“Melinda, you are a vision,” he said with a smile. It was a smile she was used to—the “wannafuckyou” smile. Polite on the surface, yearning underneath. A brief glance below John’s belt line confirmed her guess.
It was time to walk toward him for another kiss. Could have been worse.
“Mmm,” she murmured. Okay, time for business, John. His arms went around her. Rather strong arms, maybe to let her know that she was his property. Men were that way. Then, gently, he led her to the bedroom.
Wow, she thought. Whoever had decorated this room had been one who knew what the condo was for. Probably not his/ her first such commission, Melinda was sure, down to the cute little chair for her to disrobe on, by the window. At sunset it would have been fucking perfect, she thought. She sat down and first of all removed her Manolo Blahnik shoes. Pretty though they were, taking them off was more pleasant than putting them on. They were made for looking, not for walking, and she had cute, girly feet. Men always liked them. The wraparound top came off and was laid on the dressing table, and she stood. She never wore a bra while at work, which was fine with her. No sagging yet on her B+ (almost C) chest. Men always liked that. A moment later she was nude, and she walked to see John more closely.
“May I help?” she asked. Men always liked to have her undress them, especially if you threw in a little “do me” urgency.
“Yes, please,” John replied, with a dreamy smile. Wherever he came from, he wasn’t used to this sort of worship. Well, he paid top dollar to get it, which was one of the things she was good at. In a minute she saw the reason she remembered him. Red, a perfect moniker for him. Of course, she delivered a kiss.
And, of course, he reacted favorably to it. At what he paid, she wanted him to become a regular. She was thinking about a new car. A BMW, or maybe all the way to a Mercedes. He could help her with that. As with business, she liked to pay cash for things. Well, a certified check for the right car. An E-Class Benz, she was thinking. She liked the solidity of the German car. You felt safe in one of those. She liked feeling safe. She stood.
“John, is this all night? That costs more, two and a half.”
“So much?” he asked, with a smile.
“There’s an old saying: You get what you pay for.”
“Not tonight. I must be off later.”
You don’t overnight here? she wondered. Is this just your fuck pad? He must have a ton of money to throw around. This place must have set him back a million, maybe a million and a half. If he were a man who enjoyed sex that much, then she sure as hell wanted him to be a regular customer. Men never appreciated how women like her evaluated men, and in what depth. Men were such fools, Melinda thought, even the rich ones. Especially the rich ones. She watched him reach for an envelope. This he handed over.
As always, Melinda opened the envelope and counted the bills. It was important that men knew that this was a business transaction, even one delivered with the best simulated love that money could buy. Quite a few men had leaned toward wanting their relationship to be more than that. She had a supremely charming way of steering the conversation in other directions.
The envelope went into the Gucci purse, next to Little Mr. Colt with his mother-of-pearl handle. When she arose, it was with the best of smiles. The business part was over. Now love could begin.
41
WAS IT a mistake? the Emir wondered. Things were rarely entirely clear at his level of operational responsibility. The target country was inconsequential, actually, but the target itself of great significance—or potential significance. The effects of the attack would spread like ripples in a pond, lapping soon enough at the shores of their true target.
Of all his worries about the current operation, his commander on the ground did not count among them. Ibrahim was ambitious but also careful and thorough, and he’d kept his team small and well organized in every detail. Then again, the real test would come when the plan went operational, which was the decision that he presently faced. Timing was everything, along with the ability to focus on the “big picture,” as the Americans called it. There were a number of pieces moving about the board, and each had to move in the right direction and at the right pace, lest any one of them get caught alone and without support. If that happened, the rest would fall in turn, and Lotus would collapse. And he would likely die before seeing Lotus come to fruition. If he moved too fast, his life could end before it bloomed; too slow, the same result.
So he’d let Ibrahim continue with his on-scene reconnaissance, but he’d withhold final approval on the operation until he knew the disposition of the other pieces.
And if Ibrahim succeeds? he asked himself. And what then? Would this Kealty react as they expected? Their profile of him—code-named CASCADE—seemed certain of it, but the Emir had long ago learned to be wary of the vagaries of the human mind.
CASCADE ... an apt title. He found both it and the concept behind it amusing. Certainly the Western intelligence agencies had psychological profiles of him—he’d read one, in fact—so he found it entertaining to be largely basing their most ambitious operation on a profile of their own.
Kealty was the consummate politician, which in American politics was taken as synonymous for leader. How and when this ignorance had started he didn’t know. Nor did he care. The American people had chosen for themselves the politician who had most ably portrayed himself as a leader, never asking whether the image matched the character behind it. CASCADE said it did not, and the Emir agreed. Worse still—or better still, depending on your perspective—Kealty had surrounded himself with sycophants and favor-holders who did nothing to improve his credentials.
So what happens when a weak man of flawed character is faced with a cascade of catastrophes? He crumbles, of course—and with him, the country.
As promised, their charter boat was waiting for them. The captain, a local fisherman named Pyotor Salychev, sat in a lawn chair at the end of the deserted plank pier, smoking his pipe. Bobbing in the black, cold water was a twelve-meter wide-beamed British Halmatic trawler. Salychev grunted as he rose to his feet.
“You’re late,” he said, then stepped off the pier onto the afterdeck.
“Bad weather,” Adnan replied. “You’re ready?”
“Wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”
During their first negotiations, Salychev had asked few questions about who they were or why they wanted to go to the island, but Adnan, playing the role of an ecological zealot, had dropped several hints during their conversation. Watchdog groups had long been coming here to document the ravages of the Cold War, Salychev had replied with a shrug. As long as they paid and as long as they didn’t hazard him or his boat, Salychev was happy to take anyone to that godforsaken place. “No accounting for stupidity,” he’d told Adnan.
“It’s smaller than I’d imagined,” Adnan said, nodding at the boat.
“You were expecting a battleship? She’s tough enough. One of the only good things the British ever built, the Halmatic. I’ve had her lying on her beam and she still snaps to. You worry about yourself. Come on, then, we push off in ten minutes.”
The rest of Adnan’s men finished unloading their gear from the truck, then hurried down the pier and started loading it onto the afterdeck as Salychev barked orders about where and how to place everything. Once satisfied all was in order, Salychev cast off the lines, propped a foot on the pier, and pushed the Halmatic off. Seconds later he was in the wheelhouse, turning over the engine. With a belch of black smoke from the manifolds, the diesel engine roared to life and water frothed at the stern.
“Next stop,” Salychev called over his shoulder, “hell.”
Two hours later the island’s southern headlands appeared through the fog off the starboard bow. Adnan stood amidships, watching the coastline through a pair of binoculars. Salychev had assured him military patrols would be no trouble, and Adnan could see none.
“They’re out there,” he called from the pilothouse, “but they’re not so bright
. You could set your watch by ’em. Same patrol routes, every day at the same time.”
“What about radar?”
“Where?”
“On the island. I heard there was an air base. ...”
Salychev chuckled. “What, you’re talking about Rogachevo? Not really, not anymore. Not enough money. Used to have an interceptor regiment there, the 641st, I think, but nowadays it’s just a few cargo planes and helicopters.
“As for the boat patrols, they got dinky navigation sets, and like I said, they’re predictable anyway. Once we’re inshore, we’re safe. As you might imagine, they try to keep their distance.”
Adnan could understand why. While his men knew little about the nature of their mission or their destination, Adnan had been fully briefed.
Novaya Zemlya was indeed a hell on earth. According to the last census, the island was home to 2,500 people, mostly Nenetses and Avars living in Belushya Guba settlement. The island itself was in reality two islands—Severny in the north, and Yuzhny in the south—each separated from the other by the Matochkin Strait.
It was a shame, really, Adnan thought, that all the world knew of Novaya Zemlya was its Cold War history. The Russians and Europeans had known about it since the eleventh century, first through Novgorod traders, then through a steady string of explorers—Willoughby, Barents, Liitke, Hudson. . . . They’d all visited here hundreds of years before it was annexed by the Soviets in 1954, renamed the Novaya Zemlya Test Site, and divided into zones: A, Chyornaya Guba; B, Matochkin Shar; and C, Sukhoy Nos, where the fifty-megaton Tsar Bomba was detonated in 1961.
During its lifespan, Novaya Zemlya had been home to nearly three hundred nuclear detonations, the last one in 1990. Since then it had become many things to many people—a curiosity, a tragedy, a grim reminder. . . . But for the cash-poor Russian government after the dissolution, the island had become a dumping ground, a place to abandon their abominations.
What was that American phrase? Adnan wondered. Ah, yes . . . One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
They were interested in the new line, Cassiano saw. Where it crossed roads, how far off the ground it was, how many support pylons per mile ... An interesting request, and of course he would do his best to acquire the information.
They were also interested in trains, which puzzled him. It was true that trains came and went on a daily basis, but their entry into the facility was strictly limited and monitored. If they were looking to gain access to the facility, there were easier ways. Perhaps that was the answer. They weren’t interested in the trains as a means of infiltration but rather as a measurement tool. The facility’s output was a closely kept secret, but if the trains coming and going were monitored and their specifications known, one could make a good guess as to the output levels.
Very smart, he thought. And it did fit with what he knew about his employers. Competition was a healthy thing, he’d been told, and nothing could be done about a newly discovered oil field. What could be controlled, however, were prices and output capacity, which is what he suspected his employer planned to do. The OPEC nations (Islamic nations) had been the world’s largest supplier of oil for decades upon decades, and if Cassiano could help maintain that supremacy, he would happily do so.
42
IN RETROSPECT, Jenkins realized he should have seen it coming, this “promotion” that was in fact nothing more than a grade-A pain in the ass. The facility got regular visits from a plethora of government agencies and officials, from the Environmental Protection Agency and Homeland Security to the U.S. Geological Survey and the Army Corps of Engineers, all of which had thus far been handled by a Department of Energy spokesperson. The recently reheated battle in Washington over the future of the facility had changed all that, and it seemed every pol or bureaucrat who could find his or her way here was showing up, armed with probing questions generated by underpaid staffers and a deep desire to understand every nuance of the facility.
“What they want, Steve,” his boss had told him, “is a peek behind the curtain, and you’re just unpolished enough to make ’em think they’re getting it.”
Backhanded compliment notwithstanding, Steve had to admit he knew the facility inside and out, backward and forward, having started here just three years out of college, which was, in the lifespan of the project, nineteen years after the site had been initially identified as a possible candidate, along with ten others in six states; twelve years after it was nominated for intensive “site-characterization” studies; and ten years after it was crowned the winner of the beauty contest. He’d worked at this not-so-little patch of desert for most of his adult life, and at a current cost of $11 billion, it was one of the most extensively studied chunks of land in the world. And depending on who won the battle in Washington, that $11 billion might be written off as a loss. How did one do that? he wondered. In what column on the federal balance sheet did such a sum fall?
The project’s completion had become a point of pride for the nine hundred or so members of the team, and while opinion varied from employee to employee whether they would want to live next to it, their collective investment in its success was enormous. Though only thirty-seven, Steve was considered one of the site’s old hands, along with a hundred or so others who’d been here since the project had gone from a notion on a piece of paper to a shovel-in-the-dirt concern. Unfortunately, he could tell no one much about what he did, a restriction he hadn’t minded until he’d met Allison. She was keenly and genuinely interested in his work, about how he spent his days, a trait neither of his previous two girlfriends had displayed. God, he was a lucky man. To find a woman like her, and to have her attracted to him . . . And the sex. God almighty. Admittedly, his experience was somewhat limited, but the things she did to him, with her hands, with her mouth . . . Every time they were together, he felt like he was living a Penthouse Forum letter.
His musings were interrupted by a telltale plume of dust appearing over the hill opposite the main tunnel entrance, indicating vehicles approaching. Sixty seconds later, two black Chevy Suburbans appeared on the north road and pulled into the parking lot. Afternoon work had been halted, and all the trucks and equipment pallets moved to the perimeter of the lot. The Suburbans slowed to a stop about fifty feet away and sat idling. None of the doors opened, and Steve imagined the occupants dreading the idea of leaving the air-conditioned interiors. And it wasn’t even hot, he thought, not summer-hot, at least. Funny how delegation visits like this one tended to taper off in June, July, and August.
Now the doors opened, and out climbed the ten staffers who had been dispatched by their respective governors. Two for each of the five bordering states. Having already rolled up their shirtsleeves and loosened their ties, the group stood for a moment, blinking and looking around, before seeing Steve waving his arm at them. En masse, they walked over to him and gathered in a semicircle.
“Afternoon, and welcome,” he said. “My name is Steve Jenkins, and I’m one of the senior on-site engineers here. I’ll do my best to learn your names before we’re through, but for now I’ll leave it to you to sort out your visitor badges.”
He held out a shoebox, and one by one each delegate came forward and found his or her badge.
“Just a couple quick reminders, and then we’ll get out of the heat. I’ll be passing out information sheets that will cover everything we’re going to talk about this afternoon, and everything I’m allowed to say.”
This got a few chuckles. Steve relaxed a bit. Might not be so bad after all.
“That said, I’ll ask you not to take notes, either on paper or on a PDA. Same with voice recorders and cameras.”
“Why is that?” one of the delegates, a blond California-type woman, asked. “There are plenty of pictures on the Internet.”
“True, but only the ones we want there,” Steve replied. “Believe me, if I can answer a question, I’ll do it. Our goal is to give you as much information as we can. One last thing before we step inside: This contraption nex
t to me that looks like part rocket booster, part mobile home, and part oil pipeline is our TBM, or tunnel boring machine, known affectionately as the Yucca Mucker. For those of you that love facts and figures, the Mucker is four hundred sixty feet long, twenty-five feet wide, weighs seven hundred tons, and can cut through solid rock at up to eighteen feet an hour. To put that into perspective, that’s about the length of one of the Suburbans you arrived in.
There were appreciative murmurs and chuckles from the delegation.
“Okay, if you’ll follow me to the tunnel entrance, we’ll get started.”
We’re now standing in what we call the Exploratory Studies Facility,” Jenkins said. “It is shaped like a horseshoe, about five miles long and twenty-five feet wide. In several places in the ESF we constructed eight alcoves about the size of pole barns, in which we store equipment and conduct experiments, and six weeks ago we completed the first experimental emplacement drift.”
“Which is what?” one of the delegates asked.
“It’s essentially where deposits will be stored when and if the site goes active. You’ll see the entrance to the drift in a few minutes.”
“We’re not going inside?”
“No, I’m afraid not. We’re still conducting tests to ensure its stability.” This was a vast understatement, of course. The digging of the emplacement drift had taken a relatively short time. Testing and experimentation would take another nine months to a year. “Let’s talk a little geography,” Steve continued.
“The ridge above us was formed about thirteen million years ago by a now-extinct caldera volcano, and is comprised of alternating layers of rock called welded tuff—also known as ‘ignimbrite’—nonwelded tuff and semiwelded tuff.”
A hand went up. “Did I hear you right? You said ‘volcano.’”