Brown, Dale - Independent 01 Read Online Free

over at the president.
                “Sir, Cheyenne Mountain reports one Mark 21C dummy
reentry vehicle impacting at the White Sands Missile Test Range .”
                The
president felt his face flush with excitement. He turned and smiled at the
secretary of defense. “One warhead? Just one?”
                “That’s it,
sir,” Walton said. “And that one warhead was diverted off course and missed its
intended impact point by eight nautical miles. If the warhead had been active,
the fireball would not have extended to the target. Communications says
Armstrong’s after-action report is being received in CIC.”
                The
president shook hands all around, then sat back in the carrier commander’s seat
and sipped coffee.
                “Damn, I
think we’ve got something here. .. .”
     
                 THE KREMLIN, USSR
     
                 Through swirling gusts of snow that
fell outside the triple-paned windows, the Soviet Union’s Minister of Defense
Sergei Leonidovich Czilikov had difficulty seeing even as far as the frozen
Moscow River and the new Varsauskoje Highway that spanned its southern and
northern banks. He watched policemen trying to direct traffic around a minor
collision in the middle of Bakovka Avenue east of the new Kremlin Administrative Center . Another long, severe winter
was coming.
                Czilikov
turned away from the icy scene outside, but things were equally as depressing
and cold inside. Seated around a long oblong oak table in the cavernous office
were the members of the Kollegiya, the Soviet main military council. The
Kollegiya included three deputy ministers of defense, a KGB general, the
commanders of the five branches of the Soviet military, and five generals
representing various support and reserve elements of the military. Fifteen men,
six in business suits with medals and ribbons, the rest in military uniforms,
and not one of them, least of all Czilikov, under the age of sixty. All but
one, the relatively young KGB chief, Lichizev, were Heroes of the Soviet Union .
                They were
surrounded by aides and secretaries in hard metal folding chairs arranged along
the century-old tapestries covering the walls of the room. Two elite Kremlin
guards, each armed with AKSU submachine guns, flanked each heavy oak door
leading into the chamber.
                Everyone in
the large, cold room looked on edge. Czilikov knew what each of them was
expecting. As he moved to the unoccupied head of the conference table, the
hubbub of noise died abruptly away.
                “We must
attack,” Czilikov said. The faces of the fifteen men remained stony, grim.
Mindless cattle, Czilikov thought to himself. The new general secretary had
such a firm stranglehold on these formerly powerful soldiers, Heroes of the Soviet
Union , that most were afraid even to look up from the table. The
spirit of glasnost in general
secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s regime had been squashed.
                “Intelligence
reports are conclusive, tovarishniyes,” Czilikov declared. “Nearly all of the pro-Khomeini factions have been defeated
by the moderates, and the pro-Western government is consolidating control of both
the people and the military. The Alientar government in Iran has promised a return to pre-Khomeini wealth and prosperity for its
people—funded by the Americans, of course. The KGB predicts that the Iranians
will agree to the reopening of air and naval bases and listening posts in Iran in exchange for generous financial assistance. Which means
that arms sales to Iran from the West, which were nothing more than secretive trickles,
may soon flow like vodka. ”
                Czilikov
fixed each of them with an imperious stare. Despite his age, his eyes danced
with the same fire as when he was a young tank commander rolling triumphantly
across Poland in World