Debt of Honor jr-6 Page 12

  "Our grandchildren either won't care or they'll ask what the big deal was," Arnie van Damm observed, deadpan.

  "True," Ryan conceded. Trust Arnie to put a neutral spin on things.

  "Now tell me the bad news," Durling ordered.

  "Five billion," Jack said, unsurprised by the hurt expression he got in return. "It's worth it, sir. It really is."

  "Tell me why."

  "Mr. President, since I was in grammar school our country has lived with the threat of nuclear weapons on ballistic launchers aimed at the United States. Inside of six weeks, the last of them could be gone."

  "They're already aimed—"

  "Yes, sir, we have ours aimed at the Sargasso Sea, and so do they, an error that you can fix by opening an inspection port and changing a printed-circuit card in the guidance system. To do that takes ten minutes from the moment you open the access door into the missile silo and requires a screwdriver and a flashlight." Actually, that was true only for the Soviet—Russian! Ryan corrected himself for the thousandth time—missiles. The remaining American birds took longer to retarget due to their greater sophistication. Such were the vagaries of engineering science.

  "All gone, sir, gone forever," Ryan said. "I'm the hard-nosed hawk here, remember? We can sell this to the Hill. It's worth the price and more."

  "You make a good case, as always," van Damm announced from his chair.

  "Where will OMB find the money, Arnie?" President Durling asked.

  Now it was Ryan's turn to cringe.

  "Defense, where else?"

  "Before we get too enthusiastic about that, we've gone too far already."

  "What will we save by eliminating our last missiles?" van Damm asked.

  "It'll cost us money," Jack replied. "We're already paying an arm and a leg to dismantle the missile subs, and the environmentalists—"

  "Those wonderful people," Durling observed.

  "—but it's a one-time expense."

  Eyes turned to the chief of staff. His political judgment was impeccable. The weathered face weighed the factors and turned to Ryan. "It's worth the hassle. There will be a hassle on the Hill, boss," he told the President, "but a year from now you'll be telling the American people how you put an end to the sword of—"

  "Damocles," Ryan said.

  "Catholic schools." Arnie chuckled. "The sword that's hung over America for a generation. The papers'll like it, and you just know that CNN will make a big deal about it, one of their hour-long special-report gigs, with lots of good pictures and inaccurate commentary."

  "Don't like that, Jack?" Durling asked, smiling broadly now.

  "Mr. President, I'm not a politician, okay? Isn't it sufficient to the moment that we're dismantling the last two hundred ICBMs in the world?"

  Well, that wasn't exactly true, was it? Let's not wax too poetic, Jack. There are still the Chinese, Brits, and French. But the latter two would fall into line, wouldn't they? And the Chinese could be made to see the light through trade negotiations, and besides, what enemies did they have left to worry about?

  "Only if people see and understand, Jack." Durling turned to van Damm.

  Both of them ignored Jack's not-quite-spoken additional concerns. "Get the media office working on this. We do the formal announcement in Moscow, Jack?"

  Ryan nodded. "That was the deal, sir." There would be more to it, careful leaks, unconfirmed at first. Congressional briefings to generate more. Quiet calls to various TV networks and trusted reporters who would be in exactly the right places at exactly the right times—difficult because of the ten-hour difference between Moscow and the last American ICBM fields—to record for history the end of the nightmare. The actual elimination process was rather messy, which was why American tree-huggers had such a problem with it. In the case of the Russian birds, the warheads were removed for dismantlement, the missiles drained of their liquid fuels and stripped of valuable and/or classified electronic components, and then one hundred kilograms of high explosives were used to blast open the top of the silo, which in due course would be filled with dirt and leveled off. The American procedure was different because all the U.S. missiles used solid fuels. In their case, the missile bodies were transported to Utah, where they were opened at both ends; then the rocket motors were ignited and allowed to burn out like the world's largest highway flares, creating clouds of toxic exhaust that might snuff out the lives of some wild birds. In America the silos would also be blasted open—a United States Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that the national-security implications of the international arms-control treaty superseded four environmental-protection statutes, despite many legal briefs and protests to the contrary. The final blast would be highly dramatic, all the more so because its force would be about one ten-millionth of what the silo had once represented. Some numbers, and some concepts, Jack reflected, were simply too vast to be appreciated—even by people like himself.

  The legend of Damocles had to do with a courtier in the circle of King Dionysius of Sicily, who had waxed eloquent on the good fortune of his king. To make a point in the cruel and heavy-handed way of "great" men, Dionysius had invited his courtier, Damocles, to a sumptuous banquet and sat him in a comfortable place directly under a sword, which in turn was suspended from the ceiling by a thread. The purpose was to demonstrate that the King's own good fortune was as tenuous as the safety of his guest.

  It was the same with America. Everything it had was still under the nuclear sword, a fact made graphically clear to Ryan in Denver not too long before, and for that reason his personal mission since returning to government service had been to put the end to the tale, once and for all.

  "You want to handle the press briefings?"

  "Yes, Mr. President," Jack replied, surprised and grateful for Durling's stunning generosity.

  " 'Northern Resource Area'?" the Chinese Defense Minister asked. He added dryly, "Interesting way of putting it."

  "So what do you think?" Zhang Han San asked from his side of the table. He was fresh from another meeting with Yamata.

  "In the abstract, it's strategically possible. I leave the economic estimates to others," the Marshal replied, ever the cautious one despite the quantity of mao-tai he'd consumed this evening.

  "The Russians have been employing three Japanese survey firms. Amazing, isn't it? Eastern Siberia has hardly 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, c
overed 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.

  The harder part was the RV bodies. These were large, hollow, inverted cones, 120 centimeters in height and 50 across at the base, made of uranium-238, a darkly reddish and very hard metal. At just over four hundred kilograms each, the bulky cones had to be precisely machined for absolute dynamic symmetry. Intended to "fly" after a fashion, both through vacuum and, briefly, through air, they had to be perfectly balanced, lest they become unstable in flight. Ensuring that had to everyone's surprise turned out to be the most difficult production task of all. The casting process had been reordered twice, and even now the RV bodies were periodically rotated, similar to the procedure for balancing an automobile tire, but with far more stringent tolerances. The exterior of each of the ten was not as finely machined as the parts that went inside, though they were smooth to the ungloved touch. Inside was something else. Slight but symmetrical irregularities would allow the "physics package"—an American term—to fit in snugly, and, if the moment came—which everyone hoped it would not, of course—the enormous flux of high-energy "fast" neutrons would attack the RV bodies, causing a "fast-fission" reaction, and doubling the energy released by the plutonium, tritium, and lithium deuteride within.

  That was the elegant part, the engineers thought, especially those unfamiliar with nuclear physics who had learned the process along the way. The U-238, so dense and hard and difficult to work, was a highly refractory metal. The Americans even used it to make armor for their tanks, it
resisted external energy so well. Screeching through the atmosphere at 27,000 kilometers per hour, air friction would have destroyed most materials, but not this one, at least not in the few seconds it took, and at the end of the process, the material would form part of the bomb itself. Elegant, the engineers thought, using that most favored of words in their profession, and that made it worth the time and the trouble. When each body was complete, each was loaded onto a dolly and rolled off to the storage room. Only three remained to be worked on. This part of the project was two weeks behind schedule, much to everyone's chagrin.

  RV Body #8 began the first machining process. If the bomb was detonated, the uranium-238 from which it was made would also create most of the fallout. Well, that was physics.

  It was just another accident, perhaps occasioned by the early hour. Ryan arrived at the White House just after seven, about twenty minutes earlier than usual because traffic on U.S. Route 50 happened to be uncommonly smooth all the way in. As a result, he hadn't had time to read through all his early briefing documents, which he bundled under his arm at the west entrance. National Security Advisor or not, Jack still had to pass through the metal detector, and it was there that he bumped into somebody's back. The somebody in question was handing his service pistol to a uniformed Secret Service agent.

  "You guys still don't trust the Bureau, eh?" a familiar voice asked the plainclothes supervisory agent.

  "Especially the Bureau!" was the good-humored retort.

  "And I don't blame them a bit," Ryan added. "Check his ankle, too, Mike."

  Murray turned after passing through the magnetic portal. "I don't need the backup piece anymore." The Deputy Assistant Director pointed to the papers under Jack's arm. "Is that any way to treat classified documents?"

  Murray's humor was automatic. It was just the man's nature to needle an old friend. Then Ryan saw that the Attorney General had just passed through as well, and was looking back in some annoyance. Why was a cabinet member here so early? If it were a national-security matter, Ryan would have known, and criminal affairs were rarely so important as to get the President into his office before the accustomed eight o'clock. And why was Murray accompanying him? Helen D'Agustino was waiting beyond to provide personal escort through the upstairs corridors. Everything about the accidental confrontation lit off Ryan's curiosity.