Boris smelled a very large rat. This chunk of party dogma was Malankov's clumsy attempt at a cover-up. In his haste and ignorance he's exposed precisely that which he was striving to conceal. Yet Boris was still puzzled: How did Project Arrow fit into a military context? In what way exactly?
'I understand that,' he said gravely, his mind working furiously. 'But I should point out that my letter contained nothing that the Americans don't already know. The Western press has reported the scheme since its inception in the mid-seventies.'
'Speculation, Professor--not technical detail,' Malankov said sternly. 'They're certainly not aware how near we are to achieving our goal. Your letter hinted that your work on the project will soon be over.'
'And so it will. In a month's time I shall be sixty-four, and I intend to retire from the service next year. Hence the reference to my work coming to an end.'
Malankov was plainly stumped. He cleared his throat in several stages, eyes focused on the safe middle distance. 'I see. Yes, well, that would explain it. I understand now.'
'Good, I'm glad that you do, comrade,' Boris murmured, loading the last word with half-a-dozen shades of meaning: condescending, impatient, threatening--as if to say 'I am Professor Boris Vladimir Stanovnik, one of this country's leading experts in microbiology, and you, Malankov, whatever status you might have attained, remain the incompetent, shifty, sniveling lab assistant with bitten nails and bad breath.'
It was a psychological technique that Malankov himself might have used, given the opportunity, and it worked to good effect.
Boris rose to his feet, looming large in the tiny bare room, and it seemed that Malankov shrank perceptibly, a petty government official behind a cheap desk.
'Was there anything else? I realize you have to make these tedious and time-wasting inquiries.'
Malankov was staring straight ahead at the third button on Boris's overcoat. 'No, nothing. Thank you for coming in to see me, comrade.'
The satisfaction Boris felt didn't last long. As he left the gray granite building in Dzerzhinsky Square he was thinking how wise it had been to send two letters, one to Scripps, the other to Cheryl's home address. It appeared to have worked: The KGB had intercepted one and missed the other. Unless they were cleverer than he gave them credit for and had withheld the information, hoping to trap him.
In any case, both had been cryptically worded--he had casually inquired how Cheryl was progressing with her father's work and expressed the hope that 'there haven't been any new factors, such as the warming of polar currents, to exacerbate the Precambrian condition.'
By this he wished to alert her to a possibility that had been worrying him for some time. The rather terrifying hypothesis that diverting the Ob and Yenisei rivers away from the Arctic Basin would bring about a general warming of the polar ocean. As phytoplankton thrived best in colder waters, this new factor could accelerate the effect caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide, killing off the phytoplankton more rapidly than predicted--possibly within a decade of the scheme being implemented.
Now these fears had been given a perplexing twist by what Malankov had let slip. Boris might have overlooked the reference to 'national security' had not the weasel been at such pains to explain it away . . . but explain what away exactly? The diversion scheme as a strategic weapon? How would it work? By deliberately tampering with the global climate?
That didn't make sense--not that Boris could see, anyway--because its effects would be felt in Russia just as much as in the hated, feared, subversive West. So what
Secretary of Defense Thomas J. Lebasse was dying of cancer of the stomach, and he knew it. At best the doctors had given him two years, which was a year longer than he had given himself. His body disgusted him; it stank of putrefaction, the sweetish sickly odor of death.
He was sixty-one years old, a small round-shouldered man with a bald head that seemed too big for his body. Superficially he looked healthy, having just returned from ten days in Florida, yet observed closely his tan had a gray pallor and the skin of his face sagged in flaccid folds underneath his dull eyes.
Right now his body wasn't the only thing that disgusted him; this meeting, and in particular these people, he found utterly distasteful.
'You keep insisting we have no choice but to implement this plan, Major Madden. As I see it, that's precisely what we do have--a choice. We still have our nuclear capability, which is superior to anything the Soviets can muster.'
From his position at the head of the table Lebasse looked along the two rows of faces, all turned attentively toward him. Three members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. An admiral who had made a special study of deep-draft cargo vessels. Two high-ranking air force officers, experts in missile deployment. A civilian scientist named Farrer whose function here today Lebasse wasn't entirely clear about.
Plus the two prime movers of DEPARTMENT STORE: Gen. George ('Blindeye') Wolfe and his henchman, Maj. Lloyd F. Madden. They had nursed their baby with tender loving care, Lebasse knew, not to say ruthless opportunism, and they put him in mind of ambitious, hard-eyed parents who would stop at nothing to protect their offspring.
'Mr. Secretary, with respect,' Major Madden was saying in his cultured New England voice, 'we are faced with a radical new situation.'
Appearance matched voice perfectly: neat dark hair, carefully parted, smooth sharp-featured face, tailored uniform with lapel badges burnished to winking brightness. His was the kind of face that became more youthful with the passing years, in contrast with General Wolfe, who at sixty-two could have passed for a man of seventy. Two things had contributed to this: high blood pressure, which had forced him to lose weight and made his neck scrawny, and his early years spent under foreign suns, which had imprinted a crazed mosaic on what had once been a strong, rugged face.
'The use of nuclear weapons is becoming an outdated concept in terms of global strategy.' Madden spoke with the smug knowingness of a schoolboy who thinks himself brighter than his teacher but isn't smart enough not to show it. 'The MX missile system will be obsolete even before it's fully operational, and already the budget is way off the graph. Now, we know from intelligence reports and satellite photore-connaissance that the Soviets are well advanced in their scheme to divert the Ob and Yenisei rivers; that within three years maximum the scheme will be completed. With respect, Mr. Secretary--'
'Forget the respect,' Lebasse snapped. 'Say what you have to say.'
'Simply that we have to be ready to meet this new threat, sir. The balance of power must be maintained if we're to safeguard the nation. After all, that is our prime responsibility.'
'Thank you, Major Madden,' said Lebasse icily. 'I don't need you to remind me of my--our--responsibility to the nation. What you're telling me is that we're entering a new phase in which nuclear weapons are only of minor, or at least secondary, importance. Instead, the confrontation is potentially of the kind that you term 'environmental war.' Have I got it right?'
'Yes, Mr. Secretary. That is correct.' Lloyd Madden doodled on the blank pad in front of him, holding himself tight inside. He'd been too forthright; too damn obvious in fact. Better not to further arouse this sick old man, who should have stayed in Florida with the rest of the senile geriatrics. So he would wait, bide his time, let somebody else take the lead, he decided, drawing a cock and pair of balls.
That somebody else was U.S. Air Force Gen. Walter Stafford of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose support was crucial because he was known to take a moderate line (dubbed by the media as a 'dawk'--midway between dove and hawk) and, more important, because he had known
Lebasse since they were students together at Columbia in the early fifties.
'I share your misgivings, Tom, but I'm afraid Major Madden is right. We have no real alternative but to bring DEPARTMENT STORE to full operational status as quickly as possible. Nothing else will contain the Soviets, that's a dead certainty.'
' 'Dead' being the operative word,' Lebasse remarked stonily. He was thinking of his four grandchildren, whose ages ranged from seventeen to five. This was a fine legacy to bequeath them--global death. He wondered bleakly if it had been any different since 5:30 on the morning of July 16, 1945, when the atomic bomb stopped being a row of symbols in a physicist's notebook and was transformed into a five-thousand-degree fireball above the Trinity site in Arizona. That had happened two days before his ninth birthday.
Was what he was being asked to sanction any more monstrous than that? No, except that he would not live to see the consequences. The seeds of death were already within him, his escape route to eternity. History would
