'Please note that I say 'all signatories.' The Soviet Union invites the United Kingdom, the French Republic, and'-he looked up-'the People's Republic of China to join us at the negotiating table.' The explosion of flashbulbs caused him to look away for a moment.
'Ladies and gentlemen, please-' He smiled, holding his hand up to shield his face. 'These old eyes are not up to such abuse as this, and I have not memorized my speech-unless you want me to continue in Russian!'
There was a wave of laughter, then a sprinkling of applause at the jibe. The old bastard was really turning on the charm, Flynn thought, furiously taking notes. This was potential dynamite. He wondered what would come next, and he especially wondered what the precise wording on the proposal was. Flynn had covered arms talks before, and knew all too well that general descriptions of proposals could grossly distort the nuts-and-bolts details of the real issues to be negotiated. The Russians couldn't be this open-they just couldn't be.
'To proceed.' The Foreign Minister blinked his eyes clear. 'We have been accused of never making a gesture of our good faith. The falsehood of the charge is manifest, but this evil fiction continues in the West. No longer. No longer will anyone have cause to doubt the sincerity of the Soviet people's quest for a just and lasting peace.
'Beginning today, as a sign of good faith which we challenge the United States and any other interested nation to match, the Soviet Union will remove from service an entire class of nuclear-powered missile submarine. These submarines are known to the West as the Yankee class. We call them something else, of course,' he said with an ingenuous grin that drew another wave of polite laughter. 'Twenty of the vessels are presently in service, each carrying twelve sea-launched ballistic missiles. All active members of the class are assigned to the Soviet Northern Fleet based on the Kola Peninsula. Beginning today, we will deactivate these vessels at a rate of one per month. As you know, complete deactivation of so complex a machine as a missile submarine requires the services of a shipyard-the missile compartment must be physically removed from the body of the vessel-and so these vessels cannot be fully disarmed overnight. However, to make the honesty of our intentions undeniable, we invite the United States to do one of two things:
'First, we will permit a selected team of six American naval officers to inspect these twenty vessels to verify that their missiles tubes have been filled with concrete ballast pending removal of the entire missile rooms from all of the submarines. In return for this, we would require that a comparable inspection visit by an equal number of Soviet officers to American yards would be allowed at a later date to be agreed on.
'Second, as an alternative should the United States be unwilling to allow reciprocal verification of arms reductions, we will permit another group of six officers to perform this service, these officers to be from a country- or countries-upon which the United States and the Soviet Union can agree within the next thirty days. A team from such neutral countries as Sweden or India would be acceptable in principle to the Soviet Union.
'Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to put an end to the arms race. I will not repeat all of the flowery rhetoric we've all heard over the past two generations. We all know the threat that these ghastly weapons represent to every nation. Let no one ever say again that the government of the Soviet Union has not done its part to reduce the danger of war. Thank you.'
The room suddenly fell silent but for the sound of motor-driven still cameras. The Western press representatives assigned to their respective Moscow bureaus were among the best in their profession. Uniformly bright, uniformly ambitious, uniformly cynical about what they found in Moscow and the conditions under which they were forced to work, all were stunned to silence.
'Goddamn,' muttered Flynn after a full ten seconds.
'One must admire your understatement, old boy,' agreed Reuters correspondent William Calloway. 'Wasn't it your Wilson who spoke of open covenants openly arrived at?'
'Yeah, my granddad covered that peace conference. Remember how well it worked out?' Flynn grimaced, watching the Foreign Minister depart, smiling at the cameras. 'I want to see the handout. Want to ride back with me?'
'Yes on both.'
It was a bitterly cold day in Moscow. Snow piles were heaped at the roadsides. The sky was a frigid crystal blue. And the car's heater didn't work. Flynn drove while his friend read aloud through the handout. The draft treaty proposal took up nineteen annotated pages. The Reuters correspondent was a Londoner who had begun as a police reporter, and since covered assignments all over the world. He and Flynn had met many years before at the famous Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, and shared drinks and typewriter ribbons on and off for more than two decades. In the face of a Russian winter, they remembered the oppressive heat of Saigon with something akin to nostalgia.
'It's bloody fair,' Calloway said wonderingly, his breath giving ghostly substance to his words. 'They propose a builddown with elimination of many existing weapons, allowing both sides to replace obsolete launchers, both sides to reach a total of five thousand deliverable warheads, that number to remain stable for five years after the three- year reduction period. There is a separate proposal to negotiate complete removal of 'heavy' missiles, replacing them with mobile missiles, but to limit missile flight tests to a fixed number per year-' He flipped that page and rapidly scanned the remainder. 'Nothing in the draft treaty about your Star Wars research…? Didn't he mention that in his statement? Patrick, old son, this is, as you say, dynamite. This could as easily have been written in Washington. It will take months to work out all the technical points, but this is a bloody serious, and bloody generous, proposal.'
'Nothing about Star Wars?' Flynn frowned briefly as he turned right. Did that mean that the Russians had made a breakthrough of their own? Have to query Washington about that… 'We got us a story here, Willie. What's your lead? How's 'Peace' grab you?' Calloway just laughed at that.
American intelligence agencies, like their counterparts throughout the world, monitor all news wire services. Toland was examining the AP and Reuters reports before most news bureau chiefs, and comparing them with the version transmitted over Soviet microwave circuits for publication in the regional editions of Pravda and Isvestia. The way items of hard news were reported in the Soviet Union was intended to show Party members how their leaders felt.
'We've been down this road before,' his section chief said. 'The last time, things broke down on this issue of mobile missiles. Both sides want them, but both sides are afraid of the other side having them.'
'But the tone of the report-'
'They're always euphoric about their arms-control proposals, damn it! Hell, Bob, you know that.'
'True, sir, but it's the first time that I know of that the Russians have unilaterally removed a weapons platform from service.'
'The 'Yankees' are obsolete.'
'So what? They never throw anything away, obsolete or not. They still have World War II artillery pieces sitting in warehouses in case they need them again. This is different, and the political ramifications-'
'We're not talking politics, we're talking nuclear strategy,' the section chief growled back.
As if there were a difference, Toland said to himself.
'Well, Pasha?'
'Comrade General, we truly have a man's work before us,' Alekseyev answered, standing at attention in the Kiev headquarters of the Southwest Theater.
'Our troops need extensive unit training. Over the weekend I read through more than eighty regimental readiness reports from our tank and motor-rifle divisions.' Alekseyev paused before going on. Tactical training and readiness was the bane of the Soviet military. Their troops were almost entirely conscripts, in and out in two years, half of whose uniformed service was occupied just in acquiring basic military skills. Even the noncoms, the backbone of every army since the Roman legions, were conscripts selected for special training academies, then lost as soon as their enlistment periods ended. For that reason, the Soviet military leaned heavily on its officers, who often performed what in the West was sergeants' work. The professional officer corps of the Soviet Army was its only permanent, only dependable feature. In theory. 'The truth of the matter is that we don't know our readiness posture at the moment. Our colonels all use the same language in their reports, without the slightest deviation. Everyone reports meeting norms, with the same amount of training hours, the same amount of political indoctrination, the same number of practice shots fired-that is, a deviation of under three percent-and the requisite number of field exercises run, all of course of the proper type.'
'As prescribed in our training manuals,' the Colonel General noted.
'Naturally. Exactly-too damned exactly! No deviation for adverse weather. No deviation for late fuel deliveries.
