Chapter Eleven
The General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, sitting alone in his Kremlin office, understood the true meaning of loneliness for perhaps the first time since he was a teenager. But those solitary periods of his youth had been during the early 1940s. It was a time when many of his friends had lost at least one parent, and all of them knew of relatives who had been killed in the Great Patriotic War. Yet it had still been a shock to learn that both his mother and father had died together when their village had literally disappeared during the great Battle of Kursk.
In retrospect he knew it had been much easier to accept then. No Russian family escaped that immense human tragedy. Millions of them died to preserve their homeland from the invaders. That ultimate sacrifice was certainly preferable to being enslaved by the Germans. For him there were no decisions to be made, no village to return to, no friends to search for. Everything was gone. The state took care of orphans like him, and there was never a moment to stop and think about personal loss when the war was over. No one possessed the luxury of spare time. Like everyone else, he took part in rebuilding his devastated nation.
And there were advantages to being an orphan. Since there was no village, no family, no mouths to help feed, he was able to exhibit his natural abilities at an early age. This opportunity gave him the chance to be selected for advanced education which, in turn, allowed him to display military talents he might have remained unaware of. With the loss of a generation of young men, there were few people to block his progress. He recognized the advantages in the KGB, and used that organization as a stepping-stone in the Communist Party itself.
The ease of accession to each level of leadership within the party infrastructure constantly amazed him. The power he attained allowed him luxuries that were limited to just a few thousand individuals in the USSR. With each new position, he achieved new respect, which brought introductions to great men and relationships with beautiful women. That was how he’d had the good fortune to meet his wife. Being an intelligent man, and one who’d shaken the wildness of youth at an early age, he understood his luck at meeting her and treasured her undemanding, unending affection for him. He loved this woman who aspired to most of the same pleasures of life that he did.
Yet at the pinnacle of his power, when the citizens of the world anxiously anticipated each word he uttered, when he might have had anything he wished, right at this moment he was the loneliest man in the world.
The head of the KGB had presented each of the reports that had been required of him in less time than anticipated. Most of the events that had taken place in the Pacific were exactly as planned so many years before. Those were the days — and thankfully they were gone forever — when first strike seemed the only option for the future. No … it wasn’t necessarily a first strike they were planning. It would be unfair to saddle them with that. They weren’t positive of exactly what they were planning, because the world had changed so much in a very short time. What they were doing, or trying to do, was take away their enemy’s first-strike capability. But that was so ambitious. They were only partway. Did they know what they really wanted?
Today the situation was different, radically different. No longer did old men spend their waking moments planning how to gain the strategic advantage so they might end the waiting. Those veterans of the Great Patriotic War were mostly dead. Yet now, those angry old men, many of them ghosts, had returned to haunt the General Secretary. Their final plan, or at least its early stages, had succeeded — no further proof of the loss of Alaska and Nevada was necessary. Both submarines had apparently been exactly where intelligence said they would be, and the most brilliant ruse of the century was undoubtedly successful.
Those angry old men were pounding on the lids of their coffins. It was their turn to dance. The U.S. intelligence aircraft that seemed the only opportunity for Washington to learn how their ballistic-missile submarines were being located and sunk had been shot down. It appeared from electronic analysis there had been no chance for the plane to even send out a Mayday.
Haw could those old men, most of them now dead, have been so fiendishly accurate concerning an action that would take place years later? The General Secretary had grown to detest them for their prejudices and belligerence, their twisting of the future. About the only element they couldn’t have foreseen was the intelligence plane the Americans had sent out to investigate SSV-516. And that had been a minor inconvenience easily remedied.
There was one historical aspect they had not anticipated however. Not a single one of them had expected that their mighty, aggressive Soviet Union would experience the economic problems created by them and their predecessors. Nor could they possibly have understood that cooperation with their natural enemies might be preferable. If only the Americans hadn’t continued to expand their nuclear stockpile and improve their delivery vehicles, the General Secretary might have been in a position to.…
If there had been more time, would the other members of the Defense Council have gone along with his opposition to activating this strategy? Doubtful. The USSR was led by a single individual in a figurehead position — the General Secretary of the Communist Party — but it was governed by that party, and neither he nor any other man was capable of mandating what the senior party members had not agreed upon. And they had decided, without his concurrence, to activate this man who had been so successfully planted within the U.S. military framework so many years before. The plan had been originated when the General Secretary was still outside the KGB, and now he bore the burden of responsibility. Why did their government function this way? Why was the system incapable of halting something like this? A few of those old men who originated that plan were still alive — and, though not a one of them had a word to say, they would be ecstatic with its success if they’d known.
The loneliest man in Russia rose from his desk and strolled slowly to the window. One-way glass prevented anyone from looking up at him, but it also produced an odd glare that altered his perception of the people on the walkways below. He couldn’t see whether any of them were familiar to him — but he was sure none of them wanted to die that day or the next, nor would they appreciate the sacrifice of their famines in a nuclear exchange with the U.S. The people no longer harbored the hatred for Americans that he and his friends remembered and that the old men retained with a vengeance. Most of them — those under forty, anyway — actually believed that the two nations could live with each other; separately, because they were so different, but many no longer saw the necessity for the ascendancy of only one system of government.
Less than an hour before, the KGB head had explained that the President of the United States remained behind closed doors with his closest advisors. There had been no response, no statement. Even his most highly placed intelligence operatives in Washington reported they had no access to any rumor of what might be taking place. Therefore, the assumption among his own advisors was that the White House was plotting revenge on the Soviet Union. Wouldn’t that be Washington’s natural reaction?
Now, before the discussion had even opened, it seemed a majority of the Defense Council was for carrying out the original intent of those past leaders — continue to destroy the SS8N element of the American triad. The USSR could neutralize the balance of U.S- striking power. A successful first strike by the USSR would eventually be a definite possibility. That’s exactly what one of them said, and others had enthusiastically agreed with him.