Maybe. The success of the plan depended on many variables, but variables were the daily bread of Piatakov’s specialists. As his officers proposed different combinations and permutations of the basic plan, the revised edition would be turned over to the Black Praxis group for testing. Black, or clandestine, operations, involving the risk of the operations team being summarily shot if detected, were always subjected to rigorous full-scale praxis: practical exercise as opposed to theory. Only when the most feasible plan had been fully worked out would the Presidium give the go-ahead and the team be dispatched.
The eighteen-man team for Operation Armageddon, as Piatakov had named it in a moment of wry humor, was still being selected. It would take at least six months before it would be ready for action. To wipe out all margin of error had been Piatakov’s goal from the moment Operation Armageddon was first conceived. He was, after all, a professional. The Presidium was counting on him to obtain the BAM-IX, and he promised himself that come what may, the Presidium was going to get it.
To that end, Piatakov demanded every scrap of information that concerned SD-1, the Alamo operation, and Ripley Forte and his associates, their relatives, the friends of their relatives, and the relatives of their friends. Masses of information inundated Room 101. Most of it was useless, but now and again a useful morsel in the boiling caldron of gossip, speculation, and hard fact drifted to the surface. Such a one was contained in the dispatch that came from his operative in Oyo, Nigeria.
Levi Ben-Zvi was a plant geneticist allowed to emigrate from Russian to Israel on the completion of his studies at Moscow University in 1981. He was a brilliant young man and one whose good manners and civility were tempered by what appeared to be an unbearable sadness, as though he carried the world on his narrow shoulders. At the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, he rapidly rose to become chief of the Department of Plant Genetics. Ben-Zvi’s contributions to his science were continuous, conspicuous, and valuable to Israel. His contributions to Russian intelligence were equally outstanding, for Levi Ben-Zvi was an agent of the KGB.
The conflict between his two lives was the source of his suffering. Not until some years after he had been allowed–with unexpected ease, he thought at the time– to emigrate to Israel did he realize that from his school days he had been recruited into the Russian intelligence network. His great talent had been one factor. The other was his large family, for which he had such a fierce love and pride that most of his pay in Israel went back to Leningrad to help support them.
One winter evening while walking back to his spartan quarters, shortly after he had become head of department at Weizmann Institute, he was joined by a tall thin man wearing a trench coat, with a fedora pulled down over his brow. He looked like somebody out of a spy movie. He introduced himself as Pavel. He had come to Israel with news of Ben-Zvi’s family.
“Are they well?” asked a startled Ben-Zvi.
“For now.” He stopped under a street lamp and produced a picture. It was of Ben-Zvi’s father, Amos. “But we fear that this one may fall ill…”
From that day onward, Levi Ben-Zvi was one of KGB’s most faithful respondents. He told them everything he knew, had heard, read, or conjectured, and then went home to pray for his family, his country, his religion, and his immortal soul. He was a tortured man.
After he fled to Nigeria with so many other Israelis, he thought that perhaps the KGB had lost track of him. In fact, he wasn’t approached all the first year, and he began to breathe easier. But they were leaving him alone, he realized later, only until he had established himself in the heirarchy of the new diaspora. By 1995 they had come calling again, and their visits had never since ceased.
And now he had come up with some interesting, some really interesting information, thought Lieutenant General Grigoriy Aleksandrevich Piatakov, information that justified all the care they had lavished on Levi Ben-Zvi and all the extra rations and protection they had provided his family.
He had just told his case officer about the three options of Project Titanic.
The three options concerned the iceberg Alamo, which Piatakov surmised, based on the information in his files about the Salvation, must still be part of a glacier in Antarctica, as yet unseen by man. The options were contrived to ensure that the iceberg never produced a drop of water for thirsty America, never a grain of wheat that could be shipped to the Jews’ implacable enemy, Russia. As Piatakov might have expected, the three options were ingenious, logical, and probably untraceable to the twelve wise men of Oyo or, indeed, to anyone else.
The first option, Piatakov believed, would not work.
The second, given the right conditions, just might.
The third would succeed, without the slightest shadow of doubt.
Regretting that he wasn’t a drinking man, he toasted the twelve in his heart.
PART III
ICE
20. THE ALAMO
2 JANUARY 2008
ON 2 JANUARY 2008 MRS. JENNIFER RED CLOUD CHRIStened the iceberg Alamo with a bottle of the mixed waters of the Pecos, Rio Grande, Colorado, Brazos, Neches, Nueces, Trinity, and Guadalupe, the principal rivers of the Republic of Texas, which during the drought, now in its fifth year, had dwindled to little more than muddy rivulets. If successfully brought to safe harbor in Matagorda Bay, the Alamo would go far toward relieving the mounting hardships of the republic. The thoughts of the four hundred male onlookers, mostly Texans, should therefore have been focused on the importance and solemnity of this historic occasion.
They weren’t. Their thoughts–and their eyes–were focused on Mrs. Jennifer Red Cloud’s lithe and lovely body.
Ripley Forte promised himself that she would wear the form-hugging Ultravac publicly as little as possible. He felt the annoyance natural to one who sees everybody else ogling the body he covets, and worse, he feared that her distracting influence around men working with dangerous machinery could cause a catastrophe that would result in his loss of the Alamo. Of course, since nothing would please Jennifer Red Cloud more, he would have to keep her on a short rein.
Immediately following the christening, he got her away from the crowd by saying that he was off to make an aerial inspection of the facilities, a boring chore she obviously would prefer to give the miss. Predictably, she insisted on coming along.
The four-place chopper ascended in a low looping arc that brought them to the Alamo. Forte cruised its length slowly, on the lookout for trouble spots that might not
have shown up on the preliminary seismographic surveys. Turning a corner, he started up the short side, pausing in midair from time to time, bringing the chopper down almost to the waterline and then straight back up before going on.
The Alamo had been under satellite surveillance since Triple Eye had received official U.S. government sanction in June 2006. By means of satellite imaging, every one of the more than fifteen thousand bergs that had calved from the Ross, Shackleton, Amery, Filchner, and Larsen ice shelves during the ensuing eighteen months had been tracked and photographed as they circled the Antarctic continent and gradually melted away in the Circumpolar Current.
That it had not calved in its seagoing life of more than fourteen months was an indication of its internal stability. Its present size and position close to the southern tip of the African continent were other factors that prompted him to take it in tow and, on the second day of the new year, proclaim it the Alamo.
“It’s not as rectangular as the Salvation,” Jennifer Red Cloud remarked. “It’s more like a–a trapezoid” she added, as if this were a damning indictment.
“I chose it for its absence of fault lines and its ideal volume, not to enter in a beauty contest. It may not be as purty as your berg, but at 3,210 meters long by 1,165 meters wide it holds more than five times the water. More important, it’s 232 meters thick, which means its mean density is greater than yours, and the denser it is, the less likely it is to develop internal strains.”
She sniffed. Mere technicalities. He as much as admitted it: hers was more beautiful.
“If that’s the case,” she said, suddenly realizing how she could put him in his place, “why didn’t you get a bigger berg, ten thousand meters by five thousand, say?”
“This berg is already about as much as we can handle.”
“Well, I don’t see why it has to be so fat. If it were narrower, it would look better in pictures. Also, if it were more streamlined, it would be easier to tow.”
Forte smiled. Well, there was a way to stop her nagging, anyway. “Good point. But remember, the narrower a berg is, the greater the danger of its rolling over. The metacentric height should be positive–right?”