Lear. Three hours of travel, door to door, which put them down at
Peterson through the gorgeous mountain dawn. It was the kind of sight
people pay money to see, but the four FBI men took no notice at all.
Thursday July third, the fourth day of the crisis, and no proper rest
and no proper nutrition had left them ragged and focused on nothing
except the job in hand.
General Johnson himself was not available to meet them. He was
elsewhere on the giant base, on duty glad-handing the returning night
patrols. His aide saluted Webster, shook hands with the other three,
and walked them all over to a crew room reserved for their use. There
was a huge photograph on the table, black-and-white, crisply focused.
Some kind of a landscape. It looked like the surface of the moon.
That’s Anadyr, in Siberia,” the aide said. “Satellite photograph. Last
week, there was a big air base there. A nuclear bomber base. The
runway was aimed straight at our missile silos in Utah. Arms reduction
treaty required it to be blown up. The Russians complied last week.”
The four agents bent for another look. There was no trace of any
man-made structure in the picture. Just savage craters.
“Complied?” McGrath said. “Looks like they did an enthusiastic job of
work.”
“So?” Webster said.
The aide pulled a map from the portfolio. Unfolded it and stepped
around so that the agents could share his view. It was a slice of the
world, eastern Asia and the western United States, with the mass of
Alaska right in the center and the North Pole right at the top. The
aide stretched his thumb and finger apart and spanned the distance from
Siberia southeast down to Utah.
“Anadyr was here,” he said. “Utah is here. Naturally we knew all
about the bomber base, and we had countermeasures in place, which
included big missile bases in Alaska, here, and then a chain of four
small surface-to-air facilities strung out north to south all the way
underneath Anadyr’s flightpath into Utah, which are here, here, here
and here, straddling the line between Montana and the Idaho
panhandle.”
The agents ignored the red dots in Idaho. But they looked closely at
the locations in Montana.
“What sort of bases are these?” Webster asked.
The aide shrugged.
“They were kind of temporary,” he said. “Thrown together in the
sixties, just sort of survived ever since. Frankly, we didn’t expect
to have to use them. The Alaska missiles were more than adequate.
Nothing would have gotten past them. But you know how it was, right?
Couldn’t be too ready.”
“What sort of weapons?” McGrath asked.
There was a Patriot battery at each facility,” the aide said. “We
pulled those out a while back. Sold them to Israel. All that’s left
is Stingers, you know, shoulder-launch infantry systems.”
Webster looked at the guy.
“Stingers?” he said. “You were going to shoot Soviet bombers down
with infantry systems?”
The aide nodded. Looked definite about it.
“Why not?” he said. “Don’t forget, those bases were basically
window-dressing. Nothing was supposed to get past Alaska. But the
Stingers would have worked. We supplied thousands of them to
Afghanistan. They knocked down hundreds of Soviet planes. Mostly
helicopters, I guess, but the principle is good. A heat-seeker is a
heat-seeker, right? Makes no difference if it gets launched off a
truck or off a GI’s shoulder.”
“So what happens now?” Webster asked him.
“We’re closing the bases down,” the guy said. “That’s why the general
is here, gentlemen. We’re pulling the equipment and the personnel back
here to Peterson, and there’s going to be some ceremonies, you know,
end-of-an-era stuff.”
“Where are these bases?” McGrath asked. “The Montana ones?
Exactly?”
The aide pulled the map closer and checked the references.
“Southernmost one is hidden on some farmland near Missoula,” he said.
“Northern one is hidden in a valley, about forty miles south of Canada,
near a little place called Yorke. Why? Is there a problem?”
ISM
McGrath shrugged.
“We don’t know yet,” he said.
The aide showed them where to get breakfast and left them to wait for
the general. Johnson arrived after the eggs but before the toast, so