by Bart Kosko
The montage thinned to a single news broadcast in Arabic from Riyadh.
Adu touched the help button on the new computer console. A small infrared light flashed on the console. It flooded Adu’s mind with a fresh montage: dish and satellite schematic diagrams. Equations of orbital mechanics and telemetry and computer data flow. Circuit diagrams and help files on how the control room worked.
Adu solved the equations to find the angle to the geosynchronous Saudi satellite that carried the news broadcast. His fingers moved over the satellite-dish panel faster than the human eye could follow.
The parabolic antenna dish on the roof moved to point its center wave-guide stalk at the Saudi satellite in orbit over 22,000 miles above it. The government workers had programmed the antenna to receive signals from over 100 satellites. Now its smart control logic damped down the overshoot and undershoot in its movements and zeroed in on the new target.
The slight motion tripped a motion sensor on the roof. An alarm shrieked at the front desk and a video image of the moving dish flashed on the wall behind the two guards. The music stopped when they jumped to their feet. The nude Playmate still danced before them.
Adu stood straight and closed his eyes and went to nanotime.
The guards slowed to a stop as they ran for the door of the control room. The alarm slowed to chirps. The dancing Playmate slowed to a sequence of still holographs. Adu checked the settings once more and then counted down from three to one.
Three.
The guards had frozen fully in neural time. Only the small energy pulses of 1s and 0s moved through the air and through fiber-optic cables and through chips made of sand and light and solid geometry.
Now came the test of thousands of man-hours of planning and stealing and building and the final crushing with diamond anvils. All would depend on how well the real world matched the average of millions of software simulations.
Two.
Adu’s chip brain flashed in tiny pulses of blue light. The blue pulses grew in brightness and defined a fractal code. The green wax in Adu’s thin gold skull moved and then melted to form a bubbling liquid. Its atoms of francium and uranium thawed and mixed. The green bubbles were the last thing the chip sensed.
One.
The unstable francium atoms that surrounded Adu’s melting chip brain gave up a great deal of their energy and set off the neutron chain reaction. The smart nanobomb had reached its own small critical mass.
A nuclear blast lit the Dhahran evening.
The blast liquefied the main Dhahran oil field that then froze as a small crater in the desert. The pressure wave smashed the oil tankers and knocked them far out to sea in large orange plumes of burning oil. The pressure wave also leveled the nearby slums and stores that the fireball had not melted. Uncapped oil wells burned along with the twisted remains of the oil refinery and its large cylindrical storage tanks. Oil spray burned on the desert sand and rocks and on the surface of the Persian Gulf. Processed oil burned in the asphalt of the new network of roads.
The antenna dish on the roof sent one great white impulse of energy as it blew apart. In less than a second the energy impulse had hit the Saudi satellite in high-earth orbit. The onboard signal-processing chips could not cancel impulsive noise of this magnitude. Much of the fine nanocircuitry overloaded and burned as if a gust of raw solar wind had swept through it. The satellite shook in fine elastic vibrations and then tumbled slowly in chaotic instability.
Dhahran blinked on and then off as a small white light on the blue sphere of the earth.
Chapter 2
The Hoover Dam
Boulder City
Nevada
John Grant bit down on a gingersnap as he walked across the border to his Jeep. The dry brown cookie had no sugar or fat or calories. Its spicy taste masked the enzymes that killed the bacteria on his teeth and gums. John did not like fake junk food but he liked to chew something after he gave a talk. The hard brown disks of fiber were the only kind of cookies the government sold at the Hoover Dam.
“Why did you park on the Arizona side?” Ramachandra said. “I thought you disliked Arizona.”
“Not at all,” John said. “I love the land but not the taxes. I still don’t know why those old boomers want to go there to cash in what’s left of their nest eggs and then die. They would net more on the Nevada side of the border. Shit. Both sides have the same housing tracts and golf courses and burial plots.”
“I confess that my wife and I chose to live on the Nevada side because Nevada has no state income tax.”
“Ram. It’s all right. You don’t have to confess. You can just say you don’t want to pay a state income tax. No one will record it.”
“Are you sure?” Ramachandra said with just a trace of a British accent.
Both young men laughed at that. They knew what they said here in public would be on file for at least two years. Their images would stay on tape for at least a year.
They walked over to the lake side of the nearly 100-year-old dam and stopped at the guardrail.
John preferred the lake side of the dam to the river side. He always felt an animal fear of falling when he walked on the river side and looked down or even glanced down out the corner of his eye. The dam’s steep sweeping wall of concrete converged in perspective like a pair of railroad tracks and ended in the violent white waters of the Colorado River. The lake side was calm and made him feel as if he flew over a virtual image of a still turquoise lake with bare desert mountain walls made of scooped chocolate ice cream.
John fought these feelings and tried to see the lake as just a vast store of energy.
The wind blew John’s short black hair over his forehead and blew Ramachandra’s red tie back around his high white collar. Ramachandra was thin and a year younger than John and much darker from the desert sun. The two men stood still and watched the tiny specks move on the lake and in the distant parking lots.
A loud chopping sound cut the air.
The morning’s sun’s glare on the blue water made John squint when he looked up at the two silver tour helicopters from Las Vegas and the faces that looked down at the lake and at him through the smoked glass. The helicopters hovered and then crossed the dam to follow the Colorado River down the other side.
John also looked down at the bright blue water of Lake Mead in front of him and at the tiny white frothing swirls of the jet-skiers and water-skiers and the paddle-wheel boats. He had to squint again to make out the antlike family members in orange vests who climbed out of their jumbo tour raft well above the Nevada spillway.
“Smell that oil,” John said.
“Yes. Americans still drink it like beer.”
“Let ’em drink. The faster we burn up the oil the more I like it. That’s true here of these sun seekers. And it’s true of the humble folks and their new cars and refrigerators and air conditioners in your home town of Madras.”
“Bangalore.”
“Really?” John said. “Then my agent is not as smart as he thinks he is. I thought he had your Indian resume on file.”
“Please give him my regards.”
“You just did.”
John pulled one of the brown gingersnaps from its stack in the tight paper roll. He started to bite the dry cookie but then flicked his wrist and spun the gingersnap out over the dam. They saw the brown disk curve out in the wind toward the water. They did not see it fall back against the dam and bounce down into the water.
“John. Please. They’ve got that on tape. I’ll tell them you were feeding the gulls.”
John shook his head and smiled and turned halfway to the two large intake towers on his left. The two towers seemed to rise from the lake floor. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s workers had long ago blasted out their bases from the steep sides of Black Canyon.
“Stop worrying,” he said. “And forget the seagulls. Just tell them to pay me on time for once. You bastards hear me? Check that on your records. You might also tell them to stock a better gingersnap. H
ow hard can that be? They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on this security system to analyze our speech and make sure no one spits in the water. Christ. How can you work here with no privacy?”
“It is easy to get used to what you have never had. And do not worry. For next week’s demo we will fly in gingersnaps for you from London.”
“Ram. Bless you. You’re a model civil servant. I just hope the live demo works this time.”
“I have every confidence in you and Richard.”
“Bless you again,” John said as he pulled a spiky green rubber ball from his pants pocket. “Someday soon I hope to retire from this work and become a true gentleman of fortune. When I do, be sure to remind me to hire you away from the feds.”
“You are very gracious. But I hope you are not going to throw that rubber model into the water as well.”
John tossed and caught the green ball in his right hand and squeezed it.
“If only it were that easy,” he said. “Just throw this green seed in that big goddamn puddle and let the sunlight put it to work. Then watch all that cold sky-blue water turn to liquid gold. Just think what you could do with something like that. And think what these happy boaters and tourists would be willing to do to get it.”
“I am content to just drink the water.”
Chapter 3
Riyadh
Saudi Arabia
The pressure wave hit the Saudi Air Command in Riyadh as a soft thunderclap and a gentle rustle of palm fronds. Commander Haddad watched the expanding black wave approach the command bunker on the green wall map. He knew the wave had lost most of its energy but he still had to force himself not to wince when it hit the bunker.
The 12 men in the control room cheered both in relief and in defiance when the shock wave rolled past them and moved on to further dissipate over the desert on its way to Mecca. Haddad held up his fist in support. Young Omar Salala sat at his control console and nodded to Haddad.
The loss of the satellite had blinded the staff’s view of Dhahran and had punched a hole in their early warning system. The dying satellite had sent a death-status message to Riyadh and to the three closest defense satellites in the equatorial orbit. The satellite had taken less than a second to send the death-status message. In seconds the three Saudi defense satellites had retasked themselves and Dhahran was back in their full view. The early warning system returned to full function in less than a minute.
The satellite strike had no tactical effect on the Saudi defenses. The Saudis lost at least a satellite each decade when their craft crossed paths with some of the orbiting fine space debris of past space missions.
Saudi Arabia would have to pay almost a billion dollars to launch and tune a new satellite to take the place of the burned one. That would cost but a fraction of the state’s yearly oil profits. The Peace Shield that Hughes Aircraft had helped them build had at times cost almost 5% of the yearly oil profit. The Peace Shield had once again helped pay for itself. In a few more minutes other Saudi TV satellites would retask themselves and restore the commercial broadcasting to the few homes and offices that had just lost it.
Haddad knew the loss of the satellite was either a fluke side effect of the blast or a symbolic act of terrorists. He felt it was the latter. Blinding a satellite with a blast had played a part in both the popular and classified works on terrorist techniques since the end of the 20th century. It was a clear message that few could send. Terrorists had tried to send it but had failed during the great economic booms in India and Siberia. That had been more than a decade before.
Now a blank red screen flashed in front of Haddad.
He palmed the gray command pad to confirm his ID and to confirm that he had received the NATO prompt. The gray pseudo-image of a unisex NATO dispatcher appeared. It confirmed Haddad’s ID and then gave him a brief message that the NATO commander had just approved. NATO AWAC jets and satellites had confirmed that a small nanonuclear device just blew up in the Dhahran oil fields. The NATO crisis manager put the odds at over 80% that terrorists had set off the bomb. The message ran in Arabic and then in English. The red screen blinked off.
A new blue screen broke into windows.
On the first window Iranian Air Defense confirmed the explosion in Dhahran and lack of casualties in Iran. The other windows ran the same message from Turkey and the Sudan and from Saudi Arabia’s other Arab neighbors. The new radical Islamic state of Egypt sent no message. Omar Salala spoke into his headset to confirm Egypt’s null response.
Commander Haddad brought up the royal screen to King Fahd in his Riyadh palace just as the monarch had started to call him. The royal screen set off a noise barrier between Haddad and his staff. The staff could see Haddad only as a blurry mirage. They could not see the monarch or hear either man speak.
Haddad had to choose his words with care. His critics would review this secret session in the days to come. The House of Fahd held over 10,000 kinsmen. All would have something to say about what their air commander did to avenge the Dhahran attack. The king’s advisors would also have their say and that was what Haddad feared most.
The king drew most of his advisors from the Sunni matawwa religious police. The matawwa had sworn to end the regimes of the Shiite radicals in the Sudan and Egypt. They used spies and torture to root out the Sunni radical groups that had formed among the poor and the young in the Saudi empire. The matawwa still wanted blood revenge for the Shiite hackers who had once again stolen over a billion dollars from the Bank of Saudi Arabia.
Haddad stood straight with his chest out just as they had taught him to stand at pilot school. He clenched his jaw to keep his face calm and his neck rigid. The smallest mistake now in what he said or did not say could cost him at least his rank. Fahd never let him forget that the king could replace him at will and without cause.
“Haddad!” the monarch said. “Was it a bomb or a missile?”
“Your excellency. It was a bomb. We found no missile track.”
“Why not a stealth bomb from Iran?”
“We are at least 95% confident it was not a stealth bomb. We would have seen part of the heat track. NATO is at least 80% confident that terrorists set off a small nanonuclear bomb in our Dhahran oil fields. I agree. The blast blinded one of our TV satellites for a moment. That is a classic terrorist signature that goes back to the 1990s.”
“Then what does it mean?”
“It means they can spit in our eye.”
“How many killed?”
“We do not yet have hard estimates. But it must be in the many thousands for a city of that size.”
“And the royal oil fields?”
“The blast seems to have destroyed the fields and our refinery. We also think it destroyed or at least damaged all the tankers in the harbor.”
“Who did this?” Fahd said without moving his head or his watery eyes.
“I believe the Green terrorists did it.”
“Why? The Shiites have threatened our oil since I was a boy.”
“That is true. But all know this and Iran would face war. This was not an act of infowar. The Greens have sabotaged at least three oil sites in Siberia and Texas in the last year. We also have the intelligence report I sent you last month.”
“The American CIA report?”
“Yes. The CIA and the National Reconnaissance Office. With help from the Greeks and the Israelis. The report said the Greens in Paris and in Eilat have discussed cutting our optical fiber cables in the Indian Ocean and blinding our communication satellites. The Dhahran blast looks like this kind of information harassment.”
“Commander Haddad. The people demand vengeance!”
“Yes, your excellency.”
“Then tell me. What do you propose?”
“At minimum we can demand that France and Israel make good all damages. They harbor these Green terrorists.”
“As you say that is a minimum. It is not enough. And it is not your place to decide such a political issue.”
�
�Your excellency. I did not mean to—”
“Do not interrupt. We must respond at once and set a clear example for the world. No one must doubt the resolve of the Saudi people! What contingency plan did you prepare?”
Haddad paused to reflect on just how grave his plight had become.
Weakness now could mean prison or the sword later. The matawwa did not like him or trust him because he had studied aerospace engineering in the godless halls of MIT. The West had soiled him with its Coca-Cola and rock music and feminist politics. The older matawwa also did not approve of a commander who was only 46 years old. They wore white head wraps and he wore a green cap or no cap at all.
Haddad’s judgment told him to err on the side of peace and wait for more data. But his political judgment told him to err on the side of strength. The old Fahd and his rare strain of syphilis could always deny his strike request.
“We can launch a smart strike from El Haql,” Haddad said.
“Against Eilat?”
“Yes. We can launch against the desalination plant in Eilat. The Israelis own it but the Greens run it.”
“I know that,” Fahd said. “I have considered this option. Tell me the numbers. How many will it kill?”
“A spot strike should kill most of those in the main building and kill or wound those within 50 meters of it. There should be about 200 to 300 dead. There may be more than twice that number wounded. We have six cruise missiles programmed for that strike sitting in El Haql right now. At least three should make it through Israeli air defense.”