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  Politika

  ( Power Plays - 1 )

  Tom Clancy

  Martin Greenberg

  Jerome Preisler

  The sudden death of Russia's president has thrown the Russian Federation into chaos. Devastating crop failures have left millions in the grip of famine, and an uprising seems inevitable.

  One of Russia's provisional leaders asks the American president for help. But the whole world is watching when a deadly terrorist attack stuns the United States—and evidence points to the Russian government.

  Amidst the turmoil in Russia, American businessman Roger Gordian finds his multinational corporation and its employees in jeopardy. Determined to find those responsible for the attack, he calls upon his crisis control team to interven. But Gordian doesn't realize how far the terrorists will go—and how much he has to lose…

  Tom Clancy, Martin Greenberg, Jerome Preisler

  Politika

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Jerome Preisler for his valuable contribution to the preparation of the manuscript. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Larry Segriff, Denise Little, John Heifers, Robert Youdelman, Esq., Tom Mallon, Esq., the wonderful people at The Putnam Berkley Group, including Phyllis Grann, David Shanks, and Tom Colgan, and Doug Littlejohns, Frank Boosman, Jim Van Verth, Doug Oglesby, the rest of the Politika team, and the other fine folks at Red Storm Entertainment. As always, I would like to thank Robert Gottlieb of the William Morris Agency, my agent and friend. But most important, it is for you, my readers, to determine how successful our collective endeavor has been.

  — Tom Clancy

  ONE

  THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW SEPTEMBER 24, 1999

  Headaches, vodka, and aspirin; aspirin, vodka, and headaches.

  The combination was enough to make anyone reel, President Boris Yeltsin thought, massaging his temple with one hand as he popped three tablets into his mouth with the other.

  He reached for the glass on his desk and took a long drink, then silently began counting to thirty, swishing the vodka in his mouth to dissolve the aspirins.

  Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, swallow. He put down the glass, lowered his head, and pressed his palms into his eyes. And then waited.

  After a little while the pain in his head eased. Not as much as on previous days, however. Not nearly. And he still felt some dizziness. Soon he would have to add another tablet to his home remedy. Four to a swallow. Or perhaps he would experiment. Increase the amount of vodka, chase down the medicine with a good, clean shot. Certainly that would make things more palatable. Still, one had to wonder about certain things. Was it possible to overdose on aspirin and alcohol? And where would it lead? Actually, he already knew that. Perhaps, before it was all over, he would again turn on the television news and see himself dancing foolishly to rock and roll music at a campaign stop, behaving for all the world like some drunken teenager.

  Yeltsin sat there at his desk with his eyes closed, the curtains drawn over his windows to block out the sunlight pouring in over the high east wall of Red Square. He wondered what the headaches, dizziness and early morning drinking said about the general state of his health. Certainly nothing good. And why not be expansive and think about its meaning vis-à-vis the state of the body politic? If, as he believed, the power of an elected president was largely symbolic in the modern world, how might the declining condition of a man who held that position be interpreted? A man who had scarcely had so much as a cold — and never had a drink during the day — in his entire life before taking office was now a man who had lost his appetite for sex but arose from bed each morning with an irresistible lust for his vodka. A man who had already spent too much time under the surgeon’s knife, he thought, absently rubbing the scar left by his last bypass surgery.

  Yeltsin straightened, opened his eyes. The bookcase opposite his desk doubled and trebled in his vision. He took a deep breath, blinking twice, but the room remained unfocused. Dear heaven, he felt ugly. Much of it, he knew, was due to the pressures of dealing with Korsikov and Pedachenko. Especially the latter. He had been infecting the nation with his rhetoric for some time… and the infection had been spreading more rapidly than ever since he’d acquired a televised platform from which to promote his extremist views. What would happen if the situation in the southern agricultural areas worsened? It was one thing for Pedachenko to rail about the corrupting influence of Western dollars, and the threat that he believed NATO — and especially the Founding Act — represented to Russian interests. These were abstractions to his audience. But hunger was another matter. Everyone was capable of understanding it. And it would not be assuaged by calming words from political rivals. Pedachenko was clever and opportunistic. He knew which buttons to push. And there was no escaping his charisma. If the dreadful projections being made about the crop failure were even close to accurate…

  Yeltsin jettisoned the thought before it could complete itself. He capped off the vodka, put it into his bottom drawer. At any minute the lights on his phone would begin to flash. His aides would arrive with their file folders and summary briefings. He would be presented with a multitude of problems, many requiring his immediate attention. Be given documents to read and sign.

  He needed to pull himself together.

  He stretched his legs, pushed back his chair, and stood. The bookshelf swelled in his eyes again. He put his hand on the edge of the desk to steady himself and waited. This time the blurriness didn’t subside. He waited some more, perspiring now, queasy and light-headed. He could hear his heart beating in his ears. The collar of his shirt suddenly seemed much too tight. It was as if all the air pressure had been let out of the room.

  What was wrong with him?

  He reached out for his phone console, thinking he would have to cancel his appointments for the next several hours. He needed to rest.

  But before Yeltsin could push the intercom button, the pain tore through his head in a blinding, jaggedly excruciating white bolt that made him stagger back from the desk, his eyes wide and bulging, his hands flying to his temples as if to keep them from blowing apart. Groaning and terrified, he propelled himself toward the phone, literally dove across the desk for it.

  His fingers were still fumbling for it when the seizures came on. He began helplessly thrashing around on the desktop, then rolled to the floor, his arms flapping with uncontrollable spasms, his hands hooked into claws.

  Yeltsin was already falling into a coma when he was discovered by his secretary ten minutes later.

  Two hours after that, agitated doctors at Michurinsky Hospital pronounced the President of the Russian Federation dead.

  TWO

  SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA OCTOBER 6, 1999

  For the longest time, Roger Gordian had been uncomfortable hearing the word “visionary” precede his name when people talked about him in the media, or introduced him at lectures and business functions. But he’d gradually acknowledged that everybody got labeled and that some labels were more useful than others. Heavyhitters in Congress didn’t make certified visionaries languish in their waiting rooms. Military procurement officials paid closer attention to their ideas than those of someone with a reputation as an ordinary fellow with a little intelligence, a strong work ethic and some old-fashioned, Wisconsin-bred entrepreneurial zeal. There was the way he saw himself, and the way other people saw him, and both had their own sort of validity. He ran with what best served his goals.

  None of which meant Gordian was inclined toward false modesty. He was proud of his success. It had taken him just five years to turn Tech-Electric, a failing electronics firm that he’d bought for a song in 1979, into a leading manufacturer of business and personal compute
r products. By the early eighties his company, rechristened UpLink International, had become a major government contractor specializing in satellite reconnaissance technology. Toward the end of that decade his heavy investment in research and development, and his commitment to designing a complete intelligence system for the expanding military of that era, had resulted in GAPSFREE, the fastest and most accurate recon tech on the worldwide market, and the most advanced guidance system for missiles and precision guided munitions ever devised. And all that was before he’d diversified his holdings…

  Still, you had to keep things in perspective, Gordian thought. Despite twenty years of professional accomplishments, he apparently still didn’t know how to make a marriage work. Or maybe that was something he’d forgotten along the way, as his wife Ashley believed.

  He expelled a long sigh, glancing at the oversized manila envelope that had arrived on his desk along with his usual stack of news dailies. The envelope had been overnighted from the ad firm that was designing his newest prospectus, and doubtless contained preproduction mechanicals for him to review. He would get to that in a while. First, however, there were his black coffee, a blueberry muffin, and the morning paper to go through.

  Gordian took his copy of the New York Times off the pile, separated the International Report from the other sections and scanned the table of contents. Alexander Nordstrum’s guest editorial was on page A36. He chewed a bite of the muffin, took a sip of coffee, set down the cup, carefully wiped his fingers on a napkin, and began flipping through the paper.

  In an interview he’d given to a televised news magazine the previous week, Gordian was asked if he spent his days in some vast electronic control center, surrounded by walls of flickering computer screens, monitoring global events on CNN and the on-line services like a technocratic Big Brother. He’d admitted to being a compulsive newsprint junkie first and foremost, despite his own contribution to — and frequent reliance on — state-of-the-art means of information access and communications. The interviewer shot the camera a skeptical and mildly accusing look, as if to let his audience know Gordian was putting them on. Gordian had known better than to try convincing him otherwise.

  As he turned to Alex’s piece, two pages spilled from the middle of the section onto his lap, lingering there briefly before fluttering to the carpet. Gordian leaned forward to gather them off the floor, almost knocking over his coffee in the process. Then he slipped them back in place. And then he realized he’d inadvertently put them in upside down, and turned them right side up.

  Okaaay, he thought. Talk about seeing oneself in perspective. We can add an utter and abysmal failure to master the subway fold to my list of personal shortcomings.

  It took Gordian another minute or so to finally wrestle the paper into submission. He found Nordstrum’s column midway down the Editorial/Op-Ed page. It read:

  Russia’s Ruling Troika:

  Can the Three-Headed Watchdog Survive Its Own Bite?

  By Alex R. Nordstrum, Jr.

  In the weeks following the sudden death of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, Western observers believed a showdown between opposing political forces to be a near certainty, with many fearing a coup similar to the takeover by old-guard Communist party animals which ended the Gorbachev era in 1991. The crisis, however, was averted — some would say postponed — with the formation of the provisional government currently in place. But does a war within the Kremlin seem any less inevitable now Vladimir Starinov is acting president, and Arkady Pedachenko and Andrei Korsikov have agreed to share power with him until such unspecified time as the state of national emergency is lifted, and a democratic election can be held? Again, there are those in the West who think not — and who see a popular uprising being born in the deep rifts among the three leaders.

  Indeed, the signs are impossible to ignore. While having proven himself a deft political operator, former Vice-President Starinov remains weakened by his close association with Yeltsin, whose popularity had been on the wane among the Russian people. Besieged with problems ranging from critical grain shortages to rampant AIDS and drug epidemics, Starinov has become the focus of growing discontent throughout his nation. Meanwhile, official statements to the contrary, sources in Moscow report that his arch-rival Pedachenko, who heads the nationalist Honor and Soil Party, has been refusing to meet with Starinov for weeks, citing conflicts in their schedules.

  Pedachenko has, in fact, been busy. He has made unusual use of the media to steal the political limelight and urge acceptance of his extremist views, which are unguardedly anti-American and hearken back to the “good old days” of Communist rule. As tensions between Pedachenko and Starinov seem to be leading toward a face-off, Korsikov, an old-style apparatchik, with strong support from Russia’s military, seems content to remain on the sidelines, waiting to see which of them is left standing when the dust settles.

  We can only wonder how this collection of political bedfellows, which has been unable to get beyond bickering over when to sit down together in the same room, can be expected to arrive at a consensus about major issues of national and international policy that will affect Russia’s future relationship with America and other world powers. Amid this tangle of doubt, one thing is clear: the President of the United States must reach out promptly to Starinov, whose Reformist philosophies, dedication to economic reform and strong ties to the West represent the clearest line of continuity with the previous government. Without the credibility he would gain from such support, he is almost sure to become a sacrificial lamb on the altar of Russian politics. Yet the White House has been characteristically indecisive…

  Gordian frowned and put down the paper. Trust his foreign affairs consultant not to pull any punches. An expert in the fields of history, politics, and current affairs, Nordstrum had an uncanny talent for predicting political events through an analysis of the nation’s past, and the past of the personalities involved.

  Not to mention a knack for ruining my mornings, Gordian thought.

  Well, that wasn’t quite fair. The truth was that he’d already gotten Nordstrum’s assessment of the Russian situation straight from his lips… that was, after all, what he paid him for. But it distressed him that Alex had expressed his lack of optimism in such a public forum, given that construction of the new ground station was about to begin in Kaliningrad next month… and especially in light of Starinov’s upcoming trip to Washington.

  Now Gordian raised his coffee to his lips again, realized it had gone cold, and put it down. No great loss; there’d be plenty of fresh cups to drink before the day was over.

  Shaking off his gloom, Gordian reached for his phone file, thinking he’d call Dan Parker for the skinny on how the House was reacting to Starinov’s appeal for agricultural aid. After that he’d confer with Scull and Nimec, get their take on things.

  He snatched the receiver off its cradle.

  It was 9 A.M.; time to get to work.

  THREE

  CAUCASUS REGION NEAR THE CASPIAN SEA, RUSSIA, OCTOBER 10, 1999

  The flour mill was silent.

  In his half century of life, Veli Gazon had grown all too familiar with the monstrous things nature could do when it turned hostile. He had lost two sons in the cholera epidemic just six years ago, his wife in an earthquake two decades earlier, part of his farm in the floods that had swept across the grasslands when the river overflowed its banks. The lines and wrinkles on his face were a record of the hard times he had weathered. The somber depths of his eyes spoke of survival despite bitter loss.

  He was not a man who had a great need for physical comfort, or believed it was anyone’s due. That way of thinking was alien to him; he could not understand it. An Alan tribesman whose people had been cultivating the soil for centuries, he had an inborn belief that it was enough to work and persevere with dignity. To complain, or wish for more, might only bring a curse upon oneself, and provoke the world into another cruel demonstration of its power.

  And yet today, standing here amid
the empty storage bins that had once been filled with wheat; amid the huge, still framework of elevators and conveyors and scouring machines and rollers and sifters…

  Today he felt angry. And scared.

  Very scared.

  He took a long pull on his hand-rolled cigarette, held the smoke in his lungs a moment, and let it gust out his nose. His family had managed the flour mill since the days of Soviet controls and collectives, and assumed full ownership when state factories were sold back to the territories. Combining their resources, Veli, his brother, and their cousins had paid corrupt officials many times the value of the old machinery to purchase it — and somehow, even during the worst of the previous shortages, had kept that machinery running.

  But now… now the mill was silent, shut down, its shipping floor deserted. The rail cars that normally transported the raw wheat from the farms to the mill, and sackfuls of processed flour from the mill to warehouses in the northern regions, sat clustered at the receiving station, their engines cold and dead beneath the gray October sky.

  There was no grain to process.

  Nothing.

  The chyornozyom, the fertile black earth that had nourished the crop through the most devastating of catastrophes, had failed to produce even a meager harvest. In August, when the wheat had come up stunted, some men from the Ministry of Agriculture had arrived from the capital and tested the soil and explained that it was fouled. It had been overfarmed, they said. The rain had poisons in it, they said. But what the bureaucrats had not said was that the overfarming had been ordered by their own ministry back when it would set compulsory production quotas and regulate the distribution of food. What they had not said was that the water had been contaminated by wastes from government chemical and munitions facilities.