Skydancer (9 page)

With the British it was a different matter. They could not afford the massive numbers of weapons the Americans possessed, and had resorted to guile to achieve their aims. With a nuclear force of just sixty-four missiles, Kvitzinsky knew that the British had one main target in mind, the capital itself.

The British scientists at Aldermaston had been assiduous in their efforts to ensure their Polaris H-bombs would be able to penetrate Moscow's defensive ring. At the end of the 1970s they had started an improvement programme called ‘Chevaline', hardening the Polaris warheads so that they could withstand the blast and radiation effects of Moscow's nuclear-tipped ABMs. Chevaline also involved the firing of several missiles in
rapid succession so that their warheads and decoys would arrive over the target at the same time, causing the maximum of confusion and difficulty for the Soviet defences.

At the end of the 1980s, Chevaline's potential effectiveness had been almost negated by the Soviet introduction of new radars and infra-red detectors, and a massive increase in the number of defensive missiles round Moscow.

Inevitably, the game had not ended there. The British had decided to follow the American lead and go for massive numbers of warheads. The Trident system was to be bought, with eight bombs per missile. Moscow had resigned itself to expanding its defences yet further.

But suddenly, two years ago, the British had changed their minds again. They had cancelled their expensive Trident plans, and resorted to guile once again.

‘Skydancer!' Kvitzinsky spat out the English word. He had to know what tricks of technology the British had invented this time, tricks the Military Committee had designated him to counter.

Standing by the window, hands deep in his pockets, he looked across the roofs of Moscow to the onion domes of the Kremlin in the distance. There had been snow flurries earlier in the day, and he saw that it was now beginning to rain.

It would be raining in London, too, he guessed. He had visited the British capital several times and liked his stays there. It was an unprotected city, though, he mused: if there was a nuclear war, London would have no means of stopping Soviet missiles raining down to destroy it. Curious, he thought: the British talked with vague optimism about surviving a nuclear war, yet they made no effort to protect their centre of power.

‘Perhaps they are right,' he murmured. ‘Perhaps protection is indeed a waste of time.'

He tossed back the remains of the vodka. This would not do: those were negative thoughts. His orders were to keep Moscow safe. The trouble was that to learn how to do it, he needed those people in London to get him the Skydancer plans, and in that they seemed to be failing.

The day in Britain was three hours younger than in Moscow; and in Florida, where the big grey RAF VC10 jet was now heading, it was five hours earlier still. As the aircraft strained upwards into the clouds over the wet grasslands of Oxfordshire, Peter Joyce breathed in deeply, eager for the seat-belt sign to be switched off so that he could press on with his work.

He sat in an executive section of the cabin: two pairs of deeply padded seats facing each other, and a large table top between them. Opposite him sat a young woman with curly blonde hair and brown eyes. Her pretty face was turned towards the window, and she made no effort to conceal her excitement as she peered through the window.

‘Ever been to America before, Jill?' Peter asked.

He did not know the girl well but had been assured she was one of the best computer programmers at Aldermaston.

‘I've never even flown in an aeroplane before!' she confided, blushing with embarrassment.

‘What? Never even been to Majorca?' he joked.

She shook her head. ‘I'm an outdoor girl. I prefer hill-climbing to lying on a beach.' Her accent was broad Yorkshire.

‘Well, there won't be time for anything like that
where we're going. I'm sorry to say.'

As the aircraft began to level out, Peter looked up and saw the sign was finally off. As he unclipped his seat-belt and stood up, a steward came forward from his place near the rear galley.

‘The flight engineer's laid on a power supply for you from a socket in the galley, sir,' the man announced, glancing at the girl and wondering where these scientists were from. He had been told their mission was secret.

‘Would you like me to bring the cable along right away?'

‘Yes, please,'Joyce replied. ‘Then perhaps you could give us a hand with these.' He pointed across the aisle to where the components of two microcomputers had been carefully strapped in to protect them from the jolting of the takeoff.

They lifted the heavy boxes and placed them on the table, plugging in the leads that linked the components together. The flight engineer had reappeared from the cockpit by the time the steward had uncoiled the cable from the galley, and he supervised the final connection of the equipment.

‘Do you have everything you need now?' the engineer enquired, standing back and looking with satisfaction at the green glow emanating from the VDUs.

‘Yes, thank you,' Joyce replied. He could see curiosity on the RAF men's faces, but he wanted them out of the way. ‘We'll press the call button if we want anything.'

The engineer and steward returned to their posts.

Peter drew across the blue curtain which shut off each end of their ‘suite' from the rest of the aircraft.

‘Right, Jill. Now with luck we won't be disturbed.'

They sat down opposite one another at their
keyboards. Peter fumbled in a jacket pocket for the spectacles he wore for reading, and placed the tortoiseshell half-moon frames on the end of his nose. They gave him a somewhat bookish appearance, slightly at odds with his square features.

‘I finalised the parameters in the car on my way to Brize Norton,' he declared, passing a sheet of paper across the table to his junior. ‘It's only a compromise. We could have made Skydancer turn cartwheels, and that would really upset Moscow; but we can't be too clever or they'll realise it's an expensive leg-pull. I think I've got it right,' he continued, pointing to the paper which the girl was now studying. ‘But if you don't think so, for God's sake say so now. If you can work on the programme for the manoeuvring, I'll get on with the ejection routine.'

The operation of the missile was controlled by computer software; a variety of programmes could be selected, containing subtle differences to enable the warheads to cope with both short and long ranges. Completely changing the character of the missile would require a massive rewriting of the programmes, to be fed into the missile's control system when they went on board the submarine in Florida.

Peter could not help feeling apprehensive about what he was doing. Having spent most of the past two years refining and perfecting a complex electro-mechanical device, he was now about to sabotage its first operational test. Instead of demonstrating to himself and the keepers of the public purse that the money had been well spent, he was about to obfuscate the issue, possibly for ever.

Sitting in that aircraft, with the blinds drawn so the afternoon sun would not reflect from the computer screens, Peter found it difficult to get started. An image
of ‘the Russian' was firmly fixed in one corner of his brain, as if the man was peering over his shoulder at the keyboard. The face of Mary Maclean filled another corner, provoking in him a deep sense of guilt.

At the end of his second full day of enquiries into the nuclear secrets case, John Black had decided the whole business stank. British agents in Moscow had not been able to detect any KGB or GRU activity over the missile plans; and GCHQ had not intercepted a single communication between the Soviet Embassy and Moscow that seemed to relate to it. Nothing but routine reporting back to the Kremlin on what the newspapers were saying.

Yet somebody was definitely up to something, that much was clear. It either meant the Russians were being unusually cunning, and exceptionally clever at concealing their activities, or else that all this had nothing to do with Moscow at all. He had a strong suspicion that the missile document had been deliberately dumped in that rubbish bin for the express purpose of being found. Some mysterious person had certainly made sure that the world got to know about it by tipping off the
Daily Express
.

Thanks to the carelessness of Mary Maclean in leaving that vital key in her desk drawer, up to about thirty people within the Defence Ministry with access to the secrets room could have ‘borrowed' her key to the nuclear weapons filing-cabinet, and copied those papers. If he had to check all thirty of them, it would make his investigation long and tedious, but he somehow felt that would not be necessary. His instinct told him that the culprit was someone who knew precisely what the papers were about – and what a stir it
would cause if one of them was found in the wrong place.

On his desk lay the personal security files of three people. The one he had been studying for the past few minutes referred to Mr Peter Joyce. He could see that the scientist had had an impeccable career pattern. The report on his family life looked unremarkable too, except perhaps for a small admission at his last positive vetting, when he volunteered that his wife had become a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

On the surface this looked innocent enough: CND was a perfectly legitimate organ of protest, and there was nothing unusual about husbands and wives having differences of opinion over such sensitive issues. But the timing was curious; his admission about the wife's membership of CND had first been made three years ago. John Black had now learned it was just one year later that Peter Joyce had begun an adulterous affair with Mary Maclean. There was no mention of
that
liaison in the security file, and there damn well should have been. The sequence of events intrigued him. First the scientist's wife turns against the work he is doing, then the scientist takes up with another woman – events which could well be the tip of an iceberg of stress, intrigue and blackmailable goings-on that spelled
SECURITY RISK
in large letters.

The positive vetting system to which all officials in sensitive posts were regularly subjected was something of a joke as far as Black was concerned. Successive governments had been so nervous about ‘invasions of privacy' or ‘infringing the civil rights of the individual' that a vetting procedure had been allowed to continue whereby individuals were able to nominate their own referees, and security-clearance officers had no power
to make inquiries of other people. Over the years the system had allowed the concealment of countless personal weaknesses and misdemeanours which had then been exploited to great effect by KGB blackmail and bribery. In John Black's view, people in high-security positions should be subjected to regular investigation with the same intensity as suspected criminals.

He pushed back his chair, stretched out his arms, and let out a muted belch. The Defence Ministry office which he had occupied for the past two days was beginning to depress him. The walls were a dirty cream colour and seemed designed to induce sleep in the most wakeful of civil servants. He would move back to his own office in Curzon Street the next day, he decided, squeezing the square flabbiness of his chin. He had time for one more cigarette before he set out for his evening visit.

It was Alec Anderson who had tipped him off about Peter Joyce and Mary Maclean. The man had pretended to find it awkward and embarrassing to discuss the subject, but had found it his duty to mention it under the present circumstances. Black had detected a distinctly vicarious flicker in Anderson's eyes; the man must have been quite a sneak at school, he decided.

Anderson's own file had revealed nothing out of the ordinary. He had lived in the same house for seven years, regularly ran up a modest overdraft, but had never defaulted on his debts or been involved with the police except for a parking offence three years earlier. The referees he had nominated during the vetting process had all spoken of him in glowing terms. He seemed a typical civil servant on the way up, well educated, alert and efficient, happily married with a devoted wife and two children in private schools. Yet the man from MI5 was suspicious by nature, always on the look-out
for dark secrets behind the facade of normality.

He had given Anderson quite a grilling that afternoon, starting gently by taking him through all he could remember about the secret documents, from the moment they had first arrived in his department for the Ministerial briefing three months earlier. He asked precisely who had been shown the papers since then, and how often they had been removed from safe-keeping to be studied. Anderson claimed he had never looked at the papers since their first arrival, finding the technical details difficult to comprehend.

Then Black had turned to personal matters, questioning the civil servant about his normal routine, who his friends were, how often he went out, what was the state of his marriage, and so on. On those questions he had found Anderson less than satisfactory, but then he had not expected anything else from someone so stereotyped. The man's somewhat chubby features had twisted themselves into an expression of indignation at the intimate nature of these enquiries. His eyes had seemed occasionally to cower behind the lenses of his spectacles, but the trace of perspiration that broke out on his brow could have indicated simple nervousness rather than any effort at concealment.

When the interview had ended, Black continued to watch his subject closely as he stood up to leave the room. Anderson was tall with an unathletic gait. His dark hair was greying at the temples; there was a slight ruddiness to the cheeks and a somewhat bibulous mouth.

Mary Maclean scraped the edge of the record as she aimed the gramophone needle for the groove. The wine she had been drinking since she returned home had
unsteadied her hand. Her second attempt was more successful, and within moments the crackling from the loudspeakers had given way to the opening choral blasts of
Carmina Burana.
She wanted the intensity of Carl Orff's work to blow the dark thoughts from her mind like a March wind.