Blue Gold

Chapter 27

The black rubber ball was only a meteor blur, but Sandecker had anticipated the bounce, and his light wooden racket flicked out like a serpent's tongue. The quick backhand sent the ball speeding with a sharp thwack against the right wall. LeGrand lunged, but he had misjudged the spin and his racket swiped clumsily at thin air.

"That's the game, I believe," said Sandecker, deftly scooping up the bouncing ball. Sandecker was a fitness and nutrition fanatic, and his strict regimen of jogging and weightlifting gave him a competitive edge over men much younger and bigger. He stood with legs wide apart, the racket resting easily in the crook of his arm. Not one drop of perspiration beaded his forehead. Nor was a single red hair out of place on his head or the precisely trimmed fiery red Van Dyke beard.

By contrast, LeGrand dripped with sweat. As he removed his eye protectors and toweled his face dry he remembered why he had stopped playing with Sandecker. The CIA director had the height and muscle advantage over Sandecker, who stood a few inches over five feet, but as he learned each time he stepped onto the court with Sandecker, squash was a game of strategy, not power. Under normal circumstances he would have put the admiral off when he called the day after the incident in New York State.

"I've reserved a court at the club," Sandecker said cheer

fully. "How'd you like to bat the little black ball around for a bit?"

Despite the genial tone there was no doubt in LeGrand's mind that this was a command performance. LeGrand canceled his morning appointments and stopped at the Watergate complex to pick up his gear. Sandecker was waiting at the squash club. He was wearing a designer sweatsuit of navy blue with gold piping. But even in his casual outfit it took little imagination to picture Sandecker pacing the deck of a man o' war in a bygone day, barking commands to trim sail or unleash a broadside against a Barbary pirate. He ran NUMA the same way, keeping one eye on the changes in the wind and the other on his adversaries. Like any good commander he took a keen interest in his crew's welfare.

When he learned Austin had been put in harm's way by a cockeyed intelligence scheme he erupted in an explosion that would have put krakatoa to shame. The CIA's involvement added to the violence of his reaction. He was fond of LeGrand, but in Sandecker's uncompromising view the Company was pampered and overfunded.

While he relished the chance to put the CIA director in the hot seat, he saw it as more than an opportunity to vent his spleen. Sandecker wasn't above political chicanery. He was quite adept at it, in fact. One of his more valuable talents was the ability to stay ahead of his anger and use it to get his way. Targets of his rage had no idea that behind his laser-hot fury he was often serene, even joyful. His ability served him well. Presidents of both parties deferred to him. Senators and congressmen went out of their way to cultivate his acquaintance. Cabinet members instructed their staff to put through his phone calls without question.

LeGrand had readily accepted the admiral's invitation for a match because he was drenched with guilt over the incident in New York and welcomed the opportunity to make amends, even if it meant being humiliated on the squash court. To his surprise, Sandecker had greeted him with a smile and hadn't mentioned the incident throughout their play. He even offered to buy the first round at the juice bar.

"Thanks for the match on such short notice," Sandecker said with his famous alligator smile.

LeGrand sipped his papaya juice and shook his head. "One of these days maybe I'll beat you."

"Your backhand needs some work first," Sandecker offered. "By the way, while I have your ear, I'd like to thank you for averting a potential tragedy involving my man Austin."

This might not be as bad as he expected, LeGrand thought.

Sandecker maintained his disconcerting smile. "Pity you didn't get someone to respond more quickly," he said. "You might have been able to save your asset." He put heavy emphasis on the first syllable of the last word.

LeGrand groaned inwardly. It was obvious Sandecker was going to worry this one like a puppy with a bone.

Ignoring the play on words, the director said, "I'm sorry about that regrettable episode. The full extent of this, er, problem wasn't apparent at first. It was a very complex situation."

"So I hear," Sandecker said lightly. "Tell you what I'm going to do, Erwin. I will forget for the time being that a screwball scheme hatched by the OSS and carried out by the CIA went awry, almost killing the head of the NUMA Special Assignments Team and an innocent bystander and placing the speaker of the House in jeopardy."

"You're very gracious, James," LeGrand said.

Sandecker nodded. "No details of this schoolboy spy prank will ever go beyond the walls of NUMA."

"The Agency appreciates your discretion," LeGrand said.

Sandecker raised a red eyebrow. "You're not entirely off the hook," he said archly. "In exchange I want a full accounting of this sordid affair."

LeGrand knew there would be a quid pro quo. There always was with Sandecker. He had already decided to lay his cards out on the table.

"You're certainly justified in demanding an accounting," he agreed.

"I think so," Sandecker said agreeably.

"It was quite a task to piece this story together, especially on such short notice, but I'll do my best to explain what happened."

"Or thankfully in this case," Sandecker said, "what didn't happen."

LeGrand smiled wanly. "The end of World War II is the be ginning of the story. With Germany defeated, the Allied coalition fell apart. Churchill came out with his Iron Curtain speech, and the stage was set for the cold war. The U.S. was still complacent because it was the only country that had the bomb. That smugness was eroded when the Soviets exploded their own nuclear device, and the arms race was on. We gained headway with the hydrogen bomb. But the Russians were breathing down our necks, and it was clearly a matter of time before the Soviets gained parity. As you know, the hydrogen bomb utilized a different process to create an explosion."

"The thermonuclear bomb uses fusion rather than fission," said Sandecker, who was well versed in atomic physics, having served on nuclear-powered submarines. "Atoms are joined rather than split apart."

LeGrand nodded. "The hydrogen atom was fused with the helium atom. The sun and other stars use the same process to create their energy. Once it became known that the main Soviet fusion lab was in Siberia there was talk in our government of sabotage. Hubris was still strong after defeating the Axis, and some people talked nostalgically of the commando raid on the heavy-water plant in Norway. You're familiar with that mission, of course."

"You mean the plant that was producing an isotope needed for the production of a German A-bomb," Sandecker said.

"That's right. The raid delayed the German effort."

'A similar commando raid in Siberia would have been an ambitious undertaking, to say the least."

"As a matter of fact, it would have been impossible," LeGrand said. "The Norway raid was incredibly difficult to launch, even with accessibility and strong partisan support. There was an other consideration as well."

Sandecker, who tended to see situations from a global perspective, said, "Germany was at war with the Allies at the time of the Norway raid. The U.S.S.R. and the U.S. had not declared open hostilities. Both sides were careful to avoid direct military confrontation. A raid on a Soviet laboratory would be considered an overt act of war that could not be ignored."

"That's correct. It would be no different from the Russians destroying a lab in New Mexico. It could have provoked a shooting war."

Sandecker was not exactly innocent when it came to making end runs around politically dicey situations. "A raid might be feasible, but it would have to be an ironclad secret with no way to trace it."

LeGrand nodded. "That was precisely what the president said when the situation was presented to him."

"A tall order indeed," Sandecker noted.

"Granted, but these were not ordinary men. They had created the greatest military industrial machine in history virtually from scratch and ruthlessly used it to squash two formidable foes on several continents and seas. But even all their determination and resourcefulness wasn't up to this challenge. Fortunately for them, two unconnected developments intersected and showed them the way. The first was the development of the air craft that came to be known as the flying wing. The design had its problems, but there was one unplanned characteristic that made it very attractive. Stealth technology. The plane's slim silhouette and clean surface meant that under the right circum stances it could slip undetected past radar."

"My guess is that you're talking about Russian radar," Sandecker said.

LeGrand smiled mysteriously. "Supposedly all flying wings, including those still in production, were destroyed by the Air Force. But the president gave the go-ahead for a modified version to be built in secret. It had even greater range and speed than any of the original models. In short, here was a delivery system that could get in and out of Siberia without being detected."

"In my experience the Russians are not a dull people," Sandecker said. "If their lab went up in smoke they would surmise the U.S. was behind it."

"Undoubtedly, which is why the second part of the equation was crucial," LeGrand said. "That was the discovery of anasazium. It was a by-product of the work at Los Alamos. The scientist who discovered the substance was an amateur anthropologist. He was fascinated by the old Pueblo culture that once lived in the Southwest. He named his discovery after the Anasazi. The material has a number of interesting properties. The one that attracted the most interest was its ability to change the hydrogen atom in subtle ways. If anasazium could be secretly introduced into a Soviet weapons lab, it might mess up the fusion research. Estimates were that it would hamstring their bomb project by several years. The U.S. would gain time to build an intercontinental bomber and missile fleet so advanced that the Soviets would never catch up. The plan was to float bombs down on parachutes. They would explode, and re lease the substance in liquid form, which would get into the lab's ventilation systems. By itself the substance is not any more harmful than water to humans. Those under attack would think they heard a very strange thunderstorm of extremely short duration."

"It doesn't sound exactly like pinpoint bombing."

"It wasn't. As they say, desperate times call for desperate measures."

"What if the plane crashed for some mechanical reason?"

"That possibility was taken into account. There was no poi son pill like the one Francis Gary Powers didn't take after his U-2 crash. They wanted no talkative survivors. No parachutes were packed for the crew. In fact, it would have been impossible to parachute from the plane. Ejection seats had not yet been developed, and the pilot's canopy could not be jettisoned. If wreckage were found it could always be said that this was an experimental plane tragically gone off-course." "The crew knew this?"

"They were highly motivated volunteers with no sense of failure."

"Too bad the plan failed," Sandecker said.

"To the contrary," LeGrand said. "The mission was an un qualified success."

"How so? The Soviets built a hydrogen bomb close on our heels, as I recall."

"Quite true. They exploded their first thermonuclear device in 1953, two years after the U.S. Remember what I said about hubris. Our people couldn't imagine that an ignorant peasant like Stalin could outsmart them. He was extremely suspicious of everyone. He ordered Igor Kurchatov, the Soviet equivalent of our man Oppenheimer, to set up a duplicate hydrogen research lab in the Ural Mountains. Their research was successful. Stalin thought the Siberian lab had failed on purpose and ordered its technicians liquidated."

"I'm surprised a strike wasn't ordered into the Ural operation."

"A raid was contemplated, but the mission was canceled. Maybe it was considered too dangerous, or perhaps the flying wing had insurmountable technical problems."

"What happened to the plane?"

"It was sealed in its hangar with the cargo. The Alaskan base it flew from was abandoned. The men at the base were scattered all over the globe. None of them had a complete picture of the operation. That was almost the end of it."

"Almost. You mean the protocol and the killing of the pilot?"

LeGrand stirred uncomfortably in his chair. "That and more. Actually the entire flight crew was killed," he said quietly. "The~ were the only nonpolitical types who knew the mission and the target intimately. Four men died. Their families were told they were in an accident. They were buried with full military honors at Arlington." "A lovely gesture."

LeGrand nervously cleared his throat. "You all know that I've done my best to clean things up at the Agency. Sometimes I'll scrape off one layer of dirt to reveal another even more filthy. Unfortunately much of the good work we've done has gone un heralded for obvious reasons. But the intelligence community did some things that are nothing to be proud of. This sad episode was one of them."

"Austin filled me in on his findings. The pilot was at Arlington attending his own funeral. I understand his son saw him."

"He insisted that he be allowed one more look at his wife and child," the director said. "He was told he was going into protective custody for an indefinite time. Of course it was only a ruse. Shortly after he was placed under protection, he was killed by his protector."

"The man who lived in upstate New York."

"That's right."

Sandecker's blue eyes hardened. "Sorry I don't feel any sad ness for the assassin. He was a cold-blooded killer at an age when we supposedly attain wisdom. And he would have murdered Austin. What was the reason for the protocol? Wasn't murdering those crewmen enough?"

"The brass who decided this thing didn't want the faintest chance the secret would get out. They thought it could start an other war. Relations were bad enough as it was between us and the Soviets. The protocol was set up to react blindly to any at tempt to unravel the secret. They thought any spy snooping would come from abroad. No one dreamed the threat would come from the U.S. congress. It was all totally unnecessary. The speaker of the House was defeated for reelection, and his expose never got off the ground. It was probably assumed that the little land mine they left to blow up in the face of anyone following their trail would deactivate itself. They never thought it would still be dangerous fifty years later."

Sandecker leaned back in his chair and tented his fingers. "So this ancient scheme cooked up by a bunch of macho cow boys is what almost got my man killed. I understand that the assassin had his bags packed ready to go with a sniper's rifle and explosives. Apparently planning quite a retirement party for himself. Too bad we can't let the American public know what tomfoolery their tax dollars were used for in the name of democracy."

LeGrand said, "That would be a mistake. It is still extremely sensitive. Reducing Russia's nuclear arsenal has been a struggle. If this story got out it would strengthen the hand of the nationalists who say the U.S. can't be trusted."

"They would think that anyhow," Sandecker said dryly. "In my experience there is one thing powerful people fear the most: embarrassment." He smiled. "I trust there are no more protocols waiting out there to ambush the unwary?"

It was a veiled warning.

"I've already ordered a complete examination of our computer files to prevent exactly such a possibility," LeGrand said. "No more surprises."

"Let's hope so," Sandecker said.