One writer - One riot
Proceed with caution
One writer - One riot
Excerpt from Pink MIST
Dear Reader,
Set-Up: Our main character is asleep in his rack on the USS Eisenhower, cruising the Med in the days before Desert Storm. In a ready room, a group of Naval Intelligence Officers, a Wing Commander, and a mysterious civilian consultant meet to discuss a secret mission to eliminate a cutting-edge anti-aircraft system that somehow found its way into the grateful hands of Saddam Hussein.
When I sold everything and moved to Prague in the winter of 2002, I did not aim to write something that would be more prescient and relevant in 2025 than when the ideas first struck the page in 2010.
Enjoy,
JK Cleary
Beijing, March – 2025
******************* Chapter 5 "Eyes on Eisenhower from Book 1: Pink Mist ***********************
“There is only so much I can do, sir,” Stern continued, “I’ve gamed it to death, every possible profile. This is as close to a suicide mission as I’ve ever seen. Tell me there’s another way. Tell me we can send in one of the Seal teams.”
“And risk the capture and torture of a half-dozen men, all of whom will have a basic idea of the mission profile. An overland ingress would take two days. Extraction would be problematic. If we fly them in and drop them, then we’re sending an aircraft into Iraqi airspace to drop seals, so that we can avoid sending an aircraft into Iraq airspace? That makes no sense. And oh boy, if one of the Seals gets injured, you will be unable to refuse a request for a rescue team. Try telling a Seal that he has to sacrifice a fellow Seal and leave a body in the field; not going to happen. Besides, an entire Seal team would know about a black op. We’re talking: supply officers, admin, medics, at least forty or fifty people. All of whom will know that an American weapons manu…excuse me, a defense contractor sold the most sophisticated anti-aircraft system in the world to a fascist pig of a tyrant!” said Mike.
“That’s not what it is, though, is it?” Friedman weighed in. “And don’t play with words, Smith. Calling this an ‘anti-aircraft missile’ is a ruse. This is next generation ballistic missile defense technology. I respect the difficulty you may have with your choice of adjectives when you’re drumming up funding on Capitol Hill, but let’s not mislead each other. Not here! Obviously, it has the capacity to knock down planes. And I already found your subroutines. You can rest assured you and I were going to have a little chat about the extra terabyte of encrypted data you have sitting on the system. And what about the mysterious redundant processors?”
“Did you get in?” Mike asked, urgently.
“Damn! That’s a problem. If those subroutines are cracked, then we are talking about an unacceptable shift in the paradigm.”
“Unacceptable? No kidding!” Stern yelling, seething, and Alex knew she was completely out of her league, so she stared down and tried to avoid any attention as she followed the discourse.
“Wait a second,” Mike said. “Let’s calm down. I know you guys don’t want to hear this,” he said “and I know this sounds cynical and twisted, but some leaks, and some espionage is part of the paradigm.”
“Paradigm? What the hell is this guy talking about? What’s going on here?” Stern raised his hands and beseeched his fellow officers for some consensus.
“Look, listen to me,” Smith continued. “I’m trying to explain something to you here; for years, ever since the end of the World War Two, the people who really run the country have employed a strategy which, simply stated, requires the United States to remain at least two generations of technology ahead of any potential adversary: two generations of technology. It’s a simple premise, really. If any potential adversary makes an advancement, and takes a step, then we will have a small buffer. They are still one step behind us, and we have time to adapt and move ahead again, and reclaim the two step lead.”
Everyone looked at Mike scornfully. “Look,” he continued, “Don’t shoot the messenger, eh? I didn’t come up with this, so we can just drop the hostility here. I’m on your side, and I’m telling you that this paradigm is widely supported. The new Russians? They get it. They have no interest in using the limited resources of their failing economy to actually get ahead of us technically. The Chinese? They’re on board, too. The paradigm works! We pull them; they push us. The flow is optimized. They know it. You said you gamed the attack on the missile, Commander Stern? Well, other people do game theory on a bigger scale, thinking about decades and even centuries of political evolution, and the Russians, the Chinese, the Europeans, all agree that the most stable paradigm requires the United States to remain one step ahead of everyone else, and why!” He blurted. “Because we learned one clear lesson from the Third Reich, when a country barely the size of Texas nearly took over, and militarily defeated every government in what we now call western civilization. One little country! They used nothing more than political deception, the element of surprise, some superior technology, and they nearly pulled it off!”
“Hey!” said Stern. “Nice lecture, really, but how the hell is this related to defense contractors who leak our most dangerous technology to petty thug dictators? And why the hell would anyone do it on purpose? And what kind of scumbag would sell an advanced system to the Iraqis?”
Mike shook his head and bit his lip, sat up in his chair and huffed once toward Stern. “Me! That’s who! I sold it! I was the point man on the sale of this system! Nobody regrets it more than me. I was following orders! I was twisted into it! I’m trying to tell you, you simpleton, that there are forces at work here that are beyond your comprehension! In order to maintain the defense industry, we have to give them work. You have to recruit and train the right kind of engineers from the right kinds of schools. You can’t fill the labs at Lawrence Livermore with hungry young Chinese foreign nationals who used PhD’s in physics to beg their way into a green card twenty years ago. And you have to keep aircraft factories and research facilities full of people who are ready to do the job. You can’t just create this over night. It takes years, man! There’s an optimal flow or resources, human and financial. There’s also something called critical flow, a velocity, if you will, below which, key elements breakdown, and there’s no capacity to respond quickly to any sort of sucker attack. In other words, if the flow goes sub-critical, then a country the size of Poland could kick our ass. Full stop. This was the lesson from World War Two. At the same time, if the American people knew that we were three or four steps ahead of anybody who could threaten us, they would become vulnerable, they would...
“Vulnerable to what? Common sense?” Stern yelled.
“No! To political extremism, to the first handsome politician who said that we should just eliminate a major portion of the defense industry as a way to pay for welfare benefits for illegal aliens, or gay sensitivity training for five million soldiers, or some stupid shit like that.”
“Oh bullshit!” Stern retorted and tossed his pen down on top of his notepad.
“Oh really! You have to read between the lines, Commander Stern! Here we are: two centuries after the founding of our nation, two millennia after Socrates specifically warned us of the pitfalls of any democracy, and our previous head of state was virtually a puppet. Yes, a puppet! You do the research, Commander. Please don’t waste my time. Do your homework. Two thousand years after a clear warning, and two centuries after our founding, the United States, the Nation that now carries the burden of staving off the massive wars that have infected Western civilization for a thousand years, had a president who won the election due specifically and almost entirely to the support of an evangelical religious organization. That’s right! We mock third-world dictators in Arab countries for their political crudeness, using their mosques to put their own sons and grandsons in power, while our president wins the elections based on the support of politically simplistic, evangelical, single-issue voters from the Christian Coalition. And we have a wonderful silent majority, full of moderate people who would do a lot of good if they would get off their ungrateful asses and study a few issues and then vote, but they don’t! You may not agree, Mr. Stern, but this is the paradigm, and like it or not, this is the theme, the premise, the driving force, that governs the world. The United States is still vulnerable to an irresponsible electorate. Our national constituency has a questionable and potentially dangerous level of political immaturity, and the people who manage these issues must never allow a course of events to unfold that precipitates the deconstruction of our military industry and our technical superiority. And this means that our so-called enemies must, from time to time, make some technical progress, so that we, in turn, have a reason to subsidize our defense industry. We must keep them large enough and competent enough to be ready for surprises, like the God damn Third Reich. Are you catching this, Stern? So, yeah! I admit it! I sold the Iraq’s the God damned missile battery, but we never expected them to actually bring those God damn subroutines on line and use it against us.”
“What?” Kelly was shocked.
“That’s right. We only wanted to test the basic performance of the propulsion and tracking system against the Soviet made Scud missiles, and especially some early generation Silkworm missiles that the Iranians purchased from the Chinese a few years ago, and that little fact didn’t come from me, so you better keep your mouths shut!”
“So… you thought your battery would get a shot at tracking Silkworms, so you sell it to Iraq?”
“Bingo, Einstein” Mike said to Stern.
“Hey, fuck you!” Stern retorted.
“Yeah, well, nobody ever expected Saddam to kick the Americans out of the country and start gassing his own people, then take a prolonged whack at the little messiahs in Iran, and nobody knew the guy would just invade Kuwait. Jesus! Saddam Hussein was an asset for decades, the lone voice of reason in a pack of fanatics, one of the only secular governments in the Arab coalition. Nobody expected the guy to set a fucking land-speed record for running off the reservation! Nobody expected them to bring the battery on line, and if they find those subroutines and activate the AI features, then they will have essentially jumped over two generations of technology, and negated the value of hundreds,” he calmed himself and spoke slowly, “and hundreds, of billions of dollars of technology. A leap in technology of this magnitude is not in the paradigm. This is not like leaking a second generation stinger that we were using ten years ago, and convincing the bad guys that this is current stuff. This is a real jump, a bad jump.”