theirs, mostly ours. I see photos from time to time, but mostly I do signals work. That’s how we twigged to the report on the four colonels. There has also been a fair amount of operational maneuvering done, more than usual for this time of year. Ivan’s been a little freer with how his tankers drive around, too, less concern about running a battalion across a plowed field, for example.”
“And you’re supposed to have a look at anything that’s unusual, no matter how dumb it seems, right? That gives you a pretty wide brief, doesn’t it? We got something interesting along those lines from DIA. Have a look at these.” Lowe pulled a pair of eight-by-ten photographs from a manila envelope and handed them to Toland. They seemed to show the same parcel of land, but from slightly different angles and different times of year. In the upper left corner was a pair of isbas, the crude huts of Russian peasant life. Toland looked up.
“Collective farm?”
“Yeah. Number 1196, a little one about two hundred klicks northwest of Moscow. Tell me what’s different between the two.”
Toland looked back at the photos. In one was a straight line of fenced gardens, perhaps an acre each. In the other he could see a new fence for four of the patches, and one patch whose fenced area had been roughly doubled.
“A colonel—army-type—I used to work with sent me these. Thought I’d find it amusing. I grew up on a corn farm in Iowa, you see.”
“So Ivan’s increasing the private patches for the farmers to work on their own, eh?”
“Looks that way.”
“Hasn’t been announced, has it? I haven’t read anything about it.” Toland didn’t read the government’s secret in-house publication, National Intelligence Digest, but the NSA cafeteria gossip usually covered harmless stuff like this. Intelligence types talked shop as much as any others.
Lowe shook his head slightly. “Nope, and that’s a little odd. It’s something they should announce. The papers would call that another sure sign of the ‘liberalization trend’ we’ve been seeing.”
“Just this one farm, maybe?”
“As a matter of fact, they’ve seen the same thing at five other places. But we don’t generally use our reconsats for this sort of thing. They got this on a slow news day, I suppose. The important stuff must have been covered by clouds.” Toland nodded agreement. The reconnaissance satellites were used to evaluate Soviet grain crops, but that happened later in the year. The Russians knew it also, since it had been in the open press for over a decade, explaining why there was a team of agronomists in the U.S. Department of Agriculture with Special Intelligence-Compartmented security clearance.”
“Kind of late in the season to do that, isn’t it? I mean, will it do any good to give ’em this land this time of year?”
“I got these a week ago. I think they’re a little older than that. This is about the time most of their farms start planting. It stays cold there quite a long time, remember, but the high latitudes make up for it with longer summer days. Assume that this is a nationwide move on their part. Evaluate that for me, Bob.” The colonel’s eyes narrowed briefly.
“Smart move on their part, obviously. It could solve a lot of their food supply problems, particularly for—truck-farm stuff, I guess, tomatoes, onions, that sort of thing.”
“Maybe. You might also note that this sort of farming is manpower-intensive but not machinery-intensive. What about the demographic aspect of the move?”
Toland blinked. There was a tendency in the U.S. Navy to assume that since they made their living by charging into machine-gun fire, Marines were dumb. “Most of the kokolzniki are relatively old folks. The median age is in the late forties, early fifties. So most of the private plots are managed by the older people, while the mechanized work, like driving the combines and trucks—”
“Which pays a hell of a lot
“And you’re supposed to have a look at anything that’s unusual, no matter how dumb it seems, right? That gives you a pretty wide brief, doesn’t it? We got something interesting along those lines from DIA. Have a look at these.” Lowe pulled a pair of eight-by-ten photographs from a manila envelope and handed them to Toland. They seemed to show the same parcel of land, but from slightly different angles and different times of year. In the upper left corner was a pair of isbas, the crude huts of Russian peasant life. Toland looked up.
“Collective farm?”
“Yeah. Number 1196, a little one about two hundred klicks northwest of Moscow. Tell me what’s different between the two.”
Toland looked back at the photos. In one was a straight line of fenced gardens, perhaps an acre each. In the other he could see a new fence for four of the patches, and one patch whose fenced area had been roughly doubled.
“A colonel—army-type—I used to work with sent me these. Thought I’d find it amusing. I grew up on a corn farm in Iowa, you see.”
“So Ivan’s increasing the private patches for the farmers to work on their own, eh?”
“Looks that way.”
“Hasn’t been announced, has it? I haven’t read anything about it.” Toland didn’t read the government’s secret in-house publication, National Intelligence Digest, but the NSA cafeteria gossip usually covered harmless stuff like this. Intelligence types talked shop as much as any others.
Lowe shook his head slightly. “Nope, and that’s a little odd. It’s something they should announce. The papers would call that another sure sign of the ‘liberalization trend’ we’ve been seeing.”
“Just this one farm, maybe?”
“As a matter of fact, they’ve seen the same thing at five other places. But we don’t generally use our reconsats for this sort of thing. They got this on a slow news day, I suppose. The important stuff must have been covered by clouds.” Toland nodded agreement. The reconnaissance satellites were used to evaluate Soviet grain crops, but that happened later in the year. The Russians knew it also, since it had been in the open press for over a decade, explaining why there was a team of agronomists in the U.S. Department of Agriculture with Special Intelligence-Compartmented security clearance.”
“Kind of late in the season to do that, isn’t it? I mean, will it do any good to give ’em this land this time of year?”
“I got these a week ago. I think they’re a little older than that. This is about the time most of their farms start planting. It stays cold there quite a long time, remember, but the high latitudes make up for it with longer summer days. Assume that this is a nationwide move on their part. Evaluate that for me, Bob.” The colonel’s eyes narrowed briefly.
“Smart move on their part, obviously. It could solve a lot of their food supply problems, particularly for—truck-farm stuff, I guess, tomatoes, onions, that sort of thing.”
“Maybe. You might also note that this sort of farming is manpower-intensive but not machinery-intensive. What about the demographic aspect of the move?”
Toland blinked. There was a tendency in the U.S. Navy to assume that since they made their living by charging into machine-gun fire, Marines were dumb. “Most of the kokolzniki are relatively old folks. The median age is in the late forties, early fifties. So most of the private plots are managed by the older people, while the mechanized work, like driving the combines and trucks—”
“Which pays a hell of a lot
Similar Books
