CHAPTER 215: The Sarajevo Spectrum
Location: Strasbourg Headquarters, Le Kremlin (Moscow) and Palais de l'Élysée (Paris).
Date: End of January 1997.
Point of view: All-knowing.
The statistic of the"zero dead"was a political miracle for the evening news, but after fourteen days of engagement in the dinar valleys, she had taken for the staffs the face of a slow nerve asphyxiation.
While the on-board processors and satellite links of the ASTROLABE constellation were able to locate a start in a quarter of a second and to place a health helicopter in less than four minutes, no algorithm in the world could prevent a mortar shell from leaving its tube, nor could it divert the surge of overpressure from an artisanal mine buried under the ice.
Deprived of their radars and heavy tanks on the first night of Operation Vent d'Est, Serbian paramilitary militias and local factions had renounced any frontal shock against French Leclerc tanks. They had adopted the mosquito war.
Sniper snipers were trapped in the broken church attic or in the basements of kindergartens and targeted the shoulder joints and thighs of European infantrymen on patrol. On the refuelling tracks, 155-mm shells recycled into improvised explosive devices were jumping through the engineering trucks.
In the huge field hospitals deployed by the Bundeswehr on the Croatian border and on Spanish hospital ships crossing the Adriatic, the operating blocks were rotated day and night.
On the morning of 25 January, in the operations room of Strasbourg headquarters, General Heinrich von Kleist threw a thick medical file on the glass table in front of General de Villiers.
"Three hundred and forty-two serious injuries in two weeks, of Villiers, threw the German officer in a deaf voice where a contained anger trembled. Nine hundred and eight lightly injured.
Our military surgeons in Split amputated four twenty-year-old boys this night. No coffin has returned to Paris or Munich, of course, but our companies bleed on the spot because your rules of engagement forbid us to rattle the hills!"
To his right, the Spanish general Martinez and the Italian Moretti displayed the same hardness.
"The technology of Ivry and Meudon is prodigious to save our men once touched,"Martinez said. But static interposition makes us the most expensive targets in military history. The militia know our air response times: they fire two rounds from a inhabited area and disappear into the cellars before the Rafale arrived."
De Villiers did not try to contradict them. His own colonels of the Foreign Legion and Marine Troops harassed him with encrypted messages demanding the right to break the leash.
The French commander-in-chief approached the digital console and changed the three-dimensional map. The blue cordons of the humanitarian corridors fade in favour of large scarlet arrows plunged into the heart of the Bosnian paramilitary bastions and Serbian ridges.
"The interposition is over, gentlemen, trancha de Villiers in a polar tone. This afternoon, I am sending President Chirac and your chancelleries a formal request for doctrinal escalation.
We move on to coercive pacification. I demand the immediate deployment of an additional fifty thousand men, the release of our paratrooper regiments on the deep arms depots and disarmament by force of any unit refusing to deliver its heavy artillery within 48 hours."
Von Kleist fixed the red arrows that converged towards the Drina Valley and the Belgrade approaches.
"It's an occupation plan,"the German whispered. On the tactical level, it is irreproachable. But if fifty thousand European soldiers march east, the sound of our boots will awaken Moscow and Ankara. All the tectonic plates of 1914 are still under our feet."
Forty-eight hours later, a flight carefully orchestrated by the Elysée in the columns of Figaro, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and El País revealed to the world that Europe was about to deploy an additional fifty thousand men to militaryly crush the Balkan guerrilla homes.
The shock wave simultaneously struck three capitals.
In Washington, in the dull basement of the White House, Bill Clinton listened with a mixture of irritation and anguish to his national security adviser shaking the spectre of Sarajevo: if the French army crushed the Serb forces, Boris Yeltsin's nationalist Russia risked a desperate reaction of pride that would lead the continent into chaos without NATO having only been consulted.
In Ankara, the Erbakan government summoned the French and German ambassadors to demand the written guarantee that the Bosnian Muslim civilian enclaves would be sanctuarized by joint observers, as Paris agreed within the hour with a cold courtesy.
But it was in Moscow, behind the red brick walls of the Kremlin beaten by the blizzard, that the European ultimatum caused the most brutal crisis.
In the paneled lounge of the Russian Security Council, the Minister of Defense, with his scarlet face above his variegated Soviet decorations, struck with a fist on the table.
"They want to kneel Belgrade! thundered the marshal. The Serbs are our historical allies in Slavic land! If we let French and German divisions dictate their law on the Danube, Russia will prove to the world that it is only a geopolitical corpse!"
At the end of the table, Boris Yeltsin raised a heavy hand, the short breath, the complexion cut off by fatigue and excesses.
"And with what do you want to stop them, Marshal? The Russian president grunted with a cavernous voice.
With our divisions whose officers haven't received their pay in four months? With our cruisers rusting at the dock in Murmansk for lack of fuel?
Our military intelligence saw what their Rafale fighters did to SA-6 batteries on January 10: they blinded and sprayed them in twenty minutes! Their satellites ASTROLABE count the bolts on the turrets of our tanks before we even turned the key!"
A silence of lead fell upon the Russian dignitaries. The superpower that shook the West for 45 years discovered the nudity of its industrial ruin against European silicon.
It was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, an old fox trained at the Gromyko school, who opened the only honourable exit door: to advance the French offensive by forcing Belgrade to fold under cover of a Russian fraternal mediation.
Forty-eight hours later, at the Palais de l'Elysée, the final confrontation took place in camera. When the special envoy in Washington tried to ask for a moratorium on behalf of the Atlantic Alliance, Jacques Chirac dismissed him in ten minutes with a staggering mindset: Europe was now providing police at its borders with its own currency and weapons.
Then the French President and his Foreign Minister received the Moscow delegation.
Without an unnecessary word, the French chief of diplomacy had twenty large-format photographs drawn by ASTROLABE's optical and thermal sensors on the table. Every Serbian artillery battery hidden under the Bosnian forests, every underground ammunition depot, every Slobodan Milošević command post was there with its coordinates at the nearest decimeter.
"You have seven days, Minister,"said the French representative in a voice. Seven days to convince Belgrade to withdraw its heavy artillery 30 kilometres from the corridors, deliver the militias responsible for the ambush and accept our garrisons of control.
If on the eighth day at dawn a single mortar still fires at a European soldier, these twenty targets will cease to exist in less than an hour. Bring Milošević back in the name of Slavic solidarity, and Russia will save face.
Otherwise, we'll do the job without you."
The Russian diplomat looked at the inhumanity of French satellite photographs at length, closed the black maroquin and took the first flight to Belgrade. Five days later, without a single shot of an additional cannon being fired, the Serb armored columns took ridges in ice rain. The spectrum of Sarajevo had just dissolved in front of the cold eye of the low orbit.
The morning mist still clinged to the low branches of the oaks and chestnut trees of the Meudon forest when Lazare pushed the glass door of Pavilion C.
Here, in"la Souche", far from the ministerial agitation of the faubourg Saint-Honoré and the underground concrete of Ivry, the dawn had the familiar smell of ozone, wet pine and, above all, of this abominable coffee filter burned that the historical engineers perpetuated as a religion since the heroic times of the rue de la Glacière and the rue d'Alésia.
Although Lazare had endowed the campus with the best gourmet canteen in France, faithful to his axiom that well-nourished brains design better architectures, no one had ever been allowed to replace the old coffee maker in the physics laboratory.
At the bottom of the analysis room, between a scanning electron microscope and a blackboard covered with chemical kinetic equations traced to white chalk, a massive silhouette was cut under the articulated lamp.
Dr. Ilya Yuri Volkov was wearing a grey wool vest with a right elbow.
At fifty-four years old, the former academician of Zelenograd, whom the Lazare teams had exfiled from a Russian shipwreck during Operation Charonard in 1992 with his best young physicists, had the shoulders of a Siberian logger, a pepper and salt beard cut with a knife and eyes of a blue washed with a staggering intelligence.
In front of him, on a laboratory stool, was laid his old birch chessboard from Carelia with the leaded pieces, framed by the morning edition of the World and a sheet of Izvestia received by fax.
"You are three minutes late, Lazare, groaned Volkov in his rocky French with"r"rolled like Baltic pebbles, without raising the nose of the chessboard. And if you let Karim touch the coffee maker again, I quit and go back to raise goats in Novosibirsk."
Lazare smiled, removed his soft leather jacket and filled two shortened mugs with blackish liquid that smoked on the hot plate.
"Karim sleeps again, Ilya,"replied Lazare, sitting on the other side of the stool and holding his cup. I made the marc pass this morning. I put a pinch of salt in it, as we were doing rue d'Alésia in eighty-nine when we no longer had enough to buy real Arabica."
Volkov sniffed the drink with distrust, swallowed a burning sip of it and sighed a sigh of grim satisfaction.
Crude oil. Perfect."
With a thick index but surgically precise, the Russian physicist advanced his rider in f5, threatening the pawn structure of the black rock of Lazare. Then, from the chin, he designated the front page of the Parisian daily newspaper, where the photograph of the Russian Foreign Minister shook his French counterpart after the retreat from Belgrade.
"So,"said Volkov with a smile in the corner of a biting irony,"it seems that Holy Russia has just saved peace in the Balkans thanks to its legendary diplomatic wisdom?"
Lazare put his elbow on his knee, studying the white rider's position with a fun glow in his gaze. He played his madman calmly in e6, refusing the sacrifice.
"The joint communiqué of the Quai d'Orsay and the Kremlin speaks of an"exemplary cooperation between great sovereign powers", quoted Lazare in a pliers-noir tone. We must always leave it to a bear who recedes the possibility of saying that he had simply forgotten his hat in the forest."
Volkov let escape a grievous and raucous laughter that caused his chest to vibrate, before his gaze darkened with a sharp melancholy. He took his own mug between his wide palms.
"Don't tell me diplomatic fables, Lazare. I know these generals from Moscow.
I spent 20 years of my life begging for research credits before their state committees in Zelenograd. In 1987, when I presented them with my first calculations of deep trench capacitors and submicronic engraving, you know what the deputy minister of electronics said?
It was easier to fly two suitcases of rubles to Vienna to copy IBM masks five years late than to finance a Soviet atomic deposit reactor."
The Russian physicist suddenly exchanged his madman for the Lazare rider, slamming dry wood on the chessboard.
"We had the best mathematicians on the planet, the school of Landau and Kapitsa, physicists able to solve equations of quantum mechanics on the back of a pack of Belomorkanal cigarettes,"Volkov resumed in a deaf voice. And these galloned idiots let our labs starve while the apparatchiks sold the country's copper and oil on accounts in Zurich.
Today, Boris Nikolaevitch drops his panties in front of Jacques Chirac because a thirty-year-old French kid has orbited the satellites and manufactured the processors Moscow refused to let us build! It's poetic justice so cruel that I'll drink almost a second cup of your tar."
Lazare observed the burined face of the Russian scientist. Without ever being able to tell him, he knew what Volkov had become in the other frame of time, the one where no one had come to Moscow in 1992.
In this story, Ilya Volkov had survived three winters by giving private trigonometry lessons in an unheated apartment in the Moscow suburbs before emigrating to San Jose in 1996, where an American subsidiary had confined him to subordinate reliability tests until his anonymous retirement.
Here in Meudon, Volkov ruled over thirty elite physicists and one hundred and fifty million euros of vacuum equipment.
"The Soviet Union did not lose because its engineers were bad, Ilya,"replied Lazare gently, pushing his lady a5 to nail the white tower. She lost because she was afraid of what her engineers saw when they looked at the matter.
A state that forces its physicists to lie about the yields of a slice of silicon always ends up lying about the state of its tanks."
Volkov lowered his eyes on the chessboard, saw the unstoppable fork that the black lady had just weaved in three silent strokes, and groaned while sleeping her king with a chikennaude.
"You play chess like a Tatar, Bonaparte. You're pretending to talk philosophy while you steal my turn from the other end of the board."
Lazare smiled with sincere warmth and rose by stretching his shoulders.
"You took me two parts last week when I had my head in the plug-in tables of the future processor. We're even. Show me why you've been up four hours in the morning. I know you: you don't read the Izvestia at dawn if your reactor didn't spit a miracle at night."
Volkov's blue eye immediately lit up with this childish and ferocious flame, which belongs only to researchers who have just forced a lock of nature. All the geopolitical bitterness of Moscow had just evaporated. The Russian rose from a surprisingly supple leap for his carriage and led Lazare to the screen of the transmission electron microscope.
"Look at that,"said Volkov, adjusting the micrometric focal point. And dare tell me that your American Santa Clara fondeurs or your Seoul subcontractors have already seen such a wall."
On the monochrome screen, growing two hundred thousand times, appeared the cross-section of a trench engraved vertically in the crystalline silicon substrate. The shape ratio was vertiginous: an extremely narrow and deep well, whose internal walls were lined with a dielectric film of absolute atomic regularity.
Lazare leaned, breath suspended. The engineer instantly took over.
"The atomic layer deposit of doped tantalum oxide,"murmured Lazare, reading the leak current curves displayed on the neighbouring oscilloscope. Thirty angströms of uniform thickness to the bottom of the well, without a single pin hole, without degradation of the ratio of capacity to surface..."
"Zero comma four femtofarad per cell less than one hundred nanometres trench opening! triumphed Volkov by hitting his palm against his chest. The Americans and the Japanese insist on stacking crown capacitors over the transistor like wedding cakes, and they encounter a topographic wall as soon as they want to climb in frequency.
With my deep trenches from Zelenograd's theoretical work and your sequential gas aldehyde process, we bury the electrical charge in the substrate!"
Lazare slowly passed over his chin, already calculating the impact on his entire 1998 road map.
"It means that the preload time falls below fifteen nanoseconds,"says Lazare, the bright eyes. And that we can speed up the synchronous dual-speed memory bus, on the rising front and on the descending front of the clock signal, to one hundred and thirty-three megahertz real from the first revision."
"Two hundred and sixty-six million transfers per second per channel,"Volkov confirmed with a grin. Fifty-two percent less power consumption than the US DRAM.
What about the most beautiful, Lazare? Not a single patent filed in the United States.
All the mathematical geometry of the wells comes from our unpublished 1989 Soviet notebooks that you bought from the Academy of Sciences, married to Meudon's French patents. Legally, for Washington, this memory comes from another planet."
Lazare placed his hand on the massive shoulder of the Russian physicist and held her with deep gratitude.
"It will be called CELLA-M3, Ilya. And when I launch my 64-bit architecture next year, your silicon will give it its breath."
Through the high window of the laboratory, a first ray of pale sun finally pierced the mist of Meudon's woods, illuminating the two mugs of bad coffee placed on both sides of the Russian chessboard.
While the chancelleries of Europe celebrated the retreat of cannons in the Balkans, in the dull silence of the"Souche", the unlikely alliance of a Parisian orphan and an exiled Soviet scientist had just sealed the next industrial revolution.