Trans-Siberian Express (6 page)

From the beginning he had insisted on using the old family name. Alex had long since stopped correcting him.

“Who is ‘they’?” he had asked innocently, but by then it was a pose. He had been drawn in, had begun to piece things together like a detective trying to unravel a mystery. At first, he had tried to characterize it as merely an intellectual exercise, a scientific pursuit of truth. Then it all came together, and the information had cascaded into his consciousness like molten lava, covering all doubts. He knew! The old bastard was going to die, but he was going to take along with him a few million Chinese, Chinks as he called them. This was not the dream of a wild visionary. It was the will of Viktor Moiseyevich Dimitrov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Alex shivered lightly as he opened a medical book. But he couldn’t concentrate. Mrs. Valentinov had closed her eyes, perhaps on the verge of sleep. Alex watched her. She looked so innocent, virginal. But the image of Dimitrov kept returning, keeping him from pleasanter thoughts.

“It must be settled once and for all,” Dimitrov had said. And the President of the United States and that self-proclaimed genius of a Secretary of State. Did they actually believe he had meant to achieve a nonviolent solution? How little they knew of Dimitrov. How little they knew of the Russians.

THE
call had come in from the director of the Institute, routinely, almost casually.

“We’ve been invited to be present at the signing of the new research bill,” the director had said. “The usual political show. Frankly, it’s a lousy bill. But every little bit helps.”

At first, Alex had tried to decline, but it was made quite clear that this was a command performance. Actually, most civil servants might have considered it a plum, to be in the ritual photograph of the doctors standing behind the President as he signed the bill. But Alex had never enjoyed such occasions.

About thirty senior men from the various Institutes had driven downtown in an agency bus.

The East Room had been converted to an auditorium, complete with podium and microphones. It was, Alex had thought, hardly a bill warranting such fanfare and the President himself seemed halting and preoccupied as he recited a series of platitudes about the “necessity of unlocking the secrets of man’s destroyers.” Then the President had signed the bill and they all adjourned across the marbled vestibule to the Green Room for coffee and cakes.

A receiving line had formed and Alex had taken his place obediently in line.

“Dr. Alex Cousins,” an aide next to the President announced and he had found himself facing the tall, clear-eyed man. He felt the pressure of a strong handshake and watched the smile break evenly as the eyes narrowed.

“Dr. Cousins,” the President had replied, and then, in a whisper, “Would you please stay on?” He was still smiling, and looked so casual that Alex glanced over his shoulder, thinking that the remark was directed at someone behind him.

“I must see you later. Make some excuse to hang back,” the President whispered again, noting Alex’s confusion. He felt his heart begin to quicken its pace. Was he hearing things? The President turned away quickly and stretched out his hand to the man next in line as Alex moved toward the coffee cups. His hand shook as he lifted one and he quickly put it down. There must be some mistake, he had thought, although the President’s conspiratorial manner had been obvious. He put his shaking hands in his pockets, annoyed by his sudden lack of control.

“I promised my wife I’d pick something up for her at Garfinckel’s,” he told one of his colleagues. “I’ll get a taxi back.”

He hung back as the crowd began to thin and his group began to file downstairs. Watching them, he reached over to pick a little cake from a paper doily on the table when a tap on his shoulder startled him.

“Follow me,” a tall man said. Alex popped the cake into his mouth and followed. The President was already gone; he had left the room as soon as the receiving line had finished. The tall man suddenly stopped, waved Alex into a small elevator, and stepped in after him. Motors whirred and in a few seconds the elevator door opened again and the man led him to a thick white door, knocked softly, then admitted him without waiting for a response.

He found himself in a cheerful, quite comfortable living room, obviously the President’s private quarters. On a piano in a corner, directly in his field of vision, stood a forest of family photographs. The President stood up, grabbing Alex by the forearm and directing him to face a man who was sitting quietly in a wing chair. It was the Secretary of State.

“Dr. Cousins. This is Secretary Carlyle.”

“Mr. Secretary,” Alex mumbled.

Secretary Carlyle nodded. The President directed Alex to a couch and sat down beside him.

“You’ve got to believe we’re all a little touched in the head,” the President began. “All this hocus-pocus. All this subterfuge.”

“Well, it is a bit out of the ordinary,” Alex said, feeling surprisingly calm. He appreciated the President’s attempt to put him at ease.

“I assure you, Dr. Cousins, that your visit here is purely professional,” the President said.

Alex searched the two faces before him for signs of the weakness that accompanies leukemia.

“Neither of us,” the President said, reading Alex’s thoughts. “Thank God.”

Alex remained silent, watching the President fidget, uncross his legs and stand up. He walked toward a table and picked up a heavy large envelope, which he tossed on the couch next to Alex.

“The patient’s records,” the President said. Alex reached over for it instinctively. “Not yet,” the President said gently, looking toward his Secretary of State, who raised his head and began to speak.

“The balance of foreign affairs is as tenuous as life itself,” Secretary Carlyle said. He seemed tired, his voice strained, betraying fatigue. He removed his glasses and wiped them clear with a handkerchief, his pale blue eyes squinting into Alex’s face. “We reach agreements, sign treaties, most of which are only as good as the man in power at the moment.” He paused. The President squirmed beside him.

“I’ve just come back from Russia,” Secretary Carlyle said. The statement had the quality of a revelation which, indeed, it was. Alex had not read of any such trip in the Washington papers.

“I didn’t know,” he said innocently, thinking that perhaps he had overlooked it. He was, after all, locked into his own occupations, his research, his writings for journals. Politics, foreign affairs, were unimportant to him and what he knew was sopped up with the morning coffee and the idle chatter of colleagues at lunch. He was indifferent, as Janice had charged, to most things outside the intense, all-absorbing orbit of his own medical pursuits.

“It has been the most secret operation since Kissinger went to China,” the President pointed out. “And probably under the oddest set of circumstances in the history of foreign affairs.”

“Without boring you with the gritty details of global geopolitics, Dr. Cousins,” Secretary Carlyle said, “the fact is that our carefully wrought policy of détente with the Russians is now in serious danger. Détente is the underpinning of everything we have striven for in the past few years. It represents one of the last hopes of mankind to move backward from the brink of nuclear annihilation.” Secretary Carlyle’s eyes seemed to grow wide with despair. “I know that sounds a bit frightening, but you must accept that statement. The danger is acute. Our intelligence has revealed that now there are men in positions of power in the Soviet Union who would like to carry out the final act of Lenin’s revolution—global hegemony.”

What has all this got to do with me? Alex wondered, looking at the large envelope beside him on the couch. He had heard enough about Lenin’s revolution as a boy.

“When you are dealing with an oligarchy,” Secretary Carlyle continued, “your position is far more vulnerable than when you are dealing with a single ruler. You cannot predict the dynamics of a small group interacting with each other. It is actually easier to deal with a dictator.”

“Few understand it,” the President interrupted. “You make a deal with one man, who represents the group, then you wonder how long the group will support the deal.”

“In a nutshell, Dr. Cousins,” Secretary Carlyle said, “the concept of détente rests in the hands of a single man—Viktor Moiseyevich Dimitrov, General Secretary of the Communist Party, one of the sixteen members of the Politburo. He is its architect and, within the Politburo, the guiding spirit.” Secretary Carlyle paused and rewiped his glasses, replacing them with a one-handed gesture. “It is no secret that our policy, by the very nature of the democratic process, is one of reaction. The Soviets always make the first move. We react. They move again. We react again. Dimitrov has apparently managed to consolidate a great deal of power within the Politburo. He has the most dominant, persuasive personality; he keeps the others frightened and divided and has convinced them that their greatest leverage lies in pursuing a policy of détente. To the Soviets, China is the real enemy. The United States can wait. But it is in China where the problem lies. The Chinese will never bend until the Russians give back most of the land they took from them in the past. And then there is the vital ideological question: Who shall lead the revolution?”

As Alex listened, he could recall his grandfather talking contemptuously about the “Chinks” and their sneaky ways. He thought he understood what Secretary Carlyle was trying to say.

“The Russians have been trying to dominate the Chinese since the seventeenth century,” the Secretary continued. “You know that the Russians are the most notorious racial bigots in the world. For years, they have treated the Chinese as vassals, and from the Chinese point of view, the Russians still control great pieces of China. There have been pitched battles along the five-thousand-mile border. Today, hundreds of thousands of men face each other across these borders, and missiles with nuclear warheads are poised to strike in either direction.”

“It is a powder keg,” the President said. “At the moment, the Russians have the advantage of range. They can send their missiles deep into China. They can knock out major cities, bases, ports, while the Chinese missiles cannot yet reach beyond the cities of Eastern Siberia. The land mass in that part of the world is incredible. The Russians could lose all of Asian Siberia through nuclear destruction and still have a huge population. Their big cities are concentrated far to the west. The Chinese, on the other hand, have vast populations within easy reach of Soviet missiles.”

“Under that kind of pressure,” Secretary Carlyle continued, “one would think that the Chinese might work for some kind of détente with the Russians. The fact is, the Chinese are not to be intimidated by words. Mao himself publicly expressed the opinion that nuclear war would still leave the Chinese with more manpower than the Soviets, enough to reproduce and eventually swallow the Russians, even if it takes another thousand years.”

“Ghoulish,” Alex mumbled. At the mention of Siberia, his heartbeat had quickened. Was it merely nostalgia or did he feel some strange genetic pull, as his grandfather had always claimed he would.

“There are those in the Politburo,” Secretary Carlyle said, “who might opt for a quick strike now, a massive blow. They do not intend to occupy China. Their gamble is that, after the destruction, the Chinese would turn against the Maoists and turn over the rebuilding of China to Russian-oriented revolutionaries. Then China would become what it was always meant to be in Russia’s eyes—a puppet state, like Outer Mongolia, like Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany.”

“Now, one would think,” the President said, “that the United States would be happy to stand by while the two great superpowers of the Communist world bludgeon themselves to death. Not at all. Our own scientific people have told us that a huge nuclear strike in either direction would mean immense nuclear fallout, certainly over Alaska and parts of Canada, and very likely over the continental United States. The odd thing is, with the prevailing configuration of winds across the surface of the earth, we would get more fallout than European Russia.”

They had now crossed into Alex’s own field. He was a member of the “Special Task Force on Evaluation of Nuclear Destruction,” which studied the projected kill potential of radiation fallout from dirty bombs. It would destroy the blood as quickly and ruthlessly as any form of leukemia. But these studies had always been an unemotional exercise in probabilities, a game of bureaucrats. Alex had attended sessions of the Task Force for ten years, evaluating kill-ratios, radiation intensity, the effect on the human machine. But it had only been theoretical, make-work, time away from his basic research. He watched the two men in the quiet room, the family pictures on the piano, the pleasant afternoon light through the tall windows. Faintly, from the distance, he could hear the rumble of cars and the occasional honk of a horn.

“So you see,” Secretary Carlyle said. Alex seemed to have missed something. Had his attention strayed? “It all boils down to time. In time the Chinese will develop a nuclear capability to reach into the cities of European Russia, complicating Soviet strategy. And Mao’s death, of course, has a great deal of impact on the situation. He was one of the most implacable opponents of Stalin, and of the Russian brand of Communism. Now that he’s dead, some experts think the Chinese might come back into the fold, good little Communists under Russian control.

“Now we are faced with a new question of time,” the President said. “It is no secret that Dimitrov is committed to détente with us. He is also committed, apparently, to a more moderate stance toward the Chinese. Considering all the dangers and possibilities, his is the approach we favor. Dimitrov, Dr. Cousins, is our man in the Kremlin and he will be meeting in approximately seven weeks with the Politburo”—The President cleared his throat—“to recommend immediate negotiation with the Chinese to resolve all differences.”

“Is that what we want?” Alex said thoughtfully. He had always assumed the opposite.