But the weakness of all spear technique was what happened when you got close—too close for the spear’s head to be of any use. Laks remembered Sam’s first fight against the Bonking Head at Pangong Tso when he had just barreled in, absorbing damage until he was inside the other guy’s preferred range. Laks finally managed to do that. He even put his big steel kara to use blocking, then deflecting a strike. Which brought him in range of the feared nerve center strikes of Lan Lu’s kung fu; but unbeknownst to Lan
Lu it brought Lan Lu in range of the short powerful strikes that Laks had grafted on to traditional gatka. Lan Lu got in one terrific shot behind the angle of Laks’s jaw that nearly felled him and left the whole side of his face numb. But Laks fell toward Lan Lu, rather than away from him, which probably saved the day. For out of that collision Laks was able to emerge with a series of punches, using the last six inches of his stick as a force multiplier, that drove Lan Lu back shouting with pain and surprise and toppled him into the snow. He held up a hand. The fight was over. Big Fish had won. Money was changing hands in Vegas. Territory was about to change hands up here.
EINDHOVEN
It had been a long time since Willem had read an official document produced on a typewriter. This one bore the date August 14, 1962. Its author was Freeman Dyson. Each page was stamped SECRET at top and bottom, but someone had gone through with a Sharpie and drawn a slash through each repetition of that word; apparently it had been declassified at some point in the last half century.
Not that it mattered in his case; he, and everyone else in this shipping container, had the clearances needed to read this document whether it was classified or not.
PROGRAM FOR A STUDY
Implications of New Weapons Systems for Strategic Policy and Disarmament
. . . followed by a quotation from William Wordsworth’s Sonnet on Mutability, which was apparently the sort of literary touch you could get away with when you were Freeman Dyson and it was 1962. At a glance—which was all Willem had time for, as the presentation was getting underway—this was a survey of eight hypothetical new weapons systems that military planners in the United States had been worried about during the Kennedy administration. Some of them （supersonic low-altitude missiles, small portable ballistic missiles） still looked quite relevant. Which presumably explained why this chap from MI6 had gone to the trouble of reproducing the document and handing out copies. He’d flown over from London this morning and would fly back in a few hours. He was addressing a group of half a dozen Dutch colleagues in a SCIF—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility—near Eindhoven Airport. Inevitably, this particular SCIF was a portable unit built into a shipping container. This meant it was only eight feet wide, which made it a cramped environment
for the invited guests. Most of them were military or intelligence. Willem wasn’t, but he’d been invited anyway, for reasons that had not yet been made evident to him.
“You’ve probably heard of the Tsar Bomba,” said the Brit, who was going by Simon.
“The biggest H-bomb ever detonated,” said the minister of defense.
Simon nodded. “The Russians set it off about ten months before Mr. Dyson wrote this.” He put his hand on the document. “The interesting takeaway was that despite its fifty-megaton yield, it didn’t do as much damage as expected. Why? Because the earth is hard and the atmosphere is quite yielding—and only gets more so the higher up you go. So the explosion sort of ricocheted off the ground and went the only way it could go and basically punched a hole through the atmosphere and dissipated its power into the void. For those in the know, the lesson learned was that making bigger bombs was a waste of resources. But Freeman Dyson understood that large bombs could still have military effect provided you worked out a way to detonate them in a medium that would contain the blast and absorb its energy, rather than just venting it into outer space. Such a medium is water. The scenario he describes here, starting on about page 6, is that a very large hydrogen bomb—much bigger than the Tsar Bomba, even—is deposited on the floor of the ocean offshore from the coastal region to be attacked. This is easy to do covertly using a submarine or just kicking it off a ship. When the bomb is later detonated, all its energy is deposited into the surrounding water, creating an artificial tsunami that crests over the nearby coastline and, to borrow a homely phrase from the Yanks, breaks a lot of things and hurts a lot of people. And I do mean a lot, in Dyson’s scenario. No one ever accused that man of not thinking big.”