The Red Collusion Read online

  Yevgeni approached Gregory. He held him by the arm.

  “It is already too late. Come, let’s go back to our conference room and think together about what we can do, looking forward, and what we can recommend to the Minister of Defense. Let’s think together how we can explain this nuclear blast in the North Sea. I already have some ideas in the back of my mind. Come; let’s go talk about it in our conference room.”

  Gregory, his spirit broken, rose to his feet without replying, and let Yevgeni lead him to the door without resistance. The rest of the team joined them and made their way out in absolute silence.

  Svetlana entered the general secretary’s room. The shouting session with the Minister of Defense had reached her ears and she understood very well that her boss was especially agitated today.

  “Gospodin Vladimir Petrovich Yermolov, the Chairman of the Committee for State Security has arrived, at your request. Does Gospodin wish to be served tea and biscuits?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  The General Secretary watched Svetlana as she left the room. I’m so lucky to have someone so quiet and efficient, he thought. Here is a person whom I can trust completely.

  The Committee Chairman, or in his better known title, Chief of the KGB, took his seat opposite the General Secretary. He immediately noticed that the Secretary was restless.

  “Mister Secretary, has something happened? How can I help you?”

  “Yes, a lot has happened, and a lot is still happening. These are my orders. I want you to follow Marshal Budarenko twenty-four hours a day. I want to receive a report every few hours on what he does, who he meets with, what he says, what he eats, when he urinates, and I also want to know the level of sugar in his urine. Everything, I want to know everything. You hear me? Everything! This unscrupulous man is a loose cannon, and he is dragging us into a hot war with the United States. I gave him my approval for X, and he went and did X and Y and Z. This insane bastard has no limits. He will destroy us all. Do you understand? Have I made myself clear?”

  “Yes, Mister Secretary. Everything is clear and it will be done immediately.”

  “Thank you. That’s all.”

  Captain Frank Butcher sat in the captain’s chair of the USS 726 Ohio, examining a chart with the submarine’s new route. The seaman in charge of briefing him with reports from all the ship’s sections sat beside him.

  “Now, check when we are supposed to arrive at our battle position”, the captain ordered the seaman.

  A minute later, the seaman returned to Captain Butcher.

  “Sir, the navigation station reports that we will arrive at our battle position in nine hours and twenty-two minutes. But there is a preliminary report that I’ve just received, of a strong seismic event that caused ground motion. It may be an earthquake.”

  “OK. Go ahead and collect data.”

  “Sir”, the seaman said again a moment later, “This is very strange. I have just received an unexplained acoustic event from that exact direction. They say it sounds like a continuous, muffled explosion.”

  “Give me the direction.”

  “Sir, it’s coming from Northwest, direction 335.”

  “Tell them to contact Georgia 729 right now. They should be 500 miles southwest of us. See if they have also received something.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Captain Butcher continued examining the map, which he had placed on a small wooden shelf to his right. The seaman’s voice was heard again.

  “Sir, the Georgia also detected motion on the ground but not the acoustic noise. According to the cross-sections that we have with Georgia’s location and data, the epicenter of the blast, or whatever that was, is near us, about thirty-five miles northwest of us. I wrote down the exact location here.”

  Captain Butcher took the note from the seaman and looked again at the map, searching for the location of the epicenter of that explosion. On its face, the Captain thought, it appears to be an especially powerful explosion, because the ground motion that it created was detected by our sister ship Georgia, which is much farther from us. He picked up the microphone and called out.

  “USS 726 Ohio crewmen, this is the Captain speaking. I am reminding you that we are on a level two alert. A few minutes ago, we detected an explosion, probably an exceptional event of unknown magnitude, right at the place in which we would have been right now, had we continued our regular navigation exercise. Communications Officer, transmit a full report on the event immediately to our headquarters back home. When I have further details, I will notify you. USS 726 crew, keep your eyes and ears open. If someone is messing with us, he probably doesn’t know what this machine is capable of. Everyone maintain a high state of alert.”

  Captain Butcher placed the microphone back on its hook and started considering this unusual event. What the hell can this be if it reached all the way to USS 729? There’s no chance in the world that the blast was created by standard explosives. What the hell can this be and who planned this and why did it happen in the exact spot that we were supposed to have reached?

  As had become his custom, Colonel Yevgeni again assumed command of the discussion. This time, for the first time, Gregory also participated actively.

  “There are already reports of a nuclear blast south of the island of Svalbard”, Yevgeni opened. “I have no doubt that within a short time, the story will circulate throughout the world. We executed it, it is our responsibility, and our Minister of Defense did not get from us the outcome that he requested. Everybody already knows why it happened, but it’s not really going to help if we dwell on the reasons. Our responsibility now is to minimize the damage and help the Minister as much as we can, perhaps even gain some benefit from the event. We must do this within minutes. I don’t think we even have as much as half an hour.”

  “Exactly”, replied Gregory, who was showing the first signs of recovery. “But tell me, how can we benefit from such a catastrophe?”

  Colonel Yevgeni conferred briefly with his mate Brigadier General

  Dimitri, then turned back to the team members, eying Gregory directly.

  “In my opinion, we have only one option. We will propose to the Minister that the Soviet Union announce in all mass communication media that we managed to shoot down a cruise missile tipped with a nuclear warhead that was launched by an American bomber over the North Sea. We will say that the missile was on its way to destroy the city and the naval base of Murmansk, and it was only by sheer coincidence that we managed to shoot it down, causing it to explode in the sea.”

  Gregory stared at Yevgeni, perplexed.

  “What’s this coincidence that you’re talking about?”

  “I mean that it should be understood that it was only by a miracle that we managed to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of our citizens. For example, because on that day, our jet fighters were training in the area and they happened to detect the cruise missile and destroy it.”

  It was Brigadier General Dimitri’s turn to speak.

  “It’s all very well, this idea of a supposed coincidence, but not with airplanes. A cruise missile flies very low and it is difficult to intercept from the air because of the airplane radar’s technical limitations. I suggest we change our version and say that one of our battleships detected the missile as it was approaching, and its gunners shot the missile down. By the way, such missiles fly relatively slowly and at low altitude, so it would be possible to down them even with anti-aircraft cannons. Of course, in this explosion, our battleship was also destroyed, and this will be a good opportunity to praise our hero brethren who sacrificed their lives to save several hundred thousand fellow citizens.”

  “All right, that makes sense”, replied Colonel Yevgeni. “Gregory, this is what you should propose to the Minister. I think he will probably adopt this story, especially since right now, we do not have any better alternative to propose.”

&
nbsp; Gregory rose quickly from his chair and raced from the room. Dimitri turned to Colonel Yevgeni. He wore a serious expression and could not hide his concern.

  “This time, my good friend, I’m not so sure that even your good ideas can save our heads.”

  The minister of defense, Marshal Budarenko, stormed into the office suite of the Party’s General Secretary. To Svetlana’s astonishment, the Minister continued, without stopping, directly into the General Secretary’s inner office. Svetlana chased after him, trying to prevent him from entering Secretary Yermolov’s room unannounced, but the Minister ignored her pleas and stormed straight into the Secretary’s office. Even before Secretary Yermolov could say a word, the Marshal began his speech, remaining on his feet, waving his arms and spouting rebuke.

  “Am I mobilizing masses of tanks behind your back? I want to reach the Atlantic coast with my tanks? Now you understand that the Yankee Ambassador, that you like so much, came to pull the wool over your eyes. He came here to lull you. If it weren’t for our hero sons on the battleship that, just by chance happened to be in that area, we could now have three hundred thousand burned corpses in Murmansk. We are at war; get this in to your head already. The Yanks are no longer threatening us with war because they have already started it.”

  The Party General Secretary, the Head of State of the Union of Soviet States, who, just several minutes before, had received word of the nuclear blast in the North Sea, remained silent in his seat. The Minister of Defense took that opportunity to sink his claws deeper into the flesh of the Secretary, who now seemed hesitant and confused.

  “You must now come out and address the nation. Our soldiers need to know that they are about to defend the motherland, after we were attacked by the Americans.”

  The Secretary was trying with all his might to regain his composure in the face of Marshal Budarenko’s harsh words and his zeal to exact revenge on the Americans immediately, blow for blow.

  “Not one soldier will make any move at the moment to defend the nation on Western European soil”, the Secretary said at last. “We will convene, within the hour, an urgent emergency meeting of the senior leadership, and reach decisions. Meanwhile, I will prepare the official announcement to the nation of the attempted attack.”

  The Secretary’s words did not satisfy the Minister’s desire for immediate action. He decided to try again.

  “Mister Secretary, be specific. This is not an attempted attack but an actual attack. The Americans should not even think that we are hesitating or that we are not determined. Give me the order now to enter the Federal Republic of Germany. Time is not in our favor.”

  “No order yet”, the Secretary replied resolutely, having gained his composure. “I said we’ll meet in one hour and make decisions. This meeting is over.”

  When the Minister left the General Secretary’s office, Svetlana hurried into the room. She began apologizing breathlessly for not being able to stop the minister’s trajectory into the Secretary’s room.

  “It’s all right”, the General Secretary replied, with a bitter smile. “It’s not only you. Even I can’t stop him.”

  Chapter 13

  A pall of imminent war hung in the air of the Situation Room at the White House in Washington D.C. The high rate and the fast pace of Red Army troop concentrations on the threshold of West Germany had already been interpreted by all intelligence agencies as preparation for an upcoming invasion of West Germany and even beyond.

  Seated in the Situation Room were the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Gorge Abramson; the Chief of Naval Operations, General Tim Ewing; the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, General James Cannon; and George Brown, director of the CIA. The door opened and the President of the United States, James Butler, walked into the room, followed by Secretary of Defense Philip Manning. All those present in the room rose to their feet as a mark of respect for the President. The President took his seat at the head of the conference table, swiftly greeted the attendants, and instructed them to take their seats.

  James Butler had been President for the past three years. He was the first President in two decades who had not been directly involved in the Vietnam War, which had been traumatic for the American people and for its Presidents. A native of Texas, aged 54 when elected, he was a straight talker, often criticized for his rough, undiplomatic language. At six foot four, the Secret Service agents protecting him had a challenging job. Those selected to serve as his personal guard had to be at least as tall as he was, which gave the group the look of an NBA basketball team on the move. President Butler was a fastidious man who took great care with his appearance at all times. His thick mane was always combed to the right, and he never missed his daily session at the gym.

  His term had been relative quiet, both domestically and internationally. On the foreign relations front, his term was free of any notable conflicts. At home, the economy was doing better than average, earning him great public approval. He was married to First Lady Rachel and had two teenage children, a son and a daughter, who lived at the White House with them.

  The President scanned the attendees seated around the table. He could easily see the tense atmosphere in the room on the serious, silent faces of the officials sitting around the long rectangular table: the crisis with the Soviet Union, which had started out of the blue, was rapidly escalating.

  “I guess we’ll be spending some time together in this room in the coming hours and over the next few days”, the President opened the emergency meeting. “Secretary Manning has just briefed me on the nuclear explosion in the North Sea. I must tell you that I’m not satisfied with what you’ve given me so far. You’ve given me a list of unknowns, including today’s unknowns. What exactly am I supposed to do with them? Should I write myself intelligence assessments? Can any one of you stand up and tell me why half of the Red Army is deployed at the East German border? And what the heck was this nuclear explosion in the middle of nowhere?”

  The President paused, looking around at the people listening to his every word.

  “In addition to all this, two hours ago, the Communist Party General Secretary looked into the face of our Ambassador in Moscow, one might say at the whites of his eyes, saying, ‘Tell your President that we will not attack you’. So tell me, what’s going on here, for heaven’s sake? Secretary Manning, how are the military deployed since the alert was raised to DEFCON 2?”

  Defense Secretary Manning glanced quickly at General John Abramson, who nodded to him. The Secretary replied to the President directly.

  “Mister President, General John Abramson, who is being constantly briefed from the field, will give an update on the actions carried out so far.”

  General Abramson rose on his feet and walked to a large map which covered an entire wall.

  “Mister President, all of our forces, both here at home and everywhere on the globe, are at the highest alert. This means that all leaves are cancelled and we’ve started a partial call-up of the reserves. We’ve stopped all training activities. All the units of our Armed Forces are now filling their personnel vacancies and replenishing their stocks of equipment and ordnance. In Europe, all our forces have left their bases and are deploying in their battle positions on the field. The Strategic Air Command has armed all our four hundred bombers, and they are ready to take off at very short notice. A great part of our ninety-strong assault submarine fleet is en route to their battle and launch positions across the oceans. From this point, we cannot raise our level of readiness any higher. From this point, the next stage is actual combat.

  “Regarding the intentions of the Red Army, I will present the view of both the CIA and Military Intelligence. There is a consensus among all of our intelligence agencies. We are united in believing that the present Soviet deployment around East Germany is not intended for handling any internal problem there. This is without doubt a force that was assembled to attack our defense lines
in West Germany, and perhaps even to continue deeper into Western Europe. So much for the deployed force and its capabilities. The main question here is intent. Namely, will they really start up their engines and begin moving towards us? Here, one must understand that the Russians know very well what we also know for a fact, that they have a great numerical advantage over us and over NATO in general, in the number of tanks, in the number of armored personnel carriers, in artillery guns and in almost any other parameter. Therefore, they know that the only option that we have for stopping these swarms of armored divisions is solely the use of tactical nuclear weapons. That is also the reason why they have not acted against us until now.”

  President Butler impatiently interrupted General Abramson, the Commander-in Chief, the most senior officer of the Armed Forces, who reported directly to him.

  “I don’t understand where you’re heading, John. Everything you’ve said so far is well known. You haven’t explained what is different about this week’s situation and why they are about to attack now. Why aren’t they afraid now, that we’ll use nuclear weapons to stop them? Why is this week different from last week? I just don’t get it.”

  A uniformed naval officer entered the room. He saluted the President and requested his permission to deliver an urgent telegram to General Abramson. The Chief of the Joint Staff read the telegram quickly and turned to the President.

  “Mister President, we sent several maritime patrol aircraft and naval vessels to the area east of the nuclear explosion, trying to intercept those responsible for the explosion on their way back to northern Russia”, he said, holding the telegram.

  “Mister President, I will now read the message that I’ve just received; it is a message that was broadcast on Radio Moscow five minutes ago. The message begins; The Soviet General Secretary announced on the radio that an American bomber had launched a nuclear cruise missile towards the port city of Murmansk. A Russian destroyer, which happened to be in the area, detected the missile and shot it down with cannon fire, and the missile exploded. All 247 men aboard the destroyer were killed in the blast. They gave their lives to save at least three hundred thousand men and women, children and babies in the city of Murmansk. The Soviet Armed Forces have been placed at the highest alert and they will respond in kind to the American aggression. That’s the end of the Radio Moscow message. I assume that in the next few minutes, we’ll also receive our intelligence agencies’ assessment of this bizarre announcement.”