The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth Page A

would be no maneuvers, but the real thing. On command, all thirty thousand tanks and armored personnel carriers, mobile guns and amphibious craft would swing westward, hammer across the Elbe, and plow into West Germany, heading for France and the Channel ports.
    Ahead of them, fifty thousand paratroops would drop over fifty locations to take out the principal tactical nuclear airfields of the French inside France and the Americans and British on German soil. Another hundred thousand would drop on the four countries of Scandinavia to control the capital cities and main transportation arteries, with massive naval backup from offshore.
    The military thrust would avoid the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, whose governments, all partners with the Euro-Communists in office, would be ordered by the Soviet Ambassador to stay out of the fight or perish by joining in. Within half a decade later, they would fall like ripe plums, anyway. Likewise Greece, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. Switzerland would be avoided, Austria used only as a through-route. Both would later be islands in a Soviet sea, and would not last long.
    The primary zone of attack and occupation would be the three Benelux countries, France, and
    West Germany. Britain, as a prelude, would be crippled by strikes and confused by the extreme Left, which on instructions would mount an immediate clamor for nonintervention. London would be informed that if the nuclear Strike Command were used east of the Elbe, Britain would be wiped off the face of the map.
    Throughout the entire operation the Soviet Union would be stridently demanding an immediate cease-fire in every capital in the world and in the United Nations, claiming the hostilities were local to West Germany, temporary, and caused entirely by a West German preemptive strike toward Berlin, a claim that most of the non-German European Left would believe and support.
    “And the United States, all this time?” Petrov interrupted. Kerensky looked irritated at being stopped in full flow after ninety minutes.
    “The use of tactical nuclear weapons right across the face of Germany cannot be excluded,” pursued Kerensky, “but the overwhelming majority of them will destroy West Germany, East Germany, and Poland—no loss, of course, for the Soviet Union. Thanks to the weakness of Washington, there is no deployment of either Cruise missiles or neutron bombs. Soviet military casualties are estimated at between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand at the max- imum. But as two million men in all three services will be involved, such percentages will be acceptable.”
    “Duration?” asked Ivanenko.
    The point units of the forward mechanized armies will enter the French Channel ports one hundred hours after crossing the Elbe. At that point, of course, the cease-fire may be allowed to operate. The mopping up can take place under the cease-fire.”
    “Is that time scale feasible?” asked Petryanov. This time, Rudin cut in.
    “Oh yes, it’s feasible,” he said mildly. Vishnayev shot him a suspicious look.
    “I still have not had an answer to my question,” Petrov pointed out. “What about the United States? What about their nuclear strike forces? Not tactical missiles. Strategic missiles. The hydrogen-bomb warheads in their ICBMs, their bombers, and their submarines.”
    The eyes around the table riveted on Vishnayev. He rose again.
    “The American President must, at the outset, be given three solemn assurances in absolutely credible form,” he said. “One: that for her part the USSR will never be the first to use thermonuclear weapons. Two: that if the three hundred thousand American troops in Western Europe are committed to the fight, they must take their chances in conventional or tactical nuclear warfare with ours. Three: that in the event the United States resorts to ballistic missiles aimed at the Soviet Union, the top hundred cities of the United States will cease to exist.
    “President Matthews, Comrades, will