war and who had engineered the penetration of NATO’s Fulda Gap, where the masses of Russian armor had burst through before heading north to the German Plain and south to the Danube Valley, sending the NATO defenses reeling.

“I–I don’t know anything about the Far Eastern Theater, Comrade General. I didn’t know we had taken prisoners east of—”

“No, no, boy,” said Marchenko irritably. “Our own people — in the gulags.”

The guard was doubly perplexed — as far as he knew, gulags had been banned ever since the time of the revisionist Gorbachev.

Marchenko had only a few minutes before the STAVKA meeting would be called to order, and presented his deal to Chernko quickly, succinctly.

Chernko rejected it out of hand. “This is not possible,” Chernko said icily. “The American, Freeman, moves too fast. We never know where he is.” Chernko signaled an aide.