Colonel Butler's Wolf

was the horror grinning on Audley's pillow, but also that he too was a product of that privileged world which took its proved quality for granted. It was a world that had taken some hard knocks as the pressure for quantity rather than quality had built up against it, but it was not beaten yet—

and Butler rather suspected now that when its last barricade went up he would be on the same side of it as Audley.

Richardson was a similar product, but was as yet too young to identify himself wholly with it and too close to the generation of iconoclasts.

'So?' Audley was watching him warily.

What was immediately important, thought Butler, was to discover whether the man had managed to retain his sense of detachment, and the best way to find out was to play the devil's advocate—

'There could be something in it, as I say,' he said unsympathetically. 'But it's a damned, vague, airy-fairy notion compared with what the Russians usually put up, if you ask me. It hasn't got any body to it.'

'Phew!' Richardson exclaimed. 'For a man who's been bloody near burnt to death and smashed up in a car you take a darned cool view of things, I must say!'

'He's not denying something's up, Peter,' said Audley patiently. 'I think we all know there is.'

He met Butler's eyes again. 'Fair enough, Jack. I agree it sounds vague. But as you know we didn't start all this just because Sir Geoffrey Hobson dropped a word in Theodore Freisler's ear last summer. We had something to go on before that.'

'What?'

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'The Dzerzhinsky Street Report.'

Butler shifted uneasily. But it was no use pretending false knowledge. 'Never heard of it.'

'I'm not surprised. It's sixteen years old.'

'It's what?'

'Sixteen years old. Came out in '55. It was all the work of a committee the KGB set up in Dzerzhinsky Street the year before to look into the origins of the East German rising and the Pilsen revolt. You see, what shook them rigid, and went on shaking them right down to the Budapest rising, was that it was the young who were causing the trouble—the very ones who'd had all the pampering and the brain washing.'

He shook his head sadly. 'You know, the pitiful thing about my students at Cumbria is they think they invented student protest, or at least that it was invented here in the West. I can't seem to get it through their heads that the East European youth started it back in the early fifties.'

'And by God those poor little devils really had something to complain about too—I'd like to show some of our protesters a cadre sheet from the East with a note about a 'class-hostile' grandfather, or an uncle who'd got himself on the wrong end of some party purge, and then let 'em have a look at our college files for comparison!'

'And most of all I'd like to open up our file on the Hungarian Revolt—60,000 dead and only God knows how many maimed or deported, and more than half of them under 25, and tell 'em that was how the Communists settled their youth problems in the fifties. Not with a couple of elderly proctors, or a crew of panicky National Guardsmen, but with eight armoured divisions and two MVD special brigades—'

He stopped abruptly, embarrassed at his own sudden flare-up of passion. 'Sorry about that—the way people don't remember Hungary always sticks in my craw.'

'The point is, when the Dzerzhinsky Street committee put in their report they had to be bloody careful not to criticise their own set-up too much, so they dressed it up with half-truths about the inadequacy of the parents, how they'd been over-concerned with material prosperity at the expense of political consciousness, and that had led their kids astray—'

'This report,' Butler interrupted him, 'I've never seen it on the check list. Damn it—I've never even heard of it.'

'The famous Dzerzhinsky Street Report?' Audley's lips curled. 'You're not the only one. We only got it from the CIA last summer, and it was more than ten years old when they got it.'

'Why the hell—?' Butler frowned at Audley.

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'Why didn't they pass it on earlier?' Audley smiled thinly. 'For the same reason—the same basic reason

—as the Russians managed to conceal it so well. They simply didn't reckon there was any value to it.'

'You see, when the KGB turned it down as useless it was declassified, so no one took any notice of it. It wasn't until the mid-sixties that someone in their K Section remembered about it. He was swotting up the latest American campus riots in Newsweek and Time—at least, that's how the story goes—and he remembered reading one of the recommendations of the Dzerzhinsky Street committee. They'd reckoned that it was in the nature of youth to revolt under a given set of circumstances, and the Party ought to watch out for them developing in the West. They reckoned they could cash in on them because the Western governments wouldn't be capable of handling them with 'revolutionary firmness'.'

'Meaning eight armoured divisions and a couple of MVD special brigades,' murmured Richardson.

'And a thousand cattle trucks for the lucky survivors . . .'

'Maybe not so lucky, Peter,' said Audley. 'But that was the start of it anyway. Because all of a sudden the Dzerzhinsky Street formula—pampered students and materialist parents—seemed to fit the West like a glove.'

Butler frowned. 'You mean the Russians have had a hand in the student power movements? Because I rather understood the students didn't approve of the Kremlin any more than the Pentagon—'

Audley raised an admonitory finger. 'Now that is precisely the point: they didn't and they don't! You've got it exactly, Butler. There was a bit of Maoism or Castroism on the edges —and a lunatic fringe of Weathermen and such like—but none of them was amenable to anything like effective manipulation.