Authors: David DeBatto
“Would there be enough money for that in the black budget?”
“I don’t know. That’s why they call it a black budget. But even that has to be accounted for. My part of the project was pretty
high priority, but even I couldn’t just ask for more money any time I wanted it.”
“How about if you engineered it in the Soviet Union? Nongovernment. Private funding?” DeLuca had had a hunch that oil billionaire
and ex-KGB section head Vitaly Sergelin was involved the first time he’d heard the name mentioned. He hadn’t been sure how
to connect him, until now. He’d found an evaluation Koenig had written for the CIA during his time at the U.S. embassy in
Moscow expressing an odd respect for his opposite number. It wasn’t that unusual for two former enemies to develop a relationship.
“They’d have the talent,” Burgess said. “Or they used to. And the way things are over there, you wouldn’t have to pay that
much to lure away the best people from government work. I could probably make you a short list of who to look at over there.”
“I’d appreciate that,” DeLuca said.
“Of course, anybody using Russian resources or giving Russian scientists top-secret U.S. files would be guilty of treason,
even if the Russians didn’t really know what it was they were working on.”
“Would Koenig be capable of that?”
Burgess thought about it, not answering at first. A red hawk circled in the sky above them. DeLuca watched it, feeling that
he had some idea now of what it felt like to be a field mouse.
“Tom Koenig is paranoid, but he’s bright. A lot of paranoids are bright. Seeing patterns is what you get when you have too
much brain sometimes. He micromanages everything because he wants to and because he can, and when things go well, he gets
all the credit. And things have gone well for him. I thought he was the most egotistical bastard I ever met, but even I had
to respect what he accomplished. It seemed clear to me that he thought he could do everything. And that would include single-handedly
appointing himself the world’s policeman. He hated the bureaucracy, and how it took so many people so much time to make what
he considered simple decisions. He admires people who take things into their own hands, unless that means they take them out
of his. I could see him using Russians, if it suited his purposes. He wouldn’t have thought of it as treason. He’d think of
it as his personal contribution to globalization.”
“What about Huston?”
“He’d do whatever Koenig told him to do. Whenever Koenig said, ‘Jump,’ Huston said, ‘How high? And on whom?’”
“I want to bring you in,” DeLuca said. “When the time comes, we’re going to need your testimony. Could you do that?”
“And leave all this?” Burgess said.
“You can help us,” DeLuca said.
“Help who?” Burgess said. “I just wanted out of it. I still do. I didn’t want to be personally responsible for what happened.
I never thought I could stop it. You can’t stop an idea.”
“The Mexican standoff isn’t going to hold for much longer,” DeLuca said. “Let me ask you something. The penning field that
traps the antimatter. What powers it?”
“You need a fail-safe nuclear power source,” Burgess said. “You can’t afford to have a power outage. There’d be a solar backup
array, but if you go to that, you lose your stealth.”
“What happens if you lose power?”
“You lose containment.”
“Meaning what? An explosion?”
“Possibly. If the power loss is catastrophic. The penning field is the filter. Antimatter is by definition repellent to other
matter. It’s not nonmatter, or reverse matter or parallel or mirror matter—it’s matter that hates matter. The energy is released
when you force the antiprotons and antielectrons to collide with posimatter, and the electromagnetic field is what controls
how much is released, what kind, what rate. The resounder mirrors focus it into wide or narrow beams but the penning field
controls the wavelength and the amperage. The thing is designed for a controlled release in full in case of system failure.
An uncontrolled release would create a very large explosion.”
“How large?”
Burgess shrugged.
“There’s nothing to compare it to. Maybe a million times Hiroshima? Bigger than the meteor hit that killed the dinosaurs?
Ten thousand Krakatoas? It gets kind of meaningless.”
“But not the second big bang they’re talking about?”
“One can only hope.”
“So how do you stop this thing? Is that what would happen if somebody somehow manages to target a Darkstar and blow it out
of the sky with a conventional kill vehicle?”
Burgess nodded.
“That was one of the better arguments against deployment,” he said. “They were still discussing it when I left. The argument
was that you couldn’t have two countries boosting rival Darkstars without creating a catastrophic environment, but if you
could assure that you were the first in orbit, you could prevent the second from launching. There wouldn’t be a space race
because it would be over before it started. You’d have unchallenged control of the ultimate high ground, and from there you
could pretty much call the shots. I’m sure Koenig would have come down on the side that said while we sit here jawing about
this in Armed Services Committee closed session hearings and policy meetings and blah blah blah, somebody else could be putting
one of these in the sky. And he never did figure out how to suffer fools. I imagine the people who sent you are pretty eager
to see you solve the problem.”
“They expressed some urgency,” DeLuca said. “I’m not sure I understood the gravity of it until now.”
“I’ll talk to whoever you want me to talk to,” Gary Burgess said.
“I think you should talk to Penelope,” DeLuca said. “Does she know any of this?”
Burgess shook his head.
“She can’t,” he said. “She never can.”
“Sit tight,” DeLuca said. “I’m going to talk to Koenig.”
“And say what?”
“I’m not sure,” DeLuca said. “You’re under arrest, maybe. My advantage at the moment is that he thinks I’m dead. Is there
a place in Chloride to rent a car? Or buy one?”
“Take my truck,” Burgess said. “It looks like shit but don’t worry—it runs like shit, too.”
WHEN DELUCA GOT BACK TO ALBUQUERQUE, he called a team meeting in the RV. Sami was still in San Antonio and incommunicado.
Sykes had sent the remains of Theresa Davidova to Mitch Pasternak for processing. He’d calculated the shooter’s position and
the angle of fire and managed to find the round that killed her. He’d sent the round to Mitch Pasternak as well.
“You don’t want to know what I had to dig through to find it,” he said. “Somebody seriously needs to go into that cave and
change the litterbox. Josh took it pretty hard.”
“You think Huston was the shooter?” Vasquez asked.
“I don’t know,” Sykes said. “Maybe he was going there to talk her into coming back and someone else was the shooter.”
“If he’s the shooter, what’s the reason?” DeLuca asked.
“He was having an affair with Cheryl Escavedo?” MacKenzie speculated. “Or else he met Theresa Davidova when she was a prostitute
and obtained her services and then felt guilty about it. Maybe he was involved with both of them. Wasn’t Jimmy Swaggart into
three-ways?”
“Or maybe he’s just pious and there’s nothing sinister underneath,” Vasquez said. “Let’s not start suspecting people just
because they put up an innocent front. Some people actually are innocent.”
“Name one,” Sykes said.
“Hoolie has a point,” DeLuca said. “Putting Huston on the scene doesn’t make him guilty. His being a conservative doesn’t
make him guilty. Everybody here knows you need more than proximity.”
“We’ll look for it then,” MacKenzie said. “We did get some interesting intel on the helicopter downings. We ran the names
through the system and one came up twice. Vitaly Sergelin. When the British communications satellite GeOx-4 went dark, shares
in Global Oxford Telecom went through the floor, dropping by fifty Euros the first day and another eighty the next, until
a company from Luxembourg called Eurostat came in as a white knight and stopped the slide by buying the remaining shares.
You asked us to look into who profited from the lost satellites. Vitaly Sergelin owns Eurostat. And Global Oxford is trading
again where it was before the slide, creating a windfall for Eurostat.”
“What else?” DeLuca asked.
“Two years ago, his daughter Anna is a freshman at the University of Arizona and by all accounts a major party girl,” MacKenzie
said. “She picked U of A for the climate and because of its reputation as a party school. For security purposes, she’s enrolled
as Anna Johnson. One night, she ditches her bodyguard and goes to a frat party where she hits it a little too hard and dies
of a drug overdose. The drugs she took are traced to a junior named Miguel Cabrera. Son of Cipriano. Is that reason enough
to seek revenge and blow two helicopters out of the sky? Why not? Tucson police found the body of the bodyguard who was supposed
to be keeping her out of trouble in seven different pieces in a dumpster behind an El Gigante. One cop I talked to said Leon
Lev and Dushko Lorkovic were the two lead suspects but they couldn’t get a single witness to talk about it so they couldn’t
make the arrest.”
“What happened to Miguel?”
“Dropped out and disappeared,” said Vasquez. “Presumed hiding, somewhere in Sinaloa. Wes Vogel thinks Mazatlan.”
“Can somebody please explain to me how any of this connects?” Sykes said. “I’m not trying to rock the boat, but if I can speak
frankly, I think we need to know a little more about this satellite program that’s been compromised. I was fine with just
looking for a person, but if you ask me there’s a little too much darkness around here. If there’s a solid reason for it,
I’ll respect that and back off, but I feel like I’m driving around without an X on the map to head for. Just saying, ‘Go that
way and tell me what you see’ is a little frustrating.”
“I gotta agree,” Vasquez said. “We got Mexican drug dealers, we got Russians, and we have some sort of space program—I’m confused.
And I’m a big enough man to admit it.”
“I admitted it first,” Sykes said. “That makes me bigger than you.”
“It does not,” Hoolie said.
“It does too,” Sykes said.
“Seriously,” MacKenzie said. “What are we doing here?”
DeLuca exchanged glances with Peggy Romano, who nodded.
“Fair enough,” he said. “I’ll try to keep it short. Let me start by saying that getting read on to this is going to increase
your personal jeopardy—that’s why I was trying to avoid it. I don’t suppose anybody wants out?”
He paused, though he knew the question was largely rhetorical. He gave them as full a briefing as he could about Darkstar,
with Peggy Romano filling in some of the background details regarding the parts of the Star Wars program that she knew from
her time at NSA. He concluded by presenting some of Gary Burgess’s thoughts on how whoever had seized control of Darkstar1
had run and/or financed a parallel development program, possibly in the Russian Union.
“So you’re saying Darkstar took out Cabrera?” Vasquez said. “Like a bit of target practice?”
“Burgess says they’ve been practicing for a long time,” DeLuca said. “Tuning the output and calibrating target acquisition
software and whatever.”
“They’re using NRO intel,” Romano said, “but they’re inside the gates. The only way to catch them at it would be to know when
they’re going to need intel and then shut the whole system down to see who’s the last person on the other end of the line.
And they’re not going to shut down the whole system.”
“And Cheryl Escavedo stole information proving Koenig had seized Darkstar?”
“Possibly,” DeLuca said. “Peggy has a theory.”
“Stealth satellites aren’t 100 percent invisible,” she said. “They are when they’re inactive, but when they deploy to fire,
according to Burgess, they give back a radar signal. The problem is that the signal reports an object that’s significantly
smaller than its actual size. The reduction is maybe 90 percent, and these things are pretty small to begin with, as we understand
it. So if it gives back a signal the size of a baseball, say, then that’s not technically invisible. Cheyenne Mountain and
Space Command have been tracking objects the size of baseballs or larger for the last forty years. Twenty-five thousand, with
about eighty-five hundred currently in orbit.”
“Peggy thinks Darkstar is disguising itself as something currently in orbit,” DeLuca said. “Or more than one thing. If it
wants to park over western Russia, it finds something already flying over western Russia, destroys it, and assumes its orbit,
then moves on when it needs to go somewhere else.”
“Wouldn’t that leave holes when it vacates?” MacKenzie said.
“It would,” Romano said. “But these guys break up or reenter all the time, and they’re too small to leave footprints. They’re
shooting stars. Who can say what’s what?”
“And Escavedo worked in archives,” Sykes said. “She had all the records of which objects are where and when.”
“Whoever’s controlling Darkstar needs their own dish to transmit the command and control signals,” Romano said. “If they were
using ours, we’d know it. And I’m not talking about something the size of what’s on the roof of Ms. Kitty. So we’re looking
for something at least thirty feet across. We’re also looking for anomalous events. For example, we got a report that a group
of rebels in Chechnya attacking one of Sergelin’s oil pipelines was wiped out in the middle of nowhere, and a survivor who’d
been lagging behind because he’d stopped to use an outhouse said he saw a flash of light. We’re still trying to tie down the
exact time and place, but if we get enough of that sort of thing, we might be able to predict where Darkstar is going to be.
Right now, the only thing that can take out a Darkstar is another Darkstar. Anything kinetic, it’s going to see coming well
in advance and take out. When it reconfigures to fire, it’s exposed for only a few seconds. Nothing could get to it in time
except some form of directed energy. I have to correct myself—that’s not the only way to take out Darkstar. We could disable
it from the ground if we can find out who’s running it and intercept them.”