"An installation called the BioBubble was destroyed utterly by a power of unknown destructiveness."
"A bomb?"
"We think not. We think a ray."
"A laser?"
"No laser is this powerful. To do this, the laser beam would have to possess a circumference of three acres."
Glances of unease passed among stone-faced men. For security reasons, no one knew the identity of his comrades. The people's hero who had recruited them had taken his life once his task was accomplished to ensure their anonymity.
"Star Wars?"
Rushenko shook his head. "Such a laser in orbit would be so large as to reveal itself. It is not a new weapon of the supposedly cancelled US. Strategic Defense Initiative."
"Could it be ours?" a shaggy-haired man with suspicious Georgian eyes asked.
"Zhirinovsky talks of the Elipticon," an Estonian remarked.
Colonel Rushenko shook his heavy Kazakh face. "Zhirinovsky talks of foolishness. But he is useful to us."
"Colonel Rushenko, I have in my possession a file copied from the old KGB archives. It speaks of a weapon such as this."
"I am listening."
"It is a very dangerous weapon. If deployed, it could render our nuclear deterrent obsolete."
Colonel Rushenko frowned darkly. "Our nuclear deterrent is all but obsolete. Half the missiles are inoperative or under repair. We no longer test, so there is no way to know if they will launch or detonate on impact. For all we know, the current leadership has its collective finger on the trigger of a water pistol."
"You mistake my meaning, comrade. This weapon could make the surviving good missiles useless hulks resting in their silos and launchers like so many loaves of bread in so many paper sacks."
"How?"
"We have only a flimsy grasp of the event, but if the Americans are experimenting with this device, we will stand naked beneath it."
"We have assets in the Evil Empire?"
"Yes. Kinga the Bitch."
Rushenko shuddered. "A true nutcracker, that one."
"Let us send her into the field. Perhaps she will learn something useful."
"And if she is caught?"
"She has been hypnotized to give up under interrogation the name of an FSK control she once dallied with and who left her. Let the FSK take the blame."
Colonel Rushenko nodded. "Then I will see that it's done."
With that, the meeting was adjourned, and Rushenko was left with a computer linked to a Chinese-red telephone that, thanks to a friendly telephone lineman, ran through the FSK switchboard and thus accessed the superior government Vertushka phone system.
It took three hours to obtain a modem connection with the international Internet. It was another embarrassing proof of how much Russian technology had deteriorated since the old regime was overthrown.
In the glory days of the USSR, it would never have taken more than two.
Chapter 16
When Dr. Cosmo Pagan heard that the U.S. space shuttle had been melted down en route to the launch pad, he was trying to find Mars through the twenty-four-inch antique refractor at Lowell Observatory outside Flagstaff.
As observatories went, it wasn't much-a white, wood-frame Victorian structure perched on a promontory. In the cloudless dry Arizona air, it was a perfect spot to observe the Red Planet.
Here, Percival Lowell had mapped out the canals that later astronomers sought in vain. But Lowell had seen them, and before he died, Cosmo Pagan wanted to see them, too.
Mars wasn't being cooperative. Unable to sight it by fiddling with the right ascension and declination, Pagan swung the blue telescope tube by hand and peered through the brass-bound sighter.
Finally he got a fix.
There it was, the Red Planet, just as Lowell had described it in his notebooks over a century ago. Lowell saw a dying planet kept alive by a planetwide network of irrigation canals. His findings had fired the imaginations of H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and other great chroniclers of the Mars that had in turn ignited Pagan's youthful dreams.
Regrettably the Mars of canals and princesses and four-armed, green-skinned giants had evaporated with the Viking and Mariner probes and subsequent discoveries.
It was too bad. Even at his mature age, Dr. Pagan would rather green Martians than red deserts. After all, there were red deserts on earth, too. Here in Arizona. And in Mongolia, where the Red Gobi had an uncannily distinct Martian feel to it-not that Dr. Pagan had ever been to the Red Gobi. There were no news cameras in the Red Gobi. He never went anywhere where there wasn't the possibility of face timeor at least good black ink.
Though discredited, Lowell hadn't toiled in vain, Cosmo thought. If not for him, there would have been no "War of the Worlds" or Warlord of Mars to set Cosmo Pagan on the road to his red destiny. By that reasoning, Percival Lowell had not lived in vain.
And it was Cosmo Pagan's deepest wish to one night see the phenomenon that had caused a great astronomer to believe he saw Martian canals.
His cellular phone shrilled as he was drinking in the sight of Mars, and without taking his eyes from the eyepiece, he flipped it open and began speaking.
"Dr. Cosmo Pagan, world-renowned authority on the universe and everything under the heavens."
"Dr. Pagan, this is the Associated Press."
"Would you like a quote?"
"Exactly."
"The universe is transcendent in its awesome greatness. An ocean of stars in a whirling cosmic whirlpool whirling about, oblivious to the paltry human concerns of us mere molecular bio-machines."
"That's great, but I was looking for a specific quote."
"Right now I am looking at the Red Planet, Marsseat of war, according to the ancient Romans. But to me it is a place of peace and scarlet tranquillity. Some day man will set foot on Mars, but for all its grandeur it is but the steppingstone to the greater, grander cosmos."
The AP man cleared his throat and tried again. "Dr. Pagan, do you think Martians are behind the shuttle meltdown tonight?"
"I wish..." he breathed. Then, catching himself, he blurted, "Meltdown? What shuttle?"