Cold War pp-5 Read online

  But as the seconds ticked away, it became increasingly clear that it had failed again. They were obviously being attacked by someone more sophisticated than the average thirteen-year-old.

  Had to be fourteen at least.

  His computer appeared to have hung, just as it had last night. Lowry picked up his cola and reached to reboot. Just as his fingers touched the keyboard, the cursor began running across the top of the screen.

  ACCESS ACHIEVED. DUMPING DRIVES C:, D:, E:.

  * * *

  “No shit,” said Lowry. He leaned back in his swivel chair and gulped the last bit of the soda. Then he tossed the can and slid back the keyboard. “Let’s have a look at our sweetheart’s life, eh?”

  Besides the normal systems programs — Windows ME, definitely an amateur — and office suites, the hacker chap had a good store of perv pix-nudie shots that confirmed for Lowry that he was indeed dealing with a teenage boy. There were a number of word-processing files that looked like German to his admittedly unfamiliar eye. He flipped through a few, took a look at some more of the porn, and then found a directory of the standard plug-and-play hacker scripts that allowed so many idiot brats to pretend they were true geeks.

  But it was when he started to examine the contents of the lad’s D: drive that things got interesting.

  The chap liked to break into e-mail systems. He had accessed a Fleet Street newspaper, which included quite a few off-color remarks about the Queen. He’d also gotten into UKAE, the regulatory agency for British nuclear power. Lowry glanced through the texts, which were run together with the headers indicating when they had been sent. He was on the second page and giving thought to returning to the nudies when a message in the middle of the page caught his attention.

  “Eliminate Ewie Cameron. Set up as an accident. L (POUNDS) 100,000. CB.”

  The Highland Camerons were not the most renowned family in northern Scotland, but they were well known enough to have been included in several of the lectures on local history Lowry had attended over the past few months on the days he kept his mom company in Inverness; the Cameron estate was located about a mile from her home.

  As Lowry continued to read the messages, he picked up the phone and called his supervisor.

  TEN

  MOUNT EREBUS (77°53’ S, 167°17’ E) BULL PASS, ANTARCTICA MARCH 12, 2002

  High above Ross island, the volcano’s fulminating lava lake seethed and bubbled and abruptly shot a dollop of molten rock into the sky with a belch of pressurized gas. Trailing smoke and licks of flame, the red-hot ejecta hurtled toward the rim of the summit cone, and over it, and then smacked into the mountainside a mile away. It was larger than a howitzer round, and its ballistic impact threw a cloud of ash, snow, and ice crystals up from the crater’s rim.

  There the plastery magma bomb hardened in the supercooled air to lay among countless other chunks of igneous debris tossed across the slope.

  While signs of the eruption traveled across many miles in this frigid and barren land, they drew only a scattering of attention.

  It was heard clearly by National Science Foundation vulcanologists working on the mount’s upper elevations, and produced a tremor that rattled the equipment in their mobile apple huts. Its sonic precursors (vibrational pulses that signal an impending eruption) and signature oscillations (harmonic changes that indicate a discrete eruption, or series of eruptions, in progress) were registered by seismometers and broadband microphones that the researchers had installed and maintained with steady diligence throughout the Antarctic summer.

  Ten thousand feet below on another corner of the island, the discharge and resultant concussion would be audible as two dull, thudding blurts of sound to McMurdites who took notice. Few did, however. The continuous volcanic output had never inflicted damage on the station, and was for them little more than background noise.

  Eastward across the Transantarctic Mountains, the seismic precursors were detected in instantaneous-wave readouts from sensors on Erebus’s flank that had been well camouflaged from the NSF research team. As the sound of the explosive outbursts carried to Bull Pass, bouncing faintly between its craggy walls, hidden men and equipment went into clockwork action.

  Three thousand feet underground, a boom-mounted drill came alive with a percussive jolt, its tungsten carbide bit boring into solid rock. Protected from its deafening clatter inside their safety cabin, the drill controller and his assistants breathed filtered air behind the face shields of their high-efficiency, closed-circuit respirator helmets.

  Two thousand feet underground, a large jaw crusher began grinding and smashing the contents of its mineral fill chamber, the first stage in the yield’s multistage separation process.

  A thousand feet higher, a pair of specialized trolley-assisted haul trucks, slung low for tunnel clearance, started forward on an inclined concrete ramp. On a stone shelf several levels beneath the surface, their semiprocessed loads would be stored in excavated pockets until ready to be moved into the open and rigged for helicopter airlift to the coast.

  Soon after Erebus quieted, the trucks ceased to roll.

  The deep drilling continued longer, a departure from the original requirement that it start and stop in tight coordination with Erebus’s rumbling expulsions. Once needed to preserve secrecy, the precaution was now followed only when opportune. Methods had changed after a half decade of continuous production. Engineering breakthroughs, advanced sound-baffling techniques, the current depth of excavation, and a shrewd, cavalier willingness to exploit every aspect of the unique environment had all led to terrific progress since the initial investment bore first fruit.

  Five years. Expanding markets. Soaring profit margins. Things were going sensationally well. Output had reached an unbridled peak, and further growth was a given provided operations were allowed to keep running smoothly.

  Like any other commercial organization, the Consortium was determined to ensure that no obstacles arose to interfere with its success.

  Zurich, Switzerland

  The broad subject of the meeting was UpLink International, and those in attendance had come with understandable and fairly similar concerns.

  His sky-blue eyes astute behind his reading glasses, Gabriel Morgan smiled from the head of the conference table; a great, expansive, vigorous whopper of a smile. Lots of teeth, his fleshy mastiff cheeks drawn up, his wide brow creased under a deliberately uncombed thatch of silver hair. Every facial muscle enlisted to make it the heartiest smile possible.

  This was not to say his attitude was light or blasé. Albedo was his brainchild, and he better than anyone else at the table understood that this session had been called to deal with a matter of pressing importance. But a smile could be spirited and serious at the same time, no contradiction. He’d learned that under the tutelage of his father at a very young age, the same way his father had learned from his grandfather. As chairman of the group, Morgan knew one of his fundamental responsibilities was to exude calm authority, soothe jitters, allay undue fears. Reassure his partners that he had a full awareness of the developments in Antarctica, knew their particulars top to bottom, and would by no means allow them to progress into a crisis situation. That they amounted to minor stumbling blocks, bothersome but easily remediable hassles.

  Morgan trusted his ability to manage, and knew one of the keystones of his success was a talent for passing his confidence right on down the line. Business executives and government officials from several different countries, the people around him were behind-the-scenes movers, concealed switches embedded deep within the world’s political machinery. Men and women who could trip the right circuits and — by virtue of their relative obscurity — initiate activities their nominal superiors either would not or could not authorize. But he was the prime mover. The well of encouragement they turned to when their buckets needed replenishing. And his smile was an invaluable, pliable utensil that helped him ladle out the goods.

  He shifted his thickset frame in his chair. On his immedi
ate right, Olav Langkafel, a quiet but integral cog in Norway’s Energy and Petroleum Ministry, was voicing an anxious hypothetical about the close reconnaissance capabilities UpLink might have out there on the ice. Morgan decided to address it with an example that would also hopefully resolve some of the issues raised by his six other guests. Give them the overview they seemed to be missing.

  “Before you go on with that last what-if, let me ask you a question,” he said, raising a finger in the air. “Are you by any chance acquainted with the term ‘zoo event’?”

  Langkafel was momentarily nonplussed. Morgan supposed it wasn’t too often that he got interrupted.

  “No,” he replied. “I am not.”

  Morgan slid his glasses down the bridge of his nose, regarding the Norwegian over their solid-gold rims. A man of few words, Langkafel. Blond hair and mustache, fair complexion, stern features. In his navy-blue suit, white shirt, and red tie, he gave off an almost regimental air.

  Morgan added a dimension of wise understanding to his self-assured smile… with just the merest hint of condescension thrown in to keep Langkafel in line. It was a delicate balance. His goal was to communicate that he was far enough ahead of the game to have expected Langkafel’s response, but that the expectation signified neither dismissiveness nor a lack of respect.

  “The phrase is pretty obscure,” he said. “Caught my ear a while back, though, and stuck with me. I like how it’s sort of mysterious, but not so dramatic you’d think a Hollywood screenwriter dreamed it up. It refers to something that happened near Bouvetoya Island, right at the edge of the Antarctic Circle, a frigid hunk of rock I’m betting you have heard about. Your country’s held a territorial claim on it for a while, correct?”

  Langkafel nodded rigidly. “Bouvetoya is a designated nature preserve with few natural resources worth mentioning. Its chief value is as a site for satellite weather stations.”

  Morgan knew that, of course. And he had known Langkafel would know. But he wanted to spread around the verbiage, engage the group, get his points across without appearing to lecture. It was an approach he’d borrowed from trial lawyers: When the goal was to deliver information through someone else’s his lips, you never asked a question whose answer wasn’t entirely predictable. Whether you were in the courtroom or boardroom, the essential tactic was the same.

  Mindful of his digestive problems, Morgan resisted the tray of biscotti in front of him, and instead raised a glass of carbonated mineral water to his lips. He drank slowly, watching buds of filtered sunlight shrivel on the burgundy curtains over the room’s terrace doors. Two floors below, in the main hall of the restored medieval guild house he had occupied since his lamented flight from the States, the art gallery his family had run for nearly a hundred years was silent, its staff having canceled the day’s appointments at his instruction. With dusk, the specialty shops and fashion houses along the right bank of the Limma would be closing as well. Morgan imagined their owners offering courtly good-nights to prosperous clients, the musical tinkle of chimes above their shutting entries, and then their lights blinking out one by one. That was Zurich for him. A city of ritualized decorum and sterile elegance. Of priggish, elitist bankers and financiers.

  And, Morgan thought, of ultimately civilized exiles.

  He put down his glass, scanning the group around the table, his eyes gliding from person to person. Stored in his mind were two curricula vitae for each of them — the public and private, sanctioned and unsanctioned, licit and illicit details of their personal lives and careers. All were tangled up in invisible strings, pulling some while they themselves got pulled by others.

  Take Feodor Nikolin down at the opposite end of the table. On the front of the sheet, Nikolin was an advisor to the elected governor of Russia’s Baltic oil and gas pipeline region. Back of the sheet? The election and his civilian appointment had been fixed by the new ultranationalist boss at the Kremlin, President Arkady Pedachenko, whose Honor and Soil Party had crested a populist wave to power… Nikolin by no coincidence being Pedachenko’s nephew by marriage, and a former colonel from the military’s Raketnye voiska strategicheskogonaznacheniya, or Strategic Rocket Forces, which oversaw Russia’s nuclear arsenals.

  Take Azzone Spero, the Italian Treasury and Economic Planning Minister. King of the kickback, he’d violated a slew of legal bidding procedures to award government waste-collection licenses to front companies run by the LaCana crime syndicate, known to earn billions annually from the illegal dumping of hazardous wastes throughout Europe.

  Or take Sebastian Alcala, the squat, dark man seated opposite Nikolin. His open résumé showed him to be a mid-level administrator with the Argentinian mining exploration secretariat. But Morgan’s secret file tied him to everything from embezzlement of state funds to facilitation of illegal arms traffic for the black marketeer and narco-terrorist El Tio, who’d recently slipped into limbo like a vanishing ghost.

  The book was similar for the rest. There was Jonas Papp from Hungary, an entrepreneur in the transitional market economy with several legitimate upstart software firms and a flourishing underground income stream from his money-laundering enterprises. There was Constance Burns, Morgan’s UKAE inchworm. And there was the South African foreign trade deputy with a perpetually outheld palm, Jak Selebi…

  “I’m wondering if you can explain the incident to everyone, Jak?” Morgan said at length. His eyes had come to rest on Selebi. “I realize this Bouvetoya thing was long before your government’s time, but maybe it’d be best that way.”

  Selebi looked back at him. “In a sense you’ve answered your own question,” he replied, speaking with a mannered British accent. “When the change came, our predecessors took much of the information about their relinquished nuclear weapons program with them. They did not want it available to us. We may assume they judged that the development of such capabilities was to be exclusively reserved for civilized races.” He paused a moment, his brown face expressionless, devoid of the cutting irony in his voice. “I can tell you this. Throughout the nineteen-sixties, America launched a dozen orbital satellites for the detection of atmospheric nuclear explosions. This program was named Vela. A Spanish word, I believe…”

  “Meaning ‘Watchmen,’ ” said Alcala.

  “Thank you.” Selebi exchanged glances with him. “The crude optical sensors on the Velas could not fix locations with anything close to the exactitude of modern satellites. Otherwise, their reliability was unchallenged… until one of them, Vela 6911, registered a double flash scientists associated with an atomic blast of between three and four kilotons.”

  “These matched other signals the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory picked up here on earth,” Morgan said. “Acoustic waves around the Scotia Ridge, a chain of mountains between Antarctica and Africa that’s mostly underwater. Except where it isn’t underwater and the mountaintops poking out above the ocean’s surface form islands. Bouvetoya’s one of them.” Another smile. “Sorry to break in after asking you to tell the tale, but I felt it was important for everyone to be aware of that little nugget.”

  Selebi’s nod showed flat acceptance.

  “The consensus of military, intelligence, and government nuclear research scientists responsible for analyzing the Vela evidence was that an atomic detonation had occurred at or below sea level,” he continued. “But when these findings were presented to the Carter Administration, it ordered a second panel of academics from outside the government to conduct a separate review. Their assessment refuted the original determination. It stated the indications were unverifiable and may have been based on false signals caused by sensor malfunction or a meteor collision. The dispute it sparked between the two panels led to animosities that I understand linger to this day.” He looked at Morgan. “That is the extent of what I can say about the affair with confidence.”

  “Then let me put in some footnotes,” Morgan said. “One of the scientists in that first group was a top-notch man with the Los Alamos think tank. Knew his stuff inside
out, helped develop the Vela program. When their report got the presidential blow-off, he made some testy comments, said they were all zoo animals coming out with idiotic theories to discredit his panel’s conclusions. Talk is that the White House was gun-shy about a confrontation with the South Africans, whom it damn well knew were manufacturing atomics, and maybe doing it with Israeli participation.”

  He shrugged. “You got to sympathize with Jimmy’s predicament. With the gas crunch fresh in people’s minds, and Khomeini swift-kicking the Shah out of Iran, the poor guy was deep in the moat. Sharks closing in around him. Another domestic or foreign affairs boondoggle and any chance he had of swimming his way out was finished. The press, political opponents, average citizens, everybody wanted a pound of his flesh. Jimmy, well, the last thing he would’ve wanted was to out two long-standing allies for their complicity in banned nuclear-bomb testing. What was he supposed to do? Impose trade embargoes? Ask the U.N. Security Council to censure them? Neither option would’ve been to America’s advantage. So the sats, Navy, CIA, and Defense Intelligence Agency people became wrong, and the ivory-tower professors became right. In my opinion, Jimmy managed to convince himself of their rightness, and the nuke turned into an unexplained occurrence. Better for everyone that way.”

  Constance Burns was nodding her head.

  “A zoo event,” she said.

  The affirmative smile Morgan directed at her was as gentle as a pat on the back.

  “There you go,” he said. “Now, as our good friend Jak more or less implied, there’s a dash of supposition in what we’ve been talking about. Over the past couple of decades South African officials have admitted to the test, then backed off their admissions, then acknowledged them again, then qualified their acknowledgments, then shut up altogether. Same with the Israelis. Their newspapers printed articles quoting Knesset members about their government’s exchange of nuclear weapons blueprints for uranium from South Africa’s mines, then got those quotes retracted on them. But I believe the story of the zoo event’s been written. A nuclear detonation took place near Bouvetoya Island in September 1977. Low yield, about a third of a Hiroshima. Maybe subsurface, maybe an air-burst. It took place. And the leader of the Western world covered his ears, and closed his eyes, and claimed to be deaf and blind to the incident. Because dealing with it wasn’t advantageous to him. And for one other major reason.”