‘Now, into that “bus” fit the re-entry vehicles, the six objects that will eventually plummet down from space towards the target on the ground. Some of those RVs are warheads with nuclear bombs inside them, but the others carry an assortment of electronic and mechanical devices designed to help make the warheads themselves “invisible” to the scanners on the ground. Once released from the space-bus, those re-entry vehicles are in free fall; they just drop straight down. So, as you can imagine, the accuracy of the weapon depends entirely on the position and attitude of the space-bus when the RVs are ejected from it. And the plans that seem to have been stolen describe with mathematical precision the pattern for the ejection of those RVs.’
He paused there and waited to see if there were any questions.
It was the Home Secretary who was the first to speak. He harboured a deep suspicion of scientists in the defence industries, always suspecting them of inventing new problems in an effort to suck more money out of the public purse for their projects. He half suspected the Aldermaston men of setting up this whole spy scare for their own ends.
‘Are you trying to tell us, Mr Joyce,’ he whined sarcastically, ‘that all these clever inventions of yours have suddenly become worthless – if the Russians have learned how your bus scatters its goodies over the earth?’ He glared at the scientist with the icy stare he had perfected during years of withering interrogation of civil servants.
‘No, I’m not saying that, Home Secretary,’ Peter Joyce replied. ‘It’s not that easy. The problem is this. Suppose one of our missiles is fired at Moscow; the observers manning the Soviet defences round the city would see four objects falling very rapidly out of the sky towards them. Only there wouldn’t be four objects, in fact. There would be six, but two would be invisible, do you follow? So the Russians would most probably attack those four “warheads” and destroy them; but seconds later the two real bombs would have detonated and flattened most of Moscow.’
The Home Secretary’s brow knitted in a frown.
‘So,’ Joyce continued, ‘if the Russians know how many objects they should be seeing, and know the exact pattern in which they started their journey downwards from space, they might just be able to do some very clever calculations. With a high-powered computer they could feed in the positions and the trajectories of the objects they can see, and calculate the exact positions of the ones they can’t.’
He could sense that his message had struck home painfully.
‘And if they can calculate where the bombs are, they can shoot them down even if they can’t actually see them?’ the Prime Minister asked incredulously.
Peter Joyce nodded uncomfortably. ‘It is possible, Prime Minister,’ he conceded.
‘Good God!’ the First Sea Lord muttered under his breath. Admiral Barker had a sudden vision of his prized new weapon, designed to keep the Royal Navy’s proudly-held nuclear deterrent viable, being humiliatingly still-born.
‘And if the Russians believe they can defeat our nuclear deterrent,’ the Prime Minister continued, still thinking through the implications of what he had been told, ‘then it won’t be a deterrent any more. It won’t stop them launching a nuclear attack on us if they feel like it.’
‘And it’ll be a complete waste of hundreds of millions of pounds of tax-payers’ money,’ the Home Secretary grunted. The political implications of that would not be lost on the Prime Minister.
‘Now, look here,’ intervened Field-Marshal Buxton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, annoyed at the panic around the table and the paranoia of his naval subordinate, who appeared to fear most the loss of a role and the consequent diminution of his own service. ‘You’re assuming one hell of a lot from the Russians, Mr Joyce. If they did decide to develop a counter to Skydancer, it would cost them a packet, wouldn’t it?’
‘Well, it wouldn’t be cheap,’ Peter conceded.
‘And they’re already up to their eyes in financial problems, building the BMD system to defend against the older missiles, so they’d have to be pretty certain they could beat our new warheads before they decided to spend the money on it.’
‘You could be right,’ the scientist nodded.
‘So, what are you saying, Field-Marshal?’ the Prime Minister interjected. ‘You think we should forget all about it?’
‘Certainly not, Prime Minister. What I’m saying is that the Russians would need to be convinced that the Skydancer plans they have, if they have them at all, are the right ones. Before they pour money into new computer systems, they’d need to be certain that the problem the computer is intended to solve is the right problem, if you get me.’
‘In other words,’ Peter Joyce chipped in, ‘if we could persuade them that they’ve been sold a pup, that the plans are fakes, then they wouldn’t be prepared to waste their money.’
‘Precisely. Ivan’s so short of the readies at the moment, he’s only going to want to bet on certainties,’ Buxton concluded with a smile.
‘Aah!’ the Prime Minister exclaimed, slamming the flat of his palm down on the table. ‘Now we have the makings of a plan, I think. How about some counter-intelligence, Dick?’
Sir Richard Sproat stroked his chin uneasily. ‘Well, I’m not so sure. It seems a bit early to launch into that sort of game,’ he cautioned. ‘I mean, at this stage we don’t even know if the Russians are involved, let alone whether or not they’ve actually got hold of the plans.’
‘I tend to agree with Dick,’ the MI6 chief added. ‘But if we do set something up, it should be too difficult to sow doubts about the stolen papers in the appropriate quarters, when the right moment comes along.’
‘I’ve had a thought,’ Peter Joyce announced. ‘The first test of the Skydancer warheads is due to take place a few days from now. The Russians will be watching that trial shot very closely indeed from their spyships and satellites. If they do have the plans, they’ll be trying to check that the re-entry vehicles behave as the blueprint says they should.’
‘Ah, yes,’ the CDS muttered, guessing at what was about to be suggested.
‘Now, it is possible to re-programme the missile, to get the space-bus to do something that utterly contradicts the description in the drawings. It would pretty well invalidate the test for us from a scientific point of view, but it would also certainly confuse them in Moscow,’ he concluded with the hint of a smile.
‘But how would you ever be able to test the thing properly, without giving the game away?’ Michael Hawke demanded.
‘That could be a problem,’ Peter conceded, thinking hard. ‘But if its main purpose is to deter, rather than to be used as a weapon, what matters most is that the Russians should be convinced the missile works properly. So as long as we express confidence and satisfaction with Skydancer, even if it’s never fully tested, that might be enough.’
There was a snort of derision from the Home Secretary. ‘And a bloody convenient way of avoiding being held to account if the thing’s a flop,’ he muttered.
‘Don’t you think we should just wait for a while, until we know if the Russians have got those papers?’ Sproat persisted with his caution.
‘We may never know that for certain, judging by the past performance of our intelligence operations,’ the Prime Minister countered bitterly, remembering how his predecessor in Downing Street had finally lost the post he now held. ‘No. We must assume the worst case,’ he continued, ‘and I suggest that Mr Joyce should make immediate moves to set his deception plan in motion. All agreed?’
The intelligence men shrugged their shoulders. In the face of the concurrence of the politicians with their leader, there was no more they could say.
The Prime Minister then insisted that Joyce’s mission should be kept a total secret. No one outside that room should learn about it unless it became absolutely essential.
As the meeting broke up, Peter Joyce took Field-Marshal Buxton to one side.
‘Look, I could be ready to move this afternoon if I really work at it,’ he confided. ‘If you ca
n fix me a plane, I could fly over to Florida and do most of the work during the journey. Should have everything ready by the time I get on board Retribution. I’d need to take an assistant with me, and we’d want a power supply for our portable computers.’
‘You’re on,’ Buxton agreed. ‘I’ll get Brize Norton to provide the flight. The sooner we get this moving, the better.’
Peter hurried out through the front door of Number 10, and into the back seat of the official car that had brought him to London earlier that morning. There was much to do if he was to keep the deadline he had set himself.
As his uniformed driver sped down the motorway towards Aldermaston, Peter began to consider the enormity of the task ahead. He was certain that the deception plan he had described at the meeting was indeed possible, but exactly how to carry it out was another matter.
He closed his eyes to concentrate, and his mind’s eye began slowly to focus on a face. The square-jowled features were a composite, belonging to a man whose name he did not know, but a man of whose existence he was certain. He had often focused on this face in the past, whenever he needed some encouragement to overcome seemingly impossible difficulties. He thought of the face simply as ‘the Russian’.
The primary motivation behind his work at Aldermaston had been to outfox ‘the Russian’. With a combination of information from intelligence sources and guesswork based on an understanding of the way he expected ‘the Russian’ to think, Peter had calculated what Skydancer would need to be able to overcome the new Soviet defences around Moscow. To him it was an exercise in scientific theory rather than a plan for fighting a war; he well understood the disaster that would ensue if the weapons were ever used in anger, and he was convinced ‘the Russian’ did too. He likened his work to a game of chess, calculating how to avoid the traps his opponent had set for him. Now, however, he was facing an additional problem. ‘The Russian’ seemed to be cheating.
He had met several Russians in the flesh at international conferences on such ‘non-military’ subjects as computer technology. Many of those attending were in fact military scientists looking to learn something from their competitors. Scientists from the West were usually open about the nature of their employment; the Soviets were not, disguising many of their top weapon designers behind academic titles. It gave them a certain advantage.
Peter felt certain that some Soviet scientist he had already met must be the man behind the new batteries of defences round Moscow; and that the man whose skills he believed he had beaten with Skydancer was now seeking to gain an advantage, to achieve by theft what he could not through his own skill. He did not know the Russian’s identity, of course, but he was determined not to let him win.
Even though his Ministry was only a few minutes’ walk from Downing Street, Michael Hawke climbed into the back seat of his official Jaguar when he left Number 10, and allowed himself to be driven the short distance back to his office across Whitehall. As a vociferous proponent of Britain’s nuclear might, the Defence Secretary was a potential target for attack from some of the more violent anti-nuclear groups, and the police insisted he should be driven wherever he went.
Before leaving Downing Street he had secured a quiet word with the Prime Minister, eager to ensure that the blame for failure to inform the PM of this spy scandal the previous day was laid firmly at the feet of his Permanent Undersecretary, Sir Marcus Beckett, and that none of it would stick to him personally. It had been a tricky conversation on two accounts: Beckett was a personal friend of the PM, and he himself was strongly disliked by his chief. It seemed to have gone all right though: he was assured that Sir Marcus had been given a thorough roasting for his misdemeanour.
Back in his sixth-floor office, he stood for a moment behind the antique mahogany desk at which innumerable defence reviews had been planned. Waiting for his attention was a fat folder labelled ‘Long-term Costings’. The Ministry had a ten-year rolling plan for expenditure, which was constantly updated and adjusted to cope with the delays and cost-overruns which seemed endemic to weapons production. There were key decisions to be taken over which programmes they should axe to keep within budget, and until that morning this task had seemed likely to absorb all his time for the next few days. This secrets scare would change all that, he reflected.
Behind the thick stone walls of the GRU headquarters in Moscow’s Znamesky Street, General Novikov was betraying signs of unease. The normally poker-faced head of the military intelligence-gathering network had just replaced one of his four telephones on its rest – the one that linked him directly with his civilian counterpart, the KGB.
The news from London was alarming. For an operation to appear to have become unstuck, almost before it had begun, was an embarrassment that was hard to conceal. The GRU worked in collaboration with the KGB, but since the intelligence to be gathered in Britain was purely military in nature, the operatives were under his control. There was a long history of rivalry between the two organisations, and the KGB never lost an opportunity to launch sniping criticism at its military counterpart.
The problem for Novikov was that he had heard nothing from his operatives in London. He remained optimistic that the blueprints would soon be in Moscow. But the KGB had been demanding clarification, and he had no idea when he would be able to provide it.
He was well aware how important those British missile plans were. The air defence forces, the PVO, had just spent billions of roubles modernising their rocket systems to defend against ballistic missiles, and wanted reassurance that their money had not been wasted. Also the Department of Military Sciences, which was continually devising measures to counter the enemy’s countermeasures, was desperate to learn of the latest twist added to the spiral.
One man in particular had applied acute pressure on the intelligence services to find out what the British were up to – a man whose true role in Soviet life was known to only the most senior personnel in the military and intelligence communities.
Across the other side of Moscow, Oleg Kvitzinsky had just arrived home. The small name-plate on the door of his apartment described him as a professor of mathematics, which his neighbours believed him to be. He was a tall, burly man in his late forties, with straight, rather lank hair held in place by a light coating of oil.
‘Katrina?’ he called out as he headed for the bedroom of his apartment, which was spacious by Moscow standards. His wife had decorated it in styles she had selected from the shops or copied from the magazines of Europe and America.
There was no reply, and he guessed she must be visiting a friend in a neighbouring apartment in their block, which was reserved for the administrative elite of the Communist state. The women always had plenty to talk about; they lived in the small, self-protective circle of privilege at the top of Soviet society, with its own services and shops, where there were no queues and virtually no shortages. At their level, the men were usually free to travel abroad with their wives, and they did so at every opportunity, returning to Moscow laden with possessions that most of their fellow countrymen could never dream of owning.
The large Japanese transistor radio which Kvitzinsky now switched on in the bedroom was one such object. He had obtained it in America as being the most refined and sensitive radio that money could buy. He spun the dial until the needle reached a familiar resting point: the BBC World Service. He looked at his Swiss watch, and smiled at the good fortune of his timing. He had not heard any news that day, and the London bulletin would begin in precisely one minute.
He hummed to himself as the familiar signature tune blared through the apartment – but the news headlines soon wiped the smile from his lips. For the third item mentioned was the discovery of an apparent attempt to steal British nuclear missile secrets.
‘It can’t be true!’ he howled.
Impatiently he paced the room, waiting for the full details to be read out.
‘The idiots!’ he hissed, when the newsreader had finished. ‘They can’t have fouled that up so soon!’
Staring out through the picture window at the city, Kvitzinsky reminded himself of what was at stake. In his hands lay the responsibility for the protection of Moscow if there should be a nuclear war – at least that was more or less how the Military Committee had put it when they appointed him. As chief scientist for the Ballistic Missile Defence modernisation programme, it was his special responsibility to ensure that the technology of their defences could match that of the missiles aimed at them.
Trying to stop any small nuclear warhead hurtling out of the sky at thousands of miles per hour was a brainstorming problem. The idea of defending an area the size of the Soviet Union against such an attack was nonsense. What mattered to the leaders in the Kremlin, however, was that Moscow itself should never be destroyed. Without its capital, the nation would cease to exist, they believed. It was for that reason, when the first Russian anti-ballistic missiles were built in the 1960s, they were concentrated in a ring round the city.
Until a few years ago, those ABMs all carried nuclear warheads. If the city was attacked, these would have been fired into space and detonated in the path of the enemy rockets, hoping to destroy the incoming warheads through blast and radiation, even from a considerable distance. Accuracy had not been so easy to attain in those days; Kvitzinsky had thought of it as trying to crack a nut with a hand-grenade, and feared that much of Moscow could be destroyed by the defences themselves.
New technology had changed all that, though. New radars and infra-red detectors had made it easier to pinpoint and track objects in space, so that new super-accurate missiles and ground-based lasers could destroy attacking warheads individually and with great precision.
But to every measure there was a counter-measure, as Kvitzinsky knew well. The new American approach would be to saturate the defences round Moscow – to fire so many missiles at the city that eventually all the defences would be exhausted. An ever-increasing expansion of the number of defences was the only effective answer to that.
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