The Sum of All Fears.pdf - Delta Force

fending off rocks with a pole . . . ? How apt, how apt indeed. Narmonov and his
country were being swept along by overwhelming forces of history, somewhere down
that river was an immense cataract, a falls that could destroy everything . . .
but he was too busy with the pole and the rocks to look so far ahead. That was
what being a political tactician meant. He devoted all his creative energy to
day-to-day survival, and was losing sight of the next week . . . even the day
after tomorrow . . .
'Andrey Il'ych, you are growing thin,' Oleg Kirilovich Kadishev observed from
his leather seat.
'The walking is good for my heart,' the President replied wryly.
'Then perhaps you will join our Olympic team?'
Narmonov stopped for a moment. 'It would be nice indeed to compete merely
against foreigners. They think I am brilliant. Alas, our own people know
better.'
'What can I do to help my president?'
'I need your help, the help of those on the right.'
It was Kadishev's turn to smile. The press – Western as well as Soviet – never
got that straight. The LEFT wing in the Soviet Union was that of the Communist
hard-liners. For over eighty years reform in that country had always come from
the right. All the men executed by Stalin for wanting to allow the merest bit of
personal freedom had always been denounced as Right-Deviationists. But
self-styled progressives in the West were always on the political left, and they
called their reactionary enemies 'conservatives' and generally identified them
as being on the political RIGHT, It seemed too great a stretch of imagination
for Western journalists to adjust their ideological polarity to a different
political reality. The newly-liberated Soviet journalists had merely aped their
Western colleagues and used the foreign descriptions to muddle what was already
a chaotic political scene. The same was true of 'progressive' Western
politicians, of course, who were championing so many of the experiments of the
Soviet Union in their own countries – all the experiments which had been taken
to the limit and proven to be something worse than mere failures. Perhaps the
blackest humor available in all the world was the carping from leftist elements
in the West, some of whom were already observing that the backward Russians had
failed because they had proven unable to covert socialism into a humanistic
government – whereas advanced Western governments could accomplish just that (of
course, Karl Marx himself had said that, hadn't he?). Such people were, Kadishev
thought with a bemused shake of his head, no less idealistic than the members of
the first Revolutionary Soviets, and just as addle-brained. The Russians had
merely taken the revolutionary ideals to their logical limits, and found there
only emptiness and disaster. Now that they were turning back – a move that
called for political and moral courage such as the world had rarely seen – the
West still didn't understand what was happening! Khrushchev was right all along,
the parliamentarian thought. Politicians are the same all over the world.
Mostly idiots.
'Andrey Il'ych, we do not always agree on methods, but we have always agreed on
goals. I know you are having trouble with our friends on the other side.'
'And with your side,' President Narmonov pointed out more sharply than he should