“And they know it, and they can avoid it if they want to— wait a minute. We know that our carriers can and do evade Russian radar-ocean-recon satellites. If you can do it with a ship, you can damned sure do it with a train,” Jack pointed out. Allen looked on without comment, allowing his underling to pursue the line in his stead. A clever old fox, Ernie Allen.
“So, CIA is going to recommend against—damn it, this is the biggest concession they’ve ever made!”
“Fine. It’s a big concession. Everyone here knows that. Before we accept it, maybe we ought to make sure that they haven’t conceded something that they’ve made irrelevant to the process. There are other things, too.”
“So you’re going to oppose—”
“I’m not opposing anything. I’m saying we take our time and use our heads instead of being carried away by euphoria.”
“But their draft treaty is—it’s almost too good to be true.” The man had just proved Ryan’s point, though he didn’t see it quite that way.
“Dr. Ryan,” Allen said, “if the technical details can be worked out to your satisfaction, how do you view the treaty?”
“Sir, speaking from a technical point of view, a fifty-percent reduction in deliverable warheads has no effect at all on the strategic balance. It’s—”
“That’s crazy!” objected the junior member.
Jack extended his hand toward the man, pointing his index finger like the barrel of a gun. “Let’s say I have a pistol pointed at your chest right now. Call it a nine-millimeter Browning. That has a thirteen-round clip. I agree to remove seven rounds from the clip, but I still have a loaded gun, with six rounds, pointed at your chest—do you feel any safer now?” Ryan smiled, keeping his “gun” out.
“Personally, I wouldn’t. That’s what we’re talking about here. If both sides reduce their inventories by half, that still leaves five thousand warheads that can hit our country. Think about how big that number is. All this agreement does is to reduce the overkill. The difference between five thousand and ten thousand only affects how far the rubble flies. If we start talking about reducing the number to one thousand warheads on either side, then maybe I’ll start thinking we’re on to something.”
“Do you think the thousand-warhead limit is achievable?” Alien asked.
“No, sir. Sometimes I just wish it were, though I’ve been told that a thousand-warhead limit could have the effect of making nuclear war ‘winnable,’ whatever the hell that means.” Jack shrugged and concluded: “Sir, if this current agreement goes through, it’ll look better than it is. Maybe the symbolic value of the agreement has value in and of itself; that’s a factor to be considered, but it’s not one within my purview. The monetary savings to both sides will be real, but fairly minor in terms of gross military expenditures. Both sides retain half of their current arsenals—and that means keeping the newest and most effective half, of course. The bottom line remains constant: in a nuclear war, both sides would be equally dead. I do not see that this draft treaty reduces the ‘threat of war,’ whatever that is. To do that, we either have to eliminate the damned things entirely or figure something to keep them from working. If you ask me, we have to do the latter before we can attempt the former. Then the world becomes a safer place—maybe.”
“That’s the start of a whole new arms race.”
“Sir, that race started so long ago that it isn’t exactly new.”
2.
Tea Clipper
MORE photos of Dushanbe coming in,” the phone told Ryan.
“Okay, I’ll be over in a few minutes.” Jack rose and crossed the hall to Admiral Greer’s office. His boss had his back to the blazing white blanket that covered the hilly ground outside the CIA headquarters building. They were still clearing it off the parking lot, and even the railed walkway outside the seventh-floor windows had about ten inches’ worth.
“What is it, Jack?” the Admiral asked.
“Dushanbe. The weather cleared unexpectedly. You said you wanted to be notified.”
Greer looked at the TV monitor in the corner of his office. It was next to the computer terminal that he refused to use—at least when anyone might watch his attempts to type with his index fingers and, on good days, one thumb. He could have the real-time satellite photos sent to his office “live,” but of late he’d avoided that. Jack didn’t know why. “Okay, let’s trot over.”
Ryan held open the door for the Deputy Director for Intelligence, and they turned left to the end of the executive corridor on the building’s top floor. Here was the executive elevator. One nice thing about it was that you didn’t have to wait very long.
“How’s the jet lag?” Greer asked. Ryan had been back for nearly a day now.
“Fully recovered, sir. Westbound doesn’t bother me very much. It’s the eastbound kind that still kills me.” God, it’s nice to be on the ground.
The door opened and both men walked across the building to the new annex that housed the Office of Imagery Analysis. This was the Intelligence Directorate’s own private department, separate from the National Photographic Intelligence Center, a joint CIA-DIA effort which served the whole intelligence community.
The screening room would have done Hollywood proud. There were about thirty seats in the mini-theater, and a twenty-foot-square projection screen on the wall. Art Graham, the chief of the unit, was waiting for them.
“You timed that pretty well. We’ll have the shots in another minute.” He lifted a phone to the projection room and spoke a few words. The screen lit up at once. It was called “Overhead Imagery” now, Jack reminded himself.
“Talk about luck. That Siberian high-pressure system took a sharp swing south and stopped the warm front like a brick wall. Perfect viewing conditions. Ground temp is about zero, and relative humidity can’t be much higher than that!” Graham chuckled. “We maneuvered the bird in specially to take advantage of this. It’s within three degrees of being right overhead, and I don’t think Ivan has had time to figure out that this pass is under way.”
“There’s Dushanbe,” Jack breathed as part of the Tadzhik SSR came into view. Their first look was from one of the wide-angle cameras. The orbiting KH-14 reconnaissance satellite had a total of eleven. The bird had been in orbit for only three weeks, and this was the first of the newest generation of spy satellites. Dushanbe, briefly known as Stalinabad a few decades earlier—that must have made the local people happy! Ryan thought—was probably one of the ancient caravan cities. Afghanistan was less than a hundred miles away. Tamurlane’s legendary Samarkand was not far to the northwest . . . and perhaps Scheherazade had traveled through a thousand years earlier. He wondered why was it that history worked this way. The same places and the same names always seemed to show up from one century to the next.
But CIA’s current interest in Dushanbe did not center on the silk trade.
The view changed to one of the high-resolution cameras. It peered first into a deep, mountainous valley where a river was held back by the concrete and stone mass of a hydroelectric dam. Though only fifty kilometers southeast of Dushanbe, its power lines did not serve that city of 500,000. Instead they led to a collection of mountaintops almost within sight of the facility.
“That looks like footings for another set of towers,” Ryan observed.
“Parallel to the first set,” Graham agreed. “They’re putting some new generators into the facility. Well, we knew all along that they were only getting about half the usable power out of the dam.”
“How long to bring the rest on-stream?” Greer asked.
“I’d have to check with one of our consultants. It won’t take more than a few weeks to run the power lines out, and the top half of the powerhouse is already built. Figure the foundations for the new generators are already done. All they have to do is rig the new equipment. Six months, maybe eight if the weather goes bad.”
“That fast?” Jack wondered.
“They diverted people from two other hydro jobs. Both of them were ‘Hero’ projects. This one has never been talked about, but they pulled construction troops off two high-profile sites to do this one. Ivan does know how to focus his effort when he wants to. Six or eight months is conservative, Dr. Ryan. It may be done quicker,” Graham said.
“How much power’ll be available when they finish?”
“It’s not all that big a structure. Total peak output, with the new generators? Figure eleven hundred megawatts.”
“That’s a lot of power, and all going to those hilltops,” Ryan said almost to himself as the camera shifted again.
The one the Agency called “Mozart” was quite a hill, but this area was the westernmost extension of the Himalayan Range, and by those standards it was puny. A road had been blasted to the very top—there wasn’t a Sierra Club in the USSR—along with a helicopter pad for bringing VIPs out from Dushanbe’s two airports. There were sixteen buildings. One was for apartments, the view from which must have been fantastic, though it was a prototypical Russian apartment building, as stylish and attractive as a cinderblock, finished six months before. A lot of engineers and their families lived in it. It seemed strange to see such a building there, but the message of the building was: The people who lived here were privileged. Engineers and academicians, people with enough skill that the State wanted to look after them and their needs. Food was trucked up the new mountain road—or, in bad weather, flown in. Another of the buildings was a theater. A third was a hospital. Television programming came in via satellite earth-station next to a building that contained a few shops. That sort of solicitude was not exactly common in the Soviet Union. It was limited to high Party officials and people who worked in essential defense projects. This was not a ski resort.