There were already cutbacks in oil allocations; some maneuvers had had to be “rescheduled”-canceled- through lack of gasoline. The promised nuclear power plants had not reopened, the Siberian fields were still producing little more than usual, and the Arctic exploration was still a shambles for lack of technology, skilled manpower, and funds. Glasnost and perestroika and press conferences and exhortations from the Politburo were all very well, but making Russia efficient was going to take a lot more than that.
After a brief discussion of the oil report, Kozlov had handed out four files, one to each. This was Plan Suvorov, prepared over nine months since the previous November by Major General Zemskov. The marshal had sat on Suvorov for a further three months, until he estimated the situation south of their borders had reached a point likely to make his subordinate officers more susceptible to the boldness of the plan. Now they had finished and looked up expectantly. None wanted to be the first to speak.
“All right,” said Marshal Kozlov carefully. “Comments?”
“Well,” ventured the Deputy Chief of Staff, “it would certainly give us a source of crude oil sufficient to bring us well into the first half of the next century.”
“That is the end game,” said Kozlov. “What about feasibility?” He glanced at the man from High Command South.
“The invasion and the conquest-no problem,” said the four-star general from Baku. “The plan is brilliant from that point of view. Initial resistance could be crushed easily enough. How we’d rule the bastards after that… They’re crazies, of course… We’d have to use extremely harsh measures.”
“That could be arranged,” said Kozlov smoothly.
“We’d have to use ethnic Russian troops,” said the paratrooper. “We use them anyway, with Ukrainians. I think we all know we couldn’t trust our divisions from the Moslem republics to do the job.”
There was a growl of assent. The GRU man looked up.
“I sometimes wonder if we can any longer use the Moslem divisions for anything. Which is another reason I like Plan Suvorov. It would enable us to stop the spread of Islamic Fundamentalism seeping into our southern republics. Wipe out the source. My people in the South report that in the event of war we should probably not rely on our Moslem divisions to fight at all.”
The general from Baku did not even dispute it.
“Bloody wogs,” he growled. “They’re getting worse all the time. Instead of defending the south, I’m spending half my time quelling religious riots in Tashkent, Samarkand, and Ashkhabad. I’d love to hit the bloody Party of Allah right at home.”
“So,” summed up Marshal Kozlov, “we have three plusses. It’s feasible because of the long and exposed border and the chaos down there, it would get us our oil for half a century, and we could shaft the Fundamentalist preachers once and for all. Anything against…?”
“What about Western reaction?” asked the paratrooper general. “The Americans could trigger World War Three over this.”
“I don’t think so,” countered the GRU man, who had more experience of the West than any of them, having studied it for years. “American politicians are deeply subject to public opinion, and for most Americans today anything that happens to the Iranians can’t be bad enough. That’s how the broad masses of Americans see it.”
All four men knew the recent history of Iran well enough. After the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini and an interregnum of bitter political infighting in Teheran, the succession had passed to the bloodstained Islamic judge Khalkhali, last seen gloating over American bodies recovered from the desert after the abortive attempt to rescue the hostages of the U.S. embassy.
Khalkhali had sought to protect his fragile ascendancy by instigating another reign of terror inside Iran, using the dreaded Patrols of Blood, the Gasht-e-Sarallah. Finally, as the most violent of these Revolutionary Guards threatened to go out of his control, he exported them abroad to conduct a series of terrorist atrocities against American citizens and assets across the Middle East and Europe, a campaign that had occupied most of the previous six months.
By the time the five Soviet soldiers were meeting to consider the invasion and occupation of Iran, Khalkhali was hated by the population of Iran, who had finally had enough of Holy Terror, and by the West.
“I think,” resumed the GRU man, “that if we hanged Khalkhali, the American public would donate the rope. Washington might be outraged if we went in, but the congressmen and senators would hear the word from back home and advise the President to back off. And don’t forget we’re supposed to be buddy-buddies with the Yankees these days.”
There was a rumble of amusement from around the table, in which Kozlov joined.
“Then where’s the opposition going to come from?” he asked.
“I believe,” said the general of the GRU, “that it wouldn’t come from Washington, if we presented America with a fait accompli. But I think it will come from Novaya Ploshchad; the man from Stavropol will turn it down flat.”
Novaya Ploshchad, or New Square, is the Moscow home of the Central Committee building, and the mention of Stavropol was a not-too-flattering reference to the General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, who came from there.
The five soldiers nodded gloomily. The GRU man pressed his point.
“We all know that ever since that damned Cormack became the great Russian pop star at Vnukovo twelve months ago, teams from both Defense Ministries have been working out details for a big arms cutback treaty. Gorbachev flies to America in two weeks to try and clinch it, so he can liberate enough resources to develop our domestic oil industry. So long as he believes he can get our oil by that route, why should he shaft his beloved treaty with Cormack by giving us the green light to invade Iran?”
“And if he gets his treaty, will the Central Committee ratify it?” asked the general from Baku.
“He owns the Central Committee now,” said Kozlov. “These last two years, almost all the opposition has been pruned away.”
It was on that pessimistic but resigned note that the conference ended. The copies of Plan Suvorov were collected and locked in the marshal’s safe, and the generals returned to their postings, prepared to stay silent, to watch and to wait.
Two weeks later Cyrus Miller also found himself in conference, although with a single man, a friend and colleague of many years. He and Melville Scanlon went back to the Korean War, when the young Scanlon was a feisty entrepreneur out of Galveston with his meager assets sunk in a few small tankers.
Miller had had a contract to supply and deliver his new jet fuel to the U.S. Air Force, delivery to be effected to the dockside in Japan where the Navy tankers would take it over and run it to beleaguered South Korea. He gave Scanlon the contract and the man had done wonders, running his rust-buckets around through the Panama Canal, picking up the AVTUR in California, and shipping it across the Pacific. By using the same ships to bring in crude and feedstock from Texas before changing cargoes and heading for Japan, Scanlon had kept his ships in freight all the way and Miller had got ample feedstock to convert into AVTUR. Three tanker crews had gone down in the Pacific but no questions were asked, and both men had made a great deal of money before Miller was eventually obliged to license his know-how to the majors.
Scanlon had gone on to become a bulk petroleum commodity broker and shipper, buying and transporting consignments of crude all over the world, mainly out of the Persian Gulf to America. After 1981, Scanlon had taken a pasting when the Saudis insisted that all their cargoes out of the Gulf should be carried in Arab-flag ships, a policy they were really able to enforce only in the movement of participation crude-i.e., that bit which belonged to the producing country rather than the producing oil company.