ANALYST
Roger Jourgensen
tilts back in his chair, reading.
He’s a fair-haired
man, in his mid-thirties: hair razor-cropped, skin pallid from too
much time spent under artificial lights. Spectacles, short-sleeved
white shirt and tie, photographic ID badge on a chain round his
neck. He works in an air-conditioned office with no
windows.
The file he is
reading frightens him.
Once, when Roger was
a young boy, his father took him to an open day at Nellis AFB, out
in the California desert. Sunlight glared brilliantly from the
polished silverplate flanks of the big bombers, sitting in their
concrete-lined dispersal bays behind barriers and blinking
radiation monitors. The brightly colored streamers flying from
their pitot tubes lent them a strange, almost festive appearance.
But they were sleeping nightmares: once awakened, nobody—except the
flight crew—could come within a mile of the nuclear-powered bombers
and live.
Looking at the
gleaming, bulging pods slung under their wingtip pylons, Roger had
a premature inkling of the fires that waited within, a frigid
terror that echoed the siren wail of the air-raid warnings. He’d
sucked nervously on his ice cream and gripped his father’s hand
tightly while the band ripped through a cheerful Sousa march, and
only forgot his fear when a flock of Thunderchiefs sliced by
overhead and rattled the car windows for miles around.
He has the same
feeling now, as an adult reading this intelligence assessment, that
he had as a child, watching the nuclear-powered bombers sleeping in
their concrete beds.
There’s a blurry
photograph of a concrete box inside the file, snapped from above by
a high-flying U-2 during the autumn of ’61. Three coffin-shaped
lakes, bulking dark and gloomy beneath the arctic sun; a canal
heading west, deep in the Soviet heartland, surrounded by warning
trefoils and armed guards. Deep waters saturated with calcium
salts, concrete cofferdams lined with gold and lead. A sleeping
giant pointed at NATO, more terrifying than any nuclear
weapon.
Project
Koschei.