by FX Holden
The young woman stood. As he sat down, Yakob noticed more than one of the committee members flinch involuntarily, or look down suddenly at the notes or tablets in front of them. Some openly stared.
She had no notes in front of her, though she did have a digital braille notepad device he had seen her use on other occasions. But she knew her data inside out, so he was not worried she would trip up over the detail, and besides, this group was not the kind to ask detailed questions. All she had to do was convince them Groza worked, and after all their time rehearsing for today, he was completely confident she would.
“Thank you Colonel, ladies and gentlemen.” She stared straight ahead, her eyes dull and unfocused. Now even the slower members of the audience might begin to realize she was not only scarred, she was blind. She gave a slight smile. “But before I begin with the results of our final series of tests of the Groza system, I must comment on Colonel Yakob’s introduction. Colonel Yakob is a true champion of this project, and he has put his personal and professional life on the line to see it succeed. Colonel Yakob has asked me to explain to you why you should be confident to propose to Minister Kelnikov that Russia deploy Groza. Instead, I am here to tell you why you should not.”
It took a moment for Yakob to process what the woman had just said. He had been nodding and smiling when she called him a champion of the project, but only as people around the table stirred in surprise did he take in what she had actually said. Several committee members leaned toward each other and began murmuring, and Yakob rose to his feet, taking the scientist by the arm. “Perhaps you and I should talk, outside,” he said. “Chairman, if you will just excuse us…”
The committee chairman was a Russian Aerospace Force Major-General called Yevgeny Bondarev. While those around him had reacted with shock or surprise at Grahkovsky’s opening words, he had just smiled slightly and steepled his fingers beneath his chin. He had been one of the six doubters identified by Yakob, and now he leaned forward, pointing at Yakob’s recently vacated chair. “Comrade Colonel, please sit down. Chief Scientist Grahkovsky, please continue.”
Yakob reluctantly slipped Grahkovsky’s arm free and scowled as he sat. His finely laid plans had just gone seriously sideways.
Anastasia smoothed the sleeve Yakob had grabbed, and continued. “Thank you, Chairman Bondarev. I know this will displease Colonel Yakob, but I do not believe that the Groza weapons system should be deployed.”
Bondarev raised his eyebrows and tapped on the tablet in front of him. “I have read the reports of your final test series, Grahkovsky. They indicate the weapons system performed with devastating effectiveness. Are you saying that the reports are incorrect or that false data has been presented to this committee?” He was in his early forties, had the tanned, square-jawed features of a movie star warrior, and Yakob knew he had been decorated several times as a pilot for bravery under fire.
Grahkovsky shook her head. “No, Chairman. Groza performed completely within the defined success parameters. All test targets were acquired within the 30-minute operational window, the weapons platforms experienced no significant failures during the live-fire exercise, and the targets were struck with, as you say, devastating effect. The post-attack analyses showed our most modern armored vehicles were easily destroyed, the bunker complex test site comprising hardened concrete reinforced with steel rebar was penetrated to a depth of around 20 feet, effectively collapsing it. Used against moored warships with half-inch deck plating, it sunk three of four and disabled the fourth to the extent it would likely have been written off. If used against troops in an urban environment, we expect it will have an effect footprint of between two and five square miles and a guaranteed casualty ratio of 37 percent with a confidence interval of five percent.” She paused to let her audience keep up. “The Groza weapons system met every success criterion that this committee imposed on it.”
Unlike Yakob or his fellow committee members, Bondarev did not appear fazed by the contradiction in the woman’s words. He simply sat back and folded his arms. “Why, then, would you recommend that the system not be deployed?”
Anastasia Grahkovsky lifted her chin and turned her head, first to the left, and then to the right, her eyes staring into the distance. “Look at me,” she said.
There was more murmuring around the table, but Bondarev did as she asked, and even Yakob could not help but lean back in his chair and look up at her, seeing her ravaged face again as though for the first time.
“I know your history, Chief Scientist. And everyone here knows what happened at Chelyabinsk. Your point, please?” Bondarev asked quietly.
“My point, Comrade Chairman, is that if you use this weapon in a populated area, those who are not lucky enough to die will become…” She turned around slowly, lifting her arms out to her side so that her sleeves rose up her arms, showing them the scars there too. When she was facing them again she lowered her arms again and folded her hands in front of her. “This,” she said. “Or worse.”
There was a shocked silence around the table.
Yakob tried to recover. “Chairman, if I can just…”
Bondarev held a hand in the air to silence Yakob. “I have a question for the Chief Scientist,” he said.
Grahkovsky didn’t flinch; she kept her chin in the air and stared straight ahead. “Yes, Chairman?”
“Have you ever seen the impact of a fuel-air explosive weapon on a human being?” he asked.
“No, sir,” she replied. “Nor would I want to.”
“None of us would want to, Grahkovsky,” Bondarev said quickly, his voice cold. “If you are within the blast epicenter, you are burned alive. If you are within the effect radius, you are suffocated or buried alive as buildings around you collapse, or crushed by flying debris, or poisoned by unspent fuel mist. In Anadyr, I was buried alive when the enemy used a fuel-air explosive to attack my airbase and we lost two hundred men and women in that one attack.” The impact of his words was all the more chilling to Yakob because he was saying them in a detached and clinical tone. “This is what modern weapons do, Chief Scientist. We deploy them precisely because of what they do; in the full knowledge there will be casualties both military and civilian and we do so only out of necessity, knowing that if we do not, the cost to our motherland will be even greater. You may sit.”
She didn’t. She remained standing. “With respect, Chairman, some weapons are banned under treaty and we have signed such treaties.” She held up her hand and started counting on her fingers. “Cluster munitions, chemical weapons, biological weapons, low-yield nuclear weapons, cyberattacks directed at medical infrastructure…” She lowered her hands again and clasped them calmly in front of her. “If we deploy it, this weapon will one day be on that list.”
Everyone turned to look at Bondarev’s reaction, but he remained impassive. “Your advice is noted. You need not sit. You are excused from the meeting, Chief Scientist Grahkovsky.”
Heads swung back to look at her, wondering how she would react to being dismissed, but she simply tightened her lips, reached down for a cane that was resting against her chair and turned, tapping her way toward the door and out the room.
Grahkovsky waited outside in a cold corridor on an uncomfortable chair. After about forty-five minutes, she heard voices coming closer and the door to the meeting room opened. People filed out, some chatting, but none addressed her and, of course, she couldn’t see if any of them had given her a second glance. The last two to emerge were Bondarev and Yakob and she heard them speaking about the agenda for a future meeting, giving her no clue to the outcome of this one.
Bondarev said goodbye to Yakob and then raised his voice. “Goodbye, Grahkovsky.”
She nodded. “Goodbye, Major-General Bondarev.”
There were footsteps and then a creak as Yakob took the seat beside her. She could smell sweat and aftershave, and heard his feet sliding on the floor as he stretched them out in front of himself.
“Am I fired?” she asked.
&n
bsp; “You should be,” he sighed. “What in God’s name were you thinking?”
“Was the project canceled?” she asked, ignoring his question.
She heard him reach into a pocket for cigarettes and a lighter, and then set them on his lap. It wasn’t allowed to smoke inside the administration building at Titov.
“The recommendation for deployment was approved,” he said. “By a vote of ten to two. It will go to the Minister within the month.”
Anastasia smiled, grabbed her cane and stood.
“Why the hell are you smiling?” Yakob demanded. “You nearly cost us everything. Where are you going?”
“Back to work,” she said. “Are you coming?”
There was a beat or two before he said, “Are you trying to suggest you wanted this outcome?”
“You needed Bondarev’s vote,” she said. “I got it for you. And more besides.”
“You could have cost us the whole committee.”
“But I didn’t,” she insisted. “Your way was to persuade them through logic, but that was working against us. Groza will be the most expensive weapons system Russia has ever deployed, at a time we can barely afford to keep our Navy afloat and our Air Force in the air. In an age of precision weapons, it is inaccurate. In an age of sophistication, it is crude. Your sources said six of the committee were against us, while mine told me eight were. But you were right; we needed Bondarev on our side. I knew he could bring the others with him, so I went for his weak spot.”
“Bondarev is a decorated war hero, he has no bloody weak spot,” Yakob said.
“Ah, but clearly he does,” she said. She reached out with uncanny accuracy, using only the sound of his voice to guide her, and put the tip of her cane on Yakob’s chest, above his heart. “Here.”
“Nonsense. The man has no heart.”
“No, but he is a patriot. I had a conversation with a military intelligence officer who served with Bondarev in the 3rd Air Army. He told me about that attack in which Bondarev lost two hundred personnel. He also told me that Bondarev had confided in him that it was a weakness of will that had killed those men and women. He said Russia had held itself back from using the most powerful weapons in its arsenal during that conflict, while its enemies had not, and as a result, it had been defeated. He has sworn more than once that this would never happen again under his command. So I did two things.” She lowered her cane and placed it between her feet. “I told him that Groza was a terrifyingly powerful new weapon. And I challenged him not to use it.”
That night, Anastasia stood in her kitchen, making herself dinner. To anyone unfamiliar with her history, it would have seemed most bizarre. A woman, standing alone in her apartment, cooking herself a vegetarian stroganoff. In total darkness. But to Anastasia, it was just another Tuesday. Occasionally she did laugh at herself and wonder what a visitor might think. But then, visitors weren’t really a problem she had to deal with, the way her life had turned out.
As she stirred her stroganoff, she was whistling a tune to herself.
Which might have struck an observer as a slightly strange thing. She had just engineered a decision which meant that a new weapon of mass destruction was about to be visited on an unsuspecting world, a weapon she had helped develop. And not only that, she had told the absolute truth. The effect of the weapon on those civilians not lucky enough to be killed by it directly was exactly the same as she had experienced at Chelyabinsk. A shock wave, flying glass and debris, collapsed buildings – blindness, deafness, broken bones and backs, flayed skin. But as she stirred her stroganoff and added a little more pepper, she was whistling a happy tune.
Because though Anastasia Grahkovsky had lived through the meteor strike on Chelyabinsk, a part of her had died on the floor of that kitchen as she writhed in blood and glass. She had not only lost her physical sight; she had lost the ability to see beyond her own fascination with the power of meteors, of the orgiastic energy of objects striking the planet from space. The thought of it drove her; no, it consumed her. Anastasia had had sex, but nothing in her life had compared to the ecstasy she had felt hearing the sonic boom from the weapon she had created as it destroyed those tanks, burying them in a two-mile-wide crater, or turning that concrete bunker complex into powder and smoke. Having lived through a powerful meteor strike, having developed into one of the world’s leading experts in the destructive power of kinetic energy deployed at the petajoule scale, she had determined that it wasn’t just something she wanted to have lived through.
It was a power she wanted to control.
“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” scientist Robert Oppenheimer had thought to himself as he watched the first atomic weapon explode over the desert of New Mexico. It had been a quote from Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.
As Anastasia Grahkovsky spooned stroganoff into a bowl and made her way through her dark apartment to sit by the open window and listen to the sounds of the city outside, a quote from a different scripture had come to her mind. It was one she had heard a bearded, black-robed priest say in mass in the church in Chelyabinsk after she got out of hospital, and which felt like it was written just for her. Psalm 2:8–9, “Ask of Me, and I will surely give the nations as your inheritance, and the very ends of the earth as your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron; you shall shatter them like earthenware.”
As she ate, she felt a thrill both exciting and terrifying; her weapon would soon be lifted into the heavens on columns of fire to hang there like Athena’s thunderbolts, ready to strike Russia’s enemies at a moment’s notice.
And the day it was used, the world would change forever.
Ultimatum
Zurich, Switzerland, July 2033
The 194th annual meeting of the OPEC Plus group had been slated to take place in Morocco, but with the organization on the verge of collapse due to violent disagreements about how to handle an oil price which had been in freefall since the start of the year, it had been decided to move it to the traditionally neutral venue of Switzerland, where most of the participants did their banking in any case.
The meeting had been triggered by a Saudi decision to double output in a last-ditch attempt to top up its sovereign wealth fund before oil prices collapsed completely as a result of the world’s transition to renewables. Crude oil had recently fallen below the $50 a barrel price needed for sustainable production in February and declined even further so that by July it had fallen below even 2020 lows of $20 a barrel.
Unless emergency action was taken to curb supply, several major OPEC economies – Russia and Iran first among them – stood on the verge of State bankruptcy.
The world’s next-largest oil economy after Saudi Arabia, and fellow Sunni Muslim majority nation Iraq, was being propped up by loans from Riyadh, and so two opposing blocs had formed within OPEC. On the one side, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, together with other nations dependent on Saudi loans, such as Turkey, Morocco and Tunisia. In the other bloc was Russia, with long-standing Middle Eastern allies Iran and Syria, plus Venezuela, Nigeria and Algeria.
The morning air was mild and fragrant as Russian Energy Minister Denis Lapikov strolled out onto the private terrace on the fourth floor of the Hotel Baur au Lac and took in the view of Lake Zurich. A small table had been set up under a large blue parasol, and three waiters stood ready to take his breakfast order. He asked the head waiter to bring juice and coffee and said he would wait for his guest to arrive before ordering his breakfast. Privately, he did not expect the meeting to extend that long.
Saudi Prince Taisir Al-Malki never went anywhere alone and Lapikov had a suspicion he might even be followed into the bathroom so that he didn’t have to wipe himself, but he didn’t want that suspicion confirmed. Lapikov looked up as he arrived in the company of two bodyguards and two aides, one a Saudi in traditional thawb robes, the other a young woman in a business suit. Lapikov was the physical opposite of his counterpart, lean where the Saudi was portly, thin-faced where the other was round-cheeked, cle
an-shaven where the man was thickly bearded. He stood and prepared to welcome him.
It was their third meeting in three days, but their first on the sidelines of the conference, under semi-private circumstances. Lapikov had brought no aides with him; he did not need them for what he was about to say. It was a simple message, to be delivered with deliberately offensive brevity.
“Denis, my friend,” Al-Malki said, pulling his sleeves back as he approached and sticking out his hand. “A beautiful day already, isn’t it?”
Lapikov was never a small talker at the best of times, and took his right hand back quickly after shaking the Prince’s hand, sticking it in his pocket as he adjusted his small round glasses with his left hand. He took a look at the young woman standing behind the Prince and the other Saudi standing beside him. The westerner was slim, athletic and honey blonde with a golden tan. He knew she would need a razor-sharp intellect if she was to be of any use to her employer, who was renowned within the OPEC Plus community as the most inbred dullard to have occupied the Saudi Energy post in nearly twenty years.
