“They didn’t mess around,” Miriam muttered, heedless of her throat mike. Zeus-IV was a long-range surface-to-air nuclear missile. It was unguided and unjammable, but able to reach out and swat an enemy aircraft with a two-megaton warhead from over a hundred miles away. Brute-force weapons like the old Nike-Hercules had gone out of fashion in the USA during the 1970s, as sensitive electronics proliferated. A Zeus strike would burn out every unshielded microprocessor within fifty miles. Luckily unshielded microprocessors were a rarity in the Commonwealth, and would remain so thanks to MITI-dictated national shielding standards.
Miriam was still shaken from learning a nuclear weapon had just been fired in anger for the first time in nearly twenty years. And at a stealthy intruder capable of flying as high and fast as a U-2, that had appeared out of thin air. “This wasn’t the French,” she said in a thin voice. “They don’t have the tech and they know better than to tug our tail like that. No, this is an escalation over last month’s incidents.”
The earlier American drones had popped up in controlled airspace far to the south-west, flying fat and happy at medium altitude. Air Defense Command had scrambled their shiniest missile-armed supersonic interceptors and used them for target practice. Afterward, DPR’s analysts had identified the recovered wreckage as coming from MQ-1 Predators, obsolescent unmanned turboprops so embarrassingly outclassed that even the French could have shot them down. This new contact was a much more potent adversary.
“The sooner we get to the Redoubt the better.” Erasmus sounded no happier than she felt. Sick terror twisted her stomach, until she feared she’d need to reach for the bag under her seat. She hadn’t seen the bombs fall on the Gruinmarkt, but her mother had. Iris had described them in morbid detail, and suffered from nightmare flashbacks for the rest of her life. (A row of distant flashbulbs, their sullen heat refracted through cloud, popping in the distance. Then another row of hell-sparks, detonating closer. Ripples in the bloodstained sky as the overlapping shock waves tore apart the cloudscape. Panic as the burning rain crept closer, deceptively slowly, dripping from a storm front of bombers traveling just below the speed of sound.) They’d sent scouts to the Gruinmarkt shortly afterward—wearing dosimeters and protective clothing, and keeping a low profile in case the USA had monitors in place. When Miriam had seen the photographs, she’d thrown up, then slept badly for a week.
“It’s too soon. We’re not ready; the JUGGERNAUT program is nowhere near ready—”
He looked at her tiredly. “We can’t use that thing.”
“No, but if we demonstrated we had a superweapon of that caliber they’d have to back down. Deterrence works, love. Game theory doesn’t lie. It worked for half a century back in my—in the old world. It’s working for us on the French. When JUGGERNAUT is complete and we’ve made overt contact, nobody will be crazy enough to attack us.”
His chest rose and fell, wheezing. After a few seconds he reached into his coat pocket and removed a small metal aerosol inhaler. After he used it, the panting slowly subsided. A minute later he could speak again. “Your faith in psychology is wonderfully strong, dear.” He gave her a crooked little smile, clearly more worried than he was prepared to admit. “Right now, we’re boxing blindfolded with hand grenades taped to our gloves. We need intelligence; we need to know who and what we’re up against.”
“I’ve got people working on it,” Miriam reassured him as the engine note of the turboprops shifted, heralding the start of their descent. I just hope they deliver before it’s too late.
BALTIMORE, TIME LINE TWO, JULY 2020
“What do you want from me?” Rita tried to keep a whine of frustration from creeping into her voice. “I don’t understand where this is going.”
Smith looked at her disapprovingly from across the expanse of his desk. “Rita, calm down. It’s not about you.” The tension in his shoulders said something like God give me strength. “We have a problem. A very special kind of problem. One you might be able to help us with, if you can stop acting like a drama queen for five minutes.”
I’m not—Rita managed to hold the words back, with an effort. Familiarity was making it too easy to open up to Colonel Smith and his team of handlers. She needed to focus harder if she was to keep a grip on herself: even surrounded by increasingly familiar faces she felt lonely and defensive. “I’m listening.”
“You’re listening—what?”
“I’m listening, sir.”
Smith nodded, stiffly. “That’s better.”
“I don’t remember joining the services, sir. Sorry. I do know a, a sandbox when I’m in one. I’m not a mushroom; I don’t thrive in the dark on a diet of bullshit.”
“No, I don’t suppose you do.” Smith’s lips were thin. “None of us do. And you’re perfectly right, you didn’t swear the oath. And you’re right we’re keeping you in a box. But the less you know about the rest of the Office of Special Programs and DHS, the less you can give away.”
Give away. “This is the run-up to a covert deployment, isn’t it? You want me to spy for you.”
“Yes, but”—Smith leaned back and stared at the wall behind and above her head—“I’m having some second thoughts.”
“Why? Sir.”
Smith glanced down to meet her gaze. His eyes were pale blue; she found his stare disturbingly intense. “It’s premature. Rita, in all honesty, you’re nowhere near ready for this. The usual recruitment and training structure for a clandestine operative is for us to sound them out in college, security-clear them before hiring, then deploy them on an analysis desk for years of intensive immersion—often with added language training—in the target culture. We evaluate, assess their progress, identify their shortcomings, and assign them more training until they’re perfectly acculturated for the destination. Then we generate their cover identity and background material and inject them.
“Modern biometrics and DNA databases mean that a clandestine asset gets just one home run in an entire career. If they’re really lucky, if there are two different target nations with a shared culture that don’t get on well enough to share their frontier databases, they might get a second outing under a new identity: but one is the rule. After their covert identity is retired they come home and teach the next generation of agents, or retire to the analysis desk. But they can’t operate in the field again—two different names on passports with the same genetic fingerprint and facial bone structure will start alarm bells ringing. So we don’t deploy agents lightly. We only send the best of the best, and we train them for years first, to make sure we get the most bang for our bucks.”