by Tom Clancy
“The Russians have been employing three Japanese survey firms. Amazing, isn’t it? Eastern Siberia has hardly even been explored. Oh, yes, the gold deposits at Kolyma, but the interior itself?” A dismissive wave of the hand. “Such fools, and now they must ask others to do the job for them ...” The Minister’s voice trailed off, and his gaze returned to Zhang Han San. “And so, what have they found?”
“Our Japanese friends? More oil for starters, they think as big a find as Prudhoe Bay.” He slid a sheet of paper across the table. “Here are the minerals they’ve located in the last nine months.”
“All this?”
“The area is almost as large as all of Western Europe, and all the Soviets ever cared about was a strip around their damned railroads. The fools.” Zhang snorted. “All their economic problems, the solution for them lay right under their feet from the moment they assumed power from the czar. In essence it’s rather like South Africa, a treasure house, but including oil, which the South Africans lack. As you see, nearly all of the strategic minerals, and in such quantities.... ”
“Do the Russians know?”
“Some of it.” Zhang Han San nodded. “Such a secret is too vast to conceal entirely, but only about half—the items on the list marked with stars are those Moscow knows about.”
“But not these others?”
Zhang smiled. “No.”
Even in a culture where men and women learn to control their feelings, the Minister could not conceal his amazement at the paper in his hands. They didn’t shake, but he used them to place the page flat on the polished table, smoothing it out as though it were a piece of fine silk.
“This could double the wealth of our country.”
“That is conservative,” observed the senior field officer of his country’s intelligence service. Zhang, covered as a diplomat, actually conducted more diplomacy than most of his country’s senior foreign-service officers. It was more of an embarrassment to them than to him. “You need to remember that this is the estimate the Japanese have given us, Comrade Minister. They fully expect access to half of what they discover, and since they will perforce spend most of the development money ...”
A smile. “Yes, while we take most of the strategic risks. Offensive little people,” the Minister added. Like those with whom Zhang had negotiated in Tokyo, the Minister and the Marshal, who continued to keep his peace, were veterans of the 8th Route Army. They too had memories of war—but not of war with America. He shrugged. “Well, we need them, don’t we?”
“Their weapons are formidable,” the Marshal noted. “But not their numbers.”
“They know that,” Zhang Han San told his hosts. “It is, as my main contact says, a convenient marriage of needs and requirements, but he hopes that it will develop, in his words, into a true and cordial relationship between peoples with a true—”
“Who will be on top?” the Marshal asked, smiling coarsely.
“They will, of course. He thinks,” Zhang Han San added.
“In that case, since they are courting us, it is they who need to make the first overt moves,” the Minister said, defining his country’s policy in a way that would not offend his own superior, a small man with elfin eyes and the sort of determination to make a lion pause. He looked over at the Marshal, who nodded soberly. The man’s capacity for alcohol, both of the others thought, was remarkable.
“As I expected,” Zhang announced with a smile. “Indeed, as they expect, since they anticipate the greatest profit.”
“They are entitled to their illusions.”
“I admire your confidence,” the NASA engineer observed from the viewers’ gallery over the shop floor. He also admired their funding. The government had fronted the money for this industrial conglomerate to acquire the Soviet design and build it. Private industry sure had a lot of muscle here, didn’t it?
“We think we have the trans-stage problem figured out. A faulty valve,” the Japanese designer explained. “We used a Soviet design.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that we used their valve design for the trans-stage fuel tanks. It wasn’t a good one. They tried to do everything there with extremely light weight, but—”
The NASA representative blinked hard. “You mean to tell me that their whole production run of the missile was—”
A knowing look cut the American off. “Yes. At least a third of them would have failed. My people believe that the test missiles were specially engineered, but that the production models were, well, typically Russian.”
“Hmph.” The American’s bags were already packed, and a car was waiting to take him to Narita International for the interminable flight to Chicago. He looked at the production floor of the plant. It was probably what General Dynamics had looked like back in the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War. The boosters were lined up like sausages, fifteen of them in various stages of assembly, side by side, one after the other, while white-coated technicians performed their complicated tasks. “These ten look about done.”
“They are,” the factory manager assured him.
“When’s your next test shot?”
“Next month. We’ve got our first three payloads ready,” the designer replied.
“When you guys get into something, you don’t fool around, do you?”
“It’s simply more efficient to do it this way.”
“So they’re going to go out of here fully assembled?”
A nod. “That’s right. We’ll pressurize the fuel tanks with inert gas, of course, but one of the nice things about using this design is that they’re designed to be moved as intact units. That way you save final-assembly time at the launch point.”
“Move them out by truck?”
“No.” The Japanese engineer shook his head. “By rail.”
“What about the payloads?”
“They’re being assembled elsewhere. That’s proprietary, I’m afraid.”
The other production line did not have foreign visitors. In fact it had few visitors at all despite the fact that it was located in the suburbs of Tokyo. The sign outside the building proclaimed it to be a research-and-development center for a major corporation, and those who lived nearby guessed that it was for computer chips or something similar. The power lines that went into it were not remarkable, since the most power-hungry units were the heating and air-conditioning units that sat in a small enclosure in the back. Traffic in and out was unremarkable as well. There was a modest parking lot with space for perhaps eighty automobiles, and the lot was almost always at least half full. There was a discreet security fence, pretty much like what would have been around any other light-industry facility anywhere in the world, and a security shack at both entrances. Cars and trucks came and went, and that was pretty much that for the casual observer.
Inside was something else. Although the two external security points were staffed by smiling men who politely gave directions to disoriented motorists, inside the building it was something else entirely. Each security desk featured hidden attachments which held German-made P-38 pistols, and the guards here didn’t smile much. They didn’t know what they were guarding, of course. Some things were just too unusual to be recognized. No one had ever produced a TV documentary on the fabrication of nuclear devices.
The shop floor was fifty meters long by fifteen wide, and there were two evenly spaced rows of machine tools, each of them enclosed with Plexiglas. Each enclosure was individually climate-controlled by a separate ventilation system, as was the room as a whole. The technicians and scientists wore white coveralls and gloves not unlike those required of workers in a computer-chip plant, and indeed when some of them stepped outside for a smoke, passersby took them for exactly that.
In the clean room, roughly shaped plutonium hemispheres came in at one end, were machined into their final shapes at several stages, and emerged from the other end so polished they looked like glass. Each was then placed in a plastic holder and hand-carried out of the machine shop to
the storage room, where each was set on an individual shelf made of steel covered with plastic. Metal contact could not be allowed, because plutonium, in addition to being radioactive, and warm due to its alpha-radiation decay, was a reactive metal, quick to spark on contact with another metal, and actually flammable. Like magnesium and titanium, the metal would burn with gusto, and, once ignited, was the very devil to extinguish. For all that, handling the hemispheres—there were twenty of them—became just one more routine for the engineers. That task had long since been completed.
The harder part was the RV bodies. These were large, hollow, inverted cones, 120 centimeters in height and 50 across at the base, made of uranium-238, a darkly reddish and very hard metal. At just over four hundred kilograms each, the bulky cones had to be precisely machined for absolute dynamic symmetry. Intended to “fly” after a fashion, both through vacuum and, briefly, through air, they had to be perfectly balanced, lest they become unstable in flight. Ensuring that had to everyone’s surprise turned out to be the most difficult production task of all. The casting process had been reordered twice, and even now the RV bodies were periodically rotated, similar to the procedure for balancing an automobile tire, but with far more stringent tolerances. The exterior of each of the ten was not as finely machined as the parts that went inside, though they were smooth to the ungloved touch. Inside was something else. Slight but symmetrical irregularities would allow the “physics package” —an American term—to fit in snugly, and, if the moment came—which everyone hoped it would not, of course—the enormous flux of high-energy “fast” neutrons would attack the RV bodies, causing a “fast-fission” reaction, and doubling the energy released by the plutonium, tritium, and lithium deuteride within.
That was the elegant part, the engineers thought, especially those unfamiliar with nuclear physics who had learned the process along the way. The U-238, so dense and hard and difficult to work, was a highly refractory metal. The Americans even used it to make armor for their tanks, it resisted external energy so well. Screeching through the atmosphere at 27,000 kilometers per hour, air friction would have destroyed most materials, but not this one, at least not in the few seconds it took, and at the end of the process, the material would form part of the bomb itself. Elegant, the engineers thought, using that most favored of words in their profession, and that made it worth the time and the trouble. When each body was complete, each was loaded onto a dolly and rolled off to the storage room. Only three remained to be worked on. This part of the project was two weeks behind schedule, much to everyone’s chagrin.
RV Body #8 began the first machining process. If the bomb was detonated, the uranium-238 from which it was made would also create most of the fallout. Well, that was physics.
It was just another accident, perhaps occasioned by the early hour. Ryan arrived at the White House just after seven, about twenty minutes earlier than usual because traffic on U.S. Route 50 happened to be uncommonly smooth all the way in. As a result, he hadn’t had time to read through all his early briefing documents, which he bundled under his arm at the west entrance. National Security Advisor or not, Jack still had to pass through the metal detector, and it was there that he bumped into somebody’s back. The somebody in question was handing his service pistol to a uniformed Secret Service agent.
“You guys still don’t trust the Bureau, eh?” a familiar voice asked the plainclothes supervisory agent.
“Especially the Bureau!” was the good-humored retort.
“And I don’t blame them a bit,” Ryan added. “Check his ankle, too, Mike.”
Murray turned after passing through the magnetic portal. “I don’t need the backup piece anymore.” The Deputy Assistant Director pointed to the papers under Jack’s arm. “Is that any way to treat classified documents?”
Murray’s humor was automatic. It was just the man’s nature to needle an old friend. Then Ryan saw that the Attorney General had just passed through as well, and was looking back in some annoyance. Why was a cabinet member here so early? If it were a national-security matter, Ryan would have known, and criminal affairs were rarely so important as to get the President into his office before the accustomed eight o‘clock. And why was Murray accompanying him? Helen D’Agustino was waiting beyond to provide personal escort through the upstairs corridors. Everything about the accidental confrontation lit off Ryan’s curiosity.
“The Boss is waiting,” Murray said guardedly, reading the look in Jack’s eyes.
“Could you stop by on the way out? I’ve been meaning to call you about something.”
“Sure.” And Murray walked off without even a friendly inquiry about Cathy and the kids.
Ryan passed through the detector, turned left, and headed up the stairs to his corner office for his morning briefs. They went quickly, and Ryan was settling into his morning routine when his secretary admitted Murray to his office. There was no point in beating around the bush.
“A little early for the A.G. to show up, Dan. Anything I need to know?”
Murray shook his head. “Not yet, sorry.”
“Okay,” Ryan replied, shifting gears smoothly. “Is it something 1 ought to know?”
“Probably, but the Boss wants it on close-hold, and it doesn’t have national-security implications. What did you want to see me about?”
Ryan took a second or two before answering, his mind going at its accustomed speed in such a case. Then he set it aside. He knew that he could trust Murray’s word. Most of the time.
“This is code-word stuff,” Jack began, then elaborated on what he’d learned from Mary Pat the day before. The FBI agent nodded and listened with a neutral expression.
“It’s not exactly new, Jack. Last few years we’ve been taking a quiet look at indications that young ladies have been—enticed? Hard to phrase this properly. Modeling contracts, that sort of thing. Whoever does the recruiting is very careful. Young women head over there to model, do commercials, that sort of thing, goes on all the time. Some got their American careers started over there. None of the checks we’ve run have turned up anything, but there are indications that some girls have disappeared. One in particular, as a matter of fact, she fits your man’s description. Kimberly something, I don’t recall the last name. Her father is a captain in the Seattle police department, and his next-door neighbor is SAC of our Seattle office. We’ve gone through our contacts in the Japanese police agencies, quietly. No luck.”
“What does your gut tell you?” Ryan asked.
“Look, Jack, people disappear all the time. Lots of young girls just pack up and leave home to make their way in the world. Call it part feminism, part just wanting to become an independent human being. It happens all the time. This Kimberly-something is twenty, wasn’t doing well at school, and just disappeared. There’s no evidence to suggest kidnapping, and at twenty you’re a free citizen, okay? We have no right to launch a criminal investigation. All right, so her dad’s a cop, and his neighbor is Bureau, and so we’ve sniffed around a little. But we haven’t turned up anything at all, and that’s as far as we can take it without something to indicate that a statute may have been violated. There are no such indicators.”
“You mean, a girl over eighteen disappears and you can’t—”
“Without evidence of a crime, no, we can’t. We don’t have the manpower to track down every person who decides to make his or her own future without telling Mom and Dad about it.”
“You didn’t answer my initial question, Dan,” Jack observed to his guest’s discomfort.
“There are people over there who like their women with fair hair and round eyes. There’s a disproportionate number of missing girls who’re blonde. We had trouble figuring that out at first until an agent started asking their friends if they maybe had their hair color changed recently. Sure enough, the answer was yes, and then she started asking the question regularly. A ‘yes’ happened in enough cases that it’s just unusual. So, yes, I think something may be happening, but we don’t have enough
to move on,” Murray concluded. After a moment he added, “If this case in question has national-security implications ... well ... ”
“What?” Jack asked.
“Let the Agency check around?”
That was a first for Ryan, hearing from an FBI official that the CIA could investigate something. The Bureau guarded its turf as ferociously as a momma grizzly bear defended her cubs. “Keep going, Dan,” Ryan ordered.
“There’s a lively sex industry over there. If you look at the porn they like to watch, it’s largely American. The nude photos you see in their magazines are mainly of Caucasian females. The nearest country with a supply of such females happens to be us. Our suspicion is that some of these girls aren’t just models, but, again, we haven’t been able to turn up anything solid enough to pursue it.” And the other problem, Murray didn’t add, was twofold. If something really were going on, he wasn’t sure how much cooperation he’d receive from local authorities, meaning that the girls might disappear forever. If it were not, the nature of the investigation would be leaked and the entire episode would appear in the press as another racist piece of Japan-bashing. “Anyway, it sounds to me like the Agency has an op running over there. My best advice: expand it some. If you want, I can brief some people in on what we know. It isn’t much, but we do have some photographs.”
“How come you know so much?”
“SAC Seattle is Chuck O’Keefe. I worked under him once. He had me talk to Bill Shaw about it, and Bill okayed a quiet look, but it didn’t lead anywhere, and Chuck has enough to keep his division busy as it is.”
“I’ll talk to Mary Pat. And the other thing?”
“Sorry, pal, but you have to talk to the Boss about that. ”
Goddamn it! Ryan thought as Murray walked out. Are there always secrets?
