Months later on an aircraft carrier crossing the Pacific with a magazine full of nuclear weapons, the insanity of nuclear war got very personal. Figuring the fuel consumption on each leg of the run-in, working the leg times backward from the hard target time — necessary so he and his bombardier wouldn’t be incinerated by the blast of somebody else’s weapon — plotting antiaircraft defenses, examining the streets and buildings of Shanghai while planning to incinerate every last Chinese man, woman and child in them, he had to pinch himself. This was like trying to figure out how to shoot your way into hell.
But orders were orders, so he drew the lines and cut and pasted the charts and tried to envision what it would feel like to hurl a thermonuclear weapon into Shanghai. The emotions he would feel as he flew through the flak and SAMs on the run-in, performed the Götterdämmerung alley-oop over a city of ten million people, and tried to keep the airplane upright and flying as the shock wave from the detonation smashed the aircraft like the fist of God as he exited tail-on to the blast — emotions were not on the navy’s agenda.
Could he nuke Shanghai? Would he do it if ordered to? He didn’t know, which troubled him.
Fretting about it didn’t help. The problem was too big, the numbers of human lives incomprehensible, the A’s and B’s and C’s of the equation all unknown. He had no answers. Worse, he suspected no one did.
So he finished his planning and went back to more mundane concerns, like wondering how he was going to stay alive in the night skies over Vietnam.
That was twenty-three years ago.
Today listening to the experts discuss the possibility that nuclear weapons might be seeping southward from the Soviet republics into the Middle East, the memories of planning the annihilation of half the population of Shanghai made Jake Grafton slightly nauseated.
The voice of the three-star army general who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency jolted his unpleasant reverie. The general wanted hard intelligence and he was a bit peeved that none seemed to be available.
“Rumor, surmises, theories…haven’t you experts got one single fact?” he demanded of the briefers. “Just one shabby little irrefutable fact — that’s not too much to ask, is it?”
The three-star’s name was Albert Sidney Brown. After thirty-plus years in the maw of a vast bureaucracy where every middle name was automatically ground down to an initial, he had somehow managed to retain his.
The briefer was CIA officer Herb Tenney, who briefed Lieutenant General Brown on a regular basis. Today he tried to reason with the general. “Sir, the place is bedlam. Nobody knows what’s going on, not even Yeltsin. The transportation system’s kaput, the communication system is in tatters, people in the countryside are quietly starving, armed criminal gangs are in control of—”
“I read the newspapers,” General Brown said acidly. “Do you spooks know anything that the Associated Press doesn’t?”
“Not right now,” Herb Tenney said with a hint of regret in his voice. Regret, Jake Grafton noted, not apology. Tenney was several inches short of six feet. His graying hair and square jaw with a cleft gave him a distinguished, important look. In his gray wool business suit with thin, subtle blue stripes woven into the cloth he looked more like a Wall Street buccaneer, Jake Grafton thought, than the spy he was.
“Congress is performing major surgery on the American military without benefit of anesthetic,” General Brown rumbled. “Everybody east of Omaha is tossing flowers at the Russians, and that goddamn cesspool is in meltdown. There are thirty thousand tactical nuclear weapons over there just lying around loose! And the CIA doesn’t know diddly squat.”
Jake Grafton thought he could see a tiny sympathetic smile on Herb Tenney’s face. His expression looked remarkably like the one on the puss of the guy at the garage giving you the bad news about your transmission. Or was Grafton just imagining it? Damn that Judith Farrell!
Tenny’s expression seemed to irritate General Brown too. “I am fed up with you people palming off yesterday’s press clippings and unsubstantiated gossip as news. You’re like a bunch of old crones at a whores’ picnic. No more! I want facts and you spies better come up with some. Damn quick!”
Brown’s fist descended onto the table with a crash. “Like yesterday! I don’t give a shit who you have to bribe, fuck, or rob, but you’d better come up with some hard facts about who has their grubby hands on those goddamn bombs or I’m going to lose my temper and start kicking ass!”
When the briefers were gone and he and Jake were alone, Albert Sidney Brown rumbled, “They’ll never come up with hard intelligence. Nobody on our side knows anything. Not a goddamn thing. Now that’s a fact.”
“We just don’t have the HUMINT resources, General,” Jake Grafton said. HUMINT was human intelligence, information from spies. The CIA had never had much luck recruiting spies in the Soviet Union. Prior to the collapse the counterintelligence apparatus had been too efficient. It was a different story now, but a spy network took years to construct.
“The world is becoming more dangerous,” General Brown said softly. “It’s like the whole planet is on a runaway locomotive going down a mountain, faster and faster, closer and closer to the edge. The big smashup is waiting around the next bend, or the next. And those cretins in Congress are in a dogfight to divide up the ‘peace dividend.’ Makes you want to cry.”
Jake had had numerous wide-ranging conversations with General Brown since he reported to this job six months ago. Brown was convinced that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction was the most dangerous trend in an increasingly unstable international arena. And Jake Grafton agreed with him.
Recently the United States and other Western nations had agreed to spend $500 million to pay for destruction of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, but the work wasn’t going quickly enough. “They’ve got bombs scattered around over there like junk cars,” Brown told Jake Grafton. “They don’t know what they’ve got or where it is, so it’s imperative that we get someone over there to keep an eye on the situation and prod them in the right direction. You’re that someone.
“The ambassador is talking to Yeltsin right now, trying to sell military-to-military cooperation at the absolute top level. As soon as we get the okay, you’re on your way. Keep your underwear packed.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Jake, we have got to get a handle on this nuclear weapons situation. I want you to get the hard facts. Ask the Russian generals to their faces — and don’t take no for an answer. There isn’t time to massage bruised egos. They must be as worried as we are. If their criminal gangs or ragtag ethnic warriors start using nukes on one another, Revelation is going to come true word for word. And if those fanatics in the Middle East get their hands on some…” Brown lifted his hands skyward.
Jake Grafton finished the thought. “This planet will be history.”
“A radioactive clinker,” Brown agreed, and swiveled his chair toward the map of the old Soviet Union that hung on the wall.
“The first day of November 1991,” Toad Tarkington repeated, “just three days before Nigel Keren went for his long swim.”
Toad fell silent. He had completed his recital of what he learned this morning. Jake Grafton was bent over the photograph on his desk, staring at it through a magnifying glass. Finally he straightened with a sigh.
“We could ask the CIA where Herb Tenney was that week,” Toad suggested.
“No.” Jake squirmed in his chair. He flexed his right hand several times, then let it rest limply on the arm of the chair. “For the sake of argument, assume that the CIA did kill Keren. Either the president authorized it or someone in the CIA was running his own foreign policy. The Mossad must have concluded the assassination was without authorization or they would not have approached anyone in the American intelligence community, no matter how obliquely. Assuming the CIA did kill Keren. A rather large assumption, but—”