‘It’ll cost.’
‘I’ll pay.’
‘Sure,’ van Beck grunted. ‘You pay, I’ll supply. That’s business.’
‘Thank you.’ Smith relaxed back in his seat. ‘You may go. Contact me in the usual way. You have a month.’
Van Beck nodded, making no reply. None was needed. He threw aside the curtain on its jangling brass rings, and strode out into the mellow light of evening. He drank white wine, marginally chilled, and cognac at the pavement table of a café, then rejoined his car and took the road to Chartres.
From the church porch, piercing eyes in a hooded face watched him.
Then the heavy door swung open once again, and a bent, shabby little priest joined the home-goers and the evening walkers. He smiled benignly at an old woman dressed, like himself, in rusty black. He reached to pat the head of a passing boy, but missed.
It was a sheltered place, twenty-eight miles west of Stuttgart: a plateau in wooded country screened from the road by trees, and hardly ever overflown. It made an ideal secret firing range. The US Army used the unfenced fields to test their newest toy, the General Electric Lap-Laser-gun.
The US Army had four Lap-Lasers at Stuttgart. Not very many, they conceded, but still one-third of those known to exist. For the manufacturers had made only twelve so far, and they were as yet in the experimental stage. Since the Army chiefs were confident that neither General Electric’s security nor their own had been breached, they took their time about putting the Lap-Laser through its paces. No one, after all, they reasoned, was going to steal it …
On the day appointed by Smith for the theft of all four guns, a fine but drenching rain speckled the goggles of the Army’s chief weapons instructor as he strained his eyes skywards to pick up the incoming helicopter. The fretful buzz of its motor sounded intermittently out of the heavy clouds. He chewed his gum viciously and spat, a not un-accomplished combined operation.
The helicopter was part of the daily Lap-Laser routine, bringing the precious guns from the big, closely guarded Stuttgart base to the range each morning, and taking them back again in the evening for safe keeping. The guns could not be tested at the base: they were too powerful, too unpredictable.
Apart from that, they needed an enormous power source, and rather than transport huge and unwieldy banks of generators from place to place, the Army preferred the option of an isolated testing ground where they could install a small nuclear power plant.
The colonel glanced back over his shoulder at his sleekly sinister ‘babies’, all four stripped and stacked away, ready to leave on the return trip to the base. He grinned and winked at his second-in-command at his side.
‘They’re really somethin’ aren’t they.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘Yeah,’ acknowledged the major, through a stubby cigar that rarely left his stained lips.
There were US Army Generals, plenty of them, who would greet with genuinely blank astonishment any leading question about a laser-gun, and the chief weapons instructor and his 2–IC basked in the realization that they were part of an impressively small band of experts. For example, if put to the trouble, which they rarely were, they would be able to explain that the Lap-Laser was made possible by advances not in ballistics or aero-dynamics, but in the field of optics. That statement in itself was enough to confound most questioners.
The colonel grinned appreciatively at the final touch the laser-gunners had insisted on adding to the already successful day’s tests: at a range of a thousand metres they had drilled ‘USAAF’ through a four-inch plate of sheet steel as cleanly as if it had been stencilled on cartridge-paper.
The Lap-Laser’s guidance system was similar to that of a conventional radar device, except that instead of using radio beams, it reflected beams of light when seeking its target. It could be sensitized to any target within its range, or any kind of target, because the mouse-ear detectors of the Lap-Laser, on either side of its firing mechanism, were tuned to distinguish the properties of a variety of different materials. They could run from a dozen different sorts of metal, to wood, brick, or the human body.
Once the target was located, the Lap-Laser sent out a concentrated ray of appallingly destructive force, which annihilated anything in its direct path.
Its other great advantage was speed. It is the practice in orthodox electronics to work down to a nano-second – one thousandth of a millionth of a second. If even greater speed is required, the only alternative carrier is light, which can be con trolled to a pico-second, or micromicro-second – a millionth of a millionth fraction of time, of such minute duration as to be incomprehensible in human terms.
The Lap-Laser worked to pico-second tolerances, using a processor which General Electric built into the controlling computer specially for the job. To give the optical system the necessary speed to match the sophisticated laser-gun, the processor employed mini-lasers no larger than a grain of salt.
Allied to a power source of massive concentration and force, the lasers combined to produce a weapon that was like a glimpse into a fearful future. Everything ultimately depended on the uses to which the Lap-Laser was put, and on the inviolable guarantee that it could never fall into the wrong hands.
Yet the hands of Mister Smith were among the dirtiest in creation.
And the instrument of his criminal ambition was at that moment speeding down an autobahn in a hired car to keep an appointment with the four deadliest ‘babies’ of all time.
‘AUSGANG-STUTTGART’ the road sign read, and Michael Graham obediently urged the BMW into the stream that peeled off the motorway.
When the price was right, Graham was invariably obedient. Van Beck’s price had been not only right, but generous. The unknown client, the German explained, was prepared to pay for excellence. And Mike Graham, van Beck had known, was awesome in his field of weapons and weapon systems. He had received the kind of training that only the US Army could supply, and had used a privileged position to enlarge his knowledge and raise his performance to a peak of unparalleled capability.
Smith had provided the means, through van Beck, to steal the Lap-Lasers, but the plan was Mike Graham’s, and he turned it over in his mind for the thousandth time.
Using a laser-guided, tripod-mounted electronic surveillance device over a range of more than half a mile, Graham had bugged the US Army base guardroom to obtain the weekly series of passwords that would gain him admittance to the off-limits compound at the right time … when the helicopter touched down on its run back from the firing range.
Graham had also sounded out the other parts of the base’s territory which interested him: the officers’ club, and the living quarters for visiting top brass, whose faces would not be known to the guards. He had selected and marked his target officer, and now had a complete set of forged papers in his new identity. He drove carefully along the public road through the base, away from the off-limits section, and pulled into a cul-de-sac not far from the officers’ quarters, located in a mini-apartment block.
Ten minutes later, a figure in the uniform of a General of the United States Army strode the short distance from the living quarters to the officers’ club. He had a bundle under his arm. He checked his wrist-watch, peered up at the sky, and made his way to a jeep parked at the rear of the club.
The guard corporal dropped his girlie magazine and jumped to his feet as the jeep screeched to a halt outside the guardroom. He joined another soldier at the door, and they peered out into the near-darkness. The harsh whirr of the descending helicopter’s engine sounded loudly in their ears.
A man leapt lithely from the jeep, and the guardroom lights winked on his General’s stars. The corporal tightened his grip on his M–1 carbine.