Cyclops One - Страница 38

As she talked the call-waiting feature beeped Fisher’s line with another call.

“Gotta get going, Betty. Keep digging.”

“Digging for what?”

He clicked onto the other line and immediately regretted doing so.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Why, Jemma, hello to you. Actually, I am in a coffee emporium in downtown central north Alexandria. I think it’s downtown. Hard to tell.”

“I need you to get on a plane right away. You have to go to Afghanistan. Did you catch the President’s speech?”

“The President?”

“Fisher, I don’t have any time for your bullshit.”

“Such language. I bet there’s an ordinance against it here.”

“Fisher — I’m going to give you twenty minutes to get over to Andrews. There’s a plane waiting.”

“A big one, I hope.”

Chapter 5

Blitz had expected some of the criticism. It was mostly knee-jerk anti-Americanism, the kind that would interpret a cure for cancer as somehow part of a plot to bring a McDonald’s restaurant to every intersection in the world. A few of the sources were surprising, or at least ironic: A German newspaper accused the U.S. of trying to enforce its “ethos” on the world, as if eliminating all life-forms from several hundred thousand square miles was a lifestyle choice.

But there were a few nuanced opinions — he couldn’t call them criticisms exactly — that did disturb him. One, recognizing that mankind now stood at the precipice of a new age, went on to warn that the shape of this age was not so clear-cut:

* * *

One of the lessons that seems not to be understood about the use of the atomic bombs against Japan was that they helped end the war precisely because they were weapons of indiscriminate annihilation. They made possible the erasing of an entire people — not simply the removal of combatants, but of all people. World War II to a great degree erased the line between combatant and noncombatant. The Allied powers involved in the fight understood — though they could not admit it publicly — that the only real way to win the war was to combine military victory with severe crippling of the civilian population. The atomic bombs were the culmination of that, a step further along the line that led from Dresden to the firebombing of Tokyo. There would have been no final victory without these mass destructions, just more in the cycle of engagements that had wracked the world for one hundred, two hundred years.

And so, when the possibility of complete destruction is removed, what then? Does it lead to more stability — to no more war, as the President declared in his forceful speech last night? Or does it lead paradoxically to an era of more instability? If a country can only be defeated in war by total annihilation — the lesson of World War II — what happens when that possibility is removed? Is the answer truly peace? Or is the result more cycles of violence? Low-grade violence compared to world wars, certainly, but inevitable and intractable nonetheless.

The American action against Iraq in the first Gulf War is a case in point. By limiting their objectives in the war, America and its allies inadvertently set the stage for years of continued conflict and great suffering, necessitating actions in 2003 which even now we do not fully understand the ramifications of. Would the result have been so much different if Saddam Hussein — or, better, a successor who rose to power by assassinating the despised leader — swore off weapons of mass destruction? Would the Kurds have been freed, the Shiite majority unchained? The Cyclops weapon — along with the ABM and augmented ABM system currently envisioned — can eliminate nuclear war. But will they make the world safer? And in pursuing this safety — admittedly a seemingly glorious goal — are we actually making ourselves less secure?…

* * *

Not only did Blitz disagree with some of the essay’s conclusions; it bothered him considerably that the essay had been written by one of his mentors, Donald Byrd, who had preceded him at Harvard and in his estimation remained his teacher. In essence, his friend was saying he had done the opposite of what he had intended.

But what was the alternative? What would he have said if they let the war go on?

“Lost in thought?” asked the President as he entered the East Sitting Room on the second floor of the White House. The President pulled one of the ornate wooden chairs from the table where one of the aides had stacked the newspapers and printouts. A silver coffee service sat on the floor; D’Amici bent over and helped himself. “So?” he said finally. “What’s the verdict?”

“Mostly positive,” said Blitz.

“I don’t mean the press reaction,” said D’Amici. He waved his hand dismissively. “Will the cease-fire hold or not?”

“I think it will,” said Blitz. “They sound scared.”

“What about the other plane? Was it Cyclops?”

D’Amici hadn’t slept — Blitz knew this for a fact, since he hadn’t himself — but he looked as if were rested and ready to go bicycling or on a picnic. The doubt he’d seen the other night was gone. He’d made the right decision, and his people had executed it perfectly.

“We’re still going through the satellite photos,” said Blitz. “Colonel Howe should be conducting the search by now.”

“Howe’s still in Afghanistan?”

“Yes, sir. The Pentagon…His aircraft have the most advanced gear available. And he volunteered.”

“He’s got a future.” The President smiled in a way that suggested he might consider adopting the colonel — or placing him on the ticket as vice president for the next election.

“We’re a little worried about Chinese reaction,” added Blitz.

D’Amici shrugged. “If they’re the ones who have the plane, their reaction is irrelevant. And if they don’t, well, we’ll deal with that down the line. You don’t think this is parallel Chinese technology?”

The CIA had raised that possibility yesterday, claiming that their review of the strikes showed differences in the weaponry. Bonham’s experts had snickered, and Blitz sided with them.

“Doubtful. And it’s definitely not Russian. They’re clearly years behind.”

“So the Pakistanis stole it?”

“I just don’t see that,” said Blitz. The Pakistani theory — that they had stolen the plane to protect themselves from just such an attack — was popular at the Pentagon but had no evidence to back it up, especially given the plane’s flight path from the time it was spotted off the Indian coast. A task force of intel experts was trying to piece together the plane’s flight path prior to that, but had made little progress.

“Someone took it. I doubt the original crew hijacked it for Greenpeace,” he said sarcastically.

“I agree,” said Blitz. “Maybe the Russians.”

“Then why aren’t they talking about the shootdown, or the fact that they lost the aircraft?” The President was referring to intercepted communications, not public announcements, since saying anything would implicate their guilt in taking it.

“They know we can read them.”

D’Amici bent to the floor and poured himself another cup of coffee. “Congress is going to approve the augmented-ABM funding, as long as next week’s tests go well. We’re riding a wave, Professor. Riding a wave. The end of war as we know it.” He picked up a folded newspaper from the floor, holding open the editorial page. The lead editorial, congratulating him, bore that title: “The end of war as we know it.”

Blitz looked up as a familiar set of footsteps echoed through the second-floor hallway. Mozelle appeared from behind a pair of Secret Service agents. She greeted the President first, then looked at Blitz, tacitly asking whether she should speak. But there was really no option: D’Amici didn’t like secrets, especially ones so obvious.

“McIntyre is missing,” she said. “We’re not sure yet, but it looks like he was at one of the Indian bases in Kashmir. No one’s heard from him since the exchange.”

Chapter 6

Pure oxygen was a tried-and-true hangover cure, and while Howe didn’t have a hangover, the Oworked wonders, clearing his foggy head and wiping away much of his fatigue as he and Timmy began their search for the downed aircraft believed to be Cyclops One.

A day and a half’s worth of analysis had yielded a five-hundred-square-mile box where Unk-2—still not positively ID’d as Cyclops One — had apparently been hit by an Indian SAM before going down. The area, which Howe and Timmy were just entering, included a small portion of Pakistan and India as well as China and Nepal. The peaks rose over six thousand meters — eighteen thousand feet.

What would he do if he found her — if Megan were down there in the snow or worse, crumpled in the rocks?

Kick her in the face?

No, he couldn’t. He’d bend down, ask her why.

Why?

It wouldn’t be like that. He’d be in the plane, and if there were a body rather than leg or mangled bit of burnt flesh…Howe took a slow, deep breath, forcing himself to concentrate on flying the aircraft. The ground-scanning mode of the radar had been tweaked by one of the engineers, allowing the AI tactics module to assist in the search. In effect, it was like having a backseater with a magnifying glass going over the readout.

“It thinks it’s looking for a squished Scud,” the technical expert had explained.