Last Gasp (19 page)

“And so it will. In a month’s time I shall be sixty-four, and I intend to retire from the service next year. Hence the reference to my work coming to an end.”

Malankov was plainly stumped. He cleared his throat in several stages, eyes focused on the safe middle distance. “I see. Yes, well, that would explain it. I understand now.”

“Good, I’m glad that you do, comrade,” Boris murmured, loading the last word with half-a-dozen shades of meaning: condescending, impatient, threatening—as if to say “I am Professor Boris Vladimir Stanovnik, one of this country’s leading experts in microbiology, and you, Malankov, whatever status you might have attained, remain the incompetent, shifty, sniveling lab assistant with bitten nails and bad breath.” It was a psychological technique that Malankov himself might have used, given the opportunity, and it worked to good effect.

Boris rose to his feet, looming large in the tiny bare room, and it seemed that Malankov shrank perceptibly, a petty government official behind a cheap desk.

“Was there anything else? I realize you have to make these tedious and time-wasting inquiries.”

Malankov was staring straight ahead at the third button on Boris’s overcoat. “No, nothing. Thank you for coming in to see me, comrade.” The satisfaction Boris felt didn’t last long. As he left the gray granite building in Dzerzhinsky Square he was thinking how wise it had been to send two letters, one to Scripps, the other to Cheryl’s home address. It appeared to have worked: The KGB had intercepted one and missed the other. Unless they were cleverer than he gave them credit for and had withheld the information, hoping to trap him.

In any case, both had been cryptically worded—he had casually inquired how Cheryl was progressing with her father’s work and expressed the hope that “there haven’t been any new factors, such as the warming of polar currents, to exacerbate the Precambrian condition.” By this he wished to alert her to a possibility that had been worrying him for some time. The rather terrifying hypothesis that diverting the Ob and Yenisei rivers away from the Arctic Basin would bring about a general warming of the polar ocean. As phytoplankton thrived best in colder waters, this new factor could accelerate the effect caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide, killing off the phytoplankton more rapidly than predicted—possibly within a decade of the scheme being implemented.

Now these fears had been given a perplexing twist by what Malankov had let slip. Boris might have overlooked the reference to “national security” had not the weasel been at such pains to explain it away ... but explain what away exactly? The diversion scheme as a strategic weapon? How would it work? By deliberately tampering with the global climate?

That didn’t make sense—not that Boris could see, anyway—because its effects would be felt in Russia just as much as in the hated, feared, subversive West. So what did make sense?

Secretary of Defense Thomas J. Lebasse was dying of cancer of the stomach, and he knew it. At best the doctors had given him two years, which was a year longer than he had given himself. His body disgusted him; it stank of putrefaction, the sweetish sickly odor of death.

He was sixty-one years old, a small round-shouldered man with a bald head that seemed too big for his body. Superficially he looked healthy, having just returned from ten days in Florida, yet observed closely his tan had a gray pallor and the skin of his face sagged in flaccid folds underneath his dull eyes.

Right now his body wasn’t the only thing that disgusted him; this meeting, and in particular these people, he found utterly distasteful.

“You keep insisting we have no choice but to implement this plan, Major Madden. As I see it, that’s precisely what we do have—a choice. We still have our nuclear capability, which is superior to anything the Soviets can muster.”

From his position at the head of the table Lebasse looked along the two rows of faces, all turned attentively toward him. Three members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. An admiral who had made a special study of deep-draft cargo vessels. Two high-ranking air force officers, experts in missile deployment. A civilian scientist named Farrer whose function here today Lebasse wasn’t entirely clear about.

Plus the two prime movers of DEPARTMENT STORE: Gen. George (“Blindeye”) Wolfe and his henchman, Maj. Lloyd F. Madden. They had nursed their baby with tender loving care, Lebasse knew, not to say ruthless opportunism, and they put him in mind of ambitious, hardeyed parents who would stop at nothing to protect their offspring.

“Mr. Secretary, with respect,” Major Madden was saying in his cultured New England voice, “we are faced with a radical new situation.”

Appearance matched voice perfectly: neat dark hair, carefully parted, smooth sharp-featured face, tailored uniform with lapel badges burnished to winking brightness. His was the kind of face that became more youthful with the passing years, in contrast with General Wolfe, who at sixty-two could have passed for a man of seventy. Two things had contributed to this: high blood pressure, which had forced him to lose weight and made his neck scrawny, and his early years spent under foreign suns, which had imprinted a crazed mosaic on what had once been a strong, rugged face.

“The use of nuclear weapons is becoming an outdated concept in terms of global strategy.” Madden spoke with the smug knowingness of a schoolboy who thinks himself brighter than his teacher but isn’t smart enough not to show it. “The MX missile system will be obsolete even before it’s fully operational, and already the budget is way off the graph. Now, we know from intelligence reports and satellite photoreconnaissance that the Soviets are well advanced in their scheme to divert the Ob and Yenisei rivers; that within three years maximum the scheme will be completed. With respect, Mr. Secretary—”

“Forget the respect,” Lebasse snapped. “Say what you have to say.”

“Simply that we have to be ready to meet this new threat, sir. The balance of power must be maintained if we’re to safeguard the nation. After all, that is our prime responsibility.”

“Thank you, Major Madden,” said Lebasse icily. “I don’t need you to remind me of my—our—responsibility to the nation. What you’re telling me is that we’re entering a new phase in which nuclear weapons are only of minor, or at least secondary, importance. Instead, the confrontation is potentially of the kind that you term ‘environmental war.’ Have I got it right?”

“Yes, Mr. Secretary. That is correct.” Lloyd Madden doodled on the blank pad in front of him, holding himself tight inside. He’d been too forthright; too damn obvious in fact. Better not to further arouse this sick old man, who should have stayed in Florida with the rest of the senile geriatrics. So he would wait, bide his time, let somebody else take the lead, he decided, drawing a cock and pair of balls.

That somebody else was U.S. Air Force Gen. Walter Stafford of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose support was crucial because he was known to take a moderate line (dubbed by the media as a “dawk”—midway between dove and hawk) and, more important, because he had known Lebasse since they were students together at Columbia in the early fifties.

“I share your misgivings, Tom, but I’m afraid Major Madden is right. We have no real alternative but to bring DEPARTMENT STORE to full operational status as quickly as possible. Nothing else will contain the Soviets, that’s a dead certainty.”

“‘Dead’ being the operative word,” Lebasse remarked stonily. He was thinking of his four grandchildren, whose ages ranged from seventeen to five. This was a fine legacy to bequeath them—global death. He wondered bleakly if it had been any different since 5:30 on the morning of July 16,1945, when the atomic bomb stopped being a row of symbols in a physicist’s notebook and was transformed into a five-thousand-degree fireball above the Trinity site in Arizona. That had happened two days before his ninth birthday.

Was what he was being asked to sanction any more monstrous than that? No, except that he would not live to see the consequences. The seeds of death were already within him, his escape route to eternity. History would judge him on this one decision—always supposing there was anyone left to write it.

“Is there a realistic assessment of the potential threat?” asked General Smith, the army’s representative on the Joint Chiefs. “Three years has been mentioned as a finalization point. So what exactly can we expect to see happen in 2001?”

Madden looked up from his pad and gave an almost imperceptible nod to Farrer. The scientist had been exhaustively briefed and rigorously rehearsed, and he launched in confidently.

“There are several possible effects of the rivers’ diversion scheme— code-named Project Arrow by the Soviets—three of which we regard as presenting real hazards to the United States.

“First, the melting of the ice in the Spitsbergen region north of Scandinavia, known as the Eurasian Basin, will produce positive feedback, causing more ice to break up and melt over an increasingly wide area of the Arctic Ocean. This will bring a rise in mean sea level of between seventy and one-hundred-fifty feet, flooding many of our coastal cities and towns, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, New Orleans, and scores of other places.

“Second, the change in the ice cover will almost certainly disrupt the circumpolar wind pattern in the Northern Hemisphere, altering the climate right across Europe, Siberia, Alaska, and Canada. This in turn will affect the climate of the United States. It isn’t possible to know precisely how, though computer modeling studies indicate that the average temperature of the midwestern states will fall by something like four to seven degrees, which will effectively wipe out all grain production in that region.

“Third, the atmospheric circulation systems will also be affected by the warming of the Arctic Ocean, and since we know that these directly relate to the weather in the tropics it is reasonable to assume that the southern states will experience a shift in climatic patterns. Again, this is impossible to predict accurately, but we believe that the weather will become much more erratic, alternating between torrential rainfall on the scale of monsoons in the southeast and prolonged droughts in the western desert regions.”

“Floods, Starvation, Drought,” barked Blindeye Wolfe, spelling it out in headlines. He looked grimly along the table toward the secretary of defense, eyes narrowed so that they almost disappeared in the creases of his face. “Jesus, the Soviets have the perfect weapon—the goddamn climate! No call to use their nuclear capability. They’ll just drown, starve, and fry us into submission!”

“How much of this is conjecture and how much is fact?” Lebasse said.

Farrer’s fair complexion colored a little. “Well, sir, it’s extremely difficult to prove until it actually happens,” he admitted. “We rely on computer modeling studies for much of our information, but even the most conservative estimates are very disturbing. A minor change in global climate can have disastrous long-term effects.” He cleared his throat. “For example, it’s been calculated that an increase of only four degrees Celsius would be required to melt the entire polar ice cap. The Russians won’t achieve that, but even a fraction of that increase would be enough to bring about the effects I’ve outlined.” He glanced at Madden, but the major was still intent on his doodling.

Lebasse’s expression remained inscrutable. The concealed lighting in the windowless room made blurred highlights on the dome of his head.

“That’s a pretty horrific scenario,” he said eventually, and then, as if sparked by a new thought, “Why isn’t the president’s senior scientific adviser here today?”

Major Madden stirred himself. He had drawn a dagger through the erect penis, which was dripping blood. “DEPARTMENT STORE has a special security status, Mr. Secretary. Access is restricted to designated military personnel.”

“And that excludes Professor Lucas?” Lebasse frowned.

“Yes, sir.”

Lebasse sighed, shaking his head. “That’s a pity. I’d like his opinion on the scientific validity of all this.” He tapped the thick dossier and looked across at Farrer. “I’m not disputing anything you’ve told me, young fella, but before I make my recommendations to the president I want to be absolutely sure we’ve got this right.” He added darkly, “I know all about computer predictions. They can be made to prove, or disprove, just about anything you care to name.”

“These came from the DELFI facility at the National Center for Atmospheric Research,” Farrer supplied helpfully. “It’s acknowledged to have the most sophisticated and comprehensive predictive capability anywhere in the world.”

“That I don’t doubt,” Lebasse muttered. “But I’m damned if a decision of this magnitude is going to be based on the say-so of a box of microchips, no matter how ‘sophisticated and comprehensive.’ ” His gaze swiveled in the direction of General Wolfe and Major Madden. “I don’t see any reason why Professor Lucas can’t be given clearance of DEPARTMENT STORE, do you? He is the president’s senior adviser in these matters.”

Madden looked up from the pad on which he was drawing, rather crudely, a naked woman with huge breasts and pneumatic thighs, complete with genitalia. “I’m not completely happy about that, sir—”

“Dammit, man, why not? Do think Gene Lucas is a security risk?” If the secretary of defense decreed it, then of course it would have to be, Madden knew full well. But it couldn’t be allowed to happen. Lucas wasn’t in anyone’s pocket: He’d give an unbiased and independent evaluation of the Russian threat and the merits of the U.S. project to counter it. Which may, or may not, be in their favor.

They’d have to head this off somehow.

Correction. He’d have to head it off.

“Yes, Mr. Secretary, of course. I’m pretty sure that can be arranged.” Madden smiled with his thin lips. “It will have to be processed through Advanced Strategic Projects, under whose auspices DEPARTMENT STORE has been developed, but that’s a mere formality.”

“How long?”

“Sir?”

“How long will it take to give Professor Lucas security clearance?” asked Lebasse impatiently.

“Forty-eight hours.”

“Good. That’s fine.” Lebasse leaned back, palms pressed together. “Providing there isn’t a conflict of interests.”