“We have established that preparations for the capture and transport of the Alamo are proceeding on schedule, in some cases ahead of schedule. If that schedule is carried through, the Alamo will be berthed in Matagorda Bay, the Republic of Texas, shortly before the presidential conventions begin. Therefore, the fates of both the incumbent and his future opponent, David D. Castle–each of whom is very concerned that the project succeed so he can take the lion’s share of the credit for it–rides heavily on the outcome.
“Now, from a study of reports of our agents, of logistical preparations now under way, of ocean currents and the berg’s destination, we have come to the conclusion that the Alamo will be towed into the northward-flowing Benguela Current. The Benguela is cold, fast, and, fellow members, it runs within several hundred miles of the Nigerian coast.”
“Remarkable!” said OEFC Chairman Chiam Shitrit.
“God’s will!” said Rabbi Israel Cohen.
“The opportunity of the century!” said Moshe Davi, chief of operations.
“Yes,” agreed Horowitz. “It is all those things. And now we must agree on the best means of utilizing our great good fortune.”
The other eleven men in the sparsely furnished room knew exactly what he meant: The Alamo must be destroyed.
When the Russians had, in the late 1980s, conquered as much of the world as they thought they could comfortably digest, they had conspicuously omitted the Benipic countries–Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and China–from their acquisitions. At first the reasons for this omission were not apparent, but gradually their reasoning became clear. The seven countries were veritable baby factories whose uncontrolled birthrates could not possibly be matched by industrial and agricultural production to maintain even a subsistence standard of living.
The United States, as Russia had foreseen, came galloping to the rescue. It poured thousands of experts, millions of tons of foodstuffs, and billions of dollars into these sinkholes of man’s hopes, where they disappeared without a trace, except to generate even greater numbers of hungry mouths. As it strove to catch up with the ever-increasing demand, the U.S. itself grew proportionately poorer. Eventually the forty-nine states became little more than a vast plantation whose people worked overtime to feed a hungry world, an arms factory to supply the tinpot dictators who used American weapons mainly against their own people, and a bank to finance the extravagances of foreign tyrants who ruled the masses.
But the United States was also propping up its enemies. Encouraged by subsidies voted by politicians in Washington greedy for their vote, American farmers were producing great surpluses of food. Once produced, the surpluses had to be disposed of. This was accomplished by dumping millions of tons of grain every year on Russia at below-market prices, in one stroke averting bread riots in the streets of Moscow and freeing rubles for investment in war industries to produce weapons with which to menace America.
In recent years, of course, chronic drought had cut deeply into American farm surpluses. This both raised the price of exported wheat and reduced its availability. Russia, whose own farmers had for eighty years failed to satisfy domestic requirements thanks to a stultifying collective farming system, was suffering badly.
In short, the Alamo project on which America was pinning its hopes for recovery was for Russia, and for communism as well, the promise of salvation.
“Therefore,” said Horowitz, “it must fail. Our most recent diaspora from Israel, one step ahead of the Russians, must be only temporary. I know it is tempting to wish our present situation were permanent. We are living comfortable, secure lives. We have brought the Nigerians organization and technical expertise, manned their hospitals, universities, and law courts, invigorated their armed forces with combat-hardened veterans. And the Nigerians are grateful and wish us to stay. But we must not.”
“Quite true,” agreed Rabbi Cohen. “Next year–Jerusalem!”
“Some year, anyway,” said Davi wryly. “But to get there it must be over Russia’s dead body. And that’s what it will be–dead–unless it gets America’s grain. No Alamo, no grain. It’s as simple as that.”
In the Israel they had fled, the twelve wise men had worn other hats: engineer, politician, soldier, banker. Here, the “administrators” and “agronomists” formed the Planning Organization, the supreme, if covert, governing body of Jews in Nigeria.
By nightfall, a weary Meyer Horowitz gaveled his colleagues into silence. “Gentlemen, we have discussed Project Titanic in, I believe, sufficient detail. If the first alternative fails, one of the others will surely succeed. Any dissents?”
No one spoke.
“Then we begin the implementation of Project Titanic tomorrow.”
Rabbi Cohen sighed contentedly. It was the final solution.
19. BLACK PRAXIS
17 NOVEMBER 2007
HE WAS NOT A DRINKING MAN, BUT AT THE END OF HIS working day, at four o’clock on the morning of 17 November 2007, Lieutenant General Grigoriy Aleksandrevich Piatakov felt that a toast was in order.
Piatakov’s optimism was recent. His first reaction to the realization that he was facing a dead end, that his career of infinite promise had been cut short, had been livid anger. Then, during the ensuing weeks, he had passed through successive phases of resignation, despair, and the contemplation of suicide.
He finally pulled out of it. He’d always been a man of action, and action, not self-pity, was needed now. Everything had been taken from him but faith in himself. This exile to Room 101 was just another test of his strength and ingenuity. He’d won through before; he’d do so again.
Work had not paused in Room 101 during his emotional crisis. The stack of files awaiting his attention grew steadily, and after he rejoined the living, working through them took a full two months of concentrated effort before he felt free to begin the program of reform of Room 101 that had inspired his permanent assignment here.
The most pressing task was to convert the files currently on paper to laserdisk. Though tedious, involving hand feeding uncounted millions of pages into the hoppers of the automated optical character readers, it involved no special skills. All technicians were required to spend two hours extra a day manning the banks of machines until the operation was finished.
The fiber-optic system Piatakov had recommended was soon in operation as well, and the regular transmission lines were cut. No longer was there the faintest possibility of interception of calls between Room 101 and the Presidium switchboard.
But despite his very dramatic improvements in the morale and efficiency of Room 101, he had not been able to devise a plan to involve his personnel in really significant strategic operations. For one thing, the Presidium had entertained second thoughts about the wisdom of concentrating so many vital functions in a single department, no matter how secure. For another, the operatives in the field expressed outrage at the suggestion that their flexible prerogatives might be curtailed. The best bargain Piatakov had been able to strike was to be allowed the opportunity to plan and execute a single operation. Its fulfillment by Room 101 would prove, Piatakov argued, that its immense resources were underutilized, and would constitute the rationale for expanded future responsibilities.
The operation chosen was the theft of a Brown-Ash Mark IX, now in its fourth year of manufacture. Russian agents had seen it, and one had actually written a program for it, as a member of the Pentagon staff having access to a late model. But security had been tight. By law, four armed guards stood watch day and night over each of the eleven BAM-IXs, and the limited-access areas where they were located were at the centers of military installations.
There was one exception: the BAM-IX that reposed
at the bottom of an old salt dome just outside Houston, Texas. Built by the Texas multimillionaire Gwillam Forte to house his ultrasecret defense manufacturing plant, SD-1 was a city very much like Room 101 in its inaccessibility. It could be entered, so far as was generally known, only by two elevators, one passenger, one cargo, that descended 1,450 meters straight down to the hollowed-out salt dome. It was big enough to house a good-sized town. In fact, it had been conceived to do just that: During the wintriest days of the cold war, Gwillam Forte had ordered it built to accomodate the Houston employees of Sunshine Industries, safe from everything but direct hits by megaton nuclear missiles. When he died, SD-1 went to his heirs. They in turn sold it to Joe Mansour when its manufacturing facilities, until then producing heavy armaments for the United States, fell into desuetude after Texas again became a republic.
And now that Ripley Forte was a partner with Joe Mansour in the commercial recovery of Antarctic icebergs, SD-1 had been revived as the R&D center and communications base for Triple Eye. The BAM-IX was as diligently guarded in SD-1 as on the various military installations, but SD-1 had an Achilles’ heel that General Piatakov intended to exploit.
During the secret conversion of the U.S.S. Texas, which had devastated the Russian 17th High Seas Fleet in the Battle of the Black Channel on 7 July 1998, a 9.1-kilometer-long tunnel had been built to link SD-1 with the basin in which the Texas was tied up. No longer needed, the tunnel had been abandoned and bricked up. From the basin at the San Jacinto National Monument outside Houston, it would be necessary only for frogmen to breach the steel underwater door to gain admittance to the tunnel. Some night, a KGB spetsnaz force would be introduced into the tunnel. Equipped with gas masks, they would drill a hole through the tunnel seal and inject nerve gas into SD-1 proper. The salt dome’s air circulation system would diffuse the gas through the man-made cave within two minutes, and within three not a soul would be still alive. The commandos would then haul the Brown-Ash Mark IX up the tunnel tracks and load it onto a fast boat for a run down the Houston Ship Channel to rendezvous with a waiting Russian submarine in the Gulf of Mexico. It would be aboard and on its way to Murmansk before the alarm was sounded.