by Fritz Galt
Mick stared at the words confirming that the Indian nuclear test had been a fake. “It grabs me, all right,” he said, trying to contain unwanted feelings of jubilation and vindication. “Will you excuse me for a moment? I’ve got a phone call to make.”
He dropped his napkin, grabbed the wall phone and dialed Natalie’s number.
She answered on the first ring.
“I just read that it was all a hoax,” he said without preliminaries.
“How’s Mariah?” She replied irrelevantly, as if she had been waiting for his call.
“She’s still fine. Dr. Yates says she’s stable. No temperature.”
“I’m relieved.”
“I wasn’t calling about Mariah, though. I’m looking at a Herald Tribune, and it says that the Indian hydrogen bomb test was a complete fabrication.”
“I know it was a hoax, Mick. I knew all along.”
“You what?”
“I knew the tests weren’t real, but I couldn’t tell you.”
Mick found a chair and sat down. All his heady euphoria came crashing down around him. The relief that he had been right about the nuclear tests was soured by the thought that others had known all along. His wife, for God’s sake, had watched him run around for over a year without giving him the complete story.
His shock turned to anger. He felt his pulse racing. “Why the hell didn’t you say something at the time?” He had trouble controlling the tremble in his voice. “Why did you let the Agency hang me out to dry?”
“Because India needed the hydrogen bomb to further their position.”
“What position? What are you talking about?”
“Mick, someday you’ll understand what I’m talking about. You’ll just have to trust me.”
“That’s not at all the word that springs to mind.” He was on the verge of slamming down the receiver.
“Okay, while your trust is shot to bits,” she said, “I might as well fill you in on something else. I gave your Indian scientist friends the technical information to build that hydrogen bomb.”
He should have hung up the phone. “You what?”
“They couldn’t have built it without blueprints that I supplied them from Los Alamos.”
“What in God’s name? Are you crazy? You sold the store to the Indians?” His attempt at reaching out to her had failed dismally. Instead of healing their relationship, the call had only introduced a new division. She had betrayed him.
“I didn’t give them everything, but enough to convince the Paks.”
“Jesus Christ, no wonder you didn’t want to fly home with Mariah. The FBI would have strapped you to the nearest electric chair the moment you landed.” He considered several more suitable methods of execution.
“I’ve been promised protection,” she said.
“Ha. Who would want to protect you? The Indians or the Americans?”
“I wouldn’t have done it without American assurances.”
“Don’t be naïve. You’ll always be someone’s scapegoat just like I was at Langley.”
“It had the sanction of the president,” she said firmly.
“Oh, great, now the president will be impeached. Who came up with this crackpot idea?”
Natalie was silent for some time. “Me,” she finally said.
Mick slammed down the phone.
He grabbed his head and staggered back to Simon’s table.
Simon must have sensed a need for silence, for he said nothing until Mick finally sat up straight, staring at the lights twinkling across the goddamned lagoon.
“What did she say?”
“A pile of bull.”
“What did you say?”
Mick didn’t bother to respond. Simon might be a doctor, but no human being needed to know the pathetic details of such an abysmal relationship and career.
“Oh, right,” Simon said, and looked around the restaurant. He hailed the waiter to order dinner.
Mick wasn’t hungry, but Simon ordered two seafood platters anyway.
The waiter left and the two men sat in silence.
Mick felt a hollow wind blowing through him with enormous pressure, like a gust of the past that would never have meaning as long as he ignored it. “All right,” he said at last, blinking away the moisture forming in his eyes. “It’s over with anyway. Our marriage is finished, and my career with the Agency is over. I can talk.”
“You sure it’s legal to talk?”
“As long as you’re not her divorce lawyer.”
He tried to smile, but the utter finality of the word “divorce” stuck in his throat.
“No, but I may be a paid informant.”
Mick studied the world-weary doctor. He had known plenty of informants in his time. Informants had been his entire job in India, and the doctor was no informant. “With my luck, you probably are one.”
Simon chuckled at the thought. “Bounce it off me.” His face had lost its flabby indifference, and reflections of light pulsated in his eyes.
Mick sucked in his breath. Where should he begin?
“She’s been playing me for a fool. There I was running all over Aurangabad, and Hyderabad, and East Camel-dump-bad for a year while she was playing fast and loose with nuclear secrets, knowing full well that they were planning a hoax. You know, that kinda thing can really bury a relationship.”
“You mean she actually used you?”
“Sure. Don’t you see? As long as I was running around on behalf of the American Government trying to keep the scientists from setting off a test blast, it looked like Uncle Sam wasn’t part of their efforts to create a hydrogen bomb. She let me investigate them while she sold them secrets behind my back. Makes me feel like a loose turd in a toilet bowl.”
“I’ve felt that way.”
“What really burns my shorts is that my own wife was feeding these Indian scientists the very technical information that I was trying to prevent them from obtaining. She was giving away the plans to the hydrogen bomb. Do you know what that means?”
“Incredible. Wait ’til Congress hears this.”
“That’s the asinine thing. She says she’s got the president’s approval. Who can protect her from the American public once they discover she’s been playing Rosenberg with their greatest technological breakthrough since the atomic bomb?”
At the Taj Mahal Hotel, Natalie continued to sit up in her bed. She had carefully set her mobile phone under the bed lamp, but Mick’s anger still burned in her ear. She stared at her empty hands.
They had once been nice hands, the soft hands of a lover, the kind hands of a mother. In the dim yellow glow, they looked old and dry. Despite what hard-up losers like Lou told her, she had gone to pot. She had stopped taking care of herself.
She watched her hands reach for her wallet. She willed them to stop, but they didn’t. They reached into a dark place to which she had vowed never to return.
Her eyes smarting, she pulled a snapshot from her wallet. The picture of Mick and her was as crooked as hell.
Mariah had taken it.
The background captured a limitless blue sky, and in one corner the photo caught a glimpse of the Ajanta Caves of Aurangabad. The Buddhist caves had been chiseled into a horseshoe-shaped canyon over two millennia ago. The view from on top, where a British explorer had first discovered the caves in 1819, was breathtaking.
Despite Mick’s protestations, Mariah had insisted on taking the picture. She had lined up Mick to Natalie’s right, then to her left, then finally behind her.
Mick was a head taller than Natalie as he cradled her in his arms. However, his expression was not one of an adoring husband. His thick black eyebrows were half-raised in consternation with Mariah, while his dry lips tried to compose a smile for the camera.
Mick had good hands. Damn, he had great hands. Kind, yet firm, wise, yet supple. He could steer her through the highest moments of ecstasy, and lead her out of her darkest nightmares. Natalie had trusted him completely since the moment they ha
d met at the Marine Ball in Lisbon over a decade ago.
Lord, their marriage had had great highs: the meals they had cooked together, the wine they had tasted, the jokes they had shared over and over again, the places they had seen, the places they would return to. Yet the lows had been equally potent. As a couple they had been to hell and back three times, in the Balkans, in Taiwan and in the Swiss Alps. They had suffered depression, separation and misunderstandings, yet their marriage had healed each time, becoming more solid in a disjointed sort of way.
Now there was no reason for hope. The bond that held them together had snapped.
She looked into the adoring eyes of the woman in the picture. What kind of demon lurked inside her? It took so long for her fatal flaw to emerge, only to destroy her husband and daughter along with her.
The picture told her something different. It told of a woman in touch with her family as they spent a picnic on a grassy slope above an awesome landmark. She could see in herself the young girl who had scrapped music school on the East Coast and jumped into the Foreign Service with both feet. Marriage and childbirth had further brought out the wonder in her youthful, slanting blue eyes.
The photo caught her mid-stride, walking proudly with her family into their bright future.
No, there was no demon within her.
News from outside her family’s domain had crushed what turned out to be a very fragile marriage.
One morning a year ago, Ambassador Franklin Duffy had phoned her at work. She had sat listening to his patient voice, watching a crow raiding a swallow’s nest below her office window, a speckled egg dropping to the hard-packed red clay and bursting open with a yellow splat.
His words were logical. The subcontinent was in crisis. There were no restraints on the two warring nations. The United Nations had been powerless to help for forty years. Unless the Americans made a bold move, nuclear war would rain on the large cities of Pakistan and India. No mechanism prevented the world from taking sides, China with its historic ties to Pakistan, and Russia with its partner India. Explosions would rock Asia and nuclear fallout would engulf and eventually suffocate the globe.
So there had to be a New Initiative. He had revealed it to her with a note of finality. America would have to take sides, and they would choose India. America would play a key, covert role in building up the new initiative, and she could tell no one.
That fateful conversation had precipitated a series of events in which she wished she had no hand, as if that would have changed things. It drove a professional wedge between her and her husband, who was her professional counterpart. It was also destined to drive a permanent stake through their hearts. The failure of their marriage was not a byproduct of the New Initiative. It had become the means.
Tears welled in her eyes. She dropped the crude photo of her family on the elaborate, hand-embroidered bedspread and reached for her handkerchief.
Now she was ready for her cry. And it came.
“All right,” Simon said, rubbing his balding forehead with the palm of his hand. “How did all this start?”
Mick threw back his head and stared at the stars. They were swimming out of control. He squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath.
The words came slowly at first. Then, as he related a sequence of events, they took on a logic of their own.
One year ago, he had arrived in India for the first time in his life. He and Natalie had already learned the ropes overseas, having served in American missions in Portugal, Bolivia, Yugoslavia, Taiwan and Switzerland. Despite the foreign languages and the cultural idiosyncrasies involved, he had done his job effectively. Some might even call his work noteworthy. But India was a different case. The country was not foreign to him. It was alien.
From the very first moment he had set foot in Bombay’s Sahar International Airport carrying his two-year-old daughter in one arm, he knew he was in for a difficult tour. The offensive odors had set him back several steps. He didn’t know how he could continue for three years with the stench of human and animal waste and urine wafting through the dank, tropical air.
“It’s no wonder the term malaria translates as bad air,” Simon noted.
Mick nodded and went on.
The first day, as he walked across the lobby of Bombay’s luxurious five-star Oberoi Hotel, he had nearly stumbled over a half-naked man in dhoti pants and bare feet scrubbing the staircase with a toothbrush. He knew that he would have to rethink all his earlier conceptions of human dignity.
His first taxi driver tooted his horn and calmly swerved his tiny, box-shaped cab around white, ox-like zebus strolling across the city street. The cab passed moving collages of colorful saris mixing in a continuous, vivid kaleidoscope, and half-clad men pushing long two-wheel carts loaded high with shiny round tiffin lunchboxes, flattened cardboard and resplendent bolts of fabric. The saris were draped in every imaginable way over every shape of womanly form from the obese to the emaciated. He recalled thinking then that his previous life had ended, and he had joined an entirely different strand of world history.
How could he ever perform his job?
Then he proceeded to spend the entire year pursuing Indian scientists all over the map. It proved to be exhausting work. He traveled to vast cities he had never heard of before. He entered Indian states as large and varied as entire countries, containing languages as different as French and Russian. He learned and endured age-old customs and tried to interpret angry shouts in a tangle of tongues foreign to most Indians. He tailed men and women who could either be brilliant scientists or elementary school dropouts, not that he could tell the difference.
Sure, he stumbled here and there, missed the odd travel connection, brushed off thousands of beggars like they were flies, offended far too many people in positions that mattered, but he had gotten his job done. Of that he felt damned sure.
His mission had been simple and nearly impossible: anticipate potential Indian test explosions of a hydrogen bomb.
Why track down nuclear bombs in India? The answer lay in the sinister international signs over the past few years that had developed into an alarming buildup of tensions.
Several years earlier, both India and Pakistan had abstained from signing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which was designed to stop all further development of nuclear weapons worldwide. The two hostile neighbors were the only nuclear states, or potential nuclear states, to abstain.
Chilling memories resurfaced of the violent upheaval at the end of British colonial rule in 1947. On the heels of World War Two, when Lord Mountbatten, the last British Raj, quickly exited stage right, India was left virtually ungoverned.
Millions of Muslims uprooted their families and rushed from India into the newly partitioned East and West Pakistan, while Hindu families swarmed out of East and West Pakistan into the truncated India. Never before had human history witnessed so large and rapid a transmigration of people. As their paths collided on roadsides and in rail cars, over a million souls were slaughtered in ugly clashes between Muslims and Hindus. Meanwhile, famine from unharvested fields wiped out many more.
Tens of millions of Muslims were left stranded in India, remnants of the turmoil, while millions of Hindus remained in Pakistan. Ill feelings and distrust isolated the communities living behind enemy borders. And vast border regions, most notably the Punjab and Kashmir, remained in political dispute.
“Sounds like a recipe for further disaster,” Simon said.
Mick nodded.
Shortly after India defied the world by pointedly not signing the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, she demonstrated her technological prowess by launching the Indian Remote Sensing Satellite into orbit. Worrisome to her neighbors, the satellite not only carried stereoscopic cameras capable of identifying objects on the ground as small as gun turrets, but it demonstrated her long-range missile capability.
They launched the sophisticated satellite into orbit using a homegrown, five-story rocket, a source of terror in a post-Gulf
War world burgeoning with weapons of mass destruction. Other forms of rocket science were in full practice in India as she deployed her Prithvi short-range missiles for strategic defense and began developing her own cruise missiles.
Shouts from kids lobbing balls at each other in the pool briefly interrupted Mick’s train of thought.
Yes, then there was Pakistan.
Pakistan countered India’s bellicose rumblings by successfully launching its newly developed Ghauri, a fifth generation of its Hatf rocket bearing uncanny similarities to the Chinese M-11. It was an intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of delivering conventional, chemical and nuclear warheads to targets one thousand five hundred kilometers away, and deep into India’s heartland.
Most likely China supplied the subsystems, technologies for propellant production, and inertial guidance systems required for Pakistan to assemble the rocket. This was despite the fact that China had signed a joint agreement with the U.S. in 1994 establishing a ban on Chinese export of all missile technology that fell within the G7’s Missile Technology Control Regime.
It looked like India and Pakistan were competing in a quick, one-day international cricket match.
Mick checked if Simon’s eyes had glazed over, but they hadn’t. Unburdening himself was a new experience for him. It felt mildly cathartic, but he also sensed impending disaster as he relived his past. He grabbed a fork and took a vicious stab at his fish and continued his monologue.
To add political uncertainty to the mix, India’s coalition government, based largely on the long-dominant Congress Party, teetered on the brink of dissolution. An imminent balloting would usher in the Hindu nationalist party, called the BJP, in coalition with some sinister anti-Muslim groups.
In addition to the military and political posturing underway, simmering tensions in the disputed Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, in India’s northwestern corner bordering Pakistan, broke into full-scale artillery bombardment of civilian targets, including entire towns and villages.
In the half century since India’s independence, the Indo-Pak border had been the scene of two outright wars and numerous skirmishes between the two nations. During times of peace, Kashmir continued to sustain low-level military and terrorist action. Suddenly, the two rivals ratcheted up their rhetoric and their attacks. India termed the conflict a proxy war on Pakistan’s part, while Pakistan proclaimed it a fight of the Muslim majority for self-determination. Civilians ran for cover.