It was for Chester Nomuri a strange experience, living and “working” here. He’d been carefully screened and interviewed before being assigned to Operation SANDALWOOD. Having joined the Agency soon after graduating UCLA, not quite remembering why he’d done so except for a vague desire for adventure mixed with a family tradition of government service, he’d found somewhat to his surprise that he enjoyed the life. It was remarkably like police work, and Nomuri was a fan of police TV and novels. More than that, it was so damned interesting. He learned new things every day. It was like being in a living history classroom. Perhaps the most important lesson he’d learned, however, was that his great-grandfather had been a wise and insightful man. Nomuri wasn’t blind to America’s faults, but he preferred life there to life in any of the countries he’d visited, and with that knowledge had come pride in what he was doing, even though he still wasn’t quite sure what the hell he was really up to. Of course, neither did his Agency, but Nomuri had never quite understood that, even when they’d told him so at the Farm. How could it be possible, after all? It must have been an inside-the-institution joke.
At the same time, in a dualism he was too young and inexperienced to appreciate fully, Japan could be an easy place in which to operate. That was especially true on the commuter train.
The degree of crowding here was enough to make his skin crawl. He had not been prepared for a country in which population density compelled close contact with all manner of strangers, and, indeed, he’d soon realized that the cultural mania with fastidious personal hygiene and mannerly behavior was simply a by-product of it. People so often rubbed, bumped, or otherwise crushed into contact with others that the absence of politeness would have resulted in street killings to shame the most violent neighborhood in America. A combination of smiling embarrassment at the touches and icy personal isolation made it tolerable to the local citizens, though it was something that still gave Nomuri trouble. “Give the guy some space” had been a catch-phrase at UCLA. Clearly it wasn’t here, because there simply wasn’t the space to give.
Then there was the way they treated women. Here, on the crowded trains, the standing and sitting salarymen read comic books, called manga, the local versions of novels, which were genuinely disturbing. Recently, a favorite of the eighties had been revived, called Rin-Tin-Tin. Not the friendly dog from 1950s American television, but a dog with a female mistress, to whom he talked, and with whom he had ... sexual relations. It was not an idea that appealed to him, but there, sitting on his bench seat, was a middle-aged executive, eyes locked on the pages with rapt attention, while a Japanese woman stood right next to him and stared out the train’s windows, maybe noticing, maybe not. The war between the sexes in this country certainly had rules different from the ones with which he’d been raised, Nomuri thought. He set it aside. It was not part of his mission, after all—an idea he would soon find to be wrong.
He never saw the cutout. As he stood there in the third car of the train, close to the rear door, hanging on to an overhead bar and reading a paper, he didn’t even notice the insertion of the envelope into the pocket of his overcoat. It was always that way—at the usual place the coat got just a touch heavier. He’d turned once to look and seen nothing. Damn, he’d joined the right outfit.
Eighteen minutes later the train entered the terminal, and the people emerged from it like a horizontal avalanche, exploding outward into the capacious station. The salaryman ten feet away tucked his “illustrated novel” into his briefcase and walked off to his job, wearing his customarily impassive mien, doubtless concealing thoughts of his own. Nomuri headed his own way, buttoning his coat and wondering what his new instructions were.
“Does the President know?”
Ryan shook his head. “Not yet.”
“You think maybe he ought to?” Mary Pat Foley asked.
“At the proper time.”
“I don’t like putting officers at risk for—”
“At risk?” Jack asked. “I want him to develop information, not to make a contact, and not to expose himself. I gather from the case notes I’ve seen so far that all he has to do is make a follow-up question, and unless their locker rooms are different from ours, it shouldn’t expose him at all.”
“You know what I mean,” the Deputy Director (Operations) observed, rubbing her eyes. It had been a long day, and she worried about her field officers. Every good DDO did, and she was a mother who’d once been picked up by the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate herself.
Operation SANDALWOOD had started innocently enough, if an intelligence operation on foreign soil could ever be called innocent. The preceding operation had been a joint FBI/CIA show, and had gone very badly indeed: an American citizen had been apprehended by the Japanese police with burglar tools in his possession—along with a diplomatic passport, which in this particular case had been more of a hindrance than a help. It had made the papers in a small way. Fortunately the media hadn’t quite grasped what the story was all about. People were buying information. People were selling information. It was often information with “secret” or higher classifications scrawled across the folders, and the net effect was to hurt American interests, such as they were.
“How good is he?” Jack asked.
Mary Pat’s face relaxed at little. “Very. The kid’s a natural. He’s learning to fit in, developing a base of people he can hit for background information. We’ve set him up with his own office. He’s even turning us a nice profit. His orders are to be very careful,” Mrs. Foley pointed out yet again.
“I hear you, MP,” Ryan said tiredly. “But if this is for-real—”
“I know, Jack. I didn’t like what Murray sent over either.”
“You believe it?” Ryan asked, wondering about the reaction he’d get.
“Yes, I do, and so does Murray.” She paused. “If we develop information on this, then what?”
“Then I go to the President, and probably we extract anyone who wants to be extracted.”
“I will not risk Nomuri that way!” the DDO insisted, a little too loudly.
“Jesus, Mary Pat, I never expected that you would. Hey, I’m tired, too, okay?”
“So you want me to send in another team, let him just bird-dog it for them?” she asked.
“It’s your operation to run, okay? I’ll tell you what to do, but not how. Lighten up, MP.” That statement earned the National Security Advisor a crooked smile and a semiapology.
“Sorry, Jack. I keep forgetting you’re the new guy on this block.”
“The chemicals have various industrial uses,” the Russian colonel explained to the American colonel.
“Good for you. All we can do is burn ours, and the smoke’ll kill you.” The rocket exhaust from the liquid propellants wasn’t exactly the Breath of Spring either, of course, but when you got down to it, they were industrial chemicals with a variety of other uses.
As they watched, technicians snaked a hose from the standpipe next to the missile puskatel, the Russian word for “silo,” to a truck that would transport the last of the nitrogen tetroxide to a chemical plant. Below, another fitting on the missile body took another hose that pumped pressurized gas into the top of the oxidizer tank, the better to drive the corrosive chemical out. The top of the missile was blunt. The Americans could see where the warhead “bus” had been attached, but it had already been removed, and was now on another truck, preceded by a pair of BTR-70 infantry fighting vehicles and trailed by three more, on its way to a place where the warheads could be disarmed preparatory to complete disassembly. America was buying the plutonium. The tritium in the warheads would stay in Russia, probably to be sold eventually on the open market to end up on watch and instrument faces. Tritium had a market value of about $50,000 per gram, and the sale of it would turn a tidy profit for the Russians. Perhaps, the American thought, that was the reason that his Russian colleagues were moving so expeditiously.
This was the first SS-19 silo to be deactivated for the 53rd Strategic Roc
ket Regiment. It was both like and unlike the American silos being deactivated under Russian inspection. The same mass of reinforced concrete for both, though this one was sited in woods, and the American silos were all on open ground, reflecting different ideas about site security. The climate wasn’t all that different. Windier in North Dakota, because of the open spaces. The base temperature was marginally colder in Russia, which balanced out the wind-chill factor on the prairie. In due course the valve wheel on the pipe was turned, the hose removed, and the truck started up.
“Mind if I look?” the USAF colonel asked.
“Please.” The Russian colonel of Strategic Rocket Forces waved to the open hole. He even handed over a large flashlight. Then it was his turn to laugh.
You son of a bitch, Colonel Andrew Malcolm wanted to exclaim. There was a pool of icy water at the bottom of the puskatel. The intelligence estimate had been wrong again. Who would have believed it?
“Backup?” Ding asked.
“You might end up just doing sightseeing,” Mrs. Foley told them, almost believing it.
“Fill us in on the mission?” John Clark asked, getting down to business. It was his own fault, after all, since he and Ding had turned into one of the Agency’s best field teams. He looked over at Chavez. The kid had come a long way in five years. He had his college degree, and was close to his master’s, in international relations no less. Ding’s job would probably have put his instructors into cardiac arrest, since their idea of transnational intercourse didn’t involve fucking other nations—a joke Domingo Chavez himself had coined on the dusty plains of Africa while reading a history book for one of his seminar groups. He still needed to learn about concealing his emotions. Chavez still retained some of the fiery nature of his background, though Clark wondered how much of it was for show around the Farm and elsewhere. In every organization the individual practitioners had to have a “service reputation.” John had his. People spoke about him in whispers, thinking, stupidly, that the nicknames and rumors would never get back to him. And Ding wanted one, too. Well, that was normal.
“Photos?” Chavez asked calmly, then took them from Mrs. Foley’s hand. There were six of them. Ding examined each, handing them over one by one to his senior. The junior officer kept his voice even but allowed his face to show his distaste.
“So if Nomuri turns up a face and a location, then what?” Ding asked.
“You two make contact with her and ask if she would like a free plane ticket home,” the DDO replied without adding that there would be an extensive debriefing process. The CIA didn’t give out free anythings, really.
“Cover?” John asked.
“We haven’t decided yet. Before you head over, we need to work on your language skills.”
“Monterey?” Chavez smiled. It was about the most pleasant piece of country in America, especially this time of year.
“Two weeks, total immersion. You fly out this evening. Your teacher will be a guy named Lyalin, Oleg Yurievich. KGB major who came over a while back. He actually ran a network over there, called THISTLE. He’s the guy who turned the information that you and Ding used to bug the airliner—”
“Whoa!” Chavez observed. “Without him...”
Mrs. Foley nodded, pleased that Ding had made the complete connection that rapidly. “That’s right. He’s got a very nice house overlooking the water. It turns out he’s one hell of a good language teacher, I guess because he had to learn it himself.” It had turned into a fine bargain for CIA. After the debriefing process, he’d taken a productive job at the Armed Forces Language School, where his salary was paid by DOD. “Anyway, by the time you’re able to order lunch and find the bathroom in the native tongue, we’ll have your cover IDs figured out.”
Clark smiled and rose, taking the signal that it was time to leave. “Back to work, then.”
“Defending America,” Ding observed with a smile, leaving the photos on Mrs. Foley’s desk and sure that actually having to defend his country was a thing of the past. Clark heard the remark and thought it a joke too, until memories came back that erased the look from his face.
It wasn’t their fault. It was just a matter of objective conditions. With four times the population of the United States, and only one third the living space, they had to do something. The people needed jobs, products, a chance to have what everyone else in the world wanted. They could see it on the television sets that seemed to exist even in places where there were no jobs, and, seeing it, demanded a chance to have it. It was that simple. You couldn’t say “no” to nine hundred million people.
Certainly not if you were one of them. Vice Admiral V. K. Chandraskatta sat on his leather chair on the flag bridge of the carrier Viraat. His obligation, as expressed in his oath of office, was to carry out the orders of his government, but more than that, his duty was to his people. He had to look no further than his own flag bridge to see that: staff officers and ratings, especially the latter, the best his country could produce. They were mainly signalmen and yeomen who’d left whatever life they’d had on the subcontinent to take on this new one, and tried hard to be good at it, because as meager as the pay was, it was preferable to the economic chances they took in a country whose unemployment rate hovered between 20 and 25 percent. Just for his country to be self-sufficient in food had taken—how long? Twenty-five years. And that had come only as charity of sorts, the result of Western agroscience whose success still grated on many minds, as though his country, ancient and learned, couldn’t make its own destiny. Even successful charity could be a burden on the national soul.
And now what? His country’s economy was bouncing back, finally, but it was also hitting limits. India needed additional resources, but most of all needed space, of which there was little to be had. To his country’s north was the world’s most forbidding mountain range. East was Bangladesh, which had even more problems than India did. West was Pakistan, also overcrowded, and an ancient religious enemy, war with whom could well have the unwanted effect of cutting off his country’s oil supply to the Muslim states of the Persian Gulf.
Such bad luck, the Admiral thought, picking up his glasses and surveying his fleet because he had nothing else to do at the moment. If they did nothing, the best his country might hope for was something little better than stagnation. If they turned outward, actively seeking room ... But the “new world order” said that his country could not. India was denied entry into the race to greatness by those very nations that had run the race and then shut it down lest others catch up.
The proof was right here. His navy was one of the world’s most powerful, built and manned and trained at ruinous expense, sailing on one of the world’s seven oceans, the only one named for a country, and even here it was second-best, subordinate to a fraction of the United States Navy. That grated even more. America was the one telling his country what it could and could not do. America, with a history of—what?—scarcely two hundred years. Upstarts. Had they fought Alexander of Macedon or the great Khan? The European “discovery” voyages had been aimed at reaching his country, and that land mass discovered by accident was now denying greatness and power and justice to the Admiral’s ancient land. It was, all in all, a lot to hide behind a face of professional detachment while the rest of his flag staff bustled about.
“Radar contact, bearing one-three-five, range two hundred kilometers,” a talker announced. “Inbound course, speed five hundred knots.”
The Admiral turned to his fleet-operations officer and nodded. Captain Mehta lifted a phone and spoke. His fleet was off the normal commercial sea and air routes, and the timing told him what the inbound track would be. Four American fighters, F-18E Hornet attack fighters off one of the American carriers to his southeast. Every day they came, morning and afternoon, and sometimes in the middle of the night to show that they could do that, too, to let him know that the Americans knew his location, and to remind him that he didn’t, couldn’t know theirs.
A moment later he heard the start-up noise f
rom two of his Harriers. Good aircraft, expensive aircraft, but not a match for the inbound Americans. He’d put four up today, two from Viraat and two from Vikrant, to intercept the four, probably four, American Hornets, and the pilots would wave and nod in a show of good humor, but it would be a bilateral lie.
“We could light off our SAM systems, show them that we tire of this game,” Captain Mehta suggested quietly. The Admiral shook his head.
“No. They know little about our SAM systems, and we will volunteer them nothing.” The Indians’ precise radar frequencies, pulse width, and repetition rates were not open information, and the American intelligence services had probably never troubled itself to find them out. That meant that the Americans might not be able to jam or spoof his systems—probably they could, but they wouldn’t be certain of it, and it was the lack of certainty that would worry them. It wasn’t much of a card, but it was the best in Chandraskatta’s current hand. The Admiral sipped at his tea, making a show of his imperturbable nature. “No, we will take notice of their approach, meet them in a friendly manner, and let them go on their way.”