"Great One, why did you do this?" asked the Premier, looking for his eyeglasses.
"Because I believe we may soon have to launch a missile attack against the United States. Stop looking for your glasses, fool. I haven't brought you anything to see. I need your mind."
Then he explained that some force, probably a weapon, had put an entire SS-20 missile base out of operation. Without a sound or even a warning.
"What has happened is catastrophic, a Russian Pearl Harbor brought about with the silence of a falling leaf. There is a weapon out there, probably in the hands of the Americans, that can make all of our weapons useless."
"We're done for," said the Premier.
"No. Not yet. You see, there is one advantage we still have. Only one. America does not yet know they can destroy us so easily."
"How do you know that? How can you say that?"
"Because if they did, they would have done it by now. I suspect what we have here is a trial, a test. If the U.S. doesn't know that their weapon works, they may not launch the rest of the attack:"
"Yes. Yes. Of course. Are you sure?"
"I am sure that if they don't know it works, we are safe. The reason people pull the little triggers on guns is that it is common knowledge that a gun will shoot lead bullets where it is pointed. But if no one knew what a gun would do when fired, my dear friend, they would hesitate to pull the trigger."
"Yes. Good."
"Therefore, I could not allow the one man who had already risked his life to expose the truth to live. He might do something crazy, like warn someone else that one of our missile batteries is useless. Of course, he would do this with the best intentions. But his good intentions could get us all killed now. So I replaced him with the one man who would happily live a lie and command a missile base that did not work as though it did. Then, of course, I had to have shot the KGB general who stopped to think. We need obedience now, more than ever."
The Premier blinked his eyes and tried to organize his thoughts. At first, he told himself he might be dreaming. But even he would not dream of Alexei Zemyatin coming to his bedroom like this.
"Our biggest danger now, of course, is that they find out their weapon, whatever it is, has worked against us. Therefore I have ordered that I be informed of anyone or anything that might be prying into the current ready status of the Dzhusaly missile base."
"Good," said the Premier.
"We cannot waste time. I must go."
"What for?"
"To prepare a special missile for a first strike. Once they find out they can destroy our nuclear arsenal, we are going to have to launch them all or face a certain first strike ourselves."
"Then you wish me to tell no one?" said the Premier. "I have informed you because only you can authorize a first strike on the United States. Remember, once they find out how vulnerable we actually are, we must attack before they do. I expect to get more serviceable missiles."
This from the Great One, Alexei Zemyatin, who had dared to call all the Russian Premiers in their times fool, whom history had vindicated as the true genius of the Union of Soviet Republics, and who had now just reversed everything he had been preaching since the Revolution.
In America, the President was informed that the Soviet Union had no wish to share information about a threat to all mankind.
"They're crazy," insisted the President. "Something is disrupting the ozone layer. All civilization could be wiped out, and when we inform them it might be happening over their own territory and that we want to get together on this thing, they stonewall us. Won't tell a thing. They're crazy."
"Intelligence believes they think we're doing it to them."
"To them! What the hell do they think our skins are made of?" demanded the President, shaking his head. And then he quietly went to his bedroom and picked up a red telephone which had no dial or buttons on its face and which connected, when the receiver was lifted, to only one other telephone in the northeast corridor. He said simply: "I want that man. No, both of them."
"What for, sir?" came back the voice. It was crisp and lemony with sharp New England consonants.
"I don't know, dammit. Just have them ready. You come down here, too. I want you to listen in. I think the world is going up and I don't know what the hell is going on."
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he walked among the explosions. But that was nothing special. Any man could walk safely through this particular minefield. The mines were not designed to kill the person who touched them off. They were meant to kill everyone around him. Guerrillas used these mines, the Vietcong especially.
They worked this way: a company would walk along a trail. One man, usually the one walking point, would step on the buried pressure-sensitive device and set it off. Ordinary mines usually exploded upward, making hamburger of that man. Not this mine. It expended its force outward, not upward, and the singing shrapnel would cut down everyone in the vicinity. Except the one who caused the carnage. A soldier alone, conventional military wisdom said, was useless. No army fought with lone soldiers. Armies worked in platoons and companies and divisions. And if you built a mine that left one soldier standing alone, you rendered him useless.
So the mines went off under his feet, sending pieces of shrapnel cracking loudly along the prairie grass of North Dakota, setting fires where steel spanked off rocks and sending sparks into the dull dry grass. Remo thought that he heard someone laughing up ahead. That was special.
To hear a small sound in a great one was to be able to hear one hoof in a cavalry charge, or a can of beer opening during a football game.
He heard the laughter by not blocking out sounds. That was how most people dealt with loud noise, by defending their eardrums. Remo heard with his entire body, in his bones and with his nerve ganglia, because his very breathing vibrated with that sound and became a part of it.
He had been trained to hear like this. His aural acuteness came from his breathing. Everything came from his breathing: the power to sense the buried land mines, the ability to ignore the shock of the blasts, even the speed that enabled him to dodge the flying steel pellets if he had to. And there, as clear as his own breath, was the laughter up ahead. A very soft laughter coming from the high granite building set like a gray mountain in a plain that had no mountain. From its parapets, a person could see for fifteen miles in every direction. And they could see a thin man, about six feet tall, with high cheekbones and deep-set brown eyes that lay in shadows like the holes in a skull, walking casually across the minefield.
Remo heard the laughter from a mile away, from a thousand yards, and from ten yards. At ten yards, there were no more mines. He looked up at the parapet to see a very fat man with a gold hat on his head. Or a crown. Remo couldn't tell. He didn't care to tell. It was the right fat face and that was all that mattered.
The man yelled down from the parapet.
"Hey, you! Skinny. You know you're funny," said the man.
"I know. I heard you laughing," said Remo. "You're Robert Wojic, the Hemp King of North America. Right?"
"That's legal. And so are the mines. This is my property. I can shoot you for trespassing."
"I've come to deliver a message."
"Go ahead and deliver it and then get out of here."
"I forget the message," said Remo. "it has to do with testimony."
The barrel of an AK-47 poked out of one of the stone slots in the parapet. Then another. They came from both sides of the Hemp King of North America.
"Hey, you're a dead man. No one tells Robert Wojic what to say in court. No one tells Robert Wojic anything. Robert Wojic tells you. And Robert Wojic tells you you are dead."