Prisoners of Tomorrow (61 page)

“I—I have a call for you,” Mariana said in a shaking voice. The Oriental began chattering excitedly in a strange tongue. It sounded to Mariana like an obscure dialect of Chinese.

General Snell listened while the two Defense Department scientists explained the figures being displayed on one of the War Room consoles. Snell nodded, and turned back to the President and his group. “The next thirty minutes will be the crucial period. Three of our biggest space lasers will come out from eclipse behind Earth during that time. If Mermaid is going to take out our system with a surprise strike, it will be in that time frame.” Austin nodded somberly.

“We have to go for the Soviet shield, now,” Uhl implored. “Okay, so it’s an act of war. But if that colony really is clean, they should have been open about it from the beginning. If it isn’t clean, we’ve got a good reason. The world will understand that.”

“If it leads to an all-out exchange, the world will remember that it was us who struck first. Will it understand that?” Austin asked.

“They haven’t left us with a choice,” Uhl said. “It wouldn’t be striking first. It would simply be getting us back toward more of a balance. We hold right there. The next step would be up to them.”

“God, I don’t know . . .” Austin stared up at the situation displays again.

On one side of the room, an aide approached Foleda, who was standing with Borden. “You have an urgent call from your office,” he said in a low voice.

“Where do I take it?” Foleda asked.

“Follow me.” The aide led Foleda into a side room, packed with consoles and operators, off the central floor near the main door. Barbara’s face was waiting on one of the screens.

“What is it?” Foleda asked.

“A call’s come in for you from the Moscow embassy. It—”

“At a time like this?” For an instant Foleda had trouble keeping his voice down. “What do they want, for chrissakes?”

“Apparently somebody who runs a Japanese restaurant there walked in off the street and said he got a phone call from Siberia . . .” Barbara’s voice faltered at the look on Foleda’s face.

“Are you serious? We’ve got a war about to—”

“The call was to ‘Tycoon/Shot/Line/Rise/Glove’ from Sexton.”

Foleda blinked, frowned, and shook his head bemusedly. “Those codes check?”

“All of them. ‘Glove’ is Sexton’s exceptional-status verifier.”

“From Siberia? How the hell can he be calling from Siberia?”

“You’d better hear the text. . . .”

Footsteps pounded in the corridor outside Lt. General Fedorov’s office in the administrative sector of Zamork. Moments later, a major strode in, followed by several guards who between them were hustling the three prisoners Mungabo, Borowski, and the unpronounceable Asiatic. “Block Supervisor Supeyev and Foreman Luchenko are here also,” the major reported.

Fedorov gave a curt nod. “Have them wait outside.” He licked his lips nervously and surveyed the three prisoners as they were lined up before his desk. They stared back at him impassively. “This is urgent, and I have no time for politeness,” he said. “You understand? The Turk, Istamel, who was taken to the infirmary.” There was no response. “You know who I’m talking about?” he demanded in a louder voice.

The major punched Mungabo in the stomach. “Yes, sir,” Mungabo wheezed.

“Then say so when I ask you,” Fedorov shouted at him. “The doctor says he has no broken bones, no bruises, and shows no signs of having fallen. He does show symptoms of being drugged. What do you know about this?”

“Nothing . . . sir,” Mungabo replied. The major drew back his fist. Mungabo braced himself.

Then a tone sounded from the terminal next to Colonel Menikin, who was looking on. Fedorov held up a hand and turned to watch while Menikin took the call. It was from Major Gadzhovsky, who was commanding the search of the lower levels. Alarm was showing on his face. “Yes?” Menikin snapped at the screen.

“Still no sign of the four missing prisoners,” Gadzhovsky reported. “But we have found an additional hole cut through into the public levels below Zamork. Major Kavolev and his section have already left and are on their way down there now. Also, we can find no trace of the escape suits that the prisoners are known to have been manufacturing.” Istamel had been keeping the Russians updated on the progress of the suits. Since the proposed date for the prisoners’ ridiculous intended attempt at breaking out had been given by Istamel as weeks after November 7, the authorities had seen no harm in allowing them to carry on distracting themselves with the idea.

Menikin swallowed hard and flashed an apprehensive glance at Fedorov. “They can’t have done anything with them,” he protested. “They haven’t even begun work on an airlock.” Just then, another call came in on an adjacent screen. “It’s Kavolev,” Menikin said.

“Major Kavolev reporting from Level Four-H in the public sector. We’ve discovered an engineers’ store that’s been broken into. I’m having the engineering supervisor brought here to give us a list of what has been taken. From a screenview of the interior that we sent him, he says there’s an acetylene torch missing and a number of gas cylinders.”

There was a long silence when Kavolev had finished. “We just collect things,” Mungabo offered, and shrugged.

The color was draining from Fedorov’s face. “Get me a line to Turgenev,” he said in a suddenly weak voice.

The senior Russian leaders had withdrawn, and the speeches being given now were from secondary officials. The crowd had thinned somewhat. On the roof of the air-processing plant above the square, Albrecht Haber sat forward suddenly and gave the laser terminal a couple of raps. Then he picked it up and shook it. “Something wrong?” Peter Sargent asked from his vantage point by the edge.

“The screen just went blank. I don’t think we’re getting anything.”

“Oh-oh. Do you think it spells trouble?”

“I’m not sure.” Haber tried tapping in some test codes, and fiddled with a control. “It’s dead. I suspect they’ve cut us off.”

Sargent looked out over Haber’s head, and his eyes took on a sober expression. “Yes, you’re right. I rather think the show’s over, old boy.”

Haber looked up, and Sargent nodded to indicate the direction behind him. Several figures in KGB uniforms were scrambling frantically across the rooftop toward them. “So it would appear,” Haber agreed, nodding. “I would say that we put on an acceptable performance, wouldn’t you?”

“Absolutely. I see no bouquets, though. But we should go out in style nevertheless, don’t you think?”

Haber nodded solemnly. “Yes indeed,” he agreed. “In a manner that befits gentlemen of the acting profession.”

So saying, the German and the Englishman stood up in full view to face the windows of the Government Building opposite. They took off their beards and hats, and extending their arms wide, bowed as if acknowledging applause. They were still taking encores when the first KGB arrived and dragged them away out of sight.

* * *

Confusion had taken over the command center in the Government Building. One of the console operators was yelling something, Uskayev was trying to make sense out of what the KGB squad commander was saying via a handpad from the rooftop opposite, and Fedorov was babbling something else from Zamork. What was clear was that the faces of the two men being held up on the roof were not those of Scanlon and McCain. Major Uskayev used another screen to call up shots of the prisoners who had been reported missing. “The German, Haber, is one,” he announced. “The other is Sargent.”

Protbornov was wearing the expression of a skydiver who had just realized he’d forgotten something important before he jumped. On another screen to the side, Fedorov at Zamork waited for orders but was now forgotten. “What . . . What does this mean?” Protbornov choked. “Where is the American? If those two have returned wrong codes . . .”

Olga was gaping, horrified, as she took in what it meant. The color drained from her cheeks, and her face became a strained, pallid mask of wax. She turned her head slowly and found Paula watching her with a quiet, satisfied expression. “You betrayed me!” Olga whispered.

Paula almost burst out laughing. “
Me?
You wanted me to try to stop a war. Well, that’s what I’ve been doing—what
you
wanted, in
your
way. So screw you, too, lady.”

Total shock had seized the room. Seconds ticked by with nobody speaking or moving. Protbornov stared fixedly ahead of him, heedless of his surroundings as the full enormity of the catastrophe unfolded. In the background, the faces on the screens continued making noises but were no longer saying anything.

Then the shrill tone of a priority call broke the silence. Major Uskayev answered it woodenly. It was from the duty controller in the Strategic Headquarters located beneath the Government Building, which was where the Soviet leaders had withdrawn to direct the forthcoming operations. He looked dazed. “Please advise General Protbornov that American battle lasers have just fired without warning on our spacebased missile defenses,” the controller said. “The whole shield has been crippled.”

Down below, inside Strategic Headquarters, the First Secretary of the Communist Party and his immediate circle were staring dumbfounded at a message appearing on one of the main display screens. It had started coming in over a priority link from Moscow just as the Soviet supreme commander was about to send the order for Anvil to commence return-fire.

The message, signed by President Warren Austin of the United States and endorsed by all the Western European and East Asian premiers, was addressed to the First Secretary personally. But instead of being addressed to him at the
Valentina Tereshkova
space colony, it was addressed to him at “Potemkin, Ground Zero,” and specified correctly the latitude and longitude coordinates of the replica beneath Siberia.

The West, the message said, had retargeted three thousand of its strategic warheads on those coordinates. The final move of the endgame was up to him.

EPILOGUE

“Good evening, Mr. McCain.”

“Hi, Jerry. That light seems to be fine.”

“Yes, the maintenance man said it should be okay now. Your cab’s waiting out front.” Jerry took in the dark suit, crisp white shirt, and tie with jeweled clip beneath the overcoat as McCain crossed the rooftop lobby to the main doors. “Going to a party tonight?”

“No, just a quiet dinner with an old friend.”

“Have a nice evening.”

“I’ll try.”

McCain went out and found the cab waiting on the pad in front of the doors. “Is it the Milburn Towers, sir?” the cabbie checked as McCain climbed in.

“That’s right. We’ve plenty of time.” The engine note rose, and McCain settled back in the comfortable leather upholstery of the rear seat. Moments later, the brightly lit roof of the apartment building with its garden and pool was falling away below. Lights were coming on in the twilight, and as the cab’s nose swung around, the glow of the Washington, D.C., area moved into the frame of the windshield against the darker sky on the horizon to the east.

So, the war that would end wars had done precisely that—by never happening. With an entire strategic arsenal ready to rain down on the very point where they had concentrated everyone they had judged as worth the most to preserve—including themselves—what else could the Soviet leaders have done but capitulate? The hills overhead would have made little difference to the size of the hole that would have been made in Siberia.

Thus in a position to dictate terms, the West had obtained a reconnection to its agents and allies inside Potemkin, and used them to ensure that the Soviets stayed put while an international inspection force was dispatched to
Valentina Tereshkova
. What they found there, with the world looking on, was enough to topple the Soviet empire, and a modern democratic state eventually emerged from the ensuing internal chaos. Some observers described the process as “1917 played backward.”

It was November 7 again, and on that date McCain usually found his mind going back to the events that had culminated on that day in 2017. It was customary when thinking over things like that to say that it didn’t seem like ten years, he reflected as he looked up through the cab roof at the stars that were starting to come out—some of them were the artificial worlds being built out there, which at certain times were visible to the eye; he’d seen all he wanted to of artificial worlds and was content to make the best of the real one. But the truth was, it did seem like ten years. A lot of things had happened in that time.

With the big standoff between the giants at last resolved, the world had been left with little more than local squabbles and police actions to occupy its military minds while it completed its process of growing up. Defense institutions had shrunk accordingly, and the release of creativity and resources from all nations into more productive enterprises had made visible already the beginnings of a social and economic upheaval that promised to dwarf the Agricultural, Industrial, and Information Revolutions put together. The human race would soon explode outward across the Solar System. Real colonies were taking shape in the Earth-Moon vicinity now—in fact, the interior of
Valentina Tereshkova
had been rebuilt, and it was now one of them. There was a permanent base on Mars, which was mushrooming as new arrivals poured in. Gigantic manned ships for voyaging to the outer planets were under construction in lunar orbit, and robot starprobes were at the design stage. And the underground space colony that had been called Potemkin was still there and working underneath Siberia, as a familiarization and training simulator for would-be colonists. Earth’s population was plateauing out; that of the Solar System, the experts said, was about to take off. The late twentieth century of McCain’s boyhood, with its endless pessimisms about imminent doom and declining everything, seemed a long way away.

The cab joined one of the traffic corridors into the city, and minutes later was over the rainbow-lit heights and glass canyons of the metropolis. It singled out the blue-frosted pinnacle of the Milburn Towers, circled into its descent, and let McCain off outside the doors leading in from the roof-level parking area, where other vehicles were discharging their loads of evening diners, hotel guests, and revelers. McCain walked through the lobby to the Orchid Lounge adjoining the restaurant, checked his coat, and gave his name to the host, who showed him through to the booth where he was expected.