Richter stared at it with a kind of longing. The original version, the GT40, was arguably the greatest sports-racing car of all time, built for one purpose only — to win the Le Mans 24 Hour race and defeat Ferrari, a task it had achieved with consummate ease on several occasions. The current model, built to the most exacting standards and in extremely small numbers, shared that impeccable pedigree. It was low, sleek, beautiful, expensive, indescribably quick and hopelessly impractical, and Richter would have just loved to own it, but he reluctantly shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t gamble,’ he repeated.
‘At these odds, there’s very little gambling involved.’
‘OK,’ Richter demanded, ‘how many tickets are there in this raffle? A thousand, two thousand?’
‘Usually there are a thousand, but we’ve amended the rules slightly. In this draw there are only ten tickets,’ the man smiled, ‘and we’ve decided to offer you a discount on the price as well. Normally our vehicle raffle tickets are priced at about five hundred dirhams, but we’ve reduced the price of these to just one American dollar each. You can of course buy all ten tickets, if you wish. So are you still certain you don’t want to try your luck?’
Richter looked again at the Ford GT, back at the Arab’s smiling face, and without the slightest hesitation pulled out his wallet. He selected a ten-pound note and handed it over. For a moment, the Arab looked confused — he’d been expecting dollars.
Richter filled in his contact details, took a last lingering look at his new ten-dollar Ford, tucked the raffle tickets into his wallet, and finally headed for his departure gate. He glanced back to see the Arab still holding the ten-pound note.
‘Thanks very much indeed,’ he called out. ‘You can keep the change.’
Author’s note
This book touches briefly on some topics that might be considered to lie outside the normal realm of the mainstream thriller writer, particularly precognition, premonition and what is often termed remote viewing.
However, it’s worth pointing out that during the Cold War the Soviet Union allocated the second largest section of its strategic defence budget to psychotronics — the development and use of electronic mind-control weapons and devices — and research into paranormal phenomena. And it wasn’t just the Russians. The CIA ran numerous programmes of a similar nature, and admitted to spending in excess of twenty million dollars in research in this field.
Between them, the Russians and the Americans spent an absolute minimum of a quarter of a billion dollars over a ten-year period on investigations into these exotic and unlikely studies. And to paraphrase Richter’s remark early in the book — you just can’t ignore that kind of money.
The three Defense Intelligence Agency files referred to in the book are genuine, and can be read in their entirety on various Internet sites, or in Tim Rifat’s most informative book Remote Viewing published in 1999 (Century — ISBN 0 7126 7908 1). The Russian ‘Woodpecker’ programme was also real, as were the analyses of its possible effects on the target populations.
Brief mention is made in this book of ZATOs or ‘closed cities’ in the former USSR. Initially one of the most highly classified of state secrets, the first were established in the 1940s by Lavrenty Beria, one of Stalin’s closest friends and then the sadistic and psychopathic head of the NKVD — Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del — the forerunner of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti, the KGB, and administered by Minatom, the Ministry of Atomic Energy, and Minoborona, the Ministry of Defence.
In fact, the term ‘city’ is somewhat misleading, as the majority were actually quite small towns, and even the biggest of them, Zheleznogorsk, had only about a quarter of a million inhabitants. Most ZATOs were established around nuclear power plants, atomic bomb fabrication factories, weapon storage complexes and the like and, although the location of most of them is now known, the restrictions imposed on the cities and their inhabitants haven’t changed greatly since they were created.
Originally, national and international news media had no access to the cities, and what little information seeped in or out via local papers and radio and television broadcasts was highly selective and invariably censored. The resident population could not leave, other than in exceptional circumstances, and immigrants, whether from within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or foreigners, were not usually allowed to enter. Within the cities, local rules and customs over-rode national and international legislation, and the KGB and the other security organs of the state exercised more power, and generated more fear, than elsewhere. One Russian commentator, who lived for some years in the closed city of Ozersk, has presciently described a ZATO as a small-scale Soviet Union.
The closed city described in this novel — Penza-19, now known as Zarechnyy — was founded in 1954 and was one of the smaller closed cities with a population of about 65,000. It was the location of the Start Production Association or PO Start, one of four Minatom atomic warhead assembly and disassembly facilities, the others being located at Lesnoy, Trekhgomyy and Sarov’s Avangard plant. PO Start also manufactured trigger and detonation systems, and produced sub-assemblies of nuclear munitions and related electronic components.
Paradoxically, many of the residents of the closed cities saw themselves as ‘special’, as the custodians of the might of Russia, the guardians of the terrible power hidden in the nuclear warheads that their factories produced. They also pointed to the tax advantages and other financial assistance only available to residents of the ZATOs as evidence of their exalted status in the eyes of the Soviet government.
Since the collapse of the USSR, the closed cities are slowly being opened, most as part of the Cooperative Threat Reduction programme, also known as the Nunn-Lugar Program. Working under the auspices of the Defense Special Weapons Agency, and with a budget of nearly forty million dollars, American firms are trying to work with Russian entities to convert the weapons-production facilities to more mundane, and certainly safer, manufacturing processes.
The aims and intentions of the CTR programme are laudable, but the reality of its implementation has been rather less successful.
Perhaps the most embarrassing incident involved Mashinostroyenia, a high-technology facility which had been responsible for the manufacture of cruise missiles, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and manoeuvrable satellites. With a contract budget of just over five million dollars, and apparently without local consultation, the Nunn-Lugar team attempted to convert the factory into a cola bottling plant. Not entirely surprisingly, the Mashinostroyenia management refused point-blank to agree to the conversion of their leading-edge establishment into such a mundane, prosaic — and, above all, American — operation.
Some other projects were more successful. The Istok plant, for example, which had previously manufactured vacuum tubes, electro-optical and microwave devices, carbon-dioxide lasers, klystrons, magnetrons, batteries and various types of solid-state electronic components, was successfully switched, with an investment of just under six million dollars, to the production of hearing aids.
The existence of suitcase bombs has been hotly disputed ever since September 1997 when General Aleksandr Lebed, the former Russian National Security Advisor, claimed in an interview on the American CBS network that, not only had the Russians manufactured two hundred and fifty of them, but that they had ‘lost’ over one hundred of them. When asked to clarify this alarming assertion, Lebed stated that the missing weapons were ‘not under the control of the armed forces of Russia’.