”Anything putting out that much heat should be bright enough to see at night,” Meeters pointed out. “How long has it been there? Was it there before the clouds moved in?”
Shearson shook his head again. “We don’t know, sir. With the budget cuts and the lowered priority for that area, and with RIS-34 off-line right now, we’ve only been going over the feed for that area twice a week. Wasn’t a damn thing there except ice three days ago.”
”Gotta be a well fire, then,” Meeters said, straightening up.
”No, sir,” Shearson said. “I don’t think so. We have visual from last week-take a look.”
He tapped keys, and a new image, composed of gray shapes, superimposed itself on the existing one. Shearson pointed to the location of the red dot.
”It’s at least a couple of kilometers from the pipeline and twenty or more from the nearest well-head. The Russians didn’t sink any new wells in less than a week in the middle of an arctic winter, General.” He tapped more keys and added, “And besides, look at this.”
The grayish lines and blobs of the satellite photography vanished, then the bright colors of the infrared scan. Then a new scan appeared over the same outline map.
Again, a single bright red dot gleamed on a field of greens and blues, in that same location.
”What the hell is this one?” Meeters asked.
”Radioactivity,” Shearson said. “Whatever we’re looking at is hot in more ways than one. I haven’t seen a mix like this since Chernobyl-though this one’s different, the radiation’s dropped off quickly and the heat hasn’t…”
”Radioactivity?”
”Yes, sir.”
”Son of a bitch,” Meeters said. He straightened up again, turned, and shouted at the guard, “Sergeant, I want this room secured, nobody in or out without emergency authorization.” Then he turned back to Shearson. “I want hard copy of all this on my desk in five minutes, and I want this wired to the White House and NORAD. Flag any intelligence reports on anything in the area military, political, anything.”
”General…?” Shearson asked, startled. “What’s going on? Who is it?”
”I don’t know who it is,” Meeters said, “or what they think they’re doing-might be some kind of Soviet leftovers, might be terrorists, might be Russian nationalists gone overboard, but it’s somebody out there.”
”But whatever it is, why…?” Shearson groped unsuccessfully for words.
Meeters looked at the tech in exasperation. “Think, Shearson-don’t you see what that is? I mean, what the hell else could it be? You said yourself you hadn’t seen anything like it since Chernobyl, and nobody builds power reactors in the middle of an oil field. Heat and radiation means that someone just cracked open a nuke and out there in the middle of nowhere that means a bomb, Shearson.” He jabbed a finger at the computer screen. “Someone’s hauling nuclear weapons around the arctic, and it’s nothing the Russians have told us about. Sure, we know they’ve got stuff they don’t tell us, selling goodies to the Third World, and we don’t like it but we live with it-but you don’t smuggle nukes from Russia to Iran or Pakistan across the fucking polar ice cap. Think a minute, Shearson-what’s straight across the ice cap from Siberia?”
”North America,” Shearson said. “But…”
”Damn right,” Meeters said, cutting him off. “We are! Maybe they’ve got missiles hidden out there, or maybe some damn fool’s hauling them over the pole by dogsled, I don’t know, but I do know that I, for one, don’t want any nukes coming into my neighborhood unannounced.”
”But, General, that’s crazy,” Shearson protested. “We aren’t giving the Russians a hard time. Why would anyone try to attack us now?”
”Why not?” Meeters said as he headed for the door. “You got a better explanation? Since when did being crazy mean it’s not happening?” He charged out of the room.
Shearson stared after him for a moment, then turned back to his console and began typing commands.
His hands shook as he typed.
General Emory Mavis, U.S. Army, frowned as he looked at the report Meeters had sent over.
Meeters thought it was a bunch of Russian crazies smuggling nukes over the pole; he didn’t see that any other explanation of the data was possible. Once upon a time Mavis might have thought so, too.
Now, though, Mavis took a broader view. He had learned that a whole slew of supposedly impossible things were possible after all. Unlikely, maybe, but possible.
That understanding was what had landed him his current position, one that existed off the books; officially he was retired. Unofficially he was, all by himself, a black-budget item, listed in what few records existed as “Esoteric Threat Assessment Capability.” Part of his job was to look at unlikely things and figure out just which unlikely possibility was fact. That was his specialty; that was why the White House kept him on call. That was why they’d called him off the golf course to look at this stuff.
Another part of his job was to advise the president on just what the hell to do about the esoteric threats that Mavis assessed, and if necessary to take charge and see that it got done.
Meeters thought it was a bunch of crazies smuggling nukes, but that was unlikely enough that the boys in the White House basement had gotten Mavis off the best run at the back nine he’d ever had at the Burning Tree Country Club to take a look at the report, apply his expertise, and come up with something to tell the president.
Heat and radiation in the middle of the Siberian wilderness-yes, Russian warheads were the obvious explanation, but were they the right one?
He reached for the phone on his desk, lifted the receiver, and tapped in a number.
When he heard someone pick up on the other end, before the other could start to speak, Mavis barked, “Mavis here. Get me Charles Westfield.”
He didn’t bother listening to the reply; he waited until he heard Westfield’s familiar voice say “Hello?”
”Dr. Westfield,” Mavis said. “I need to know what sort of heat and radiation you’d see if one of the Russians’ largest warheads cracked open. Fax me the figures ASAP.”
”Tonight?” Westfield said, startled.
”Now,” Mavis told him. “As soon as we’re done talking. You have the number?”
”I’m not sure…”
”Got a pen?”
Ten minutes later the fax machine whirred and began extruding paper.
Mavis looked at the numbers. He wasn’t a physicist himself, but he’d worked with enough of this sort of material to be able to make sense of what he saw.
It didn’t match what the satellites showed for Assyma. It wasn’t even close:
Mavis had expected that. Five minutes later he had Westfield on the phone again.
”You’re sure of these figures?” he asked.
”Yes,” Westfield said. No hesitation, no qualifications-just “yes.”
”Suppose a Russian nuke were damaged, enough to trigger a meltdown
…”
”Warheads don’t melt down,” Westfield interrupted. “You’ve got several times critical mass of highly enriched metal there-you put it together and it’s going to explode, not just melt into slag.”
”All right, it’s not a warhead, then,” Mavis said. “Let me fax you something, and you tell me what you make of it.” He pulled out the printout of the raw satellite data, before Shearson or Meeters had added any comments or interpretation, and fed it into the fax.
”It’s not a warhead, damaged or otherwise,” Westfield told him. “And it’s not a meltdown-too much heat, not enough neutron emission for a meltdown. Might be a low-yield burst of some kind-are there any seismic reports?”
”Good question,” Mavis replied.
It took hours and dozens of calls-to seismologists, CIA analysts, and several agencies that weren’t supposed to exist-before General Mavis was satisfied.