Roarke and the others looked at Gerald Weinroth, head of the President’s scientific board. The shaggy-haired, rumpled professor nodded vigorously and stood up.
“Project Jerusalem has been going forward for over three years. We hope to have a workable model in three to six months. It has been in many ways a more difficult task to organize this effort than the original atomic bomb back in 1945. But when we do get it, it will revolutionize warfare. We’ll have come up with a death ray.”
Roarke interrupted again, “Where are the Russians on this one?”
Riordan took the floor again, “We know they’ve been working on the same idea for some time. But like their missile program, it may be they’ve run into economic difficulties which have slowed down their progress. It’s like the time they tried to beat us to the moon and fell so far behind, mostly because of finances and also a certain lack of sophistication in gadgetry. Look how long it was before they finally got to the Sea of Tranquillity. At any rate, the information we get back from agents on the ground is that they have gotten bogged down. Now as to those Midas readings, I’m not quite sure if that’s a prototype that was fired. I can only hope they didn’t break through on this. It might get sticky as hell…”
At 6:45, the meeting adjourned for a light supper, and the participants went to the next room for a meal of chicken salad and black-eyed peas, General Roarke’s favorite delicacy. Whitecoated waiters passed among the officials and served impeccably from gold service, bearing the seal of the U.S. Army. The conversation was relaxed and warm. Most of these men were comrades from many crises during the cold war and often entertained one another at intimate parties in the suburbs of Washington. They spoke the same language professionally and faced the same problems in their tiny fiefdoms. In the dining room at the Pentagon, they were comfortable and confident over coffee and brandy.
Across the river, the White House basked in the brilliant sunshine. In the Oval Room, President William Mellon Stark sat with his Secretary of Labor, Bruce A. Hinton, and discussed a proposed bill to enlarge relief benefits to migratory workers scattered across the land. The secretary was telling the President how much the passage of the measure would ingratiate him with the liberal community, which would be convinced the President was finally moving on the human-rights issue. Stark was bored by the whole discussion and particularly by the secretary. Hinton had been forced on him by certain people who had contributed heavily to his campaign. Because of this, Stark put up with his constant ramblings about minorities and whatever else he preached about as the months went by.
Stark himself was more interested in a long-postponed vacation, due to start in two days. His wife was joining him at a retreat near Bar Harbor for two long weeks. Since the children had their own families and jobs to think about, that would leave him alone with Pamela for the first time in two years. Stark was tired of being President, tired of constantly watching over the fate of the nation. He had lost that drive which once ate at him, forcing him to grasp for the shiny gold ring. Once he got it, the challenge was met and the fires had been banked. The President of the most powerful country in the world just wanted to serve out his term and then quit and go fishing with his wife of twenty-five years. He owed it to her and to himself.
So Stark listened to his Secretary of Labor and found him a bore. The secretary did not seem to notice and kept up his dreary monologue.
In the basement of the building, another man sat before a machine. Master Sergeant Arly Cooper watched indifferently as he read a poem before him on a teletype; it was in English but it was from Eugen Onegin by Pushkin:
Fifty-one hundred miles away in Moscow, a Russian soldier was tapping out his favorite lines to his American counterpart in the Situation Room deep beneath the White House. The two men manned the hot line which traversed the Atlantic Ocean and then went through Scandinavia on into the heartland of Russia. Every hour on the hour the Soviet technician cleared his machine to guarantee its dependability. Each hour on the half hour, Arly Cooper or his replacement did the same. Cooper, a black man, always used Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address for his message. He would type out: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Cooper did it with a certain relish, as though in the process he was educating the enemy to the real meaning of America. Cooper felt as though he personally was piercing the Iron Curtain with his own brand of propaganda. It was a game which helped him while away the monotonous eight hours a day he spent locked in this walnut-paneled nerve center of United States military communications. The hot line was manned on three shifts by both countries. Cooper’s counterpart in Moscow was always the Pushkin lover. He often wondered what the man looked like, whether he too was a master sergeant, or if he too wished he could be somewhere else, doing something more interesting. Arly Cooper would never know, but he thought about it often.
The transmission ended at 7:05 P.M. and Cooper acknowledged. He then went to the coffee urn and poured himself a cup, black with no sugar. In twenty-five minutes it would be his turn to promote the cause of Abraham Lincoln behind the Iron Curtain.
At the Pentagon, the intelligence meeting had reconvened. The representative from the Defense Intelligence Agency, filling in for Secretary of Defense Clifford Erskine, who was in London, added his office’s pieces to the world mosaic. He noted that a Soviet diplomat in Ankara, who had been friendly for years with Premier Smirnov, had been unusually garrulous at a reception for foreign ambassadors on the previous Tuesday. His garrulity seemed forced, and an informant reported he seemed extraordinarily nervous and agitated. No one had ever seen him act this way before.
Charlie Tarrant commented on this remark by saying that a pattern had been established in at least one area. The ranks of Soviet diplomats and secret police apparently were under some kind of internal stress. “Perhaps,” offered Tarrant, “the Kremlin is undergoing a periodic reshuffle.”
Claude Norton, from the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, reinforced this argument by saying that the last meeting of the two great powers had been the most difficult in several months. The Soviet delegation was mute, completely intransigent. It was shocking to the Americans because Premier Smirnov himself had urged the Americans to stay at the conference so that an important breakthrough could be achieved in the near future. Smirnov was evidently pursuing the idea of disarmament despite increasing opposition at home from hawkish elements who feared he was giving away the security of the country. Yet, in the last meeting, Norton recalled, it had seemed just like the old days of Stalin.
General Roarke asked for any further comments bearing on the subject Hearing none, Roarke continued, “Gentlemen, I think we can say that our immediate safety is not threatened by anything we’ve heard here today. Our missile strength is at least equal to the enemy. Our military posture is superb. There does seem to be some indication of a political upheaval over there, but it will take time to resolve the significance of it. Don’t you agree? As to the mysterious Midas sensings, let’s also suppose that the Russians are working on a project similar to ours, and are possibly proceeding at a faster rate than we thought. Still, Dr. Weinroth, what would that mean as far as capability if they are now testing a weapon?”