The Cardinal of the Kremlin - By Tom Clancy Page 0,116

and blew it, during the Kennedy Administration, Moore thought. But Khrushchev fell, and we had twenty years of Party hacks. Now there may be another chance. You're afraid we might never get another opportunity as good as this one. Well, that's one way to look at it, he admitted to himself.

"Jeff, his position will not be affected any more by extracting our man than by his capture-"

"If they're on to him, why haven't they grabbed him already?" Pelt demanded. "What if you're overreacting?"

"This man has been working for us over thirty years-thirty years! Do you know the risks he's run for us, the information we've gotten from him? Can you appreciate the frustration he's felt the times we ignored his advice? Can you imagine what it's like to live with a death sentence for thirty years? If we abandon the man, what's this country all about?" Moore said with quiet determination. The President was a man who could always be swayed by arguments based on principle.

"And if we topple Narmonov in the process?" Pelt demanded. "What if Alexandrov's clique does take over, and it's back to the bad old days all over again-more tension, more arms races? How do we explain to the American people that we sacrificed this opportunity for the life of one man?"

"For one thing, they'd never know unless somebody leaked it," the DCI replied coldly. "The Russians wouldn't make it all public, and you know that. For another, how would we explain throwing this man away like a used Kleenex?"

"They wouldn't know that either, unless somebody leaked it," Pelt answered in an equally cold voice.

The President stirred. His first instinct had been to put the extraction operation on hold. How could he explain any of this? Either by an act of commission or omission, they were discussing the best way to prevent something unfavorable from happening to America's principal enemy. But you can't even say that in public, the President reflected. If you said out loud that the Russians are our enemy, the papers would throw a fit. The Soviets have thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at us, but we can't risk offending their sensibilities

He remembered his two face-to-face meetings with the man, Andrey Ilych Narmonov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Younger than he was, the President reflected. Their initial conversations had been cautious, each man feeling out the other, looking both for weaknesses and common ground, for advantage and compromise. A man with a mission, a man who probably did wish to change things, the President thought-

But is that a good thing? What if he did decentralize their economy, introduce market forces, give them a little freedom-not much, of course, but enough to get things moving? Quite a few people were warning him about that possibility: Imagine a country with the Soviets' political will, backed up by an economy that could deliver quality goods both in the civilian and military sectors. Would it make the Russian people believe again in their system; would it revive the sense of mission that they'd had in the 1930s? We might be faced with a more dangerous enemy than ever before.

On the other side, he was told that there is no such thing as a little freedom-one could ask Duvalier of Haiti, Marcos of the Philippines, or the ghost of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The momentum of events could bring the Soviet Union out of the dark ages and into the 20th-century era of political thought. It might take a generation, perhaps two, but what if the country did start to evolve into something approaching a liberal state? There was another lesson of history: Liberal democracies don't make war on one another.

Some choice I have, the President thought. I can be remembered as the regressive idiot who reinstated the Cold War in all its grim majesty-or the Pollyanna who expected the leopard to change its spots, only to find that it had grown bigger, sharper fangs. Jesus, he told himself as he stared at his two interlocutors, I'm not thinking about success at all, only the consequences of failure.

That's one area in which America and Russia have paralleled their history-our postwar governments have never lived up to the expectations of our people, have they? I'm the President, I'm supposed to know what the Right Thing is. That's why the people elected me. That's what they're paying me for, God, if they only knew what frauds we all are. We're not talking about how to