The Trigger Read online

  Then I'm more mystified than ever,' said Hawley, pushing the packet away from him as though it were something distaste-ful. 'Mr President, I'm completely at a loss to understand why you're proposing to dismantle the preeminent military force of the twenty-first century.'

  'Dismantle?' asked Admiral Jacobs. 'A submarine equipped with this device would be virtually invulnerable.' The appeal of that idea was evident in the voice of the former fast-attack submarine commander.

  'And completely useless, Mark. Your Sawfish couldn't even carry a deck gun.'

  'Wait - but this is a directional effect, yes?'

  'No, sir,' said Stepak. 'The Trigger field is omni-directional.'

  'Surely there's some way to shield our own magazines -'

  'Not that we now know of,' admitted Stepak. 'We have to do more testing, but the available evidence is that the field penetrates all ordinary materials. The primary limitation on the Trigger appears to be range - which is principally a question of available power.'

  'You see. Admiral? You see?' Hawley prodded.

  'Well, what are we supposed to do, then?' Jacobs exploded, looking to Breland for an answer.

  I'll tell you what you're supposed to do - disarm the entire Fleet, or mothball it,' said Hawley. 'Better yet, mount battering rams. General Moorman, you'll have to rearm all your tanks with bayonets. General Brennan, you'd better call your Warfighting Laboratory and tell them to lay in a supply of crossbows. And I'll be able to send everything but the recon squadrons to the graveyard at Davis-Mothan.'

  He turned on Breland with angry eyes. 'Start building these things, Mr President, and you're throwing away everything that makes this country strong and keeps our people safe,' Hawley said. 'We have a technological advantage in every dimension of the combat cube - air, sea, land, undersea, and space. We enjoy an absolute numerical advantage against every possible adversary except China. And even against them, we can establish absolute battlefield dominance - right up to their front door, if need be. Push this technology into the mix, and we lose all of that.'

  'The Chinese can raise an army of ten million, a hundred million, and hardly notice if they lose them all,' said Moorman. 'What are we going to do when they cross into South Korea, into Vietnam -when they take Vladivostok, and Taiwan, and start looking across the water at Japan?'

  Breland was unfazed. 'Gentlemen, it seems to me that those are exactly the kind of questions you're going to need to help answer.'

  The Vice Chairman, General Heincer, spoke for the first time since the meeting began. There have to be other options. An intermediate strategy - fast development, but no deployment -all-out effort on alternative weapons, but a maximum effort to contain and suppress this discovery -'

  Shaking his head, Breland said, 'Unless someone's been keeping secrets from the President again, we don't have enough people in China to prevent them from discovering this on their own - or even to know if they've discovered it already.'

  'The President is correct on that point,' said the Chairman. 'We are tracking nearly eight thousand Chinese agents in the US. We have barely two hundred agents in China.'

  'Maybe it's time we evened things up,' said Admiral Jacobs. 'March 'em out to the end of Santa Monica Pier, point toward Beijing, and wish 'em a nice swim.'

  'And when Beijing responds by expelling every American businessman -'

  That'd be all right by me,' General Moorman grumbled. 'It's gotten so you can hardly buy anything for under a hundred bucks that isn't made in China. They're making our toys, our clothes, our tools - last month, my wife even found an American flag, one of those little desk flags, that was made in China. And that was at the Base Exchange. I couldn't believe it.'

  'Believe it. Be glad for it. That's part of the answer to General Hawley's challenge, General,' said Breland. 'We're China's biggest trading partner. And Japan is number two. We're more valuable as customers than as conquests.'

  That won't help Vladivostok much,' said Jacobs. 'Or Taiwan. Hell, they take Taiwan, and we'll just have to buy that much more from them.'

  'You're missing the point,' said Breland. 'In the long run, it doesn't matter if the Chinese factories are full of kids being paid slave wages. In the long run, it doesn't matter if the ruling circle is full of rabid expansionists. The real meaning of all of those billions of dollars we're sending to China is that there are now powerful voices inside China with a strong interest in staying on good terms with us.'

  Jacobs answered with a derisive snort. 'All we've been doing is paying for their military build-up.'

  'Which is about as smart as paying for your wife's divorce lawyer,' said General Brennan. That brought a laugh that took some of the edge off the tension in the room.

  While he listened, Breland had reclaimed his chair and settled into a determinedly relaxed posture. 'Gentlemen, I respect the dedication and experience you bring to the great responsibility of ensuring the security of our country,' he said. 'It's your duty to take the darkest possible view of our adversaries, the most cynical interpretation of their acts, the most skeptical view of their words.

  'It's my duty, however, to balance the worst possible scenario against the best possible scenario, in search of the most likely. We don't fortify our northern border against the possibility that some Canadian Prime Minister might decide he wants a port on Lake Michigan. We don't search every trunk, cooler, and hat box coming across the Friendship Bridge, looking for Canadian terrorists with suitcase nukes.

  'Now, China is no Canada. They keep building Long March ICBMs. They keep cloning Soviet missile cruisers and arming them with Silkworms. They keep upgrading their air force with Su-27 and MIG-31 knockoffs. They keep spying on us and our friends. They keep six million men in uniform. In short, they keep acting like they expect to find themselves in a scrap against someone a lot like us.

  The question is whether they expect to start that scrap.'

  'What are you talking about?' asked Moorman.

  'Every one of you has a counterpart in China. What do they tell the premier about us?' Breland asked. 'When they look at the United States, with our technological superiority, our absolute battlefield dominance, our allies on their doorstep, our super-silent boomers which we promise aren't lurking in the Kuril Trench and the Bering Abyssal, our hypersonic SSTOs which we keep assuring them aren't bombers, maybe they get to feeling just a little bit uncomfortable, a little unsure of our intentions. It's just possible they'd welcome a chance to stop spending four hundred billion yuan every year on guns and bombs.'

  The Chairman leaned forward and rested his folded hands on the table. 'No offense intended, Mr President, but I hope you're not telling us you belong to that school of woolly-headed internationalists who believe that people everywhere are the same, and every conflict is the result of a misunderstanding.'

  'No offense taken, General,' said Breland. 'I hope you're not telling me that you belong to that club of testosterone addicts so in love with big fast toys and noisemakers that they can't imagine giving them up.'

  'Now, just a minute -' Jacobs began.

  'I'm not finished, Admiral,' Breland said sharply. The fact is, we've been extremely successful playing under twentieth-century rules. But if we keep on fighting the last war, we're going to find ourselves wearing red and marching in straight lines across the meadow while our enemy mows us down from behind the trees. Does anyone here want to fight the twenty-first century version of the Battle of New Orleans - as the British?

  'Gentlemen, the rules of the game are changing. They've already changed, in fact. You don't have to like it, but we all have to deal with it. I know it's going to be a painful transition - but I have to believe that if we apply all the experience and dedication and talent we can call on, we can be successful under the new rules, too.

  'But we have to be smart, and we have to be flexible. We have to be able to break our own tendencies, and we have to be willing to redefine success. It may not mean technological superiority and absolute battlefield dominance. It
might mean giving up the capacity to start a war in exchange for the capacity to prevent one. It might mean a hundred little victories no one notices instead of one big one that gets written about for a hundred years. It might mean a new kind of conflict, and a new kind of peace. And if we're very smart, and a little lucky, it just might mean a safer, saner planet for all of us.

  That's what I expect from you, gentlemen,' Breland said, meet-ing the eyes of each chief in turn. 'I expect you to find the path that gets us from here to there. I expect you to figure out how to keep us as safe as possible along the way. I expect you to rise to the challenge of the hardest job any President has ever handed this body - and the most tantalizing opportunity fate has ever handed our country.

  'No, we won't forget that we have real enemies, that greed and cruelty and hate keep evil alive in human hearts. But we also won't forget that there never has been a war that left the world a better place - that even the "good" wars exact a terrible price in both blood and treasure, in lost years and squandered lives. If there can be another way, a better way, let us be the ones to uncover it. Now, you may call that woolly-headed idealism if you like - but I call it hard-headed human compassion. And if you can't locate a fund of that to draw on, then you've forgotten why we wanted the guns in the first place.

  'Now - are there any other questions? General Hawley ? General Moorman?' He looked from one face to the next, searching for the men behind the insignia, the humanity behind the duty.

  'Not a question, but a comment,' General Brennan said at last. 'Over the years, the Warfighting Laboratory has looked into a lot of alternative weapons for Special Forces - compressed-air guns, hurling sticks, shock prods, various martial arts devices, and so on. Those files, eh, would probably be worth a second look now.'

  Nodding, Breland said, 'Consider it on the list of things to do.'

  'I have a question,' said General Madison.

  Breland swiveled his chair toward the head of the table. 'Go ahead.'

  The chairman drummed his fingers on the table for a long moment before responding. 'Those other nine hundred Triggers - what plans do you have for them?'

  'Well,' Breland said, 'I confess I find the thought of putting one in every high school in Los Angeles for a month or so very appealing.' Then he shrugged. 'But, actually, those decisions are waiting on input from all of you.'

  'Then I have a few thoughts in that area, Mr President,' Madison said. 'Some allocations that I'd like to propose receive priority.'

  Sitting back in his chair, Breland caught a sideways glance from Stepak that said I think the worst is over. 'Go ahead, General. It's as good a place as any to start.'

  * * *

  12: Apostasy

  London, UK - Constable Clarence Whitehead closed out an era today when he added a leather holster and a black Webley & Scott pistol to his uniform before setting out on his daily foot patrol in the Docklands. Though London's famed bobbies have had the option of carrying firearms on regular patrols for years, the recent murder of two officers in Shropshire led Scotland Yard officials to make it mandatory. 'I've got regrets,' said Whitehead, a 25-year veteran, 'but I don't see as the Inspector had much choice.'

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  The day for good-byes had finally come, and Donovan King had chosen it well.

  The day was a cloudy autumn Saturday, and the stiff breeze had a winter's bite. With the top-ranked Penn State Nittany Lions in town for a showdown with the Buckeyes, the entire city of Columbus awakened to thoughts of football. All across the region, Ohio State fans began the rituals and ablutions which would lead them to their seats in the stadium and in front of television screens. The patterns were as predictable as a sunrise: as the sports bars filled, the roads emptied. As kickoff neared, the stores became deserted, the beer flowed and the heady energy of anticipation grew. The police were occupied, the populace distracted.

  At Terabyte, Saturday began with the arrival of a yellow Ryder tractor and semi-trailer at the gates. The truck was driven by a two-man team from Terabyte's expanded security force, and accompanied by a forest green Chevy Tahoe sport-utility and a silver Honda sedan. All three vehicles bore plates from different states, and all three drivers wore casual clothes - both signs of Donovan King's attention to the smallest details in planning a safe but unobtrusive move from Columbus to the West Annex.

  Even on a lightly traveled highway, it would take more than a casual observation to realize that the three unremarkable vehicles made up a caravan, or to guess that anything more valuable than household furniture was being transported. To complete the illusion, the last three meters of the trailer would be packed high with ordinary moving boxes filled with what had been the contents of Leigh Thayer's apartment.

  While the crates containing the prototype and its instrumentation were loaded into the trailer, three teams from the lab's engineering staff went to work on the vehicles. Working quickly enough to beat the twenty-minute update cycle, they removed the unsophisticated Ryder and Hertz global positioning system trackers, transplanting them into Terabyte vehicles. Those vehicles, with their identification numbers spoofed to match those of the caravan, would never leave greater Columbus.

  In place of the trackers they removed, the engineering teams installed Terabyte's own military-grade GPS-III secure-duplex trackers. Identical systems had been installed overnight in the two largest crates, against the possibility that they might become separated from the truck or each other en route. It was all part of King's promise to Brohier:

  'I'm going to make sure it's easy for you to monitor the entire move, and damned hard for anyone else to.'

  The caravan rolled out the gates again a few minutes before kickoff, with King himself at the wheel of the lead vehicle. Brohier saw them off, then crossed to where Lee and Gordon were waiting and watching, near the main entrance to Planck Center. As he approached them, he noted their starkly contrasting body language - Gordon perched casually on a low wall, bare-headed, coat wide open, while Lee stood stiffly half a dozen paces away, hands buried in her ski jacket's square pockets, collar rolled up and a crocheted hat on her head.

  'That's one, Doctor,' Gordon said.

  'That's one,' he agreed.

  'I was kind of surprised to see King leave now,' said Gordon, hopping off the wall. 'I would have thought he'd stay around until the second caravan was away.'

  'No, this was always what he planned,' Brohier said. 'Listen, you two - we're looking at a lull of an hour or so now, and I spoiled the chief cook's day by making her come in. How about one last lunch in the grille, for old time's sake?'

  'Sure,' said Greene. 'But I'll eat Lee's hat if you can name three of Josie's specials - when did you ever patronize the campus cafeteria?'

  'Whenever there was six or more inches of snow between me and something better,' Brohier said cheerfully. 'Lee?'

  'I could use something hot,' said Lee, and shivered. 'Even soine-thing from the Terror-Bite Girl.'

  The deserted cafeteria seemed cavernous, tomblike - every clink of glass and flatware, every word above a whisper carrying to the four corners. Conditions were perfect for eavesdropping, except that the only conversation underway was the one at the table where Lee was seated.

  Mercifully, even that conversation was largely Karl Brohier's monologue. The director seemed to be aware of how uncomfortable she and Gordon were with each other, of the way their easy banter had given way to a chilly, awkward silence, and smoothly took over the burden of filling the silence. Lee had never seen him quite so garrulous.

  Brohier told them a series of physicist jokes so groaningly bad that the cumulative effect had them both laughing out loud. He reminisced about his one chance meeting with Stephen Hawking, about embarrassing himself in front of John Wheeler, about his tumultuous internship under John Bardeen at Bell Laboratories.

  'I took that internship hoping it would lead to a job at the lab, and on
ce I was there I wasn't shy about telling them so.' He laughed and shrugged.'- My father used to tell me, "Always ask for what you really want - you might get it." I had to discover on my own that the style points counted.

  'Dr Bardeen was brilliant, one of the few legitimate geniuses I've known - and he had just accepted his second Nobel Prize in Physics. And here I was, younger than either of you, the ink barely dry on my doctorate, totally clueless about the etiquette and politics at that level, and totally in love with my own ideas, in love with new ideas.

  'I wanted to impress Dr Bardeen. And I tried to do it the same way I'd done it all through school - by showing my teachers I was just as smart as they were. Or smarter. I kept treating the internship like it was Wilkenson's graduate seminar - with a paycheck. Well, surely you can see this coming - Dr Bardeen and I could never seem to agree on anything, including how smart I was. We had at least one full-blown, high-theater argument a week, and I never won a single one. I got used to going home feeling like I'd been exposed as an idiot.

  'But I was a stubborn idiot. And the less success I had, the more frantic I was to find some way to correct Dr Bardeen's mistaken opinion of me. By the end, I must have been completely obnoxious.

  'I came to Dr Bardeen's office that last day, itching to reopen an argument we'd had a few weeks earlier - as I recall, something about Fahy's approach to modeling the properties of complex materials from first principles. Old news, now.

  'In any event, I never even got started. He told me that the lab wouldn't be offering me a position. Then he told me he'd enjoyed our arguments, that he thought I'd helped make it a "lively" year -which I could only hear as his way of saying I'd provided valuable comic relief. Finally, he handed me his letter of recommendation.

  'I was afraid to open the letter in front of him. I didn't even want to open it when I was alone. I sat there in my kitchen, staring at the envelope, realizing all my mistakes. I did a year's growing up in the hour or so it took for me to reach a point where I thought I could read the letter without crumbling.'