Overkill

colonel shook his head at the President’s unspoken question. ‘No, sir. No casualties – it was an electro-mechanical trigger.’

The President stood. ‘Inform the Vice-President and the Joint Chiefs,’ he said, ‘and everyone else on the Command Net. Then locate Ambassador Karasin and tell him I want to speak with him.’ The President paused and smiled grimly. ‘And then,’ he concluded, ‘I’ll have a little chat with the Kremlin and see what they have to say about all this.’

Hammersmith, London

Simpson’s office was large enough to include a small conference table, and when Richter got there Simpson was sitting at the head of it, the Intelligence Director to his right and a long-haired, bespectacled man wearing jeans and a CALTECH T-shirt, and who looked faintly familiar to Richter, on his left. The only vacant chair was at the end of the table, facing Simpson. Richter had changed out of the g-suit in his office, where he kept some spare clothes. ‘Do you know James Baker?’ Simpson asked, by way of introduction.

‘I think I’ve seen you around the place,’ Richter said, stood up and shook his hand.

‘Probably. They usually keep me locked up in the basement.’

‘Of course,’ Richter said. ‘You’re one of our computer experts.’

Baker grinned at him. ‘They normally call me the computer nerd.’

‘Well done,’ Simpson said, ‘in France and Gibraltar. Both were handled very competently.’

‘You can thank the SAS for that,’ Richter said. ‘I was really only along for the ride.’

‘If you say so. Right, that was the past; now we have to look to the future. I’ve asked Baker along because I hope he’ll be able to help, but first things first. We will be re-routing the London weapon as you suggested. It should be in place within four or five days.’ The Intelligence Director looked disapproving. ‘Second, the word Modin insisted you remember – Krutaya. We’ve run it through our database, or rather Baker has, and we came up with nothing, or almost nothing. We tried SIS, MI5 and GCHQ – all negative. A tame source in CIA London tried it through the CIA, DIA and NSA systems with the same result. It’s not a code-word that we know about, and it isn’t the real name, or the work-name, of any known Russian operative.’

Richter interrupted him. ‘You said we had almost nothing on it. What did you find?’

‘The only Krutaya listed was in the gazetteer,’ said Simpson. ‘It’s a small settlement in the Komi district of Russia, at the southern end of the Timanskiy Kryazh. It’s virtually at the end of a road that leads to another settlement called Voy Vozh but goes nowhere after that.’ He was looking absurdly pleased with himself.

‘Yes?’ Richter said, encouragingly.

Simpson was determined to spin it out. ‘We checked the BID (CIS) and found nothing, and we checked with JARIC at Brampton. No major developments, nothing of apparent military interest. Apart from what appear to be new telephone cables and some renovation work on a couple of buildings, nothing of any interest appears to have happened in the past year or two – or perhaps for the last two hundred years – at Krutaya.’

‘Simpson, stop grinning like a Cheshire cat,’ Richter said. ‘Stop telling me what you haven’t found, and tell me what you have found.’

‘Where do you think Krutaya is near?’

‘I seem to have forgotten to bring my pocket atlas of the world with me,’ Richter said. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Ukhta,’ said Simpson triumphantly.

Richter sat in silence for a moment. The name rang a distant bell, but he couldn’t place it. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That means nothing to me. Give me a clue.’

He seemed to have spoilt Simpson’s moment. ‘Your memory’s going, Richter. What about Sosnogorsk?’

Light dawned. ‘Where Newman’s deputy went as a translator?’ Richter said.

‘Exactly. Krutaya is about fifty miles to the south-east of Sosnogorsk.’

‘Is that it?’ Richter asked.

‘More or less, yes.’

Richter stared at him. ‘I’d hoped for something a bit more interesting than that,’ he said. ‘As far as I can see, we’ve been given the name of a town in Russia. A town which appears to have no military significance whatsoever. The only possible link, which could be entirely coincidental, is that last month an SIS operative visited a town about fifty miles away.’

Simpson was still smiling. ‘Baker has a theory,’ he said. Baker was grinning too. Richter was beginning to feel like the only one in the room who hadn’t understood the punch line of the joke.

‘OK,’ Richter said. ‘Let’s have it.’

‘First,’ Baker said, ‘let me take you back to the French autoroute, when you talked to General Modin. A question. When he gave you the word Krutaya, did you think he was serious? I mean, did he toss the word out to see if you’d catch it, or did he really emphasize it?’

‘He was serious about it, no doubt,’ Richter replied.

‘Did you think he was trying to help you, or was it a ploy to mislead you, to force you to waste time looking in the wrong place?’

Richter thought for a few moments. ‘I think he was trying to help, not hinder.’

‘Right,’ Baker responded. ‘Now let’s take the situation a stage further. If we accept that Modin was genuine, then the word or the place Krutaya must be important. Because of his position in the SVR, Modin probably has a reasonably good idea of the data held on allied intelligence service computers, and he would have been able to assume that the only Krutaya we would find would be the village at the foot of the Severnyy Urals.’ Richter nodded. ‘So, a reasonable working hypothesis would be that Krutaya the place, rather than, say, Krutaya the code-name, is important, despite what the BID and JARIC say.’

‘I don’t see where you’re heading, but I’ll accept that for the moment.’

‘JARIC reported only building renovation work, and new telephone cables being laid. The telephone cables were laid underground, in a trench. The Russians usually run them using telegraph poles.’

Richter was beginning to get confused. ‘Maybe it’s an attractive area. Maybe they decided not to cover the landscape with telegraph poles. Maybe they’ve run out of bloody trees to make the poles – I don’t know.’

‘Maybe,’ said Baker, ‘but there could be another reason. They could be important telephone cables. Cables that they didn’t want to string from telegraph poles in case some drunken peasant drove his tractor into one and brought the lot down.’

Richter thought this through for a minute or so. ‘The road goes nowhere,’ he said slowly, ‘apart from running to the other settlement. If we assume that these cables are important for some reason, they must link something in Krutaya with somewhere else. They can’t just be vital telephone links that simply pass through the village.’

‘Precisely,’ said Baker. ‘And so?’ he prompted.

‘So if we accept that Modin was on the level, then there is something in Krutaya that we need to find out about.’ Richter looked at Simpson. ‘I’m not going tramping round the bloody Urals disguised as a Russian potato farmer, if that’s what you’ve got in mind,’ he said.

‘There won’t be any need for that,’ Simpson said, and nodded to Baker.

‘So what is it?’ Baker asked. ‘What could the Russians put in a nowhere village that’s important enough to link to the outside world with armoured telephone cables? OK,’ he said, as Richter opened his mouth to challenge his assumption, ‘I don’t know that they’re armoured, but I think that they probably are.’

Richter shook his head. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘just assume I’m a congenital idiot and tell me what you’re leading up to. I’ve been up all night and I want to get to bed some time today.’

Baker looked disappointed. ‘A computer,’ he said. ‘A big computer.’

Simpson interrupted. ‘Put it all together, Richter. Modin’s insistence on you investigating the clue he gave you; the Russian plan; the underground cables; the fact that Krutaya is way out in the sticks, well away from any strategic target, and the visit to Sosnogorsk by Newman’s deputy. Add that lot up, and what do you get?’

‘A headache,’ Richter said.

‘You get,’ said Baker slowly, ‘the very real possibility that one of the buildings in Krutaya houses the computer that controls the satellite that controls the weapons that the Russians have planted.’