The Devil's Alternative

At the other end, Rudin listened, asked two brief questions, rapped out a string of orders, and put the phone down. He turned to Vassili Petrov, who was with him, leaning forward, alert and worried.

“He’s dead,” said Rudin in disbelief. “Not a heart attack. Shot. Yuri Ivanenko. Someone has just assassinated the chairman of the KGB.”

Beyond the windows the clock in the tower above Savior Gate chimed midnight, and a sleeping world began to move slowly toward war.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE KGB has always ostensibly been answerable to the Soviet Council of Ministers. In practice, it answers to the Politburo.

The everyday working of the KGB, the appointment of every officer within it, every promotion, and the rigorous indoctrination of every staffer—all are supervised by the Politburo through the Party Organizations Section of the Central Committee. At every stage of the career of every KGB man, he is watched, informed on, and reported on; even the watchdogs of the Soviet Union are never themselves free of watching. Thus it is unlikely that this most pervasive and powerful of control machines can ever run out of control.

In the wake of the assassination of Yuri Ivanenko, it was Vassili Petrov who took command of the cover-up operation, which Maxim Rudin directly and personally ordered.

Over the telephone Rudin had ordered Colonel Kukushkin to bring the two-car cavalcade straight back to Moscow by road, stopping neither for food, drink, nor sleep, driving through the night, refueling the Zil bearing Ivanenko’s corpse with jerry-cans, brought to the car by the Chaika and always out of sight of passersby.

On arrival at the outskirts of Moscow, the two cars were directed straight to the Politburo’s own private clinic at Kuntsevo, where the corpse with the shattered head was quietly buried amid the pine forest within the clinic perimeter, in an unmarked grave. The burial party was of Ivanenko’s own bodyguards, all of whom were then placed under house arrest at one of the Kremlin’s own villas in the forest. The guard detail on these men was drawn not from the KGB but from the Kremlin palace guard.

Only Colonel Kukushkin was not held incommunicado. He was summoned to Petrov’s private office in the Central Committee Building.

The colonel was a frightened man, and when he left Petrov’s office he was little less so. Petrov gave him one chance to save his career and his life: he was put in charge of the cover-up operation.

At the Kuntsevo clinic he organized the closure of one entire ward and brought fresh KGB men from Dzerzhinsky Square to mount guard on it. Two KGB doctors were transferred to Kuntsevo and put in charge of the patient in the closed ward, a patient who was in fact an empty bed. No one else was allowed in, but the two doctors, knowing only enough to be badly frightened, ferried all the equipment and medicaments into the closed ward that would be needed for the treatment of a heart attack. Within twenty-four hours, save for the closed ward in the secret clinic off the road from Moscow to Minsk, Yuri Ivanenko had ceased to exist.

At this early stage, only one other man was let into the secret. Among Ivanenko’s six deputies, all with their offices close to his on the third floor of KGB Center, one was his official deputy as chairman of the KGB. Petrov summoned General Konstantin Abrassov to his office and informed him of what had happened, a piece of information that shook the general as nothing in a thirty-year career in secret police work had done. Inevitably he agreed to continue the masquerade.

In the October Hospital in Kiev, the dead man’s mother was surrounded by local KGB men and continued to receive daily written messages of comfort from her son.

Finally, the three workmen on the annex to the October Hospital who had discovered a hunting rifle and night-sight when they came to work the morning after the shooting were removed with their families to one of the camps in Mordovia, and two detectives were flown in from Moscow to investigate an act of hooliganism. Colonel Kukushkin was with them. The story they were given was that the shot had been fired at the moving car of a local Party official; it had passed through the windshield and been recovered from the upholstery. The real bullet, recovered from the KGB guard’s shoulder and well washed, was presented to them. They were told to trace and identify the hooligans in conditions of complete secrecy. Somewhat perplexed and much frustrated, they proceeded to try. Work on the annex was stopped, the half-finished building sealed off, and all the forensic equipment they could ask for supplied. The only thing they did not get was a true explanation.

When the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle of deception was in place, Petrov reported personally to Rudin. To the old chief fell the worst task, that of informing the Politburo of what had really happened.

The private report of Dr. Myron Fletcher of the Agriculture Department to President William Matthews two days later was all and more than the ad hoc committee formed under the personal auspices of the President could have wished for. Not only had the benign weather brought North America a bumper crop in all areas of grain and cereals; it had broken existing records. Even with probable requirements for domestic consumption taken care of, even with existing aid levels to the poor countries of the world maintained, the surplus would nudge sixty million tons for the combined harvest of the United States and Canada.

“Mr. President, you’ve got it,” said Stanislaw Poklewski. “You can buy that surplus any time you wish at July’s price. Bearing in mind the progress at the Castletown talks, the House Appropriations Committee will not stand in your way.”

“I should hope not,” said the President. “If we succeed at Castletown, the reductions in defense expenditures will more than compensate for the commercial losses on the grains. What about the Soviet crop?”

“We’re working on it,” said Bob Benson. “The Condors are sweeping right across the Soviet Union, and our analysts are working out the yields of harvested grain, region by region. We should have a report for you in a week. We can correlate that with reports from our people on the ground over there, and give a pretty accurate figure—to within five percent, anyway.”

“As soon as you can,” said President Matthews. “I need to know the exact Soviet position in every area. That includes the Politburo reaction to their own grain harvest. I need to know their strengths and their weaknesses. Please get them for me, Bob.”

No one in the Ukraine that winter would be likely to forget the sweeps by the KGB and militia against those in whom the slightest hint of nationalist sentiment could be detected.

While Colonel Kukushkin’s two detectives carefully interviewed the pedestrians in Sverdlov Street the night Ivanenko’s mother had been run down, meticulously took to pieces the stolen car that had performed the hit-and-run job on the old lady, and pored over the rifle, the image intensifier, and the area surrounding the hospital annex, General Abrassov went for the nationalists.

Hundreds were detained in Kiev, Ternopol, Lvov, Kanev, Rovno, Zhitomir, and Vinnitsa. The local KGB, supported by teams from Moscow, carried out the interrogations, ostensibly concerned with sporadic outbreaks of hooliganism such as the mugging of the KGB plainclothes man in August in Ternopol. Some of the senior interrogators were permitted to know their inquiries also concerned the firing of a shot in Kiev in late October, but no more.

In the seedy Lvov working-class district of Levandivka that November, David Lazareff and Lev Mishkin strolled through the snowy streets during one of their rare meetings. Because the fathers of both had been tak

en away to the camps, they knew time would run out for them eventually also. The word Jew was stamped on the identity card of each, as on those of every one of the Soviet Union’s three million Jews. Sooner or later, the spotlight of the KGB must swing away from the nationalists to the Jews. Nothing ever changes that much in the Soviet Union.

“I posted the card to Andriy Drach yesterday, confirming the success of the first objective,” said Mishkin. “How are things with you?”

“So far, so good,” said Lazareff. “Perhaps things will ease off soon.”

“Not this time, I think,” said Mishkin. “We have to make our break soon if we are going to at all. The ports are out. It has to be by air. Same place next week. I’ll see what I can discover about the airport.”

Far away to the north of them an S.A.S. jumbo jet thundered on its polar route from Stockholm to Tokyo. Among its first-class passengers it bore Captain Thor Larsen toward his new command.