The report had come as a shock to him. He had known things in the economy were not working any better since the introduction of perestroika-the restructuring-than before, but as a soldier he had spent his life locked into the military hierarchy, and the military had always had first call on resources, materiel, and technology, enabling them to occupy the only area in Soviet life where quality control could be practiced. The fact that civilians’ hair dryers were lethal and their shoes leaked was not his problem. And now here was a crisis from which not even the military could be exempt. He knew the sting in the tail came in the report’s conclusion. Standing by the window he resumed reading.

CONCLUSION. The prospects that face us are only four and they are all extremely bleak.

1. We can continue our own oil production at present levels in the certainty that we are going to run out in eight years maximum, and then enter the global oil market as a buyer. We would do so at the worst possible moment, just as global oil prices start their remorseless and inevitable climb to impossible levels. To purchase under these conditions even part of our oil needs would use up our entire reserves of hard currency and Siberian gold and diamond earnings.

Nor could we ease our position with barter deals. Over 55 percent of the world’s oil lies in five Middle East countries whose domestic requirements are tiny in relation to their resources, and it is they who will soon rule the roost again. Unfortunately, apart from arms and some raw materials, our Soviet goods have no attraction for the Middle East, so we will not get barter deals for our oil needs. We will have to pay in cold hard cash, and we cannot.

Finally there is the strategic hazard of being dependent on any outside source for our oil, and even more so when one considers the character and historical behavior of the five Middle East states involved.

2. We could repair and update our existing oil production facilities to achieve a higher efficiency and thus lower our consumption without loss of benefit. Our production facilities are obsolete, in general disrepair, and our recovery potential from major reservoirs constantly damaged through excessive daily extraction. We would have to redesign all our extraction fields, refineries, and pipe infrastructure to spin out our oil for an extra decade. We would have to start now, and the resources needed would be astronomical.

3. We could put all our effort into correcting and updating our offshore oil-drilling technology. The Arctic is our most promising area for finding new oil, but the extraction problems are far more formidable even than those in Siberia. No wellhead-to-user pipe infrastructure exists at all and even the exploration program has slipped five years behind schedule. Again, the resources needed would be simply huge.

4. We could return to natural gas, of which, as stated, we have the largest reserves in the world, virtually limitless. But we would have to invest further massive resources in extraction, technology, skilled manpower, pipe infrastructure, and the conversion of hundreds of thousands of plants to gas usage.

Finally, the question must arise: Where would such resources as mentioned in Options 2, 3, and 4 come from? Given the necessity of using our foreign currency to import grain to feed our people, and the Politburo’s commitment to spending the rest for imported high technology, the resources would apparently have to be found internally. And given the Politburo’s further commitment to industrial modernization, their obvious temptation might be to look at the area of military appropriations.

I have the honor to remain, Comrade Marshal,

– Pyotr V. Kaminsky, Major General

Marshal Kozlov swore quietly, closed the dossier, and stared down at the street. The ice flurries had stopped but the wind was still bitter; he could see the tiny pedestrians eight floors down holding their shapkas tight on their heads, ear-muffs down, heads bent, as they hurried along Frunze Street.

It had been almost forty-five years since, as a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant of Motor/Rifles, he had stormed into Berlin under Chuikov and had climbed to the roof of Hitler’s chancellery to tear down the last swastika flag fluttering there. There was even a picture of him doing it in several history books. Since then he had fought his way up through the ranks, step by step, serving in Hungary during the 1956 revolt, on the Ussuri River border with China, on garrison duty in East Germany, then back to Far Eastern Command at Khabarovsk, High Command South at Baku, and thence to the General Staff. He had paid his dues: He had endured the freezing nights in far-off outposts of the empire; he had divorced one wife who refused to follow him, and buried another who died in the Far East. He had seen a daughter married to a mining engineer, not a soldier as he had hoped, and watched a son refuse to join him in the Army. He had spent those forty-five years watching the Soviet Army grow into what he deemed to be the finest fighting force on the planet, dedicated to the defense of the Rodina, the Motherland, and the destruction of her enemies.

Like many a traditionalist he believed that one day those weapons that the toiling masses had worked to provide him and his men would have to be used, and he was damned if any set of circumstances or of men would stultify his beloved Army while he was in charge. He was utterly loyal to the Party-he would not have been where he was had he not been-but if anyone, even the men who now led the Party, thought they could strike billions of rubles off the military budget, then he might have to restructure his loyalty to those men.

The more he thought about the concluding pages of the report in his hand, the more he thought that Kaminsky, smart though he was, had overlooked a possible fifth option. If the Soviet Union could take political control of a ready-made source of ample raw crude oil, a piece of territory presently outside her own borders… if she could import in exclusivity that crude oil at a price she could afford, i.e., dictate… and do so before her own oil ran out…

He laid the report on the conference table and crossed the room to the global map that covered half the wall opposite the windows. He studied it carefully as the minutes ticked away to noon. And always his eye fell on one piece of land. Finally he crossed to the desk, reconnected the intercom, and called his ADC.

“Ask Major General Zemskov to come and see me-now,” he said.

He sat in the high-backed chair behind his desk, picked up the TV remote control, and activated the set on its stand to the left of his desk. Channel One swam into focus, the promised live news broadcast from Vnukovo, the VIP airport outside Moscow.

United States Air Force One stood fully fueled and ready to roll. She was the new Boeing 747 that had superseded the old and time-expired 707’s earlier in the year, and she could get from Moscow back to Washington in one hop, which the old 707’s could never do. Men of the 89th Military Airlift Wing, which guards and maintains the President’s Wing at Andrews Air Force Base, stood around the aircraft just in case any overenthusiastic Russian tried to get close enough to attach something to it or have a peek inside. But the Russians were behaving like perfect gentlemen and had been throughout the three-day visit.

Some yards away from the tip of the airplane’s wing was a podium, dominated by a raised lectern in its center. At the lectern stood the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, bringing his valedictory address to a close. At his side, hatless, his iron-gray hair ruffled by the bitter breeze, sat his visitor, John J. Cormack, President of the United States of America. Ranged on either side of both were the twelve other members of the Politburo.