“This is Golovko,” he told the male voice who answered. He didn’t have to say anything else.
“Sergey Nikolay’ch,” the minister’s voice greeted him pleasantly five seconds later. “What can I do for you?”
“Well, Vasily Konstantinovich, you can confirm these numbers to me. Are they possible?”
“They are more than possible, Sergey. They are as real as the sunset,” Solomentsev told the intelligence chief cum chief minister and advisor to President Grushavoy.
“Solkin syn, ” the intelligence chief muttered. Son of a bitch! “And this wealth has been there for how long?” he asked incredulously.
“The oil, perhaps five hundred thousand years; the gold, rather longer, Sergey.”
“And we never knew,” Golovko breathed.
“No one really looked, Comrade Minister. Actually, I find the gold report the more interesting. I must see one of these gold-encrusted wolf pelts. Something for Prokofiev, eh? Peter and the Golden Wolf.”
“An entertaining thought,” Golovko said, dismissing it immediately. “What will it mean to our country?”
“Sergey Nikolay’ch, I would have to be a fortune-teller to answer that substantively, but it could be the salvation of our country in the long term. Now we have something that all nations want— two somethings, as a matter of fact— and it belongs to us, and for it those foreigners will pay vast sums of money, and do so with a smile. Japan, for example. We will answer their energy needs for the next fifty years, and along the way we will save them vast sums in transportation costs— ship the oil a few hundred kilometers instead of ten thousand. And perhaps America, too, though they’ve made their own big strike on the Alaskan-Canadian border. The question becomes how we move the oil to market. We’ll build a pipeline from the field to Vladivostok, of course, but maybe another one to St. Petersburg so that we can sell oil more easily to Europe as well. In fact, we can probably have the Europeans, especially the Germans, build the pipeline for us, just to get a discount on the oil. Serge, if we’d found this oil twenty years ago, we—”
“Perhaps.” It wasn’t hard to imagine what would come next: The Soviet Union would not have fallen but grown strong instead. Golovko had no such illusions. The Soviet government would have managed to fuck up these new treasures as it had fucked up everything else. The Soviet government had owned Siberia for seventy years but had never even gone looking for what might have been there. The country had lacked the proper experts to do the looking, but was too proud to let anyone else do it, lest they think less of the Motherland. If any one thing had killed the USSR, it wasn’t communism, or even totalitarianism. It was that perverse amour propre that was the most dangerous and destructive aspect of the Russian character, created by a sense of inferiority that went back to the House of Romanov and beyond. The Soviet Union’s death had been as self-inflicted as any suicide’s, just slower and therefore far deadlier in coming. Golovko endured the next ninety seconds of historical speculation from a man who had little sense of history, then spoke: “All this is good, Vasily Konstantinovich, but what of the future? That is the time in which we will all live, after all.”
“It will do us little harm. Sergey, this is the salvation of our country. It will take ten years to get the full benefit from the outfields, but then we shall have a steady and regular income for at least one whole generation, and perhaps more besides.”
“What help will we need?”
“The Americans and the British have expertise which we need, from their own exploitation of the Alaskan fields. They have knowledge. We shall learn it and make use of it. We are in negotiations now with Atlantic Richfield, the American oil company, for technical support. They are being greedy, but that’s to be expected. They know that only they have what we need, and paying them for it is cheaper than having to replicate it ourselves. So, they will get most of what they now demand. Perhaps we will pay them in gold bricks,” Solomentsev suggested lightly.
Golovko had to resist the temptation to inquire too deeply into the gold strike. The oil field was far more lucrative, but gold was prettier. He, too, wanted to see one of those pelts that this Gogol fellow had used to collect the dust. And this lonely forest-dweller would have to be properly taken care of— no major problem, as he lived alone and was childless. Whatever he got, the state would soon get back, old as he was. And there’d be a TV show, maybe even a feature film, about this hunter. He’d once hunted Germans, after all, and the Russians still made heroes of such men. That would make Pavel Petrovich Gogol happy enough, wouldn’t it?
“What does Eduard Petrovich know?”
“I’ve been saving the information until I had a full and reliable reading on it. I have that now. I think he will be pleased at the next cabinet meeting, Sergey Nikolay’ch.”
As well he should, Golovko thought. President Grushavoy had been as busy as a one-armed, one-legged paperhanger for three years. No, more like a stage MAGICian or conjurer, forced to produce real things from nothing, and his success in keeping the nation moving often seemed nothing short of miraculous. Perhaps this was God’s own way of rewarding the man for his efforts, though it would not be an entirely unmixed blessing. Every government agency would want its piece of the gold-and-oil pie, each with its needs, all of them presented by its own minister as vital to the security of the state, in white papers of brilliant logic and compelling reasoning. Who knew, maybe some of them would even be telling the truth, though truth was so often a rare commodity in the cabinet room. Each minister had an empire to build, and the better he built it, the closer he would come to the seat at the head of the table that was occupied, for now, by Eduard Petrovich Grushavoy. Golovko wondered if it had been this way under the czars. Probably, he decided at once. Human nature didn’t change very much. The way people had acted in Babylon or Byzantium was probably little different from the way they’d act at the next cabinet meeting, three days hence. He wondered how President Grushavoy would handle the news.
“How much has leaked out?” the spymaster asked.
“There are doubtless some rumors,” Minister Solomentsev answered, “but the current estimates are less than twenty-four hours old, and it usually takes longer than that to leak. I will have these documents messengered to you— tomorrow morning?”
“That will be fine, Vasily. I’ll have some of my own analysts go over the data, so that I can present my own independent estimate of the situation.
“I have no objection to that,” the economics minister responded, surprising Golovko more than a little. But then this wasn’t the USSR anymore. The current cabinet might be the modern counterpart to the old Politburo, but nobody there told lies… well, at least not big lies. And that was a measure of progress for his country, wasn’t it?
C H A P T E R – 11
Faith of the Fathers
His name was Yu Fa An, and he said he was a Christian. That was rare enough that Monsignor Schepke invited him in at once. What he saw was a Chinese national of fifty-plus years and stooped frame, with hair a curious mix of black and gray that one saw only rarely in this part of the world.
“Welcome to our embassy. I am Monsignor Schepke.” He bowed quickly and then shook the man’s hand.
“Thank you. I am the Reverend Yu Fa An,” the man replied with the dignity of truth, one cleric to another.
“Indeed. Of what denomination?”
“I am a Baptist.”
“Ordained? Is that possible?” Schepke motioned the visitor to follow him, and in a moment they stood before the Nuncio. “Eminence, this is the Reverend Yu Fa An— of Beijing?” Schepke asked belatedly.
“Yes, that is so. My congregation is mainly northwest of here.”
“Welcome.” Cardinal DiMilo rose from his chair for a warm handshake, and guided the man to the comfortable visitor’s chair. Monsignor Schepke went to fetch tea. “It is a pleasure to meet a fellow Christian in this city.”
“There are not enough of us, and that is a fact, Eminence,” Yu confirmed.
Monsignor Schepke swiftly arrived with a tray of tea things, which he set on the low coffee table.
“Thank you, Franz.”
“I thought that some local citizens should welcome you. I expect you’ve had the formal welcome from the Foreign Ministry, and that it was correct… and rather cold?” Yu asked.
The Cardinal smiled as he handed a cup to his guest. “It was correct, as you say, but it could have been warmer.”