Warren Murphy: The Sky is Falling

If we can make it mobile, and aim it better, we might have a weapons sale, thought Reemer. Or perhaps we could market a screen against the rays. Maybe both. The future was limitless. As bright as the sun.

The budget was tripled and, within a month, they had constructed an aiming mechanism. There was only one small glitch. The fluorocarbon stream could be controlled in the amount of ozone shield it opened, but it could not be aimed very exactly. They could direct the beam elsewhere instead of straight up, but they were just not sure where it would land. Which meant that Chemical Concepts would control this immense new energy source so that life on earth wasn't threatened, but couldn't direct it anywhere in particular. This shot the boards out from under Marketing. It was like owning a car you couldn't steer: if you can't steer it, you can't sell it.

"How far off this time?" asked Kathy. She had once again found Bolt using the fluorocarbon gun, as they were calling it now, without her permission.

"Two or three thousand miles," said Bolt. "I think you'll have to upgrade your targeting computer. I'll help you get more money."

"Over where did we open up a hole in the ozone shield?" asked Kathy.

"Not sure. Maybe China or Russia. Maybe neither. We'll find out when someone's electronics shut down, or if mass skin problems develop somewhere. If it's Russia, I don't think we have to worry. They won't sue for damages."

In his somewhat shrewd way, Reemer Bolt was right. Russia wouldn't sue. It was planning to start World War III.

He was old. Even for a Russian general. He had known and buried Stalin. He had known and buried Lenin. He had buried them all. Every one of them, in some way or other, at some time or other, had said to him:

"Alexei. What would we ever do without you?"

And Alexei Zemyatin would answer: "Think. Hopefully, think."

Even during the harshest times, Field Marshal Alexei Zemyatin would speak his mind to any of the Soviet leaders. He would, in brief, call them fools. And they would listen to him because he had saved their lives so many times before.

When Lenin was fighting both America and Britain on Russian soil after the First World War, and a hundred groups plotted the overthrow of the Communist government, Zemyatin confronted Lenin's worst fears. He was at the time the dictator's secretary.

"I dread the joining of all our enemies," said Lenin. "It is the one thing that will destroy us. If ever they stop fighting among themselves, we are ruined."

"Unless you help them to form a united front against you."

"Never," said Lenin. The one hope the Communists had was that their disparate enemies would keep fighting among themselves. Otherwise they could destroy the young revolution.

"Then let me ask you to think, Great Leader. If a hundred groups are all working against you, each with a different idea and a different leader, it will be as it was against the czar. No matter how many are killed, the opposition will survive. And then, as happened to the czar, a group will succeed against you one day.

"That will come later, and then only maybe. Right now we are fighting for our lives," said Lenin.

"Later always comes, fool. That is why God gives us brains to plan with."

"Alexei, what are you getting at? I warn you, you are not dealing with a small matter here. Your life is wagered on it."

"No, it isn't," said Zemyatin, who knew that Lenin needed argument in his life. So few now were willing to argue with him, at least not successfully. "Today there are shootings even in Moscow. Your secret police kill one group, but still there are dozens more untouched. Why?"

"Because the sewers spawn different bugs."

"Because none of them are joined. If you have a tree with a hundred branches, every branch will fall when you cut down the trunk. But if you have a hundred dandelion weeds, you will never be rid of them. Forests can be felled. But to my knowledge no lawn, not even that of the czar on the Baltic, was ever free of dandelions."

"But something that strong could destroy us."

"Not if we run it. And who has better knowledge of these counterrevolutionary groups than our own secret police? We will not only join these groups into one strong oak, but we will fertilize this tree. Prune it occasionally. And then, when we wish, we will cut it down with a single chop of the ax."

"It is too dangerous."

"As opposed to what else, my Ilyich?" asked Alexei Zemyatin.

In the years that followed, Zemyatin's strategy proved to be the master stroke of counterintelligence secretly admired by all of Russia's enemies. It was the one move that enabled Soviet Russia to survive, but Zemyatin was never given credit for its formulation. Instead, at Zemyatin's request, credit was given to the founder of what later became the KGB. Nor did Zemyatin accept recognition for saving Russia from Nazi Germany. While everyone else celebrated Stalin's nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler, Zemyatin told Stalin that these were the most dangerous times in Russia's history.

"How can it be?" asked Stalin, fingering his clipped mustache. They had met in a private room because the dictator was shrewd enough to know that he could not allow any man to call him a fool in public and live. He did not want the brilliant Zemyatin dead.

"The safest times precede the greatest dangers, Mr. Chairman," Zemyatin told him.

"We have made peace with Hitler. We have the Capitalists and the Nazis at each other's throats. We will shortly control half of Poland, giving us more territorial safety, and you tell me that these times are dangerous."

"They are dangerous," answered the middle-aged man with the steady blue eyes, "because you think they are safe. You think that your enemies are at each other's throats. Well, they are. But because you think you are safe, the Red Army thinks it is also safe. The soldiers will sit comfortably in their barracks waiting for weekends in the taverns with whores instead of preparing for war."

Zemyatin's plan was to create another army, secretly, behind the Urals. Let Germany attack. Let Germany have its unstoppable victories. And watch them carefully. See how they fought. Then, with the Nazis rolling toward Moscow, confident of victory, their strengths and weaknesses absolutely clear, Russia would unleash its hidden army. A gigantic trap: a country wide and a people long.

The year of the plan was 1938. Four years later, after the nonaggression pact was proven to be the joke Zemyatin suspected, the Nazi advance was halted with difficulty at a city called Stalingrad. As the Germans prepared to take the city, they were surrounded by fully one hundred divisions: Zemyatin's secret army. The Russians annihilated the German Sixth Army like locusts descending on old corn, and then marched to Berlin, only stopping when they met the Americans coming from the opposite direction.

Zemyatin, as usual, took no credit, letting the battalion be called Zhukov's Army.

His counsel was passed on from Russian leader to Russian leader like a national treasure. More often than not, he would counsel caution. Aiexei Zemyatin did not believe in adventures any more than he believed his form of government was any better than another. He kept his government from war with China. He lectured each new general personally on his belief that so long as Russia did not endanger America proper, there would be no Third World War. He insisted on three safety backups for every Soviet nuclear weapon, his greatest fear being an accident of war. Thus, the entire Politburo was shocked and terrified when it heard that Field Marshal Zemyatin himself was preparing for World War III. This was confided by the Premier to select Politburo members, who later spread the word.

It was autumn, cold already in the country of the Russian bear and Siberian steppes. No one had expected it. No one knew what the danger was or even if there was a danger, just that one was coming. Even the chief of staff was asking: Why?