The Negotiator Read online

  His intercom buzzed softly.

  “The man whose name you wanted, Mr. Miller? When you met him he worked for IBM in Saudi Arabia. IBM confirms it must be the same man. He quit them and is now a free-lance consultant. His name is Easterhouse—Colonel Robert Easterhouse.”

  “Find him,” said Miller. “Send for him. No matter what it costs. Bring him to me.”

  Chapter 2

  November 1990

  Marshal Kozlov sat impassively behind his desk and studied the four men who flanked the stem of the T-shaped conference table. All four were reading the Top Secret folders in front of them; all four were men he knew he could trust—had to trust, for his career, and maybe more, was on the line.

  To his immediate left was the Deputy Chief of Staff (South), who worked with him here in Moscow but had overall charge of the southern quarter of the U.S.S.R. with its teeming Moslem republics and its borders with Romania, Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan. Beyond him was the chief of High Command South at Baku, who had flown to Moscow believing he was coming for routine staff conferences. But there was nothing routine about this one. Before coming to Moscow seven years earlier as First Deputy, Kozlov himself had commanded at Baku, and the man who now sat reading Plan Suvorov owed his promotion to Kozlov’s influence.

  Across from these two sat the other pair, also engrossed. Nearest to the marshal was a man whose loyalty and involvement would be paramount if Suvorov was ever to succeed: the Deputy Head of the GRU, the Soviet armed forces’ intelligence branch. Constantly at loggerheads with its bigger rival, the KGB, the GRU was responsible for all military intelligence at home and abroad, counterintelligence, and internal security within the armed forces. More important for Plan Suvorov, the GRU controlled the Special Forces, the Spetsnaz, whose involvement at the start of Suvorov—if it ever went ahead—would be crucial. It was the Spetsnaz who in the winter of 1979 had flown into Kabul airport, stormed the presidential palace, assassinated the Afghan president, and installed the Soviet puppet Babrak Karmal, who had promptly issued a back-dated appeal to Soviet forces to enter the country and quell the “disturbances.”

  Kozlov had chosen the Deputy because the head of the GRU was an old KGB man foisted on the General Staff, and no one had any doubt that he constantly scuttled back to his pals in the KGB with any tidbit he could gather to the detriment of the High Command. The GRU man had driven across Moscow from the GRU building just north of the Central Airfield.

  Beyond the GRU man sat another, who had come from his headquarters in the northern suburbs and whose men would be vital for Suvorov—the Deputy Commander of the Vozdyshna-Desantnye Voiska or Air Assault Force, the paratroopers of the VDV who would have to drop onto a dozen cities named in Suvorov and secure them for the following air bridge.

  There was no need at this point to bring in the Air Defense of the Homeland, the Voiska PVO, since the U.S.S.R. was not about to be invaded; nor the Strategic Rockets Forces, since rockets would not be necessary. As for Motor/Rifles, Artillery, and Armor, the High Command South had enough for the job.

  The GRU man finished the file and looked up. He seemed about to speak but the marshal raised a hand and they both sat silent until the other three had finished. The session had started three hours earlier, when all four had read a shortened version of Kaminsky’s original oil report. The grimness with which they had noted its conclusions and forecasts was underscored by the fact that in the intervening-twelve months several of those forecasts had come true.

  There were already cutbacks in oil allocations; some maneuvers had had to be “rescheduled”—canceled— through lack of gasoline. The promised nuclear power plants had not reopened, the Siberian fields were still producing little more than usual, and the Arctic exploration was still a shambles for lack of technology, skilled manpower, and funds. Glasnost and perestroika and press conferences and exhortations from the Politburo were all very well, but making Russia efficient was going to take a lot more than that.

  After a brief discussion of the oil report, Kozlov had handed out four files, one to each. This was Plan Suvorov, prepared over nine months since the previous November by Major General Zemskov. The marshal had sat on Suvorov for a further three months, until he estimated the situation south of their borders had reached a point likely to make his subordinate officers more susceptible to the boldness of the plan. Now they had finished and looked up expectantly. None wanted to be the first to speak.

  “All right,” said Marshal Kozlov carefully. “Comments?”

  “Well,” ventured the Deputy Chief of Staff, “it would certainly give us a source of crude oil sufficient to bring us well into the first half of the next century.”

  “That is the end game,” said Kozlov. “What about feasibility?” He glanced at the man from High Command South.

  “The invasion and the conquest—no problem,” said the four-star general from Baku. “The plan is brilliant from that point of view. Initial resistance could be crushed easily enough. How we’d rule the bastards after that ... They’re crazies, of course. ... We’d have to use extremely harsh measures.”

  “That could be arranged,” said Kozlov smoothly.

  “We’d have to use ethnic Russian troops,” said the paratrooper. “We use them anyway, with Ukrainians. I think we all know we couldn’t trust our divisions from the Moslem republics to do the job.”

  There was a growl of assent. The GRU man looked up.

  “I sometimes wonder if we can any longer use the Moslem divisions for anything. Which is another reason I like Plan Suvorov. It would enable us to stop the spread of Islamic Fundamentalism seeping into our southern republics. Wipe out the source. My people in the South report that in the event of war we should probably not rely on our Moslem divisions to fight at all.”

  The general from Baku did not even dispute it.

  “Bloody wogs,” he growled. “They’re getting worse all the time. Instead of defending the south, I’m spending half my time quelling religious riots in Tashkent, Samarkand, and Ashkhabad. I’d love to hit the bloody Party of Allah right at home.”

  “So,” summed up Marshal Kozlov, “we have three plusses. It’s feasible because of the long and exposed border and the chaos down there, it would get us our oil for half a century, and we could shaft the Fundamentalist preachers once and for all. Anything against ...?”

  “What about Western reaction?” asked the paratrooper general. “The Americans could trigger World War Three over this.”

  “I don’t think so,” countered the GRU man, who had more experience of the West than any of them, having studied it for years. “American politicians are deeply subject to public opinion, and for most Americans today anything that happens to the Iranians can’t be bad enough. That’s how the broad masses of Americans see it.”

  All four men knew the recent history of Iran well enough. After the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini and an interregnum of bitter political infighting in Teheran, the succession had passed to the bloodstained Islamic judge Khalkhali, last seen gloating over American bodies recovered from the desert after the abortive attempt to rescue the hostages of the U.S. embassy.

  Khalkhali had sought to protect his fragile ascendancy by instigating another reign of terror inside Iran, using the dreaded Patrols of Blood, the Gasht-e-Sarallah. Finally, as the most violent of these Revolutionary Guards threatened to go out of his control, he exported them abroad to conduct a series of terrorist atrocities against American citizens and assets across the Middle East and Europe, a campaign that had occupied most of the previous six months.

  By the time the five Soviet soldiers were meeting to consider the invasion and occupation of Iran, Khalkhali was hated by the population of Iran, who had finally had enough of Holy Terror, and by the West.

  “I think,” resumed the GRU man, “that if we hanged Khalkhali, the American public would donate the rope. Washington might be outraged if we went in, but the congressmen and senators would hear the word from back home and advise the Presiden
t to back off. And don’t forget we’re supposed to be buddy-buddies with the Yankees these days.”

  There was a rumble of amusement from around the table, in which Kozlov joined.

  “Then where’s the opposition going to come from?” he asked.

  “I believe,” said the general of the GRU, “that it wouldn’t come from Washington, if we presented America with a fait accompli. But I think it will come from Novaya Ploshchad; the man from Stavropol will turn it down flat.”

  Novaya Ploshchad, or New Square, is the Moscow home of the Central Committee building, and the mention of Stavropol was a not-too-flattering reference to the General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, who came from there.

  The five soldiers nodded gloomily. The GRU man pressed his point.

  “We all know that ever since that damned Cormack became the great Russian pop star at Vnukovo twelve months ago, teams from both Defense Ministries have been working out details for a big arms cutback treaty. Gorbachev flies to America in two weeks to try and clinch it, so he can liberate enough resources to develop our domestic oil industry. So long as he believes he can get our oil by that route, why should he shaft his beloved treaty with Cormack by giving us the green light to invade Iran?”

  “And if he gets his treaty, will the Central Committee ratify it?” asked the general from Baku.

  “He owns the Central Committee now,” said Kozlov. “These last two years, almost all the opposition has been pruned away.”

  It was on that pessimistic but resigned note that the conference ended. The copies of Plan Suvorov were collected and locked in the marshal’s safe, and the generals returned to their postings, prepared to stay silent, to watch and to wait.

  Two weeks later Cyrus Miller also found himself in conference, although with a single man, a friend and colleague of many years. He and Melville Scanlon went back to the Korean War, when the young Scanlon was a feisty entrepreneur out of Galveston with his meager assets sunk in a few small tankers.

  Miller had had a contract to supply and deliver his new jet fuel to the U.S. Air Force, delivery to be effected to the dockside in Japan where the Navy tankers would take it over and run it to beleaguered South Korea. He gave Scanlon the contract and the man had done wonders, running his rust-buckets around through the Panama Canal, picking up the AVTUR in California, and shipping it across the Pacific. By using the same ships to bring in crude and feedstock from Texas before changing cargoes and heading for Japan, Scanlon had kept his ships in freight all the way and Miller had got ample feedstock to convert into AVTUR. Three tanker crews had gone down in the Pacific but no questions were asked, and both men had made a great deal of money before Miller was eventually obliged to license his know-how to the majors.

  Scanlon had gone on to become a bulk petroleum commodity broker and shipper, buying and transporting consignments of crude all over the world, mainly out of the Persian Gulf to America. After 1981, Scanlon had taken a pasting when the Saudis insisted that all their cargoes out of the Gulf should be carried in Arab-flag ships, a policy they were really able to enforce only in the movement of participation crude—i.e., that bit which belonged to the producing country rather than the producing oil company.

  But it had been precisely the participation crude that Scanlon had been carrying across to America for the Saudis, and he had been squeezed out, forced to sell or lease his tankers to the Saudis and Kuwaitis at unattractive prices. He had survived, but he had no love for Saudi Arabia. Still, he had some tankers left which plied the route from the Gulf to the United States, mainly carrying Aramco crude, which managed to escape the Arab-flag-only demand.

  Miller was standing at his favorite window staring down at the sprawl of Houston beneath him. It gave him a godlike feeling to be so high above the rest of humanity. On the other side of the room Scanlon leaned back in his leather club chair and tapped the Dixon oil report, which he had just finished. Like Miller, he knew that Gulf crude had just hit $20 a barrel.

  “I agree with you, old friend. There is no way the U.S. of A. should ever become dependent for its very life on these bastards. What the hell does Washington think it’s up to? They blind up there?”

  “There’ll be no help from Washington, Mel,” said Miller calmly. “You want to change things in this life, you better do it yourself. We’ve all learned that the hard way.”

  Mel Scanlon produced a handkerchief and mopped his brow. Despite the air conditioning in the office, he always had a tendency to sweat. Unlike Miller he favored the traditional Texan rig—Stetson hat, bolo tie, Navajo tie clasp and belt buckle, and high-heeled boots. The pity was he hardly had the figure of a cattleman, being short and portly; but behind his good-ole-boy image he concealed an astute brain.

  “Don’t see how you can change the location of these vast reserves,” he huffed. “The Hasa oil fields are in Saudi Arabia, and that’s a fact.”

  “No, not their geographic location. But the political control of them,” said Miller, “and therefore the ability to dictate the price of Saudi and thus world oil.”

  “Political control? You mean to another bunch of Ay-rabs?”

  “No, to us,” said Miller. “To the United States of America. If we’re to survive, we have to control the price of world oil, pegging it at a price we can afford, and that means controlling the government in Riyadh. This nightmare of being at the beck and call of a bunch of goatherds has gone on long enough. It’s got to be changed and Washington won’t do it. But this might.”

  He picked up a sheaf of papers from his desk, neatly bound between stiff paper covers that bore no label. Scanlon’s face puckered.

  “Not another report, Cy,” he protested.

  “Read it,” urged Miller. “Improve your mind.”

  Scanlon sighed and flicked open the file. The title page read simply:

  THE DESTRUCTION AND FALL OF THE HOUSE OF SA’UD

  “Holy shit,” said Scanlon.

  “No,” said Miller calmly. “Holy Terror. Read on.”

  Islam: The religion of Islam was established through the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed around A.D. 622 and today encompasses between 800 million and 1 billion people. Unlike Christianity it has no consecrated priests; its religious leaders are laymen respected for their moral or intellectual qualities. The doctrines of Mohammed are laid down in the Koran.

  Sects: Ninety percent of Moslems are of the Sunni (orthodox) branch. The most important minority is the Shi’ah (partisan) sect. The crucial difference is that the Sunnis follow the recorded statements of the Prophet, known as the Hadith (traditions), while the Shi’ites follow and accord divine infallibility to whoever is their current leader, or Imam. The strongholds of Shi’ism are Iran (93 percent) and Iraq (55 percent). Six percent of Saudi Arabians are Shi’ites, a persecuted, hate-filled minority whose leader is in hiding and who work mainly around the Hasa oil fields.

  Fundamentalism: While Sunni fundamentalists do exist, the true home of fundamentalism is within the Shi’ah sect. This sect-within-a-sect predicates absolute adherence to the Koran as interpreted by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, who has not been replaced.

  Hezb Allah: Within Iran, the true and ultimate fundamentalist creed is contained within the army of fanatics who style themselves the Party of God, or Hezb Allah. Elsewhere, fundamentalists operate under different names, but for the purposes of this report, Hezb Allah will do.

  Aims and Creeds: The basic philosophy is that all of Islam should be brought back to, and eventually all the world brought to, the submission to the will of Allah interpreted by and demanded by Khomeini. On that road there are a number of prerequisites, three of which are of interest: All existing Moslem governments are illegitimate because they are not founded on unconditional submission to Allah—i.e., Khomeini; any coexistence between Hezb Allah and a secular Moslem government is inconceivable; it is the divine duty of Hezb Allah to punish with death all wrongdoers against Islam throughout the world, but especially heretics within Islam.

  Methods
: The Hezb Allah has long decreed that in accomplishing this last aim there shall be no mercy, no compassion, no pity, no restraint, and no flinching—even to the point of self-martyrdom. They call this Holy Terror.

  Proposal: To inspire, rally, activate, organize, and assist the Shi’ah zealots to massacre the six hundred leading and controlling members of the House of Sa’ud, thus destroying the dynasty and with it the government in Riyadh, which would then be replaced by a princeling prepared to accept an ongoing American military occupation of the Hasa fields and peg the price of crude at a level “suggested” by the U.S.A.

  “Who the hell wrote this?” asked Scanlon as he put down the report, of which he had read only the first half.

  “A man I’ve been using as a consultant these past twelve months,” said Miller. “Do you want to meet him?”

  “He’s here?”

  “Outside. He arrived ten minutes ago.”

  “Sure,” said Scanlon. “Let’s take a look at this maniac.”

  “In a moment,” said Miller.

  The Cormack family, long before Professor John Cormack left academe to enter politics as a congressman from the state of Connecticut, had always had a summer vacation home on the island of Nantucket. He had come there first as a young teacher with his new bride thirty years earlier, before Nantucket became fashionable like Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod, and had been entranced by the clean-air simplicity of life there.

  Lying due east of Martha’s Vineyard, off the Massachusetts coast, Nantucket then had its traditional fishing village, its Indian burial ground, its bracing winds and golden beaches, a few vacation homes, and not much else. Land was available and the young couple had scrimped and saved to purchase a four-acre plot at Shawkemo, along the strand from Children’s Beach and on the edge of the near-landlocked lagoon called simply the Harbor. There John Cormack had built his frame house, clad in overlapping weathered-gray boards, with wooden shingles on the roof and rough-hewn furniture, hooked rugs, and patchwork quilts inside.