Darpa Alpha

“Exiled,” put in Beria bitterly, “a thousand miles from Moscow.”

“Secondly,” said Big, taking no notice of Beria’s comment, “you’ve all seen combat. In Afghanistan and elsewhere.”

“So we three have organizational skills and combat experience,” said General Abramov. “What is the third reason?”

“You’re very poor,” said Big. He looked at each one of them in turn, before exhaling fully, his smoke engulfing them. “None of you can sleep because you don’t know how you’re going to look after your family in this new capitalist paradise of ours.” He paused. “You’re worried sick, gentlemen.” He fixed his gaze on Abramov. “Even you, Mikhail.” He inhaled again slowly, deeply, giving them time to realize just how much he might know about them beyond their outward show of braggadocio. As the brownish blue smoke poured forth, he continued, “I know what it’s like. Believe me. We now have in Russia the very, very rich and the dirt poor. The rich have reserves to see them through the chaos that’s followed Yeltsin, Putin, and their successors. The poor—” He shrugged. “Well, most of them have never known anything else, only now it’s worse. But you three—” He was using his cigarette as a pointer again, jabbing it at them. “—Your whole officer class has been raised to enjoy the fruits of your hard work for the party. And now it’s all crumbled.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “I’ve seen your medical files. Not your official military medical records, your local—private—physician’s. Zopiclone?” He left the name of the sleeping pill hanging in the air before adding, “Prozac and Volga!” Volga was the cheapest brand of vodka, and Big gave a sardonic grin, reciting the commercial jingle, “Like the mighty river Volga, it will wash your troubles away!” He leaned forward, the smile gone, shoulders hunched with intensity. “For you, we’re offering a way to win back Russia for the party and to earn yourselves some hard cash for your families. It is what the Americans call ‘a win-win situation.’ Da?” He leaned back and opened his tin of Sobranies, plucking out another cigarette.

“How much money?” asked Air Defense General Cherkashin, his medals clinking as he leaned forward, placing both hands on the table.

“A hundred thousand a month,” said Big. “For each of you.”

“Rubles?” asked Beria.

“American dollars.”

The normally cool, hard-eyed Abramov tried to appear nonchalant, but his face was flushed with excitement and he had to make a conscious effort to sit back and look relaxed, as if he could take it or leave it.

Beria and Cherkashin were stunned.

“Ah, where do we move this equipment, this capability?” asked Cherkashin.

“Where Moscow can’t see it,” replied the Sobranie smoker. “As far from here in Orsk and from Moscow as possible, in fact. East. You’ll be told in due time, if you accept our offer. But once you’re given the location, the three of you hold your lives in your hands. We want you to—” Reaching into his pocket, he fished out the gold Dunhill lighter. “We want you to think it over. But quickly. There are plenty of other candidates, disaffected officers like yourselves, but my colleague and I—” He looked at Little. “—have to get back to Moscow. He glanced at his Rolex, asking his smaller partner, “The last plane out of Orsk is at 2100, correct?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll give you fifteen minutes,” Big told the three generals, who were now convinced by the official’s use of “2100” that he was a military man. “We’ll be down in the foyer,” Big added, getting up and gathering his jacket and the tin of Sobranies. “It’s either yes or no.”

The three generals went out into Orsk’s polluted air to talk it over. The road’s badly cracked surface was an apt symbol, Mikhail Abramov thought, of the state of Russia. It was the beginning of the end.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” Big had told Abramov, the commander of the grossly understaffed Siberian Sixth Armored Division. It was a phrase that had been quoted many times by the officer corps in the turmoil since the collapse. He himself had had to cannibalize half his tanks just to keep the other half going.

“So?” said Viktor Beria, looking at the leaner Abramov and the taller, gray-haired Cherkashin, the air defense general. “Are you two in? I know I’m sick of constantly scrabbling around to make ends meet.”

Abramov had been conjuring up the glory days of the Siberian Sixth; at least the days had been glorious until the humiliating defeat that he, as a young lieutenant, and other tank platoon commanders had suffered in a trap wherein American M1A1 Abrams tanks had duped the famed Sixth Armored Corps during a winter battle between it and the U.S.-led U.N. peacekeeping force in Siberia.

“A hundred thousand dollars a month!” said Beria with a whistle.

“But what is this equipment, this capability, he talks about?” said Abramov.

“I don’t care!” said Beria. “I’m broke.”

“I want to know,” said Abramov, as the three of them made their way back into the hotel, “whether this capability is real or not. I at least want to ask him if it’s in place, ready to go, or are we expected to start from scratch? I need to know that much if I’m to decide.”

Abramov posed the questions quietly but without preamble as they met the two officials in the foyer. “What capability are we talking about? At least give us a rough idea.”

The two officials looked at each other and decided that a little more bait was necessary to hook the generals.

“A capability,” Big answered him, “that is staggering, General, and which will be ready for full production in two months if our acquisition of the data is successful. But beyond that I will discuss it in detail only if you wish to join our team.”

“Whose team is that?”

Little, who had spoken nary a word since the three generals had returned from outside, suddenly leaned forward, his suit’s crease crumpling as he did so. “The old team,” he told Abramov, as if the tank general was a student who’d forgotten his most important lesson, a lesson which governed all others, “the team which the stupid Americans think is washed up but is just waiting, as their George Washington did, to cross the Delaware, to regain what has been stolen, stolen from our party’s grip because some generals didn’t have the balls to overturn all these ridiculous democratic reforms. Are you with us or not? Do you want to slave away for kopecks in this so-called new democratic Russia or be able to hold your head up again, armed with some real weapons for a change, with something our clients can hit the Americans with, so fast, so utterly, that they’ll be pissing themselves in the streets. And which, if successful, if organized correctly, will act as a nucleus to attract more of our comrades to reinvigorate the party. Now, are you with us or not?

Abramov thought for a second. His final humiliation had been having to tell his daughter that she’d have to stop taking her beloved studies in ballet because of the money. He’d stopped her dream. “Da!” he told Little. “I’m with you.”

And so were Beria and Cherkashin, the air force general asking gleefully, “Now we’re in. Tell us, how do we get the Americans pissing their pants?”

Looking at the three generals in turn, Big asked, “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Flow-In-Flight’ data?”

None of them had.

CHAPTER FIVE

His recurring dream evicted from consciousness upon his arrival at Fairchild. Aussie, with Freeman and the other six members of the team, was now aboard an oily-smelling Chinook helo heading for the lower, southernmost, end of northwest Idaho’s ninety-thousand-acre Lake Pend Oreille. To Choir Williams’s extreme discomfort, the team encountered a gut-rolling turbulence as a low-pressure weather system rushing in from the Pacific coast hit a Canadian Express, a stream of freezing air pouring down from the Arctic through British Columbia, a little more than sixty miles to the north of the lake.

As the general studied his Tactical Pilotage map of the rugged 48-mile-wide, 75-mile-long Idaho panhandle that contained both Lake Pend Oreille and Priest Lake, thirty miles north-northwest of Pend Oreille, he shook his head.

“What’s up, General?” Aussie shouted over the roar of the Chinook’s engines.

Freeman’s face was creased by what his team had come to call his George C. Scott look, one of concern and