Reborn in 1970 INDIA

September 3 – September 4, 1979

London • Paris • Bonn • East Berlin • Warsaw • Bucharest • Rome • Stockholm

For four hundred years, the borders of the earth had been drawn in rooms with high plaster ceilings in Western Europe.

They had been drawn with brass parallel rulers on oak tables in Whitehall, where junior under-secretaries who had never seen a palm tree or a camel divided kingdoms between tea and dinner. They had been drawn in the gilded salons of the Quai d'Orsay, where French cartographers sliced the Levant and the Sahara into straight geometric lines with silver pencils. They had been drawn in Otto von Bismarck's palace on the Wilhelmstraße in Berlin, where fourteen European ambassadors carved the entire continent of Africa like a roast goose at Christmas without a single African in the building.

Even after 1945, when the physical empires began to crack, the habit of mind had endured in the chancelleries of London, Paris, Bonn, and Rome: the quiet, unexamined certainty that Europe remained the intellectual and diplomatic senate of human civilization—that no war could be settled, no state recognized, and no frontier moved without the statesmen of the Old World being consulted first.

On the weekend of the first and second of September, 1979, six hundred and forty thousand square miles of Inner Asia—a territory larger than Britain, France, West Germany, and Italy combined—was torn out of the map of China, partitioned along a twenty-thousand-foot mountain range, stripped of its nuclear arsenal, and reorganized into two new states by Moscow and New Delhi, and then blessed at nine o'clock on Saturday night by the President of the United States.

And not one of the three superpowers had bothered to pick up a telephone to ask a single European prime minister what he or she thought about it.

I. The Ghost of the India Office: London

Monday, September 3, 1979 — 1000 Hours to 1530 Hours BST

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office • The House of Commons, London

The Durbar Court of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Whitehall had been built in 1866 as the heart of the old India Office, its marble floors, Ionic columns, and grand staircases paid for down to the last brass doorknob out of taxes levied on the peasants of Bengal, Madras, and the United Provinces. High on the walls above the staircase still hung the oil portraits of Clive, Warren Hastings, Wellesley, and Curzon—men who had ruled three hundred million Indians with a signature and a regiment of redcoats.

At ten o'clock on the morning of Monday, September 3rd, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher walked up that staircase with the rapid, heel-clicking stride that already terrified her permanent secretaries, her blue eyes hard and bright beneath her lacquered blonde hair.

She did not go to the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. She had summoned Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, Lord Privy Seal Sir Ian Gilmour, Defence Secretary Francis Pym, and Cabinet Secretary Sir John Hunt directly to the Map Room of the old India Office on the second floor.

Pinned across the central mahogany table was the original 1895 linen-backed survey map of the Pamir Boundary Commission and the Kashgar Consular Agency—drawn by Captain Francis Younghusband and Sir George Macartney under the personal direction of Lord Curzon—side by side with the front page of that morning's Times of London showing the new boundary of the Free and Democratic Republic of Tarim along the 2,600-metre contour line of the Tian Shan range.

Margaret Thatcher stood at the head of the table, her black leather handbag set down on the corner of Curzon's map like an iron weight.

"Tell me again, Peter," Thatcher said, her voice pitched in that low, metallic contralto she used when she was controlling a cold fury, "precisely when the Foreign Office first learned that the Republic of India was moving forty thousand troops and two hundred main battle tanks across the Karakoram Pass into Kashgar and Khotan."

Lord Carrington—sixth Baron Carrington, former tank commander at Nijmegen, a patrician Tory who rarely lost his sangfroid—looked down at the green dispatch box open before him.

"At twelve-eighteen on Saturday afternoon, Prime Minister," Carrington said quietly. "Twelve minutes after Andrei Gromyko walked onto the stage in Moscow and six hours after the Indian 14th Corps had already crossed the passes."

"And our High Commissioner in New Delhi?" Thatcher demanded, her eyes flashing. " India is a member of the Commonwealth! We sit in the same Commonwealth Secretariat! Did Prime Minister Chavan or Sardar Swaran Singh not summon Sir John Thomson on Friday night to offer Her Majesty's Government prior confidential notice of a major military operation in Central Asia?"

"Sir John was invited to the Ministry of External Affairs at five o'clock on Saturday afternoon, Margaret," Sir Ian Gilmour replied dryly. "Ten minutes before the public press conference at Vigyan Bhavan. He was handed the exact same printed press release and map that was distributed to the correspondent from the Yugoslav News Agency."

Thatcher's lips pressed into a thin, bloodless line. She turned her head sharply toward Carrington.

"And Washington?" she asked, the word coming out like a chip of ice. "When President Carter went before the television cameras at nine o'clock on Saturday night to recognize this 'Republic of Tarim,' announce an American Embassy in Kashgar, and dispatch an Export-Import Bank and oil-company consortium to New Delhi—how many hours in advance did Cyrus Vance consult the British Ambassador in Washington?"

Carrington did not answer for three seconds.

"Nico Henderson was informed by an Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs at eight-forty-five, Prime Minister," Carrington said, a muscle tightening in his jaw. "Fifteen minutes before Carter went on the air. The text of the presidential declaration was already on the teleprompter."

For ten seconds, nobody in the old India Office Map Room spoke.

Outside the tall windows, a grey September drizzle was falling over St. James's Park. Three miles away in the Midlands and South Wales, engineering unions were threatening another round of wildcat walkouts; British inflation was running at sixteen percent; British Leyland was surviving only because Manmohan Singh had allowed it a forty-nine-percent joint-venture assembly foothold in Maharashtra the previous February; and the Bank of England was clearing three hundred thousand barrels a day of forty-dollar industrial crude in Indian Rupees through Bombay so that British factories wouldn't suffer another winter blackout like 1977.

And here, on the table before them, lay the parchment maps of Kashgar, Yarkand, Khotan, and the Taghdumbash Pamir—the very places where British officers in pith helmets had played the Great Game against the Russian Tsar for a hundred years, treating Indian sepoys as pack-mules and native clerks as human tape-measures.

"Look at that map, Peter," Francis Pym, the Defence Secretary, said in a hollow, bitter voice, pointing at the red 2,600-metre demarcation line along the Tian Shan mountains and the nuclear symbol at Lop Nor. "Our seismic array at Eskdalemuir in Scotland picked up a subterranean detonation wave from the Lop Nor desert at eight-fifteen this morning our time—four hundred tonnes of conventional high explosive going off simultaneously inside the Chinese nuclear test shafts and storage tunnels at Malan.

"And ten minutes ago, RAF intelligence finished analyzing the high-altitude American imagery shared through the joint cell at Brampton," Pym continued, his voice dropping low. "Do you know what was parked on the Malan runway on Saturday afternoon while the Soviet and Indian ambassadors were screaming at each other at the United Nations? Four Soviet Ilyushin transports and four Indian Airavat-II heavy transports—sitting wingtip-to-wingtip, loading the Chinese nuclear stockpile fifty-fifty into their cargo bays before their engineers blew the mountain down together!"

Thatcher stared down at the map, her fingers curling tightly around the strap of her handbag.

A hot, suffocating wave of emotion rose in her chest—an emotion that no British Prime Minister since Anthony Eden at Suez had been forced to taste so rawly. It was not fear of the Soviet Union, and it was not anger at China.

It was envy.

Pure, scorching, civilizational envy.

"They carved it up together," Thatcher whispered, looking at the saffron expanse of the Tarim Basin above the green expanse of Tibet and India. "Moscow and New Delhi sat down in a room, divided six hundred thousand square miles of Asia between them, split China's nuclear vaults in half, and then staged a diplomatic row at the Security Council so smartly that Jimmy Carter rushed in four hours later begging for a percent commercial share of the Indian half!"

She walked to the tall window overlooking Whitehall, her back rigid.

"Four months ago, when I walked into Downing Street," Thatcher said, her voice vibrating with the wounded pride of an island that had once ruled a quarter of the human race, "we told ourselves that Britain was still at the top table. We are a Permanent Member of the Security Council. We are the head of the Commonwealth. We are America's closest ally.

"And look at what happened this weekend! The three real powers of the world—Washington, Moscow, and our former colony in New Delhi—just redrew the map of the largest continent on earth! India moved forty thousand armoured troops, seized a hundred and forty thousand tonnes of uranium and fifty billion barrels of oil, and pushed its border to the borders of Russia in twelve hours! And not one of the three—not Brezhnev, not Chavan, not Karan Shergill, and not Jimmy Carter—even thought it necessary to pick up a telephone and ask what London thought!"

Sir Ian Gilmour looked down at the carpet. "Because in 1979, Prime Minister, what can London actually do in the middle of Asia? We have no aircraft carriers capable of steaming east of Suez without Indian bunker fuel. Our currency reserves are hedged in Rupees and Deutsche Marks. We are spectators in the stalls watching a play written by giants."

"I will not have this country talk like a spectator!" Thatcher snapped, spinning back from the window, her eyes blazing blue fire. "If we do not have their tonnage today, it is because thirty years of socialism and trade-union cowardice hollowed out British industry while a twenty-eight-year-old engineer in Uttar Pradesh was building steel mills, silicon foundries, and nuclear carriers!

"Wait until I am finished with our own trade unions and our nationalized dinosaurs, Peter—we will teach this country to compete again!

"In the meantime," she said, marching back to the table and opening her parliamentary briefing folder for the afternoon sitting of the House of Commons, "I have to stand at the Despatch Box at three-fifteen today and state the position of Her Majesty's Government. We certainly cannot condemn India—half of British engineering in the Midlands is working on sub-contracts for the Indian railway and automotive joint ventures, our North Sea deficit is covered by forty-dollar Bombay crude, and the Americans have already recognized Kashgar!

"So we will give Moscow the lash, and we will give New Delhi the cold truth."

At 1518 hours that afternoon, in a packed, hushed House of Commons, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher rose at the Despatch Box opposite Labour Opposition Leader James Callaghan.

"Mr. Speaker," Thatcher declared, her voice cutting clearly across the green leather benches, "the events of Saturday morning in Central Asia mark a watershed in the strategic balance of the Eastern Hemisphere.

"Her Majesty's Government condemns without reservation the naked Bolshevik territorial aggrandizement of the Soviet Union in Dzungaria. Once again, Moscow has demonstrated that wherever political collapse creates a vacuum along its borders, the reflex of the Kremlin is military occupation and the imposition of a single-party police state.

"By contrast," Thatcher continued, her chin lifting a fraction of an inch as she delivered each frost-rimmed syllable with tight-lipped, imperial precision, "while Her Majesty's Government notes with grave concern the precedent of unilateral military movements across established international frontiers, Her Majesty's Government welcomes the decisive containment of Soviet expansion along the Celestial Mountains, and notes the establishment of representative civic administration in the historic trading oases of the Tarim Basin under the guarantee of the Republic of India.

"In a choice between the extension of Soviet totalitarianism to the borders of the Indian subcontinent and the preservation of commercial and civic freedom in Kashgar and Khotan by a fellow Commonwealth democracy, no member of this House can be in any doubt where the interests of the free world lie."

She sat down to a low, rumbling chorus of *"Hear, hear"* from both front benches—while up in the Peers' Gallery, Lord Carrington looked down at the chamber and thought privately that Lord Curzon, had he heard a British Prime Minister thanking an Indian army for holding Kashgar against the Tsar, would have turned to dust in his grave.

II. The Boutique of the Champs-Élysées: Paris

Monday, September 3 – Tuesday, September 4, 1979

The Élysée Palace • The Quai d'Orsay, Paris

Across the English Channel in Paris, the wound did not ache in the memory of the nineteenth century; it bled in the vanity of the twentieth.

At eleven o'clock on the morning of Tuesday, September 4th, President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing sat behind the antique Louis XV gilt-bronze desk in the Salon Doré of the Élysée Palace, staring at two documents laid out on the crimson leather blotter by Foreign Minister Jean François-Poncet.

The first document was a technical flash from the Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique (CEA) seismic array at Bruyères-le-Châtel, confirming the massive, four-hundred-tonne simultaneous conventional demolition of every nuclear test shaft and storage tunnel at Lop Nor and Malan ninety minutes earlier.

The second document was a commercial intelligence cable from the French Embassy in Washington, reporting that a Boeing 707 chartered by the US Export-Import Bank—carrying senior vice presidents of Exxon, Chevron, Bechtel, Kerr-McGee, and Westinghouse, accompanied by a newly appointed US Charge d'Affaires for Kashgar— for New Delhi and the Tarim Basin to negotiate a American corporate stake in the Tarim petroleum and uranium concessions.

Giscard d'Estaing—tall, aristocratic, a graduate of the École Polytechnique and the École Nationale d'Administration who viewed himself as the heir to Charles de Gaulle's vision of France as the indispensable intellectual arbiter between the superpowers—picked up the Washington cable with two fingers as if it smelled of sewage.

"Read this, Jean," Giscard said in rapid, clipped French, his aristocratic nostrils flaring. "On Saturday morning, the Indians and the Russians partition Western China along the Tian Shan mountains without breathing a single word to Paris. On Saturday night, Jimmy Carter recognizes this 'Republic of Tarim' on television without consulting his European allies. And by Tuesday morning, before the dust has even settled over the Lop Nor craters, American oil and uranium executives are flying into New Delhi and Kashgar to carve out a commercial slice of a fifty-billion-barrel oil basin and a hundred-and-forty-thousand-tonne uranium reserve!"

Jean François-Poncet, standing before the tall windows overlooking the palace courtyard, sighed quietly.

"I spoke with the Indian Ambassador, Monsieur le Président, and with our commercial attaché in Bombay," François-Poncet said. "When I inquired whether Total, Elf Aquitaine, and Cogema would be invited alongside the American corporations to bid on the Tarim oil and uranium blocks, the Indian Foreign Secretary was impeccably polite—and utterly ice-cold.

"He reminded us that under the Hyderabad House treaties of February 1978, Alstom is already electrifying the Indian trunk railways, Framatome is building heavy-water reactor vessels in Maharashtra, and France is receiving four hundred and eighty thousand barrels a day of forty-dollar stabilization oil cleared in Rupees. As for the strategic resource concessions in the Tarim Basin, New Delhi informed us that those are 'bilateral security arrangements between the Republic of Tarim, the Republic of India, and co-guarantor powers of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.'"

Giscard stood up from his desk, his hands clasped tightly behind his back as he paced across the Savonnerie carpet.

"Co-guarantor powers!" Giscard repeated with bitter, corrosive resentment. "For twenty years since General de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic, France's entire foreign policy rested on the doctrine that there were two clumsy military giants—Washington and Moscow—and that France, leading Europe with our independent nuclear force de frappe and our diplomatic brilliance, was the third voice of the world!

"Look at what has happened to us since 1977, Jean!" Giscard stopped in front of the fireplace mirror, staring at the reflection of the gilded room. "India did not ask for permission to become the Third Superpower—they simply built the silicon chips, pumped the oil, launched the nuclear carriers, forced Carter and Brezhnev to sign a 0.75 nuclear warhead treaty in Singapore that gives India ten times as many warheads as France, and took our chair at the table!

"Do you remember what Count Lambsdorff said to our delegation in New Delhi last February when Manmohan Singh slashed Indian tariffs on French perfume, champagne, and couture by ninety percent while forcing us to buy Indian microchips and Indian medicine in Rupees?" Giscard's voice dropped to a low, humiliated hiss. "Lambsdorff said: 'They are turning the continent of Europe into a luxury handbag boutique for the Indian empire.'

"Look at us today! Washington, Moscow, and New Delhi divide continents, dismantle nuclear proving grounds, and split fifty billion barrels of oil over a weekend—and then they toss Paris a railway electrification sub-contract and buy three million bottles of Moët & Chandon to toast their treaties!"

"If we protest the Indian move into Kashgar, Monsieur le Président," François-Poncet said quietly, "we accomplish nothing except offending the boardroom in Bombay that controls our winter oil allocation and the Rupee clearing accounts of the Banque de France. And if we applaud it too loudly like Carter, we look like Washington's errand boy."

Giscard stared out the window at the tricolour hanging limp in the September heat above the courtyard. The impotence was absolute, and the only shield left to French pride was the cold, lofty grammar of Gaullist detachment—pretending to judge from Olympus a game that France was no longer strong enough to play on the field.

"Draft the communiqué of the Quai d'Orsay in my own style, Jean," Giscard instructed coldly. "Use the language of high principle that costs us nothing in Bombay:

"State that the Government of the French Republic regrets the unilateral modification of Asian frontiers by military force. However, stress explicitly in the second paragraph that the neutralization and verified demolition of the Lop Nor nuclear testing grounds constitutes an undeniable contribution to the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Asia, and that France takes note of the de facto establishment of civil administration in the Tarim Basin with a view toward maintaining normal commercial relations."

III. The Divided Men on the Rhine and the Spree: Bonn and East Berlin

Tuesday, September 4, 1979

The Bundeshaus, Bonn • Stasi Headquarters, Berlin-Lichtenberg

In Bonn, the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, the envy that hung in the modern glass-and-steel office of the Federal Chancellery was darker and heavier than the wounded vanity of London or Paris—because in Germany, the word Partition was not a historical metaphor. It was the barbed wire, the concrete wall, and the automatic-rifle towers running through the living flesh of their own nation two hundred miles to the east.

At eleven-thirty on Tuesday morning, Federal Chancellor Helmut Schmidt stepped down from the rostrum of the Bundestag after delivering a twenty-minute government declaration on the Asian crisis.

His public words had been a masterpiece of disciplined, technocratic tightrope-walking. Speaking to a hushed parliament that depended on Soviet natural gas pipelines from the east, American nuclear divisions on the Rhine, and five hundred and fifty thousand barrels a day of three-hundred-rupee ($40) Indian crude oil arriving through Bombay, Schmidt had expressed the Federal Government's *"deep concern over the further militarization of the Asian continent,"* while explicitly praising the rapid establishment of the direct Indo-Soviet military hotlines and the 2,600-metre demarcation line in the Tian Shan passes as *"a triumph of rational crisis-management and mutual deterrence over ideological adventurism."*

Now, back in his corner study in the Chancellery with the door locked, Schmidt poured himself a small glass of schnapps, lit a menthol cigarette despite his doctor's orders, and sat down across from his Economics Minister, Count Otto von Lambsdorff, and his State Secretary in the Chancellery, Manfred Schüler.

On the low glass table between them lay the satellite map of the Tian Shan Line forwarded by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) in Pullach.

Schmidt took a long drag of his cigarette, staring down at the two new states carved out of Western China.

"Look at the sheer speed of it, Otto," Schmidt said in his low, gravelly North German voice. "Between six-thirty on Saturday morning and noon on Sunday—thirty hours!—India and the Soviet Union moved a hundred thousand mechanized troops across mountains four times higher than the Alps, divided a territory two and a half times the size of the entire German Reich of 1937, emptied China's nuclear vaults at Lop Nor, blew the test shafts into rubble, and set up two functioning governments with painted white stones along the 2,600-metre contour line!

"And what did they say to Europe before they did it? Nichts. Not a syllable."

Count Lambsdorff leaned back, resting his walking stick against his knee, his sharp aristocratic face lined with a grim, ironic fatigue.

"Why should they ask us, Helmut?" Lambsdorff said bluntly. "We are the richest industrial economy in Europe. Our Bundesbank has the hardest currency on the continent. And yet geopolitically, what is the Federal Republic of Germany in 1979? We are a prisoner standing between three wardens!

"For our physical survival against the Warsaw Pact, we are hostage to Jimmy Carter in Washington. For the natural gas and the safety of Berlin, we are hostage to Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow. And for the forty-dollar oil that keeps the Ruhr blast furnaces from freezing, the Rupee bonds in Frankfurt, and the three-micron logic chips from Gorakhpur that run our Siemens computers, we are hostage to Karan Shergill and Manmohan Singh in India!"

Schmidt stared at the blue smoke curling from his cigarette tip, a wave of bitter, unspoken envy tightening his jaw.

"In 1900," Schmidt murmured, "when Kaiser Wilhelm and the General Staff in Berlin looked at the world, Europe was the engine-room of human destiny, and India was a crowd of starving subjects pulling rickshaws for British colonels.

"Today, we Germans cannot even cross the street in Berlin from Friedrichstraße to Alexanderplatz without showing a passport to an eighteen-year-old boy with a Kalashnikov—while an Indian Chief Minister in Lucknow and an Indian Prime Minister in Delhi snap their fingers, send an eighty-five-thousand-tonne nuclear supercarrier to the Persian Gulf, march two hundred Arjuna tanks across the Silk Road to Kashgar, and lock up a hundred and forty thousand tonnes of uranium for the next century!"

"At least their 2,600-metre line in the Tian Shan held without a shooting war," Schüler offered quietly. "If the Indians and the Russians had started firing at each other in those passes on Saturday, the forty-dollar oil ceiling in Bombay would have collapsed by Monday morning."

"Oh, the line will hold for now," Schmidt said, crushing his cigarette out in the ashtray. "Because Karan Shergill got all the uranium and oil in the basement, and Ustinov got the snow peaks on the roof. And meanwhile, Europe sits in the parlour like a retired grandfather—writing polite essays about 'crisis-management' while the young giants divide the earth."

Two hundred and eighty miles northeast of Bonn, on the other side of the barbed wire and the minefields, in East Berlin, the panic inside the ruling politburo of the German Democratic Republic was infinitely sharper—because East Berlin could feel the floorboards of the Soviet Empire groaning beneath its boots.

On Tuesday morning, the official organ of the Socialist Unity Party, Neues Deutschland, had appeared on every kiosk along Unter den Linden with a screaming, eight-column front-page headline that outdid even Moscow's Pravda in sycophantic hysteria:

FRATERNAL VICTORY IN INNER ASIA: SOVIET ARMED FORCES LIBERATE WORKING PEOPLE OF NORTH TURKESTAN FROM MAOIST CHAOS! GDR Condemns Reactionary Bourgeois-Feudal Clique Installed by Indian Monopoly Capital in Kashgar!

Yet at two o'clock that afternoon, inside the windowless sixth-floor conference room of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) headquarters on Ruschestraße in Berlin-Lichtenberg, nobody was reading Neues Deutschland.

General Secretary Erich Honecker sat at the head of the table, his face grey and pinched—still visibly aged by the global humiliation of June, when Karan Shergill's Lucknow Protocol had exposed Staatsplan 14.25 and forced East Germany to pull half its doped Olympic swimmers and sprinters out of international competition in disgrace.

Across from Honecker sat Stasi Minister Erich Mielke, Foreign Intelligence (HVA) Chief Generaloberst Markus Wolf, and GDR Defence Minister General Heinz Hoffmann.

On the table lay a top-secret military railway-traffic intercept compiled by the HVA's liaisons inside the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany (GSFG) at Wünsdorf.

"Read the Wünsdorf rail order to the General Secretary, Markus," Mielke rasped.

Markus Wolf—the suave, razor-sharp spymaster of East Berlin—opened his black folder and read in a cool, diagnostic voice:

"Yesterday evening at twenty-two hundred hours, Marshal Ustinov and the Soviet General Staff issued Directive 00419 to the Commander-in-Chief of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany at Wünsdorf and the Northern Group of Forces in Poland.

"Effective September 10th, two heavy tank regiments from the 3rd Shock Army in Magdeburg, three self-propelled artillery battalions, four transport aviation squadrons, and twelve thousand logistics and combat-engineering troops are being permanently detached from the Central European front and transferred by rail three thousand miles east—to the newly created North Turkestan Military District in Ürümqi and the Tian Shan Defensive Line!"

Erich Honecker stared at Wolf, his thin lips parting in alarm.

"They are pulling tank regiments out of Magdeburg?!" Honecker piped, his voice rising. "Out of East Germany?! To sit on a mountain range in China?!"

"Do the arithmetic of the Soviet Armed Forces on September 4th, 1979, Comrade General Secretary," Defence Minister Heinz Hoffmann said grimly, tapping a map of Eurasia.

"Five years ago, the Soviet Union had two fronts: NATO in the west, and the Chinese border in the east. "Today, look at what Moscow has hung around its neck: "First: They are bogged down in a bleeding guerrilla war in Afghanistan. "Second: They still have to watch the burning, unpredictable ruins of warlord China along the Amur and Mongolia. "And third: By marching into Dzungaria on Saturday and meeting the Indian Army along a fifteen-hundred-kilometre mountain line from the Pamirs to Lop Nor, the Soviet General Staff now has to permanently garrison the Tian Shan range against the most technologically advanced conventional military machine in Asia!

"Our Soviet liaison generals at Wünsdorf told me over vodka last night that General Varennikov was shaken to his core by what the GRU saw in Southern Xinjiang this weekend," Hoffmann continued quietly. "The Indians moved one hundred and eighty Arjuna main battle tanks and seventy-two Dhanush-40 self-propelled howitzers across seventeen-thousand-foot passes in twenty-four hours, wiped out an entire Chinese tank division in the dark of a sandstorm at three kilometres range without losing a single tank, and landed black-armoured commandos inside the Malan mountain tunnels before the Soviet paratroopers even got their parachutes off on the runway!

"Moscow does not trust New Delhi an inch along that mountain line—and to hold the Tian Shan passes at three thousand metres against the Indian 14th Corps, the Kremlin is going to have to drain divisions, spare parts, fuel, and roubles away from Eastern Europe for the next twenty years!"

Markus Wolf closed his folder with a soft click, his cold, intelligent eyes sweeping the room.

"First Karan Shergill destroys our Olympic prestige in Lucknow with a sixty-four-page medical book," Wolf said quietly. "Then he forces West Germany and France to trade in Indian Rupees and buy Indian microchips that our factories in Dresden cannot build for another fifteen years. And now he draws a line across the middle of Asia that forces our Soviet protectors to pull tanks out of Magdeburg just to guard the back door of Kazakhstan.

"We print insults about 'Indian monopoly capital' in Neues Deutschland to please Moscow," Wolf said, "while in reality, New Delhi is reshaping the world over our heads, and East Berlin does not even register as a footnote on their map."

IV. The Whispers of Rozbiór: Warsaw, Bucharest, Rome, and Stockholm

September 3 – September 4, 1979

Three hundred miles east of Berlin, along the leafy boulevards of Warsaw, the news of what had happened on the first of September struck a nerve so deep and so raw that not even thirty-four years of communist censorship could keep it off the streets.

In Poland, the date September 1st was not a calendar day.

Saturday, September 1st, 1979, was the exact fortieth anniversary of the morning in 1939 when Adolf Hitler's panzers had crossed the Polish frontier from the west, followed sixteen days later by Joseph Stalin's Red Army crossing from the east to divide the country along the Bug River under the secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

At noon on Saturday, the Polish state leadership under First Secretary Edward Gierek had been standing at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Victory Square, laying wreaths for the fortieth anniversary of September 1939 and delivering wooden speeches about "eternal fraternal peace"—when the news flashes from Moscow and New Delhi arrived over the wire services: that at dawn that very morning, the Soviet Red Army from the north and the Indian Army from the south had crossed into Xinjiang simultaneously and met along a pre-determined contour line in the middle of the Tian Shan mountains.

By Monday evening, September 3rd, from the smoke-filled student cafés along the Krakowskie Przedmieście and the sacristies of the Catholic churches in Kraków to the canteen tables of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, a single Polish word was being whispered over every cup of tea and every shot of vodka:

Rozbiór.

The Partition.

Nobody in Warsaw believed the official Trybuna Ludu headline claiming that the Soviet and Indian movements were an uncoordinated coincidence, and nobody believed the theatrical shouting match between Ambassador Troyanovsky and Ambassador Jaipal in New York. Forty million Poles knew a secret partition protocol by smell—they had lived inside four of them since 1772.

Inside the white stone headquarters of the Polish United Workers' Party (KC PZPR) on Nowy Świat that evening, First Secretary Edward Gierek stood by his office window with Politburo member Stanisław Kania, looking down at the quiet street.

"Listen to what the party secretaries from Katowice and Gdańsk reported today, Stanisław," Gierek said heavily, rubbing his tired face. "In the factories, the workers are laughing at our newspapers. They are saying: 'On the fortieth anniversary of September 1939, Comrade Brezhnev decided to celebrate by staging a replay in China—only this time, instead of Ribbentrop, he had to split the cake with an Indian Maharajah who took all the oil and uranium in the south and left Moscow the snowdrifts!'"

Kania winced, glancing toward the closed door. "Our people feel a gut terror whenever they see the Russian Bear dividing a neighbour on a map, Edward. It reminds them that in Moscow's eyes, borders are only temporary conveniences.

"Yet you know what is strangest in the underground leaflets our security service picked up at Warsaw University this morning?" Kania added quietly, pulling a mimeographed student sheet from his pocket. "The students and the Catholic intellectuals are not just afraid of Moscow. They are staring in sheer, envious awe at India!

"Read what this dissident professor wrote here: 'In 1947, India was poorer and more ruined than Poland. Today, Poland is a debtor nation begging Western banks for loans to buy meat while Soviet divisions sit in Legnica—whereas India has built its own tanks, its own computers, and its own nuclear supercarriers, forced both Washington and Moscow to treat it as an equal, and when the Russian Bear marched into Xinjiang, India marched up to the Tian Shan mountains with two hundred tanks, took half the country, and told the Red Army where to stop!'"

Gierek looked down at the underground leaflet and let out a long, bitter sigh.

"Every nation in Europe—East and West—used to look down on Asia as a continent of beggars," Gierek murmured. "Now a Polish steelworker in Silesia looks at New Delhi and wonders why a country that used to starve under British viceroys is one of the three masters of the earth, while Europe is still trapped in the rubble of 1945."

Four hundred miles south of Warsaw, inside the cavernous, marble-lined Hall of the Council of State in Bucharest, the reaction of Nicolae Ceaușescu, President of the Socialist Republic of Romania, was not philosophical envy—it was cold, sweating, existential panic.

For fifteen years, Ceaușescu had played a single, high-wire geopolitical trick to keep Romania independent of Moscow's heel inside the Warsaw Pact: he had played the China card.

In August 1968, when Brezhnev invaded Czechoslovakia, Ceaușescu had stood on the balcony in Bucharest and denounced the invasion because Zhou Enlai had stood at the Romanian Embassy in Beijing and warned Moscow that China backed Romania. In 1971, it was Ceaușescu who had served as the secret backchannel courier between Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong. Even during the first two years of the Chinese Civil War, Ceaușescu had desperately clung to the hope that one of the Chinese factions would eventually win, reunify the mainland, and restore Beijing as the giant eastern counterbalance that kept the Soviet Bear from swallowing Bucharest.

On the weekend of September 1st and 2nd, that hope had been blown into dust along with the test shafts of Lop Nor.

China was gone—not just ruined by civil war, but physically dismembered by the Soviet Union and the Republic of India, with the open, smiling blessing of Jimmy Carter in Washington!

At four o'clock on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 4th, Ceaușescu paced up and down the long Persian carpet of his private study with Foreign Minister Ștefan Andrei, his voice shaking with rage and terror.

"Did you read Carter's speech from Saturday night, Ștefan?!" Ceaușescu shouted, waving the translated Washington transcript in his fist. "The Soviets take Northern Xinjiang! The Indians take Southern Xinjiang! And instead of threatening war to defend the territorial integrity of a sovereign state, the President of the United States goes on television, praises the Indians for 'bringing democracy to Kashgar,' and sends American oil companies to cut of the spoils!

"Do you see what that means for a nation like Romania?!" Ceaușescu's dark eyes were wide with paranoia as he grabbed Andrei by the lapel. "There is no international law left! There is only the Rule of the Three Giants! If Moscow, New Delhi, and Washington agree behind closed doors that a country is inconvenient, they can slice it in half over a weekend, call one half a 'People's Republic' and the other half a 'Democratic Protectorate,' divide its mines, and the United Nations does nothing but listen to two hours of fake speeches!

"If Moscow decides tomorrow morning to march across the Prut River into Moldavia and Bucharest," Ceaușescu hissed, "nobody in Washington or Western Europe will fire a single shot to save us!

"We will not validate this precedent! Not by one word!" Ceaușescu marched to his desk and struck the blotter with his fist. "Inform the Soviet Ambassador today that the Socialist Republic of Romania refuses to recognize the 'People's Republic of North Turkestan'! And publish a declaration of the Central Committee in Scînteia tomorrow morning condemning 'great-power chauvinism, the politics of spheres of influence, and the unilateral violation of sovereign borders by foreign military forces in Asia'!"

And in the capitals of Southern and Northern Europe—in Rome and Stockholm—the weekend's earthquake in Inner Asia produced two final, contrasting portraits of a continent that history had passed by.

In Rome, on Tuesday evening, newly appointed Prime Minister Francesco Cossiga sat inside the heavily sandbagged, bulletproof-glass study of the Palazzo Chigi, surrounded by a platoon of Carabinieri paratroopers carrying submachine guns.

Sixteen months had passed since the Red Brigades had kidnapped former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in broad daylight on the Via Fani and left his bullet-riddled body in the trunk of a red Renault midway between the headquarters of the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party. Italy in September 1979 was bleeding from knee-cappings, bombings, fourteen-percent unemployment, and a fiscal deficit kept from complete collapse only because the Bank of Italy had signed up for three hundred and fifty thousand barrels a day of forty-dollar Indian stabilization crude in Tokyo two months earlier.

At two o'clock that afternoon, the Italian Foreign Ministry at the Farnesina had dutifully issued a bland, four-sentence NATO statement condemning Soviet military intervention in Dzungaria while welcoming the stabilization of the Tarim trade routes.

Now, at eight-thirty in the evening, while Cossiga reviewed the latest domestic anti-terrorist police warrants, the television set in the corner of his office was tuned to RAI Uno's evening Speciale TG1 broadcast.

Across the screen flashed dramatic, romanticized maps of the ancient Silk Road from Venice through Samarkand to Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan, cut together with sensationalized television footage shot that very morning in Kashgar's central square by an Indian Doordarshan pool crew: showing fifty-eight-tonne Indian M-73 Lion [Arjuna] main battle tanks and black-helmeted Indian soldiers standing guard outside the tiled gates of the reopened Id Kah Mosque while Uyghur merchants unloaded bolts of silk and carpets beneath the blue-and-gold flag of the Republic of Tarim.

The Italian television presenter's voice soared with operatic nostalgia:

*"Seven hundred years after the Venetian merchant Marco Polo first rode through the Jade Gate into the fabled oasis cities of Kashgar and Khotan, the ancient Silk Road has returned to life tonight—rescued from thirty years of Maoist isolation not by the powers of Europe, but under the steel shield of the new Indian superpower..."*

Francesco Cossiga looked up from his stack of Red Brigades arrest warrants at the television screen showing the gleaming Indian tanks in Kashgar, and let out a quiet, bitter laugh.

"Seven hundred years ago, an Italian from Venice walked to Kashgar and discovered Asia for Europe," Cossiga murmured to his Interior Minister sitting across the desk. "Today, we cannot walk three blocks from the Palazzo Chigi to the Pantheon without four armoured cars and twelve bodyguards—while the Indians run the Silk Road, price our oil in Rupees, and let us watch it on television."

And eight hundred miles north of Rome, in Stockholm, Prime Minister Ola Ullsten—leader of Sweden's minority Liberal government, presiding over a serene, prosperous Scandinavian society that had not fought a war since 1814 and viewed itself as the appointed moral schoolmaster of the planet—convened a formal afternoon press conference at the Kanslihuset to deliver Sweden's verdict on the partition of Xinjiang.

Standing before the microphones, Ullsten furrowed his brow with earnest Nordic gravity and read a three-page statement expressing the Swedish Government's *"profound human-rights and international-law reservations regarding the speed of the military occupations in both Northern and Southern Xinjiang, the absence of a United Nations-supervised plebiscite prior to the proclamation of the regimes in Ürümqi and Kashgar, and the dangerous erosion of the sovereignty of smaller peoples when great powers redraw boundaries by force of arms."*

It was an eloquent, high-minded lecture.

There were only eleven people in the press room to hear it—all of them local Swedish parliamentary reporters.

Neither the American Ambassador, nor the Soviet Ambassador, nor the Indian Ambassador in Stockholm had bothered to send even a third secretary to attend the briefing, and not a single major newspaper in New York, Moscow, New Delhi, London, Paris, or Bonn printed a line of Ullsten's speech the following morning—because ever since Chief Minister Karan Shergill had stood up in Lucknow on June 2nd and handed the world the free biochemical test that exposed the state-sponsored poisoning of twelve-year-old Olympic children in Eastern Europe, New Delhi held a monopoly on tangible global human rights that no Scandinavian press release could compete with.

At midnight on Tuesday, September 4th, 1979, as the clocks struck twelve across the capitals of the Old World—in Whitehall, where the portraits of the Viceroys stared down at empty marble corridors; in the Élysée, where the chandeliers were turned off to save electricity; in Bonn and Berlin, where searchlights swept the concrete wall dividing a once-imperial nation in half; and in Warsaw, where old men whispered Rozbiór in the dark—the truth of the last quarter of the twentieth century stood plain and undeniable.

Europe was still rich. Europe was still cultured. Its museums were full of the gold and marble of three millennia, and its cafés were full of brilliant men who could explain history in six languages.

But the steering wheel of the world was no longer in Europe's hands.

Four thousand miles to the east, along the twenty-thousand-foot granite spine of the Tian Shan mountains, the searchlights of the Soviet Red Army at two thousand eight hundred metres and the searchlights of the Indian Army at two thousand six hundred metres swept across the cold September snow—two continental titans standing chest-to-chest across the roof of Asia, while the third titan in Washington wired its banks into the bazaars of Kashgar, and the old empires of Europe sat by the radiator, warming their hands over three-hundred-rupee Indian oil, watching history march past their window.

End of Chapter 392