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Before agreeing to Cormack?s strange request, Mikhail Gorbachev had consulted with the State Television experts. They had been as surprised as he, but pointed out that, first, the American would be understood by only a tiny fraction of Soviet citizens until the translation came through (and that could be sanitized if he went too far) and, second, that the American?s speech could be held on an eight- or ten-second loop so that transmission (both sound and vision) would actu-ally take place a few seconds after delivery; and if he really went too far, there could be a sudden breakdown in transmis-sion. Finally it was agreed that if the General Secretary wished to effect such a breakdown, he had but to scratch his chin with a forefinger and the technicians would do the rest. This could not apply to the three American TV crews or the BBC from Britain, but that would not matter, as their mate-rial would never reach the Soviet people.

Ending his oration with an expression of good will toward the American people and his abiding hope for peace between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., Mikhail Gorbachev turned toward his guest. John Cormack rose. The Russian gestured to the lectern and the microphone and made way, seating himself to one side of the center spot. The President stepped behind the microphone. He had no notes in view. He just lifted his head, stared straight at the eye of the Soviet TV camera, and began to speak.

?Men, women, and children of the U.S.S.R., listen to me.?

In his office Marshal Kozlov jerked forward in his chair, staring intently at the screen. On the podium Mikhail Gorbachev?s eyebrows flickered once before he regained his composure. In a booth behind the Soviet camera a young man who could pass for a Harvard graduate put his hand over a microphone and muttered a question to a senior civil servant beside him, who shook his head. For John Cormack was not speaking in English at all; he was speaking in fluent Russian.

Although not a Russian speaker, he had before coming to the U.S.S.R. memorized in the privacy of his bedroom in the White House a five-hundred-word speech in Russian, re-hearsing himself through tapes and speech-coaching until he could deliver the speech with total fluency and perfect accent while not understanding a word of the language. Even for a former Ivy League professor it was a remarkable feat.

?Fifty years ago this, your country, your beloved Moth-erland, was invaded in war. Your menfolk fought and died as soldiers or lived like wolves in their own forests. Your women and children dwelt in cellars and fed off scraps. Mil-lions perished. Your land was devastated. Although this never happened to my country, I give you my word I can understand how much you must hate and fear war.

?For forty-five years we both, Russians and Ameri-cans, have built up walls between ourselves, convincing our-selves that the other would be the next aggressor. And we have built up mountains?mountains of steel, of guns, of tanks, of ships and planes and bombs. And the walls of lies have been built ever higher to justify the mountains of steel. There are those who say we need these weapons because one day they will be needed so that we can destroy each other.

? Noh, ya skazhu: mi po-idyom drugim putyom.?

There was an almost audible gasp from the audience at Vnukovo. In saying ?But I say, we will/must go another way,? President Cormack had borrowed a phrase from Lenin known to every schoolchild in the U.S.S.R. In Russian theword put means a road, path, way, or course to be followed. He then continued the play on words by reverting to the meaning of ?road.?

?I refer to the road of gradual disarmament and of peace. We have only one planet to live on, and a beautiful planet. We can either live on it together or die on it together.?

The door of Marshal Kozlov?s office opened quietly and then closed. An officer in his early fifties, another Kozlovprot?g? and the ace of his planning staff, stood by the door and silently watched the screen in the corner. The American President was finishing.

?It will not be an easy road. There will be rocks and holes. But at its end lies peace with security for both of us. For if we each have enough weapons to defend ourselves, but not enough to attack each other, and if each one knows this and is allowed to verify it, then we could pass on to our chil-dren and grandchildren a world that is truly freeof that awful fear that we have known these past fifty years. If you will walk down that road with me, then I on behalf of the people of America will walk it with you. And on this, Mikhail Sergeevich, I give you my hand.?

President Cormack turned to Secretary Gorbachev and held out his right hand. Although himself an expert at public relations, the Russian had no choice but to rise and extend his hand. Then, with a broad grin, he bear-hugged the American with his left arm.

The Russians are a people capable of great paranoia and xenophobia but also capable of great emotionalism. It was the airport workers who broke the silence first. There was an outbreak of ardent clapping, then the cheering started, and in a few seconds the fur shapkas started flying through the air as the civilians, normally drilled to perfection, went out of control. The Militiamen came next; gripping their rifles with their left hands in the at-ease position, they started waving their red-banded gray caps by the peak as they cheered.

The KGB troops glanced at their commander beside the podium: General Vladimir Kryuchkov, Chairman of the KGB. Uncertain what to do as the Politburo stood up, he, too, rose to clap with the rest. The Border Guards took this as a cue (wrongly, as it turned out) and followed the Militia-men in cheering. Somewhere across five time zones, 80 mil-lion Soviet men and women were doing something similar.

? Chort voz?mi...?Marshal Kozlov reached for the remote control and snapped off the TV set.

?Our beloved General Secretary,? murmured Major General Zemskov smoothly. The marshal nodded grimly several times. First the dire forebodings of the Kaminsky re-port, and now this. He rose, came around his desk, and took the report off the table.

?You are to take this, and you are to read it,? he said. ?It is classified Top Secret and it stays that way. There are only two copies in existence and I retain the other one. You are to pay particular attention to what Kaminsky says in his Conclusion.?

Zemskov nodded. He judged from the marshal?s grim demeanor that there was more to it than reading a report. He had been a mere colonel two years before, when, on a visit to a Command Post exercise in East Germany, Marshal Kozlov had noticed him.

The exercise had involved maneuvers between the GSFG, the Group of Soviet Forces Germany, on the one hand and the East Germans? National People?s Army on the other. The Germans had been pretending to be the invading Americans, and in previous instances had mauled their So-viet brothers-in-arms. This time the Russians had run rings around them, and the planning had all been due to Zemskov. As soon as he arrived in the top job at Frunze Street, Mar-shal Kozlov had sent for the brilliant planner and attached him to his own staff. Now he led the younger man to the wall map.

?When you have finished, you will prepare what ap-pears to be a Special Contingency Plan. In truth this SCP will be a minutely detailed plan, down to the last man, gun, and bullet, for the military invasion and occupation of a for-eign country. It may take up to twelve months.?

Major General Zemskov raised his eyebrows.

?Surely not so long, Comrade Marshal. I have at my disposal　

?You have at your disposal nothing but your own eyes, hands, and brain. You will consult no one else, confer with no one else. Every piece of information you need will be obtained by a subterfuge. You will work alone, without sup-port. It will take months and there will be just one copy at the end.?

?I see. And the country ...　

The marshal tapped the map. ?Here. One day this land must belong to us.?

?

The Pan-Global Building in Houston, capital city of the American oil industry and, some say, of the world?s oil busi-ness, was the headquarters of the Pan-Global Oil Corpora-tion, the twenty-eighth-largest oil company in the United States and ninth-largest in Houston. With total assets of $3.25 billion, Pan-Global was topped only by Shell, Tenneco, Conoco, Enron, Coastal, Texas Eastern, Transco, and Pennzoil. But in one way it was different from all the others: It was still owned and controlled by its veteran founder. There were stockholders and board members, but the founder retained the control and no one could trammel his power within his own corporation.

Twelve hours after Marshal Kozlov had briefed his planning officer, and eight time zones to the west of Moscow, Cyrus V. Miller stood at the ceiling-to-floor plate-glass win-dow of his penthouse office suite and stared toward the west. Four miles away, through the haze of a late November after-noon, the Transco Tower stared back. Cyrus Miller stood a while longer, then walked back across the deep-pile carpet to his desk and buried himself again in the report that lay on it.

Forty years earlier, when he had begun to prosper, Miller had learned that information was power. To know what was going on and, more important, what was going to happen gave a man more power than political office or even money. That was when he had initiated within his growing corporation a Research and Statistics Division, staffing it with the brightest and sharpest of the analysts from his coun-try?s universities. With the coming of the computer age he had stacked hisR andS Division with the latest data banks, in which was stored a vast compendium of information about the oil industry and other industries, commercial needs, na-tional economic performance, market trends, scientific ad-vances, and people?hundreds of thousands of people from every walk of life who might, by some conceivable chance, one day be useful to him.

The report before him came from Dixon, a young grad-uate of Texas State with a penetrating intellect, whom he had hired a decade earlier and who had grown with the company. For all that he paid him, Miller mused, the analyst was not seeking to reassure him with the document on his desk. But he appreciated that. He went back for the fifth time to Dix-on?sconclusion.

?

The bottom line is that the Free World is simply running out of oil. At the moment this remains unperceived by the broad mass of the American people, due to successive governments? determination to maintain the fiction that the present ?cheap oil? situation can continue in perpetuity.

The proof of the ?running-out? claim lies in the table of global oil reserves enclosed earlier. Out of forty-one oil-producing nations today, only ten have known reserves beyond the thirty-year mark. Even this picture is optimistic. Those thirty years assume contin-ued production at present levels. The fact is that con-sumption, and therefore extraction, is increasing in any event, and as the short-reserve producers will run out first, the extraction from the remainder will increase to make up the shortfall. Twenty years would be a safer period to assume run-out in all but ten producing na-tions.

There is simply no way that alternative energy sources can or will come to the rescue in time. For the next three decades it is going to be oil or economic death for the Free World.

The American position is heading fast for catas-trophe. During the period when the controlling OPEC nations hiked the crude price from $2 a barrel to $40, the U.S. government sensibly gave every incentive to our oil industry to explore, discover, extract, and refine the maximum possible from domestic resources. Since the self-destruction of OPEC and the Saudi production hike of 1985, Washington has bathed in artificially cheap oil from the Middle East, leaving the domestic industry to wither on the vine. This shortsightedness is going to produce a terrible harvest.

The American response to cheap oil has been in-creased demand, higher crude and product imports, and shrinking domestic production, a total cutback in exploration, wholesale refinery closings, and an unem-ployment slump worse than 1932. Even if we started a crash program now, with massive investment, and large-scale federal incentives, it would take ten years to rebuild the pool of skills, mobilize the machinery, and execute the efforts needed to bring our now-total reli-ance on the Middle East back to manageable propor-tions. So far there is no indication that Washington intends to encourage any such resurgence in national American oil production.

There are three reasons for this?all of them wrong:

(a) New American oil would cost $20 a barrel to find, whereas Saudi/Kuwaiti oil costs 10-15 cents a barrel to produce and $16 a barrel for us to buy. It is assumed this will continue in perpetuity. It won?t.

(b) It is assumed the Arabs and especially the Saudis will go on buying astronomical quantities of U.S. arms, technology, goods, and services for their own social and defense infrastructure, and thus keep on recycling their petrodollars with us. They won?t. Their infrastructure is virtually complete, they cannot even think of anything else to spend the dollars on, and their recent (1986 and 1988) Tornado fighter deals with Britain have pushed us into second place as arms suppliers.

(c) It is assumed that the monarchs who rule the Mideastern kingdoms and sultanates are good and loyal allies who would never turn on us and hike the prices back up again, and who will stay in power forever. Their blatant blackmail of America from 1973 through 1985 shows where their hearts lie; and in an area as un-stable as the Middle East any regime can fall from power before the end of the week.

?

Cyrus Miller glared at the paper. He did not like what he read but he knew it was true. As a domestic producer and refiner of crude oil he had suffered cruelly in the previous four years, and no amount of lobbying in Washington by the oil industry had persuaded Congress to grant oil leases on the Arctic National Wildlife Range in Alaska, the country?s most promising discovery prospect for new oil. He loathed Washington.

He glanced at his watch. Half past four. He pressed a switch on his desk console and across the room a teak panel glided silently sideways to reveal a 26-inch color TV screen. He selected the CNN news channel and caught the headline story of the day.

Air Force One hung over the touchdown area at An-drews Base outside Washington, seemingly suspended in the sky until its seeking wheels gently found the waiting tarmac and it was back on American soil. As it slowed and then turned to taxi back toward the airport buildings, the image was replaced by the face of the gabbling news-caster relating again the story of the presidential speech just before the departure from Moscow twelve hours earlier.

As if to prove the newscaster?s narration, the CNN pro-duction team, with ten minutes to wait until the Boeing came to rest, rescreened the speech President Cormack had made in Russian, with English-language subtitles, the shots of the roaring and cheering airport workers and Militiamen and the image of Mikhail Gorbachev embracing the American leader in an emotional bear hug. Cyrus Miller?s fog-gray eyes did not blink, hiding even in the privacy of his office his hatred for the New England patrician who had unexpectedly stormed into the lead and the presidency twelve months ear-lier and was now moving further toward detente with Russia than even Reagan had dared to do. As President Cormack appeared in the doorway of Air Force One and the strains of ?Hail to the Chief? struck up, Miller contemptuously hit the off button.