Forte spent much of the next ten hours reviewing his plan for disposing of the bomb now that he actually had it. Of the main outlines of his solution he found no self-argument. But there was one aspect of his plan on which success would stand or fall. It was only a detail, but if he miscalculated, he would fail.
Whether he won or lost the next and final round depended possibly on whether the Russians had been able to see through his fake hospitalization, certainly on whether they had been able to penetrate SD-1. He was gambling that they had been thwarted in trying to place an agent in the old salt dome outside Houston where his father Gwillam had maintained a vast underground industrial complex.
To sweeten the odds, a week earlier he had devised an “accident” in SD-1. A slightly toxic gas had been released in the salt dome, precipitating the mass exodus of his hundreds of researchers and technicians. The forty-odd men his A-bomb operation depended on remained behind to “decontaminate” the man-made cavern. They’d stay until the operation was finished.
They were there now, waiting in SD-1, 1,450 meters below the surface. The elevator shafts to the surface were already sealed with huge steel bombproof blast shields. The central telephone exchange was inactivated. Only the navigation channels to the Alamo remained a link to the outside world.
There was still one way in, though, and Ripley Forte was one of the few men still alive who knew about it.
37. SHELL GAME
22 JUNE 2008
THE LAST TIME THE AIRLOCK HAD BEEN USED HAD BEEN ten years earlier, just before the U.S.S. Texas, Gwillam Forte, Captain, had sailed from its slip on its fatal voyage. The slip was now empty, but the turgid brown waters concealed the Mako’s stealthy passage as it glided up to the open airlock ten meters below the surface and was manhandled into its interior by waiting frogmen. They slid the big watertight doors back into place, and Ripley Forte switched on the lights.
He couldn’t see the frogmen as they carefully disengaged the bomb from its sling, but after a few minutes they came into view, pushing it on a dolly ahead of them.
“All clear,” came the voice of the team leader over the Mako’s loudspeakers, and he gave a thumbs-up to Forte inside the SDC by way of confirmation.
“Start the pumps,” Forte ordered.
A high-pitched whine penetrated the tiny cabin, and the zero-buoyant SDC began to settle toward the floor of the airlock as the water was pumped out. A few minutes later it made contact with a gentle bump, and hands got busy undogging the forward hatch.
Forte climbed out and stretched his cramped and aching limbs, followed by Bill Makepeace, who lit up his first cigarette in what seemed like a century.
The inner door of the airlock was opened, and Gunnar Nielson, the chief of the Meta Unit, which would supervise the conversion, walked through. He was a stolid, unemotional Swede who seemed perpetually on the verge of falling asleep, but under his shaggy gray brows his eyes moved fast, and behind them his brain moved even faster.
He looked at the bomb and favored it with an unaccustomed smile.
Forte heaved a huge sigh of relief. If Nielson had scowled or remained expressionless, that would have been bad news indeed.
“It’ll fit?” said Forte, to whom no reassurance about this particular matter would be excessive.
“Like Laurel and Hardy,” said Nielson, his face reverting to its usual impassivity. “Shall we?”
“We shall,” responded Forte.
He spread himself out on a wooden bench in the little passenger car that had brought Nielson and the Mako’s relief crew. The new pilot and his mate had already climbed down the SDC’s hatch and buckled up. As soon as the bomb was secured to a flat car behind the miniature electric locomotive, the inside tunnel door would be closed and the airlock flooded. The frogmen would then open the outside door, and the Mako would start the long return journey down the Houston Ship Channel to the Stephen F. Austin, out in the Gulf of Mexico. There the exhausted SEAL divers, Lieutenant Commander Mahosky and Lieutenant Peloquin, who would by then have been under twenty-one atmospheres of pressure in the lockout and in the water for something over twenty-four hours, would at last be able to start their eight-day decompression.
“Ready to rumble,” said a technician who had just finished tightening the last bolts on the steel webbing making fast the bomb to its carriage.
Nielson checked each fitting in turn and pointed his chin at the engine driver.
“Main braking system?”
The driver put his foot on the brake pedal and pushed. The brakes went on with a metallic snap.
“Auxiliaries?”
The driver reached down and jerked back on the long steel lever. Another clank as the shoes grabbed the brake drums.
“Ten kilometers per hour,” Neilson ordered.
And at that jogger’s pace they were off down the steeply inclined tunnel, 9.1 kilometers long, that led to the vast cavern that was SD-1, nearly a mile below the surface of the earth. It was 2100 hours when they arrived in the iondrive engine assembly room, cleared for Team Meta two weeks earlier, when Forte had been ordered by the Pentagon to surrender the BAM-IX for transfer to the Japanese Defense Force.
The Brown-Ash Mark IX was already there, in the middle of the clean room, which was still under slightly positive pressure. The appearance of the Brown-Ash Mark IX was considerably less impressive than its performance. To Forte it looked like nothing so much as a big mechanical pineapple or a strange kind of electrical transformer bristling with cooling vanes wherever one could be tacked onto it. It stood three meters tall, and three big men could almost encircle it with outstretched arms. The barrel-shaped body rested on a squat base that contained a small built-in CRT and keyboard from a Lemon home computer, whose sole function was to confirm the status of the tens of thousands of interlocking systems and programs. The real work was done by a constellation of peripherals.
The sun had long since set, but lights still burned brightly in SD-1 when the work was done, the bomb secreted within the Brown-Ash Mark IX, and the Trojan horse computer carefully wrapped in layer after layer of Styrofoam and airtight plastic sheeting, crated in wood, and then packed with additonal dunnage in an iron minicontainer. All joints were welded tight, and the container was stenciled in bold black letters: COMPUTERIZED MILLING
MACHINE–FRAGILE!
Shortly after midnight, four men wrestled a dolly bearing an iron container stenciled with that legend into the cargo elevator. At the surface the blast shield slid back on its rails, and the four men found, as expected, an empty tractor and trailer parked next to the darkened loading dock. By the light of hooded lanterns, they loaded the trailer. Two of the men, carrying shotguns, were locked with it inside. The other two, also armed, climbed into the tractor and moved off, headlights extinguished, toward the main gate. There they were met by unmarked cars, each carrying men with automatic weapons”.
The procession moved out onto the main highway toward Route 612 and the Houston International Airport, two cars in front, two behind. After a few minutes a helicopter appeared overhead and kept under surveillance the five vehicles moving at well beyond the legal speed limit, and yet unchallenged by the occasional passing police cruiser, all the way to the airport. There the trailer truck and its escorts proceeded to a far corner of the field and transferred the shipment to a Texas Air Force transport. The plane took off shortly thereafter with a flight plan filed for Haneda Airport, Tokyo, with refueling stops at Johannesburg and Dacca.
At 0300 on the morning of 23 June, the airlock of the tunnel through which the A-bomb had been admitted to SD-1 less than twenty-four hours earlier opened once more, and the dripping wet minicontainer with the Brown-Ash Mark IX and its lethal cargo was hoisted onto a barge that had been anchored in the slip during the night. The barge, without lights showing, moved out into the Houston Ship Channel and proceeded some miles downstream, where it tied up alongside the 4,300-ton Turkish breakbulk carrier Kara Deniz. The minicontainer was loaded aboard, the ship’s anchor was raised, and it headed south toward the Gulf of Mexico. In the hold, among its nondescript cargo, was the minicontainer, the bill of lading of which called for delivery to a Mr. Miramura, c/o The Oki-hiko Co., Osaka.
The Kara Deniz made stops in New Orleans and Tampa before setting out across the Atlantic for its next stop at Lagos, Nigeria, en route to the Far East.
The Turkish merchant ship was slow and dilapidated, crewed by nonunion seamen from a dozen Asian and African nations, but its captain was meticulous in the observance of the rules of the road and international health regulations. It was, therefore, with some surprise that in mid-Atlantic, on the ninth day out of Tampa, he was ordered to heave to by a signal from a surfaced submarine displaying American colors. At the submarine skipper’s request, he sent a boat, which returned with a handsome young lieutenant commander, two ratings, and the ship’s doctor.