8 OCTOBER 2009
“His Excellency, Professor Mish-Mish Pasha, the Ambassador of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” announced the president’s aide, ushering in a small, dapper Azerbaijani who resembled the diplomat out of the late nineteenth century he wished he had been, instead of a messenger boy delivering ultimata from the Kremlin. He was dressed in morning coat and spats, and wore a pince-nez. He was one of those people whose faces suggest those of a dog; Professor Mish-mish Pasha’s was that of a Shetland sheep dog-long-nosed, skin of apricot hue, with soulful eyes and hairy ears that came to a point.
Ambassador Mish-mish Pasha bowed from the waist to President Horatio Francis Turnbull, who enveloped the Russian’s small manicured hand in his practiced grip and exerted his own brand of political pressure. He liked the ambassador, who came from a more civilized time, but didn’t want him to go away with the idea that Turn-bull was soft on communism.
“Long time no see, Mish-mish,” Turnbull said cordially. “How are all the Kremlin’s gremlins?”
“Deeply concerned, Mr. President, which is to say, in layman’s language, that from time to time they’re thinking about that spaced-out meeting between your representative and ours.”
“If you don’t have to deliver their answer standing up,
I’ll know we’re not going to have to start shooting just yet.”
Professor Mish-mish sat down. He crossed his legs, shot his cuffs, and smiled. “The news from Kiev is good, Mr. President. We are prepared to accede to your request, even though it will require a great national effort to put out the fires ignited by the late renegade Mr. Rip-ley Forte.”
“That’s good.”
“Of course, since we live in the real world, we cannot but anticipate that our heroic sacrifices will be met by equally significant sacrifices on your side.”
“That’s not so good.”
“Nevertheless, it is necessary.”
“Tell me more about the sacrifices you want us to make,” Turnbull said warily.
“It’s like this, Mr. President: the national effort that the Soviet Union will have to undertake to extinguish those hundreds of fires is one fraught with difficulties. Civilians will be unwilling to do-not to mention incapable of doing-this dangerous work. Therefore, we must draft our soldiers. Our experts expect many to perish from burns, smoke inhalation, falls, and other misadventures. That is a grievous human toll that the Soviet Union can ill afford. Moreover, from the defense standpoint, our armed forces will be weakened by this diversion of skilled manpower. That will leave us at a strategic disadvantage. For this reason, we expect that the United States will cut back its fighting strength commensurately.”
“Sounds reasonable,” said Turnbull. “We’ll disband national guard and reserve units equal to the numbers of your firefighters for the duration.”
Mish-mish shook his head. “I’m afraid that won’t do, Mr. President. I’m instructed to hand you this list of units to be demobilized and this list of capitalist war materiel that must be destroyed.” He took two sheaves of papers from his pocket and handed them across the desk to Turnbull.
Turnbull riffled through them with growing incredulity. “You can’t be serious-whole divisions, air wings, aircraft carriers?”
Mish-mish returned a sickly grin. “Perhaps there is some small room for negotiation and compromise, sir, but I have been instructed that these reductions in your armed services must precede any Soviet effort to bank the fires the capitalist criminal Ripley Forte set. It’s a matter of equity, a matter of Soviet national security.”
“Bullshit! It’s blackmail.”
“That, too,” conceded Mish-mish. “But cannot all diplomatic initiatives be called blackmail, in the final analysis? You do this, or we’ll do that. If you don’t do this, we won’t do that. It’s all a matter of semantics. But there is one fact that all the semantics in the world won’t alter: it’s dark outside.” He gestured to the windows of the Oval Office.
It was indeed like 6:30 p.m. of a bleak mid-December day, even though as they spoke the hour of 11 a.m. was striking on the Oval Office grandfather clock. The little light that filtered in from the outside came from the street lights on Pennsylvania Avenue and the security lights that surrounded the White House, which had long since become as soot-encrusted as a smokehouse chimney. In the Oval Office the air was filtered, but outside everyone but the destitute or unheeding wore gauze masks. Aid stations on downtown street corners administered oxygen to those who suddenly keeled over from breathing the foul air. And the scream of ambulance sirens had become so commonplace that nobody noticed them anymore, as new victims of respiratory ailments were hauled away to District hospitals.
President Turnbull made some rapid mental calculations as he considered the Kremlin’s proposal. The force reductions the Russians demanded would temporarily cripple America’s armed services. But the manpower wouldn’t just evaporate. Though demobilization would rob them of their tight organization and fighting edge, these could be retrieved within weeks-months at the outside. Junking of planes and ships was another matter altogether. It took six months to build a modern aircraft, six years to build a man-of-war. The destruction of the materiel on the Kremlin’s list would put America’s armed forces effectively out of action long enough for Russia to launch and win a conventional war.
And in the end, what would be accomplished? The Russians would put out the fires in Siberia and unleash another offensive conceived by the seventeen missing scientists-and they’d all be right back where they started. Meanwhile, in SD-1 in Houston work was near-ing completion on plans for the evacuation to the interior of millions of inhabitants of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Also nearly complete were plans for the largest construction job in history: the building of dikes around America’s major low-lying coastal cities. That effort would stalemate Russia’s smoke offensive. And once the Soviets saw it wouldn’t work, they’d go on to something else, which the Americans, in turn, would thwart.
But there remained the problem of cost. America could win each battle, Turnbull was convinced, but each response would be prohibitively expensive in manpower, materiel, and mental stress. If he could somehow moderate the Russian demands, they might be something the United States could live with.
Professor Mish-mish observed President Turnbull as these thoughts churned through his mind. He knew the Americans far better than most knew themselves. When he had heard of Vice-President Castle’s threat to Deputy Premier Badalovich to kill the Soviet people with anthrax, he had a hearty laugh, a distant echo of the hilarity in the Kremlin that had greeted Castle’s ultimatum. The Russian leaders were all students of American psychology and history. They knew Americans would never, never resort to such draconian measures, even if their national existence depended on it. Throughout history other nations might, would, and regularly did use all the weapons in their arsenals, no matter how barbarous, to ensure national survival. But biting this particular bullet was way beyond the capacity of the American people and their leaders. The ACLU-human-rights mentality prevailed, a self-abasing death wish. The American conscience felt comfortable in battling to the death the genocidal frenzy of other nations, but shrank from using the enemy’s methods against him, and so sparing American lives. So Mish-mish waited, secure in the conviction that, having called the American bluff, the Russians could rest easy. If the Americans had indeed sowed anthrax over Russia, which he seriously doubted, they would never activate it. Mish-mish was not a gambling man, but he was willing to bet money on it.
When the negotiations concluded ten days later, the Russians proved to have been remarkably flexible. To the surprise of the American negotiators, the Russians agreed to a reduction in America’s armed forces by one-third and the retirement and mothballing, rather than outright destruction, of the long list of American war machines. To be sure, once these steps had been taken, it would give the Russian armed forces an indisputable three-month advantage in any war they cared to launch. But the disorganization and decimation of the Russian army after the Moscow blast had not yet been repaired, and Turnbull seriously doubted whether the Soviet Union was in any position to consider further military conquest in the near future. It was far more likely that it would continue measures short of war and hope to wear the United States down. The only posture the United States could now adopt was that of a watchful defense.
“Well, we did it,” exulted the secretary of state.
“That we did,” agreed Turnbull. “But what, exactly, did we do?”
28. SWITCH HITTER
18 OCTOBER 2009
“I don’t know who you are, buddy,” said the security man at the kiosk guarding the elevator shaft of SD-1, “but you’re sure as hell not Ripley Forte. Mr. Forte’s dead.”
“Yeah,” Forte said, “I guess I must look that way, after flying all night from halfway around the world. But appearances deceive. I’m not only alive, I’m Ripley Forte. Get Mark Medina, and he’ll tell you the same thing.”