by David Drake
“Particle beam,” repeated the Secretary, staring at the damaged target. He turned slowly toward the military men. All of them now were standing. “All right, I’m not a bad person to impress . . . but I don’t have a thing to do with the funding of this project, you know. And I don’t have a thing to do with you or the DoD, either—not in any way that matters to you.
“So why did the Defense Intelligence Agency drag me out to Oak Ridge to see”—he waved—“this?”
Follett sucked in his gut. In round tones that masked his nervousness he said, “As you have seen, Mr. Secretary, particle beam technology has the potential of developing into the most important defensive tool in our nation’s arsenal.”
He paused. “In the arsenal of any nation. What concerns us—here in this room—is that evidence suggests that the Soviets have already developed the—principle—to a stage well beyond what you have seen here. If our information is correct, a Russian scientist has made a breakthrough as important as the one that gave the Soviets their initial lead in hydrogen bombs.”
The Secretary’s aide straightened in surprise. The Secretary himself was more direct. “What the hell do you mean by that?” he snapped, his heavy eyebrows closing together. “We had the H-bomb first. Have you forgotten Bikini?”
General Follett dipped his chin, knowing the chance he was taking to make his point. “We—American scientists—detonated the first thermonuclear device on Bikini Atoll, that is correct,” he said. “The device used tritium and deuterium to fuel the reaction. These isotopes were in such short supply that no significant—no military—use could have been made of the principle. Furthermore”—the Secretary of State’s look was fading from irritation to puzzlement, but Follett avoided making eye contact—“the tritium had to be chilled. The entire apparatus would have filled two railroad boxcars. It could not have been transported by air, much less delivered in the military sense of the term. Unlike the bomb the Russians exploded nine months later, using lithium hydride instead of heavy hydrogen as the major fuel element.”
“Fortunately,” broke in Rear Admiral Haynes, “by analyzing fallout from the blast, we were able to duplicate the Soviets’ research before their advantage became decisive. Our own personnel—scientists—had determined to their satisfaction that lithium hydride would not sustain a thermonuclear reaction. Fortunately, they were not wholly incapable of learning from their opponents. I assure you, the Soviets gained nothing from Klaus Fuchs and his like to equal what we learned from Soviet above-ground testing.”
“All right, get to the point,” said the Secretary, straightening again in his chair. The men in uniform had five minutes, a fact the politician made adequately clear by glancing at his thin, gold watch.
“The problem with particle beam weapons,” said Follett, plunging toward the invisible deadline, “and with all energy weapons, is the energy source. It’s all very well to tie into the commercial power grid when we’re testing devices here in Tennessee or Nevada. For the weapons to be really effective, however, they need to be based in space, in orbit over the sites from which hostile missiles may be launched. For that . . . well, all manner of solutions have been suggested. But the simple solution, and a solution that might work for the microseconds which are all a particle beam”—he tapped the dummy nose cone—“requires, would be to detonate a thermonuclear device and focus portions of its energy output into, ah, beams.”
“How are you going to focus something that’s vaporizing everything around it the moment it gets there?” asked the Secretary. The demonstration he had just seen was real. If the reason behind it turned out to be nonsense, he was out the door and gone, though. “Look, Follett, we have a Science Committee at State, too. If you people want to go jaw them about this stuff, that’s fine, but I’m on a tight schedule.”
“Many of the best minds in the field agree, Mr. Secretary,” the general said soothingly, “that such a proposal is impossible, even in theory. It would appear, however, that on the other side of the line there’s a Professor Evgeny Vlasov, who has developed a—theoretical, at least—method of drawing several dozen simultaneous, magnetically focused, bursts from a single thermonuclear device.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, call it an H-bomb like a human being!” snapped the Secretary of State. He was not looking at the military men, though. His bushy stare was directed at some indefinite bank of instruments while his fingers drummed the side of the chair seat. His mind was neither place, turning over possibilities. He looked up at Follett. “If that were true,” he said carefully, “any missiles we attempted to send over the Pole would detonate a few yards out of their silos. That’s what you’re trying to tell me?”
Redstone, the Brigadier general, spoke for the first time since the demonstration. “Yeah, with normal allowance for error, of course. 95% of anything we launched, say. And we guess a bolt that can do that”—he thumbed toward the twisted warhead in the test chamber—“would pretty well scramble a B-52, too. Or the White House, if somebody wanted to get cute.”
“All right,” the civilian repeated. “Since I don’t suppose you brought me here to propose we surrender now to the Sovs, what do you have in mind?”
“We would like,” said General Follett, staring at his wedding band rather than the Secretary of State, “your support for a plan to secure Professor Vlasov’s defection to the United States.”
“Oh,” said the Secretary. “Oh . . .” and he settled back in his chair, relaxing now that he had enough information at last to guess why he was being manipulated. A smile quirked the corners of his mouth. “Does the JCS know you’ve got something in mind?” he asked in amusement. “You people at the DIA, that is.”
Follett’s tongue touched his lips, but he managed to control his reflexive glance toward the Secretary’s aide. He knew that Lieutenant Commander Platt was secretly reporting to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on all of the Secretary of State’s activities. The DIA further suspected that Platt was also leaking information to the Office of Naval Intelligence. By charter, the ONI was supposed to be under the control of the Defense Intelligence Agency. In practice, it—and the other service intelligence staffs—were as parochial as the KGB and very nearly as hostile to one another. The presence of a known double agent at the secret meeting had complicated Follett’s task enormously, but there had been no alternative. If the DIA had burned Platt, exposing him to the Secretary, his replacement might very well have been controlled by the CIA.
“I have briefed the Chairman, yes,” Follett said, “on our intention to approach you, sir, and the necessity for it.” With an appearance of steely candor, he added. “The Defense Intelligence Agency is only the information collection and assessment arm of the Department of Defense. My colleagues and I are as much controlled by the Joint Chiefs as are the lowliest recruits in training.”
“Go on,” said the Secretary in irritation. “I’m waiting for a concrete proposal.” He could not know, of course, that Follett’s bit of fluff was meant not for him but for his aide.
“Yes sir,” said the general, nodding quickly and continuing to meet the civilian’s eyes. “Well. One of our agents made contact with Professor Vlasov. This was fortuitous, rather than a major priority of the Agency”—perhaps he shouldn’t have admitted that—“because the Professor appeared from all the information we had available to us to be at least as politically reliable as a member of the Politburo.” Follett cleared his throat. “The Professor not only had all the perquisites available to a scientist of genius—which he is—within the Soviet Union, his love for his motherland is of exceptional and tested quality. He has only one arm, you see. He lost the other in 1943 during the Siege of Leningrad when the satchel charge he had been throwing into a German blockhouse exploded prematurely. He had refused several offers of evacuation previous to that occurrence, since it was evident even then to the Party leadership that Vlasov’s endeavors would be more valuable to the State in the laboratory than on the front line.”
“How di
d you get an agent into the Soviet Union, Follett?” demanded the Secretary as if he had not been listening to the remainder of the general’s discourse.
Admiral Wayne coughed behind his hand. Follett warned him with a quick gesture. “Ah, Mr. Secretary,” he said. “I’m afraid we can’t go into sources and methods at this time. . . .”
“Look, General,” the civilian went on, “either your agent is playing you for a fool—or the KGB is.” He paused. “Or maybe everything you’ve just told me about Vlasov is a lie? Why would a man like that want to defect? Did somebody catch his son in Dzerzhinsky Square with a firebomb? Have we turned up photos of him with the Premier’s wife? Because there’s not a whole lot else that would make somebody like that decide to fly the coop, is there?”
One of Follett’s subordinates cleared his throat nervously. There was an answer to that question, but it was an answer they had hoped to be able to finesse giving. They had even considered concocting a lie, but there were no lies they could think of which fit Vlasov’s background and were significantly more reasonable than the story their agent had told them for true. “Well, Mr. Secretary,” the general said, “it appears that Professor Vlasov has been experiencing difficulties of a, ah”—Follett locked his hands behind his back to stop himself from twiddling his fingers in front of the others—“problems of a psychiatric nature.”
The Secretary of State blinked. Follett bulled onward, saying, “Ah, the Professor believes he is being persecuted by, well, aliens . . . And he appears to believe that we in the West will be better able to protect him from them.”
The civilian hooted and slapped his thigh. “Say, that’s great!” he roared. “And I suppose you want me to set up a Little Green Man Patrol in State? Jesus, that’s great! Chuckie”—he prodded his embarrassed aide in the ribs—“how’d you like to head up the National Space Patrol?”
“I assure you, Mr. Secretary,” the DIA chief said stiffly, “that we would not have developed this mission—even to the present extent—were we not. . . . Well, our agent assures us that Professor Vlasov was entirely lucid during lengthy discussions of nuclear physics. He may well have cracked under the strain of his work or of life within a police state—but he has not become stupid as a result; nor has he lost his expertise.”
The uniformed men stiffened when the Secretary stood up, but the politician was walking toward the duplicate nose cone rather than the door. “All right,” the civilian said, “I can see that. Does he speak English?”
“Ah—” Follett said.
Rear Admiral Wayne cleared his throat and replied, “No Sir, he does not, though we gather he may be able to parse his own way through technical material. His French is fluent—his mother was a Breton—and it was in French that our agent contacted the Professor.”
That was more than Follett had wanted the Joint Chiefs—or the State Department, for that matter—to know about their agent, a Vietnamese physicist named Hoang Tanh. The Secretary, at least, ignored the slip. “Well, if he can’t talk to them directly,” the civilian said, “we can make sure the story we give the media is our story and not his own. All right.” The Secretary’s fingers traced the sharp edges of the blocks which simulated the plutonium core. His nails left a hint of a line across the lead oxide. With the unhurried certainty of a record changer cocking, he turned to the general again. “All right,” he repeated, “what do you want from State, Follett?”
Brigadier General Redstone took over as planned. “Sir,” he said, a mental heel click though his feet remained splayed on the concrete floor. “Mr. Secretary, you’ll appreciate that however bad Professor, ah . . . the Professor may want to get out of Russia, it’s flat out impossible for a scientist like that to do it. Some Jew doctor, sure, if he’s willing to sweat for a couple years. But, ah, Vlasov, they know he’s worth more to us than he is to them. They’ve got his math already. Any hint that he plans a bunk and zip! He gets it where the chicken got the axe.”
General Redstone had the intense glare of a preacher warming to his subject. He cocked his upper body forward, bringing his face a few inches closer to that of the Secretary of State. The civilian edged backward reflexively. “Now, the Professor will be getting out from behind the Iron Curtain in a couple weeks,” Redstone continued, “a conference in Algiers. That’s his chance and our chance—and it’s the only chance we’re going to get. If Vlasov’s as crazy as the reports say—” Follett and the admiral winced, but Redstone plowed on obliviously—“then the Sovs aren’t going to leave him loose very long, even if they don’t know we’ve contacted him.”
“The conference on nuclear power?” said the Secretary’s aide, speaking almost for the first time that evening. “The one in Algeria? We’re boycotting it because it threatens still wider proliferation of nuclear weapons in the non-advanced world.”
“That’s right,” agreed the soldier, “and there you’ve put your finger on the fucking rub. On both of them, I ought to say.”
You ought to have said something else entirely, thought Follett; but the Secretary appeared to have been caught up in Redstone’s enthusiasm, so the DIA chief did not interrupt. Not the sort of candor you ran into a lot in Foggy Bottom, he supposed. Or the Pentagon, come to think.
“Because the Algerians are just as red as the Chinks and the Russkies,” the brigadier was continuing, “what with them and the Libyans carrying on a war against us in the Western Sahara—”
Here Follett had to interrupt. “Against our ally, the King of Morocco,” he corrected.
“Right,” Redstone went on. “That’s the sort of people we’d be dealing with. They’ll take our dollars for natural gas quick enough, but they’re not about to help a top scientist escape from one of their Communist buddies. And the other thing is”—Redstone paused to take a deep breath, fixing the Secretary with his eyes during the pause—“we don’t have a delegation to the goddam conference to plant a team in. The Canadians do, but they won’t play ball—all that new flap with their security force scared them shitless.”
“Ah, Red,” Follett said, “I don’t think the Secretary is—”
“Oh, right, right,” the brigadier said. “Well, if it weren’t for the agent who made the touch to begin with, we still wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance of extracting the Professor. But he’s there in place. And if you can keep the lid on at the UN—and the White House—if there’s a flap, we’ll get Vlasov out.”
The civilian gave Redstone a scowl of dawning concern. “What sort of flap?” he demanded. “You don’t have some wild-hare notion about going in with a battalion of Marines, do you?”
“Huh?” said Redstone. “Oh, hell, no. Not Marines—”
“Let me take over here, General,” Follett said loudly. Brigadier General Redstone had wanted to use elements of the 82nd Airborne Division for the snatch; Follett was sure that he was about to blurt that fact. To anyone outside the military community, that would have appeared to be a distinction without a difference.
“Mr. Secretary,” Follett continued, “we will—our agents will be operating in what must for the purpose be considered a hostile country. And Professor Vlasov, despite his desire to flee to freedom, will be escorted by KGB personnel who will stop at nothing to prevent him from doing so. It may well be necessary to take”—the general drew a deep breath; his Air Force background permitted him to be queasy when discussing murder from less than 40,000 feet up—“direct action to save the Professor’s life. Furthermore, while the operation will be under the control of a DIA operative, the—heavy work—will be carried out by local agents. It is simply a fact of life that one cannot expect perfect . . . discretion from, ah, freedom fighters in a situation of this sort.”
The Secretary of State turned away with a look of distaste. “You mean,” he said, “that it’s going to be World War III in downtown Algiers if you go ahead with this.”
“No, Mr. Secretary,” said Rear Admiral Wayne. “It’s going to be World War III if we don’t go ahead with this. And we’re
going to lose.”
The civilian grimaced, but he did not respond at once. Finally he said, “General Follett, isn’t the Central Intelligence Agency better suited to carry out this, ah, program with a minimum of, of publicity?”
Follett sucked in his gut again. “Sir,” he said, “without a contact agent to keep Professor Vlasov informed of the plans, there would be absolutely no way of achieving his successful defection. Only we in the Defense Intelligence Agency have such an agent—or could have one in the time available.”
“Well, you could tell the CIA about your prize agent, couldn’t you?” the Secretary snapped. “Does he only talk Army jargon or something?”
“Sir,” Follett said, standing as if he were about to salute the flag, “the Central Intelligence Agency is not responsible for the safety of our agent. We are. This is a man who has trusted us, who has provided valuable intelligence for many years out of his love of free society. I’m sorry, sir, I cannot permit him to be compromised by divulging his identity to parties who would throw away his life without hesitation if it suited their purposes.”
“We can handle this, Mr. Secretary,” added General Redstone. “Remember, it was us and not those state-department rejects at Langley who bribed the Russky to defect with his MiG-25.”
“Jesus,” said the Secretary of State. He was staring out the observation window at the melted target. “All right,” he said, turning. “General Follett, you have my support for this project—”
“Project Skyripper,” Redstone interrupted unhelpfully with a grin.