"She's a grand lady, and a damn good ally to have in our corner, Travis," replied the SecDef after swallowing a bite of the sandwich. "If anybody can reign in the hawks in the ESDI — and I can think of two offhand —"
"— Caillou and Potenza," interjected Russ Conejo, the White House National Security Advisor.
"— And let's not forget our friend 'Falcon' Hull," put in Dougless Galvin, the Secretary of State, technically outranking the SecDef but more often requiring the coordination of the National Security Advisor between the two major foreign policy departments. "That sonofabitch's been spoiling for a fight ever since the damn Gulf."
"All three. Certainly," agreed the SecDef, sandwich now finished. "Field Marshall Hull especially. 'Whale' Weisskopf threatened to punch him out to stop him from making a unilateral move on Sumatra."
That remark brought a laugh. Someone remarked, "It would have been a hell of a bout, though. In this corner, the Whale. In this corner, the Falcon."
"You were there, weren't you, Lyle?" chimed in State, after a fresh round of laughter.
"Damn right I was, Mike," answered Dalhousie. "And didn't Hull raise a stink over it too. If we hadn't kept as close a lid on the fucking press as we did back then, who knows what would have happened. It could have blown the "special relationship" right out of the water. And mind you, Hull was only a chickenshit two-star then. Today he's a field marshall."
"Gentlemen," the president interjected, silencing the byplay, "all this inside baseball bullshit notwithstanding, we've gotta craft a policy on this issue. When this is over it's my intention to phone Premier Starchinov and address the issues directly. I want to be prepared." The president leaned forward. "Lyle, your assessment, please."
"Mr. President," replied the SecDef, "this morning I conferred with the Chiefs of Staff. As you know, we have been monitoring the situation closely. We are gravely concerned about the implications of this action on the part of the Soviets, but more along the lines of ancillary or corollary actions that might flow from it than the action itself."
"Explain."
"Mr. President, as Burt may have already told you (he referred here to Burlington Downes, Director of CIA), while we have confirmed the Soviets' deployment of a chemical weapon — delivered by long-range artillery — all evidence so far points to the agent's being a fairly benign, if I may use that word, form of antipersonnel agent."
"We'd discussed the agent, CS-X, with the president just before you arrived, Lyle," added the CIA director, addressing Dalhousie."
"OK. Then Travis, you already know that what we're dealing with here's essentially a very concentrated form of tear gas, which in military strength can cause severe vomiting, dizziness, and shortness of breath."
"Yep, I heard that, Lyle," answered Travis from behind the presidential desk. "But CS-X is also like a nerve gas in some ways, isn't it, and can be lethal."
"Travis, Mr. President, yes, yes it can," replied the SecDef. "That's true. I don't want to give you the false impression that it's not a powerful or potentially deadly weapon they used. But I want to put it into perspective. Compared to chemical agents we know the Soviets to have available to them —"
"— The binary shells?"
"— Yes, Mr. President, the binary weapons, or binary artillery shells, if you will, these binary weapons can disperse truly horrendous nerve agents such as tabun or sarin, which are many orders of magnitude deadlier than those which the Soviets have used. They also have stocks of biologicals including anthrax and chimeric botulin available. Truly deadly, horribly deadly, agents."
"You said this word?"
"Chimeric?"
"Right."
"That means, Mr. President, that the viral or biological agent is an artificially mutated strain."
The President leaned back, silent a moment.
"Bucky wanted to turn loose those lunatic Snake Eaters on this Kamera facility out near Sebastopol somewhere. That's where all this germ shit they got's supposed to come from. What do you think of that?"
"Snake Handlers," the Secretary of State corrected.
"Right, Bucky's Snake Handlers."
"Mr. President, I have just a short while ago conferred with Chairman Starkweather and I can report that he and the chiefs of staff firmly agree that a strike on the Kamera, or any other Soviet installation of its kind, would be neither strategically sound nor politically expedient at this time."
"Then what?"
"We believe that the use of CS-X agent was due to the indiscretion of a particular field commander acting under the authority of the FSB. As you know, the Kremlin has been frustrated by lack of progress against rebel forces. Control of many sectors has been taken from the GRU and placed it in the hands of the state intelligence service, the FSB. The field commander in question is believed to have been recalled to Moscow.
"What concerns us is the threat of command and control slipping from Soviet military forces in theater, leading to the use of deadlier weapons of mass destruction farther down the line. Secondly, we're worried about the ESDI overreacting and doing something foolish. Thirdly, we're gravely concerned about the escalation of the Caucasus fighting to the fringes of neighboring countries, and fourthly —"
Suddenly there was a knock and the door of the Oval Office was opened by a Marine guard.
"— Sorry I'm late," the CJCS said as he came in, accompanied by an aide carrying an assortment of maps, charts and audiovisual aids. "There was a really bad accident on the way. We got stuck in traffic."
"That's okay, Buck," said the president. "Have a seat. We'll fill you in. Lyle?"
"Actually, Mr. President," said Lyle Dalhousie, "the chairman's got all the presentation materials to fill you and the working group in on the fourth point I was about to get to. I think we should let him have the floor."
"Buck, how about it?" the president asked.
"Be happy to, Mr. President," replied the CJCS, and stepped to the fireplace where his aide was already setting things up.
The Premier and General Secretary of the Neo-Soviet Communist government replaced the telephone receiver in its cradle and sat for a few moments gazing out the window of his dacha, across the grand, sloping greensward that ran parallel to the Moskva River for almost half a kilometer before the view was obscured by the beech woods surrounding the country estate.
The dacha was situated only a few miles from Moscow Center, yet was blessed with all the peace and solitude a man could want. A short ride from his Kremlin office, there was this solitude, and the General Secretary took advantage of this fact whenever possible. Boris Andreyevich Starchinov now watched a freight vessel pass along the darkened river, its running lights revealing the ship's ghostly outline against the deeper darkness of night.
The General Secretary's mind flashed back to his first encounter with the dacha, during the height of the November Revolution of a decade past. What heady days they had been! As a young FSB agent, loyal to Oleksandr, the director, he had been among those who had been hand-picked to detain the traitor Kuzmin and his foul-mouthed wife Anastasiya under house arrest.
Had he been given instructions to carry out the execution of the two traitors to the Party, Starchinov would have done so with pleasure. But the order had never come. Instead, there had been the ignominy of defeat and the ascendancy of the doddering bizhdenok Chapayev and his Vlasti — Oligarchs — to power at the Center. That had been the beginning of the end, though only for a time.
Little had he dreamt on that day, when both the birthmarked one and Anastasiya were in his grasp, that he would one day occupy this place some years later. He could thank the squint-eyed ferret Lebed for the honor.