asked.
Kuhl shook his head. “I’ve no interest in art.”
“Perhaps not, but you might want to make an exception and seek theirs out anyway. ‘The Last Judgment,’ ‘The Triumph of Death,’ ‘The Beggars’… they are works filled with marvelous deviltry, to mangle the words of a poet who admired Brueghel in particular.” DeVane smiled. “Very little is known about either man, and most of their oils are undated. We know both lived in the Middle Ages, about a century apart. Who commissioned their paintings, what specifications they were given, whether they ever painted to please themselves rather than their patrons… these things are mostly open to conjecture. But their styles and monstrous images cannot be confused with anyone else’s, and must have bordered upon the heretical in their day. One sees a Bosch canvas, one does not need a signature to identify the cruel, exacting hand of its creator. The work
Kuhl met his gaze.
“I don’t get your point.”
DeVane smiled.
“I think you do, despite my occasional tendency to be elliptical,” he said. “Please accept that I implied no disrespect. To the contrary, I see you as a master of your trade, an invisible artist whose handiwork is unmistakable to the studied connoisseur. And I enjoy giving you creative leeway.”
DeVane turned over more cards. Kuhl watched him, showing neither interest nor disinterest.
“I must tell you, Siegfried, my single nagging concern about our endeavor is not that we will fail to carry it out, but that success could prove a disappointment to our clients,” DeVane said after a moment. “Compared to what we intend to place aboard the Russian orbital platform, the device you fielded is as a cannonball would be to a precision-guided missile.”
Kuhl shrugged minimally. A
“Havoc does have a far higher performance watershed to meet, yes, and the fact that one proved reliable is no guarantee that the other will do the same,” he said. “Still, the Albanians have paid us up front. As have the cartels. We’ve made clear that their money is ours to keep regardless.”
“I like to take the larger view. Keep our customers satisfied.” DeVane paused again. “It is also my wish to see Roger Gordian’s reputation and influence suffer for all this. UpLink’s growing presence in so many of our pipeline nations arguably represents our greatest threat. The economic and political stability his operations brings to those states is bad for business, and what is bad for business must be eliminated. Think of the trust he stands to lose with his global partners should we deliver on our contracts… and consider the embarrassment to us if we don’t. There are huge dividends at stake on both sides.”
Kuhl nodded once.
“A weapon’s effectiveness cannot be absolutely proven until it is deployed,” he said. “But we know that the engineering difficulties that beset its prototypical antecedents — namely the lack of an adequate, rechargeable energy source, and susceptibility to their own radiation — have been solved. The sun itself will function as an incomparably powerful generator and allow long-range, focused targeting from space. And the exotic metal alloy developed by Ilkanovitch’s team has proven capable of shielding the device’s components from its intense, repetitive production of broad-frequency microwave beams. Ilkanovitch’s documentation of the Russian testing is backed up by the evidence we’ve seen of its potential.”
“You are referring to the railway ‘accident’?”
“And to the crash of the 747 commuter plane in Los Angeles some months back. American investigators attributed its explosion after takeoff to a spark in the conductive wiring inside its center fuel tank. This was true. But the cause of the spark remained undetermined in official reports, and the abrupt retirement of a senior FBI official who publicly speculated that it might have been a microwave pulse was swept under the agency’s very large carpet.” Kuhl paused. “Again, I am convinced beyond doubt that Ilkanovitch’s claim of responsibility is genuine… and Havoc is many, many times more effective than the ground-based device that ignited the fuel tank. Imagine the destruction of not a single plane, but of dozens with the targeting of a major airport’s air traffic control system. Imagine the chaos that would arise from the total disruption of civil electronic systems and communications grids in a city such as New York or London. Havoc will achieve superb results. It will make the entire world hostage to our demands.”
DeVane looked at him.
“Tell me what you’ve learned about Gordian’s proposed reinforcement of the Cosmodrome.”
“It’s as we foresaw. My intelligence is that he’s succeeded in convincing the officials at Baikonur to let him provide additional security. Much of the support is being brought over from the UpLink ground station in Kaliningrad, though he is drawing upon other assets as well… all meant to prevent anything from interfering with the shuttle’s launch.”
“So he is playing into our hands. Without being aware of our true goal, thinking we mean to
“Exactly.”
DeVane looked at him another moment, then nodded.
“Good enough,” he said. “You have sufficient manpower in Kazakhstan to implement our strike?”
“Yes,” Kuhl replied. “With added elements leaving from our base in the Pantanal tomorrow night.”
“Those men will be transporting the device, I take it?”
“Yes.”
“Then let us be expeditious and move within a few days,” DeVane said.
“Yes.”
DeVane turned over his last three cards and nodded with satisfaction, his smile lengthening, his lips parting slightly to show his small, white front teeth.
“Aces, Siegfried,” he said, “We’re all aces.”
As the sun was setting in Bolivia it was blazing an ascendant track through the Kazakhstan sky halfway around the world, where the latest stream of UpLink helicopters and transport planes had begun to arrive at the military airfield in Leninsk, some twenty miles south of the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
His hand visored over his eyes to shield it from the desert brightness, Yuri Petrov stood looking out at the tarmac as a wide-bellied Lockheed transport made its final approach. He scowled. Perhaps he ought to feel something like gratitude for the assistance he was receiving from UpLink, but instead he felt… what? Outrage was more than he could muster these days, and he had worn indignation on his back for so long it was like an old, threadbare shirt. How could it be otherwise?
He was the director of a Russian Space Agency that was propped up by American loans and subsidies. The Baikonur facility that had been the launch site for every manned space mission Russia had conducted, and the town of Leninsk that had been established as an outpost for its defense and supply, had since 1994 been leased from the sovereign state of Kazakhstan — once part of the Soviet Union — for over a hundred million dollars a year, much of it apportioned from the American hand-outs. And now the Voenno Kosmicheskie Sily, or Military Space Force, that was garrisoned in the town had been subordinated to a private American security contingent under the rubric of “mutual support” at the direct order of President Vladimir Starinov himself, who many believed had become not merely indebted, but
Petrov’s scowl deepened. Why bother raising the Russian flag over the installation, emblazoning Russian decals on the spacecraft that launched from it, or stitching Russian patches onto the spacesuits of the cosmonauts that rode into space aboard those craft? Why not confirm what was already all too evident to him and stamp the stars and stripes, or better yet the U.S. dollar sign, onto the brow of every person who worked for an agency that had once been at the forefront of space exploration, sending the first satellite into orbit around the earth, the first unmanned probes to the surface of the moon and Venus, the first
Now Petrov watched the Lockheed taxi easily to a stop in an unloading area across the airfield, where ground crews and wheeled freight conveyors were already rolling toward its freight door. He was aware of the almost subliminal drone of more aircraft winging in above the steppes, while above him another transport bearing UpLink
