Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (2 page)

In addition, if the laser were chemically fueled, there would be the roar and rush of fluorine and heavy hydrogen combining into an expensive form of hydrofluoric acid. The waste product cheerfully dissolved glass, platinum, and virtually everything else. Cleaning up after a test was similar to dealing with a spill of Cobalt 60, but presumably it would be all right to dump the crap straight into the upper atmosphere during service use.

All in all, a laser demonstration could be expected to be a spectacular show. It was that, even more than his frequent assertions that a strong defense was a necessary concomitant to a strong diplomacy, which had led the Secretary of State to accept the invitation to a Top Secret briefing by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

And this had not been spectacular in the least.

The Secretary turned away from the heavy lead-glass window of the observation room. He and his aide wore civilian clothes, but his aide would return to active duty as a lieutenant commander when he left the Secretary’s personal service. The other three men were in dress uniforms, imposing with gold braid and medal ribbons. Still, there was no question as to where the power lay during
this
administration. “All right,” said the Secretary of State, “what went wrong, Follett?”

The lieutenant general in Air Force blue was Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He understood his duties perfectly. His two top aides—a rear admiral and an army Brigadier general—were less experienced in testifying to hostile Congressional committees and like affairs. General Follett gave them a sweeping glance of reminder before he said, “Nothing at all went wrong, Mr. Secretary. That is”—he nodded to the observation window. Mechanical arms could be seen dollying toward the target—“This was a normal test. That’s all that happens. Overtly.”

He paused, coughing to clear his throat and to settle the wash of fear that had leapt up when he committed himself. Normally, high-ranking observers would have been in the control room with the scientists conducting the test. If anything had gone wrong under those circumstances, General Follett would have known before he had to make a fool of himself. This time the observers had to be rigidly separated from the scientists: top secret matters much more sensitive than the hardware were about to be discussed.

To calm himself by moving and to fill time before the opened target made him a hero or a buffoon, Follett rose from his chair. He fingered the duplicate target on its display stand. It was a missile nose cone, sectioned to split along the centerline and to display the dummy nuclear trigger within. Lead segments were individually pinned to the inner surface of a sphere the size of a soccer ball. In the original, mirror-polished wedges of plutonium would be held in place by the explosive lining itself. Follett and his aides had considered using a filling of flash powder or the like. In the end they had decided not to do anything that might have put their demonstration on a level with all those others which were intended only to maintain modest program funding. The DIA was going for the throat on this one. Nothing that would cheapen the effect could be permitted.

Metal squealed in the test chamber, audible even through the thick walls. It was the first sign that the weapon had functioned properly. The mechanical arms prizing apart the halves of the target had popped a fresh weld.

All five of the men in the observation room were staring intently through the window now. General Follett had remained standing; the others leaned forward in their chairs. The arms, controlled by the technicians invisible in the room next door, slowly rotated the dummy warhead. Floodlights especially rigged for this demonstration flashed on to illuminate the interior.

“I’ll be damned,” said the Secretary of State. The three uniformed men shifted stance minusculy. It had worked. At least—the hardware had worked.

The lead blocks which had been in the path of the momentary beam had slumped and twisted. Their surfaces were no longer dully metallic but rather a furry white where the lead had recrystallized after melting. Other segments only a finger’s breadth away were unchanged from their original appearance.

“If this had been a live trigger and not a test unit,” the general said, “the implosion charge would almost certainly have been set off by the beam. Even if it had not exploded, the elements of the fission trigger have obviously”—he waved toward the window—“been damaged to the extent that the device would melt down rather than detonate when the warhead reached its target. And if the particle beam had struck the booster stage of a missile rather than the nose cone proper, the fuel and oxidizer tanks—no matter how they were hardened and protected—would have been flash-heated to the point of catastrophic explosion.”

“Particle beam,” repeated the Secretary, staring at the damaged target. He turned slowly toward the military men. All of them now were standing. “All right, I’m not a bad person to impress . . . but I don’t have a thing to do with the funding of this project, you know. And I don’t have a thing to do with you or the DoD, either—not in any way that matters to you.

“So why did the Defense Intelligence Agency drag me out to Oak Ridge to see”—he waved—“this?”

Follett sucked in his gut. In round tones that masked his nervousness he said, “As you have seen, Mr. Secretary, particle beam technology has the potential of developing into the most important defensive tool in our nation’s arsenal.”

He paused. “In the arsenal of
any
nation. What concerns us—here in this room—is that evidence suggests that the Soviets have already developed the—principle—to a stage well beyond what you have seen here. If our information is correct, a Russian scientist has made a breakthrough as important as the one that gave the Soviets their initial lead in hydrogen bombs.”

The Secretary’s aide straightened in surprise. The Secretary himself was more direct. “What the hell do you mean by that?” he snapped, his heavy eyebrows closing together. “
We
had the H-bomb first. Have you forgotten Bikini?”

General Follett dipped his chin, knowing the chance he was taking to make his point. “We—American scientists—detonated the first thermonuclear device on Bikini Atoll, that is correct,” he said. “The device used tritium and deuterium to fuel the reaction. These isotopes were in such short supply that no significant—no military—use could have been made of the principle. Furthermore”—the Secretary of State’s look was fading from irritation to puzzlement, but Follett avoided making eye contact—“the tritium had to be chilled. The entire apparatus would have filled two railroad boxcars. It could not have been
transported
by air, much less delivered in the military sense of the term. Unlike the bomb the Russians exploded nine months later, using lithium hydride instead of heavy hydrogen as the major fuel element.”

“Fortunately,” broke in Rear Admiral Haynes, “by analyzing fallout from the blast, we were able to duplicate the Soviets’ research before their advantage became decisive. Our own personnel—scientists—had determined to their satisfaction that lithium hydride would not sustain a thermonuclear reaction. Fortunately, they were not wholly incapable of learning from their opponents. I assure you, the Soviets gained nothing from Klaus Fuchs and his like to equal what we learned from Soviet above-ground testing.”

“All right, get to the point,” said the Secretary, straightening again in his chair. The men in uniform had five minutes, a fact the politician made adequately clear by glancing at his thin, gold watch.

“The problem with particle beam weapons,” said Follett, plunging toward the invisible deadline, “and with all energy weapons, is the energy source. It’s all very well to tie into the commercial power grid when we’re testing devices here in Tennessee or Nevada. For the weapons to be really effective, however, they need to be based in space, in orbit over the sites from which hostile missiles may be launched. For that . . . well, all manner of solutions have been suggested. But the simple solution, and a solution that might work for the microseconds which are all a particle beam”—he tapped the dummy nose cone—“requires, would be to detonate a thermonuclear device and focus portions of its energy output into, ah, beams.”

“How are you going to focus something that’s vaporizing everything around it the moment it gets there?” asked the Secretary. The demonstration he had just seen was real. If the reason behind it turned out to be nonsense, he was out the door and gone, though. “Look, Follett, we have a Science Committee at State, too. If you people want to go jaw them about this stuff, that’s fine, but
I’m
on a tight schedule.”

“Many of the best minds in the field agree, Mr. Secretary,” the general said soothingly, “that such a proposal is impossible, even in theory. It would appear, however, that on the other side of the line there’s a Professor Evgeny Vlasov, who has developed a—theoretical, at least—method of drawing several dozen simultaneous, magnetically focused, bursts from a single thermonuclear device.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, call it an H-bomb like a human being!” snapped the Secretary of State. He was not looking at the military men, though. His bushy stare was directed at some indefinite bank of instruments while his fingers drummed the side of the chair seat. His mind was neither place, turning over possibilities. He looked up at Follett. “If that were true,” he said carefully, “any missiles we attempted to send over the Pole would detonate a few yards out of their silos. That’s what you’re trying to tell me?”

Redstone, the Brigadier general, spoke for the first time since the demonstration. “Yeah, with normal allowance for error, of course. 95% of anything we launched, say. And we guess a bolt that can do that”—he thumbed toward the twisted warhead in the test chamber—“would pretty well scramble a B-52, too. Or the White House, if somebody wanted to get cute.”

“All right,” the civilian repeated. “Since I don’t suppose you brought me here to propose we surrender now to the Sovs, what
do
you have in mind?”

“We would like,” said General Follett, staring at his wedding band rather than the Secretary of State, “your support for a plan to secure Professor Vlasov’s defection to the United States.”

“Oh,” said the Secretary. “Oh . . .” and he settled back in his chair, relaxing now that he had enough information at last to guess why he was being manipulated. A smile quirked the corners of his mouth. “Does the JCS know you’ve got something in mind?” he asked in amusement. “You people at the DIA, that is.”

Follett’s tongue touched his lips, but he managed to control his reflexive glance toward the Secretary’s aide. He knew that Lieutenant Commander Platt was secretly reporting to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on all of the Secretary of State’s activities. The DIA further suspected that Platt was also leaking information to the Office of Naval Intelligence. By charter, the ONI was supposed to be under the control of the Defense Intelligence Agency. In practice, it—and the other service intelligence staffs—were as parochial as the KGB and very nearly as hostile to one another. The presence of a known double agent at the secret meeting had complicated Follett’s task enormously, but there had been no alternative. If the DIA had burned Platt, exposing him to the Secretary, his replacement might very well have been controlled by the CIA.

“I have briefed the Chairman, yes,” Follett said, “on our intention to approach you, sir, and the necessity for it.” With an appearance of steely candor, he added. “The Defense Intelligence Agency is only the information collection and assessment arm of the Department of Defense. My colleagues and I are as much controlled by the Joint Chiefs as are the lowliest recruits in training.”

“Go on,” said the Secretary in irritation. “I’m waiting for a concrete proposal.” He could not know, of course, that Follett’s bit of fluff was meant not for him but for his aide.

“Yes sir,” said the general, nodding quickly and continuing to meet the civilian’s eyes. “Well. One of our agents made contact with Professor Vlasov. This was fortuitous, rather than a major priority of the Agency”—perhaps he shouldn’t have admitted that—“because the Professor appeared from all the information we had available to us to be at least as politically reliable as a member of the Politburo.” Follett cleared his throat. “The Professor not only had all the perquisites available to a scientist of genius—which he is—within the Soviet Union, his love for his motherland is of exceptional and tested quality. He has only one arm, you see. He lost the other in 1943 during the Siege of Leningrad when the satchel charge he had been throwing into a German blockhouse exploded prematurely. He had refused several offers of evacuation previous to that occurrence, since it was evident even then to the Party leadership that Vlasov’s endeavors would be more valuable to the State in the laboratory than on the front line.”

“How did you get an agent into the Soviet Union, Follett?” demanded the Secretary as if he had not been listening to the remainder of the general’s discourse.

Admiral Wayne coughed behind his hand. Follett warned him with a quick gesture. “Ah, Mr. Secretary,” he said. “I’m afraid we can’t go into sources and methods at this time. . . .”

“Look, General,” the civilian went on, “either your agent is playing you for a fool—or the KGB is.” He paused. “Or maybe everything you’ve just told me about Vlasov is a lie? Why would a man like that want to defect? Did somebody catch his son in Dzerzhinsky Square with a firebomb? Have we turned up photos of him with the Premier’s wife? Because there’s not a whole lot else that would make somebody like that decide to fly the coop, is there?”

One of Follett’s subordinates cleared his throat nervously. There was an answer to that question, but it was an answer they had hoped to be able to finesse giving. They had even considered concocting a lie, but there were no lies they could think of which fit Vlasov’s background and were significantly more reasonable than the story their agent had told them for true. “Well, Mr. Secretary,” the general said, “it appears that Professor Vlasov has been experiencing difficulties of a, ah”—Follett locked his hands behind his back to stop himself from twiddling his fingers in front of the others—“problems of a psychiatric nature.”