Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [115]
Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev came in last of all, walking like the aged peasant he was, his skin drooping on his once manly face. He was approaching eighty years, a number he might meet but would not surpass, by the look of him. That was both good news and bad. There was no telling what thoughts wiggled their way around the inside of his doting brain. He'd been a man of great personal power once—Andropov could remember it plainly enough. He'd been a vigorous man who'd enjoyed walking in the forests to kill elk or even bear—the mighty hunter of wild animals. But not now. He hadn't shot anything in years—except, perhaps, people, at second or third hand. But that didn't make Leonid Ilyich mellow with age. Far from it. The brown eyes were still sly, still looking for treachery, and sometimes finding it where there was none. Under Stalin, that was frequently a death sentence. But not now. Now you'd just be broken, stripped of power, and relegated to a provincial post where you'd die of boredom.
"Good afternoon, comrades," the General Secretary said, as pleasantly as his grumbly voice allowed.
At least there was no obvious bootlicking anymore, every communist courtier jousting with each other to curry favor with the Marxist emperor. You could waste half the meeting with that twaddle, and Andropov had important things to discuss.
Leonid Ilyich had been prebriefed, and after sipping his post-lunch tea, the General Secretary turned his face to the KGB Chairman. "Yuriy Vladimirovich, you have something to discuss with us?"
"Thank you, Comrade General Secretary. Comrades," he began, "something has come up which commands our attention." He waved to Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy, who quickly circulated around the table, handing out copies of the Warsaw Letter.
"What you see is a letter dispatched to Warsaw last week by the Pope of Rome." Each man had a photocopy of the original—some of them spoke Polish—plus an exact translation into literary Russian, complete with footnotes. "I feel that this is a potential political threat to us."
"I have already seen this letter," Alexandrov said from his distant "candidate" seat. In deference to the seniority of the terminally ill Mikhail Suslov, the latter's seat at Brezhnev's left hand (and next to Andropov) was empty, though his place at the table had the same collection of papers as everyone else's—maybe Suslov had read them on his deathbed, and he'd lash out one last time from his waiting niche in the Kremlin wall.
"This is outrageous," Marshal Ustinov said immediately. He was also well into his seventies. "Who does this priest think he is!"
"Well, he is Polish," Andropov reminded his colleagues, "and he feels he has a certain duty to provide his former countrymen with political protection."
"Protection from what?" the Minister of the Interior demanded. "The threat to Poland comes from their own counterrevolutionaries."
"And their own government lacks the balls to deal with them. I told you last year we needed to move in on them," the First Secretary of the Moscow Party reminded the rest.
"And if they resist our move?" the Agricultural Minister inquired from his seat at the far end of the table.
"You may be certain of that," the Foreign Minister thought out loud. "At least politically, they will resist."
"Dmitriy Fedorovich?" Alexandrov directed his question at Marshal Ustinov, who sat there in his military uniform, complete with a square foot of ribbons, and two Hero of the Soviet Union gold stars. He'd won them both for political courage, not on the battlefield, but he was one of the smartest people in the room, having earned his spurs as People's Commissar