Cold War p-2

by Nathan Archer

  However, centered on the screen, in empty wilderness a few kilometers from a greenish dot marked ASSYMA PS #12, was a fiery red spot.

  ”So what the hell is that?” Meeters demanded. “Is there visual?”

  Shearson shook his head. “It’s night there,” he said, “and there’s heavy cloud cover. Probably snowing.”

  ”Anything putting out that much heat should be bright enough to see at night,” Meeters pointed out. “How long has it been there? Was it there before the clouds moved in?”

  Shearson shook his head again. “We don’t know, sir. With the budget cuts and the lowered priority for that area, and with RIS-34 off-line right now, we’ve only been going over the feed for that area twice a week. Wasn’t a damn thing there except ice three days ago.”

  ”Gotta be a well fire, then,” Meeters said, straightening up.

  ”No, sir,” Shearson said. “I don’t think so. We have visual from last week-take a look.”

  He tapped keys, and a new image, composed of gray shapes, superimposed itself on the existing one. Shearson pointed to the location of the red dot.

  ”It’s at least a couple of kilometers from the pipeline and twenty or more from the nearest well-head. The Russians didn’t sink any new wells in less than a week in the middle of an arctic winter, General.” He tapped more keys and added, “And besides, look at this.”

  The grayish lines and blobs of the satellite photography vanished, then the bright colors of the infrared scan. Then a new scan appeared over the same outline map.

  Again, a single bright red dot gleamed on a field of greens and blues, in that same location.

  ”What the hell is this one?” Meeters asked.

  ”Radioactivity,” Shearson said. “Whatever we’re looking at is hot in more ways than one. I haven’t seen a mix like this since Chernobyl-though this one’s different, the radiation’s dropped off quickly and the heat hasn’t…”

  ”Radioactivity?”

  ”Yes, sir.”

  ”Son of a bitch,” Meeters said. He straightened up again, turned, and shouted at the guard, “Sergeant, I want this room secured, nobody in or out without emergency authorization.” Then he turned back to Shearson. “I want hard copy of all this on my desk in five minutes, and I want this wired to the White House and NORAD. Flag any intelligence reports on anything in the area military, political, anything.”

  ”General…?” Shearson asked, startled. “What’s going on? Who is it?”

  ”I don’t know who it is,” Meeters said, “or what they think they’re doing-might be some kind of Soviet leftovers, might be terrorists, might be Russian nationalists gone overboard, but it’s somebody out there.”

  ”But whatever it is, why…?” Shearson groped unsuccessfully for words.

  Meeters looked at the tech in exasperation. “Think, Shearson-don’t you see what that is? I mean, what the hell else could it be? You said yourself you hadn’t seen anything like it since Chernobyl, and nobody builds power reactors in the middle of an oil field. Heat and radiation means that someone just cracked open a nuke and out there in the middle of nowhere that means a bomb, Shearson.” He jabbed a finger at the computer screen. “Someone’s hauling nuclear weapons around the arctic, and it’s nothing the Russians have told us about. Sure, we know they’ve got stuff they don’t tell us, selling goodies to the Third World, and we don’t like it but we live with it-but you don’t smuggle nukes from Russia to Iran or Pakistan across the fucking polar ice cap. Think a minute, Shearson-what’s straight across the ice cap from Siberia?”

  ”North America,” Shearson said. “But…”

  ”Damn right,” Meeters said, cutting him off. “We are! Maybe they’ve got missiles hidden out there, or maybe some damn fool’s hauling them over the pole by dogsled, I don’t know, but I do know that I, for one, don’t want any nukes coming into my neighborhood unannounced.”

  ”But, General, that’s crazy,” Shearson protested. “We aren’t giving the Russians a hard time. Why would anyone try to attack us now?”

  ”Why not?” Meeters said as he headed for the door. “You got a better explanation? Since when did being crazy mean it’s not happening?” He charged out of the room.

  Shearson stared after him for a moment, then turned back to his console and began typing commands.

  His hands shook as he typed.

  General Emory Mavis, U.S. Army, frowned as he looked at the report Meeters had sent over.

  Meeters thought it was a bunch of Russian crazies smuggling nukes over the pole; he didn’t see that any other explanation of the data was possible. Once upon a time Mavis might have thought so, too.

  Now, though, Mavis took a broader view. He had learned that a whole slew of supposedly impossible things were possible after all. Unlikely, maybe, but possible.

  That understanding was what had landed him his current position, one that existed off the books; officially he was retired. Unofficially he was, all by himself, a black-budget item, listed in what few records existed as “Esoteric Threat Assessment Capability.” Part of his job was to look at unlikely things and figure out just which unlikely possibility was fact. That was his specialty; that was why the White House kept him on call. That was why they’d called him off the golf course to look at this stuff.

  Another part of his job was to advise the president on just what the hell to do about the esoteric threats that Mavis assessed, and if necessary to take charge and see that it got done.

  Meeters thought it was a bunch of crazies smuggling nukes, but that was unlikely enough that the boys in the White House basement had gotten Mavis off the best run at the back nine he’d ever had at the Burning Tree Country Club to take a look at the report, apply his expertise, and come up with something to tell the president.

  Heat and radiation in the middle of the Siberian wilderness-yes, Russian warheads were the obvious explanation, but were they the right one?

  He reached for the phone on his desk, lifted the receiver, and tapped in a number.

  When he heard someone pick up on the other end, before the other could start to speak, Mavis barked, “Mavis here. Get me Charles Westfield.”

  He didn’t bother listening to the reply; he waited until he heard Westfield’s familiar voice say “Hello?”

  ”Dr. Westfield,” Mavis said. “I need to know what sort of heat and radiation you’d see if one of the Russians’ largest warheads cracked open. Fax me the figures ASAP.”

  ”Tonight?” Westfield said, startled.

  ”Now,” Mavis told him. “As soon as we’re done talking. You have the number?”

  ”I’m not sure…”

  ”Got a pen?”

  Ten minutes later the fax machine whirred and began extruding paper.

  Mavis looked at the numbers. He wasn’t a physicist himself, but he’d worked with enough of this sort of material to be able to make sense of what he saw.

  It didn’t match what the satellites showed for Assyma. It wasn’t even close:

  Mavis had expected that. Five minutes later he had Westfield on the phone again.

  ”You’re sure of these figures?” he asked.

  ”Yes,” Westfield said. No hesitation, no qualifications-just “yes.”

  ”Suppose a Russian nuke were damaged, enough to trigger a meltdown

  …”

  ”Warheads don’t melt down,” Westfield interrupted. “You’ve got several times critical mass of highly enriched metal there-you put it together and it’s going to explode, not just melt into slag.”

  ”All right, it’s not a warhead, then,” Mavis said. “Let me fax you something, and you tell me what you make of it.” He pulled out the printout of the raw satellite data, before Shearson or Meeters had added any comments or interpretation, and fed it into the fax.

  ”It’s not a warhead, damaged or otherwise,” Westfield told him. “And it’s not a meltdown-too much heat, not enough neutron emission for a meltdown. Might be a low-yield burst of some kind-are there any se
ismic reports?”

  ”Good question,” Mavis replied.

  It took hours and dozens of calls-to seismologists, CIA analysts, and several agencies that weren’t supposed to exist-before General Mavis was satisfied.

  Whatever was out there in Siberia had appeared with a shock wave that fit the profile of a fair-sized meteorite impact rather than any sort of explosion-but if something big had fallen from the sky, there was no trace of its descent. It hadn’t shown up on the tracking radar that constantly scanned the skies all over Earth. The impact profile, working from seismographic records, indicated that the object had been traveling southeast at a fairly shallow angle when it hit; if it had been a meteor, then it should have been spotted on several radar screens.

  The heat of impact should have dissipated fairly quickly, but that wasn’t what the infrared showed. The radiation profile didn’t fit a meteor, either.

  The CIA didn’t have much to tell him about human activity; the technical stuff was comparatively easy to get and safe to pass along, while ground-level reports were risky. However, they said that a low-ranking officer had been rushed from Assyma to Moscow just hours ago, and was debriefed by several generals. Something was going on out there, all right but the CIA didn’t know what it was. They didn’t think the Russians knew exactly what was happening, either.

  Mavis nodded as he considered that.

  It all fit.

  Something hot had fallen from the sky, something that hadn’t shown on radar, something that didn’t act like any sort of natural object, something that the Russians seemed as puzzled by as anyone…

  A spaceship, Mavis thought.

  He had dealt with spaceships before. It was something everyone kept quiet about, for several reasons, but Mavis knew about some previous visits by spaceships. None had been quite like this, though. Some parts of the profile matched, others didn’t.

  Assuming that this time the ship hadn’t landed under its own power explained the mismatches perfectly.

  All the other visitors had been the same species; Mavis wondered, as he looked over his own scribbled notes, whether perhaps Earth was their private preserve. Maybe there were cosmic NO TRESPASSING signs out there that kept away everyone else.

  Whether there were signs or not, Mavis guessed that these were probably the same fellows, back again. And if that was the case, then Mavis knew who to call in to deal with them.

  He reached for the phone.

  Chapter 6

  General Philips sat at his desk and stared at the empty shot glass, rolling it back and forth in his hands, trying to decide whether to refill it.

  There was a time when he would have sworn he would never drink on duty. He snorted quietly. He’d been a naive little punk back then.

  And after all, was he really on duty? Oh, sure, they said he was. They said he was on call. They gave him this little space here, his own little cubbyhole of an office, with nothing in it but a desk and a phone and the shot glass and a bottle of bourbon, and said he was on call, that he’d be getting new orders any day.

  They had lied to him, of course. He wasn’t on duty here; he was just out of the way. And nobody ever said a man shouldn’t drink when he’d been shoved aside because his superiors thought he’d screwed up.

  And Philips didn’t doubt that his superiors thought he’d screwed up big time six months ago, when big-game hunters from outer space had been using New York City as their private preserve.

  The brass had known for years that the aliens existed. They’d known that the monsters had been hunting humans in tropical jungles for decades, and they’d kept it all quiet-but you can’t keep it all quiet when people start getting butchered in the middle of an American city!

  They’d done a damn good job covering it up; Philips had started it himself, before his “transfer.” Still, there were rumors, there were people who’d seen too much, and Philips was pretty sure that his superiors thought that those rumors and witnesses were his fault.

  His superiors hadn’t been there, damn it. They hadn’t been there on the streets, watching a bunch of alien monsters shooting it out with cops and hoodlums. They’d been willing to write off a couple of dozen civilians gone for trophies if it meant avoiding trouble with the aliens, but they hadn’t been there, watching it happen, seeing innocent people slaughtered.

  Philips had been there, and at the end he’d come in on the human side, fighting the monsters, in defiance of his orders. He’d had to.

  But it hadn’t made any difference-the creatures had left because they got bored and the weather turned cool, not because they’d lost or gotten angry.

  The big brass didn’t believe that. They thought Philips and those two cops, Schaefer and Rasche, had chased the aliens away. They’d wanted a piece of the aliens’ gadgetry to play with, and they thought Philips had screwed up in not getting them something.

  But they hadn’t seen how careful those damned extraterrestrials were about making sure their precious technology didn’t fall into the hands of the people they preyed upon. There hadn’t been a chance to capture anything.

  The brass didn’t know what it had been like. He hadn’t screwed up, damn it-he’d been handed a disaster, and he’d done everything he could to keep it from getting any worse than it already was. No one could have done better without just shooting Schaefer and Rasche-and no one could have known to do that until it was too late.

  Of course, his superiors had never told him to his face that he’d screwed up-they’d probably been afraid that he’d go to the press if they booted him out or dressed him down. No, they’d just waited a couple of weeks, transferred him, given him this office, and told him to wait here until they called with his new orders.

  He’d asked about the programs he’d started, whether he’d still be training Captain Lynch’s team, whether Smithers and the rest of the New York office would still be tracking down possible incidents, whether the Pentagon team would continue checking incoming electronic intelligence for signs of the aliens, and they’d said not to worry about any of that; it would all be taken care of. He was just to wait until they called.

  That was almost six months ago, and the phone hadn’t rung yet.

  He’d finished up all his paperwork the first month. Then he’d started bringing books he’d always wanted to read. Around the third month he started bringing a bottle of bourbon along with the books.

  By the fifth month he was just bringing the bourbon. Another couple of weeks and he doubted he’d bother coming in at all. It had taken a while, but he’d gotten the hint. That phone was never going to ring. Lynch was probably training antiterrorist teams somewhere, and Smithers was probably training terrorists for the CIA. The whole thing was over.

  He couldn’t go to the press now. The news wasn’t hot. The people in charge had had all the time they needed to cover everything up, to get all the stories to match, all the messes cleaned up, and all the evidence neatly tucked out of sight.

  He could argue with them, of course. He could complain, he could demand something to do, he could go all the way to the president if he had to.

  There wasn’t any point in it, though. If he made a stink, they might give him something to do, or they might just retire him, but one thing seemed pretty sure-they weren’t going to put him back on the assignment he’d had before, the one he really wanted, dealing with those things, those killers, those monsters from outer space.

  That was what he really cared about. There was so much potential there. The technology to travel between stars, all those incredible weapons the things had, their invisibility screens-if the right people had all that, it would mean a whole new world, a whole new universe. If one of the starships those things used could be captured and reverse-engineered, the Apollo flights to the moon would look like a soapbox derby by comparison-people would go to the stars. Entire worlds might well be out there for the taking-resources and wealth beyond imagining! If there were other alien civilizations besides the hunters somewhere out there in the ga
laxy, friendlier ones, then humanity wouldn’t be alone anymore. That would change everything.

  Even if that wasn’t possible, even if human beings didn’t get a stardrive out of it, at the very least those things had weapons and technologies that could put the U.S. so far ahead of the rest of the world that dealing with bozos like Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi would be no more trouble than swatting a few flies.

  This was the biggest thing anyone had ever been involved in-it had been his own private playground, and they had taken it away from him.

  He hoped they hadn’t just abandoned everything. Maybe they had put someone else on it, someone they trusted more. Maybe someone like Lynch was in charge.

  He hoped so.

  Maybe, he told himself, it wasn’t as bleak as he thought. Maybe they really did intend to call him, and those things just hadn’t been back to Earth since the New York affair, so there hadn’t been any need for him. Maybe they’d get around to calling him eventually.

  Or maybe the big brass honestly thought those things were gone for good.

  Hell, maybe they were gone for good-that whole mess must’ve been embarrassing for them, too. They’d come to Earth looking for a good time, or maybe to avenge the hunter Dutch had killed all those years ago, and they’d wound up getting two or three of their boys notched; if they were an outfit running the equivalent of paid safaris, that wouldn’t have looked good in the ads back home. Or if they had some sort of noninterference rules, they’d blown those out of the water when they landed their ship in the middle of Third Avenue.

  Hushing all that up must’ve been a bitch, Philips thought. Even on a Sunday morning, there must have been a hundred witnesses.

  Maybe the top brass thought that the trouble had all happened because people had tried to interfere. Maybe they thought there was no way to get that technology, so they just wanted to ignore the aliens now. Even when Philips had been running the show he’d usually had orders to let the hunters have their fun, kill a few people, take a few trophies-don’t make ‘em mad. The brass had always been more worried than eager, more concerned that they not get the aliens mad enough to start an actual war than with having anyone learn anything from the spacefaring bastards.