The Devil's Alternative

Vishnayev, with his war plan. And we all know what that would entail.”

“Point taken,” said Kahn. “Actually, my own reading of the combined Nightingale file runs along very similar lines. I’ve got a paper in preparation for the President’s eyes at the moment. He’ll have it next week when he and Benson meet with Lawrence and Poklewski.”

“These figures,” asked President Matthews, “they represent the final aggregate grain crop the Soviet Union brought in a month ago?”

He glanced across at the four men seated in front of his desk. At the far end of the room a log fire crackled in the marble fireplace, adding a touch of visual warmth to the al­ready high temperature assured by the central heating system. Beyond the bulletproof south windows, the sweeping lawns held their first dusting of November morning frost. Being from the South, William Matthews appreciated warmth.

Robert Benson and Dr. Myron Fletcher nodded in unison. David Lawrence and Stanislaw Poklewski studied the figures.

“All our sources have been called on for these figures, Mr. President, and all our information has been correlated ex­tremely carefully,” said Benson. “We could be out by five percent either way, no more.”

“And according to the Nightingale, even the Politburo agrees with us,” interposed the Secretary of State.

“One hundred million tons, total,” mused the President. “It will last them till the end of March, with a lot of belt tighten­ing.”

“They’ll be slaughtering the cattle by January,” said Pok­lewski. “They have to start making sweeping concessions at Castletown next month if they want to survive.”

The President laid down the Soviet grain report and picked up the presidential briefing prepared by Ben Kahn and presented by his Director of Central Intelligence. It had been read by all four in the room, as well as himself. Benson and Lawrence had agreed with it; Dr. Fletcher was not called upon for an opinion; the hawkish Poklewski dissented.

“We know—and they know—they are in desperate straits,” said Matthews. “The question is, how far do we push them?”

“As you said weeks ago, Mr. President,” said Lawrence, “if we don’t push hard enough, we don’t get the best deal we can for America and the free world. Push too hard and we force Rudin to abort the talks to save himself from his own hawks. It’s a question of balance. At this point, I feel we should make them a gesture.”

“Wheat?”

“Animal feed to help them keep some of their herds alive?” suggested Benson.

“Dr. Fletcher?” asked the President.

The man from the Agriculture Department shrugged.

“We have the feed available, Mr. President,” he said. “The Soviets have a large proportion of their own merchant fleet, Sovfracht, standing by. We know that because with their sub­sidized freight rates they could all be busy, but they’re not They’re positioned all over the warm-water ports of the Black Sea and down the Soviet Pacific coast. They’ll sail for the United States if they’re given the word from Moscow.”

“What’s the latest we need to give a decision on this one?” asked President Matthews.

“New Year’s Day,” said Benson. “If they know a respite is coming, they can hold off slaughtering the herds.”

“I urge you not to ease up on them,” pleaded Poklewski. “By March they’ll be desperate.”

“Desperate enough to concede enough disarmament to as­sure peace for a decade, or desperate enough to go to war?” asked Matthews rhetorically. “Gentlemen, you’ll have my de­cision by Christmas Day. Unlike you, I have to take five chairmen of Senate subcommittees with me on this one: De­fense, Agriculture, Foreign Relations, Trade, and Appropria­tions. And I can’t tell them about the Nightingale, can I, Bob?”

The chief of the CIA shook his head.

“No, Mr. President Not about the Nightingale. There are too many Senate aides, too many leaks. The effect of a leak of what we really know at this juncture could be disastrous.”

“Very well, then. Christmas Day it is.”

On December 15, Professor Ivan Sokolov rose to his feet at Castletown and began to read a prepared paper. The Soviet Union, he said, ever true to its traditions as a country devoted to the unswerving search for world peace, and mindful of its often-reiterated commitment to peaceful coexistence ...

Edwin J. Campbell sat across the table and watched his So­viet opposite number with some fellow feeling. Over two months, working until fatigue overcame both of them, he had developed a fairly warm relationship with the man from Mos­cow—as much, at least, as their positions and their duties would allow.

In breaks between the talks, each had visited the other in the opposing delegation’s suite. In the Soviet drawing room, with the Muscovite delegation present and its inevitable com­plement of KGB agents, the conversation had been agreeable but formal. In the American room, where Sokolov had ar­rived alone, he had relaxed to the point of showing Campbell pictures of his grandchildren on holiday on the Black Sea coast. As a leading member of the Academy of Sciences, the professor was rewarded for his loyalty to Party and cause with a limousine, chauffeur, city apartment, country dacha, seaside chalet, and access to the Academy’s grocery store and commissary. Campbell had no illusions but that Sokolov was paid for his loyalty, for his ability to devote his talents to the service of a regime that committed tens of thousands to the labor camps of Mordovia; that he was one of the fat cats, the nachalstvo. But even the nachalstvo had grandchildren.

He sat and listened to the Russian with growing surprise.

You poor old man, he thought. What this must be costing you.

When the peroration was over, Edwin Campbell rose and gravely thanked the professor for his statement, which on be­half of the United States of America he had listened to with the utmost care and attention. He moved an adjournment while the U.S. government considered its position. Within an hour he was in the Dublin embassy to begin transmitting Sokolov’s extraordinary speech to David Lawrence.

Some hours later in Washington’s State Department, David Lawrence lifted one of his telephones and called President Matthews on his private line.

“I have to tell you, Mr. President, that six hours ago in Ire­land the Soviet Union conceded six major points at issue. They concern total numbers of intercontinental ballistic missiles with hydrogen-bomb warheads, through conventional ar­mor, to disengagement of forces along the Elbe River.”

“Thanks, David,” said Matthews. “That’s great news. You were right. I think we should let them have something in re­turn.”

The area of birch and larch forest lying southwest of Moscow where the Soviet elite have their country dachas covers little more than a hundred square miles. They like to stick to­gether. The roads in this area are bordered mile after mile by green-painted steel railings, enclosing the private estates of the men at the very top. The fences and the driveway gates seem largely abandoned, but anyone trying to scale the first or drive through the second will be intercepted within mo­ments by guards who materialize out of the trees.

Lying beyond Uspenskoye Bridge, the area centers on a small village called Zhukovka, usually known as Zhukovka Village. This is because there are two other and newer settle­ments nearby: Sovmin Zhukovka, where the Party hierarchs have their weekend villas; and Akademik Zhukovka, which groups the writers, artists, musicians, and scientists who have found favor in Party eyes.

But across the river lies the ultimate, the even more exclu­sive, settlement of Usovo. Nearby, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the Politburo, retires to a sumptuous mansion set in hundreds of acres of rigorously guarded forest.

Here on the night before Christmas, a feast he had not recognized in more than fifty years, Maxim Rudin sat in his favorite button-back leather chair, feet toward the enormous fireplace in rough-cut granite blocks where meter- long logs of split pine crackled. It was the same fireplace that had warmed Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev before him.

The bright yellow glare of the flames flickered on the pan­eled walls of the study and illuminated the face of Vassili Petrov, who faced him across the fire. By Rudin’s chair arm, a small coffee table held an ashtray and half a tumbler of Ar­menian brandy, which Petrov eyed askance. He knew his ag­ing protector was not supposed to drink.