The Devil's Alternative Read online

  Matthews nodded and watched Taylor cross to the bank of television sets placed in the curving west wall below the bookcases, which had been specially remodeled to accept the console of TV sets. When non-security-cleared deputations were in the room, the new row of TV screens was covered by sliding teak doors. Taylor turned on the extreme left-hand set and returned to the President’s desk. He detached one of the six telephones from its cradle, dialed a number, and said simply, “Screen it.”

  President Matthews knew about the Condor satellites. Flying higher than anything before, using cameras of a sophistication that could show a close-up of a human fingernail from two hundred miles up, through fog, rain, hail, snow, cloud, and night, the Condors were the latest and the best.

  Back in the seventies, photographic surveillance, though good, had been slow, mainly because each cartridge of exposed film had to be ejected from the satellite at specific positions, free-fall to earth in protective coverings, be retrieved with the aid of bleepers and tracing devices, be air-freighted to the NRO’s central laboratories, be developed and screened. Only when the satellite was within that arc of flight which permitted a direct line between it and the United States or one of the American-controlled tracking stations could simultaneous TV transmissions take place. But when the satellite passed close over the Soviet Union, the curve of the earth’s surface baffled direct reception, so the watchers had to wait until it came around again.

  Then, in the summer of 1978, the scientists cracked the problem with the Parabola Game. Their computers devised a cat’s cradle of infinite complexity for the flight tracks of half a dozen space cameras around the globe’s surface, to this end: whichever spy-in-the-sky the White House wanted to tap into could be ordered by signal to begin transmitting what it was seeing, and throw the images in a low-parabola arc to another satellite that was not out of vision. The second bird would throw the image on again, to a third satellite, and so on, like basketball players tossing the ball from fingertip to fingertip while they run. When the needed images were caught by a satellite over the United States, they could be beamed back down to NRO headquarters, and from there be patched through to the Oval Office.

  The satellites were traveling at over forty thousand miles per hour; the globe was spinning with the hours, tilting with the seasons. The number of computations and permutations was astronomical, but the computers solved them. By 1980, at the touch of a button, the President had twenty-four-hour access by simultaneous transmission to every square inch of the world’s surface. Sometimes it bothered him. It never bothered Poklewski; he had been brought up on the idea of the exposition of all private thoughts and actions in the confessional. The Condors were like confessionals, with himself as the priest he had once nearly become.

  As the screen flickered into life, General Taylor spread a map of the Soviet Union on the President’s desk and pointed with a forefinger.

  “What you are seeing, Mr. President, is coming to you from Condor Five, tracking here, northeastward, between Saratov and Perm, across the black-earth country.”

  Matthews raised his gaze to the screen. Great tracts of land were unrolling slowly down the screen from top to bottom, a swath about twenty miles broad. The land looked bare, as in autumn after the harvest. Taylor muttered a few instructions into the telephone. Seconds later, the view concentrated, closing to a band barely five miles wide. A small group of peasant shacks—wooden-plank isbas, no doubt—lost in the infinity of the steppe, drifted past on the left of the screen. The line of a road entered the picture, stayed center for a few uncertain moments, then drifted offscreen. Taylor muttered again; the picture closed to a track a hundred yards wide. Definition was better. A man leading a horse across the vast expanse of steppe came and went.

  “Slow it down,” instructed Taylor into the telephone. The ground beneath the cameras passed less quickly. High in space, the Condor satellite was still on track at the same height and speed; inside the NRO’s laboratories the images were being narrowed and slowed. The picture came closer, slower. Against the bole of a lone tree, a Russian peasant slowly unbuttoned his fly. President Matthews was not a scientist and never ceased to be amazed at the possibilities of advanced technology. He was, he reminded himself, sitting in a warm office on a late spring morning in Washington, watching a man urinate somewhere in the shadow of the Ural mountain range. The peasant passed slowly out of vision toward the bottom of the screen. The image coming up was of a wheat field, many hundreds of acres abroad.

  “And freeze,” instructed Taylor into the telephone. The picture slowly stopped moving and held.

  “Close up,” said Taylor.

  The picture came closer and closer until the entire yard-square screen was filled with twenty separate stalks of young wheat. Each looked frail, listless, bedraggled. Matthews had seen them like this in the dust bowls of the Midwest he had known in his boyhood, fifty years before.

  “Stan,” said the President.

  Poklewski, who had asked for the meeting and the screening, chose his words carefully.

  “Mr. President, the Soviet Union has a total grain target this year or two hundred forty million metric tons. Now, this breaks down into goal targets of one hundred twenty million tons of wheat, sixty million of barley, fourteen million of oats, fourteen million of corn, twelve million of rye, and the remaining twenty million of a mixture of rice, millet, buckwheat, and leguminous grams. The giants of the crop are wheat and barley.”

  He rose and came around the desk to where the map of the Soviet Union was still spread. Taylor flicked off the television and resumed his seat.

  “About forty percent of the annual Soviet grain crop, or approximately one hundred million tons, comes from here, in the Ukraine and the Kuban area of the southern RSFSR,” Poklewski continued, indicating the areas on the map. “And it is all winter wheat. That is, it’s planted in September and October. It has reached the stage of young shoots by November, when the first snows come. The snows cover the shoots and protect them from the bitter frosts of December and January.”

  Poklewski turned and paced away from the desk to the curved ceiling-to-floor windows behind the presidential chair. He had this habit of pacing when he talked.

  The Pennsylvania Avenue observer cannot actually see the Oval Office, tucked away at the back of the tiny West Whig building, but because the tops of these south-facing tall windows to the office can just be observed from the Washington Monument, a thousand yards away, they have long been fitted with six-inch-thick, green-tinted bulletproof glass just in case a sniper near the monument might care to try a long shot. As Poklewski reached the windows, the aquamarine-tinted light coming through them cast a deeper pallor across his already pale face.

  He turned and walked back, just as Matthews was preparing to swing his chair around to keep him in vision.

  “Last December, the whole of the Ukraine and the Kuban Steppe were subjected to a freak thaw during the early days of the month. They’ve had them before, but never as warm. A great wave of warm southern air swept in off the Black Sea and the Bosporus and rolled northeastward over the Ukraine and the Kuban region. It lasted a week and melted the first coverings of snow, about six inches deep, to water. The young wheat and barley stems were exposed. Ten days later, as if to compensate, the same freak weather patterns hammered the whole area with frosts going fifteen, even twenty degrees, below zero.”

  “Which did the wheat no good at all,” suggested the President.

  “Mr. President,” interjected Robert Benson of the CIA, “our best agricultural experts have estimated the Soviets will be lucky if they salvage fifty percent of that Ukrainian and Kuban crop. The damage was massive and irreparable.”

  “So that is what you have been showing me?” asked Matthews.

  “No, sir,” said Poklewski. “That is the point of this meeting. The other sixty percent of the Soviet crop, nigh on one hundred forty million tons, comes from the great tracts of the Virgin Lands in Kazakhstan, first put under the plow by
Khrushchev in the middle fifties, and the black-earth country, butting up against the Urals. A small portion comes from across the mountains in Siberia. That is what we have been showing you.”

  “What is happening there?” asked Matthews.

  “Something odd, sir. Something strange is happening to the Soviet grain crop. All this remaining sixty percent is spring wheat, put down as seed in March and April after the thaw. It should be coming up sweet and green by now. It’s coming up stunted, sparse, sporadic, as if it had been hit by some kind of blight.”

  “Weather again?” asked Matthews.

  “No. They had a damp winter and spring over this area, but nothing serious. Now that the sun has come out, the weather is perfect—warm and dry.”

  “How widespread is this ... blight?”

  Benson came in again. “We don’t know, Mr. President. We have maybe fifty samples of film of this particular problem. We tend to focus on military concentrations, of course—troop movements, new rocket bases, arms factories. But what we have indicates it must be pretty widespread.”

  “So what are you after?”

  “What we’d like,” resumed Poklewski, “is your go-ahead to spend a lot more time on this problem, find out just how big it is for the Soviets. It will mean trying to send in delegations, businessmen. Diverting a lot of space surveillance from non-priority tasks. We believe it is in America’s vital interest to find out just exactly what it is that Moscow is going to have to handle here.”

  Matthews considered and glanced at his watch. He had a troop of ecologists due to greet him and present him with yet another plaque in ten minutes. Then there was the Attorney General before lunch about the new labor legislation. He rose.

  “Very well, gentlemen, you have it. By my authority. This is one I think we need to know. But I want an answer within thirty days.”

  General Carl Taylor sat in the seventh-floor office of Robert Benson, the Director of Central Intelligence, or DCI, ten days later and gazed down at his own report, clipped to a large sheaf of photo stills, that lay on the low coffee table in front of him.

  “It’s a funny one, Bob. I can’t figure it out,” he said.

  Benson turned away from the great, sweeping picture windows that form one entire wall of the DCI’s office at Langley, Virginia, and face out north by northwest across vistas of trees toward the invisible Potomac River. Like his predecessors, he loved that view, particularly in late spring and early summer, when the woodlands are a wash of tender green. He took his seat on the low settee across the coffee table from Taylor.

  “Neither can my grain experts, Carl. And I don’t want to go to the Department of Agriculture. Whatever is going on over there in Russia, publicity is the last thing we need, and if I bring in outsiders, it’ll be in the papers within a week. So what have you got?”

  “Well, the photos show the blight, or whatever it is, is not pandemic,” said Taylor. “It’s not even regional. That’s the twister. If the cause were climatic, there’d be weather phenomena to explain it. There aren’t any. If it were a straight disease of the crop, it would be at least regional. If it were parasite-caused, the same would apply. But it’s haphazard. There are stands of strong, healthy, growing wheat right alongside the affected acreage. The Condor reconnaissance shows no logical pattern at all. How about you?”

  Benson nodded in agreement.

  “It’s illogical, all right. I’ve put a couple of assets in on the ground, but they haven’t reported back yet. The Soviet press has said nothing. My own agronomy boys have been over your photos backwards and forwards. All they can come up with is some blight of the seed or in the earth. But they can’t figure the haphazard nature of it all, either. It fits no known pattern. But the important thing is I have to produce some kind of estimate for the President for the total probable Soviet grain harvest next September and October. And I have to produce it soon.”

  “There’s no way I can photograph every damn stand of wheat and barley in the Soviet Union, even with Condor,” said Taylor. “It would take months. Can you give me that?”

  “Not a chance,” said Benson. “I need information about the troop movements along the China border, the buildup opposite Turkey and Iran. I need a constant watch on the Red Army deployments in East Germany and the locations of the new SS-twenties behind the Urals.”

  “Then I can only come up with a percentage figure based on what we have photographed to date, and extrapolate for a Soviet-wide figure,” said Taylor.

  “It’s got to be accurate,” said Benson. “I don’t want a repeat of 1977.”

  Taylor winced at the memory, even though he had not been Director of the NRO in that year. In 1977 the American intelligence machine had been fooled by a gigantic Soviet confidence trick. Throughout the summer, all the experts of the CIA and the Department of Agriculture had been telling the President the Soviet grain crop would reach around 215 million metric tons. Agriculture delegates visiting Russia had been shown fields of fine, healthy wheat; in fact, these had been the exceptions. Photoreconnaissance analysis had been faulty. In the autumn the then Soviet President, Leonid Brezhnev, had calmly announced the Soviet crop would be only 194 million tons.

  As a result, the price of the U.S. wheat surplus over domestic requirements had shot up, in the certainty the Russians would after all have to buy close on 20 million tons. Too late. Through the summer, acting through French-based front companies, Moscow had already bought up futures for enough wheat to cover the deficit—and at the old, low price. They had even chartered dry-cargo shipping space through front men, then redirected the ships, which were en route to Western Europe, into Soviet ports. The affair was known in Langley as “the Sting.”

  Carl Taylor rose. “Okay, Bob, I’ll go on taking happy snapshots.”

  “Carl.” The DCIs voice stopped him in the doorway. “Nice pictures are not enough. By July first I want the Condors back on military deployment. Give me the best grain-figure estimates you have by the end of the month. Err, if you must, on the side of caution. And if there’s anything your boys spot that could explain the phenomenon, go back and reshoot it. Somehow we have to find out what the hell is happening to the Soviet wheat.”

  President Matthews’s Condor satellites could see most things in the Soviet Union, but they could not observe Harold Lessing, one of the three first secretaries in the Commercial Section of the British Embassy in Moscow at his desk the following morning. It was probably just as well, for he would have been the first to agree he was not an edifying sight. He was pale as a sheet and feeling extremely sick.

  The main embassy building of the British mission in the Soviet capital is a fine old pre-Revolution mansion facing north on Maurice Thorez Embankment, staring straight across the Moscow River at the south facade of the Kremlin wall. It once belonged to a millionaire sugar merchant in tsarist days, and was snapped up by the British soon after the Revolution. The Soviet government has been trying to get the British out of there ever since. Stalin hated the place; every morning as he rose he had to see, across the river from his private apartments, the Union Jack fluttering in the morning breeze, and it angered him greatly.

  But the Commercial Section does not have the fortune to dwell in this elegant cream-and-gold mansion. It functions in a drab complex of postwar jerry-built office blocks two miles away on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, almost opposite the wedding-cake-style Ukraina Hotel. The same compound, guarded at its single gate by several watchful militiamen, contains several drab apartment buildings set aside for the flats of diplomatic personnel from a score or more of foreign embassies, and is called collectively the “Korpus Diplomatik,” or Diplomats’ Compound.

  Harold Lessing’s office was on the top floor of the commercial office block. When he finally fainted at ten-thirty that bright May morning, it was the sound of the telephone he brought crashing to the carpet with him that alerted his secretary in the neighboring office. Quietly and efficiently, she summoned the commercial counselor, who had two young attaché
s assist Lessing, by this time groggily conscious again, out of the building, across the parking lot, and up to his own sixth-floor apartment in Korpus 6, a hundred yards away.

  Simultaneously, the commercial counselor telephoned the main embassy on Maurice Thorez Embankment, informed the head of Chancery, and asked for the embassy doctor to be sent over. By noon, having examined Lessing in his own bed in his own flat, the doctor was conferring with the commercial counselor. To his surprise, the senior man cut him short and suggested they drive over to the main embassy to consult jointly with the head of Chancery. Only later did the doctor, an ordinary British general practitioner doing a three-year stint on attachment to the embassy with the rank of First Secretary, realize why the move was necessary. The head of Chancery took them all to a special room in the embassy building that was secure from wiretapping—something the Commercial Section was definitely not.

  “It’s a bleeding ulcer,” the medico told the two diplomats. “He seemingly has been suffering from what he thought was an excess of acid indigestion for some weeks, even months. Put it down to strain of work and bunged down loads of antacid tablets. Foolish, really; he should have come to me.”

  “Will it require hospitalization?” asked the head of Chancery, gazing at the ceiling.

  “Oh yes, indeed.” said the doctor. “I think I can get him admitted here within a few hours. The local Soviet medical men are quite up to that sort of treatment.”

  There was a brief silence as the two diplomats exchanged glances. The commercial counselor shook his head. Both men had the same thought; because of their need-to-know, both of them were aware of Lessing’s real function in the embassy. The doctor was not. The counselor deferred to Chancery.

  “That will not be possible,” said Chancery smoothly. “Not in Lessing’s case. He’ll have to be flown to Helsinki on the afternoon shuttle. Will you ensure that he can make it?”