President Turnbull’s heart bounded. The news media would give saturation coverage to the congress taking place in Washington, D.C. World opinion, thus informed, would demand that the Russians yield to the demonstrated capacity of the American leadership to achieve a democratic government, prosperity, and tranquillity for its citizens. The United States would, at last, be king of the hill.
Ripley Forte broke into their reflections. “The rules are simple: each side is to bring to the congress the delegation it sees fit. One man or five, five or five thousand. Ideally, each delegation will include the experts who provide the factual background and analysis on which policy is founded, as well as the deliberative bodies that discuss policy, judges who determine the policy’s constitutionality, and the executives who are empowered to carry it out. Is that agreeable to you both?”
“It is,” said the president, echoing the premier.
“Then all that remains is to decide the venue for the Russo-American Conference, to begin on November ninth.”
“Kiev, of course,” said Luchenko.
“Washington, of course,” said Turnbull. “After all, it is the capital of the world.”
“It seems that we have a tie, gentlemen,” said Forte. “As I have not yet voted, I shall cast my ballot… against Washington.”
Dammit, thought Turnbull furiously. The man’s a dirty communist after all.
“I shall cast my ballot,” Forte went on, “against Kiev, as well. For the sake of strictly impartial deliberations, the congress will convene in neutral territory: Houston, the Republic of Texas.”
32. THE CONGRESS OF HOUSTON
14 NOVEMBER 2009
The red army went on full alert on the evening of 7 November, when the first aircraft bearing the lowest-ranking members of the Soviet delegation-representatives of the Supreme Soviet-took off for Houston. The aircraft was escorted by long-range Il-51 Fanfire bombers, which had orders to disperse and fire their nuclear-tipped cruise missiles at major American cities at the first confirmed sighting of hostile interceptors. In the event, no opposition to their passage was encountered, and the bomber escort refueled at Houston International Airport and returned to the USSR for another batch of bureaucrats. By 9 November the airspace between the Soviet Union and the Republic of Texas was as busy as the aerial corridor between Washington and New York City as more, and steadily higher-ranking, delegates arrived in Houston.
They were met by squadrons of KGB men, dispatched the day after Ripley Forte’s fateful conversation with the American president, to ensure that the convention-center hotel to which they had been assigned was bug-free and totally secure. The Russian secret police contingent was given complete control of the two adjacent hotels and allowed to carry whatever weapons they considered necessary. After all, this was Houston, where even schoolboys carried magnums-and not of champagne. The KGB brought over one planeload of cooks and more than a dozen loaded with Russian food, water, and liquor, to preclude any attempts by the Texans to poison them. Behind police lines that prevented the approach of the curious closer than three city blocks, they made each hotel a citadel. They established machine-gun positions at each entrance, a complex system of identification cards and passwords, walking armed patrols on every corridor, and a sophisticated optical cable communications system, with signal scramblers to make it immune to the inevitable American attempts at surveillance.
Even these ample precautions did not seem sufficient to the nervous Russians. They were, after all, surrounded by more than two million hostile citizens of Houston, whom the Russians twice in a single decade had tried and failed to exterminate. KGB Security Chief Igor Gabalan demanded that all Texans be cleared within the radius of a mile from Sam I and Sam II-the Sam Houston and Sam Rayburn hotels. President Tom Traynor refused. The Russian shuttle flights abruptly ceased. President Turnbull interceded with Ripley Forte, who was in daily contact by radiotelephone from his subterranean hiding place. Forte prevailed upon Traynor to do the Russian bidding. The flights resumed.
Forte had told Premier Luchenko that the Soviet delegation could consist of one man-or five thousand. By the time the airlift over the pole was completed, more than six thousand Russian bureaucrats were installed in unaccustomed luxury in Sam I and Sam II. Such a convergence of Soviet leaders upon a single city was unprecedented. The Russians were unanimous in opposing such a concentration of power, but it had been unavoidable. Premier Luchenko did not dare enter into binding decisions with the United States in Houston, leaving Deputy Premier Badalovich in Russia to disavow them, seize the Party apparatus, and become premier in his stead. The same logic applied right down the line, from ministers of state, party chiefs, KGB functionaries, marshals, and admirals to the leaders of autonomous republics, krays and oblasts who, while they would not be called upon for opinion or decision, would at least be unable to engineer a palace coup. The temporary administrators left behind were third- and fourth-rate men, who would be too busy spying on their counterparts and foiling their power plays to attempt any themselves.
The American delegation, housed in the Howard
Hughes and Chester Nimitz hotels some blocks away, was less numerous but equally high powered. Led by the President of the United States, it comprised his cabinet and undersecretaries, the members of both houses of Congress, senior officers of the National Security Agency and the CIA, and the senior flag officers of the armed forces, not quite seven hundred in all. Conspicuously absent were state governors and members of the judiciary.
Of the more than thirteen thousand delegates, security men, aides, and flunkies, only twenty-three actually mattered. They were the sixteen men of the Presidium of the USSR, and the American president and six of his closest advisers. Their respective entourages were present merely to rubber-stamp agreements reached by the leadership. Indeed, with the hot-water emissions making the seas boil and black clouds form over deserts where rain had not fallen in eons, there was no time for lengthy deliberations. What the twenty-three men decided would become the fate of their respective nations, the fate of the world.
“Gentlemen,” said President Tom Traynor, conference host and self-appointed moderator to the twenty-three men seated around the oval mahogany table, “we are here today not to talk about peace in our time but to make large-scale war impossible.
“They are not the same thing. Peace will not come until man’s fundamental aggressive instincts are curbed. When that happens, his defenses against a hostile environment will have atrophied, and he will be an endangered species awaiting only the coup de grace of those-rats or roaches, ants or amoeba-that were here millions of years before us, and have survived and prospered only by unremitting warfare against a thousand enemies. What we must seek here are not absolute solutions. We haven’t the leisure to wander in the dreamland where all men are brothers, where violence has ceased, where love is the only conqueror. We’ve got to work with what we are: lazy, selfish, stupid, mean men; but men, also, with intelligence, vision, courage, reason, and hope.
“I ask you, then, to consider ways to ensure that this world of ours endures-not a Utopian forever-but simply, say, for another hundred years, without us killing each other by the tens of millions over inflexible, doctrinaire ideologies. There are some fairly obvious solutions. History has precedents, and I pray that you invoke them. I pray, moreover, that you do so with some speed, for I am advised by my scientific staff, as I presume you have been by your own, that unless a decision that we can all live with is reached in seven or eight days, the heating of the atmosphere will have irreversible effects: first will come the drowning of coastal cities around the world, and within seven or eight months a gigantic sheet of ice will form at the North Pole and the resulting glacier will begin its inexorable descent across the face of Russia, across Europe, down to the Pyrenees.
“Mr. Premier,” he said, turning to Marshal Evgeniy Luchenko, on the left side of the table, appropriately, “since you are our guest, you have the floor.”
Marshal Luchenko cleared his throat and launched into a set speech on which his staff had labored through the night. It contained numerous references to the virtues of Marxist-Leninist socialism, the dignity of workers of the world, the peace-loving intentions of the Soviet people, and the necessity for the Americans to demonstrate their goodwill by a progressive reduction in their armed forces over a period of five years, which the Russians would match missile for missile, division for division, man-of-war for man-of-war.
“Very generous of you, Marshal Luchenko,” President Turnbull said dryly when the premier had finished his two-hour speech. “The trouble is, with twice the number of missiles, divisions, and capital ships that the free world possesses, a step-by-step reduction will eliminate all our armed forces and leave the Soviet Union with enough firepower to conquer those countries it does not already possess.”