even been explored. Oh, yes, the gold deposits at Kolyma, but the interior itself?' A dismissive wave of the hand. 'Such fools, and now they must ask others to do the job for them…' The Minister's voice trailed off, and his gaze returned to Zhang Han San. 'And so, what have they found?'
'Our Japanese friends? More oil for starters, they think as big a find as Prudhoe Bay.' He slid a sheet of paper across the table. 'Here are the minerals they've located in the last nine months.'
'All this?'
'The area is almost as large as all of Western Europe, and all the Soviets ever cared about was a strip around their damned railroads. The fools.'
Zhang snorted. 'All their economic problems, the solution for them lay right under their feet from the moment they assumed power from the czar. In essence it's rather like South Africa, a treasure house, but including oil, which the South Africans lack. As you see, nearly all of the strategic minerals, and in such quantities…'
'Do the Russians know?'
'Some of it.' Zhang Han San nodded. 'Such a secret is too vast to conceal entirely, but only about half-the items on the list marked with stars are those Moscow knows about.'
'But not these others?'
Zhang smiled. 'No.'
Even in a culture where men and women learn to control their feelings, the Minister could not conceal his amazement at the paper in his hands. They didn't shake, but he used them to place the page flat on the polished table, smoothing it out as though it were a piece of fine silk.
'This could double the wealth of our country.'
'That is conservative,' observed the senior field officer of his country's intelligence service. Zhang, covered as a diplomat, actually conducted more diplomacy than most of his country's senior foreign-service officers. It was more of an embarrassment to them than to him. 'You need to remember that this is the estimate the Japanese have given us, Comrade Minister. They fully expect access to half of what they discover, and since they will perforce spend most of the development money…'
A smile. 'Yes, while we take most of the strategic risks. Offensive little people,' the Minister added. Like those with whom Zhang had negotiated in Tokyo, the Minister and the Marshal, who continued to keep his peace, were veterans of the 8th Route Army. They too had memories of war—but not of war with America. He shrugged. 'Well, we need them, don't we?'
'Their weapons are formidable,' the Marshal noted. 'But not their numbers.'
'They know that,' Zhang Han San told his hosts. 'It is, as my main contact says, a convenient marriage of needs and requirements, but he hopes that it will develop, in his words, into a true and cordial relationship between peoples with a true—'
'Who will be on top?' the Marshal asked, smiling coarsely.
'They will, of course. He thinks,' Zhang Han San added.
'In that case, since they are courting us, it is they who need to make the first overt moves,' the Minister said, defining his country's policy in a way that would not offend his own superior, a small man with elfin eyes and the sort of determination to make a lion pause. He looked over at the Marshal, who nodded soberly. The man's capacity for alcohol, both of the others thought, was remarkable.
'As I expected,' Zhang announced with a smile. 'Indeed, as they expect, since they anticipate the greatest profit.'
'They are entitled to their illusions.'
'I admire your confidence,' the NASA engineer observed from the viewers' gallery over the shop floor. He also admired their funding. The government had fronted the money for this industrial conglomerate to acquire the Soviet design and build it. Private industry sure had a lot of muscle here, didn't it?
'We think we have the trans-stage problem figured out. A faulty valve,' the Japanese designer explained. 'We used a Soviet design.'
'What do you mean?'
'I mean that we used their valve design for the trans-stage fuel tanks. It wasn't a good one. They tried to do everything there with extremely lightweight, but—'
The NASA representative blinked hard. 'You mean to tell me that their whole production run of the missile was—'
A knowing look cut the American off. 'Yes. At least a third of them would have failed. My people believe that the test missiles were specially engineered, but that the production models were, well, typically Russian.'
'Hmph.' The American's bags were already packed, and a car was waiting to take him to Narita International for the interminable flight to Chicago. He looked at the production floor of the plant. It was probably what General Dynamics had looked like back in the 19608, at the height of the Cold War. The boosters were lined up like sausages, fifteen of them in various stages of assembly, side by side, one after the other, while white-coated technicians performed their complicated tasks. 'These ten look about done.'
'They are,' the factory manager assured him.
'When's your next test shot?'
'Next month. We've got our first three payloads ready,' the designer replied.
'When you guys get into something, you don't fool around, do you?'
'It's simply more efficient to do it this way.'
'So they're going to go out of here fully assembled?'
A nod. 'That's right. We'll pressurize the fuel tanks with inert gas, of course, but one of the nice things about using this design is that they're designed to be moved as intact units. That way you save final-assembly time at the launch point.'
'Move them out by truck?'
'No.' The Japanese engineer shook his head. 'By rail.'
'What about the payloads?'
'They're being assembled elsewhere. That's proprietary, I'm afraid.'
The other production line did not have foreign visitors. In fact it had few visitors at all despite the fact that it was located in the suburbs of Tokyo. The sign outside the building proclaimed it to be a research-and-development center for a major corporation, and those who lived nearby guessed that it was for computer chips or something similar. The power lines that went into it were not remarkable, since the most power-hungry units were the heating and air-conditioning units that sat in a small enclosure in the back. Traffic in and out was unremarkable as well. There was a modest parking lot with space for perhaps eighty automobiles, and the lot was almost always at least half full. There was a discreet security fence, pretty much like what would have been around any other light-industry facility anywhere in the world, and a security shack at both entrances. Cars and trucks came and went, and that was pretty much that for the casual observer.
Inside was something else. Although the two external security points were staffed by smiling men who politely gave directions to disoriented motorists, inside the building it was something else entirely. Each security desk featured hidden attachments which held German-made P-38 pistols, and the guards here didn't smile much. They didn't know what they were guarding, of course. Some things were just too unusual to be recognized. No one had ever produced a TV documentary on the fabrication of nuclear devices.
The shop floor was fifty meters long by fifteen wide, and there were two evenly spaced rows of machine tools, each of them enclosed with Plexiglas. Each enclosure was individually climate-controlled by a separate ventilation system, as was the room as a whole. The technicians and scientists wore white coveralls and gloves not unlike those required of workers in a computer-chip plant, and indeed when some of them stepped outside for a smoke, passersby took them for exactly that.
In the clean room, roughly shaped plutonium hemispheres came in at one end, were machined into their final shapes at several stages, and emerged from the other end so polished they looked like glass. Each was then placed in a plastic holder and hand-carried out of the machine shop to the storage room, where each was set on an individual shelf made of steel covered with plastic. Metal contact could not be allowed, because plutonium, in addition to being radioactive, and warm due to its alpha-radiation decay, was a reactive metal, quick to spark on contact with another metal, and actually flammable. Like magnesium and titanium, the metal would burn with gusto, and, once ignited, was the very devil to extinguish. For all that, handling the hemispheres—there were twenty of them—became just one more routine for the engineers. That task had long since been completed.
