by The Cool War
It was clear that Deena Fairless didn’t want conversation, so Hake forbore to ask her where they were flying. He knew that it was generally southwest, at least. Fairless hadn’t said, but Hake could estimate direction well enough from the position of the sun. They flew low, under ten thousand feet, and updrafts from the dry mesas kept them in bouts of turbulence. Fairless didn’t talk, or at least not to Hake. She kept moving her lips into the radio; he could not hear what was said, but granted it enough importance to refrain from offering conversation. Only as they began to climb over a ridge of hills she leaned toward him and said, “Have you got a lot of fillings in your teeth, Hake?”
“No. Not too many.”
“Lucky,” she said, looking over the hills. “There’s the Wire.”
There was something there to look at. He could not identify it, was not even sure he was seeing what he saw. It — looked like pencil-thin searchlight beams winking on and off, tinged with color, one red, two bluish-green. The beams were very faint except for high patches where they impinged upon wisps of cirrostratus, and even there they existed only as split-second impressions. As they topped the hill he saw what looked like a tilted plain of chicken wire sloping away on the far side. But he had only a glimpse, and then they were dropping to a short, black-topped landing strip next to a cluster of buildings. Painted on the roof of one low, long shed were the words HAS-TA-VA RANCH. He saw what looked like a row of small and unprosperous motel cabins, a corral with a clump of horses milling around one end, a few stables. The horses did not even look up as the plane screamed down to a rolling stop on the airstrip, which was the only indication in sight that the place was anything other than an attempt at a tourist attraction, rapidly going broke.
“Welcome to your new home,” said Deena Fairless, unstrapping herself and flipping switches off. “You’ll love it here.”
Hake didn’t love it there. He didn’t hate it, either; he didn’t have time. Or energy. Up at 4:45 a.m., and a quarter-mile run before breakfast, snaking among the supports for the wire-field overhead. Ten minutes to go to the toilet, and then out again. Sometimes for an hour’s hand-to-hand combat instruction, flinging each other into hillocks of sand or clumps of buffalo grass—the buffalo grass was softer, but once in a while there was a snake in it. Sometimes for calisthenics. Sometimes for scuba-training, practicing clearing the mask, practicing snatching the mask away from each other—those were good times, because with water-discipline enforced it was about the only time any of them got an all-over bath; but not so good, because with water-discipline a necessity the pool was never changed. Then something sedentary for half an hour’s rest: learning to use bugging equipment, learning to know when it was being used on themselves. Making repairs in equipment. Morale—over and over, morale. Then lunch, twenty minutes of it. Then more. And more and more. Hake had tucked a dozen microfiches into his “personal effects” bag, but he never learned if there was a viewer on the premises, because he never even found time to ask.
Hake ‘s fellows included three dozen persons, most of them new trainees like himself, a few old-timers being brought back on line for reassignment, a cross-section of humanity. Hispanic teenaged boys, a glowingly long-legged California blonde, one elderly black professor, a nun. They all shared the same bunkhouse, tucked in the lee of a dune Under the Wire. They all, somehow, kept up. The only thing they seemed to have in common was that they had little in common—beyond, of course, the purpose of their presence here. If Hake had looked around his commuter bus one morning and seen all of them there he would have considered them a perfectly normal busload of average Americans. The group changed. Some came, some went. The San Diego blonde was the first to go, to Hake’s regret, but a day or two later a New Orleans brunette turned up, along with two middle-aged Japanese ladies from Hawaii. The only constants were the instructors: a one-legged youth for surveillance and debugging, a whipcord and vinegar senior citizen for hand-to-hand and physical training, Deena Fairless for scuba and instrument repair, all of them, taking turns, for the morale lectures. In the first ten days Under the Wire, Hake never did the same thing twice, and never came to the end of a day without falling instantly into exhausted sleep, regardless of hunger, pains, itches or the occasional mad singing of the wire overhead.
He had not, as it turned out, stayed at Has-Ta-Va Ranch any longer than it took to get into a truck and bounce half a mile under the power rectenna that he had glimpsed from the air. By the time he had been dropped off and set about drawing two sets of underwear, ten pairs of socks and the stoutest hiking boots he had ever had on his feet, he had figured out both what he had seen and why he was there.
The training base was hidden under the microwave receiver that supplied most of three states with electricity. The power came from space. Twenty-two thousand miles straight up from the equator a magnetohydrodynamic generator hung in geosynchronous orbit, sucking electrical energy out of plasma, transmuting it into microwaves, pumping five gigawatts of it down to the Ok-Tex-Mex grid. The trouble with a “stationary” orbit is that it can only be stationary directly over some point on the equator, so the rectenna had to be tilted toward the south: thus the slope of the hill. At 30° North Latitude the tilt did not have to be extreme. And, as a valuable byproduct, there was all that land under the wire that was, if not immune, at least resistant to airborne or satellite inspection. Some was used for grazing forty-acre cattle, or the three-five buffalo hybrids that survived better and gained faster, if you could get used to the gamey, sweetish taste of the meat. Some was used, or was sometimes used, for irrigated crops—soy, sorghum or alfalfa. (But not this year, with the water tables sinking.) And some was used by Curmudgeon’s people, for the purposes that brought Hake there. Ok-Tex- Mex was not the only huge rectenna bringing down MHD power to pop American toasters and light American homes. SCALAZ, on the Gila River, handled more energy. Three or four others were the same size, and the new one in the Gulf of Mexico off Cape Sable was much larger (when it wasn’t being ripped up by tropical storms). But Ok-Tex-Mex had a special advantage. It was a long way from anything more populous than a dude ranch. There were reasons for that. That part of Texas, south of the Permian Basin, had never had much to make anyone want to be there, at least above ground; and the stuff that had been below ground had long since been pumped into the tanks of American cars and burned away.
Being Under the Wire was not so bad, once you got used to a couple of things. The Wire itself was not your average snow fence. It was three hundred square kilometers of dipole elements, each with its own filter, gallium-arsenide Schottky barrier diode rectifier and bypass capacitor. Put them all together and they were supposed to be something over eighty percent efficient at sucking in low-density microwaves and spitting out 10,000-volt DC into the Ok-Tex-Mex power grid. It was eight percent transparent to sunlight, and a hundred percent leaky to rain—when there was any rain. It was also hot and noisy. Most of the eighteen percent loss came off as heat, and convected harmlessly away into the Texas air. Most of what was left appeared as a dull, faint hum, like a toy-train transformer spread out over the sky. Living Under the Wire meant that where the Wire came down low to the ground you felt its radiance like a toaster element overhead; where it was high, the convection sucked in surface winds; and always it droned at you. It did other things. The support columns got in the way of moving around. And there was the little problem with the microwave energy itself. There was a good chance it damaged DNA. The cattle grazing under it were raised for slaughter, not breeding; there was some question about what sort of descendants they would have. (And the people in the camp underneath? No one seemed to want to discuss it.)
The satellite transmitter was constantly locked onto a comer-reflector at the center of the rectenna’s spread. Ninety-nine-plus percent of the time it stayed centered there, or no farther from it than the wire could accommodate. The average power density of the beam was comfortably low. Unfortunately, it didn’t always stay average. Atmospherics intervened. The interf
ace between air layers became lenses. Focusing one way, the beam spread over more area than the rectenna accepted, and some of the power was lost. Focusing another, the power density climbed. That was when dental fillings became significant. In a dense beam, the result was the damnedest toothache anyone could have. For this the management of the training camp offered aspirin, or even rough-and-ready extraction if desired, and nothing else. (The good part was that the worst lumps in the beam seldom lasted more than an hour or two. Only enough to drive a sufferer out of his mind for a while. Not enough to interfere with his training.)
What was left of Hake’s convalescent frailty was sweated out of him in running, knee-bends and hand-to-hand combat, an eclectic discipline that seemed to include judo, la savate, sapping-and-stabbing and the dirtier kinds of Saturday-night punchups. That wasn’t bad. Hake hadn’t had his strong male body long enough’to take it for granted, and when he sent the Louisiana charmer flying and dropped one of the professors to the ground, his knee on the man’s throat, two seconds after they had jumped him from behind, he heard himself growling with pleasure. There was a session on how to make plastic explosives on a base of Vaseline, with ingredients purchasable in any drugstore, and one on the use of Blue Box and Black Box penetration of telecommunication networks. They weren’t bad, either. The technology was fascinating to the MIT dropout who had not thought of any of those things for years. They trained with a large selection of electronic cameras and microphones, and each of the trainees in turn took the equipment to spy on the others. The prize was when the nun came up with a two-minute sniperscope tape of one of the teenagers masturbating behind a cluster of yucca. Hake was impressed. Not so much by the nun’s technical skill as by Tigrito’s energy. Hake did not seem to have the energy left after a day to think of sex. (Or not in the first week; but then, Tigrito had been there for four.) When Hake thought of sex, or indeed when he let his mind drift in any direction at all away from remembering to spit into his facemask and rehearsing the nomenclature of the parts of the rifle-microphone, was only during the indoctrination lectures. Sprawled out on the sparse grass, the sun beating through the wire overhead, they listened to Deena or Fortnum or Captain Pegleg going on and on about their purpose in being there:
“The United States is threatened as never before in its history—” Pegleg drumming on his outstretched artificial limb with the fingers of one hand, while the words droned out of him as if he were himself a tape—“by a world in which our rightful defense forces are stymied by red tape and international agreements, any questions? Right.” There weren’t any questions. There was a difference of viewpoint, to be sure, but Hake did not feel a necessity to air it, and besides Mary Jean was stretched out before him with her hands folded behind her head and he was enjoying what he saw.
Or, “Under the constitution and laws of our land—” this was old Fortnum, who stood up when he talked to them and insisted on alert posture from his audience— “we are charged with securing the blessings of democracy to ourselves and our posterity, which we got to do by keeping our nation strong and secure, any questions?” There weren’t any questions for Fortnum, either. He was the only one of the instructors who had the habit of imposing extra duty for misdemeanors. Attracting his attention was usually a misdemeanor.
Deena Fairless was the only one who held Hake’s attention as a speaker. For one thing, she didn’t sit or stand but moved around among them, sometimes rousting them awake with a toe when the after-lunch heat began to put one or another of them away. For another, she talked about more interesting things. “By presidential directive, we are limited to covert, nonlethal operations on foreign soil only. All three things, remember. Covert. Nonlethal. Foreign. Now, if there are no questions—” she barely paused, but there weren’t any questions then, either—“let me explain some of the things you’ve been seeing around here.”
And that was how Hake found out that agent training was only one of the functions of the installation. There was a research-and-development underground—literally underground, dug into the side of the slope itself—a few miles away, and that was where things like the IR spectacles and the foamboats came from. There was a place euphemistically called “debriefing.” None of them were ever to go near it. Nor likely to, since it was constantly patrolled with attack dogs. Deena Fairless didn’t say who was “debriefed,” but the trainees formed their opinions; and if any of them happened to be taken out by the Other Side, decided they could expect to wind up in some other “debriefing” place at some other point on the surface of the Earth. There was even a small writers’-colony place—that was the one that was actually housed at the Has-Ta-Va Ranch itself—where psychological warfare texts were prepared.
And then, when God was kind, they were permitted to watch films. They saw notable agency triumphs of the past, the counterfeiting operations that broke the Bank of England and the price-rigging that bankrupted ten thousand Indian, Filipino and Indochinese rice growers. Those, they were given to understand, were only a tiny fraction of the successful ventures of the agency. Those were the blown ones, where the Other Side, or more often the Other Sides, knew what had happened. There were still huger projects that had never been detected. And that, they understood, because they were told so day after day, with relentless insistence, was the Optimal Project: to do something that weakened some part of the rest of the world relative to the United States without ever being found out.
And, of course, at the same time the Other Sides were doing all they possibly could to the United States. The water lilies that were choking out every slow-moving stream in the Northeast, the “Hell, No, I Won’t Mow!” revolt of condominium owners in Florida, the California stoop-labor strikes and the truckers’ go-slow that jointly had kept fresh vegetables rotting in the fields and warehouses while consumers paid triple prices for canned goods •—all had been traced to foreign intervention, playing the Team’s game from the other side of the board. They were doing it now. Even under the microwave antenna, even fresh and new to the Southwest as he was, Hake could see that the sparse grass was browning and dying. The Other Side, they said, was cloudnapping again, projecting bromide smoke into the big cumulus over the Pacific and stealing their rain before it ever reached America.
Perhaps Hake’s microfiches could have told him when the game had begun, if he had had time to read them. Peer as hard as he could into the future, he could not see where it all would end.
Even Southwest Texas got cold at two in the morning. Surprising cold, mean cold. Overhead the ten thousand Texas stars winked through the moaning wire, and the north wind that strummed the rectenna froze Hake at the same time. And froze Tigrito and Mary Jean and Sister Florian and the two Hawaiian ladies; they were worse off than Hake, not being New Jersey-bred. Deena Fairless seemed comfortable enough, but then she was the one who had rousted them all out of bed at midnight for this training exercise. She had had time to prepare for the night march—including, Hake was pretty sure, wool socks and thermal underwear.
Mary Jean, propped against the same three-cornered pillar as Hake, wriggled closer to him. He did not suppose that it was affection. She was a long way from Louisiana. What she was after was warmth. Nevertheless he glanced at Deena, who said, “Stay awake, that’s all.” But Hake’s problem was not sleepiness. Hake’s problem was that Deena had shattered one of the truly fine erotic dreams of his recent memory when she came in with her flashlight and twisted him awake by the toe. He still wasn’t quite out of it. Mary Jean certainly did not smell like a dream girl— more like a real one who had been worked hard and bathed insufficiently—but some synapse, cell or process in his brain unerringly identified a yin for his yang, and the real person drowsing against his shoulder merged with the dream one he had abandoned so reluctantly.
“Stay awake, I said!”
“Sorry, Deena,” Mary Jean apologized, shifting to a more alert posture. “When are we going to get moving?”
“When it’s clear.”
“When will
it be clear?”
“When Tiger comes back and tells us so.” Deena hesitated, then said, “Move around if you want to. Keep your voices down.” They were in an arroyo that bent sharply just ahead of them; good cover from sight, as the sighing wire overhead was good cover for sound. At this point the antenna was at least seventy feet above them, but Hake could see it as a winking tracery of scarlet spiderwebs, faint but clear, as it reflected the pulse of the radar corner beacons. In fact, it was astonishing how much he could see by starlight, now that his eyes had had two hours to adapt. Deena Fairless was unscrewing what looked like a huge tube of toothpaste, head cocked in concentration, squeezing out a dab of what it contained onto her finger.
“What’s that?” asked Beth Hwa, sitting cross-legged, spine straight and alert.
“That’s what we’re going to stick up a cow’s ass,” said Deena. There was the sort of silence that follows a wholly unsuccessful joke, until Deena said, “No kidding. That’s the job for tonight. We’re going to move in on the three-five herd, locate the heifers and smear some of this on their, excuse the medical terms, their private parts. I don’t mean rectums, I mean vaginas. But if you can’t figure out which is which you have to do both.”
The silence protracted itself, but changed in kind; now it was the silence that surrounds a group of persons wondering if somebody was playing a very bad joke of which they were the butt. Deena chuckled. “It’s a simulation,” she explained. “Represents an actual operation, of which you may, or may not, hear more before you leave here.”
“Some operation,” snarled Sister Florian.
“Well, you’re excused from that part,” said Deena. “You’re going to be our lookout.”
