Alaska (170 page)

'Second, we must never make even the most tentative overt move prematurely. World conditions, not our hopes, will determine when the time is ripe for us to make our intentions and our claims known. Eighty years would not be too long to wait for the propitious moment, because I am positive that it will in due course arrive.

'Third, the significant signal will be the decline of American power and, more important, the gradual wasting away of American will power.'

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'Can we anticipate such decline? Zelnikov asked, and Voronov replied: 'Inescapably.

Democracies grow weary. They lose momentum. I can foresee the time will come when they might want to rid themselves of Alaska.' He paused: 'Just the way we wanted to get rid of it in 1866 and '67.' These obiter dicta brought him to his major strategy: 'Now we forget Russia and focus sternly on the Soviet Union. Our argument must invariably be that the men who so cravenly gave away Alaska were not entitled to do so. They did not speak for the Russian people. In no way did they represent the soul of Russia.

The sale was corrupt from the moment it was conceived. It had not the slightest validity.

It transferred no rights to America and its terms will be reversed by any impartial international court or by the perceived wisdom of the rest of the world. The sale of Alaska was fraudulent, without moral base, and is subject to reversal. Alaska was, is and shall be Russian. The entire logic of world history demands this.'

The three visitors, not knowing enough historical detail to judge the merits of Voronov's claim that the transfer had been basically illegal, asked for substantiation, and he cited the three solid bases for the Soviet Union's claim to Alaska: 'I warn you gentlemen and those who follow in your place. Indeed, I've drawn up my most important aide memoir

on just this point, and you must keep it on file for your successors and mine. You must base our claim on legal principles, never on force, and I assure you that our legal claim is impeccable. It must prevail in the court of world opinion.

'First, the Russian government as it then existed was incompetent to speak for the Russian people. It was a corrupt tyranny from which the huge bulk of the Russian people were excluded. Since it possessed no authority, its acts were illegal, especially those involving the disposition of territories over which it exercised no moral control.

The transfer became illegal at the moment of sale, which was itself totally venal and therefore unenforceable.

'Second, the agent who maneuvered the sale and without whose infamous participation it could not have gone forward was not a Russian; he was not formally authorized to conduct negotiations; and he could not 1039

possibly have been construed as acting on behalf of the Russian people. Baron Edouard de Stoeckl, as he liked to style himself, had no right to the title he paraded; he was either a Greek adventurer or an Austrian lackey who interposed himself in the negotiations, God knows how, if you'll forgive an old folk expression, and in much of the affair he acted solely on his own without consultation with St. Petersburg.

It was his sale, not Russia's.'

At this point Maxim showed the men from Moscow three shelves of books in some seven or eight different languages dealing with Baron Edouard de Stoeckl and a set of two notebooks in which he, Voronov, had chronicled the life of this shadowy man month by month for a period of nearly four decades. But he had long ago decided that it would not further the Soviet Union's claim to Alaska for him to publish his materials now: 'It's all here, gentlemen, in these notebooks. You can publish a devastating biography of De Stoeckl whenever you care to.' He laughed nervously: 'I'd appreciate it if you'd cite me in one of the footnotes.' And now he was ready with one of his most telling points:

'Third, there is the ugly business of the missing two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I have facts in this second pair of notebooks, and a miserable set of facts they are. I have traced with infinite detail, accounting for nearly every kopeck, the money that De Stoeckl handled in this malodorous affair, and without the slightest ambiguity or juggling of figures, I have proved that De Stoeckl had in his control not the hundred and fifty thousand dollars which American scholars cite, but nearly twice that much. So what happened to it? American historians have long suspected that Baron de Stoeckl used this money to buy votes in the American House of Representatives, but they've never been able to prove it. I have. With the greatest care and discretion I've bought family records, old accounts, newspaper suspicions and hard proof. American documents, English, German consular reports and they're a clever lot, those Germans and this row of Russian sources. Taken together, they prove without question that De Stoeckl corrupted the American Congress to an unbelievable degree.'

Here he stopped dramatically, smiled at each of his visitors, and hammered home his major point:

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'Do you understand what this means? That the sale was corrupted from the moment of its completion in Congress. The American government in its wisdom did not want Alaska.

It knew those remote areas were no part of its territory. The vote was consistently against either purchasing our land or paying for it when it was purchased. But De Stoeckl, this evil adventurer from nowhere, he forced America to take it, and he accomplished this coercion by paying United States congressmen to vote against the national interest. America's acquisition of Alaska was totally corrupt and must be rescinded.'

In the discussion that followed, Voronov proposed that some Soviet scholar, not himself 'because that might attract unwanted attention to what I'm doing,' be authorized to publish a small hard-hitting volume which might be titled What Happened to the Quarter Million?

It would reveal the surprising data accumulated here in Irkutsk, name the congressmen who accepted the bribes, and establish in world circles the solid footing upon which the Soviet Union's later claim for Alaska would be based. But Comrade Zelnikov had for some time been developing his own scenario for the ultimate recapture of Alaska, and he counseled patience: 'I assure you it would look suspicious if Soviet scholars reopened this subject now. I agree with you, Voronov, it would awaken world scholarship to the facts, and it would build a solid foundation for our later claims, but I fear we would lose far more in the long run than we would gain in the short. Keep your notebooks for 2030, when we'll use them and everything else with devastating effect.'

Maxim Voronov came from a family of fighters and he was not prepared to accept a reversal so easily: 'Could we encourage foreign scholars to do our work for us?'

'I don't see how. Anything surreptitious we did would be bound to leak out.'

'But scholars in the United States and especially in Canada are already probing into these muddy waters to see if they can locate carp hiding at the bottom,' and here he showed the men half a dozen remarkable publications, barely known in the West, in which Canadians and Americans dredged up some of the easier facts that he had been uncovering since the end of World War II. Any one of these writers stood on an elevated platform of learning from which he or she could take off and reach the higher levels already occupied by Voronov, but the four plotters could devise no strategy whereby the Soviet Union could encourage or underwrite the necessary 1041

studies. 'It would be too risky,' Zelnikov warned, at which Voronov snorted: 'Russians can't do it, and Canadians and Americans can't be pushed. So the truth can only be very slowly revealed. And may be lost if too much time passes.'

'Not-with your notebooks in existence,' Zelnikov said. 'And I want to take photocopies back to Moscow with me. We'll start shooting them as soon as we can get an army photography team in here.'

'We have good copy machines right here,' Voronov said, and Zelnikov smiled: 'Would you trust your notebooks to just anybody? The CIA probably runs your machines.'

So the time bomb on Alaska began ticking in both Irkutsk, where the individual tiles of the groundwork were being assiduously pieced together by Voronov, and in Moscow, where clever operatives like Zelnikov and Petrovsky were contemplating the geopolitical moves that would be necessary if Alaska were to be successfully reclaimed. All who worked on this sensitive project kept in mind Maxim Voronov's closing statement at the Irkutsk meeting: 'The time for our action will never be ripe unless the whole world sees great changes. But century by century such changes do occur, and we should be, prepared when the next one arrives.' Neither he nor Zelnikov believed that the United States would willingly or even unwillingly surrender its grasp on Alaska.

'Those people labored too hard to extend their territory from their foothold on the Atlantic to the Pacific to relinquish anything,' Voronov predicted, but Zelnikov corrected him: 'They won't do the surrendering. World opinion, world conditions will dictate it, and they'll be powerless to resist.'

THERE WAS A THIRD EXPERT, NOT IN ASIA, WHO KEPT HIS eye trained on Alaska. He was an Italian-born volcanologist who had spent his early days on a farm in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, and since he was a precocious child, by the age of fourteen he had become something of an expert on volcanoes and earthquakes. At fifteen he enrolled at the University of Bologna, where he excelled in science, and at twenty at the California Institute of Technology, where he earned a doctorate in seismology, his American citizenship and an appointment to a federal seismological station in the Los Angeles region. There he mastered the intricacies of earthquake measurement, assessment and prediction, knowledge in the first two fields being far more sophisticated than in the latter.

Giovanni Spada, forty-one, found himself in the small Alaskan city of Palmer, where the Flatches had done their

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marketing and where LeRoy had flown his first planes. There, on a quiet street lined with trees, he supervised operations in an inconspicuous white building of the Tsunami Research Center. On behalf of the governments of the United States, Canada, Japan and the Soviet Union, Spada surveyed the behavior of the volcanoes, earthquakes and devastating tsunamis that originated along the northern apex of the Rim of Fire.

It was his responsibility, among other tasks, to alert the northern Pacific areas from Japan to Hawaii to Mexico and all points north when the volatile arc of the Aleutians generated a tsunami that might sweep with mounting force across the ocean toward a distant shore.

In the summer of 1986, wishing to impress upon a new group of associates assigned to the Tsunami Center the power of earthquakes to generate huge marine disturbances, he flew his team down to Lituya Bay, some four hundred and fifty miles to the southeast.

There he led them to a spot high in the surrounding mountains where they could see the beautiful bay below: 'Observe that it's a long, thin bay with steep sides and a narrow opening to the Pacific,'

When his younger colleagues had familiarized themselves with the terrain, he told a story which astounded them: 'On 9 July 1958 an earthquake registering a massive eight on the Richter scale struck about a hundred miles north of here in the Yakutat area. The jolt was so strong that about forty million cubic yards of rock and earth were dislodged from that little mountain over there at the head of the bay and plunged all at once into the bay.

The resulting splash created the greatest wave the world has seen in recorded history, and you can see for yourselves the magnitude of devastation it produced.'

As they looked down they slowly began to see that this wave, penned in as it was into the narrow bay, had risen tremendously high, uprooting every tree it encountered, and Spada suggested: 'Will someone who's had surveying experience calculate how high on the flanks of the mountainside the wave rose?' and a young man from the Colorado School of Mines laid out with his thumb and forefinger strata from sea level to the line of denudation, and after a while said in an awed voice: 'My God, that's more than a thousand feet high!' and Spada said quietly: 'Actually, that wave rose one thousand seven hundred and forty feet. That's the kind of tsunami a submarine earthquake can generate in a closed area.'

At Palmer, with his battery of delicate seismographs probing the earth's crust, and with instantaneous connections to similar watch stations in Canada, California, Japan, Kamchatka and the Aleutians, Spada monitored the restless plates 1043

which ground together deep below the surface of the ocean, now advancing, now submerging, now fracturing and often slipping and sliding one against the other to produce the submarine earthquakes which gave birth to the devastating tsunamis. He was especially responsible for any tsunamis originating in the Aleutians, for they had proved their capacity to overwhelm cities, towns and villages along the coast thousands of miles away, and when the stylus on his seismographs shuddered, indicating that something had slipped somewhere, he alerted some sixty stations throughout the Pacific that a tsunami might be on its way.

But Spada also monitored those earthquakes which were not submarine, or those which transmitted their power directly to inland locations. Thus, in 1964 he had caught the first tremors of that violent quake which struck Anchorage, dropping sections of the city forty feet, raising others, and creating havoc across a wide area. More than a hundred and thirty lives were lost in that quake which first registered on the Richter scale as 8.6 but which was later calculated to have been 9.2, the greatest ever recorded in North America. It was about ten times greater than the quake which had destroyed San Francisco in 1906.

Spada maintained a master map, one that showed in extended detail the supposed structure of the Aleutian chain, and whenever an earthquake struck in that region he filled in with red crayon that portion of the Aleutian arc. To his assistants he said, when his map was completed: 'Gradually, since 1850, we've noted the areas where the plates have shifted,' and he pointed to nine different arcs which filled in spaces on his map. 'At each of these sites an earthquake has eventuated. The plates have readjusted.'