Deep Cover (12 page)

Rykov was patient. “If one agent's cover is blown it won't lead to others. That's always the first rule when you set these things up.”

“They've had nearly twenty years to break it.”

“And they haven't broken it, have they.”

“We don't know that, Comrade.”

“I'd know it. Do you think I'm without sources in American Intelligence?”

“Do you think they're without sources in yours?”

“They are where the Amergrad program is concerned. The Americans are adolescents when it comes to this sort of thing.”

“I don't share your confidence. The risk of discovery is greater than the potential benefit. I suggest again that you draw up a plan for the withdrawal of the network.”

Rykov let the silence grow. Grigorenko was watching him keenly. Rykov had got the job he wanted; Grigorenko was Commanding General, GRU (combined Military Intelligence Services) but that to KGB was as provincial ballet was to Bolshoi. Only because of his close ties to Yashin and Premier Tsvetnoy was Grigorenko on the Presidium at all. And by infiltrating the American military complex, Rykov's deep-cover team was encroaching on Grigorenko's territory.

Rykov said, “I grant it isn't foolproof. Nothing is foolproof. But our people are in a position to hamstring the enemy's nuclear capacity if it comes to war. Can you say the same for any substitute you're prepared to offer? No. As long as I'm capable of influencing decisions, my network will hold its position.”

As long as I'm capable of influencing decisions
—the gauntlet had been dropped and Yashin sat there looking at it, deciding whether now was the time to pick it up, but knowing in the end that it wasn't.

Yashin tugged at the flap of dry skin that sagged beneath his sharp jaw, and a wisp of smoke drifted free from the bowl of his pipe. The expressionless slits of eyes, the thin lips and very slightly shriveled face—behind the mask, Rykov was aware of the hatred. But Yashin wasn't ready to expose it. He had the patience of a Russian peasant—and the deviousness. He would wait.

Yashin said finally, “We'll keep the question under advisement. Let's get to the reports. Marshal Grigorenko—has there been any change in the Mediterranean?”

“None to speak of. Benghazi wants to blackmail us into
building an aviation-petrol refinery in Libya. Evidently the Libyan Army thinks it's going to withhold commitment of those two Derna divisions to Cairo if we don't agree to put in the refinery. We'll get the official demand in due course.”

Alexai Strygin snorted. His voice gritted with sudden sarcasm. “Benghazi puts a high value on two divisions.”

Rykov let his mind drift while Grigorenko made his reports on the Hanoi situation and the Tanzanian dispute; in response to each, Strygin delivered himself of cliché-ridden dissertations to which Rykov paid little attention. He was thinking of the sight he had passed on his way here: the tomb where Colonel Yuri Gagarin was buried in the Kremlin wall.

The brief years of the Cosmonauts had been a kind of golden age and in the decade since, Russia had lost her lead in space because Russian leadership had knuckled under to popular demands for individual effete comforts at the expense of collective technological advances: the Russian middle class had clamored for refrigerators and central heating. History, forgetting those who had starved, would not forget those who dominated the world, nor those who put the first man on Mars. Russia's revisionists had abandoned technological supremacy in exchange for slavish imitations of the gratifications of a dying capitalist society, and that very capitalism now threatened to destroy the Soviet Union. Rykov's agents had reported hints of a new American multiple-warhead system which might deploy within eighteen months—did that suggest war was becoming remote from the American mind? And the American danger was remote by comparison with the two others: the decay of Russian vigor and the immediate and present threat from just beyond Russia's own eastern underbelly.…

Strygin's voice ran down and Yashin turned toward Rykov, whose face became attentive. Rykov wore the filter stub of his cigarette on his lower lip; he peeled it free and put it out. He spoke softly, without heat, delivering the routine analysis of the week's developments, and he left one subject deliberately for the last. “Now I draw your attention to the reports we've submitted regularly on the China question.” He leaned forward
in the chair and draped both hands over the handle of his erect cane.

Marshal Grigorenko leaned to one side in his chair to break wind slyly against the cushion. Strygin watched Rykov, his face rigid with suppressed feelings, knowing what was coming and disliking it. Yashin only waited politely.

“Every evidence leads to the same conclusion,” Rykov said. “The Maoists think we've gone soft, lost the determination to resist.”

Grigorenko sighed. “The paper tiger again. China can be swatted like a fly. They know that. They'll make noise forever but there won't be war, Viktor. You know there won't be war.”

“On the contrary. To the Chinese, war is the inevitable historical necessity. It's only a question of which of us will start it and when it will begin. On the answers to that question will depend the outcome of the war.”

Alexai Strygin said, “As always you overstate the case.”

“No.”

Strygin turned to Yashin. “Every week he comes to us with some new wives' tale of Chinese perfidy which upon analysis becomes no more than a bee sting. But every time Comrade Rykov is stung by the bee he rushes to beat the hive with a club. The stings do no real harm but our friend wants to capitalize on them. He wants to make war on China and he will use any flimsy excuse to encourage it.”

Yashin did not interrupt and so Strygin continued: “I spent two years in China. I know their problems, and they are too many and too difficult for China to waste time and resources in a war she cannot win. We have more than enough Warsaw Pact troops along the border to discourage any serious challenge. Our nuclear capacity is incomparably greater than theirs. The Chinese have offered far more verbs than violence, and with good reason—if nothing else deters them, the Chinese must always know that any attack by them upon us would merely give the Americans the excuse they've been looking for to bury China.”

Drawing breath, Strygin glanced at Rykov and added in a harder voice, “As for the rest of Rykov's debating points, I can
only suggest he's become the victim of the solipsism of his profession. His intellect craves to discover more information than espionage can supply. Spies will always guess at what they do not know, and the tendency is strong to use one's brain not to arrive at the truth but to support the prejudices one began with. Remember it was the KGB which embarrassed us all by assuming the Arabs could defeat Israel in the 1967 six-day war.”

Rykov said mildly, “I was not the chief of KGB in 1967.”

“It would have been the same,” Strygin said. He went back to Yashin “Rykov has a Stalinist's view of the world. I suppose it's inevitable, in his profession, but it is for precisely that reason that he must keep his political notions to himself. We can no longer afford to have the KGB dictate national foreign policy. I suggest Comrade Rykov ought to concentrate on the gathering of information and leave the fighting of wars to the Army.”

Rykov flicked a cigarette against the back of his hand. After the echo of Strygin's anger had subsided he glanced at Yashin. “I should like to reply to that.”

“Of course,” Yashin replied with the attitude of a man offering another enough rope to hang himself.

“In 1945,” Rykov said, looking from face to face, “Eisenhower asked Zhukov how the Russians cleared mine fields and Zhukov replied, ‘We march over them.' Now that is the attitude of the Chinese today, arid I don't believe we are capable of as much.”

Grigorenko snapped, “The Russian soldier is no coward.”

“The spirit of collective sacrifice requires more than courage, I think. It requires a national will.”

“Stalinist claptrap,” Strygin said.

“Evidently,” Rykov murmured, “I have made the mistake of fragmenting the evidence. Each week I come to you with bits and pieces, and each week you point out tome that they are merely bits and pieces. Quite so. Let me rectify the mistake: let's look at the total picture.

“Six hundred years ago the Mongols invaded Russia without warning. Since the 1600's we have been fighting skir
mishes with the Chinese along the Amur River. Until a hundred and fifty years ago the Mongols were still in possession of the Volga and Crimea regions and their rule imposed such oppression and ignorant backwardness on our people that today we still struggle to get out from under the memory and experience. Because of those little yellow bastards we're two centuries behind and we simply sit here waiting for them to do the same thing again because Peking calls itself a Communist regime and we all tend to follow the stupid idea that the enemy of one's enemies is perforce one's friend.”

Strygin sat upright. “That's absurd. You're confusing Chinese with Mongols.”

“They're all the same.”

“No. Genghiz conquered Russia but the Chinese never have. Russia has never once made the kowtow of obeisance to China since Baikov's mission to Peking three hundred years ago—but forget that. History's always a good hiding place; it won't argue back. Let's talk about
now.”

“All right.” Rykov's words fell heavily, dropped like shoes, spaced out: “Consider the evidence. The Chinese have enlarged their satellite-tracking station near Nanking, they've installed huge electronic complexes in the mountains in the Khentei, and they're constantly expanding the nuclear facilities at Lop Nor, Paotow, and Lanchow. According to the figures I submitted last week they've stockpiled at least eight hundred hydrogen warheads of all sizes. Their missile program has grown faster than we anticipated and as you know they have an initial ICBM capability now sufficient to destroy almost half the major cities in the Soviet Union.”

“Yes,” Strygin said, “but at what cost to themselves?”

Rykov's head turned. “They can sacrifice four hundred million men—more than our entire population—and still win. And they've no reluctance to do that, as long as the loyal Maoist elite survives. China has one billion people and they face a famine—in less than thirty years she'll have two billion; today if there's a bad crop year millions of them starve, and tomorrow even if it's a
good
crop year millions of them will starve. Look at it, then: China has got to expand into new
agricultural lands. Where's she going to find them? In Japan or India or Indochina? Those areas are even more overcrowded than she is. No, she's
got
to move into our underpopulated frontier regions.

“To do that,” he finished in a different voice altogether, “the Maoists are willing to risk a nuclear exchange—precisely because they believe
we
are
not
willing to.”

He spread his hands in the universally expressive gesture.

“Rubbish,” Alexai Strygin said.

“Perhaps. But each year we spend debating the point gives the Chinese another year to close the gap in military strength.”

Yashin said, “You're saying we had better crush them while we still can.”

“I'm saying that one day I'm going to report to you that the Chinese will start to push buttons within twenty-four hours and you are going to have to be ready to react instantly and without any more of this idiotic debating.”

Strygin muttered, “As always Viktor ignores the political actualities.”

“If we were justified in intervening in Czech affairs in 1968, there's no reason we can't apply the same doctrine to China.”

Strygin uncrossed his legs. “He talks reasonably,” he said to Yashin, “but the premises aren't reasonable. All this talk of preparedness is a smoke screen. We're quite ready to repel any Chinese attack, nuclear or otherwise, and Viktor knows it and Peking knows it. No. He's saying we ought to get ourselves in a frame of mind to hit them before they can hit us. He wants a Soviet blitzkrieg. Viktor and his friends carefully avoid mentioning the obvious critical factor that negates their whole position—the Americans are on the fence right now, maintaining
detente
with us and putting out feelers to China in the Warsaw talks, but if we attack China they'll have their excuse to destroy us. Don't forget the Pentagon is in the hands of generals who can't tell one Communist from another; as far as they're concerned Russia is stronger than China, therefore Russia ought to be whipped. We're strong, but we're not strong enough to fight China and America together.” And Strygin smiled like a schoolmaster.

Yashin leveled his palms on the desk, pushed his chair back and stood. “Alexai is quite right. Our eastern defenses are on a constant alert and our missiles are pointed down Peking's throat. If there is to be war let the Chinese start it, because only then will the Americans ally themselves with us. Let's have no more talk of preemptive strikes. The KGB will spend more time providing information and less time trying to alter the policies of the Soviet Government. Now you must excuse me, I have an appointment.”

That had been yesterday. Now Rykov sat in his office in the Arbat, pushing the China reports around on the desk and reflecting on the meeting. He had listened to Strygin's appeasing whine and Yashin's careful chastisements before; emotionally immune to them, he was neither angry nor dismayed. But the clarity of his own vision made him impatient with them. Yashin had the distraction of his personal vanity and Strygin had his comfortable ambition and his large family of artists and intellectuals. Rykov had none of those dilutions; he was a superior servant of the State because his whole and only dedication was to the State. He had been widowed eight years ago; there were no children; he had no weaknesses for material things, no wish for personal aggrandizement.