His control of the Politburo was on a knife edge; the small majority still supporting his reformist views was being whittled away. He could only retain their support by buckling to pressure for the perestroika programme to be further diluted.
There were those in the Politburo who’d proclaimed their commitment to his predecessor’s ideas, but without the man himself to hold the line now the going was tough, they’d begun to distance themselves from the policies. They had the rest of their lives to think of; if perestroika collapsed, and the old system of economic feather-bedding returned, Savkin thought, holding on to their jobs would be their number-one priority. Without the privileges that went with their status, life wouldn’t be worth living in the chaos that followed.
He tugged at the bushy, white hair at his temples, then beat at his head with his knuckles, as if to drum sense into it.
‘You’re right, Vasily. I’m thinking like a defeated man. And if I think like one, soon I’ll act like one. You must stop me.’
Kalinin was more than a foreign minister; he was also Savkin’s oldest friend, an ally whose loyalty he believed he could count on for ever. A curious choice for a foreign minister, many thought; Kalinin had never travelled outside the Soviet Union before taking up his appointment. Yet he had an insight into the thinking of western leaders that Savkin found remarkably astute, all the more valuable because Savkin had little insight of his own.
It was Kalinin who had had the original idea of using the threat from the West as a goad to keep the Soviet economy on course for modernization. Previous regimes had used the fear of attack from abroad to tighten belts at home. What had been done before could be done again. The armada of Western warships currently on course for the Kola Peninsula provided just the threat that was needed.
‘You know the irony of our plan, Nikolai?’ Kalinin grimaced. ‘Perestroika is meant to curb the military budget and redirect funds to consumer goods. But if we make too much of the military threat from NATO, our beloved generals will be demanding the expansion of their arsenals again!’
‘It’s already happened. Admiral Grekov was here last night. Says he needs more ships to match the NATO navies.’
‘I hope you told the Comrade Admiral he was pissing into the wind?’
‘Yes… but not in those words. Something a little more refined. But tell me, what’s the latest from Washington? Are they tugging at the bait?’
‘It’s too early to say. The predictable reactions have already occurred. Half a dozen Republican senators and the media have been raging about a new threat from Cuba. But McGuire hasn’t commented yet. Our ambassador has been given a flat denial that the American helicopters posed any sort of threat to the Rostov, and the administration has had nothing at all to say about the MiGs.’
‘And Castro?’
‘He’ll play ball. He’s desperate for the aid we’ve promised him.’
‘Is McGuire clever enough to know what’s happening?’
‘He knows little of life outside Middle America, so he takes advice. Tom Reynolds is the one he’ll be listening to. And Tom’s a cautious man. “Take no action until you have to” is his motto. They may be waiting to see what we do next.’
‘And what will that be, I wonder,’ Savkin ruminated. ‘Every day that passes, the bigger the distraction needed to jolt our people back into line.’
‘The Department of Naval Aviation is taking the television teams out this morning. Their film should be on Vremya tonight, and on the American networks. And Admiral Grekov is holding a press conference this afternoon for the foreign journalists.
‘He’ll condemn NATO strategy, call it provocative and dangerous. He can be pretty aggressive when provoked. And what he says is sure to get the American TV reporters on their hind legs baying at him. He’ll call on NATO to abandon their exercise. By the end of the day the West’ll be digging its heels in.
‘Our own television will of course present the press conference in its true light: Grekov — the voice of reason; the American press — the hyenas of the West ready to bite into the soft and vulnerable throat of Russia. By the end of the day no one should be in any doubt there’s a crisis.’
‘We’ll see,’ the General Secretary answered doubtfully. ‘It may not be enough.’
In his heart he knew it would take more than TV pictures and a press conference to jolt the Soviet citizenry out of their sloth. With sadness, resignation and fear, he realized it might take war.
Every time he met the Prime Minister, Admiral Waverley was struck by her small stature and her femininity, which hid a steely determination. Both he and the Foreign Secretary were in a state of some trepidation about the meeting that lay ahead.
‘Gentlemen, good day,’ she greeted them in the hall. ‘We’ll go straight in and sit down, if you don’t mind. I’ve got to be in the House at two-thirty.’
She led them into the dining room, where a small table was set with just three places, a large bottle of Malvern Water in its centre.
‘You sit here, Admiral, and Nigel, there.’
The Prime Minister placed herself facing the door and nodded to the butler that he could begin serving.
‘Now, Stewart, the Defence Secretary has told me about HMS Truculent and Commander Hitchens. It’s appalling. And the Home Secretary’s briefed me on what happened in Plymouth. This KGB officer — he’s still on the loose. Most unsatisfactory!
‘But it’s the implications I’m concerned with. Lucky we had this little lunch arranged. Now, first of all, remind me about Ocean Guardian. As you know, the Russians are making the most extraordinary fuss. Heaven knows why; they’ve never bothered about it before.’
‘That’s right, Prime Minister,’ Waverley answered. ‘But the exercise has never been quite like this before. We hold them every two years; dozens of warships from several NATO countries deploying to the North Atlantic, but we’ve never taken the exercise right round the tip of Norway into the Barents Sea before, right to the doorstep of the Russian Navy’s main harbours. That’s why they’re squealing. It’s international waters of course, so they’ve no right to complain. And Norway is NATO’s northern frontier.’
‘So the Russians could conduct their manoeuvres off the coast of Scotland if they wanted to?’ the Foreign Secretary queried. ‘We wouldn’t like that.’
‘So long as they stayed in international waters, we could do nothing to stop them.’
‘The idea is to be able to bottle up the Soviet fleet at the start of a conflict, correct?’ the PM asked.
‘That’s right. The Americans took the initiative. They felt defending the Atlantic further south had become too difficult. The Soviets have so many new, quieter submarines.’
‘Ambassador Bykov placed another protest on my desk this morning,’ Sir Nigel remarked. ‘Argued in most reasoned terms. Said this was a time of peace and improved east-west relations, and that such an “aggressive rehearsal for war”, as he put it, was quite unacceptable.’
The PM waved him to silence.
‘How big is our involvement? How many ships have we got up there?’
‘About twenty. The Americans have eighteen, the Canadians, the Dutch, the Norwegians, Germans and French bring the total to over a hundred.’