"Can you isolate one of the guards?" Jack asked.
Graham spoke into his phone, and the picture changed. One of his technicians was already doing this, as much to test camera calibration and ambient air conditions as for the purpose Ryan intended.
As the camera zoomed in, a moving dot became a man-shape in greatcoat and probably a fur hat. He was walking a big dog of uncertain breed and had a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his right shoulder. Man and dog left puffs of vapor in the air as they breathed. Ryan leaned forward unconsciously, as though this would give him a better view.
"That guy's shoulder boards look green to you?" he asked Graham.
The reconnaissance expert grunted. "Yep. He's KGB, all right."
"That close to Afghanistan?" the Admiral mused. "They know we have people operating there. You bet they'll take their security provisions seriously."
"They must have really wanted those hilltops," Ryan observed. "Seventy miles overland are a few million people who think killing Russians is God's will. This place is more important than we thought. It isn't just a new facility, not with that kind of security. If that's all it was, they wouldn't have had to put it here, and they for damned sure wouldn't have picked a place where they had to build a new power supply and risk exposure to hostiles. This may be an R and D facility now, but they must have bigger plans for it."
"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 low 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-mindedness? 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 Sary Shagan, they said that a natural-gas pipeline had caught fire. The fact that the nearby Chimkent-Pavlodar pipeline iried 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 road 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 a 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 asked 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 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 cleared 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 told what one of these places looks like!"
"I've been saying that for quite a while." The DDI chuckled. "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 XJS 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 Semyonovich Filitov wrote into his diary left-handed. An early riser, he sat at a hundred-year-old oak desk that his wife had bought for 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.