"Charles Stross - A Colder War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

smoke rolling in the air beneath the merciless light until his hand stops
shaking.

Most people think spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed
wire, but in point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper.
Papers carry secrets. Papers can carry death warrants. Papers like this one,
this folio with its blurry eighteen year old faked missile photographs and
estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive psychosis ratios, can give
you nightmares, dragging you awake screaming in the middle of the
night. It's one of a series of highly classified pieces of paper that he is
summarizing for the eyes of the National Security Council and the
President Elect -- if his head of department and the DDCIA approve it --
and here he is, having to calm his nerves with a cigarette before he turns
the next page.

After a few minutes, Roger's hand is still. He leaves his cigarette in the
eagle-headed ash tray and picks up the intelligence report again. It's a
summary, itself the distillation of thousands of pages and hundreds of
photographs. It's barely twenty pages long: as of 1963, its date of
preparation, the CIA knew very little about Project Koschei. Just the bare
skeleton, and rumours from a highly-placed spy. And their own
equivalent project, of course. Lacking the Soviet lead in that particular
field, the USAF fielded the silver-plated white elephants of the NB-39
project: twelve atomic-powered bombers armed with XK-PLUTO, ready
to tackle Project Koschei should the Soviets show signs of unsealing the
bunker. Three hundred megatons of H-bombs pointed at a single target,
and nobody was certain it would be enough to do the job.

And then there was the hard-to-conceal fiasco in Antarctica. Egg on face:
a subterranean nuclear test program in international territory! If nothing
else, it had been enough to stop JFK running for a second term. The test
program was a bad excuse: but it was far better than confessing what had
really happened to the 501st Airborne Division on the cold plateau
beyond Mount Erebus. The plateau that the public didn't know about, that
didn't show up on the maps issued by the geological survey departments
of those governments party to the Dresden Agreement of 1931 -- an
arrangement that even Hitler had stuck to. The plateau that had swallowed
more U-2 spy planes than the Soviet Union, more surface expeditions
than darkest Africa.

Shit. How the hell am I going to put this together for him?


file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi...ten/spaar/Charles%20Stross%20-%20A%20Colder%20War.htm (6 of 34)19-2-2006 17:13:54
A Colder War - a novelette by Charles Stross


Roger's spent the past five hours staring at this twenty page report, trying
to think of a way of summarizing their drily quantifiable terror in words
that will give the reader power over them, the power to think the