"Like what?"
"Going after my satellites, maybe." Art Graham thought of them as his.
"Have they tickled any of 'em recently?" Jack asked. "No, not since we rattled their cage last April. Common sense broke out for once."
That was an old story. Several times in the past few years, American reconnaissance and early-warning satellites had been 'tickled'-laser beams or microwave energy had been focused on the satellites, enough to dazzle their receptors but not enough to do serious harm. Why had the Russians done it? That was the question. Was it merely an exercise to see 4ow we'd react, to see if it caused a ruckus at the North American Aerospace Defense Command-NORAD-at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado? An attempt to determine for themselves how sensitive the satellites were? Was it a demonstration, a warning of their ability to destroy the satellites? Or was it simply what Jack's British friends called bloody-bindedness? It was so hard to tell what the Soviets were thinking. They invariably protested their innocence, of course. When the American satellite had been temporarily blinded over lake Shagan, they said that a natural-gas pipeline had caught fire. The fact that the nearby Chimkent-Pavlodar pipeline carried mostly oil had escaped the Western press. The satellite pass was complete now. In a nearby room a tire of videotape recorders were rewound, and now the complete camera coverage would be reviewed at leisure. "Let's have a look at Mozart again, and Bach also, please," Greer commanded.
"Hell of a commute," Jack noted. The residential and industrial site on Mozart was only one kilometer or so from the emplacement on Bach, the next mountaintop over, but the ad looked frightful. The picture froze on Bach. The formula fences and guard towers was repeated, but this time the distance between the outermost perimeter fence and the next was at least two hundred meters. Here the ground surface appeared to be bare rock. Jack wondered how you plant mines in that-or maybe they didn't, he thought. It was obvious that the ground had been leveled with bulldozers and explosives to the unobstructed flatness of a pool table. From the guard towers, it must have looked like a shooting gallery. "Not kidding, are they?" Graham observed quietly. "So that's what they're guarding " Ryan said. There were thirteen buildings inside the fence. In an area perhaps the size of two football fields-which had also been leveled-were ten holes, in two groups. One was a group of six arranged hexagonally, each hole about thirty feet across. The second group of four was arrayed in a diamond pattern and the holes were slightly smaller, perhaps twenty-five feet. In each hole was a concrete pillar about fifteen feet across planted in bedrock, and every hole was at least forty feet deep-you couldn't tell from the picture on the screen. At each pillar was a metal dome. They appeared to be made crescent-shaped segments. "They unfold. I wonder what's in them?" Graham ask rhetorically. There were two hundred people at Langley who knew of Dushanbe, and every one wanted to know what was under those metal domes. They'd been in place for only a few months.
"Admiral," Jack said, "I need to kick open a new compartment."
"Which one?"
"Tea Clipper."
"You're not asking much!" Greer snorted. "I'm not deal for that."
Ryan leaned back in his chair. "Admiral, if what they're doing in Dushanbe is the same thing we're doing with Tea Clipper, we sure as hell ought to know. Goddammit, how are we supposed to know what to look for if we're not sure what one of these places looks like!"
"I've been saying that for quite a while." The DDI conceded. "SDIO won't like it. The Judge will have to go to the President for that."
"So he goes to the President. What if the activity here is connected with the arms proposal they just made?"
"Do you think it is?"
"Who can say?" Jack asked. "It's a coincidence. They worry me."
"Okay, I'll talk to the Director."
Ryan drove home two hours later. He drove his Jaguar CFS out onto the George Washington Parkway. It was one of the many happy memories from his tour of duty in England, he loved the silky-smooth feeling of the twelve-cylinder engine enough that he'd put his venerable old Rabbit into semi-retirement. As he always tried to do, Ryan set his Washington business aside. He worked the car up through its five gears and concentrated on his driving.
"Well, James?" the Director of Central Intelligence asked.
"Ryan thinks the new activity at Bach and Mozart may be related to the arms situation. I think he might be correct. He wants into Tea Clipper. I said you'd have to go to the President." Admiral Greer smiled.
"Okay, I'll get him a written note. It'll make General Parks happier, anyway. They have a full-up test scheduled for the end of the week. I'll set it up for Jack to see it." Judge Moore smiled sleepily. "What do you think?"
"I think he's right: Dushanbe and Tea Clipper are essentially the same project. There are a lot of coarse similarities, too many to be a pure coincidence. We ought to upgrade our assessment."
"Okay." Moore turned away to look out the windows. The world is going to change again. It may take ten or more years, but it's going to change. Ten years from now it won't be my problem, Moore told himself. But it sure as hell will be Ryan's problem. "I'll have him flown out there tomorrow. And maybe we'll get lucky on Dushanbe. Foley got word to CARDINAL that we're very interested in the place."
"CARDINAL? Good."
"But if something happens "
Greer nodded. "Christ, I hope he's careful," the DDI said.
Ever since the death of Dmitri Fedorovich, it has not been he same at the Defense Ministry, Colonel Mikhail Semyonich Filitov wrote into his diary left-handed. An early riser, he sat at a hundred-year-old oak desk that his wife had bought or him shortly before she'd died, almost-what was it? Thirty years, Misha told himself. Thirty years this coming February, his eyes closed for a moment. Thirty years. Never a single day passed that he did not remember his Elena. Her photograph was on the desk, the sepia print faded with age, its silver frame tarnished. He never seemed to have time to polish it, and didn't wish to be bothered with a maid. The photo showed a young woman with legs like spindles, arms high over her head, which was cocked to one side. The round, Slavic face displayed a wide, inviting smile that perfectly conveyed the joy she'd felt when dancing with the Kirov Company. Misha smiled also as he remembered the first impression of a young armor officer given tickets to the performance as a reward for having the best-maintained tanks in the division. How can they do that? Perched up on the tips of their toes as though on needle-point stilts. He'd remembered playing on stilts as a child, but to be so graceful! And then she smiled at the handsome young officer in the front row. For the briefest moment. Their eyes had met for almost as little time as it takes to blink, he thought. Her smile had changed ever so slightly. Not for the audience any longer, for that timeless instant the smile had been for him alone. A bulk through the heart could not have had a more devastating effect. Misha didn't remember the rest of the performance-to this day he couldn't even remember which ballet it ha been. He remembered sitting and squirming through the rest of it while his mind churned over what he'd do next. Already Lieutenant Filitov had been marked as a man on the move, a brilliant young tank officer for whom Stalin's brutal purge of the officer corps had meant opportunity and rapid promotion. He wrote articles on tank tactics, practiced innovating battle drills in the field, argued vociferously against the fall "lessons" of Spain with the certainty of a man born to themprofession.
But what do I do now? he'd asked himself. The Red Army hadn't taught him how to approach an artist. This wasn't some farm girl who was bored enough by work on the kolkhoz to offer herself to anyone-especially a young Army officer who might take her away from it all. Misha still remembered the shame of his youth-not that he'd thought it shameful at time-when he'd used his officer's shoulder boards to win any girl who'd caught his eye. But I don't even know her name, he'd told himself. What do I do? What he'd done, of course, was to treat the matter as a military exercise. As soon as the performance had ended he'd fought his way into the rest room and washed hands and face. Some grease that still remained under his fingernails was removed with a pocketknife. His short hair was wetted down into place, and he inspected his uniform as strictly as a general officer might, brushing off dust and picking off lint, stepping back from the mirror to make sure his boots gleamed as a oldier's should. He hadn't noticed at the time that other men in the men's room were watching him with barely suppressed grins, having guessed what the drill was for, and wishing him luck, touched with a bit of envy. Satisfied with his appearance, Misha had left the theater and asked the doorman where the artists' door was. That had cost him a ruble, and with the knowledge, he'd walked around the block to the stage entrance, where he found another doorman, this one a bearded old man whose greatcoat bore ribbons for service in the revolution. Misha had expected special courtesy from the doorman, one soldier to another, only to learn that he regarded the female dancers as his own daughters-not wenches to be thrown at the feet of soldiers, certainly! Misha had considered offering money, but had the good sense not to imply the man was a pimp. Instead, he'd spoken quietly and reasonably-and truthfully-that he was smitten with a single dancer whose name he didn't know, and merely wanted to meet her.