over to his bridge chair and settled in. 'Tea!'
A steward appeared at once with a tray of cups.
'There is no liquor aboard?' Andreyev was surprised.
'Not unless your men brought it, Comrade General. I do not tolerate alcohol on my ship.'
'That is true enough.' The first officer joined them. 'All secure aft. The special sea detail is set. Lookouts posted. The deck inspection is under way.'
'Deck inspection?'
'We normally check at the turn of every watch for open hatches, Comrade General,' the first officer explained. 'With your men aboard, we will check every hour.'
'You do not trust my men?' The General was mildly offended.
'Would you trust one of us aboard one of your airplanes?' the captain replied.
'You are right, of course. Please excuse me.' Andreyev knew a professional when he saw one. 'Can you spare a few men to teach my junior officers and sergeants what they need to know?'
The first officer pulled a set of papers from his pocket. 'The classes begin in three hours. In two weeks, your men will be proper seamen.'
'We are particularly worried about damage control,' the captain said.
'That concerns you?'
'Of course. We stand into danger, Comrade General. I would also like to see what your men can do for ship defense.'
The General hadn't thought of that. The operation had been thrown together too quickly for his liking, without the chance to train his men in their shipboard duties. Security considerations. Well, no operation was ever fully planned, was it? 'I'll have my antiair commander meet with you as soon as you are ready.' He paused. 'What sort of damage can this ship absorb and still survive?'
'He is not a warship, Comrade General.' Kherov smiled cryptically. 'However, you will note that nearly all of our cargo is on steel barges. Those barges have double steel walls, with a meter of space between them, which may even be better than the compartmentalization on a warship. With luck, we will not have to learn. Fire is what concerns me most. The majority of ships lost in battle die from fire. If we can set up an effective firefighting drill, we may well be able to survive at least one, perhaps as many as three missile hits.'
The General nodded thoughtfully. 'My men will be available to you whenever you wish.'
'As soon as we clear the Channel.' The captain got up and checked the chart again. 'Sorry that we cannot offer you a pleasure cruise. Perhaps the return trip.'
The General lifted his tea. 'I will toast that, Comrades. My men are at your disposal until the time comes. Success!'
'Yes. Success!' Captain Kherov lifted his cup also, almost wishing for a glass of vodka to toast their enterprise properly. He was ready. Not since his youth in Navy minesweepers had he had the chance to serve the State directly, and he was determined to see this mission through.
'Good evening, Major.' In a guarded wing of the military hospital, the chief of CIA's Bonn Station sat down with his British and French counterparts and a pair of translators. 'Shall we talk about Lammersdorf?' Unbeknownst to the Germans, the British had a file on Major Chernyavin's activities in Afghanistan, including a poor but recognizable photograph of the man remembered by the Mudjahaddin as the Devil of the Kandahar. General Jean- Pierre de Ville of the French DGSE handled the questioning, since he spoke the best Russian. By this time Chernyavin was a broken man. His only attempt at resistance was killed by listening to a tape of his drug-induced confession. A dead man to his own countrymen, the major repeated what these men already knew but had to hear for themselves. Three hours later, Flash-priority dispatches went to three Western capitals, and representatives of the three security services prepared briefing papers for their counterparts in the other NATO countries.
14. Gas
SCENARIO 6
Spring-summer weather patterns (moderate humidity and temperatures; rain probability 35 % per day); westerly and southwesterly winds of 10 to 30 km/hr at ground level, indexed for altitude; use of highly persistent agents against communications nexi, POMCUS sites, airfields, supply, and nuclear weapon storage facilities (normal computed delivery error rate, see Appendix F of Annex 1). The chief of the Communist Party of the German Democratic Republic read on to the bottom of the abstract, despite the acid churning in his stomach:
As with Scenarios 1, 3, 4, and 5, any warning of over 15 minutes will ensure virtually complete MOPP-4 protection of alerted combat and support personnel. The problem of civilian casualties remains, since over a hundred targets of the categories cited above are near major population centers. Biodegradation of persistent agents such as GD (the expected Soviet agent of choice; for an analysis of Soviet literature on this topic, see Appendix C of Annex 2) will be slowed by generally mild temperatures and weather-reduced sunlight photochemical action. This will allow the agents in aerosol form to drift on wind currents. Given minimum source concentrations of 2 milligrams per cubic meter, predicted vertical temperature gradients, and cloud-width inputs, we see that the downwind toxic vapor hazard to large areas of the FRG and DDR will be approximately 0.3 (plus or minus 50 % in our calculations, allowing for expected impurities and chemical breakdown in the chemical munitions) as great as that at the targets themselves.
Since open Soviet literature calls for source (that is, target) concentrations well beyond median lethal dose (LCT-50), we see that the entire German civilian population is at the gravest risk Expected allied retaliation to such chemical strikes would be largely psychological in nature-the use of Soviet munitions alone will effectively contaminate most of Greater Germany; it is expected that no part of Germany east of the Rhein can be considered safe to unprotected personnel, beginning 12 hours after the first munitions are expended. Similar effects may be expected in parts of Czechoslovakia, and even western Poland, depending on wind direction and speed. Such contamination must be expected, moreover, to continue at least 1.5 times the mean persistence level of the agents used.
This is the last (and statistically most likely) of the scenarios outlined by the contract specifications.
SECTION VIII: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
As the reader will appreciate, although given tactical warning of only a few minutes, alerted military formations can confidently be expected to sufferfew casualties (albeit with 30–50 % degradation of combat effectiveness;this degradation likely, however, to equate to both sides), expected casualties es civilians will actually be greater than those anticipated from a Level-2 exchange of tactical nuclear weapons (200 warheads @ { 100kt yield, seeAppendix A of Annex 1) at a mix of military and civilian/industrial targets. Thus, despite the fact that chemical munitions are not of themselves directly damaging to fixed industrial assets, serious near- and long-term economic effects must be expected. Even the use of nonpersistentagents at the FEBA (Forward Edge of the Battle Area) cannot but have major impact on the civilian population due to the heavily urbanized character of the German countryside and the patent inability of any government to provide adequate protection for its civilian population.
In terms of immediate effects, the 10,000,000+ civilian fatality floor figure in Scenario 2 represents a public health problem worse by an order of magnitude than that following the Bangladesh Cyclone disaster of 1970, and is likely to include synergistic effects well beyond the scope of this study. (Contract specifications specifically excluded investigation into bidecological effects from a major chemical exchange. While the difficulty associated with an in- depth examination of this subject is impossible at this writing to estimate, the reader is cautioned that such far- reaching effects are less easily dealt with than studied. It might be necessary, for example, to import tons of insect larvae before the simplest food crops can again flourish in Western Europe.) For the moment the ability even of organized armies to dispose of millions of civilian bodies in advanced stages of decomposition is not something to be taken for granted. And the civilians needed for the reestablishment of industrial production (under what are almost certainly optimistic estimates) will have been at the least decimated in the literal, classical sense.
