public mood: rancor, acrimony, hardball politics, charges and countercharges resulting in political deadlock, which made it impossible for any group to govern. The politicians bickered and postured and clawed at one another while the nation rotted. Until now. At last the Russian people had an enemy they could unite against.
Kalugin thought the moment sublime. He savored it. He was the absolute master of Russia. None opposed him or even dreamed of doing so. All looked to him to save the nation. Unfortunately, the euphoria would eventually wear off. Sooner or later people would want action. One evening, Kalugin sent a car to Stolypin’s dacha in the Lenin Hills to bring the old soldier to the Kremlin. “I have sent for you,” he told the retired officer when he walked into the president’s office, “because Russia needs you.” Stolypin was escorted by several members of Kalugin’s private security force, men he paid personally who did not work for any government agency. The security people withdrew, reluctantly. They had searched the former soldier from head to toe, looking for weapons, contraband, letters from people in prison, anything. The hallways outside were filled with armed guards, men personally loyal to Kalugin because he had been feeding them and their families for almost twenty years. They were also in the courtyard outside the window, on the roofs across the street. Kalugin was taking no chances. Now the president offered the old man hot tea. Stolypin had retired from the army before Kalugin won the presidency, so they had never worked together, although they had a nodding acquaintance from parties and official functions. The marshal was in his early seventies. He had short, white hair and thick peasant’s hands. He was stolid, too, like a peasant, and as he sipped his tea, he looked around the president’s office vacantly, without interest. “Tell me frankly,” Kalugin said, “what we must do to defeat the Japanese in Siberia.”
“I don’t know that we can,” the old man replied, then sipped more tea. “The draft laws have not been enforced for years; the logistics system has collapsed; weapons procurement has stopped … Baldly, Mr. President, we have no army … No army, no NAVY, no air force.”
“If we spend the summer and fall building an army, can we not win when the Japanese are buried under a Siberian winter?”
“I am not sanguine. Japan is a rich nation. They can supply their forces by air. We will be the ones most hindered by winter.”
“Come, come, Marshal,” Kalugin scoffed. “The Russian man is tough, able to endure great hardships. Winter is the Russian season.”
“In another age, Mr. President, winter was a large battalion. It ruined the French, the Poles, and the Germans. The world has changed since then. Japan is physically closer to the Siberian oil fields than we are. By winter they will be comfortably established, well dug in. Russia will have to mobilize, put the entire economy on a war footing, like we did during World War Two. Even then, we may not win.”
“Enoughst” Kalugin roared. “Enough of this defeatism! I will not hear it. I am the guardian of holy Mother Russia. We will defend her to the very last drop of Russian blood.”
Stolypin shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Mr. President, everything we do must be based on the hard realities. We must work with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. The bitter truth is that the armed forces are in the same condition as the rest of Russia. It will take time to change that.”
Kalugin rapped his knuckles on the desk. “Ask Samsonov,” Stolypin said. “Get his opinion.”
“What is your advice?” Kalugin said, his knuckle poised above the desk. “Negotiate the best deal possible with the Japanese— buy time. Rebuild the army. When we are strong enough, drive them into the sea.”
Kalugin made a gesture of dismissal. “That course is politically impossible. By all appearances, we would be compromising with aggression. The people would never stand for it.”
“Mr. President, you asked for a professional opinion and I have given it. Building an army will take time.”
“Nothing can be done in the interim?”
“We can use small units, bleed the Japanese where we can without excessive cost. However, we must ensure that we do not squander assets that we will need to win the victory later.”
“We must do more. More than pinpricks.” Kalugin’s face had a hard, unyielding look. Stolypin shifted his feet. He cleared his throat, sipped tea, and sized up the politician in the tailored gray Italian suit seated behind the desk. “What does Marshal Samsonov say?” he asked finally. “Why isn’t he here?”
“He’s dead. Tragically. A heart attack, two nights ago. We have not announced it yet … The people put such faith in him.”
Stolypin grimaced. “A good man, the very best. Ah well, death comes for us all.” He sighed. After a bit, he asked, “Who is to replace him?”
“Y.”
Stolypin was genuinely surprised.
“I’m too old, too tired. You need a young man full of fire. He will need to weld together an army, which will not be a small task.”
“I am giving you the responsibility, Marshal,” Kalugin said crisply. “Your country needs you.”
“Can we get foreign help? Military help?”
“We are working on that.”
“The military protocol with the United States — will they send troops?
Equipment? Fuel? Food? Weapons? God knows, we need everything we can get.”
“They are offering a squadron of planes.”
“A squadron?” Stolypin thundered. He sprang from his chair with a vigor that surprised Kalugin, then paced back and forth. “A squadron! They promised to come to our aid if we destroyed our nuclear weapons. So we did. Fools that we were, we believed their lies.”
He stopped in front of a picture of Stalin hanging over a fireplace and stood staring at it. “At least some of the politicians believed them.”
“You didn’t?”
“Do you have any vodka for this tea?”
“Yes.” Kalugin reached into the lower reaches of his desk for a bottle and poured a shot into Stolypin’s tea. Stolypin sipped the mixture. “I didn’t believe any of it, Mr. President. The Americans always act in America’s best interests, just as we always act in Russia’s best interests. They made a promise, just a promise, written on good paper and signed with good ink and worth maybe ten rubles at a curio shop. So I acted in Russia’s best interests. I secreted ten warheads, kept them back so they were not destroyed. The last time I saw Samsonov, he said we still have them.”
Kalugin couldn’t believe his ears. “We still have nuclear weapons?”
“Ten.”
“Only ten?”
“Only? We had to lie and cheat to keep ten.”
Kalugin was trying to comprehend the enormity of this revelation. “Where are the weapons?” he asked after a bit. “Mr. President, they are at Trojan Island.”
“I am not familiar with the place.”
“Trojan Island is an extinct cone-shaped volcano near the Kuril Strait. Although the island is fairly small, the volcano reaches up over two thousand meters, so it is almost always shrouded in clouds, which kept it hidden from satellite photography when we built the base. The nearby waters are deep, ice-free year-round, and there is good access to the Pacific. For these reasons, we built a submarine base there twenty years ago, a base that can only be entered underwater. It is similar to the base at Bolshaya Litsa, on the Kola Peninsula.”
“Do the Japanese know of this place?”
“I would be amazed if they did, sir. The base was officially abandoned when the last of the boomer boats were scrapped. We hid the warheads there for just that reason.”
“Nuclear weapons,” Kalugin mused, his eyelids reducing his eyes to mere slits. “The use of nuclear weapons involves huge, incalculable risks,” Sto-lypin said. “That road is unknown. We devoted much thought to pondering where it might lead years ago, when we had such weapons in quantity.”
“And what were your conclusions?”
“That we would use them only as a last resort, when all else had failed.”
Kalugin merely grunted. He was deep in thought. Stolypin dropped into a chair, helped himself to more vodka and tea. Kalugin grinned wolfishly. “Marshal Stolypin, let us drink to Russia. You have answered my prayers, and saved your country.”
“God saves Russia, Mr. President,” Stolypin replied. “He even saved Russia from the Communists, although
