James P. Hogan (60 page)

The others exchanged looks again, but with more interest this time. “You know, it might just be crazy enough to work,” McCain murmured, half to himself.

Scanlon had steepled his hands in front of his nose and was staring wide-eyed over them, thinking furiously all of a sudden. He stood up, walked a few paces stiffly toward the far wall, then turned to face the others again. “The containers,” he said. “All those containers full of soil that have been coming down the spokes… they’re the kind that deep-space transporters use – designed for automatic handling. That means they probably came in by rail through Nizhni Zaliski to the transportation center upstairs, and were offloaded into the elevators, transferred via the gondolas, and sent down the spokes without any unloading.”

“So?” McCain asked.

“They’ll be going back the same way, empty,” Scanlon said, “They’re probably still going back now, because there were a lot of them. And if I’m right in what I’m thinking, I know where they’ll be collected together to go onto the trains. If we could get into one of those, we might find our-selves with a clear run out to Nizhni Zaliski…. Koh’s right, We were all talking about going the wrong way.”

McCain was frowning, however, as he considered the implications. “What’s up, Lew?” Rashazzi asked. “Is there something wrong with it?”

“Not as far as it goes,” McCain said. “But what then? Okay, so we find a phone. Exactly who are we intending to call with it? An international call to Washington – from here, at a time like this? No way. What else is there? The US embassy? Sure, they’re in radio contact with Washington all the time, but what about a line to their number in Moscow? Don’t tell me the KGB won’t be monitoring it twenty-four hours a day. We’d never get through, and we’d be picked up in minutes.”

Scanlon nodded resignedly. “Lew’s right.”

“We call my cousin in Moscow,” Koh said simply. “The KGB aren’t interested in his number.”

McCain blinked. “Who?”

“My cousin – the one who has the restaurant franchise in Moscow. I told you about him once. He’s only a fifteen-minute walk from the American embassy. I’ll call him, and he can go there and tell them whatever you want him to say.”

For several seconds there was one of those sudden silences that descends when everybody realizes that there’s nothing left to say. McCain stared at Koh disbelievingly, and shook his head – but still couldn’t fault it. They got up and gathered together the rest of the things that were worth taking. Then Scanlon turned off the light, opened the door a fraction, and brought an eye close to the crack. “It looks clear,” he hissed. “Lew and I’ll go first. The other two of you follow when we’ve made it to the top of those stairs.”

“Then, let’s go,” McCain said.

“Just a minute,” Rashazzi’s voice whispered from the shadows behind.

McCain turned his head. “What?”

“I don’t have any money for the phone. Does anyone else?”

“Holy Mother of God,” Scanlon breathed disbelievingly.

“Scientists!” Koh muttered at the rear

“Razz, let’s worry about that after we get out of this god-dam place,” McCain groaned tiredly.

President Warren Austin of the United States stood in the center of the Pentagon War Room floor, looking grimly up at the situation displays. General Snell, other senior officers of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and advisers watched from one side as Borden summarized the latest analysis. “What it boils down to is that our agents there are telling us it’s not a weapons platform and that the top Soviet leaders are arriving, and at the same time not to believe what they’re telling us – Pangolin and the sender designating himself Sexton have both returned incorrect validation codes.”

Defense Secretary Robert Uhl, who had only recently arrived, shook his head and hesitated. Nothing was making any sense. He gestured at one of the screens monitoring the Soviet TV connection from Paula, who at that moment was talking to others in another part of the Pentagon. “How can they be telling us not to believe what they’re saying? They’re telling us they’re up there where the Russian leaders are, i and we can see it with our own eyes.”

“We think it could be for the Russians’ benefit rather than ours,” Foleda said from beside Borden. “Somehow they’re controlling all the communications, in and out. Sexton – if it is Sexton – seems to be letting them hear what they want to hear.”

“But how could it not mean what it says when we can see that what it’s saying is right?” Uhl asked again.

“Could that TV transmission with the woman in it be recorded?” an aide asked.

Somebody else shook his head. “No. We’re interacting with her live.”

“So what does it mean?” Uhl asked.

Borden could only shake his head. “We don’t know. There are all kinds of theories…”

“Theories!” Uhl snorted and turned away, rubbing his hands together nervously.

The President stared up at the displays again. “If Mermaid is a weapons platform as we’ve been fearing, its mission will be to take out our spacebased systems from long range in an opening strike,” he said slowly. “That would deprive us of two things: our Starshield defense against a strategic attack down on the surface, and our ability to knock out their shield. Agreed?”

“That’s the way we see it,” General Snell confirmed. In other words, the Soviets would be able to launch virtually unopposed from behind a now-immune defensive screen that would reduce any retaliatory strike from the West down to ineffective proportions.

“Would we accept the odds under those conditions, or would we back down without a fight?” Austin asked. “Could that have been their aim all along?”

“It would make a lot of sense,” Uhl agreed. Who wouldn’t have liked an intact global economy to dictate terms to, rather than a mess that would take fifty years to rebuild?

Austin paced a yard or two with his hands clasped behind him. “So what are our options?” he asked the room in general.

“Well, as long as those Soviet leaders are walking around out in the towns up there, they’re vulnerable” Snell said. True, US weapons firing from Earth orbit could blow away the roof and wipe out everybody unprotected, even if they couldn’t damage hardened weapons emplacements. But this was really ruling out an option rather than offering one. It would be unacceptable morally to resort to anything that drastic purely as a precautionary measure – and the consequences if the fears subsequently turned out to be unfounded would be unthinkable. As a retaliation, yes. But the problem there was that if the fears were well grounded and
Tereshkova
was permitted to fire its weaponry first, the US would have nothing left to retaliate with.

Uhl chewed unhappily on his lip for a moment. “I wish I had something else to offer, but I don’t. I have to agree with the intelligence people.” He glanced quickly in Borden and Foleda’s direction. “We eliminate part of Mermaid’s advantage by a preemptive strike against the Soviet shield, and hope we can take out a large part of it before Mermaid replies. That would leave them exposed – partially, anyhow – to our missiles. Then, after Mermaid takes out our shield – which we can’t stop it from doing, anyway – we’d be left set for a slugging match, eighties-style.”

“In that case, they might end up being the ones who back down,” somebody suggested.

Snell shook his head. “They’d still have the edge. Besides, they’re desperate; we’re not. Time isn’t on their side.”

Uhl accepted the statement with a heavy nod. “What about the UN ship?” he asked, looking at the President. “There’s still time to try and get it diverted.”

Austin thought for a while. “I’m not sure we should try,” he said at length. “If we’re likely to end up depending on surprise, it might be the wrong thing to do. The Soviets would be alerted through their UN people.” Snell nodded his agreement without saying anything. “I’m afraid they’ll have to take their chances with everyone else,” Austin said. He turned to take in the whole of the waiting assembly. “We go to General Readiness Orange, and Red Standby One for the spacebased orbital systems. Send it out right away. And find out how we’re doing with that conference hookup to the Europeans.”

“Yes, hello? This is the Tunguska Cement Works,,,, Comrade Gorzchenko? One moment.” Mariana Porechny plugged a line into a socket on the switchboard in front of her and keyed in an extension number. “So I told her not to be stupid,” she continued saying to Eugenia, her only companion in the exchange. “If you can’t keep your boy from climbing over fences, I said, it’s not my fault if he goes and cuts his leg. I mean, the nerve of the woman – complaining about us leaving
our
tools out in our
own
yard. You’d think it was your job to mind everybody else from their own stupidity, wouldn’t you. And it’s not as if it was the first time, either. And her husband’s always blocking our gate in that wreck they drive around in. And then there was the time when – No, he isn’t answering…. The works manager? Wait, I’ll try it….”

“I tried to call my son in Moscow yesterday,” Eugenia said distantly. “He said it’s like a graveyard there. They’re having rallies outside the city this year because there’s no parade. The funny thing is, he said they were on alert for civil-defense drill. Did you ever hear of anything like that before? It gets worse. What a thing to go and do on a holiday. I sometimes think they haven’t got anything worthwhile to do at all – any of them.”

“Nasty kids they’ve got – especially him, that one. That day there was paint all over our window and down the wall, they tried to say it was the two little Bryokov boys from round the corner – and they’re no angels, mind – but I knew straightaway it was them. I even saw the tin – it was the one her creepy-crawly husband had the day before, when he painted their door. A real mess he made of it, too. You’ve never seen such an ugly color. Kind of purple, like the stuff that tart across the street plasters all round her eyes when she goes out, wobbling along on those heels with her skirt up the top of her legs – you can tell she’s up to no good. And do you know what time she comes prancing back, brassy as you please? And then her mother told me one day – Hello? The general manager?… Well, that’s not my fault, is it?… Yes, wait a minute. I’ll try it…. No patience, some people. They’re the kind who make the world what it is – never a good word to say for anyone. I can’t understand them at all.”

“He sounded as if he’d caught a cold,” Eugenia said absently.

Neither of them noticed the door inching inward until it opened all the way suddenly. A tall, heftily built man in a gray sweater, followed instantly by another one, scrawnier, with bulging eyes, came through so swiftly that the two women found hands clamped over their mouths before they’d had a chance to react or make a sound. Another man, younger than the other two, and swarthy-skinned, with wavy black hair – definitely a killer, from the intense look in his eyes – moved in between them and the switchboard, while a fourth closed the door softly and bolted it.

Mariana quivered with terror. The four intruders looked mean and desperate, with blotchy, unshaven faces, disheveled hair, and scruffy, grease-stained clothes – escaped convicts if she’d ever seen one. The face of the man staring down at her was grotesque: wild eyes staring from a mask of bloated purple. Psychotic murderers were often physically deformed or mutilated, and they killed compulsively to get revenge on the society they felt rejected by – she’d read it in a magazine somewhere. Eugenia had slumped over in her chair and seemed to be in a swoon. The man at the door turned, revealing cruel, slant-eyed, Oriental features. That meant for a certainty they’d be raped. Mariana’s chest pounded, and every reflex drove her to struggle and scream in mindless panic. But the two killers were holding her so tightly that she couldn’t move, and the hand over her mouth stifled her shouting.

“We don’t want to hurt you,” the big man said slowly. His voice had a foreign accent. “There’s no need to be afraid. All we need is your cooperation. Nod your head if you understand me.” They held her until her strength was exhausted, “There is no danger. Do you understand?” At last the meaning sank in. She nodded her head twice. “I’m going to let go so that you can breathe. Please do not make any noise.”

The hand on her mouth loosened, and she gasped in air gratefully. The hand drew away “Who are you?” she asked fearfully. “What do you want?”

The Oriental wrote something on her notepad and pushed it across the console. “Merely your help, if you would be so kind, madam,” he said. “Please call that number in Moscow for us. It is extremely urgent.”

“That’s all?”

“Please. It is urgent.”

Mariana nodded. She indicated a handset on the console, and the Oriental picked it up. Then she looked at the notebook and keyed in the number with trembling fingers. It rang for four or five seconds. Then a voice answered, “Willow Garden restaurant.”

“I – I have a call for you,” Mariana said in a shaking voice. The Oriental began chattering excitedly in a strange tongue. It sounded to Mariana like an obscure dialect of Chinese.

General Snell listened while the two Defense Department scientists explained the figures being displayed on one of the War Room consoles. Snell nodded, and turned back to the President and his group. “The next thirty minutes will be the crucial period. Three of our biggest space lasers will come out from eclipse behind Earth during that time. If Mermaid is going to take out our system with a surprise strike, it will be in that time frame.” Austin nodded somberly.

“We have to go for the Soviet shield, now,” Uhl implored. “Okay, so it’s an act of war. But if that colony really is clean, they should have been open about it from the beginning. If it isn’t clean, we’ve got a good reason. The world will understand that.”

“If it leads to an all-out exchange, the world will remember that it was us who struck first. Will it understand that?” Austin asked.

“They haven’t left us with a choice,” Uhl said. “It wouldn’t be striking first. It would simply be getting us back toward more of a balance. We hold right there. The next step would be up to them.”