by Gordon Kent
It was time to act, he thought. His own government had worn his patience to the bone: he and Touhey had been making the rounds of the Senate, pleading and joking and cajoling to get Peacemaker more money. And more money and more money. Assholes, Shreed thought. Why do the people keep electing absolute assholes? The question confounded him. He believed in America to the depths of his soul, but he despised every person who got elected to its government.
Shreed hobbled to his study after dinner and, once confident that his wife was in bed, again booted up his computers and called up his special programs. Reaching with one of them into an Agency network, he withdrew a file and left no track; from that file he selected a report, deleted the rest, and then edited the report to remove any specific data that would trace it back to its sources. What was left was a description of Peacemaker, detailed enough to make its capabilities clear, but merely verbal and therefore not specific enough to make replication possible. Enough, that is, to scare the daylights out of any reader but not to give much hint as to what the hell he could do about it.
Again, Shreed prepared to encrypt the document and embed the result in a pixel.
Again, he called up a pornographic image, this one of two male bodies, so twisted together they might have been wrestling, on examination shown to be engaged in mutual oral sex. Shreed did not even glance at it.
The report proved too long for a single pixel. He encrypted the first, and longer, section, reduced it and embedded it in one man’s eye. He was setting up the remainder for encryption when he became aware of two things simultaneously: that someone was standing in the room behind him, and that she had been there for longer than a breath.
Shreed turned. It was his wife. Her face was uneven, as if she had started a smile and it had gone wrong.
He looked back at the screen, saw the image of the two men, hit a key, and it vanished.
When he turned back, she was gone.
“Janey—!” He tried to struggle up. His canes were a long reach away, and he flailed. “Goddamit—!” He threw himself back in the chair as the canes rattled to the floor, then sat there with his face in his hands. He was trembling with anger, with frustration, with hopelessness. When he got control of himself, he turned back to his work, his inevitable antidote to failure.
And he looked at the screen, and realized that he had sent the second part of the document.
Unencrypted.
He put his face in his hands again.
Eleven seconds later. Tehran.
The operator intercepted the message early in his shift. It fit the parameters, from the correct address and aimed at the site in Dubai. The program detected two expanded pixels in a somewhat garish photograph of two men performing fellatio on each other. The computer operator was scandalized and said aloud that it was certainly American.
One pixel contained encrypted data that was opaque to the decryption program. The other, however, came through in clear, causing consternation: Was somebody on to them? Was this a joke? A message? A virus? Two of the operators, studying the image, decided it was a message, and an insulting one, at that.
They turned it all over to Efremov, who took it home, where he did his best work and nobody except Anna, his mistress, bothered him.
The unencrypted page of the intercept appeared to be part of an agent’s report on a weapons system codenamed Peacemaker. Efremov was initially confused by the name. Then, as he read the material, things got clearer. This was the American surveillance system that was in the public media—indeed, the Americans were making rather a lot of its peaceful intentions and its usefulness to the world—hence its name. And yet, according to this report—
Sensing its importance by the change in his body language, Anna came and folded herself on a pillow by his chair. Her autumn-leaf hair fell to the floor and pooled upon it as she threw her head back to watch him. That was what made him trust her: that she never rushed to look at his affairs, but only at him. If she had other priorities, she hid them well.
“This is interesting, darling. Somebody is passing what appears to be a classified report to an untraceable recipient. I think the recipient is in China, but that is what we brilliant analysts call a ‘guess.’ The report is on a piece of military reconnaissance hardware. You understand?”
“Like a satellite?”
He smiled. Anna was uneducated, but she was not ignorant.
“A temporary satellite. Of course, they’re all temporary, but this one apparently falls out of orbit after a week. But what is interesting about this one is that, I think, it is also meant to carry some sort of weapon.”
She said nothing. She had nothing to say. She waited.
“It’s American, of course. So is this document—an intercept, did I say that? Another from the pornographic site. I told you about it.” He looked down at her.
“The site you own,” she said, a little mischievously.
“Well, my ministry owns it.” He had had them buy it when he had discovered that the site functioned as a pass-through for at least one Chinese agent. Physically situated in Dubai, the site got ninety-two thousand hits a day from the sexually challenged—perfect cover.
He read some of it a second time. “Hmm. Well—you see, the Americans have by-products from their Star Wars program. This must be one—a temporary, low-orbit satellite that can provide local photographic coverage as well as detect radar transmission within a fairly broad band. That by itself would be useful. But this seems to be a weapon, as well. It can target the transmissions, identify them, log and locate the point that made the transmission and—and what? That is where it ends!”
She scowled. “A nuclear weapon?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t think so. Too big, too heavy. But it refers to ‘the test,’ so they’re apparently ready to test the weapons capability when they test the rest of it—soon, if I remember; it’s no secret.”
“What will the Chinese do?”
“What a good question. What good questions you ask, darling!”
He ran a hand through her hair and laughed. “The Chinese are inscrutable, which is simply a way of saying they have a different culture. They use time as a defensive weapon; therefore, they will go slowly. It is now weeks before this test; they will slowly stir, murmur, contact this country and that. Then, very late, they will appear very big on the world’s screens and they will be very loud. A speech at the UN, I suppose. Perhaps call home their ambassador to Washington. Even perhaps cut off trade, but I doubt that.” He grinned. “But I will tell you what they won’t do. They won’t say that they know that this thing is a weapon or how it works, because if they do that, they will reveal their source—and the source is far more important than the facts.”
In truth, he wasn’t as confident as he seemed. The fragment seemed to him of the first importance, and he was frustrated by all that he didn’t know—who had sent it and why (A spy in the American defense establishment? How useful to identify him!); how this weapon worked; where the test was to take place.
“Come to bed?” she said, mistaking his stroking of her hair.
“In a minute.” He put on his glasses and began to touch the keyboard, giving orders to the computer operators downtown: try more decryption; gather and prepare a digest of all data on Peacemaker and an upcoming test launch; list all files re US “Star Wars” programs; flag agents in Beijing re awareness/response to US space/satellite/weapons development—
He called the duty officer at his headquarters, had himself put through to an encrypted answering recorder so that somebody would start working on things as soon as the first shift came in.
“I want to know what agency or office in the United States is responsible for a new satellite device called Peacemaker. Identify the managing office.
“Then I want a list of all employees.
“Then I want that list sorted for the following criteria: one, Chinese ancestry or connection by marriage; two, experience in weapon targeting; three, new hires by that office over the last twe
lve months; four, prior service with the so-called Star Wars program.” Efremov stopped, stood with the telephone in his hand, staring at the doorway in which Anna had appeared, not really seeing her. He was thinking about the earlier intercept, the African shootdown photo; since then, they had had a report of a CIA case officer’s disappearance in the Rwandan push into Zaire. Suppose, he was thinking, the source of the first one was somebody in the CIA—that is sensible, that it was their photo, got somehow by one of their agents, maybe this one who has disappeared—
“Yuri?” she said, very softly because she knew how he hated to be distracted when he worked.
He paid no attention. When he had been in the KGB, they had said that there were five moles in the CIA: three were their own, one was Israeli, and one was a mystery. Suppose—
He spoke again into the telephone. “Five, sort for any connection with the Central Intelligence Agency. Then—new task here, give it to somebody else—I want to check the Peacemaker’s managing entity for any links with the CIA—advisory, financial, shared committees—anything. If you find something, try to get names of individuals. End of message.”
He hung up. He thought for some seconds. He looked at her. “That color suits you,” he said.
18
October
At sea—the Andrew Jackson.
Even without the press of fourteen-hour working days, it took Alan a week to find where his laundry went. On his old carrier, the Jefferson, laundry was bagged, tagged, and left outside the stateroom door. On the Jackson, it had to be left in the ready room—if you were squadron personnel, and he wasn’t. It took him about six hours of homesickness to get over wanting to hang around the squadron spaces, because it was quickly apparent that he didn’t belong there—nothing personal, nothing even overt—but he was a lieutenant-commander and he had a staff marker, and despite his background with S-3s he was from up there in blue-tile country and, suddenly, an outsider.
His new duty-mates became individuals over several days, but he had no friends up there as yet. Captain Parsills, maybe, but Parsills was working even longer hours than Alan and spent his working life elsewhere. The admiral was a familiar presence but hardly a friend—not even, properly, an acquaintance. He greeted Alan that first day with a handshake and a quick smile and a “Let’s get on with it,” and that was the beginning of a full-court press that was still going on. It took him a day to discover that he had an assistant, a ship’s-company, senior jg glommed from communications by Parsills. “Thought you’d need help in this zoo,” Parsills growled and introduced LTjg Kravitz, a ship-driver who had already had his own command (granted, not much bigger than the average bass boat) and who brought to flag intel a knowledge of ships and water that Alan didn’t even know he lacked. In the same way, air warfare was a mystery to Kravitz. “Well, our ignorance is a good match, anyway,” Alan said and set Kravitz to swotting up the data on ocean conditions, including isothermals, from the Bight of Benin down to Walvis Bay. Oh, and by the way, keep track of that Russian surface group and just make sure they stay out of our water, okay?
And then he had no clean shirts.
The discovery came in the middle of the afternoon, a week after he’d come aboard. He’d been getting a whiff of his own sweat for some hours; now, back in his stateroom, he wanted to change, and where the hell was a clean shirt? There were no goddam clean shirts. He tunneled through his bags, tore the locker apart, went into his dirty laundry (a pile beside the rack) hoping to find something better than he was wearing, and found nothing. This was what you got for going to sea on short notice, smartass. He saw the helmet bag on the chair, went into it, thinking that maybe, somehow, he’d stuck a shirt in there. No, but he did encounter one of the plastic-wrapped parts of the gun, and he thought, I ought to put that in the armory, and immediately forgot about it.
Shirts. That was the subject, shirts—in the squadron spaces, you could wander around in a flight suit; blue-tile country was different, felt different. Same people, most of them, having been squadron personnel last tour, but now they seldom flew and the boss was an admiral, and you dressed a little up to the job. So he put on a different shirt instead of a clean one, hustled down to the head and washed the collar and the underarms of the one he’d been wearing, using hand soap, and wrapped everything else into a bundle and put it outside his stateroom door.
That was when he found that they didn’t pick up the laundry outside your door on the Andrew Jackson. What they did if you put your laundry outside the door was leave it there, and other people kicked it out of their way. If the people were other officers and they saw you and connected you with the laundry, they said things like, “You expecting room service, too?”
This small change in custom came as a shock at the end of a fourteen-hour day of trying to dummy-up a French order of battle because the admiral, on his advice, wanted it. The French were an unknown quantity vis-à-vis Zaire. If they got their backs up, and God knew the French could, what might their submarine capability be down there? Did they have any boats down there already, or did they have to send them from Toulon? Should Fort Klock be listening for them? Did they have a specific sonar profile? And what about French air power—aircrews from the Jackson should be able to reel off speed, far-on circles, radar frequencies, weapons, in case they met French aircraft, plus everybody would have to know French IFF or NATO ID code. And a great deal more, for which he had a stack of pubs under his arm and another sitting in his cubicle in the flag spaces. And now to come back and find his shirts, socks, and underwear scattered over about twenty yards of corridor! Stepped on. A lot! He was tired enough to think, This isn’t fair; I have important work to do; I’m the—And he caught himself, and he thought, Yeah, and I’m certainly capable of being small-minded. Hump your own fucking laundry, asshole!
He slung the laundry bag over his shoulder and walked down to the S-2 locker near the Dirty Shirt wardroom, just forward of his stateroom. It was ship’s nighttime, past 2200 local, and a single, rather harassed-looking petty officer third class was playing a Game Boy. He looked up when Alan entered but didn’t seem to focus.
“Hey! Petty Officer—mmm—Sanchez.” Alan was reading the nametag with difficulty. “Where does laundry go?”
“Oh, yeah, sir. You new? Gotcha. Air wing? Ship’s company?”
“Flag staff.” It still embarrassed him to say that. It sounded as if he meant the staff the flag flew on: Hi, I’m on the flagpole.
“Uh, I think you got to drop it in the flag wardroom. Or in a squadron ready room.”
Alan pondered this. It was a week until next laundry day.
“What are my chances of getting it done right now?”
“Sure. Just take it down to Laundry yourself. Fourth deck forward. They’ll maybe do it while you wait.” He was an optimist—why not? It wasn’t his laundry.
“Thanks.” Alan ducked out of the duty closet. The process struck some kind of memory in him; he had once taken his own laundry down when he wanted his shore-going shirts ironed on the Jefferson. Not a problem.
Twenty minutes later, he was wandering from berthing area to berthing area on the fourth deck. As most of the crew was asleep, the entire lower deck area was lit only with dark red lamps. He couldn’t see to read frame numbers on hatches, and no one seemed to be awake to give directions.
As much as possible, the Navy tries to have enlisted men of similar ratings bunk together, as they work together. The addition of women has changed this somewhat, as women require separate berthing areas and often don’t comprise the numbers to allow all female air-warfare petty officers, for example, to bunk in the same space, but the custom is continued as far as possible. It has a practical aspect, as well: dental technicians tend to be a different breed from steamfitters, often with different hours, different rhythms.
Pure luck now led him into the intelligence-specialists’ berthing area of the ship’s company. Equally lucky, somebody was awake and watching a John Wayne movie on ship’s TV. Alan walked up
hesitantly: officers are discouraged from intruding into enlisted berthing areas.
“Ah—excuse me. Petty Officer, mm—?” It was too dark to read the nametag.
The man looked up with that hint of slowness that suggests that he could have moved faster if he had wanted to, but he didn’t want to because he wanted to watch this fucking movie, sir. The man had a big head, the face still in shadow, although the light from the TV glittered on two shrewd eyes. He didn’t get up. He took in Alan’s collar pins, his flag marker, his decorations. The decorations seemed to require a second look, and then he suddenly uncoiled from the chair and stood and said, in a cigarette-roughened voice, “Help you, sir?”
“Don’t I know you?” Alan said. He’d seen the intel-specialist badge, now took in the iron-on SEAL patch—a trident and a pistol—on the left breast of the blue work shirt. Alan grinned. “You’re Petty Officer Djalik.” People had already told him about Djalik, the only former SEAL in CVIC.
Djalik was the work-center supervisor for the CVIC, a man with the natural authority that comes from being big and hardened. He had a square body and a long, leonine head. He spoke very softly, in a manner calculated to make officers and teenagers pay attention, with a lot of dropped final g’s and some t’s and d’s that suggested, maybe, Chicago. Alan already knew the story: Djalik had been a SEAL until his knees began to go and jumping became too painful. What he lacked in professional knowledge about intelligence he made up for in leadership, and he kept the intel center running with high efficiency. A lot of people admired Djalik. Some envied him his SEAL pin. Alan wasn’t immune to the mystique: he found himself resisting admitting to the former SEAL that he was lost.
A stupid male reaction. He bit the bullet.
“I’m looking for the laundry.”
Djalik smiled. “You’re not too far off, sir.” Was he amused? Was he going to have a little fun? No, he was thinking, because now he said, “You’d be Lieutenant-Commander Craik, I guess. Am I right about that?”