Delta Blue

by William H. Lovejoy

  “If they’re just energy taps,” Amber asked, “why hide them at all?”

  “Two reasons,” Pearson said.

  “We’d better put in a call to Cheyenne Mountain,” McKenna told her.

  She checked her watch. “It’s eleven-thirty there.”

  “Hell, Amy, I’ll make the call. It’s the best time of all to get a general out of bed,” McKenna said. “It gives you a chance to see them operating at their best.”

  *

  Gen. Marvin Brackman called Hannibal Cross at his home in Arlington Heights.

  “You know what the hell time it is, Marvin?”

  “I know, Hannibal. But you’ll want to hear this. I’ve got a set of pictures, and they’re being transferred to your office by data link.”

  “You’ve confirmed that the wells are geothermal taps, then?”

  “We think so, yes. Pearson says she’s ninety-nine percent sure.”

  “Generating electricity?” Cross asked.

  “Almost certainly.”

  “That fits in with some information the CIA has developed. Quite a bit of German industry has been converted to electrical usage. New plants are driven by it. Older plants have been switched to coal from fuel oil. What do you suppose the electrical output is, Marvin?”

  “We’ll have to get some of the academics busy on it, Hannibal, but for the moment, Thorpe and Pearson have an estimate. One complex of several geothermal wells in California generates three-quarters of a million kilowatts. That’s enough to run a small city. That’s also slightly better than the output of Hoover Dam.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Not in the least. Pearson and Thorpe argue that, given German ingenuity and engineering and strong thermal sources, each platform could develop five hundred thousand kilowatts at minimum. That’s twelve million kilowatts for twenty-four platforms. Equal to two Coulee Dams. And that’s the minimum, Hannibal. Thorpe thinks it might run to fourteen or fifteen million on the top end of the estimate range.”

  “That’s a hell of a lot of power, Marvin.”

  “And it gets cheaper every day they’re in operation. In no time at all, the Germans will not be dependent on imported energy.”

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs grunted, as if he were finally climbing out of bed. “Worse than that, in a conflict situation, they’ve got a strong source of energy that allows them to divert petroleum fuels to military usage. They may, in fact, already be doing that.”

  “You’ve seen the tank farms.”

  “What would be the next step, Marvin?”

  “If it were me, preparing for war on a long-range plan? I’d start hardening the storage sites. Bury the tank farms. For all I know, some of the fuel storage is already underground. I’d probably have pre-sited some kind of platform defenses. SAM and AA units that could be quickly shipped out to the platforms and set up on those oversized chopper pads. It’s a rationale for the large pads. To stave off the superpowers, I’d have some long-range hardware in reserve.”

  “Peenemünde?”

  “Maybe. We have anything back on that, Hannibal? I haven’t heard from Sheremetevo.”

  “Nothing from the CIA or DIA, yet. I’ll put some matches under a few butts. I did see a CIA report that said travel to Germany was becoming more difficult. Stricter controls on issuing visas.”

  “The countdown may have started, Hannibal, and all we’re doing is accelerating it.”

  “We’ll know when we see what the response is to the attack on the well. If Bonn doesn’t scream like a stuck pig, I’m going to worry.”

  “They won’t have any evidence, no place to point a finger, and that may keep them quiet.”

  “Perhaps. Okay, any other implications?”

  “Yes, a major one. One of the reasons for disguising the wells is to hide the development of a tremendous new power source. But there’s another reason, too. If the court of world opinion knew about the risks of geothermal taps at sea, the Germans would never have gotten the first well drilled.”

  “Tell me about the risks, Marvin.”

  “First, there’s simple accident. A number of years ago, one of the California geothermal wells blew a wellhead. It’s difficult to control unknown pressures from five miles down. They had steam, boiling water, red-hot mud spewing all over the landscape. Quite a few personal injuries”

  “We still drill,” Cross said.

  “Sure, because the risks of drilling on land are acceptable. A blowout mostly goes straight up and dissipates. I don’t know about seaborne platforms, Hannibal. Pearson says those wells have anywhere from six hundred to seventeen hundred feet of probably unsupported well casing. Get a major storm in the area, lose an anchor on a platform, break a casing.”

  “And?”

  “And turn loose an uncontrolled spigot of steam into the Arctic. Up to six hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit,” Brackman said.

  “Damn. That high?”

  “That high. I don’t know what one broken wellhead would do to the ecology, but it wouldn’t help it.”

  “And we shot missiles at the son of a bitch?”

  “Shot high, Hannibal. But that’s the other risk. Attacking those wells could unleash a catastrophe. Can you imagine twenty or twenty-four uncapped wells pouring hot gases and water into the Arctic?”

  “Meltdown?”

  “My contact at the University of Colorado, who is also grumbling about being awakened at night, says yes. Within a year, we’d see rising water levels on all Northern European coasts. Half asleep, he still estimated a couple of feet of increased water level, and probably more. That might put some ports out of commission. It would disrupt the North Sea oil fields. The low-lying countries — Holland, the Netherlands — would have long refugee lines. Not to mention the damage to underwater life, both fish and plant life. There’d be environmentalists crawling over the steps of every capital in the world.”

  Hannibal Cross was silent for a long moment, then said, “Marvin, I’m going to roust out a few of the heavy brass and a few of the heavier civilians. You get McKenna hot trying to locate a few of the weak spots. If we can’t attack the wells, we’ve got to find somewhere else where the system is vulnerable.”

  “That might work for us, Hannibal, but what about Mother Nature? If we just leave the wells alone, sure as hell, someday there’s going to be an earthquake, a tidal wave, a Force Ten gale that will take out those wells and upset a lot of balances.”

  *

  Oberst Albert Weismann and Direktor-Assistent Daniel Goldstein climbed down from the scaffolding gingerly. Weismann did not like heights, unless he was in a cockpit, and the top of the scaffolding was eight meters above the concrete floor. His fingers trembled slightly until he reached the floor.

  The banks of bright fluorescent lights overhead gave his face an ashen pallor. It made the rosy rash of his skin more noticeable, but Weismann did not think that Goldstein noticed his discomfiture.

  When his feet were once again firmly planted on cement, Weismann looked back up at the rocket for several minutes to regain his composure. The rocket was long and sleek, finished in a matte gray, the diameter growing by phases from the tip of the nose to the base. Stubby wings protruded from the first and second stages. The German flag was imprinted on each of the three stages and the nose cone. The rocket was reclining on its side, half encased in a steel-wheeled cradle that mated to the pair of railroad tracks leading under the massive doors on the end of the building.

  There were four cradles in this building, two each side by side, and four more in the adjoining building. Six of the cradles were occupied by the thirty-meter-long rockets, but only this one had been certified by the scientists as ready for launch.

  Possibly certified.

  Every time he had toured the complex, Weismann had been confronted with, “ … just one more little problem. A simple glitch, Herr Colonel.”

  In the control thrusters or control surfaces. In the hydraulic system. In the fuel pumping system
, in the inertial navigation system, in the computer backup software linkage, or in … the list went on forever. There were many complex systems, thousands of places open to potential failure, he had been told more than once.

  It was difficult to believe Goldstein when he said, “It is absolutely functional, Colonel. A tribute to those who have designed it and worked upon it.”

  “It is more a tribute to the Russians, and perhaps, the German who acquired the blueprints from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, would you not say, Herr Director-Assistant?”

  Goldstein gave him a pained look. “There was much to be improved upon over the Soviet design.”

  “Is that true? The Russian rocket has been operational for three years, Herr Goldstein. This one has yet to perform a maiden voyage.”

  “The Russians have experience and a capable work force, Colonel.”

  “Another excuse?”

  Weismann was at least twenty-five centimeters taller than the scientist. He looked down on a shaggy mop of gray hair that made him feel much cleaner with his own close-cropped blond hair. The scientist’s face sagged at the jowls, making Weismann feel less than his fifty-two years.

  Weismann was in uniform. He was always in uniform because he was proud of it. The Jew wore baggy brown slacks covered with a dirty gray lab smock. There was never a display of pride.

  “The warhead, Goldstein?”

  “Is operational, also. It is not, of course, a nuclear warhead. We have five Multiple Individually Retargeted Vehicles stored in the bunker a half kilometer from here. The MIRVs are composed of eight separate twenty-mega-ton nuclear warheads. Ghost One is armed only with high explosive, for the test flight.”

  Gespenst I was almost a year behind its scheduled test flight. The High Command had been frustrated in its desire to publicize a successful intercontinental/space orbital vehicle capable of delivering Germans into space or destruction to the other side of the world. Like his superiors in Bonn and Berlin, Weismann also wanted to put Moscow and Washington and London and Paris on notice, notice that those capital cities fell under the shadow of yet another nuclear threat. Notice that their interference in German national matters was subject to extreme reaction.

  The Gespenst program had been considered essential to the German reemergence as a power to be reckoned with, and Albert Weismann was very gratified that the program had been placed under his command, an adjunct to the 20 S.A.G. The constant delays had naturally brought pressure upon himself, but now, now he was nearly ready.

  “How long, Goldstein, until we are ready for a test flight?”

  “Herr Colonel, it only requires some four hours to transport the rocket to the launch pad, to raise it in place, and to fuel it. In a crisis, the countdown could be shortened, perhaps, to an hour.”

  “How long?”

  “There is the matter of the nose-cone mating, of course, Herr Colonel.”

  “The no … what now?”

  “For the test flight, we have had to fabricate a nose cone not designed for the Ghost. At the moment, it does not mate properly with the third stage. A matter only of days, Herr Colonel.”

  Maximillian Oberlin was correct. This Jew was more a bottleneck than an asset. It was quite possible the man was sabotaging the project in subtle ways. Oberlin had wanted to get rid of him immediately and let Direktor Schumacher assume the tasks of final preparation. Weismann had had to explain that Schumacher was not a scientist, merely the son of a banker who was a major underwriter of the VORMUND PROJEKT. The son was in dire need of a respectable job title.

  “And of course, Colonel Weismann, we have yet to complete the debugging of the flight software.”

  Weismann’s shoulders slumped. Mein Gott!

  The intrusion of the Russians. The destruction of the dome on Bahnsteig Acht. The platforms seemed suddenly vulnerable, and the supreme weapon was not available to protect them.

  “As of this moment, Goldstein, the Ghost Project is on sixteen-hour shifts. If I do not see sufficient progress within the next few days, we will increase that to twenty hours.”

  “That seems unduly harsh, Herr Colonel.”

  Weismann drilled the stubby scientist with his eyes. “Not as harsh as it could be.”

  Spinning on his heel, he marched to the office built into the corner of the building, ignored the secretary who looked up to him, and picked up her telephone. He dialed the number of the Zwanzigste Speziell Aeronautisch Gruppe operations office.

  When the officer on duty answered, he said, “Get me Major Zeigman.”

  A five-minute, intolerable wait.

  “Zeigman.”

  “Major, your squadron has tonight’s patrols?”

  “That is correct, Colonel.”

  “From midnight on, I want four aircraft on each patrol. Do not group them. One pair at two thousand meters, one pair deployed at ten thousand meters above the first pair. The higher aircraft are to separate by five kilometers. Reverse the direction of the patrol circuit.”

  “Understood, Colonel. Are we to anticipate hostile aircraft?”

  “Expect the American stealth planes.”

  *

  The Themis Command Center felt deserted. Everyone except McKenna and Sergeant Arguento, who was manning the Radio Shack, had gone to their dining compartments for dinner.

  The intercom buzzed.

  McKenna pulled himself close to the main console and pressed the keypad. “Command.”

  “Radar, Command. I’ve got Mako Two one-five-zero out, closing at one-seven-five feet per second.”

  “Copy that, Radar.”

  Mako Three was docked aboard Themis, and Mako One was at Peterson Air Force Base.

  McKenna punched the general public address system. “Lieutenant Polly Tang. Lieutenant Tang to hangar bays for docking.”

  On the Tactical 1 frequency, the primary frequency used by the MakoSharks, Dimatta said, “I’ve got her here, Colonel, pushing me out. You want me to hold?”

  McKenna thought about it, but only for two seconds. The orbit of Themis had been calculated into this mission. “No, Cancha. Proceed as planned.”

  On the intercom to the hangars, he said, “Lieutenant Tang, Command. Mako Two inbound.”

  “Roger, Command. I’ve got it.”

  He switched to Tac-3, the chief frequency utilized by the Makos. “Mako Two, Alpha One.”

  “Go ahead, Alpha.”

  “What’s your manifest, Mako?”

  “In order of importance, Alpha?” Lynn Haggar asked.

  “Why not?”

  “Foodstuffs, solid fuel pellets, circuit boards for Honeywell, chemicals, Colonel Avery.”

  “Hey, damn,” the deputy commander of Themis said. “I’m gone for a week, and get shoved to the bottom of the list?”

  Haggar laughed.

  “Mako, reduce velocity to one-six-zero FPS.”

  “Complying, Alpha.”

  McKenna searched the monitor selector board and found the key for the camera mounted on the exterior of the pod of Spoke Fifteen. He tapped it, and the screen gave him an exterior view of the hangar side of the hub. He moved the image to a secondary screen and brought up the radar image on the main screen.

  On the visual monitor, one set of hangar doors were open, and Delta Green slowly emerged from her bay. As he watched, another set of doors opened as Polly Tang had an assistant prepare for Mako Two’s arrival.

  Tac-1. “Delta Green, you’ve got a Mako inbound.”

  “We’ll keep our eyes wide open, Alpha. You think this is wise?”

  “Had to happen some time, Cancha.”

  “Command, Radar. Mako Two six-five miles out.”

  “Copy, Radar.”

  Tac-3. “Mako Two, stay alert for an outbound vehicle.”

  “Roger, Alpha. We’ve got it on radar.”

  McKenna found the remote camera adjustment stick, keyed if for the right camera, and aimed the Spoke Fifteen camera outward, following Delta Green.

  Dimatta was turning the MakoShark ste
rn-forward, when the Mako drifted past him. The MakoShark was already becoming invisible against the blackness of space. The white Mako was a complete study in contrast.

  Haggar hit her transmit button, “That’s it, Kevin!”

  “Let’s maintain radio protocol,” McKenna said into his microphone.

  “Roger that, Alpha,” Haggar said.

  Twenty-five minutes later, just after Delta Green ignited her rockets for the reentry sequence, Lynn Haggar and Ben Olsen, her WSO, shot into the Command Center. Both of them were still in pressure suits, and McKenna figured she was making about fifteen miles an hour when she grabbed onto Val Arguento to halt her flight.

  Arguento, at the doorway to the Radio Shack, grinned at her.

  “Requesting permission to enter the Command Center,” she said.

  “Come on in,” McKenna told them.

  “My God, Kevin, it’s beautiful!”

  Olsen had a grin that threatened to eclipse the room. “She was armed, Colonel. I saw pylons with two Sidewinders and four unknowns.”

  “You got a peek, huh?”

  “You let us,” Haggar said.

  “Oh, no! If Brackman or Overton should ever ask you, it was purely by accident.”

  Haggar’s face sobered. “Ah. I see.”

  “Step at a time, okay?”

  “All right, Kevin. I appreciate it.”

  “Now, I want you both to grab a bite to eat, then go to Ben’s cubicle. I’m going to accidentally leave Tac-1 open on Ben’s intercom circuit. I want you to listen in. Sergeant Arguento.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Could you print out a copy of Map GS-1014 and accidentally drop it?” That map pinpointed the wells.

  “Damn right, sir.” Arguento turned back into the Radio Shack.

  “And no one talks to anyone about these accidents,” McKenna ordered.

  He got three affirmative responses.