Fedotov cleared his throat and continued. “Some of you sitting here today were friends of these cowardly men. You know who you are. I know who you are. And while loyalty is an admirable trait, it doesn’t change the truth. And each of you… if you examine your hearts… if you look at the facts… you will see what I have told you is true.”
Fedotov paused. Absolute silence. No one looked away. “Now, I have called this meeting to make one simple point, and I want to be perfectly clear.” A screen behind Fedotov’s seat suddenly flickered to life, and the lights in the room slowly dimmed. Fedotov studied the reaction of the men as a picture emerged on the eight-foot screen that was positioned behind him.
It was a picture of a little girl. She was dirty and horribly small. A hollow and frightened face looked up at the camera in hunger and desperation and a terror so real it leapt from her eyes. Tiny arms extended out from underneath a burlap sack of a dress. Her legs, no larger than her bony arms, huddled beneath her bloated stomach. She was reaching out. Reaching out to her mother. Her mother who lay dead and crumpled beside her.
“Her name is Tasha,” Fedotov said without turning around. “She is five years old tomorrow.” The ministers and generals sat motionless, barely able to breathe.
“Five years old, comrades!” Fedotov cried as he stood and turned toward the screen. “Look at her! She is only a child, and already she has lived through more horror and pain than all of our miserable lives put together!
“She lives in Voroshilovgrad, along the Ukrainian border. Look at her bloated stomach and the horrible rash, the results of the scarlet fever from which she suffers. She has no medicine. She has never even seen a doctor. Every day, like millions of our children, she gets but a few ounces of food. Her life is but hunger and horror. Though living, she is already dead.
“As a nation, we have come to the point where our children are raised in a world of such hopelessness and gloom that it seems they are left with only three choices. Die of starvation. Die of disease. Or live in a world of despair.
“And this…,” Fedotov continued, pointing to the mutilated corpse in the picture, “this is Tasha’s mother. She and twenty-three of her villagers were killed early this evening in an attack by Kazakhaki bandits. For the past five years, the bandits have been free to roam across our border and plunder our people, all the time knowing they can find protection to the south. The Ukrainian government claims they are powerless to stop them. They claim to have exhausted all available means.
“I, for one, don’t believe them. And I think that the time for action has come.
“If there could be a last straw, if there could be one final insult, or one single incident so rending that it changes our lives, then look at this photo and tell me, where will we draw the line?”
Fedotov fell silent. It was as if a massive weight had pressed down on the assembled audience. The room turned oppresively hot. No one moved.
The picture slowly faded out, and the lights in the room flickered on once again.
“Over the next few months, I want you to think of Tasha,” Fedotov ordered as he took three steps toward the head of the table. “I want this image forever engraved in your brains.
“Because comrades, I vow to you now. I make you this solemn promise.
“By my life, by my heart, by my soul, things are going to change. You are going to change. I am going to change. Our nightmare has come to its end. It is time to rebuild our nation. It is time to reclaim our power.
“So, remember Tasha, comrades, and know this one thing. Beginning right here. Beginning right now. Things… are going… to change.”
SIX
Fifty-seven kilometers southeast of Borovichi, Russia, buried deep under the rolling hills, lay “Satan’s bedroom”—the launch facilities for the SS-18/mod 5 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. Built very early in the 1990s, the missile complex was comprised of one hundred missile silos and four central launch facilities spread out over a thousand square kilometers of the sub-arctic tundra. The silos extended more than thirteen stories into the rock and soil and were capped by thick steel doors. Enormous bundles of buried wires and fiber-optic cables linked the silos and the launch facilities. The whole complex was an incredible engineering marvel, to the tune of more than a hundred billion rubles.
Yet, to the casual observer, the complex doesn’t even exist. The wet tundra extended for miles around, with no buildings or fences in sight. The rolling, treeless hills showed no scars of construction, and a man could walk for days over the complex and never suspect that billions of rubles in technology lay just underneath the wet soil. The native herdsmen, with their goats and their sheep, walked among the unseen missiles every day. There were stories and rumors that tried to explain why they had not been allowed to graze the tundra for several summers, but the theories that the natives came up with were not even close to the truth. The herdsmen never had any idea that they were living atop the most powerful weapons on earth.
Nicknamed “Satan” by western intelligence, the SS-18 was capable of dropping each of its ten nuclear warheads to within just feet of their targets. Each of the ten warheads had the same destructive power as one million tons of TNT. The enormous Sukhoy rockets had a range of over 11,000 miles, placing virtually every target within the Northern Hemisphere at risk. Its sheer potential for destruction, coupled with its pinpoint accuracy and range, made “Satan” the most feared weapon the Soviets had ever developed.
But it wasn’t the mass destruction of its cities that the Americans feared, for they knew that the missiles were only pointing at strategic targets. The thing that made the SS-18 so destabilizing was the fact that it could destroy the United States’ ICBMs before they could be launched from their silos. It could destroy all of the manned bombers that were sitting alert before they could get in the air, as well the entire fleet of nuclear submarines, even as they sat in their protective pens.
This had the effect of forcing the U.s. to lean forward during an international crisis into a “use them or lose them” mentality.
For this reason, the SS-18 was one of the major sticking points between the U.s. and the Soviets during the START II negotiations. The Russians were unwilling to completely destroy one of their crowning technological achievements, while at the same time the U.S. was unwilling to accept their continued existence.
Finally, an acceptable compromise was reached. It was decided that the SS-18 missile silos would be breached and rendered unusable. Fifteen meters of concrete would be poured into the bottom of the silos, while a 2.9-meter restrictive ring would be placed around the top. This would make the silos’ dimensions simply too small to hold the SS-18s, rendering the missiles utterly useless.
But the missiles themselves were never destroyed. The Russians had argued that it would have been prohibitively expensive to properly and safely dismantle the warheads. In addition, it would require money that they simply didn’t have. And since the missiles were useless without their launch facilities, it seemed reasonable to give them more time. So the Russians removed the missiles into storage, until such time that they could be “properly destroyed.”
But this agreement didn’t make everyone happy. Many of the American negotiators were concerned that it would be relatively easy for the Russians to refurbish the silos. But in the emerging era of trust and friendship, their anxieties were altogether ignored. Ignored by everyone, that was, except a very small group of Russian scientists and military leaders. These men didn’t laugh at the doubts of the less trusting Americans, for it was their job to secretly ensure that the silos could be used once again.