Act of God (17 page)

Kuroda did not hesitate. "No, I cannot do you this favor or any other favor, as you well know." He saw Sam's bewildered look and rushed on. "Favors are not possible between us. I am in debt to you for the rest of my life. Quite aside from the mutual danger to our nations, I owe you this. Since you ask for it, it is yours."

CHAPTER NINETEEN

DENVER

"Come
on
, Taggart! What kinda leverage did you have on this guy? I don't buy that story about the Mafia and Singapore." Ciano looked as if he were about to burst or collapse with apoplexy, but since he looked like that most of the time, nobody paid much notice.

"Mafia?" said Fred. "Singapore? I must not have been involved in that one." They were enjoying a rare moment of relaxation in a ski-type lodge near Denver. The snow was falling heavily outside but a fire crackled on the hearth. The little cluster of cottages had better security than Camp David. Fred lay in a lanky sprawl near the fire, and Laine sat crosslegged on a cushion with Sam lying back in her lap. Idly, she stroked his hair, which she noted was beginning to get thin on top. He seemed to tally relaxed, so different from the violent, taut-wired man she had met—how long ago had it been? It seemed like ages.

"Yeah, tell us, Sam," Fred urged. "You know how I love to talk shop."

"Just a minute," Laine said. "Is this going to be another of your cowboy stories, all full of shooting and dead people?"

" 'Fraid so," Sam told her. "Not as bad as some, but it got a little rough."

"Then I have some work to catch up on." She got up and Sam's head dropped to the floor with a thunk. "I'll be in my room. Call me when dinner is ready."

"I don't think Laine's going to reconcile herself with your profession, Sam," said Ugo when she was gone.

"She won't need to," Sam said. He sat up and picked up his wine glass. "All right, since you insist. Remember, you never heard this. I had no business taking part, I just let my better nature get the best of me."

"You think I can't keep a secret?" Ugo demanded, hurt. Sam didn't answer him.

"Well, it was about three, no, closer to four years ago, just before that operation that got me shot up. . . ."

It had been a nasty business all the way around; not the kind of well-planned and executed mission Sam liked, but instead a spontaneous, vicious piece of work that, by a miracle, had ended well. Sam had been in Rome on a rather routine investigation in cooperation with Italian authorities, trying to find a link between certain Central American guerrillas and the Italian Red Brigades. In the middle of the night, he received a phone call from Goro. His friend sounded close to panic. The two had met briefly during a judo tournament in Graz the month before, and Sam had given him his Rome address and phone number.

Goro's desperate story was drearily familiar in Italy, where kidnapping was still the major growth industry. This time, it was Goro's daughter, Miyoko.

She was then a junior at Japan's exclusive girl's school, Ochanomizu University. Taking advantage of her two-month vacation, she had attended summer school at the Sorbonne to improve her French. There she met an intense young woman from Milan, who invited Miyoko to visit her there on her way back to Japan. She accepted, and Goro's next word from her came in the form of a ransom demand. Having no faith in the Italian police, his first thought had been to contact Sam.

One look at the wording of the ransom demand told Sam which group they were dealing with: It was a faction that had split from the Red Brigades as being too moderate, working in conjunction with an extreme fringe of Al Fatah and a splinter band from the JDL. Ugo broke into the narration at this point. "This is another one of your silly spook stories, isn't it? I mean, I didn't buy the Triad-Mafia-Yakuza story, so you want to see if I'll swallow this?"

"I heard of that bunch," Fred said. "Hell, I've seen weirder combinations than that. I know an old-timer in FBI who worked back in the sixties. He once busted an arms-smuggling ring that turned out to be run jointly by the KKK and the Black Panthers. Terrorists don't let little ideological quibbles keep them from having their fun."

It was not Sam's assignment, and he had no authority to take action on behalf of the Agency. What he did instead was call in a lot of outstanding IOUs from colleagues in Italy. Meanwhile, they mailed the kidnappers by demanding proof that Mivoko was alive. The accepted practice was for the kidnappers to send a photograph of the victim holding a copy of that day's newspaper with the date plainly shown. Within a few days Sam had good news: his agents had located the terrorists at a remote mountain hut in Calabria. The bad news was that this bunch had a reputation for killing their victims as soon as the ransom was paid. There was also the matter of the mountain hideout, which was too well-guarded to be taken by assault without giving the kidnappers plenty of time to kill Miyoko.

The security setup consisted mainly of guards instead of a lot of technological gimmickry, and Sam knew that it was a relatively simple matter for a small group to penetrate such a system, as long as they were willing to kill a few people to do it. After a brief consultation, Sam and Goro decided that they owed these people no favors at all. On the evening of the day they received the photo, Sam and Goro were at the bottom of the mountain, dressed in black, with blackened faces. Both were heavily armed and the night, fortuitously, was moonless. They took out the first guard just after midnight and within ten minutes were on their way back down the mountain with Miyoko. The girl was badly shaken but relatively undamaged.

The next morning Italian authorities found five bodies on the premises; one with a broken neck, one dead from a stab wound, and three perforated by small-arms fire. They picked up thirty shell casings but Sam had used only Czech-made ammunition. Goro had wanted to leave a Japanese dagger in one of the bodies, but Sam advised against any grandstanding. Terrorists were incapable of learning from their mistakes. Officially, the affair was written off as a vendetta between rival gangs, but Sam found himself swiftly booted out of Italy. Once again, he was in the doghouse. It seemed he could not be sent on a simple investigation without getting involved in a shootout. Worse, he had let himself be influenced by things like friendship, morality and personal honor, for which there was scant room in Agency operations. He was packed off to Central America where, he was told, he could pick a direction at random and open fire without anybody paying much attention.

That Christmas, he was spending a few weeks in Washington when a package was delivered to his apartment. After taking his usual precautions with the oblong box, he opened it. Inside was a Japanese sword in a perfectly plain black-laquered sheath. Its handle was bound with white rayskin and wrapped with black silk tape. Its form was elegant but simple as a Zen ink drawing. Sam called a friend whose hobby was Japanese swords and the man arrived with an armload of books and a tiny brass hammer. With the hammer and a wooden dowel, he drove out the retaining peg that bound handle to blade and slipped the handle off, revealing an age-blackened tang deeply cut with Japanese characters. Sam's friend refused to make any pronouncements, since forgery of Japanese swords was such a big business, but he made a rubbing of the handle with charcoal and thin paper and took several pictures of the sword, along with closeups of the inscription, and promised to have them authenticated. He also recommended that Sam keep the sword in a bank vault.

Weeks later, in a tiny Indian village in the tropics, he received a letter from something called the Japanese Sword Society of America. It identified his sword as an ancient masterpiece by the sword-smith Munemitsu. It was known to have been a Measure of the Kuroda family for generations. Valuation: "priceless."

"That was a better story than the last one," Ugo nald, up and pacing as usual. "Sam, I wanna meet your friend Kurodo."

"Kuroda," Sam corrected. "Why? He'll probably wring your neck for that bribery attempt."

"Fred'll protect me. Just give me ten minutes with him and I'll have him eating out of my hand. I got a proposition for him I think he'll like. I been talking with my man McNaughton and some other people. We re making plans."

"What kind of plans?" Sam asked, suspiciously.

"You think when we've settled this Project Ivan thing the salad days'll be over for old Ugo Ciano? Not a chance! I got plans, Taggart, and this guy Kurodo—"

"Kuroda!"

"—sounds like my kind of man. You'll want in on it, too. Since you and Laine will be getting married—"

"Hold it! Who said anything about marriage?"

Ugo shook his head pityingly. "Come on. I got eyes, and God knows I got brains. You're gonna have to grow up, Taggart, settle down, stop being a kid. You don't get to play cowboy forever. Besides, your guy with his bulletproof car and his kidnapped kid and his almost-kidnapped brother knows the kind of world we live in. I don't like living in a world where things like that happen, either. Once I get things rolling, we can leave worries like that behind."

"Wait a minute," Sam protested. "Somewhere in there I lost the thread of this conversation. You're going to fix the world?"

Ugo stared upward and raised his arms in a dramatic appeal to heaven. "They don't listen to me, God! Why did you make me so smart and the rest of them so dumb?" Receiving no answer, he went on. "Sam, everywhere we look in this project there's golden opportunities, ideas, paths opening up. No, I ain't gonna fix the world. Barring divine intervention, nothing's gonna keep the world from going straight to hell. What I'm gonna do—what we're gonna do, is shape the course of history!"

"Ambitious, isn't he?" Fred commented.

Ugo shrugged. "You was wondering what to do with your life after this little caper's over anyway, Sam. You might as well stick with me."

Once again, eerily, Ciano was reading his mind with some accuracy. He was at loose ends about his life after leaving the Agency, true, but did he want to stake his future on a mind-reading maniac like Ugo Ciano?

WASHINGTON

McNaughton and Chambers studied the agreement Sam had worked out with Kuroda as the most acceptable to all parties involved. It would meet the emergency security needs of the U.S., protect the possible stake of Japan in the matter and safeguard the financial interest of Uchu Kogyo. The details were left to be hashed out at the working level, but in essence Uchu Kogyo was to manufacture, at cost plus modest fixed fees, two or more reparation units for Project Bountyhunter according to the specifications provided by General Spacecraft.

McNaughton raised a question at this point. "Is their security adequate?"

Chambers shrugged. "We tried hard enough to crack it."

Kuroda would not reveal to anyone, not even to his executive vice-president, the nature of Project Bountyhunter. It was given a different project name at Kogyo. A mutually agreed upon American agent would be free to inspect security measures at the Japanese plant upon request.

After completion, the engineers of Uchu Kogyo would travel to the U.S. for the integration of the separation system with the rest of the interplanetary spaceship. During the integration, no photographs would be taken. This was to protect any secrets concerning the interplanetary ship that the Americans might want to maintain. Since all the basic technology for ion-drive and nuclear engines was well known to the engineering community, there was really no secret to be stolen just by looking at the hardware. To forestall future legal problems, Uchu Kogyo would immediately file a patent claim for their separation system throughout the world. Sam had guaranteed that their patent application in the U.S. would go through in record time.

Chambers raised an eyebrow at the final condition. It stipulated that Kuroda and two assistants of his choice were to be present for in-orbit testing of the separation system. Japan had a growing manned space program employing their mini-shuttles, but it was limited in scope compared to U.S. and Soviet programs. Only a few technically trained personnel could go into space. Goro, for all his wealth and power, had virtually no chance of going into space in the Japanese space program.

"This project is filling up with frustrated zoomies," Chambers commented. "Two assistants, huh? Did you tell me Kuroda has two grown kids, Sam?"

"That's correct, sir," Sam said, correctly and innocently.

"What do you want to bet that's who these 'assistants' are going to be?" Nobody took the bet.

CHAPTER TWENTY

DEPARTMENT OF SPACE DEFENSE

WASHINGTON, D.C.

There were fifty men or women in the room, some in uniform, most in civilian clothes. One entire wall of the room consisted of a high-resolution TV screen. It was the latest system and provided far cleaner detail than had ever been achieved by photographic film and projection. In the key seat of the long table sat the President. Far down to one end sat Sam Taggart, still in his uneasy position as astronaut-Agency liaison-observer.

Colonel Chambers stood. "Gentlemen, ladies, you have been called to this emergency meeting because of events within the Soviet Union which have the utmost significance for us all. Dr. Ciano, will you brief the members on our latest reports?"

Ugo stood before the screen. "Sam, would you dim the lights?" As a Lieutenant Colonel Sam was the lowest-ranking person in the room. "This is a sequence shot by one of our spy satellites early this morning, D.C. time." The picture showed a greenish, flat, nondescript landscape of frozen tundra. It looked much like the view from an airplane's window at about ten thousand feet. "What we're looking at here is a piece of the Western Siberian Lowland. It's just about the most desolate, empty piece of landscape God ever put together. It's north of the Ob River, south of the Pur and the Taz. The nearest cities are Surgut and Kargasok and they're way the hell far from this spot. Death Valley is Manhattan compared to this place."

"We get the picture, Dr. Ciano," said the President. "Just what happened in this garden spot?"

"Coming right up. At exactly one A.M. Washington time, which is ten A.M. in this part of Siberia, this is what happened."

In the upper left hand corner of the screen a digital insert marked off the minutes, seconds, and tenths of seconds. Precisely on the turn of the hour, the center of the screen was bisected by a brilliant fireball trailing a fiery tail. Then there was an immense flash which blinded the camera for a few moments. Gradually, the picture resolved itself once more. A huge, circular section of tundra was glowing a dull red through a haze of smoke and steam. The room was dead silent.

"Exactly two minutes later, about three hundred miles to the east of that blast, there was another." The sequence was repeated. It might have been a rerun of the first display.

"Each blast was about 10 kilotons, and there was no radiation. Our satellite surveillance of the Russian space stations confirms that a Soviet spacecraft returned a few weeks ago from beyond circum-terra space to a docking orbit with Space Station Volga. That's one of the clinchers: those were ice bombs, folks."

"Have the Russians made any statement yet concerning these blasts?" asked the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

"Almost immediately," Chambers answered. "The noon Moscow broadcast reported the falls and claimed they were meteorites. They praised Soviet scientists who have been predicting a rash of meteorite activity for some time. Some European astronomers have already made requests to be allowed to visit the fall sites. It was midafternoon in Europe when the official broadcast went out, remember. They were turned down on grounds of national security."

"Dr. Ciano," the President said, "you said the report about Space Station
Volga
was 'one of the clinchers.' I'd be interested to hear what the other ones might have been."

"Ah, Dr. Ciano has some theories that the rest of us don't necessarily—" Chambers' attempt to waffle was immediately interrupted by Ciano's steamroller delivery.

"It was the timing, Mr. President! You all saw the clock on that first blast. It struck at precisely the turn of the hour, on the second, almost on the millisecond. Now my esteemed colleague on the other side, Pyotr Tarkovsky, does not concern himself with niggling details like this. It would make no difference to him what time the damned thing came down because it's scientifically irrelevant. Tarkovsky is a genius of wide-ranging and generous mentality; a man much like me.

"But," he waved a finger in the air, "everything I've read about Sergei Nekrasov says that he's just the kind of man who'd demand such precision, and he has Tarkovsky under his thumb." Ciano pounded on the table for emphasis and said, triumphantly, "We are dealing here with a classic anal retentive!"

There was a long moment of silence following this outburst, then the National Security Advisor cleared his throat. "I take it this means that the Russians are ready to play for real when the next target of opportunity comes this way?"

"Unless they're stupid," Ciano went on in a more subdued tone, "and let me clue you that they are not, they won't miss the next comet with a favorable orbit."

"When will that be?" asked the President.

"Slightly less than two years from now."

"I hate to mess up your little scenario," said the chairman of the Senate National Security Committee, "but isn't it possible that what we just saw was a real meteor fall?" The Senator was an old-fashioned supporter of bigger land armies and notoriously hostile to the whole idea of space defense.

Ugo started to go purple but this time Chambers managed to forestall him. "Not a chance, Senator. You saw the recording. That was an aerial burst at approximately five thousand feet. The dust was negligible, there was no significant cratering. That was ice, Senator Lardner." The Senator settled back, grumbling. He saw the funding for his pet computerized tanks and missile submarines and aircraft carriers being poured into space.

"So we have less than two years," the President said. "Does that give us time to get our birds into space?"

"Into space, yes," Chambers said, "but not fully tested. Under normal circumstances, we'd want five more years at the least, just for testing in space."

"Normal times be damned," said General Moore. "We're now, for all practical purposes, on wartime status. In times like this, you don't wait until everything is proven safe. We've sent our people up in planes and down in subs when we didn't have the first goddamned idea what their limits were. In wartime you take risks."

"As a matter of fact," Ciano said, "in that little time we'll be damned lucky to have any of this show on the road at all, tested or not. However, it's times like this that bring out the best, and we have no shortage of volunteers. We've got a second and third team in training." He did not bother to suppress a gleeful grin. He had wangled himself a place on the crew selection board, claiming his indispensable expertise on interplanetary science and cometary environment.

As the meeting broke up, Senator Lardner ambled his considerable bulk over to Ciano, "I guess you're pretty relieved, Dr. Ciano," Lardner said with a politician's ability to sound vicious and bland at the same time.

"Why?" Ugo asked.

"Well, you must've been sweating blood for months. This," he waved an arm at the screen, "is the first real evidence that Project Ivan the Terrible was anything more than another of your crackpot theories."

"Nah. I had it all figured out: timing, the most probable locations for the icefall, all of it. It was no coincidence that our sky spies were looking so close at just that part of Siberia. It's the same kind of terrain as where the Tunguska blast took place, but a hell of a lot more accessible to Russian observers."

"Pretty sure of yourself, aren't you?" Lardner said, nastily.

Ciano seemed honestly puzzled. "Any reason why I shouldn't be?"

"Jesus!" Lardner spun around and stalked out of the room.

Ciano shook his head and turned to Chambers and Taggert, who were standing nearby. "You know, they elect some real wackos to public office these days."