The Cardinal of the Kremlin - By Tom Clancy Page 0,215

change that no one could agree on. It was like turning a ship to a new course, he thought, but knowing that the rudder might break if you did so. Continuing in the same path would allow the ship to plow on into what? Where was the Soviet Union heading? They didn't even know that. But to change course meant risk, and if the rudder broke-if the Party lost its ascendancy-then there would be only chaos. That was a choice that no rational man would wish to face, but it was a choice whose necessity no rational man could deny.

We don't even know what our country is doing, Narmonov thought to himself. For at least the past eight years all figures on economic performance had been false in one way or another, each compounding itself on the next until the economic forecasts generated by the GOSPLAN bureaucracy were as fictitious as the list of Stalin's virtues. The ship he commanded was running deeper and deeper into an enveloping fog of lies told by functionaries whose careers would be destroyed by the truth. That was how he spoke of it at the weekly Politburo meetings. Forty years of rosy goals and predictions had merely plotted a course on a meaningless chart. Even the Potitburo itself didn't know the state of the Soviet Union-something the West hardly suspected.

The alternative? That was the rub, wasn't it? In his darker moments, Narmonov wondered if he or anyone else could really change things. The goal of his entire political life had been to achieve the power that he now held, and only now did he fully understand how circumscribed that power was, All the way up the ladder of his career he'd noted things that had to change, never fully appreciating how difficult that would be. The power he wielded wasn't the same as Stalin's had been. His more immediate predecessors had seen to that. Now the Soviet Union wasn't so much a ship to be guided, as a huge bureaucratic spring that absorbed and dissipated energy and vibrated only to its own inefficient frequency. Unless that changed the West was racing into a new industrial age while the Soviet Union still could not feed itself, China was adopting the economic lessons of Japan, and in two generations might become the world's third economy: a billion people with a strong, driving economy, right on our border, hungry for land, and with a racial hatred of all Russians that could make Hitler's fascist legions seem like a flock of football hooligans. That was a strategic threat to his country that made the nuclear weapons of America and NATO shrivel to insignificance-and still the Party bureaucracy didn't see that it had to change or risk being the agent of its own doom! Someone has to try, and that someone is me. But in order to try, he first had to survive himself, survive long enough to communicate his vision of national goals, first to the Party, then to the people-or perhaps the other way around? Neither would be easy. The Party had its ways, resistant to change, and the people, the narod, no longer gave a moment's thought to what the Party and its leader said to them. That was the amusing part. The West-the enemies of his nation-held him in higher esteem than his own countrymen.

And what does that mean? he asked himself. If they are enemies, does their favor mean that I am proceeding on the right path-right for whom? Narmonov wondered if the American President were as lonely as he. But before facing that impossible task, he still had the day-to-day tactical problem of personal survival. Even now, even at the hands of his trusted colleague. Narmonov sighed. It was a very Russian sound.

"So, Ilya, what will you do?" he asked a man who could not commit an act of treason more heinous than his daughter's.

"I will support you if it means my disgrace. My Svetlana will have to face the consequences of her action." Vaneyev sat upright and wiped his eyes. He looked like a man about to face a firing squad, assembling his manhood for one last act of defiance.

"I may have to denounce you myself," Narmonov said. "I will understand, Andrushka," Vaneyev replied, his voice laden with dignity.

"I would prefer not to do this. I need you, Ilya. I need your counsel. If I can save your place, I will."

"I can ask for no more than that." It was time to