by Tom Clancy
"Sir, that race started so long ago that it isn't exactly new."
2
Tea Clipper
MORE photos of Dushanbe coming in," the phone told Ryan. "Okay, I'll be over in a few minutes." Jack rose and crossed the hall to Admiral Greer's office. His boss had his back to the blazing white blanket that covered the hilly ground outside the CIA headquarters building. They were still clearing it off the parking lot, and even the railed walkway outside the seventh-floor windows had about ten inches' worth.
"What is it, Jack?" the Admiral asked.
"Dushanbe. The weather cleared unexpectedly. You said you wanted to be notified."
Greer looked at the TV monitor in the corner of his office. It was next to the computer terminal that he refused to use-at least when anyone might watch his attempts to type with his index fingers and, on good days, one thumb. He could have the real-time satellite photos sent to his office "live," but of late he'd avoided that. Jack didn't know why. "Okay, let's trot over."
Ryan held open the door for the Deputy Director for Intelligence, and they turned left to the end of the executive corridor on the building's top floor. Here was the executive elevator. One nice thing about it was that you didn't have to wait very long.
"How's the jet lag?" Greer asked. Ryan had been back for nearly a day now.
"Fully recovered, sir. Westbound doesn't bother me very much. It's the eastbound kind that still kills me." God, it's nice to be on the ground.
The door opened and both men walked across the building to the new annex that housed the Office of Imagery Analysis. This was the Intelligence Directorate's own private department, separate from the National Photographic Intelligence Center, a joint CIA-DIA effort which served the whole intelligence community.
The screening room would have done Hollywood proud. There were about thirty seats in the mini-theater, and a twenty-foot-square projection screen on the wall. Art Graham, the chief of the unit, was waiting for them.
"You timed that pretty well. We'll have the shots in another minute." He lifted a phone to the projection room and spoke a few words. The screen lit up at once. It was called "Overhead Imagery" now, Jack reminded himself.
"Talk about luck. That Siberian high-pressure system took a sharp swing south and stopped the warm front like a brick wall. Perfect viewing conditions. Ground temp is about zero, and relative humidity can't be much higher than that!" Graham chuckled. "We maneuvered the bird in specially to take advantage of this. It's within three degrees of being right overhead, and I don't think Ivan has had time to figure out that this pass is under way."
"There's Dushanbe," Jack breathed as part of the Tadzhik SSR came into view. Their first look was from one of the wide-angle cameras. The orbiting KH-14 reconnaissance satellite had a total of eleven. The bird had been in orbit for only three weeks, and this was the first of the newest generation of spy satellites. Dushanbe, briefly known as Stalinabad a few decades earlier-that must have made the local people happy! Ryan thought-was probably one of the ancient caravan cities. Afghanistan was less than a hundred miles away. Tamurlane's legendary Samarkand was not far to the northwest and perhaps Scheherazade had traveled through a thousand years earlier. He wondered why was that history worked this way. The same places and the same names always seemed to show up from one century to the next. But CIA's current interest in Dushanbe did not center on the silk trade. The view changed to one of the high-resolution cameras.
It peered first into a deep, mountainous valley where a river was held back by the concrete and stone mass of a hydroelectric dam. Though only fifty kilometers southeast of Dushanbe, its power lines did not serve that city of 500,000. Instead they led to a collection of mountaintops almost within sight of the facility.
"That looks like footings for another set of towers," Ryan observed.
"Parallel to the first set," Graham agreed. "They're putting some new generators into the facility. Well, we knew all along that they were only getting about half the usable power out of the dam."
"How long to bring the rest on-stream?" Greer asked.
"I'd have to check with one of our consultants. It won't take more than a few weeks to run the power lines out, and the top half of the powerhouse is already built. Figure the foundations for the new generators are already done. All they have to do is rig the new equipment. Six months, maybe eight if the weather goes bad."
"That fast?" Jack wondered.
"They diverted people from two other hydro jobs. Both of them were 'Hero' projects. This one has never been talked about, but they pulled construction troops off two high-profile sites to do this one. Ivan does know how to focus his effort when he wants to. Six or eight months is conservative, Dr. Ryan. It may be done quicker," Graham said.
"How much power'll be available when they finish?"
"It's not all that big a structure. Total peak output, with the new generators? Figure eleven hundred megawatts."
"That's a lot of power, and all going to those hilltops," Ryan said almost to himself as the camera shifted again.
The one the Agency called "Mozart" was quite a hill, but this area was the westernmost extension of the Himalayan Range, and by those standards it was puny. A road had been blasted to the very top-there wasn't a Sierra Club in the USSR-along with a helicopter pad for bringing VIPs out from Dushanbe's two airports. There were sixteen buildings. One was for apartments, the view from which must have been fantastic, though it was a prototypical Russian apartment building, as stylish and attractive as a cinderblock, finished months ( ) message of the building was: The people who lived here were privileged. Engineers and academicians, people with enough skill that the State wanted to look after them and their needs. Food was trucked up the new mountain road-or, in bad weather, flown in. Another of the buildings was a theater. A third was a hospital. Television programming came in via satellite earth-station next to a building that contained a few shops. That sort of solicitude was not exactly common in the Soviet Union. It was limited to high Party officials and people who worked in essential defense projects. This was not a ski resort.
That was also obvious from the perimeter fence and guard towers, both of which were recent. One of the identifiable things about Russian military complexes was the guard towers; Ivan had a real fixation for the things. Three fences, with two ten-meter spaces enclosed. The outer space was usually mined, and the inner one patrolled by dogs. The towers were on the inner perimeter, spaced two hundred meters apart. The soldiers who manned the towers were housed in a better-than-average new concrete barracks- "Can you isolate one of the guards?" Jack asked. Graham spoke into his phone, and the picture changed. One of his technicians was already doing this, as much to test camera calibration and ambient air conditions as for the purpose Ryan intended.
As the camera zoomed in, a moving dot became a manly shape in greatcoat and probably a fur hat. He was walking a big dog of uncertain breed and had a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his right shoulder. Man and dog left puffs of vapor in the air as they breathed. Ryan leaned forward unconsciously, as though this would give him a better view. "That guy's shoulder boards look green to you?" he asked Graham. The reconnaissance expert grunted. "Yep. He's KGB, right."
"That close to Afghanistan?" the Admiral mused. "They know we have people operating there. You bet they'll take their security provisions seriously."
"They must have really wanted those hilltops," Ryan observed. "Seventy miles overland are a few million people who think killing Russians is God's will. This place is more im portant than we thought. It isn't just a new facility, not with that kind of security. If that's all it was, they wouldn't have had to put it here, and they for damned sure wouldn't have picked a place where they had to build a new power supply and risk exposure to hostiles. This may be an R and D facility now, but they must have bigger plans for it."
"Like what?"
"Going after my satellites, maybe." Art Graham thought of them as his.
"Have they tickled any of 'em rece
ntly?" Jack asked. "No, not since we rattled their cage last April. Common sense broke out for once."
That was an old story. Several times in the past few years, American reconnaissance and early-warning satellites had been 'tickled'-laser beams or microwave energy had been focused on the satellites, enough to dazzle their receptors but not enough to do serious harm. Why had the Russians done it? That was the question. Was it merely an exercise to see 4ow we'd react, to see if it caused a ruckus at the North American Aerospace Defense Command-NORAD-at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado? An attempt to determine for themselves how sensitive the satellites were? Was it a demonstration, a warning of their ability to destroy the satellites? Or was it simply what Jack's British friends called bloody-bindedness? It was so hard to tell what the Soviets were thinking. They invariably protested their innocence, of course. When the American satellite had been temporarily blinded over lake Shagan, they said that a natural-gas pipeline had caught fire. The fact that the nearby Chimkent-Pavlodar pipeline carried mostly oil had escaped the Western press. The satellite pass was complete now. In a nearby room a tire of videotape recorders were rewound, and now the complete camera coverage would be reviewed at leisure. "Let's have a look at Mozart again, and Bach also, please," Greer commanded.
"Hell of a commute," Jack noted. The residential and industrial site on Mozart was only one kilometer or so from the emplacement on Bach, the next mountaintop over, but the ad looked frightful. The picture froze on Bach. The formula fences and guard towers was repeated, but this time the distance between the outermost perimeter fence and the next was at least two hundred meters. Here the ground surface appeared to be bare rock. Jack wondered how you plant mines in that-or maybe they didn't, he thought. It was obvious that the ground had been leveled with bulldozers and explosives to the unobstructed flatness of a pool table. From the guard towers, it must have looked like a shooting gallery. "Not kidding, are they?" Graham observed quietly. "So that's what they're guarding " Ryan said. There were thirteen buildings inside the fence. In an area perhaps the size of two football fields-which had also been leveled-were ten holes, in two groups. One was a group of six arranged hexagonally, each hole about thirty feet across. The second group of four was arrayed in a diamond pattern and the holes were slightly smaller, perhaps twenty-five feet. In each hole was a concrete pillar about fifteen feet across planted in bedrock, and every hole was at least forty feet deep-you couldn't tell from the picture on the screen. At each pillar was a metal dome. They appeared to be made crescent-shaped segments. "They unfold. I wonder what's in them?" Graham ask rhetorically. There were two hundred people at Langley who knew of Dushanbe, and every one wanted to know what was under those metal domes. They'd been in place for only a few months.
"Admiral," Jack said, "I need to kick open a new compartment."
"Which one?"
"Tea Clipper."
"You're not asking much!" Greer snorted. "I'm not deal for that."
Ryan leaned back in his chair. "Admiral, if what they're doing in Dushanbe is the same thing we're doing with Tea Clipper, we sure as hell ought to know. Goddammit, how are we supposed to know what to look for if we're not sure what one of these places looks like!"
"I've been saying that for quite a while." The DDI conceded. "SDIO won't like it. The Judge will have to go to the President for that."
"So he goes to the President. What if the activity here is connected with the arms proposal they just made?"
"Do you think it is?"
"Who can say?" Jack asked. "It's a coincidence. They worry me."
"Okay, I'll talk to the Director."
Ryan drove home two hours later. He drove his Jaguar CFS out onto the George Washington Parkway. It was one of the many happy memories from his tour of duty in England, he loved the silky-smooth feeling of the twelve-cylinder engine enough that he'd put his venerable old Rabbit into semi-retirement. As he always tried to do, Ryan set his Washington business aside. He worked the car up through its five gears and concentrated on his driving.
"Well, James?" the Director of Central Intelligence asked.
"Ryan thinks the new activity at Bach and Mozart may be related to the arms situation. I think he might be correct. He wants into Tea Clipper. I said you'd have to go to the President." Admiral Greer smiled.
"Okay, I'll get him a written note. It'll make General Parks happier, anyway. They have a full-up test scheduled for the end of the week. I'll set it up for Jack to see it." Judge Moore smiled sleepily. "What do you think?"
"I think he's right: Dushanbe and Tea Clipper are essentially the same project. There are a lot of coarse similarities, too many to be a pure coincidence. We ought to upgrade our assessment."
"Okay." Moore turned away to look out the windows. The world is going to change again. It may take ten or more years, but it's going to change. Ten years from now it won't be my problem, Moore told himself. But it sure as hell will be Ryan's problem. "I'll have him flown out there tomorrow. And maybe we'll get lucky on Dushanbe. Foley got word to CARDINAL that we're very interested in the place."
"CARDINAL? Good."
"But if something happens "
Greer nodded. "Christ, I hope he's careful," the DDI said.
Ever since the death of Dmitri Fedorovich, it has not been he same at the Defense Ministry, Colonel Mikhail Semyonich Filitov wrote into his diary left-handed. An early riser, he sat at a hundred-year-old oak desk that his wife had bought or him shortly before she'd died, almost-what was it? Thirty years, Misha told himself. Thirty years this coming February, his eyes closed for a moment. Thirty years. Never a single day passed that he did not remember his Elena. Her photograph was on the desk, the sepia print faded with age, its silver frame tarnished. He never seemed to have time to polish it, and didn't wish to be bothered with a maid. The photo showed a young woman with legs like spindles, arms high over her head, which was cocked to one side. The round, Slavic face displayed a wide, inviting smile that perfectly conveyed the joy she'd felt when dancing with the Kirov Company. Misha smiled also as he remembered the first impression of a young armor officer given tickets to the performance as a reward for having the best-maintained tanks in the division. How can they do that? Perched up on the tips of their toes as though on needle-point stilts. He'd remembered playing on stilts as a child, but to be so graceful! And then she smiled at the handsome young officer in the front row. For the briefest moment. Their eyes had met for almost as little time as it takes to blink, he thought. Her smile had changed ever so slightly. Not for the audience any longer, for that timeless instant the smile had been for him alone. A bulk through the heart could not have had a more devastating effect. Misha didn't remember the rest of the performance-to this day he couldn't even remember which ballet it ha been. He remembered sitting and squirming through the rest of it while his mind churned over what he'd do next. Already Lieutenant Filitov had been marked as a man on the move, a brilliant young tank officer for whom Stalin's brutal purge of the officer corps had meant opportunity and rapid promotion. He wrote articles on tank tactics, practiced innovating battle drills in the field, argued vociferously against the fall "lessons" of Spain with the certainty of a man born to themprofession.
But what do I do now? he'd asked himself. The Red Army hadn't taught him how to approach an artist. This wasn't some farm girl who was bored enough by work on the kolkhoz to offer herself to anyone-especially a young Army officer who might take her away from it all. Misha still remembered the shame of his youth-not that he'd thought it shameful at time-when he'd used his officer's shoulder boards to win any girl who'd caught his eye. But I don't even know her name, he'd told himself. What do I do? What he'd done, of course, was to treat the matter as a military exercise. As soon as the performance had ended he'd fought his way into the rest room and washed hands and face. Some grease that still remained under his fingernails was removed with a pocketknife. His short hair was wetted down into place, and he inspected his uniform as strictly as a general officer might, brush
ing off dust and picking off lint, stepping back from the mirror to make sure his boots gleamed as a oldier's should. He hadn't noticed at the time that other men in the men's room were watching him with barely suppressed grins, having guessed what the drill was for, and wishing him luck, touched with a bit of envy. Satisfied with his appearance, Misha had left the theater and asked the doorman where the artists' door was. That had cost him a ruble, and with the knowledge, he'd walked around the block to the stage entrance, where he found another doorman, this one a bearded old man whose greatcoat bore ribbons for service in the revolution. Misha had expected special courtesy from the doorman, one soldier to another, only to learn that he regarded the female dancers as his own daughters-not wenches to be thrown at the feet of soldiers, certainly! Misha had considered offering money, but had the good sense not to imply the man was a pimp. Instead, he'd spoken quietly and reasonably-and truthfully-that he was smitten with a single dancer whose name he didn't know, and merely wanted to meet her.
"Why?" the old doorman had asked coldly. "Grandfather, she smiled at me," Misha had answered in the awed voice of a little boy.
"And you are in love." The reply was harsh, but in a moment the doorman's face turned wistful. "But you don't know which?"
"She was in-the line, not one of the important ones, I mean. What do they call that? — I will remember her face until the day I die." Already he'd known that. The doorman looked him over and saw that his uniform as properly turned out, and his back straight. This was not a swaggering pig of an NKVD officer whose arrogant breath stank of vodka. This was a soldier, and a handsome young one at that. "Comrade Lieutenant, you are a lucky man. Do you know why? You are lucky because I was once young, but old as I am, I still remember. They will start to come out in ten minutes or so. Stand over there, and make not a sound." It had taken thirty minutes. They came out in twos and threes. Misha had seen the male members of the troupe and thought them-what any soldier would think of a man in a ballet company. His manhood had been offended that they held hands with such pretty girls, but he'd set that aside. When the door opened, his vision was damaged by the sudden glare of yellow-white light against the near blackness of the unlit alley, and he'd almost missed her, so different she looked without the makeup.
