“How would you suggest we get that assessment?”
“Obviously I cannot do it. I am too old, and too uneducated, but we have some bright new colonels in the Ministry, especially in the signals section. They are not combat officers, strictly speaking, but they are soldiers, and they are competent to look at these electronic marvels. It is only a suggestion.” Filitov didn’t press. He had planted the seed of an idea. Yazov was far easier to manipulate than Ustinov had ever been.
“And what of the problems at the Chelyabinsk tank works?” Yazov asked next.
Ortiz watched the Archer climbing the hill half a mile away. Two men and two camels. They probably wouldn’t be mistaken for a guerrilla force the way that twenty or so would have. Not that this had to matter, Ortiz knew, but the Soviets were to the point now that they attacked almost anything that moved. Vaya con Dios.
“I sure could use a beer,” the Captain observed.
Ortiz turned. “Captain, the thing that allowed me to deal with these people effectively is that I live the way they do. I observe their laws and respect their ways. That means no booze, no pork; that means I don’t fool with their women.”
“Shit.” The officer snorted. “These ignorant savages—” Ortiz cut him off.
“Captain, the next time I hear you say that, or even think it real loud, will be your last day here. These people are working for us. They’re bringing us stuff that we can’t get any place else. You will, repeat will treat them with the respect they deserve. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.” Christ, this guy’s turned into a sand nigger himself.
3.
The Weary Red Fox
IT’S impressive—if you can figure out what they’re doing.” Jack yawned. He’d taken the same Air Force transport back to Andrews from Los Alamos, and was behind in his sleep again. For all the times this had happened to him, he’d never quite learned to deal with it. “That Gregory kid is smart as hell. He took about two seconds to identify the Bach installation, practically word for word with the NPIC assessment.” The difference was that the photointerpreters at the National Photographic Intelligence Center had taken four months and three written report to get it right.
“You think he belongs in the assessment team?” “Sir, that’s like asking if you want to have surgeons in the operating room. Oh, by the way, he wants us to infiltrate somebody into Bach.” Ryan rolled his eyes.
Admiral Greer nearly dropped his cup. “That kid must watch ninja movies.”
“It is nice to know that somebody believes in us.” Jack chuckled, then turned serious. “Anyway, Gregory wants know if they’ve made a breakthrough in laser power output―excuse me, I think the new term is ‘throughput.’ He suspects that most of the new power from the hydroelectric dam will go to Bach.”
Greer’s eyes narrowed. “That’s an evil thought. Do think he’s right?”
“They’ve got a lot of good people in lasers, sir. Nikolay Bosov, remember, won the Nobel Prize, and he’s been laser-weapons research ever since, along with Yevgeniy Velikhov, noted peace activist, and the head of the Laser Institute is Dmitri Ustinov’s son, for God’s sake. Site Bach is almost certainly a sparse array laser. We need to know what kind of lasers, though—could be gas-dynamic, free-electron, chemical. He thinks it’ll be the free-electron kind, but that’s just a guess. He gave me figures to establish the advantage of putting the laser assembly on this hilltop, where it’s above about half of the atmosphere, and we know how much energy it takes to do some of the things they want to do. He said he’d try to do some backwards computations to estimate the total power of the system. The figures will be on the conservative side. Between what Gregory said, and the establishment of the residential facilities at Mozart, we have to assume that this site is intended to go into formal test and evaluation in the near future, maybe operational in two or three years. If so, Ivan may soon have a laser that can snuff one of our satellites right out of business. Probably a soft kill, the Major says—it’ll smoke the camera receptors and the photovoltaic cells. But the next step—”
“Yeah. We’re in a race, all right.”
“What are the chances that Ritter and the Operations people can find out something inside one of those Bach-site buildings?”
“I suppose we can discuss the possibility,” Greer said diffidently, and changed the subject. “You look a little ragged.”
Ryan got the message: he didn’t need to know what Operations had in mind. He could talk like a normal person now. “All this traveling around has been pretty tiring. If you don’t mind, sir, I’d just as soon take the rest of the day off.”
“Fair enough. See you tomorrow. But first—Jack? I got a call about you from the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
“Oh.” Jack bowed his head. “I forgot all about that. They called me right before I flew to Moscow.”
“What gives?”
“One of the companies I own stock in, the officers are being investigated for insider trading. I bought some of it right when they did, and SEC wants to know how I decided to buy it just then.”
“And?” Greer asked. CIA had had enough scandals, and the Admiral didn’t want one in his office.
“I got a tip that it might be an interesting company, and when I checked it out I saw that the company was buying itself back. So what got me to buy in was that I saw they were buying in. That’s legal, boss. I have all the records at home. I do all this by computer—well, I don’t since I came to work here—and I have hard copies of everything. I didn’t break any rules, sir, and I can prove it.”
“Let’s try to settle that in the next few days,” Greer suggested.
“Yes, sir.”
Jack was in his car five minutes later. The drive home to Peregrine Cliff was easier than usual, taking only fifty minutes instead of the usual seventy-five. Cathy was at work, as usual, and the kids were at school—Sally at St. Mary’s and Jack at kindergarten. Ryan poured himself a glass of milk in the kitchen. Finished, he wandered upstairs, kicked off his shoes, and collapsed into bed without even bothering to take off his pants.
Colonel of Signal Troops Gennady Iosifovich Bondarenko sat across from Misha, straight of back and proud, as so young a field-grade officer should be. He did not show himself to be the least intimidated by Colonel Filitov, who was old enough to be his father, and whose background was a minor legend in the Defense Ministry. So this was the old war-horse who fought in nearly every tank battle in the first two years of the Great Patriotic War. He saw the toughness around the eyes that age and fatigue could never erase, noted the impairment to the Colonel’s arm, and remembered how that had happened. It was said that Old Misha still went out to the tank factories with some of the men from his old regiment, to see for himself if quality control was up to standards, to make certain that his hard blue eyes could still hit a target from the gunner’s seat. Bondarenko was somewhat in awe of this soldier’s soldier. More than anything else, he was proud to wear the same uniform.
“How may I serve the Colonel?” he asked Misha.
“Your file says that you are very clever with electronic gadgets, Gennady Iosifovich.” Filitov waved at the file folder on his desk.
“That is my job, Comrade Colonel.” Bondarenko was more than just “clever,” and both knew it. He had helped develop laser range-finders for battlefield use, and until recently had been engaged in a project to use lasers in place of radios for secure front-line communications.
“What we are about to discuss is classified Most Secret.” The young Colonel nodded gravely and Filitov went on. “For the past several years the Ministry has been financing a very special laser project called Bright Star—the name itself is also classified, of course. Its primary mission is to make high-quality photographs of Western satellites, though when fully I developed, it may be able to blind them—at a time when such action is politically necessary. The project is run by academicians and a former fighter pilot from Voyska PVO—this sort of installation comes under the authority of the air-defense forces, unfortunately. I would have preferred myself that a real soldier was running it, but—” Misha stopped and gestured at the ceiling. Bondarenko smiled in agreement. Politics, they both communicated silently. No wonder we never get anything done.
“The Minister wants you to fly down there and evaluate , the weapons potential of the site, particularly from a reliability standpoint. If we are to bring this site to operational status, it would be well to know if the damned-fool thing will work when we want it to.”