them and your weapons before the forces of the People’s Red Army.
“If Leonov is not surrendered within the hour, if the forces of division
and counterrevolution continue to defy the forces of lawful government,
one SS-N-20 missile with six independently targeted warheads will be
launched from a submarine at targets in rebellion against Moscow’s
authority.”
One hour. Krasilnikov was giving them one hour! It was as though he
wanted to incinerate Chelyabinsk–for that was the identity of the rebel
city in the orders now locked in Dobrynin’s personal safe. That city of
a million people in the eastern fringes of the Urals had been chosen as
a demonstration site, for there were several major rebel troop and armor
concentrations in the area that could also be taken out by the same
strike.
“If, after the first target is destroyed, the rebel forces do not
surrender the traitor Leonov, a second target will be destroyed one hour
after the first.”
Alma-Ata was the second target on the list, the capital of the sprawling
republic of Kazakhstan. The revelation that Moscow was willing to
sacrifice one of its own cities, like Chelyabinsk, would make the
republics supporting Leonov eager to change sides. No one seriously
believed that a second missile would need to be fired. While
Chelyabinsk was still burning, Alma-Ata, Kiev, Minsk, and the rest would
be scrambling to be the first to swear eternal loyalty to Moscow. Even
the Baltic states might fall into line.
Just in case, though, Dobrynin’s orders listed twenty targets, from
Minsk in Belarus to Khabarovsk in the Far East.
For at least the hundredth time during the past sixty hours, Dobrynin
examined his feelings about the orders he had sworn to carry out.
In a little over one hour, he would give an order and as a direct
result, some one million of his countrymen would die, some in a single,
searing instant, their shadows burned into the sidewalks and walls of
their city, others in lingering pain ten years hence, as cancers rotted
their bodies.
Could he possibly carry out such orders?
Even as he asked the question though, he knew–for the hundredth
time–that he would. He believed in Krasilnikov’s vision for a new
Russia and had accepted the premise that suffering in the short term was
needed to win a future security. Like Chelyag, his counterpart aboard
the Pravda, he’d undergone countless meetings with Karelin before this
mission–and even one interview with Krasilnikov himself. They’d
screened him carefully, gauging the depth and the conviction of his
belief in Communism.
They knew him, he was convinced, better than he knew himself.
And besides, there was Strelbitski.
Kirill Borisovich Strelbitski was the Revolutsita’s political commissar,
a civilian assigned to the Revolutsita by Karelin “to maintain the
political fervor of the crew.” Maintaining political fervor, Dobrynin
knew, meant keeping an eye on the Captain. If Dobrynin failed to carry
out his orders precisely as they were written, he would be relieved of
his command and Strelbitski would take his place, and there was no doubt
at all that that mean-eyed, thin-lipped reptile would carry out the
orders … and even enjoy doing so. As for Dobrynin, his wife Tanya,
in Murmansk, his son fighting with the 12th Red Guards at Voronezh, his
daughter, a thirty-year-old doctor working in Moscow, all would be
rounded up within the hour. And then …
well, he didn’t want to think about the ultimate cost of his defection.
Yes, when the time came, he would give the proper order.
0730 hours EST (Zulu -5)
Situation Room Support Facility
Washington, D.C.
It had been another long, working night. They’d reconvened here, in
Room 208 of the Executive Office Building, sitting around a long, highly
polished table that gleamed in the morning sunlight spilling through the
huge windows along the east wall. It was a lot airier here than in the
White House Situation Room, with more light and more space.
Hours before, the Sit Room had proved inadequate for the task, as more
and more advisors, aides, and staffers had been brought in to ride herd
on what clearly was becoming a crisis of mammoth proportions. This
room, its nineteenth-century decor masking a wealth of hidden