Free Red Storm Rising (1986) by Tom Clancy Page A

at a rate of one per month. As you know, complete deactivation of so complex a machine as a missile submarine requires the services of a shipyard—the missile compartment must be physically removed from the body of the vessel—and so these vessels cannot be fully disarmed overnight. However, to make the honesty of our intentions undeniable, we invite the United States to do one of two things:
    “First, we will permit a selected team of six American naval officers to inspect these twenty vessels to verify that their missile tubes have been filled with concrete ballast pending removal of the entire missile rooms from all of the submarines. In return for this, we would require that a comparable inspection visit by an equal number of Soviet officers to American yards would be allowed at a later date to be agreed on.
    “Second, as an alternative should the United States be unwilling to allow reciprocal verification of arms reductions, we will permit another group of six officers to perform this service, these officers to be from a country—or countries—upon which the United States and the Soviet Union can agree within the next thirty days. A team from such neutral countries as Sweden or India would be acceptable in principle to the Soviet Union.
    “Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to put an end to the arms race. I will not repeat all of the flowery rhetoric we’ve all heard over the past two generations. We all know the threat that these ghastly weapons represent to every nation. Let no one ever say again that the government of the Soviet Union has not done its part to reduce the danger of war. Thank you.”
    The room suddenly fell silent but for the sound of motor-driven still cameras. The Western press representatives assigned to their respective Moscow bureaus were among the best in their profession. Uniformly bright, uniformly ambitious, uniformly cynical about what they found in Moscow and the conditions under which they were forced to work, all were stunned to silence.
    “Goddamn,” muttered Flynn after a full ten seconds.
    “One must admire your understatement, old boy,” agreed Reuters correspondent William Calloway. “Wasn’t it your Wilson who spoke of open covenants openly arrived at?”
    “Yeah, my granddad covered that peace conference. Remember how well it worked out?” Flynn grimaced, watching the Foreign Minister depart, smiling at the cameras. “I want to see the handout. Want to ride back with me?”
    “Yes on both.”
    It was a bitterly cold day in Moscow. Snow piles were heaped at the roadsides. The sky was a frigid crystal blue. And the car’s heater didn’t work. Flynn drove while his friend read aloud from the handout. The draft treaty proposal took up nineteen annotated pages. The Reuters correspondent was a Londoner who had begun as a police reporter, and since covered assignments all over the world. He and Flynn had met many years before at the famous Caravelle Hotel in Saigon, and shared drinks and typewriter ribbons on and off for more than two decades. In the face of a Russian winter, they remembered the oppressive heat of Saigon with something akin to nostalgia.
    “It’s bloody fair,” Calloway said wonderingly, his breath giving ghostly substance to his words. “They propose a builddown with elimination of many existing weapons, allowing both sides to replace obsolete launchers, both sides to reach a total of five thousand deliverable warheads, that number to remain stable for five years after the three-year reduction period. There is a separate proposal to negotiate complete removal of ‘heavy’ missiles, replacing them with mobile missiles, but to limit missile flight tests to a fixed number per year—” He flipped that page and rapidly scanned the remainder. “Nothing in the draft treaty about your Star Wars research . . . ? Didn’t he mention that in his statement? Patrick, old son, this is, as you say, dynamite. This could as easily have been written in