"Brown, Dale - Warrior Class" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Dale)

"The report has not yet been confirmed, Mr. President," Army General Nikolai Stepashin replied, refilling his coffee cup. "It may not be true. It may be an elaborate hoax, or a security test, or a joke." The general, wearing a civilian suit too big for him and a tie too small, still looked very much like the grizzled field commander that he was. He downed the coffee, his third that morning, but craved more. "But the information in the intercept was so crazy, and the Chancellor's reaction so strong, that I thought it best to pass it along."
"Tell me what this means," Valentin Gennadievich Sen'kov, president of the Russian Federation, said. "Someone please tell me what in hell this means." Sometimes, Sen'kov thought, the more he learned, the less he knew, and he understood even less.
Fifty-two-year-old Valentin Gennadievich Sen'kov was the leader of the Russia All-Fatherland Party, formerly the Liberal Democratic Party under Sen'kov's mentor and friend, President Vitaly Velichko. But when Velichko was killed in the joint American-Ukrainian attack on Moscow following Russia's attempt to reunite its former empire by force, Sen'kov, a for7ner KGB agent and former prime minister, had been named acting president. He had been quickly voted out of office in the national elections that soon followed; his name and that of his party had been so tainted by Velichko's failure that he'd had the name of his political party changed so the Russian people might not recognize it and associate it with past failures. He'd held on to his seat in the Federation Council, the Russian Parliament's upper house, by his very fingernails.
When the reformist government of Boris Yeltsin had failed to lift Russia out of its economic, political, and morale doldrums, Sen'kov and his new Russia All-Fatherland Party had been called upon to support the government and help restore the citizens' confidence in it. Yeltsin had been able to hold on to power only by bringing back Sen'kov, and with him a few vestiges of the old Soviet-style authoritarian govemment. Sen'kov had finally been back in the Kremlin, no
longer an outcast, first as foreign minister and then as prime minister. When Yeltsin, helpless in his alcoholic haze, had been forced to resign in disgrace, Valentin Sen'kov had been chosen by a unanimous vote of Parliament
as acting president. His election, just four months before the U.S. elections, had been a landslide victory for the conservative NeoCommunist Party.
Sen'kov seemed to take over where Velichko had left off, but this time the Russian people had responded positively to his political views and actions. Sen'kov immediately crushed the rebellion in Chechnya; he pledged to modernize Russia's nuclear arsenal; and he resigned his nation from membership in the Council of Europe, the judicial body formed to resolve conflicts between European nations, because the Council had denounced Russia's actions in Chechnya but refused to speak out against the NATO bombing of Bosnia or Serbia. His brand of quiet toughness and conservative, nationalistic ideals resonated well with the Russian people, who were growing tired of seeing their country become nothing more than a very large third-world nation. In the national elections that soon followed, the Russia All-Fatherland Party under Valentin Sen'kov had captured a huge majority in both the Federation Council and the Duma, and he had been elected the new president.
"What is happening? What are they trying to do?" Sen'kov asked himself. "The Americans are actually going to leave Kosovo, leave Bosnia, leave the Balkans, leave NATO, leave Europe?"
"Sir, what it means, if true, is that the United States is imploding-literally as well as figuratively," Stepashin said. Stepashin was the director of the Foreign Intelligence Service. He looked at the other members of the president's Cabinet there for the impromptu meeting: retired Rocket Forces General Viktor Trubnikov, minister of defense; Ivan Filippov, the foreign minister; Sergey Yejsk, aide to the president on national security affairs and secretary of the Security Council; and Colonel-General Valeriy Zhurbenko, the first deputy minister of defense and chief of the general staff. "For years, ever since their president's foreign policy debacles, domestic stag-








nation-and personal indiscretions---the Americans have b&n like ffightened children."
"Is the tap in the German chancellor's office reliableT'President Sen'kov asked.
"As reliable as any microwave tap set up over a week ago," Stepashin replied noncommittally. "The Germans will undoubtedly find it and shut our tap down. They may already have discovered it and are feeding us crap, just so they can watch us have these early-morning meetings and chase our tails around for a day or two. We may spend a few weeks having to sift through mountains of data and thousands of pages of transcribed phone conversations and find out it is all garbage." He thought for a moment, then added, "But usually when a tap is discovered, the chancellor and most of the members of the Cabinet retreat to alternate locations or go on a foreign trip until their offices can be swept. No one has left Bonn, except for the vice chancellor, and he had a meeting scheduled in Brazil for weeks. In fact, the Cabinet has had two unscheduled meetings since President Thorn's call last night. I believe the information to be factual."
"What are you talking about, GeneraIT' National Security Advisor Yejsk asked. "The United States is the most powerful nation on Earth. Their economy is strong, their people are happy, it's a good place to live and invest and emulate. Like Disneyland." He chuckled, then added, "Apparently not like EuroDisney, though."
"Nikki is right," Foreign Minister Ivan Filippov said. "Besides, it's a societal and anthropological fact: the wealthier the nation, the more they tend to withdraw."
"The United States is not going to withdraw from anything," Minister of Defense Trubnikov said. "Withdrawing from peacekeeping duties in Kosovo and Bosnia-what the hell, we were all considering it, even before the death. of Gregor Kazakov. Great Britain and Italy were looking for a graceful way out; the rest of NATO, the French, and the nonaligned nations will not remain behind if the others pull out."
"That leaves Russia and Germany," President Sen'kov said. "The question is, do we want to be in the Balkans? Sergey? What do you think?"
"We have discussed this many times, sir," National Security
Advisor Sergey Yejsk replied. "Despite your predecessor's talk of unity between
Slavic peoples, we have virtually nothing in common with the Serbs or any interest in the civil wars or the breakup of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavs are nothing but murderous animals-they invented the word 'vendetta,' not the Sicilians. The Red Army proportionally lost more soldiers to Yugoslav guerrillas than we did to the Nazis. Marshal Tito was the biggest Thorn in Stalin's side since that smug pig Churchill. We stood behind the Serbs because that stupid bigoted shit Milosevic opposed the Americans and NATO." He paused, then said, "We should get out of the Balkans, too, Mr. President."
"We should stay," Trubnikov said immediately. "The Americans will not leave the Balkans. Macedonia, Slovenia, Bulgaria-they want to make them members of NATO. If we leave, NATO will swarm into Eastern Europe. They'll be knocking on the Kremlin doors before we know it."
"Always the alarmist, eh, Viktor?" Foreign Minister Filippov said with a smile. "We should stay in the Balkans simply because the Americans are leaving. We milk the public relations value for all it's worth, then depart when we can sell that to the world, too. We are staying to keep the warring factions apart; now we're leaving because we have restored peace and stability to the Balkans."
"The problem is, getting out before our forces lose any more soldiers like Gregor Kazakov," Yejsk added. "If we sustain heavy guerrilla losses and then depart, we look like cowards."
"Russia will not flee either Chechnya or the Balkans," Sen'kov said resolutely. "I like the public relations idea best of all. If it is true, and the Americans leave the Balkans, it will be seen as a sign of weakness. We can exploit that. But remaining in the Balkans might be a waste of resources at best and dangerous at worst. After a few months, maybe a year, we depart." He turned to General Zhurbenko. "What about you, ColonelGeneral? You have been rather quiet. These are your men we are talking about."
"I met with Pavel Gregorievich Kazakov, the night the cas-








kets returned to Moscow," he said solemnly. "He was angry because you did not attend the return."
"Pavel Gregorievich," Sen'kov muttered bitterly. "A chip off the old block, except his piece flew in an entirely different direction. We did a profile of the families of the dead soldiers that could attend the service, General. I was advised that it would be politically unpopular for me to attend. The analysis proved correct: Gregor's wife virtually spat on the flag, in front of the other families. It was a very ugly scene. It only heightened whatever power Pavel Gregorievich has in this country."
"I spoke with him at length, and so did my aide," Zhurbenko said. A few of the president's advisors smiled at thatthey were well familiar with some of Major Ivana Vasilev's unique talents and appetites. "Pavel Gregorievich doesn't want power, he wants wealth."
"And he is getting it, I suppose-a hundred drug overdoses a day in Moscow, because of uncontrollable heroin imports by scum like Kazakov," Stepashin said acidly. "A mother will sell her baby for a gram of heroin and a hypodermic syringe. Yet Kazakov jets around the world, to his homes in Kazakhstan, Vietnam, and Venezuela, raking in money as fast as he can. He does not deserve to bear Gregor Mikhailievich's name."
"Did he threaten you? Did he threaten the president?" National Security Advisor YeJsk asked.
"No. He made us an offer," Zhurbenko replied in a quiet voice. "A truly remarkable, unbelievable offer." He had agonized over the decision to tell the president and the Security Council about Kazakov's incredible proposals. He had harbored ideas about trying to manipulate events himself, but decided that was impossible. But if he had the full support of the government as well as the military, it might actually work.
"He says he can sell two and a half billion rubles' worth of oil per day with a pipeline from the Black Sea to Albania." He looked around at the stunned faces in the president's office. "The plans for the pipeline exist, but it has not yet started because of all the political and domestic unrest in southern Europe, primarily Macedonia and Albania. But if the unrest
ceased, or if the various governments turned in Russia's favor, the pipeline project might be accelerated."
"What was he offering, General?" Sen'kov asked in a low voice.