who are going to have it. Dr. Fletcher?”

The man from the Department of Agriculture nodded. “It appears North America is going to have a bumper crop this year. Maybe fifty million tons over domestic requirements for both us and Canada considered together.”

Minutes later, Dr. Fletcher was escorted out. The debate resumed. Poklewski pressed his point.

“Mr. President, this time we have to act. We have to re­quire a quid pro quo from them this time around.”

“Linkage?” asked the President suspiciously. “I know your thoughts on that, Stan. Last time it didn’t work; it made things worse. I will not have another repeat of the Jackson Amendment.”

All three men recalled the fate of that piece of legislation with little joy. At the end of 1974 Congress had passed a compromise trade-reform bill; its passage had been delayed by a controversial section that specified in effect that unless the Soviets went easier on the question of Russian-Jewish emigration to Israel, there would be no U.S. trade credits for the purchase of technology and industrial goods. The Polit­buro under Brezhnev had contemptuously rejected the pressure, launched a series of predominantly anti-Jewish show trials, and bought their requirements, with trade credits, from Britain, Germany, and Japan.

“The point about a nice little spot of blackmail,” Sir Nigel Irvine, who was in Washington in 1975, had remarked to Bob Benson, “is that you must be sure the victim simply cannot do without something that you have, and cannot acquire it anywhere else.”

Poklewski had learned of this remark from Benson and re­peated it to President Matthews, avoiding the word black­mail.

“Mr. President, this time around they cannot get their wheat elsewhere. Our wheat surplus is no longer a trading matter. It is a strategic weapon. It is worth ten squadrons of nuclear bombers. There is no way we would sell nuclear technology to Moscow for money. I urge you to invoke the Shannon Act.”

In the wake of the Sting of 1977, Congress had, finally and belatedly, in 1980 passed the Shannon Act. This said simply that, in any year, the federal government had the right to ex­ercise an option to buy the entire U.S. grain surplus at the going rate per ton at the time of the announcement that it wished to do so.

The grain speculators had hated it, but the farmers had gone along. The act smoothed out some of the wilder fluctua­tions in world grain prices. In years of glut, the farmers got prices for their grain that were too low; in years of shortage, the prices were exceptionally high. The Shannon Act ensured that if the government exercised its option the farmers would get a fair price but the speculators would be out of business. The act also gave the administration a gigantic new weapon in dealing with customer countries: the aggressive as well as the humble and poor.

“Very well,” said President Matthews, “I will invoke the Shannon Act. I will authorize the use of federal funds to buy the futures for the expected surplus of fifty million tons of grain.”

Poklewski was jubilant.

“You won’t regret it, Mr. President. This time, the Soviets will have to deal directly with your administration, not with middlemen. We have them over a barrel. There is nothing else they can do.”

Yefrem Vishnayev had a different opinion. At the outset of the Politburo meeting, he asked for the floor and got it.

“No one here, Comrades, denies that the famine that faces us is not acceptable. No one denies that the surplus foods lie in the decadent capitalist West. It has been suggested that the only thing we can do is to humble ourselves, possibly grant concessions that will reduce our military might and thereby delay the onward march of Marxism-Leninism in order to buy these surpluses to tide us over.

“Comrades, I disagree, and I ask you to join me in rejec­tion of the course of yielding to blackmail and betraying our great inspirator, Lenin. There is one other way—one other way in which we can obtain acceptance by the entire Soviet people of rigid rationing at the minimum-subsistence level, promote a nationwide upsurge of patriotism and self-sacrifice, and secure an imposition of that discipline without which we cannot get through the hunger that has to come.

“There is a way in which we can use what little harvest grain we shall cull this autumn, spin out the national reserve until the spring next year, use the meat from our herds and flocks in place of grain, and then, when all is used, turn to Western Europe, where the milk lakes are, where the beef-and-butter mountains are, where the national reserves of ten wealthy nations are.”

“And buy them?” asked Foreign Minister Rykov ironically.

“No, Comrade,” replied Vishnayev softly. “Take them. I yield the floor to Comrade Marshal Kerensky. He has a file he would wish each of us to examine.”

Twelve thick files were passed around. Kerensky kept his own and began reading aloud from it. Rudin left his un­opened in front of him and smoked steadily. Ivanenko also left his on the table and contemplated Kerensky. He and Rudin had known for four days what the file would contain. In col­laboration with Vishnayev, Kerensky had brought out of the General Staff’s safe the file for Plan Aleksandr, named after Field Marshal Aleksandr Suvorov, the great and never defeated Russian commander. Now the plan had been brought right up to date.

And it was impressive, as Kerensky spent the next two hours reading it During the following May the usual massive spring maneuvers of the Red Army in East Germany would be bigger than ever, but with a difference. These would be no maneuvers, but the real thing. On command, all thirty thou­sand tanks and armored personnel carriers, mobile guns and amphibious craft would swing westward, hammer across the Elbe, and plow into West Germany, heading for France and the Channel ports.

Ahead of them, fifty thousand paratroops would drop over fifty locations to take out the principal tactical nuclear air­fields of the French inside France and the Americans and British on German soil. Another hundred thousand would drop on the four countries of Scandinavia to control the capi­tal cities and main transportation arteries, with massive naval backup from offshore.

The military thrust would avoid the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, whose governments, all partners with the Euro-Communists in office, would be ordered by the Soviet Ambas­sador to stay out of the fight or perish by joining in. Within half a decade later, they would fall like ripe plums, anyway. Likewise Greece, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. Switzerland would be avoided, Austria used only as a through-route. Both would later be islands in a Soviet sea, and would not last long.

The primary zone of attack and occupation would be the three Benelux countries, France, and West Germany. Britain, as a prelude, would be crippled by strikes and confused by the extreme Left, which on instructions would mount an im­mediate clamor for nonintervention. London would be in­formed that if the nuclear Strike Command were used east of the Elbe, Britain would be wiped off the face of the map.

Throughout the entire operation the Soviet Union would be stridently demanding an immediate cease-fire in every capital in the world and in the United Nations, claiming the hostili­ties were local to West Germany, temporary, and caused en­tirely by a West German preemptive strike toward Berlin, a claim that most of the non- German European Left would be­lieve and support.

“And the United States, all this time?” Petrov interrupted. Kerensky looked irritated at being stopped in full flow after ninety minutes.

“The use of tactical nuclear weapons right across the face of Germany cannot be excluded,” pursued Kerensky, “but the overwhelming majority of them will destroy West Ger­many, East Germany, and Poland—no loss, of course, for the Soviet Union. Thanks to the weakness of Washington, there is no deployment of either Cruise missiles or neutron bombs. Soviet military casualties are estimated at between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand at the max­imum. But as two million men in all three services will be in­volved, such percentages will be acceptable.”

“Duration?” asked Ivanenko.

The point units of the forward mechanized armies will en­ter the French Channel ports one hundred hours after crossing the Elbe. At that point, of course, the cease-fire may be allowed to operate. The mopping up can take place under the cease-fire.”

“Is that time scale feasible?” asked Petryanov.

This time, Rudin cut in.

“Oh yes, it’s feasible,” he said mildly. Vishnayev shot him a suspicious look.

“I still have not had an answer to my question,” Petrov pointed out. “What about the United States? What about their nuclear strike forces? Not tactical missiles. Strategic missiles. The hydrogen-bomb warheads in their

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