certain that would be enough to do the job.
And then there was the hard-to-conceal fiasco in Antarctica. Egg on face: a subterranean nuclear test program in international territory! If nothing else, it had been enough to stop JFK running for a second term. The test program was a bad excuse: but it was far better than confessing what had really happened to the 501st Airborne Division on the cold plateau beyond Mount Erebus. The plateau that the public didn’t know about, that didn’t show up on the maps issued by the geological survey departments of those governments party to the Dresden Agreement of 1931-an arrangement that even Hitler had kept. The plateau that had swallowed more U-2 spy planes than the Soviet Union, more surface expeditions than darkest Africa.
Shit. How the hell am I going to put this together for him?
Roger’s spent the past five hours staring at this twenty-page report, trying to think of a way of summarizing its dryly quantifiable terror in words that will give the reader power over them, the power to think the unthinkable. But it’s proving difficult. The new man in the White House is a straight-talker, who demands straight answers. He’s pious enough not to believe in the supernatural, confident that just to listen to one of his speeches is an uplifting experience, if you can close your eyes and believe in morning in America. There is probably no way of explaining Project Koschei, or XK-Pluto, or MK-Nightmare, or the gates, without watering them down into just another weapons system-which they are not.
Weapons may have deadly or hideous effects, but they acquire moral character from the actions of those who use them. Whereas these projects are indelibly stained by a patina of ancient evil…
He hopes that if the balloon ever does go up, if the sirens wail, he and Andrea and Jason will be left behind to face the nuclear fire. It’ll be a merciful death compared with what he suspect lurks out there, in the unexplored vastness beyond the gates. The vastness that made Nixon cancel the manned space program, leaving just the standing joke of the shuttle, when he realized just how hideously dangerous the space race might become. The darkness that broke Jimmy Carter’s faith and turned Lyndon B. Johnson into an alcoholic.
He stands up, nervously shifts from one foot to the other. Looks around at the walls of his cubicle. For a moment the cigarette smoldering on the edge of his ashtray catches his attention: wisps of blue-gray smoke coil like lazy dragons in the air above it, writhing in a strange cuneiform text. He blinks and they’re gone, and the skin in the small of his back prickles as if someone had pissed on his grave.
“Shit.” Finally, a spoken word in the silence. His hand is shaking as he stubs the cigarette out.Mustn’t let this get to me. He glances at the wall. It’s nineteen hundred hours; too late, too late. He should go home, Andy will be worrying herself sick.
In the end it’s all too much. He slides the thin folder into the safe behind his chair, turns the locking handle and spins the dial, then signs himself out of the reading room and submits to the usual exit search.
During the thirty-mile drive home, he spits out of the window, trying to rid his mouth of the taste of Auschwitz ashes.
Late Night in the White House The Colonel is febrile, jittering about the room with gung-ho enthusiasm. “That was a mighty fine report you pulled together, Jourgensen!” He paces over to the niche between the office filing cabinet and the wall, turns on the spot, paces back to the far side of his desk. “You understand the fundamentals. I like that. A few more guys like you running the Company and we wouldn’t have this fuck-up in Tehran.” He grins, contagiously.
The Colonel is a firestorm of enthusiasm, burning out of control like a forties comic-book hero. He has Roger on the edge of his chair, almost sitting at attention. Roger has to bite his tongue to remind himself not to call the Colonel ‘sir’-he’s a civilian, not in the chain of command.
“That’s why I’ve asked Deputy Director McMurdo to reassign you to this office, to work on my team as Company liaison. And I’m pleased to say that he’s agreed.”
Roger can’t stop himself: “To work here, sir?”Here is in the basement of the Executive Office Building, an extension hanging off the White House. Whoever the Colonel is he’s gotpull, in positively magical quantities. “What will I be doing, sir? You said, your team-”
“Relax a bit. Drink your coffee.” The Colonel paces back behind his desk, sits down. Roger sips cautiously at the brown sludge in the mug with the Marine Corps crest.
“The president told me to organize a team,” the Colonel says, so casually that Roger nearly chokes on his coffee, “to handle contingencies. October surprises. Those asshole commies down in Nicaragua. ‘We’re eyeball to eyeball with an Evil Empire, Ollie, and we can’t afford to blink’-those were his exact words.
The Evil Empire uses dirty tricks. But nowadays we’re better than they are: buncha hicks, like some third-world dictatorship-Upper Volta with shoggoths. My job is to pin them down and cut them up.
Don’t give them a chance to whack the shoe on the UN table, demand concessions. If they want to bluff I’ll call ’em on it. If they want to go toe-to-toe I’ll dance with ’em.” He’s up and pacing again. “The Company used to do that, and do it okay, back in the fifties and sixties. But too many bleeding hearts-it makes me sick. If you guys went back to wet ops today you’d have journalists following you every time you went to the john in case it was newsworthy.
“Well, we aren’t going to do it that way this time. It’s a small team and the buck stops here.” The Colonel pauses, then glances at the ceiling. “Well, maybe up there. But you get the picture. I need someone who knows the Company, an insider who has clearance up the wazoo who can go in and get the dope before it goes through a fucking committee of ass-watching bureaucrats. I’m also getting someone from the Puzzle Palace, and some words to give me pull with Big Black.” He glances at Roger sharply, and Roger nods: he’s cleared for National Security Agency-Puzzle Palace-intelligence, and knows about Big Black, the National Reconnaissance Office, which is so secret that even its existence is still classified.
Roger is impressed by this Colonel, against his better judgment. Within the Byzantine world of the US intelligence services, he is talking about building his very own pocket battleship and sailing it under the Jolly Roger with letters of marque and reprise signed by the president. But Roger still has some questions to ask, to scope out the limits of what Colonel North is capable of. “What about Fever Dream, sir?”
The Colonel puts his coffee-cup down. “I own it,” he says, bluntly. “And Nightmare. And Pluto.‘Any means necessary,’ he said, and I have an executive order with the ink still damp to prove it. Those projects aren’t part of the national command structure anymore. Officially they’ve been stood down from active status and are being considered for inclusion in the next round of arms reduction talks. They’re not part of the deterrent Orbat anymore; we’re standardizing on just nuclear weapons. Unofficially, they’re part of my group, and I will use them as necessary to contain and reduce the Evil Empire’s war-making capabilities.”
Roger’s skin crawls with an echo of that childhood terror. “And the Dresden Agreement…?”
“Don’t worry. Nothing short ofthem breaking it would lead me to do so.” The Colonel grins, toothily.
“Which is where you come in…”
The Moonlit Shores of Lake Vostok The metal pier is dry and cold, the temperature hovering close to zero degrees Fahrenheit. It’s oppressively dark in the cavern under the ice, and Roger shivers inside his multiple layers of insulation, shifts from foot to foot to keep warm. He has to swallow to keep his ears clear and he feels slightly dizzy from the pressure in the artificial bubble of air, pumped under the icy ceiling to allow humans to exist here, under the Ross Ice Shelf; they’ll all spend more than a day sitting in depressurization chambers on the way back up to the surface.
There is no sound from the waters lapping just below the edge of the pier. The floodlights vanish into the surface and keep going-the water in the sub-surface Antarctic lake is incredibly clear-but are swallowed up rapidly, giving an impression of infinite, inky depths.
Manfred is here as the Colonel’s representative, to observe the arrival of the probe, receive the consignment they’re carrying, and report back that everything is running smoothly. The others try to ignore him, jittery at the presence of the man from DC. They’re a gaggle of engineers and artificers, flown out via Mc-Murdo base to handle the midget sub’s operations. A nervous lieutenant supervises a squad of marines with complicated-looking weapons, half gun and half video camera, stationed at the corners of the raft. And there’s the usual platform crew, deep-sea rig-maintenance types-but subdued and nervous looking. They’re afloat in a bubble of pressurized air wedged against the underside of the Antarctic ice sheet: below them stretch the still, supercooled waters of Lake Vostok.
They’re waiting for a rendezvous.
“Five hundred yards,” reports one of the techs. “Rising on ten.” His companion nods. They’re waiting for the men in the midget subdrilling quietly through three miles of frigid water, intruders in a long-drowned tomb. “Have
