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FORTY-FOUR

The poshed, command model Kamov Ka-25 helicopter hurried along about one hundred and fifty meters above the undulating steppe toward Voronezh. It might almost as well have been at 3,000 meters, because General Serafim Petrovich Gurenko wasn't giving the snowbound landscape much attention now. In two days of hopping from base to base, he'd already seen and heard all he needed to. This morning it was time to return to Moscow.

That the roads were plugged with snow was bad enough. But in the Soviet Union, the railroads were far more important than highways, and on them too, almost nothing moved. Trains were nearly buried by drifts, visible mainly where the winds had scoured the snow away. Snowplows chuffed and pushed so slowly that their sooty coal smoke formed no plume, but simply rose up, then spread, to settle on and around them. Most were not rotary plows, but pushed and punched their way behind tall, V-shaped blades. When they came to a grade cut, they hunkered, virtually stalled, for the cuts were drifted full, the depth of the snow equalling the depth of the cut, be it three meters or six.

Military traffic was utterly stopped—supplies, troop trains, all of it. And there was little sense of urgency. Urgency comes with purpose, desire, and there was little of that beyond the purpose and desire to survive. In the cities they might riot, but the time-honored peasant rule was tighten your belt, wait, persist. And on the collective or in the city, those whose purpose reached beyond simple survival were mostly ignored, unless they had authority, and even authority was heeded mainly until it was out of sight.

Gurenko's eyes paused on a village, one of many on the steppe. It was the coal smoke that had caught his attention, pooled over the low buildings by the frigid inversion layer. Snow had blown across the open plain until it met some obstruction or depression; there it had been dumped by the wind eddies. Thus, beneath its smoke, a village appeared as little more than a complex pattern of drifts and scour holes, with walls and roofs showing mainly on the windward sides.

By now the peasants would have dug, tunneled where necessary, to the shed to feed and milk their family cow. But the collective's livestock would still be waiting, hungry and freezing, in their lean-to shelters.

Gurenko had not visited the rangelands of Kazakhstan; that had been out of his way. But the conditions there would be worse. The death toll of cattle and sheep could only be guessed until spring uncovered them, but it would be bad. How bad depended on how many had found their way to shelter, or been driven there when the storm warnings were broadcast. No doubt many herdsmen had died too, caught by blinding blizzard, unable to find their way to safety.

Ahead, low hills appeared now, and patches of scrubby woods. Voronezh would soon be in sight. There he would transfer to something faster than this machine, fly to Moscow, and do what had to be done. Or try to. For the storm, and this bitter cold that Pavlenko had brought upon them, had forced him to look, and to see more surely, how deeply his country had foundered these last few years. Till now, he'd equivocated, rationalized. Now it was time to place his life on the line.

***

Marshall Premier First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Oleg Stepanovich Pavlenko walked down the wide and polished corridor noticing neither its grandeur nor its beauty. He was not much given to aesthetics. Nor did he notice the ever-present guards standing stiffly at intervals along the polished hardwood wall panels, their AKM rifles at present arms.

He had seen the reports, from every republic, every oblast. No one was doing anything! No one but the army! They were all waiting for someone to do it for them; their God maybe! Waiting for spring to come! By God, they should be out there with their shovels, with tea spoons if that was all they had, clearing the railroads! He knew these damned people; they wanted him to do it for them!

Well, he had done it for them. He did not remember the names of the exact places, but his technologists knew. Nor had he asked the concurrence of the others; now he would simply tell them. He was tired of that puking Predtechensky, who wished always to argue; and Makarov, who always nodded but who, behind his back, whispered and plotted; and Goncharov, who seemed to be turning against him lately....

Today he had taken the irreversible step. Today they would either overthrow him or they would get on their bellies. And tomorrow he would begin making a nation of those treacherous and willful minorities, and of the disobedient, bull-headed Russian people who could so easily say yes, then turn around and do the opposite.

He was the only one who had any sense of history, of destiny. The first since Comrade Stalin. The rest of them, one after the other, had been nothing but apparatchiks.

His aide opened the door for him, held it, and Pavlenko stepped through into the council room. The others were there ahead of him. A haze of cigarette smoke was already forming. He nodded curtly and took his place at the head of the burnished Circassian walnut table.

His hawk eyes swept the congregated Politburo. Three were there besides the members: Bogoslovsky from the Transport Ministry, a whiner; Morozov of the Armed Forces Inspectorate, who'd grown surly of late; and Feldstein of the newly reconstituted OGPU. Being a Jew by birth, Feldstein was vulnerable to certain prejudices, thus his loyalty was more reliable.

They sat there with each his own trivial business to press. In a minute he would tell them what he had ordered, and they would forget all about what they'd wanted to say. His eyes moved to the clock on the wall opposite him: 0906 hours. It would be happening just about now! Leering, he rapped his gavel on its ceramic plate and called the meeting to order.

***

When the president went to bed, he'd plunged deeply into sleep. It was less than an hour and a half later, at 0116 hours, that the phone drew him unwillingly awake. He fumbled the receiver from the cradle.

"This is the president."

"Mr. President, this is Jumper. A heavy quake has hit the San Andreas Fault, actually two of them almost simultaneously, at 7.7 and 7.3 on the Richter Scale. The first reports are that San Bernardino's in bad shape, and San Francisco's taken a lot of damage. L.A.'s taken some too."

Jesus Christ! Haugen found himself thinking, let it be natural. But it couldn't be, not two at once.

"A lighter one hit Seattle at almost the same time," Jumper continued. "It was still fairly strong—it read 5.3. The epicenter was where the Juan de Fuca plate rides beneath the North American. All three were artificially triggered."

"Right. Jumper, is Bulavin with you?"

"He's in the debrief room; we were almost finished when I got the call."

"Call Gupta right away and get him on a security conference call with you and me and Bulavin. I'm going down to my office right now."

He disconnected and got off his bed. Lois was staring at him from her own. "Pavlenko's given us an earthquake, Babe," he said. "Three of them in fact. Be glad the White House isn't in San Bernardino."

Frank and Will were the Secret Service men on duty in the Stair Hall. They followed the bathrobed, slippered president down the stairs. "Big quake in California," he told them. The rest of the way he was silently blessing the nation's luck: Seattle's and Tacoma's especially. The geologists had worried for years that enormous stress had built up along the Juan de Fuca subduction zone—it was either that or subduction had been unusually smooth. The fear had been that when it let go, the quake might be close to the theoretical maximum of nine-plus on the Richter Scale! With an actual reading of 5.3, apparently it had been smooth.

There was an exasperating but actually short wait to get Gupta tied in on the call. The NSA office at the Nevada Test Center had phoned him as soon as they'd read the quakes, and he'd already been on his way to his office at Fort Meade when Cromwell had phoned. When the general called the White House again, the president could see Bulavin sitting beside him.

"Colonel Schubert," Haugen said, "it's 0938 hours in Moscow now, right?"

"Yes, Mr. President."

"Then the Politburo's likely to be in meeting now?"

"Yes sir. Almost certainly, and for at least half an hour to come."

"Jim," the president said, "do you have a detailed diagram of the Kremlin?"

Gupta's eyebrows raised. "I'm sure we do, sir; in the computer."

"It's there," said Cromwell.

"How detailed is it? Would it show the building where the Politburo meets?"

"It shows every building there," Cromwell answered, "with floor plans."

"How accurate is it? And how fine is the coordinate system?"

"Sir, it's part of our computer-generated planetary coordinate system, so it's as fine as you want it to be. As for accuracy, it's probably within inches; a couple of feet at most."

"Jim, how accurately can you place a Tesla energy release? Or let's make that an energy extraction, to minimize damage."

Gupta's mouth formed an oh—he realized what the president had in mind. "Either one can be centered within a ten meter radius anywhere on Earth," he replied. "Without ranging."

"And what's the smallest radius of effect you can give me?"

"It depends on the effect you want. The temperature within the heat extraction sphere will be virtually at absolute zero at the moment of extraction—say minus 458° Fahrenheit. So there's going to be a damned sharp temperature gradient around it that will suck heat out of the surroundings. But if the extraction sphere is entirely enclosed within a certain room or rooms, it won't have a lot of effect outside those walls.

"The sphere needs to be large enough to account for the error of location and to include the entire room, or almost the entire room. So the sphere is sure to intrude into other spaces—a hall probably, and one or more adjacent rooms. Within the sphere, it'll be as if the walls aren't there, as far as the temperature effect is concerned. But a twenty-meter extraction sphere won't have much effect outside of four or five rooms, assuming they're large."

The president's intent eyes moved to Schubert/Bulavin, sitting beside the general. "Colonel Schubert," he said, "can you locate, on the general's diagram, the actual conference room where the Politburo meets?"

Bulavin's eyes seemed to gleam at him through the CRT. "Definitely, Mr. President."

"How long, Dr. Gupta, does it take your people to set coordinates on a scalar resonance transmitter and do a heat extraction?"

"The people are on alert there now. They can do the job within five minutes of a call."

The President of the United States stared silently at nothing for maybe three or four suspended seconds. "All right," he said. "I want you three to get your information together and instant-freeze the Politburo. You need to work fast, while they're still in conference. I'll notify Nevada and authorize it. Is there anything else I need to do on this?"

Gupta shook his head. "No sir. I'll order a target zone of twenty-five meters, to make sure we cover any possible error."

"Let me know when it's done," Haugen said. "I'll be here in my office."

"Yes sir."

Haugen cut the connection, then his fingers called the Nevada NSA code to the screen and he rapped it on his keyboard. The man at the other end looked sober as hell. The authorization procedure took less then thirty seconds, and when it was done, the president slumped back in his chair to wait for Gupta's call. It didn't occur to him to make himself coffee.

Hopefully the order he'd just given had nipped World War Three in the bud. But if the Politburo had already adjourned, he may have ensured it instead.

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Framed