The Red Collusion Page 13

  “I don’t really think so”, the Minister of Defense replied. “Who will try raising his head in Poland when the Red Army has such a presence in its territory? That would be unthinkable.”

  General Secretary Yermolov shifted his weight uneasily, seemingly not convinced by his Minister’s answer.

  “In order for it to stay unthinkable, as you say, the operation in Germany must be swift, and with a minimum of casualties. If you can accomplish this, then the Americans and NATO will need less time to calm down.”

  “Mister Secretary, regarding the Americans and NATO, I propose that you send the American President a conciliatory letter, explaining that this is business that we have with our sister states and that we have no aggressive intentions towards them. What do you think?”

  The General Secretary took another sip from his cup of tea. He raised his eyebrows, and a hint of an ironic smile played at the corners of his mouth.

  “I don’t believe what I’m hearing. Marshal Budarenko; is this you? What happened? Has the tiger turned into a sheep?”

  The Minister of Defense opted not to answer the General Secretary, and continued staring at him.

  “By the way, dear Marshal, I think your idea of the letter to Washington is excellent, and that is exactly what I will be doing before the end of the day.”

  The united states army European command headquarters was located in a large military base near the city of Frankfurt. The large conference room in the Operations Section was filled with the senior commanding officers of the United States forces stationed on European soil. Those with higher ranks took their seats in the first row of chairs, which was already filled, except for one empty chair at its center. The headrest on the chair bore the name Thomas C. Bell, and four stars were printed on it in gold. Along the row, the United States Army’s most senior officers were seated beside top U.S. Navy Admirals. George N. Kelly, Commander of the U.S. Air Forces European Air Command, based in Ramstein, also sat there in his blue uniform, with his pilot’s wings hardly visible above the rows of ribbons, somewhat aloof towards his green- and-white uniformed colleagues.

  In the second row, an officer in different-looking formal attire was seated. He was NATO’s Liaison Officer to the United States Armed Forces, wearing a French General’s cap that looked like a gilded upside- down cooking pot, setting the French General aside from the others. He wore a red silk scarf around his neck, tucked neatly under his shirt collar. A few seats to his right, a German officer sat in his unassuming gray military suit.

  “Attention!” was heard, and all those in attendance rose to their feet. General Thomas Bell, wearing camouflage fatigues, strode into the room. Many stories and legends had been told of the colorful military career of this son of Texas. He was not a tall man, but had an athletic, muscular build. As an ex-Marine, his short-cropped hair was no more than stubble, a few days old. He was known as an outspoken, maverick officer, who had been rebuked numerous times for his undiplomatic, often provocative, language, especially towards the Soviet Union. Behind his back, some people dubbed him Little Patton.

  Thomas Bell walked directly to the stage and stood behind a wooden podium adorned with the seal of the United States Armed Forces. The large expanse of wall behind him was covered with large maps of Central and Eastern Europe, overlaid with transparent plastic sheets that bore many tactical markings in red, blue, and black.

  General Bell wished his audience a good morning and instructed them to be seated. Holding a long stick, the General addressed them.

  “The Red enemy has apparently decided to test our nerves, and I’m not sure that it really wants to test us. The enemy has been pushing vast amounts of armor westward for the past three days. In the next few hours, the Supreme Command will up the alert for all the United States Armed Forces, wherever they are, to DEFCON 3. It will require each of you to ensure that all your units, on land and at sea and in the air, open their operations files, examine and revise their details and memorize all battle orders. At this stage – and I emphasize: at this stage – training will continue as usual. We will now hear an intelligence update.”

  General Bell walked to his seat in the first row, and his place at the podium was taken by a representative of Military Intelligence, a Colonel wearing light khaki camouflage fatigues.

  “Good morning, everyone.”

  A few officers murmured a greeting.

  “For three nights now the Red Army has been transferring, mainly by rail, very large forces, mostly armored forces, into Western Poland, close to the border with Eastern Germany. So far, in our estimation, about eight thousand tanks and some two thousand armored personnel carriers have been transported, and the flow of vehicles and materials is continuing.”

  Whispers were heard throughout the room. The Colonel paused for several seconds until silence was restored in the hall.

  “I wish to make it clear, so that you understand, that such a scope of troop deployment has never been seen before. This is the size of more than forty armored divisions! Just for a sense of scale, in 1968, when the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia, they only deployed about two thousand tanks. According to radio communications that we’ve intercepted, more tanks will continue to be moved westwards tonight. The scope of activity is so vast that no Polish civilian trains run at night. One can say that all railroads have been seized for the Russian military trains.

  “On the diplomatic front, our President received tonight an urgent letter from the General Secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. In this letter, Secretary Yermolov explains that this is an internal problem of the Warsaw Pact. The letter is quite uncharacteristic, as it lacks the traditional threats of ‘do not interfere and if you do interfere, be prepared to suffer the consequences’ etc. etc. I must confess that our experts are quite confounded by this letter. Some of them claim that the conciliatory and nonthreatening language is meant to lull us into a false sense of security regarding an operation that could exceed the limits of repressing the insurrection in the German Democratic Republic.”

  General Bell interrupted the Colonel.

  “I agree with that”, he called out from his seat for everyone to hear. “It makes a lot of sense. They don’t need so many forces just to suppress civil disobedience in Eastern Germany.”

  A young officer entered the room, saluted, and handed the Colonel on the stage a piece of paper seemed to have been torn off a teleprinter roll. The Colonel glanced at the paper and placed it on the podium before him.

  “Actually, tonight is extremely critical. If we see that the transfer of forces continues at the same rate tonight, and I don’t want to even think about the next nights, then we will face a serious problem with them. There are several elements that we call preparatory threat indicators, which point to later belligerent actions, if the intention is indeed for Soviet forces to cross East Germany and continue westward toward our territory in West Germany.

  “These indicators would include the transfer to the front of large engineering corps and many artillery batteries; in addition, deployment of fighter jet and helicopter squadrons west of the front. It goes without saying that they will have to advance anti-aircraft missile batteries. We have enough means at our disposal to detect their movements almost in real time, regardless of the weather. It is important to emphasize that at this moment, we are not there yet. Without the added elements that I mentioned before, they will have the capacity, albeit excessive and exaggerated, to suppress the uprising in Eastern Germany. However, they will not have enough to engage our forces. Of course, this is the complete opposite of their usual tactics, namely, to push forward without the close support of attack aircraft and an anti-aircraft missile umbrella.”

  The Colonel picked up the message he had received a few minutes before and read it again. He looked at Gerald Bell across from him.

  “Precisely on this subject of preparatory threat indicators tha
t must be present before war, our intelligence teams have intercepted an interesting conversation. The conversation was made from the base of an artillery battalion stationed several hundred kilometers southwest of Moscow. All the details of that conversation are here, and the people there are talking about preparations for redeployment, and also about loading onto a train. It may be innocent, but it may also be the first of those indicators which I noted before, now being realized.”

  The Colonel completed his briefing, and General Bell took his place behind the podium.

  “We have heard, with great concern, worrying figures that must trouble every one of us. I’ll start with the letter that was sent to our President. This is not typical of the Red enemy as I know it, and I know it at least as well as our intelligence people. In my opinion, this letter has only one purpose: lulling us into complacency. If they continue their unprecedented use of the trains tonight, and haul more tanks into Poland, then by tomorrow the situation as I see it will not have changed, and I will explicitly recommend to Washington, by virtue of my rank, to raise our alertness to DEFCON 2. When this happens, you must halt all training activities throughout your units. All our units will leave their bases for their battle deployment areas and positions and complete their preparations for engaging the enemy.”

  General Bill waved his finger to the General in charge of the Air Force sitting across from him. The Air Force General sat up in his chair.

  “You know that our forces are numerically inferior to the enemy’s, in everything to do with tanks and artillery pieces. This is your opportunity to prove to the sages at the Pentagon that they were right to shower you and your friends with so many billions of dollars instead of procuring more tanks and guns for us. You’d better not disappoint me. I expect to raise the alert to number two tomorrow, and then all your aircraft will be there ready on the tarmac, fully loaded for a thirty- minute notice to take off.”

  General Bell then turned to the Intelligence Colonel.

  “I want to say a few more things, especially to you, Colonel, and please forward this to your commanding officers. We all agree that the forces that the enemy has concentrated for entry into Eastern Germany are exaggerated and unreasonable. I’ll tell you even more. This force is now exaggerated by any scale, not just for suppressing civil disobedience there, but also for a scenario where the East German Armed Forces resist the invader and fight him on the battlefield. Now I want to ask you a question. I’m sure you know that every unit larger than a battalion in the East German military has Soviet officers attached. The enemy certainly knows and recognizes his own officers, that he himself sent there. Do you really think that the Communist East German military will fight them? Please answer me.”

  The Colonel in the camouflage fatigues stood up.

  “Sir, we have no disputes with you on this point. Your opinion on this point matches our opinion. Our official evaluation says that the East German military will not engage the Red Army in battle.”

  The General nodded his head in satisfaction before continuing.

  “Now, gentlemen, I really don’t understand you guys in intelligence. If you agree with me, then it must be clear to you that to suppress civil disobedience, no one needs thousands of tanks, as it makes better sense to base your forces on armored personnel carriers, not tanks. Therefore, only a fool can’t see that all these tanks are intended to engage us, or deter us, over here. Don’t give me your answer now, but give it to me tomorrow, with an authorized assessment from Intelligence. Not what you personally think, but how the Intelligence Division in its entirety explains this absurdity. In my opinion, tomorrow morning you will also come to agree with my evaluation and understanding. The enemy will use East Germany only as a transit point or a staging point to continue rolling on towards us.

  “It doesn’t take a great expert to see the reason for this maneuver by the enemy. Their sister countries’ regimes are already shaky. They are anxious that the dissent will spill over and spread into the Soviet Union itself. What have others done anywhere in the world, dozens of times, in similar situations? They start a war with their neighbors to rally their people behind their army and regime. This is not a new phenomenon. Has the enemy not heard of it before? I tell you again, those SOBs want a war, and that’s what they’re going to get!”

  “For our meeting tomorrow, I want each of you to bring up-to-date reports of the numbers of viable materials and personnel in all your units. Also, bring inventory stock reports of ordnance and fuel. Hand this report to my deputy and we’ll check what we need to request from our hosts here and from Washington. Now let’s get to work because there’s a lot to be done. We’ll meet here tomorrow at the same time.”

  All the officers rose to their feet when General Thomas Bell left the room at his swift Marine pace, adjusting his camouflage baseball cap on his head.

  Chapter 11

  The four members of Marshal Budarenko’s special team stood on the gray, dilapidated pier 4 of the Murmansk naval port, wearing thick storm coats and fur caps adorned with the red star and gold laurel leaves of the Soviet Navy. Colonel Yevgeni, Brigadier General Dimitri, General Vitaly Okhramenko and the KGB operator whom the others had dubbed the Sixth Man, watched the small tugboat towing the much bigger trawler out of the port. In the bitterly cold winter air, one could cut the tension with a knife, and each of them kept to himself.

  The trawler, with their mate Colonel Nazarbayev aboard, sailed away into the horizon.

  Colonel Yevgeni broke the silence.

  “Let’s go. The plane is waiting for us. There is nothing for us to do here anymore. We can also pray in Moscow.”

  Yevgeni caught Dimitri’s hand and drew him away from the group.

  “Did you deliver the envelope to Captain Yashin, the submarine captain?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Exactly what we agreed upon. That only when the trawler arrives at the location point and stops, is he permitted to open the envelope.”

  The two continued to walk side by side, each deep in thought. Then Yevgeni spoke in a soft voice.

  “Tell me, Dimitri. Is the Kazakh married? Does he have children?”

  “No. He’s not married and he has no children”, Dimitri answered, then added, “Well, with children, sometimes it’s difficult to know, but at least as far as he knows, he has no children.”

  Dimitri paused for a moment, before asking: “Say, Yevgeni, doesn’t it seem more logical to you that we run this operation from here, from Murmansk?”

  “You may be right on a logical level, with this operation being mainly Naval, but my friend, you are forgetting two things. One is that we hardly have anything to manage anymore; at most we can monitor the events that we have cooked up. Two, the Minister probably prefers our necks close to him, closer to the noose, and he has his own reasons.”

  “Well, it seems that you are right again. We return to Moscow. And, as usual, thank you for the encouragement.”

  They quickened their pace and rejoined their three colleagues.

  A day and a night had passed, and the trawler was still cutting its way through the North Sea, its bow pointing northwest. Up to a few hours before, the boat crew could discern, on the port side, from a great distance in the cold clear air, the northern snow-covered cliffs of Norway. From time to time, they detected small icebergs in the water, but it did not cause much concern, as this sophisticated vessel could detect any iceberg in its way and had some capacity to function as an icebreaker.

  Colonel Nazarbayev sat in the cabin of the ship’s captain, Commander Vitaly. The captain, true to his Soviet military discipline, did not try to extract from Colonel Nazarbayev any details, not even hints, of their shared mission. Not once did Nazarbayev wonder about the captain’s apparent indifference. If I were the captain, the Colonel thought, and someone had placed a self-propelled gun on my boat’s deck, I c
ouldn’t contain my curiosity. Indeed, Commander Vitaly is a strange bird, or perhaps he has his own secrets in this operation, unbeknownst to me.

  Commander Vitaly noticed that his colleague was deep in thought and decided to start a conversation.

  “You are a field rat, after all. How do you feel on my boat?”

  “Yes, it’s true that in the past few years I have been what you call a field rat, and generally speaking, I much prefer to be on solid ground, but here’s something that may surprise you. I was born in a city called Atyrau in Kazakhstan, which is a port city on the coast of the Caspian Sea. My uncle, my mother’s brother, earned his living for many years fishing sturgeon, from whose eggs black caviar is produced. That is the best and most expensive of all fish roe. When I was a boy, I would go out to sea with him on weekends and holidays, so I do have quite a few sea hours under my belt.”

  “Black caviar, you say? Then he made a very good living, your uncle.” “Yes, I might say that he supported us financially.”

  The two continued their small talk, just to pass the time and to ease their boredom on the long journey to their destination.

  “Luckily, the weather is with us”, said Vitaly. “I think we may even arrive at our destination half an hour early. How are your four gunners doing down there? Have they thrown up their meal yet?”

  “I’m glad you reminded me, Commander. I’ll go pay them a visit now.

  Thank you for the tea, Captain.”

  The four men in the crew of the self-propelled gun were sitting nearby and chatting, and when they noticed Colonel Nazarbayev approaching, they stood up quickly. They wore green coveralls and blue puffy seamen’s coats which made them look like inflatable dolls. The gun was completely covered with a blue tarp.

  “How are you, gunners?”

  “We are fine, Colonel, except for Gregory. He has already thrown up several times”, replied the crew leader.