Operation Damocles (23 page)

He threw the case and rifle onto the passenger seat, started the car and drove straight through the island without incident. He looked for the van as he passed lighted convenience stores and fast-food places, thinking that the man might try to use a public phone to report the attack. He didn’t see it again, anywhere.

He turned south on the Savannah highway, stopping only once along the way for a moment, where the marshes approached the highway. Leaving the car running, he took the rifle down near the water and threw it as far as he could into the tall swamp grass. He got back into the car and drove on to Savannah. There, he took Highway 16 west, back to Atlanta.

###

The next day, Jack Townsend checked out of his Atlanta hotel, and took his scheduled flight back to San Jose. He had left the little Volkswagen in the hotel parking lot, its VIN number removed and the registration papers destroyed. He had never registered the sale.

XXXI

“By God, something is finally beginning to break our way,” said Teller.

Edward Nigel Teller was named after the great physicist (his father had given himself second billing) in his father’s futile hope that it would direct Edward’s destiny. It hadn’t. At sixty, Eddie was active and incorrigible, a genuine colorful character who either rubbed off on people, or made them despise him. True to form, if you liked him, he liked you back; if you didn’t, he didn’t give a damn. His war-worn body was still as flat and hard as pavement, and he wasn’t afraid of Satan himself.

Naturally outgoing and friendly, Teller was nonetheless a purposeful man, whose outward charm and submerged focus had made him an incomparably efficient and successful agent during the “bomb years,” as he referred to the Cold War Era.

At the moment, he was standing in front of his bookshelf, his hands working at eye level, trying to thread a Justin Wilson tape on his old reel-to-reel machine in order to rewind it. “One of these days, I got to get a machine with automatic rewind,” he observed.

Ortiz and Townsend sat on the sofa, each with a Miller Lite in his hand.

“Why don’t you get rid of that antique and get a cassette player?” asked Townsend.

“Ah! Those damn things don’t give true sound,” replied Teller, “don’t have the bandwidth.”

“Getting back to the issue, what are we going to do with this information?” asked Ortiz. “We really can’t prove anything, so any kind of action through the civil authorities or news media is a wasted effort.”

“Maybe not,” said Teller, setting the tape reels in motion and resuming his seat in the adjacent chair. “If we could get the plot aired, even as an unconfirmed rumor, it would make the bastards more reluctant to go through with it. It would have to be carried nationwide, though. A local broadcast wouldn’t do it.”

“Who are we going to get to air it?” asked Townsend. “The conventional media wouldn’t touch it.”

“How about taking a hostage, and forcing them to air it?” asked Ortiz. “It could be the only way.”

“Who do we get to sacrifice himself by holing up with a hostage?” responded Teller sarcastically.

“There is a way,” said Townsend. “The hostage could be left alone—tied up with a fake radio-controlled bomb. That way, nobody gets caught.”

“This is bullshit, guys, get serious,” said Teller. “First, you would have to kidnap someone in the limelight in order for it to work. You kidnap some ordinary Joe, and you’ll spent two days arguing with the local cops, and accomplish absolutely nothing. We don’t even know if they will go through with it, now that Broderick has bought the farm, and we don’t know what their timetable is. Who are we going to grab on short notice?” He waved his hand at the absurdity of it and took a pull on his beer.

Townsend got up and walked casually to the window, his hands in his pockets. He gazed absently at three boys playing in the street with their skateboards. “I keep remembering that trailer,” he said.

“What trailer?” asked Ortiz.

Townsend turned back toward the room. “In South Carolina. Broderick had a small cargo trailer sitting by the house, with two satellite dishes on it. It was one of those ready-com kits, Eddie, with its own gas generator and everything you need to set up a quickie, satellite ground station.

“I don’t know why, but the image of it—sitting there with its wheels half-buried in the sand, and its dishes aimed at the sky—has stuck in my mind. Listen, could we tap into a commercial satellite transmission and broadcast our message—you know, interrupt the news or something?”

“No good,” said Teller. “Everything is filtered; you know that, Jimmy.”

“I thought you once told me that everything but sports is filtered,” contributed Ortiz, looking at Teller.

Teller and Townsend looked at Ortiz, then at each other, their faces lighting up.

“Eureka!” said Teller, grinning maliciously and rubbing his hands together in the classic parody of the mad scientist. “You got the transponder codes, Jimmy?”

“That was my job in Broderick’s outfit,” grinned Townsend. “Ain’t irony grand?”

“What are we going to say?” asked Ortiz. “We don’t want to come off like a bunch of whackos.”

“We’ll set it up just like a news broadcast,” said Townsend, returning to his seat. He leaned forward earnestly. “The community college has a closed-circuit TV studio. It’s for their television communications courses. Has a news desk, studio and everything. It’s attached to the drama club theater building. Has satellite dishes on the roof, tape equipment—the works. We could produce the tape and broadcast from there—and I just happen to know a trained newscaster. Eve can write the material and orchestrate the production.”

“Will they let you use it?” asked Ortiz.

“I don’t intend to ask,” responded Townsend. “We’ll go in at night, do our thing, and leave without anyone knowing. We also need to get to the TV station transmitter that’s going to carry the game. We have to install an uplink translator. We also have to rig things so that the transmitted signal can’t be interrupted from a remote site,” he explained for Ortiz’s benefit. “We’ll wire in a relay that switches all feed circuits directly to our translator, and run a direct auxiliary power circuit as well. We’ll have to rig the station monitors so that the feed they see is strictly from their remote camera at the game.

We don’t want them trying to pull the plug until we’re through. Sixty seconds ought to be enough.”

“Who’s going to do all that?” asked Ortiz.

“Meet the guru of intelligence communications,” said Townsend, extending an introductory hand toward Teller.

Teller put his thumbs in the armpits of his sportshirt, pushing outward in a parody of suspenders. He grinned at Ortiz with wide-open eyes, bobbed his eyebrows up and down several times in a Groucho Marx impersonation, and said, “You’re a hell of straight man, Hector. We couldn’t have done it without you.”

Ortiz sneered in mock derision, “You’re ten years out of date with the technology, you old dipstick. You’re going to stick your fingers in an electrical circuit and fry your dumb ass. Or the both of you will get your dicks shot off by some security guard.”

“Why Hector,” Teller said in his most convincing Peter Lorre, “I never knew you could be so vulgar.”

“You two old farts invented vulgar,” laughed Townsend. “But seriously, Hector, the stuff Eddie was playing with ten years ago is today’s technology. Back when TV cameras were too big to carry, he installed a miniature CCD camera in a shower head in one of the women’s dressing rooms in the United Nations, and fed its output to one of the security monitors. It was there for almost a year before the security chief discovered it.”

“Didn’t the security guards know it was there?”

Teller winked at Ortiz, “Of course they did. Those guys still love me.”

“And on that note, I’d better be leaving,” said Townsend. “I’ve got to pick up Eve in town.”

“How is she holding up?” asked Teller.

“She’s fine. She’s a tough little trooper underneath, and she’ll spring back, once her life begins to return to normal. There is no way of knowing for sure what Broderick may have set in motion. I don’t think he had a fix on us though, and I think it’ll probably fade away now that he’s dead. I can’t continue to keep her cooped up like a prisoner, in any case. I can’t help wondering what will happen to us when she doesn’t need to depend on me anymore,” he confided, gazing introspectively at the beer bottle in his hand. “I’m not exactly what she’s used to.”

Ortiz leaned over, put his hand on Townsend’s knee. “Eve loves you, son. Anyone can see it. The only thing that’s going to happen, when all this shit is over, is that the light we occasionally glimpse behind her face is going to brighten and burn steady. She’s a keeper, my boy. If she was going to fold, she would have left you months ago.”

Townsend smiled. “I hope you’re right.”

“Of course we are,” said Ortiz. He patted Townsend’s knee, rising from the sofa. “Tell her that Eddie and I both want her body, and we’ll gladly kill you for your insurance and run away with her. All she has to do is give us the high sign, and you’re history.”

“I think she’s fond enough of you two old goats that she might consider it,” Townsend said ruefully, getting up. “But I’ll tell her you said hi.”

XXXII

“What are we going to do about Gene, Hector? We can’t just leave him to their mercy, can we?” asked Paul Haas. He twirled the ice in his glass, regarding it absently. He and Ortiz sat smoking cigars and sipping bourbon in the warmly lit living room of Haas’ Santa Clara home.

“No, but Leland thinks he’ll be all right for a while. We don’t know where they’re holding him, and we can’t very well start blasting away in order to save him. We’ll have to go about it some other way. In any case, he’ll have to wait. We’ve got more pressing business.”

“This gas-bomb thing?”

“No. Leland has that under control, I think. I’m going to need your help with the telemetry on that ghost of yours. Diana is closing in.”

“Do you think they can find it?”

“You’ve got to give them credit. Those boys really are pretty good.”

“You sound like you admire them.”

“It’s wrong to downplay your opponent’s ability, Paul. To win, you have to operate on facts, not prejudice. Besides, most of them are just young people that have been indoctrinated to think they are being patriotic—serving their country. We shouldn’t lose sight of that.”

“Bullshit, Hector! Those ‘young people’ know the difference between shooting at the soldiers of a foreign enemy, and shooting American citizens. Nobody is that fucking stupid.”

“Well, obviously, some of them are. They’ve been taught a command structure that does not include civilians, except for the President and Secretary of Defense, and they’ve had it drilled into them to think that they are better than their civilian brothers and sisters. Also, they’ve been isolated demographically as much as possible from their own kind in the past few years. That alone shows you that it was coming; it was being planned.”

“What do you mean, ‘isolated demographically’?”

Ortiz looked at him curiously. “I thought you knew. Remember that Colonel Hayes that took over the Domestic Policy Office a few years ago? He gave a speech at the ROTC graduation in San Diego last year. No? Well, no matter. Anyway, he had almost all enlistees and junior officers in the military, with more than two years of service remaining, relocated. He established new recruiting and training policies. Kids from the southeast ended up being trained and stationed in the northwest, and vice versa. Kids from L.A. ended up at Newport News or Fort Bragg, Kentucky. He wanted them to feel as little kinship with the local civilians as possible.

“He also intensified training in riot control. Didn’t you hear David Goldstein’s talk on this just before Christmas?”

“How could I? I was in Chile.”

Ortiz nodded, “So you were; so you were.”

“What did David suggest we do about the military mentality?”

“Well, he actually had a few good ideas for a change. I thought so, anyway. For one, he wanted to change the Pledge of Allegiance.”

“That sounds like David,” Haas said sarcastically, rolling his eyes at the ceiling,

“He has a point,” said Ortiz, waving Haas down. “For example, he suggested that it be made mandatory, that every civil servant—from the lowliest private in the military to the President himself—formally stand at the beginning of the workday, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. He wants the police, the dogcatcher, the county clerk to do it. He also suggested the words be changed to: ‘I pledge allegiance to the people of the United States of America, and to the Constitution I am sworn to uphold.’ There’s more, but you get the idea. It’s the same thing that the women’s movement has been trying to do—instill ideas and make people think about old, ingrained attitudes by making them sensitive to the meaning and appropriateness of words.”

“You think it would work?”

“Can’t hurt. We grew up pledging allegiance ‘to the flag, and to the republic for which it stands.’ Nothing wrong with that, in itself, but somewhere along the way, we came to subconsciously believe that the ‘republic’ was the people who run government—a few dozen civil servants—the hired help.

“It seems kind of crazy when you stop to think about it. It’s a battle for minds. Human beings, for some indefinable reason, abhor logic. Otherwise, they couldn’t be controlled. They like rituals, and chants, and symbols—all that mindless crap. It gets their blood pumping, and the adrenaline flowing, and they don’t want to know if it makes sense. It’s like the cereal commercials on TV; if they thought that it was good for them, or made sense, it would spoil it for them. They wouldn’t eat it.

“Why do you think they like spectator sports so much? Why do people boogying around a dance floor suddenly feel foolish if someone turns the music off? Or the lights on? It’s because no one would be caught dead acting like a spastic chimp with a corncob up his ass, except under certain, programmed as acceptable, conditions.”

“You would have made a fair psychologist,” said Haas.

“Comes from learning to live with prima donna scientist schleps like you, all my life.” Ortiz gave him a Cheshire grin.

“Pity you didn’t learn to psychoanalyze yourself. Maybe you wouldn’t be such an asshole,” retorted Haas, smiling back extravagantly.

“How about another whiskey?”

“Coming up,” Haas said, rising to do the honors. “Where is Leland, anyway?”

“He’s freezing his tail off in Zurich.”

“What’s he doing in Switzerland?”

“They’re getting ready to put their system up. Sydney is almost ready, too. He’ll be going there next.”

“What about the Chinese? And the Russian military? Won’t they see them?”

“It can’t be helped. We could theorize for years on what their reaction might be, and still be wrong in the end. For my money, the sooner we get them in place, the better off we’ll be, no matter what they do.”

“Where are we going to be launching from?”

“Bonn, Germany, and a place near Woomera in Australia.”

“Isn’t the Space Command at Woomera?”

“Yes. We’ll be launching from practically under their noses. There will be a small diversion to occupy the Air Force people at the site, but everyone else in the country will think it’s an official shot from Woomera A.F. Space Com.”

“Pretty damned clever.”

“I think so, too.”

“How did they set it up without anybody knowing? How did they construct the rockets?”

“They didn’t. They bought two ex-Soviet, truck-mounted ICBMs, and modified them with strap-on solid boosters and a bigger delivery capsule. Seems you can buy any kind of military hardware in the Balkan republics now. They broke the missiles down and shipped them out as sewage plant equipment, leaving the warheads behind. The one near Bonn was reconstructed in a barn.”

“That’s amazing. I guess, deep down, I never really thought we would be able to pull it off.”

“It wasn’t that hard—finding a way to get them up. Hell, we did it with NASA, twice in two weeks, but thanks to you and Leland, we had something to put up there. You’re both very remarkable men. Tesla would have been proud of you. So would Einstein. I intend to hand you the Nobel, personally.”

Haas smiled and colored at Ortiz facetious flattery. The smile turned to a frown, and he said, “I feel like Leland does, Hector. We’ve paid a dear price for what we’ve done. I don’t even want to kid about getting a prize for it. My only hope of consolation is that we succeed in what we’re trying to do. I couldn’t live with myself if all those people died for nothing.”