Vulcan's Forge

by Du Brul, Jack

  The delegates stood quickly and shuffled from the room. Perchenko remained seated and made a show of lighting a thin Dutch cigar. Undersecretary of Commerce Donnelly clapped Perchenko on the shoulder in a friendly gesture, but the big Texan’s hand dug deeply into the Russian’s soft muscles. “See ya’ at dinner, pardner.”

  Perchenko waited until the room was empty before wincing at the pain in his shoulder and attempting to massage it away.

  “Fucking cowboy,” he muttered.

  Perchenko left the hotel quickly, forgoing the dinner, as he had most evenings. Exiting the gleaming concrete tower on the river side, he called over one of the hotel’s river taxis. Perchenko told the bellman his destination and he, in turn, informed the liveried boat driver. The Russian stepped lightly onto the taxi, a Riva twenty-four footer, and settled himself into the wide backseat just forward of the craft’s idling engine.

  The driver eased the boat into the teeming river traffic, heading north and passing the classic Victorian elegance that was the Oriental Hotel. Like its brethren, Shepherds in Cairo, or the Mount Nelson in Cape Town, the Oriental stood as a reminder of the once mighty and far-flung British Empire.

  The Riva drove north, cutting a quick stroke through the river, dodging other boats with the agility of a thoroughbred. Bangkok tumbled down to the edge of the river in urban sprawl. Barges sat tied to the banks four and five deep, forming cluttered neighborhoods of their own. The numerous canals that once sliced off into the city and earned Bangkok the title “Venice of the East” were all but gone, turned into automobile-choked streets, but all of Bangkok’s diversity could still be seen from the river; the wealth stacked up in glittering high-rises and the abject poverty living in stick and sheet metal shacks crammed between warehouses.

  On the river, the sharp water smell almost masked the reeking cloud of pollution which shrouds the city, ejected from sweatshops and cars in a pall that rivals Los Angeles or Mexico City.

  The boat sped along, under the Memorial Bridge, where cars and the three-wheeled jitneys called tuk-tuks were strung like beads. They shot past the Arun Wat, the Temple of Dawn, a squashed cone that typified Thai religious architecture. The dying rays of the sun shone hard against its gilded facade.

  The taxi passed the royal palace, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, and Wat Po. As they pounded northward, the city became older, the buildings more tumbled, the Western influence not nearly as strong. The houses and tenements were so jammed together that they leaned against one another. It seemed as though if one were torn down, whole neighborhoods would tumble like dominos.

  Finally they came to the Royal River Hotel, the only major hotel on the western bank of the river. A new hotel, it was immensely popular with European and Australian tour groups. Tourists clustered around white tables on the hotel’s landing, their shorts and open-necked shirts garish splashes of color that clashed sharply with their sunburnt skin.

  Gennady Perchenko stood and shuffled to the Riva’s gunwale. Ignoring the proffered hand of a bellman, he stumbled to the dock and told the driver to wait, in both English and mangled Thai. He approached the waterside bar’s host, a tuxedoed man with a deeply pocked face and slicked back hair. As the maître d’ led Perchenko to the only unoccupied table, he spoke quietly from the side of his mouth, his thin lips barely moving.

  “There is no word yet, you should wait.”

  Perchenko bristled at the order from this man who was no more than a cutout in the spy trade, a disposable piece of garbage whose worth was so small it was un-countable, yet he knew the man was right. He must wait.

  As a slim waitress set a Rum Collins on his table, Perchenko thought, as he had every night since coming to Bangkok, about how he had gotten into his current situation.

  He had been a successful diplomat under the old Soviet regime, a functionary of some standing who might have one day reached a cabinet position. The coup, the collapse of the Soviet government, and the subsequent formation of the Russian Federation had all but crushed his career. In the sweeping changes that washed across his homeland like a tsunami wave, Perchenko had found himself tumbling in the swirling black eddies. Former allies in the Politburo vanished, others switched loyalties so fast that even they had no idea in what they believed. Gennady watched assignment after assignment pass him by. The old cronyism had been replaced by a tougher but more subtle system of political patronage that left him idle while other men flourished.

  It was at that time that a hand reached out and dragged him back onto the crest of the wave. Later he realized that that hand belonged to the very devil himself: Colonel Ivan Kerikov, Director of Department 7, KGB Scientific Operations. Kerikov was a shadowy figure in the stygian world of espionage, a man no one claimed to know yet the list of those who feared him was lengthy.

  A full month before the Bangkok Accords were announced, Kerikov had invited Perchenko to his offices in a nondescript building near the Moskva Hotel, far from KGB headquarters. He was told about the upcoming meetings and given a choice—attend as Kerikov’s agent or never receive another posting in the foreign service.

  Perchenko did not question how Kerikov knew of the impending meetings, nor did he question the meaning of the word “agent,” he simply accepted and began making preparations.

  Five weeks later, Gennady was told by his superior in the Foreign Office that he would represent the federation in Thailand. Gennady innocently asked if Kerikov had any final orders. His superior shot him a scathing look, then sharply denied that he’d ever heard of Kerikov.

  The full extent of Kerikov’s power became apparent in Bangkok when the Taiwanese ambassador took Gennady aside and explained that he too was working for Kerikov and would follow Perchenko’s orders. At that moment, Perchenko began to fear for his life. Engineering his posting to the conference was one thing, but Kerikov seemed to control people outside of the Russian Federation. Perchenko couldn’t, nor did he wish to, understand that level of dominion.

  At first, Perchenko simply had to attend the rounds of meetings and pay attention, but a week ago, the situation changed. Kerikov contacted Gennady through the maître d’ at the Royal River and instructed him to delay the final signing of the Accords. No explanation was given and the fear that Gennady had built of Kerikov had prevented him from ever asking for one. If Ivan Kerikov wanted the Bangkok Accords stalled, that was exactly what Gennady would do.

  So Gennady stalled—and waited for some sort of inquiry from his superiors in the Foreign Office. Their silence, he assumed, was another sign of Kerikov’s influence. Perchenko could easily handle the pressure put on him by the other delegates, and the assistance given by the Taiwanese ambassador made the situation even easier. Still, he wanted some sense of Kerikov’s final plan. How long would he have to delay the meetings and what was the ultimate goal?

  As Perchenko watched the maître d’ wend his way through the crowded tables to seat a group of Dutch tourists, he knew the answers wouldn’t be found here.

  “Yes,” he muttered, “I must wait.”

  Moscow

  Colonel Ivan Kerikov dragged his hard, flat gaze from the face of the man across his desk and lined up the glowing tip of the nearly spent cigarette to the fresh one pressed between his thin lips. As soon as the smoke filled his lungs, he ground the old cigarette into an overflowing ashtray and stared again at his guest. The man seemed to shrink under Kerikov’s scrutiny.

  Through the cloud of acrid smoke Kerikov continued his assessment of his guest. Though he had never met the man before, he was cut from the same mold as so many other bureaucrat accountants that Kerikov seemed to know the man intimately. The accountant wore the uniform of a KGB major, but the tailoring was poor so it hung loosely across his thin shoulders and sunken chest. The few decorations seemed to be more apology than a statement of valor. His skin was pasty white and, had Soviet doctors not perfected cheap ocular surgery, Kerikov was sure that this man would sport thick-lensed glasses. Kerikov remembered with distaste that the auditor�
��s handshake was limp, like squeezing a plastic bag of entrails.

  Kerikov had not been surprised when this man had presented himself to his secretary an hour earlier. In fact, he had been expecting a general audit from the KGB’s Central Bureau, of which this man was the vanguard, here merely to pave the way for the dozen or so other little ferrets who would tear through Kerikov’s budgetary reports with the anticipation of hounds tracking a fresh scent.

  This audit was a long time coming. After the collapse of the old Soviet Union, every sector of the government had been reevaluated. The budgets, once lavish under Brezhnev and Andropov, had dwindled under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and accountability had risen. Every ruble and kopek now had to be tracked and disbursed. Financial discrepancy was unacceptable. It was an indication of the power of the KGB that they were the last of the major organizations to fall victim to the auditor’s slashing pens.

  Kerikov had known a full six months earlier that the auditing teams were interested in the affairs of his particular division of the KGB, Department 7, Scientific Operations. It was only a cruel quirk of fate that this interest coincided with a massive amount of new spending, which he was now forced to justify to the thin major sitting on the other side of his oak desk.

  As the auditor busied himself in his imitation leather expandable briefcase, Kerikov reflected on the easier times Scientific Operations had once enjoyed.

  Born in the tumult of the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, Department 7 had been established by Stalin himself to help assimilate captured enemy technology into the Soviet army. As the Russian forces advanced into Germany and liberated various factories and laboratories, members of the newly formed Scientific Operations were there to see that secret works were preserved and brought back to a huge facility near the Black Sea port of Odessa.

  If a site was deemed important to the members of Department 7, they gave the order and whole buildings were dismantled, packed up and shipped back to Russia, oftentimes with the original staffs kept as virtual slave labor. In this fashion, a deuterium plant was taken from outside Berlin and reestablished, giving Russia her first source of heavy water, a critical component in the building of fission bombs. A factory outside of Warsaw that produced Zyklon-B, the nerve agent used in the death camps, was shipped to a remote site in the Ural Mountains and began stockpiling gas weapons by the summer of 1945. Officers of Department 7 seized a Heinkle workshop just as the staff were destroying their accumulated research. The papers and models captured from that raid led to the development of the MIG-15, the Soviet’s first jet fighter.

  Since the strategic rocket site at Penemunde was liberated by the Western Allies, Department 7 lost out on that windfall of missile technology, yet still managed to secure many top scientists and designs for their homeland. By far, their greatest boon came during the occupation of Berlin.

  While the Western Allies busied themselves searching the city for war criminals, the Soviets searched for secrets. A safe in the home of a Messerschmitt engineer yielded the formula for a synthetic oil necessary for turbine engines. The diary of a Krupp manager held the key to the metallurgy of the exhaust nozzle of the V-2 rocket.

  In this fashion, Department 7 brought secrets home to Russia and gave Soviet scientists the facilities they needed to adapt them to the Red Army.

  By the summer of 1952, all of the captured German technology had been evaluated, much incorporated, and some abandoned. With its primary mission complete, the head of Department 7, Boris Ulinev, decided to change the objective of his section.

  Scientific Operations had been a passive agency; it had no agents in the popular sense, nor did it create anything original. Ulinev set out to change all that. Because Scientific Operations had always dealt with technology that was ahead of its time, Ulinev began setting up operations that would only come to fruition far into the future. Spending millions of rubles supplied by the Soviet government, Ulinev directed the eight hundred scientists on his staff to concentrate their efforts leap-frogging current technology and developing devices far more advanced than anything on any drawing board in the world.

  Like Kelly Johnson’s “Skunk Works” at Lockheed, which developed the SR-71 spy plane long before the materials were available to build it, Scientific Operations began designing and testing rudimentary multiwarhead ballistic missiles even before Sputnik was conceived. A Department 7 theoretician came just a couple of molecules away from discovering carbon fiber. And a team of experts began working on circuit boards for computers while the rest of the world still marveled at the power of the vacuum tube.

  One project in particular became the pet of Boris Ulinev and subsequently the potential triumph of Ivan Kerikov. Presented to Ulinev by an intense young geologist named Pytor Borodin, the project was as audacious as anything yet attempted by Department 7. In fact, it might rival the greatest feats of mankind.

  The undertaking, code-named “Vulcan’s Forge,” had its genesis on Bikini Atoll on July 25, 1946, when the United States conducted the first underwater nuclear test as part of Operation Crossroads. It took four years, until 1950, for the data from that test to reach Department 7, stolen by a female agent who seduced a lab technician at the White Sands Testing Grounds in New Mexico, where the volumes of information and tons of samples were warehoused. Pytor Borodin became involved due to a happenstance comment from a colleague, who mentioned that a hitherto unknown alloy had been created by the Bikini explosion. Borodin quickly became obsessed, going so far as to request a clandestine submarine reconnaissance to Bikini in late 1951 in order to collect additional samples of sand, water, and debris from the seventy-four ships the U.S. intentionally sank as part of the test.

  For eighteen additional months, Borodin labored at his task until he was able to present a far-reaching plan to Boris Ulinev. It seemed tailor-made for the new direction Scientific Operations was to take.

  The opening phase of Vulcan’s Forge called for the detonation of a nuclear weapon deep under the Pacific Ocean. Because all atomic materials were under the direct control of the army, Ulinev had his team secretly build one. This alone took more than a year. Department 7 also established a large dummy corporation and secreted money in various accounts in Europe and Asia. All in all, Vulcan’s Forge wasn’t ready to commence until the spring of 1954.

  Once the opening gambit had been played, the only thing left to do was wait for nature to take her course. For forty years the waiting dragged by, through the height of the Cold War, through the opening of Eastern Europe, and through the collapse of the Soviet Union herself. During this time, Boris Ulinev died and was replaced, and his replacement was himself replaced, and so on, until Ivan Kerikov reigned as the head of a much diminished department. Of all the plots and projects launched by Ulinev in the 1950s, only Vulcan’s Forge remained viable.

  Unfortunately, its raison d’être had vanished. The mighty struggle between communism and capitalism was all but over. The massive arms race during the 1980s had brought the Soviet Union to her economic knees. Though gamely trying to keep pace in conventional and nuclear forces, Reagan’s gamble on Star Wars technology had chimed the death knell for Russia. The Soviet Union had no response to SDI but capitulation. America paid for the arms buildup with a four-year recession, but Russia paid with her very existence.

  Bit by bit, Russia began withdrawing into herself. Aid to Cuba was slowed to a trickle, then shut off completely. Troops were pulled from the fifty-year occupation of Berlin. Aeroflot suspended most international flights. Within Russia, programs and departments began to vanish. The state-run diamond mines at Aikhal in central Siberia were surreptitiously sold to a London consortium linked to the Consolidated Selling System. The Blackjack bomber, the MIG-29 Fulcrum, and Russia’s aircraft carrier program were all shelved. Officers began committing suicide because they were worth more to their families dead than alive. The staff of the KGB was cut by more than fifty percent.

  Bold projects like Vulcan’s Forge had no place in the New World Order. D
uring his first four years as head of Scientific Operations, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kerikov had guarded and nurtured Vulcan’s Forge for pure patriotism and duty. But now, the very fabric of what he believed had torn through, and Kerikov started to protect the project from the auditors for simple greed. He planned to steal Vulcan’s Forge for himself in a coup as brilliant as the original plan laid down by Pytor Borodin forty years before.

  Time, once so abundant, had run incredibly short for Kerikov. The Bangkok Accords had seemed a providential gift when first proposed, but now it had become necessary to delay them at a substantial cost in bribe money paid to the ambassador of Taiwan and to Gennady Perchenko and Perchenko’s superior in the Foreign Office.

  Department 7 could ill afford the huge payoffs. Kerikov had been able to dodge the auditors for months, but now they were here, in his office, asking questions that he was unwilling to answer.

  “Ah, here we are,” the ferret said, pulling a sheaf of notes from his briefcase. “It seems that your department paid for the refitting of a refrigeration ship called the August Rose four years ago at a cost of twenty-seven million dollars. An affidavit from a shipyard foreman in Vladivostok states that the sonar system installed on the ship is far superior to anything he’s seen on our strategic submarines. Would you care to comment on that?”

  Kerikov felt a pressure building behind his eyes, a force that threatened to blow apart his entire head. Security concerning the refit of the August Rose had been airtight, yet here was the entire story being laid out before him. The constraint of time he’d felt a moment ago had just tightened with the relentlessness of a garrote.

  Kerikov opened the top right-hand drawer of his desk. “I happen to have something here that is very pertinent to that.”

  The accountant leaned forward in his chair, eyes bright with anticipation.

  There was only one round in the Makarov semiautomatic pistol, the one round Kerikov had planned to use on himself if the need ever arose. It blew a perfectly round hole through the accountant’s forehead, then splattered the contents of his skull onto the wall and door behind his slumping body.