'Then you tell me, Gennady Iosefovich,' Golovko commanded.
Bondarenko leaned across the map table, and spoke while moving a finger about. 'I would say that what concerns you is the possibility that Iran is making a bid for superpower status. In uniting with Iraq, they increase their oil wealth by something like forty percent. Moreover, that would give them contiguous borders with Kuwait and the Saudi kingdom. The conquest of those nations would redouble their wealth—one may safely assume that the lesser nations would fall as well. The objective circumstances here are self-evident,' the general went on, speaking in the calm voice of a professional soldier analyzing disaster. 'Combined, Iran and Iraq outnumber the combined populations of the other states by a considerable margin—five to one, Comrade Chairman? More? I do not recall exactly, but certainly the manpower advantage is decisive, which would make outright conquest or at least great political influence likely. That alone would give this new United Islamic Republic enormous economic power, the ability to choke off the energy supply to Western Europe and Asia at will.
'Now, Turkmenistan. If this is, as you suspect, not a coincidence, then we see that Iran wishes to move north also, perhaps to absorb Azerbaijan' — his finger traced along the map—'Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, at least part of Kazakhstan. That would triple their population, add a significant resource base to their United Islamic Republic, and next, one assumes, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and we have a new nation stretching from the Red Sea to the Hindu Kush—nyet, more to the point, from the Red Sea to China, and then our southern border is completely lined with nations hostile to us.' Then he looked up.
'This is much worse than I had been led to expect, Sergey Nikolay'ch,' he concluded soberly. 'We know the Chinese covet what we have in the east. This new state threatens our southern oil fields in the Transcaucasus—I cannot defend this border. My God, defending against Hitler was child's play compared to this.'
Golovko was on the other side of the map table. He'd called Bondarenko for a reason. The senior leadership of his country's military was composed of holdovers from the earlier era—but these were finally dying off, and Gen- nady Iosefovich was one of the new breed, battle-tested in the misbegotten Afghan War, old enough to know what battle was—perversely, this made him and his peers the superiors of those whom they would soon replace—and young enough that they didn't have the ideological baggage of the former generation, either. Not a pessimist, but an optimist ready to learn from the West, where he'd just spent over a month with the various NATO armies, learning everything he could—especially, it would seem, from the Americans. But Bondarenko was looking down at the map in alarm.
'How long?' the general asked. 'How long to establish this new state?'
Golovko shrugged. 'Who can say? Three years, perhaps two at the worst. At best, five.'
'Give me five years and the ability to rebuild our country's military power, and we can… probably… no.' Bondarenko shook his head. 'I can give you no guarantee. The government will not give me the money and resources I require. It can't. We do not have the money to spend.'
'And then?' The general looked up, straight into the RVS chairman's eyes.
'And then I would prefer to be the operations officer for the other side. In the east we have mountains to defend, and that is good, but we have only two rail lines for logistical support, and that is not so good. In the center, what if they absorb all of Kazakhstan?' He tapped the map. 'Look how close that puts them to Moscow. And what about alliances? With Ukraine, perhaps? What about Turkey? What about Syria? All of the Middle East will have to come to terms with this new state… we lose, Comrade Chairman. We can threaten to use nuclear arms— but what real good does that do us? China can afford the loss of five hundred million, and still outnumber us. Their economy grows strong while ours continues to stagnate. They can afford to buy weapons from the West, or better yet to license the designs to manufacture their own. Our use of nuclear arms is dangerous, both tactically and strategically, and there is the political dimension which I will leave to you. Militarily, we will be outnumbered in all relevant categories. The enemy will have superiority in terms of arms, manpower, and geographic location. Their ability to cut off the oil supply to the rest of the world limits our hope of securing foreign help—assuming that any Western nation will have such a desire in the first place. What you have shown me is the potential destruction of our country.' That he delivered this assessment calmly was the most disturbing fact of all. Bondarenko was not an alarmist. Fie was merely stating objective fact.
'And to prevent it?'
'We cannot permit the loss of the southern republics, but at the same time, how do we hold them? Take control of Turkmenistan? Fight the guerrilla campaign that would surely result? Our army is in no shape to fight that sort of war—not even one of them, and it won't be just one, will it?' Bondarenko's predecessor had been fired over the failure of the Red Army—the term and the thought died hard—to deal effectively with the Chechens. What should have been a relatively simple effort at pacification had advertised to the world that the Russian army was scarcely a shadow of what it had been only a few years before.
The Soviet Union had operated on the principle of fear, they both knew. Fear of the KGB had kept the citizens in line, and fear of what the Red Army could and would do to any systematic rebellion had prevented large-scale political disturbances. But what happened when the fear went away? The Soviet failure to pacify Afghanistan, that despite the most brutal measures imaginable, had been a signal to the Muslim republics that their fear was misplaced. Now the Soviet Union was gone, and what remained was a mere shadow, and now that shadow could be erased by a brighter sun to the south. Golovko could see it on his visitor's face. Russia didn't have the power she needed. For all the bluster his country could still summon to awe the West—the West still remembered the Warsaw Pact, and the specter of the massive Red Army, ready to march to the Bay of Biscay—other parts of the world knew better. Western Europe and America still remembered the steel fist which they'd seen but never felt. Those who had felt it knew at once when the grip lessened. More to the point, they knew the significance of the relaxed grip.
'What will you need?'
'Time and money. Political support to rebuild our military. Help from the West.' The general was still staring at the map. It was, he reflected, like being the scion of a powerful capitalist family. The patriarch had died, and he was the heir to a vast fortune—only to discover that it was gone, leaving only debts. He'd come back from America upbeat, feeling that he'd seen the way, seen the future, found a way to secure his country and do it in the proper way, with a professional army composed of long-service experts, held together by esprit de corps, proud guardians and servants of a free nation, the way the Red Army had been on its march to Berlin. But that would take years to build. As it was… if Golovko and the RVS were right, then the best he could hope for was that his nation would rally as it had in 1941, trade space for time, as it had in 1941, and struggle back as it had in 1942-43. The general told himself that no one could see the future; that was a gift given to no man. And perhaps that was just as well, because the past, which all men knew, rarely repeated itself. Russia had been lucky against the fascists. One could not depend upon luck.
One could depend on a cunning and unpredictable adversary. Other people could look at a map the same as he, see the distances and obstacles, discern the correlation of forces, and know that the wild card lay on another sheet of printed paper, on the other side of the globe. The classical formula was first to cripple the strong, then crush the weak, and then, later, confront the strong again in one's own good time. Knowing that, Bondarenko could do nothing about it. He was the weak one. He had his own problems. His nation could not count on friends, only the enemies she had labored so long and so hard to create.
SALEH HAD NEVER known such agony. He'd seen it, and had even inflicted it in his time as part of his country's security service—but not like this, not this bad. It was as though he were now paying for every such episode all at once. His body was racked with pain throughout its en-
tire length. His strength was formidable, his muscles firm, his personal toughness manifest. But not now. Now every gram of his tissue hurt, and when he moved slightly to assuage the hurt, all he accomplished was to move it about to a fractionally different place. The pain was so great as to blot out even the fear which should have attended it.
But not for the doctor. lan MacGregor was wearing full surgical garb, a mask over his face, and his hands gloved— only his concentration prevented them from shaking. He'd just drawn blood with the greatest care of his life, more than he'd ever exercised with AIDS patients, with two male orderlies clamping the patient's arm while he took the samples. He'd never seen a case of hemorrhagic fever. It had been for him nothing more than an entry in a textbook, or an article in the Lancet. Something intellectually interesting, and distantly frightening, as was cancer, as were other African diseases, but this was here and now.
'Saleh?' the physician asked.
'… yes.' A word, a gasp.
