“So?”
“So this is different.”
He picked up a cigarette and made a production of lighting it. He was waiting for me to ask him how it was different. Then he could tell me that was a good question, and I could say—
What I said was, “Just tell it straight. There are no points given for suspense and dramatic effects. Just tell it.”
“The direct approach, eh? But sometimes a straight line isn’t the shortest distance between two points. Sometimes a great circle route—”
“Not here. Not on my island.”
A smile, a nod. “Okay. To hell with drama. This isn’t ordinary weaponry, conventional stuff. We’re talking about a shipment that’s worth in excess of two million dollars and fits into four trucks. We’re talking about the most highly sophisticated combat devices ever produced for guerrilla warfare. I don’t have to tell you about guerrilla warfare. You had ten years of it. All I have to say is that this gear makes the stuff you used in Asia look like water pistols. They didn’t give you fellows toys like this. They’ve been making them all along, but they were never okayed for combat use. Not because they don’t work. The testing reports would knock you out. But because nobody would buy escalation on that scale.
“Like atomic grenades, for example. One man throws one and clears three acres. Like nuclear mortars. Gas grenades. Do you realize what you’ve got when you can combine the knockout power of a nuclear blast with the maneuverability of a mortar? Do you realize how effective they’d be against guerrillas? Or how well they’d work for guerrillas?”
“The real dirty stuff.”
“Right.”
“We kept hearing rumors that we were getting stuff like that. Or that the other side was.” I remembered a tangle we had in Laos on a patrol deep in Pathet Lao territory. I tried to imagine what it would have been like if we’d had that kind of weaponry.
Or if they had it.
“I could go on, Paul, but you wanted it engraved on the head of a pin. It’s choice stuff, the real dirty stuff. The decision to give it to some friends was ultra-top level. It didn’t make the papers. It never will — if the question ever comes up, we’ll deny we ever had it, we’ll insist they made it out of old tire tubes in Burma, we’ll lie our heads off no matter who says what. Hell, giving the stuff out couldn’t get fifty votes in the House or twenty in the Senate.”
“Keep talking.”
“I was just noticing the stars. It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Peaceful. I could see how a man could enjoy spending nights here, under the stars, sitting beside a fire—”
“You made your point, Dattner.”
“George.”
“You made your point. Get on with it.”
He flicked ashes from his cigarette. “You can figure out the rest, can’t you? The shipment was dispatched — not, needless to say, through the usual channels. You can also guess who was supposed to receive it.”
“The hell I can. I haven’t looked at a newspaper or heard a radio in months. For all I know we sent the crud to Canada.”
“I forget how out of touch you’ve been.”
“Not out of touch. Call it — no, forget it, forget word games. Where were they supposed to go?”
“To guerrillas, and in this hemisphere, and now you can guess, Paul, because it’s the same guess you would have made a year ago. You with me?” I was. “But instead of going where they were supposed to go, a wheel came off and they wound up in the wrong hands. At first it looked as though they were going to go to the bad-guy government that our good-guy guerrillas were trying to overthrow, and that would have been more or less terrible, but it turned out that it was worse than that. A lot worse, because we could have made a good stab at blocking that shipment.”
He put his cigarette in the fire. “Instead it turns out that the new destination of all this hell on wheels is yet another group of guerrillas, but in this instance they’re bad-guy guerrillas who’ll use them to knock hell out of a good-guy government. Four truckloads of this garbage is just about enough to do it, too, but it hardly matters whether they win or lose, because the U.S.A. loses either way. If they make it, we’ve lost the cornerstone of free Latin America. If they flop, a lot of people will want to know what happened. It won’t even help us to deny that these were our goods, not even if anybody’s fool enough to believe us. Because then people will ask how the hell we managed to let the enemy smuggle dynamite like this into the western hemisphere. Did I say dynamite?” He snorted. “It’s about time we changed our lingo. Dynamite is something kids use to celebrate the Fourth of July. Where was I?”
“If we lose we lose, and if we win we lose.”
“That says it. There’s only one way to come out of this clean. We have to get the shipment back before delivery is made.”
“Or prevent delivery.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Not really. If the object is to prevent delivery, all you have to do is destroy it. If it’s in trucks you drop bombs on them. If it’s on a ship you sink it. If it’s in a plane you shoot it down. It sounds like a job in the Air Force, doesn’t it?”
He grinned. “This stuff is nuclear, remember? You blow it up and you have fallout.”
“So you say Sorry about that and explain that it won’t happen until next time.”
“Even if it’s in a friendly country?”
“Even if it’s in London.”
“And suppose it’s in the United States. Then what?”
I stared at him.
“Because that’s where it’s at, Paul. It’s in the midwest right now, smack in the Heartland of America, as the fellow says. We know the location and we know the players on the other team. We know how they’re going to ship it. We can even make a hell of a good guess when they’re going to ship it. It’ll go by air, of course, and takeoff time will be in more than a week and less than three.”
“If it’s in the States, and you can pinpoint the location—”
“Let me go on, Paul.” He lit another cigarette, but without theatrics this time. “We could bomb the storage site, of course.”
“That’s not what I was going to say.”
“I know, but it’s one of the things we’ve thought about. Our computers estimate it would cost us two-thirds of the population of three counties, plus long-term fallout victims scattered over four states. That’s been tentatively ruled out.”
“That’s nice.”
“Uh-huh. There are other things we can try. We can let them load the plane and then knock it out of the skies. The plane will be a jet. We know this, too, because the plane is already in this country. We know everything about the plane because they stole it from us. Don’t interrupt me. We know everything, that is, except where they’re keeping it. But we’ll probably spot it when it takes off, and we can probably keep interceptors on its tail. But they’re not idiots on the other team, Paul. They won’t cooperate by flying over water. They’ll stay over land, and we’ll have to try for an intercept over relatively unpopulated South American terrain. We asked the computer to estimate chances of a successful intercept and guess the probably casualties. It blew three transistors. We’ll try for that intercept if push comes to shove, but we look on it as a last line of defense.”
“Go on.” My head was aching for the first time in months. I wasn’t used to hearing people talk. “Go on,” I said. “Now explain why you can’t throw a battalion of marines and paras around the place.”