The Cardinal of the Kremlin - Tom Clancy [16]
"Hell of a commute," Jack noted. The residential and industrial site on Mozart was only one kilometer or so from the emplacement on Bach, the next mountaintop over, but the ad looked frightful. The picture froze on Bach. The formula fences and guard towers was repeated, but this time the distance between the outermost perimeter fence and the next was at least two hundred meters. Here the ground surface appeared to be bare rock. Jack wondered how you plant mines in that-or maybe they didn't, he thought. It was obvious that the ground had been leveled with bulldozers and explosives to the unobstructed flatness of a pool table. From the guard towers, it must have looked like a shooting gallery. "Not kidding, are they?" Graham observed quietly. "So that's what they're guarding " Ryan said. There were thirteen buildings inside the fence. In an area perhaps the size of two football fields-which had also been leveled-were ten holes, in two groups. One was a group of six arranged hexagonally, each hole about thirty feet across. The second group of four was arrayed in a diamond pattern and the holes were slightly smaller, perhaps twenty-five feet. In each hole was a concrete pillar about fifteen feet across planted in bedrock, and every hole was at least forty feet deep-you couldn't tell from the picture on the screen. At each pillar was a metal dome. They appeared to be made crescent-shaped segments. "They unfold. I wonder what's in them?" Graham ask rhetorically. There were two hundred people at Langley who knew of Dushanbe, and every one wanted to know what was under those metal domes. They'd been in place for only a few months.
"Admiral," Jack said, "I need to kick open a new compartment."
"Which one?"
"Tea Clipper."
"You're not asking much!" Greer snorted. "I'm not deal for that."
Ryan leaned back in his chair. "Admiral, if what they're doing in Dushanbe is the same thing we're doing with Tea Clipper, we sure as hell ought to know. Goddammit, how are we supposed to know what to look for if we're not sure what one of these places looks like!"
"I've been saying that for quite a while." The DDI conceded. "SDIO won't like it. The Judge will have to go to the President for that."
"So he goes to the President. What if the activity here is connected with the arms proposal they just made?"
"Do you think it is?"
"Who can say?" Jack asked. "It's a coincidence. They worry me."
"Okay, I'll talk to the Director."
Ryan drove home two hours later. He drove his Jaguar CFS out onto the George Washington Parkway. It was one of the many happy memories from his tour of duty in England, he loved the silky-smooth feeling of the twelve-cylinder engine enough that he'd put his venerable old Rabbit into semi-retirement. As he always tried to do, Ryan set his Washington business aside. He worked the car up through its five gears and concentrated on his driving.
"Well, James?" the Director of Central Intelligence asked.
"Ryan thinks the new activity at Bach and Mozart may be related to the arms situation. I think he might be correct. He wants into Tea Clipper. I said you'd have to go to the President." Admiral Greer smiled.
"Okay, I'll get him a written note. It'll make General Parks happier, anyway. They have a full-up test scheduled for the end of the week. I'll set it up for Jack to see it." Judge Moore smiled sleepily. "What do you think?"
"I think he's right: Dushanbe and Tea Clipper are essentially the same project. There are a lot of coarse similarities, too many