Dead or Alive (48 page)

So he’d let Ibrahim continue with his on-scene reconnaissance, but he’d withhold final approval on the operation until he knew the disposition of the other pieces.

And if Ibrahim succeeds?
he asked himself.
And what then?
Would this Kealty react as they expected? Their profile of him—code-named CASCADE—seemed certain of it, but the Emir had long ago learned to be wary of the vagaries of the human mind.

CASCADE ... an apt title. He found both it and the concept behind it amusing. Certainly the Western intelligence agencies had psychological profiles of him—he’d read one, in fact—so he found it entertaining to be largely basing their most ambitious operation on a profile of their own.

Kealty was the consummate politician, which in American politics was taken as synonymous for leader. How and when this ignorance had started he didn’t know. Nor did he care. The American people had chosen for themselves the politician who had most ably portrayed himself as a leader, never asking whether the image matched the character behind it. CASCADE said it did not, and the Emir agreed. Worse still—or better still, depending on your perspective—Kealty had surrounded himself with sycophants and favor-holders who did nothing to improve his credentials.

So what happens when a weak man of flawed character is faced with a cascade of catastrophes? He crumbles, of course—and with him, the country.

 

 

 

A
s promised, their charter boat was waiting for them. The captain, a local fisherman named Pyotor Salychev, sat in a lawn chair at the end of the deserted plank pier, smoking his pipe. Bobbing in the black, cold water was a twelve-meter wide-beamed British Halmatic trawler. Salychev grunted as he rose to his feet.

“You’re late,” he said, then stepped off the pier onto the afterdeck.

“Bad weather,” Adnan replied. “You’re ready?”

“Wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”

During their first negotiations, Salychev had asked few questions about who they were or why they wanted to go to the island, but Adnan, playing the role of an ecological zealot, had dropped several hints during their conversation. Watchdog groups had long been coming here to document the ravages of the Cold War, Salychev had replied with a shrug. As long as they paid and as long as they didn’t hazard him or his boat, Salychev was happy to take anyone to that godforsaken place. “No accounting for stupidity,” he’d told Adnan.

“It’s smaller than I’d imagined,” Adnan said, nodding at the boat.

“You were expecting a battleship? She’s tough enough. One of the only good things the British ever built, the Halmatic. I’ve had her lying on her beam and she still snaps to. You worry about yourself. Come on, then, we push off in ten minutes.”

The rest of Adnan’s men finished unloading their gear from the truck, then hurried down the pier and started loading it onto the afterdeck as Salychev barked orders about where and how to place everything. Once satisfied all was in order, Salychev cast off the lines, propped a foot on the pier, and pushed the Halmatic off. Seconds later he was in the wheelhouse, turning over the engine. With a belch of black smoke from the manifolds, the diesel engine roared to life and water frothed at the stern.

“Next stop,” Salychev called over his shoulder, “hell.”

 

 

 

Two hours later the island’s southern headlands appeared through the fog off the starboard bow. Adnan stood amidships, watching the coastline through a pair of binoculars. Salychev had assured him military patrols would be no trouble, and Adnan could see none.

“They’re out there,” he called from the pilothouse, “but they’re not so bright. You could set your watch by ’em. Same patrol routes, every day at the same time.”

“What about radar?”

“Where?”

“On the island. I heard there was an air base. ...”

Salychev chuckled. “What, you’re talking about Rogachevo? Not really, not anymore. Not enough money. Used to have an interceptor regiment there, the 641st, I think, but nowadays it’s just a few cargo planes and helicopters.

“As for the boat patrols, they got dinky navigation sets, and like I said, they’re predictable anyway. Once we’re inshore, we’re safe. As you might imagine, they try to keep their distance.”

Adnan could understand why. While his men knew little about the nature of their mission or their destination, Adnan had been fully briefed.

Novaya Zemlya was indeed a hell on earth. According to the last census, the island was home to 2,500 people, mostly Nenetses and Avars living in Belushya Guba settlement. The island itself was in reality two islands—Severny in the north, and Yuzhny in the south—each separated from the other by the Matochkin Strait.

It was a shame, really, Adnan thought, that all the world knew of Novaya Zemlya was its Cold War history. The Russians and Europeans had known about it since the eleventh century, first through Novgorod traders, then through a steady string of explorers—Willoughby, Barents, Liitke, Hudson. . . . They’d all visited here hundreds of years before it was annexed by the Soviets in 1954, renamed the Novaya Zemlya Test Site, and divided into zones: A, Chyornaya Guba; B, Matochkin Shar; and C, Sukhoy Nos, where the fifty-megaton Tsar Bomba was detonated in 1961.

During its lifespan, Novaya Zemlya had been home to nearly three hundred nuclear detonations, the last one in 1990. Since then it had become many things to many people—a curiosity, a tragedy, a grim reminder. . . . But for the cash-poor Russian government after the dissolution, the island had become a dumping ground, a place to abandon their abominations.

What was that American phrase? Adnan wondered. Ah, yes . . . One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

 

 

 

T
hey were interested in the new line, Cassiano saw. Where it crossed roads, how far off the ground it was, how many support pylons per mile ... An interesting request, and of course he would do his best to acquire the information.

They were also interested in trains, which puzzled him. It was true that trains came and went on a daily basis, but their entry into the facility was strictly limited and monitored. If they were looking to gain access to the facility, there were easier ways. Perhaps that was the answer. They weren’t interested in the trains as a means of infiltration but rather as a measurement tool. The facility’s output was a closely kept secret, but if the trains coming and going were monitored and their specifications known, one could make a good guess as to the output levels.

Very smart,
he thought. And it did fit with what he knew about his employers. Competition was a healthy thing, he’d been told, and nothing could be done about a newly discovered oil field. What could be controlled, however, were prices and output capacity, which is what he suspected his employer planned to do. The OPEC nations (Islamic nations) had been the world’s largest supplier of oil for decades upon decades, and if Cassiano could help maintain that supremacy, he would happily do so.

I
N RETROSPECT, Jenkins realized he should have seen it coming, this “promotion” that was in fact nothing more than a grade-A pain in the ass. The facility got regular visits from a plethora of government agencies and officials, from the Environmental Protection Agency and Homeland Security to the U.S. Geological Survey and the Army Corps of Engineers, all of which had thus far been handled by a Department of Energy spokesperson. The recently reheated battle in Washington over the future of the facility had changed all that, and it seemed every pol or bureaucrat who could find his or her way here was showing up, armed with probing questions generated by underpaid staffers and a deep desire to understand every nuance of the facility.

“What they want, Steve,” his boss had told him, “is a peek behind the curtain, and you’re just unpolished enough to make ’em think they’re getting it.”

Backhanded compliment notwithstanding, Steve had to admit he knew the facility inside and out, backward and forward, having started here just three years out of college, which was, in the lifespan of the project, nineteen years after the site had been initially identified as a possible candidate, along with ten others in six states; twelve years after it was nominated for intensive “site-characterization” studies; and ten years after it was crowned the winner of the beauty contest. He’d worked at this not-so-little patch of desert for most of his adult life, and at a current cost of $11 billion, it was one of the most extensively studied chunks of land in the world. And depending on who won the battle in Washington, that $11 billion might be written off as a loss. How did one do that? he wondered. In what column on the federal balance sheet did such a sum fall?

The project’s completion had become a point of pride for the nine hundred or so members of the team, and while opinion varied from employee to employee whether they would want to live next to it, their collective investment in its success was enormous. Though only thirty-seven, Steve was considered one of the site’s old hands, along with a hundred or so others who’d been here since the project had gone from a notion on a piece of paper to a shovel-in-the-dirt concern. Unfortunately, he could tell no one much about what he did, a restriction he hadn’t minded until he’d met Allison. She was keenly and genuinely interested in his work, about how he spent his days, a trait neither of his previous two girlfriends had displayed. God, he was a lucky man. To find a woman like her, and to have her attracted to
him . . .
And the sex. God almighty. Admittedly, his experience was somewhat limited, but the things she did to him, with her hands, with her mouth . . . Every time they were together, he felt like he was living a
Penthouse
Forum letter.

His musings were interrupted by a telltale plume of dust appearing over the hill opposite the main tunnel entrance, indicating vehicles approaching. Sixty seconds later, two black Chevy Suburbans appeared on the north road and pulled into the parking lot. Afternoon work had been halted, and all the trucks and equipment pallets moved to the perimeter of the lot. The Suburbans slowed to a stop about fifty feet away and sat idling. None of the doors opened, and Steve imagined the occupants dreading the idea of leaving the air-conditioned interiors. And it wasn’t even hot, he thought, not summer-hot, at least. Funny how delegation visits like this one tended to taper off in June, July, and August.

Now the doors opened, and out climbed the ten staffers who had been dispatched by their respective governors. Two for each of the five bordering states. Having already rolled up their shirtsleeves and loosened their ties, the group stood for a moment, blinking and looking around, before seeing Steve waving his arm at them. En masse, they walked over to him and gathered in a semicircle.

“Afternoon, and welcome,” he said. “My name is Steve Jenkins, and I’m one of the senior on-site engineers here. I’ll do my best to learn your names before we’re through, but for now I’ll leave it to you to sort out your visitor badges.”

He held out a shoebox, and one by one each delegate came forward and found his or her badge.

“Just a couple quick reminders, and then we’ll get out of the heat. I’ll be passing out information sheets that will cover everything we’re going to talk about this afternoon, and everything I’m allowed to say.”

This got a few chuckles. Steve relaxed a bit. Might not be so bad after all.

“That said, I’ll ask you not to take notes, either on paper or on a PDA. Same with voice recorders and cameras.”

“Why is that?” one of the delegates, a blond California-type woman, asked. “There are plenty of pictures on the Internet.”

“True, but only the ones we want there,” Steve replied. “Believe me, if I can answer a question, I’ll do it. Our goal is to give you as much information as we can. One last thing before we step inside: This contraption next to me that looks like part rocket booster, part mobile home, and part oil pipeline is our TBM, or tunnel boring machine, known affectionately as the Yucca Mucker. For those of you that love facts and figures, the Mucker is four hundred sixty feet long, twenty-five feet wide, weighs seven hundred tons, and can cut through solid rock at up to eighteen feet an hour. To put that into perspective, that’s about the length of one of the Suburbans you arrived in.

There were appreciative murmurs and chuckles from the delegation.

“Okay, if you’ll follow me to the tunnel entrance, we’ll get started.”

 

 

W
e’re now standing in what we call the Exploratory Studies Facility,” Jenkins said. “It is shaped like a horseshoe, about five miles long and twenty-five feet wide. In several places in the ESF we constructed eight alcoves about the size of pole barns, in which we store equipment and conduct experiments, and six weeks ago we completed the first experimental emplacement drift.”

“Which is what?” one of the delegates asked.