Free Skydancer by Geoffrey Archer Page A

the deadline he had set himself.
    As his uniformed driver sped down the motorway towards Aldermaston, Peter began to consider the enormity of the task ahead. He was certain that the deception plan he had described at the meeting was indeed possible, but exactly how to carry it out was another matter.
    He closed his eyes to concentrate, and his mind’s eye began slowly to focus on a face. The square-jowled features were a composite, belonging to a man whose name he did not know, but a man of whose existence he was certain. He had often focused on this face in the past, whenever he needed some encouragement to overcome seemingly impossible difficulties. He thought of the face simply as ‘the Russian’.
    The primary motivation behind his work at Aldermaston had been to outfox ‘the Russian’. With acombination of information from intelligence sources and guesswork based on an understanding of the way he expected ‘the Russian’ to think, Peter had calculated what Skydancer would need to be able to overcome the new Soviet defences around Moscow. To him it was an exercise in scientific theory rather than a plan for fighting a war; he well understood the disaster that would ensue if the weapons were ever used in anger, and he was convinced ‘the Russian’ did too. He likened his work to a game of chess, calculating how to avoid the traps his opponent had set for him. Now, however, he was facing an additional problem. ‘The Russian’ seemed to be cheating.
    He had met several Russians in the flesh at international conferences on such ‘non-military’ subjects as computer technology. Many of those attending were in fact military scientists looking to learn something from their competitors. Scientists from the West were usually open about the nature of their employment; the Soviets were not, disguising many of their top weapon designers behind academic titles. It gave them a certain advantage.
    Peter felt certain that some Soviet scientist he had already met must be the man behind the new batteries of defences round Moscow; and that the man whose skills he believed he had beaten with Skydancer was now seeking to gain an advantage, to achieve by theft what he could not through his own skill. He did not know the Russian’s identity, of course, but he was determined not to let him win.
    Even though his Ministry was only a few minutes’ walk from Downing Street, Michael Hawke climbed into the back seat of his official Jaguar when he left Number 10,and allowed himself to be driven the short distance back to his office across Whitehall. As a vociferous proponent of Britain’s nuclear might, the Defence Secretary was a potential target for attack from some of the more violent anti-nuclear groups, and the police insisted he should be driven wherever he went.
    Before leaving Downing Street he had secured a quiet word with the Prime Minister, eager to ensure that the blame for failure to inform the PM of this spy scandal the previous day was laid firmly at the feet of his Permanent Undersecretary, Sir Marcus Beckett, and that none of it would stick to him personally. It had been a tricky conversation on two accounts: Beckett was a personal friend of the PM, and he himself was strongly disliked by his chief. It seemed to have gone all right though: he was assured that Sir Marcus had been given a thorough roasting for his misdemeanour.
    Back in his sixth-floor office, he stood for a moment behind the antique mahogany desk at which innumerable defence reviews had been planned. Waiting for his attention was a fat folder labelled ‘Long-term Costings’. The Ministry had a ten-year rolling plan for expenditure, which was constantly updated and adjusted to cope with the delays and cost-overruns which seemed endemic to weapons production. There were key decisions to be taken over which programmes they should axe to keep within budget, and until that morning this task had seemed