Politika (1997)
Page 4
Which was what he’d meant when he told Perry he was in Kaliningrad “assessing risks.” It had been twelve weeks since he’d flown back to the States, and all the information he’d gotten while he was there suggested the Russian food shortage was rapidly worsening. Alarmed by the reports, and wanting to see for himself how serious it was, he had decided to make a trip to the nearest population center his immediate priority upon returning to the region. And from where he stood right now, the situation looked a lot like the divorce settlement a judge had handed down to him a couple of weeks ago, formally dissolving his third marriage and sticking him with whopping alimony payments: pretty damned grim.
The grocery in front of him was locked up tight, its window displays bare of merchandise. The plate glass was pocked with starry fractures of the sort that would have been made by rocks or blunt-ended sticks. A cardboard sign in the doorway read “NYETU PISCHA”—“NO FOOD”—in handscrawled Cyrillic characters. It was similar to the sign he’d seen in the bakery down the block, which had said, “NO BREAD.” Or the one above the empty market stand that said, “NO FRUITS OR VEGETABLES.”
Scull thought it significant that none of the signs merely had “CLOSED” written on them. Obviously, the absent storekeepers had wanted to discourage property damage from break-ins, making it clear nothing had been left behind for potential looters.
He moved up to the storefront, shaded his eyes with his hand, and peered in at the vacant shelves.
“Shit,” he said in a rueful tone. “So much for my smoked-fucking-herring.”
“Hope it’s easier to get drunk than fed around here,” Perry said.
He stood with his back to Scull, his gaze wandering up and down the street. It seemed somehow appropriate to him that Kaliningrad had taken its name from one of Vladimir Lenin’s less distinguished cronies; on its best days, it was a drab and cheerless place. The cars looked old. The people looked shabby. The streets were a blockish grid of factories, commercial warehouses, and precast concrete apartment buildings. Shoehorned between Poland, Lithuania, and the Baltic States, the region—which had been part of Germany until after World War I—was separated from the rest of Russia by several borders, and valuable primarily for its strategic position as a territorial buffer and port city. Even its attraction to German tourists was unromantic, based not on sightseeing or other leisure activities, but its status as a duty-free import-export zone.
“Might as well head for the bar,” Scull said, turning from the window.
“Hold on, I think we might be in luck.” Perry nodded his head toward the corner, where a street vender had begun unloading crates from the rear hatch of his van. There were fifteen or twenty people clotting the sidewalk around him, most of them women in shapeless gray clothing with big canvas grocery sacks on their arms.
Scull frowned and smoothed down a wisp of his thinning hair. It instantly sprang back out of place. His frown deepened.
“Forget it, I’m not waiting in any goddamn line,” he said, becoming surly. “Let’s go.”
Perry continued to hesitate. A pair of young men in ugly leather jackets—he guessed they were in their twenties—had sidled up to an old woman as she left the entrance to the shop. One of them was very tall, the other about average height. The shorter one was drinking out of a brown paper bag and walking slightly off balance.
Wrapped in a dark, well-worn winter shawl, her grocery bag weighted with goods, the woman tried to brush past them, but they quickly flanked her on both sides, keeping pace with her.
Perry felt a little jolt in the pit of his stomach. It was a sensation he’d experienced often in his days as a New York City detective.
His pale blue eyes locked on the three of them, he tapped Scull on the shoulder and motioned in their direction.
“Tell me, Vince, what’s wrong with that picture?” he said.
Scull stood beside him and looked blank. He was thinking exclusively about getting a drink now.
“Looks to me like a couple black marketeers making a pitch, is all.” He grunted. “Maybe they’ve got herring.”
Perry was shaking his head. “Black marketeers go after tourist cash. You ever see any of them stick to a babushka like that?”
Scull was silent. The old woman had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and pulled her satchel closer against her body. The two guys in cheap leather were still crowding her. The taller of them had slipped his right hand into his jacket pocket and was pointing at the satchel with the other.
“Those punks are gonna boost her,” Perry said.
“It’s none of our business. Let the locals handle it.”
“You see anybody about to do that?” Perry made a sweeping gesture with his hand that encompassed both sides of the street. The pedestrians moving past the old lady didn’t seem to understand what was happening. Or maybe they did and just weren’t getting involved.
What the hell am I waiting for? he thought, and hustled down the block.
“Goddamn it, Neil,” Scull said, trotting along at his heels, “this is a foreign country!”
Ignoring him, Perry reached the two men and put his hand on the taller one’s left shoulder.
“All right, that’s enough, leave her alone,” he said, waving him on.
The tall guy stiffened a little but remained where he was. The shorter guy glared at Perry and took a slug of whatever was in the brown paper bag. Scull moved up next to him and waited. In the center of the group, the old woman had raised her hand to her mouth and was looking around uncertainly, her face nervous and fearful.
“I said to take a hike,” Perry said, conscious that the guy still had his right hand in his pocket. “Pahkah!”
The guy glanced at him sideways and jerked his shoulder, trying to shake him off. He had small, close-set eyes and needed a shave. Perry tightened his grip.
The guy looked at him another moment, then suddenly rounded on him and spat in his face, his hand coming out of his pocket, something metallic flashing in his fist. A knife.
As the blade slashed up at him, Perry shifted his body to avoid the attack, clamping his left hand around the guy’s wrist in mid-thrust and then pushing it downward. The punk struggled to bring the knife back up, but Perry slammed the back of his right hand with the outer edge of his palm in a crisp chopping motion. He felt the snap of bone, and then the guy groaned in pain as his hand went limp, hanging from his arm at an unnatural angle, his weapon clattering to the pavement.
Still holding the guy by his wrist, Perry moved in on him and jammed his knee into his crotch. The guy doubled over, clutching himself. Then he sank to the ground.
Perry was bending to snatch up the knife up when he heard the loud crash of breaking glass.
He glanced quickly over at the shorter man. Holding the bottle by its neck, he had smashed it against the side of a building, shaken off the paper bag, and was waving its jagged stump at Scull. Beer and suds were running down the wall where he’d shattered it.
Scull grinned slightly. The guy swiped the bottle stump at him, shaking droplets of liquid from the pointy spurs of glass. Scull felt a rush of air against his face and slipped backward an instant before it would have torn into his cheek. Then he reached into his jacket pocket, brought out a thin metal OC canister, and thumbed down its sprayhead. A conical mist discharged from its nozzle into his attacker’s face. The guy gagged, dropped the broken bottle, and began to stagger around blindly, clutching at his face as the pepper spray dilated the capillaries of his eyes and swelled the soft membranes in his nose and throat. Scull shoved the canister back into his pocket, spun him around by the shoulder, and drove an uppercut into his middle. The guy sagged to his knees beside his friend, gasping for breath, thick ropes of mucus glistening on his chin.
Scull looked down at him without moving. Disoriented, his eyes red and teary, the guy still hadn’t quit. He struggled to pull himself upright and somehow managed to get his knees under him. Scull swung his leg out and kicked him full in the face. He droppe
d back to the ground, his hands covering his nose, blood spurting through his fingers.
“Should’ve stayed down,” Scull muttered.
Perry realized that he still had the taller guy’s gravity knife in his hand. He folded the blade into the handle and slipped it into the back pocket of his trousers.
Then he felt a tug on his sleeve. The old woman. She had stepped forward, a smile on her plump, upturned face.
“Spasibo,” she said, thanking him in Russian. She pulled two oranges from her canvas bag and held them out for him to take. “Bolshoya spasibo.”
Perry put his hand on her arm.
“Thanks for offering, Grandmother, but you should keep them for yourself,” he said, motioning for her to return the fruit to her sack. “Go home now. Bishir yetso.”
“We’d better get out of here ourselves,” Scull said.
Perry glanced both ways. A crowd had begun to gather around them. The cars and buses had continued their slow progress along the street, though many rubberneckers were pausing at the curb to get a look at the commotion.
“Yeah,” he said. “Still want that drink?”
“I’m thirstier than ever,” Scull said.
“Then lead the way,” Perry said.
They hurried off down the street.
EIGHT
WASHINGTON, D.C. NOVEMBER 5, 1999
IT SEEMED TO GORDIAN THAT DAN PARKER HAD BEEN watching his back for as long as they’d known each other ... which was now something like thirty-five years. In Nam, when both served with the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing, he had been wingman to Gordian’s lead in the countless bombing runs they had made over enemy territory. Going low against VC strongpoints in their F-4 Phantoms, they had learned the difficulty of hitting camouflaged, dug-in targets with their payloads at speeds approaching Mach 2—and come to understand the importance of developing guided weapons systems that would allow pilots to drop their ordnance in tight spots without having to fly multiple passes over their objectives, while practically holding their fingers up into the wind to decide which way it was blowing.
Gordian’s final day in a warplane—and in the war, for that matter—had been January 20, 1968, when he was downed during a close-support mission about four miles east of Khe Sanh. Ditching out of his fiery cockpit over an enemy-held ridge, he had scarcely shucked his parachute before he found himself surrounded by a bristling ring of North Vietnamese machine guns. As a pilot, he had been a prized catch, able to provide information about Air Force tactics and technology... and valuable enough for his captors to put him in a specimen cage rather than mount his head on a trophy wall. But throughout his five-year imprisonment in the Hanoi Hilton he had kept what he knew to himself, resisting carrot-and-stick coercions that had ranged from promises of early release to solitary confinement and torture.
Meanwhile, Dan had completed his second tour of duty in ’70 and returned to the States with a chest full of military decorations. The son of a prominent California congressman, he’d successfully pressured his social and political contacts to get a Red Cross pipeline through to Gordian. The humanitarian teams had provided basic medical treatment, delivered letters and care packages, and reported back to Gordian’s family about his condition, all despite an uncooperative North Vietnamese government that had done little more than pay lip service to the Geneva Convention.
Dan’s efforts on his friend’s behalf hardly stopped there. As the Paris peace talks staggered toward a cease-fire agreement, he had twisted arms to ensure that Gordian was among the first prisoners of war to be released. And although Gordian emerged from captivity weakened and underweight, he was in vastly better shape than he would have been without Dan’s unfailing support.
In the following decades, that support would reach across to the professional arena even as their friendship and mutual respect took on increasingly greater dimension. Their experiences in Vietnam had left both men convinced of the need for technology that would combine advanced navigation and reconnaissance capabilities with a precision missile delivery system. Together they had been forced to rely on guesswork time and again when making their strikes, placing their lives in jeopardy and causing unnecessary collateral damage to civilian locations. And Gordian had never forgotten that he owed his incarceration in a POW camp to a Russian surface-to-air missile that he hadn’t seen coming. While things had changed dramatically since the advent of smart weapons, there was still a lack of integration—a gap, so to speak—between infrared-targeting and radar surveillance systems.
By the late eighties, Gordian had begun to see how it was at least theoretically possible to fill that gap using modern satellite communications ... and Dan was in a position to help him obtain the funding he needed to make those ideas a reality. Having followed in his father’s footsteps, he had pursued a career in politics, and in his third term as a congressman from California occupied seats on several House allocations committees. His confidence in Gordian had been instrumental in shaking loose underwriting grants which, added to Gordian’s own huge investment of corporate profits into R&D, opened the way for the development of GAPSFREE, the most impressive jewel in UpLink’s wire-and-silicon crown.
In terms of its adaptability to existing avionics and communications hardware, GAPSFREE was almost too good a package to be believed. Interfacing with orbital Global Positioning System satellites, it allowed the pilot or weapons officer of a fighter plane to know exactly where he was in relation to his target, or what was targeting him, providing real-time data relayed directly from the satellites to onboard navigational computers, and using synthetic-aperture radar to peer through fog and battle smoke. The system was also light and compact enough to be enclosed in a weapons pod that could be affixed to hardpoints on even low-tech aircraft like the A-10, transforming them—in combination with some cockpit modifications—into lethal fighter-bombers able to launch the smartest of smart weapons. This versatility made GAPSFREE the cheapest and most effective guidance system for missiles and precision guided munitions ever designed.
Not surprisingly, it also made Gordian’s firm the worldwide leader in recon tech.
And made Gordian a very, very rich man.
Having reached this sort of professional milestone, many entrepreneurs would have retired, or at least rested on their laurels. But Gordian had already begun pushing his ideas toward their next logical phase. Parlaying his tremendous success, he expanded his corporation in numerous ways, moving into dozens of countries, opening up new markets, and absorbing local chemical, communications, telephone, and industrial holdings on all four continents. His ultimate goal was to create a single, world spanning, satellite-based communications network that would allow phone transmissions to be made inexpensively from a mobile phone—or fax, or modem—to a destination anywhere on the globe.
What drove him was neither ego nor a desire for greater wealth, but a belief that this system could truly make a difference in the lives of millions, perhaps billions of people, bringing communications services and technology to every spot on earth. In his eyes, rapid access to information was a weapon. He had returned from Vietnam with a firm commitment to do what he could to stand up to totalitarian governments and oppressive regimes. And he had seen firsthand how no such government could stand in the face of freedom of communication.
To achieve his goal, however, he needed the support of the governments of a dozen or more key countries. He needed them to assign radio frequencies to his company; he needed them to give him access to their space programs to provide for the scores of low-earth-orbit satellite launches that NASA simply couldn’t handle; and he needed them to allow him to build ground stations in countries scattered all across the planet, to link into his satellite network and feed signals into existing land lines.
He also needed Dan Parker. Again. Of course. Since 1997, Dan had been guiding him through the regulatory tangle that had accompanied the evolution of handheld satellite communications. More recently, he’d been keeping tabs on events in Congress tha
t could affect Gordian’s plans to have his Russian ground station operational by the end of the year.
Now, sitting across from Dan at the Washington Palm on Nineteenth Street, Gordian took a drink of his beer and glanced up at the sports and political cartoons covering the walls. Stirring his martini to melt the ice cubes, Dan looked impatient for their food to arrive. Gordian couldn’t remember him ever not being impatient when he was expecting his food.
They were at their regular corner table beneath an affectionate caricature of Tiger Woods. A decade ago, when they’d started having their monthly lunches here, the drawing in that spot had been of O.J. Simpson. Then that had come down and one of Marv Albert had taken its place. Then Albert was removed and Woods had gone up.
“Tiger,” Gordian mused aloud. “An all-American legend.”
“Let’s keep our fingers crossed he stays up there,” Parker said.
“He goes, who’ll be left?”
Dan shook his head. “Secretariat, maybe.”