“The United States is threatened as never before in its history—” Pegleg drumming on his outstretched artificial limb with the fingers of one hand, while the words droned out of him as if he were himself a tape—“by a world in which our rightful defense forces are stymied by red tape and international agreements, any questions? Right.” There weren’t any questions. There was a difference of viewpoint, to be sure, but Hake did not feel a necessity to air it, and besides Mary Jean was stretched out before him with her hands folded behind her head and he was enjoying what he saw.
Or, “Under the constitution and laws of our land—” this was old Fortnum, who stood up when he talked to them and insisted on alert posture from his audience— “we are charged with securing the blessings of democracy to ourselves and our posterity, which we got to do by keeping our nation strong and secure, any questions?” There weren’t any questions for Fortnum, either. He was the only one of the instructors who had the habit of imposing extra duty for misdemeanors. Attracting his attention was usually a misdemeanor.
Deena Fairless was the only one who held Hake’s attention as a speaker. For one thing, she didn’t sit or stand but moved around among them, sometimes rousting them awake with a toe when the after-lunch heat began to put one or another of them away. For another, she talked about more interesting things. “By presidential directive, we are limited to covert, nonlethal operations on foreign soil only. All three things, remember. Covert. Nonlethal. Foreign. Now, if there are no questions—” she barely paused, but there weren’t any questions then, either—“let me explain some of the things you’ve been seeing around here.”
And that was how Hake found out that agent training was only one of the functions of the installation. There was a research-and-development underground—literally underground, dug into the side of the slope itself—a few miles away, and that was where things like the IR spectacles and the foamboats came from. There was a place euphemistically called “debriefing.” None of them were ever to go near it. Nor likely to, since it was constantly patrolled with attack dogs. Deena Fairless didn’t say who was “debriefed,” but the trainees formed their opinions; and if any of them happened to be taken out by the Other Side, decided they could expect to wind up in some other “debriefing” place at some other point on the surface of the Earth. There was even a small writers’-colony place—that was the one that was actually housed at the Has-Ta-Va Ranch itself—where psychological warfare texts were prepared.
And then, when God was kind, they were permitted to watch films. They saw notable agency triumphs of the past, the counterfeiting operations that broke the Bank of England and the price-rigging that bankrupted ten thousand Indian, Filipino and Indochinese rice growers. Those, they were given to understand, were only a tiny fraction of the successful ventures of the agency. Those were the blown ones, where the Other Side, or more often the Other Sides, knew what had happened. There were still huger projects that had never been detected. And that, they understood, because they were told so day after day, with relentless insistence, was the Optimal Project: to do something that weakened some part of the rest of the world relative to the United States without ever being found out.
And, of course, at the same time the Other Sides were doing all they possibly could to the United States. The water lilies that were choking out every slow-moving stream in the Northeast, the “Hell, No, I Won’t Mow!” revolt of condominium owners in Florida, the California stoop-labor strikes and the truckers’ go-slow that jointly had kept fresh vegetables rotting in the fields and warehouses while consumers paid triple prices for canned goods •—all had been traced to foreign intervention, playing the Team’s game from the other side of the board. They were doing it now. Even under the microwave antenna, even fresh and new to the Southwest as he was, Hake could see that the sparse grass was browning and dying. The Other Side, they said, was cloudnapping again, projecting bromide smoke into the big cumulus over the Pacific and stealing their rain before it ever reached America.
Perhaps Hake’s microfiches could have told him when the game had begun, if he had had time to read them. Peer as hard as he could into the future, he could not see where it all would end.
Even Southwest Texas got cold at two in the morning. Surprising cold, mean cold. Overhead the ten thousand Texas stars winked through the moaning wire, and the north wind that strummed the rectenna froze Hake at the same time. And froze Tigrito and Mary Jean and Sister Florian and the two Hawaiian ladies; they were worse off than Hake, not being New Jersey-bred. Deena Fairless seemed comfortable enough, but then she was the one who had rousted them all out of bed at midnight for this training exercise. She had had time to prepare for the night march—including, Hake was pretty sure, wool socks and thermal underwear.
Mary Jean, propped against the same three-cornered pillar as Hake, wriggled closer to him. He did not suppose that it was affection. She was a long way from Louisiana. What she was after was warmth. Nevertheless he glanced at Deena, who said, “Stay awake, that’s all.” But Hake’s problem was not sleepiness. Hake’s problem was that Deena had shattered one of the truly fine erotic dreams of his recent memory when she came in with her flashlight and twisted him awake by the toe. He still wasn’t quite out of it. Mary Jean certainly did not smell like a dream girl— more like a real one who had been worked hard and bathed insufficiently—but some synapse, cell or process in his brain unerringly identified a yin for his yang, and the real person drowsing against his shoulder merged with the dream one he had abandoned so reluctantly.
“Stay awake, I said!”
“Sorry, Deena,” Mary Jean apologized, shifting to a more alert posture. “When are we going to get moving?”
“When it’s clear.”
“When will it be clear?”
“When Tiger comes back and tells us so.” Deena hesitated, then said, “Move around if you want to. Keep your voices down.” They were in an arroyo that bent sharply just ahead of them; good cover from sight, as the sighing wire overhead was good cover for sound. At this point the antenna was at least seventy feet above them, but Hake could see it as a winking tracery of scarlet spiderwebs, faint but clear, as it reflected the pulse of the radar corner beacons. In fact, it was astonishing how much he could see by starlight, now that his eyes had had two hours to adapt. Deena Fairless was unscrewing what looked like a huge tube of toothpaste, head cocked in concentration, squeezing out a dab of what it contained onto her finger.
“What’s that?” asked Beth Hwa, sitting cross-legged, spine straight and alert.