«You won't be a captain very long, however. There will be quite a few vacancies at higher levels as soon as we know which of the present Independent people will have to be transferred out of fieldwork. Some of them haven't made the necessary adjustments from peace to war.»

Blade nodded. That was inevitable, in any intelligence network. Even some people who had already been living and working under near wartime conditions couldn't go on when the world marched off to war all around them.

They sipped at their whiskey, and R went on. «As far as our operations in Nordsbergen being penetrated, we've suspected that was the case for several weeks. So we set up a number of diversions at the ends of all the routes we suspected might be compromised. Each of these diversions was also covered by another operation. Meanwhile, we set up a completely new route to extract all the key material and personnel. It worked quite successfully.»

«What about the diversions?»

«We sent in six of our people. You are the only one who's still alive.»

Blade could not come up with a quick or easy answer. R saved him the trouble.

«We also suspected this would happen when we heard that General Golovin was in Nordsbergen.»

The name rang a faint bell in Blade's mind. «Their security chief?»

«Yes. The Chairman of the Counterintelligence Office of the Red Flames' Administration of State Security. He's a professional soldier, but he's made a specialty of intelligence work for thirty years. He personally directed Red Flame operations against Imperial citizens in three of the conquered countries over the last fifteen years.»

«He must have come up fast. Is he that good?»

«He is. He's also a thoroughly unpleasant type, personally. A sadistic streak a mile wide. He also has one other weakness. He's too fond of being as far up front as he can manage when there's a big operation on. Since he's six feet eight, he's rather hard to conceal. So when he's spotted, it's usually a reliable indication that the Red Flames have a high-priority operation underway. We can react accordingly.»

«I see.» R's being able to react on cue had been no help to five of the six agents who'd been part of the reaction. But that was too often the way intelligence operations worked out. Knowing who your enemy was and where he was didn't necessarily mean safety. It could mean that he knew the same things about you.

«Do we have anything on how the Nordsbergen operations were blown?»

«Nothing reliable. We're doing a good deal to remedy that situation, of course, including checking for leaks in our own staff. That will be one of your jobs for about the next six weeks.»

«Sir?»

«You'll have about six weeks of light duty before you start the briefing for another field assignment. During that time you'll be assigned to Division Headquarters. You'll be one of the first new people there since the crisis with the Red Flames developed. That means you've a good chance of being one of the people any Red Flame agent will test out, to see if you can be used. I trust you have no objections to keeping a watchful eye on your colleagues and associates?»

Blade slowly shook his head, and gave the answer he'd worked out for himself over the years. «No, sir, I can't say that I do. In the long run it's self-defense. If they're working for the opposition, they can kill me just as thoroughly as a Russlander with an assault rifle.»

R nodded, smiling, and poured out some more whiskey.

For three days Blade was assigned a private room in one wing of Special Operations headquarters. Except for the view and the different color scheme, the room was identical to the one in which he'd awakened on his first day in the service of the Division. During those three days it was made clear that he not only didn't have to do anything but shouldn't even try.

The medical officer was blunt. «It's a pattern we're trying to break. Tough young man does four field jobs in rapid succession without resting up between them. Thinks he's indestructible. Sneers at doctors' orders to rest. Goes out on fifth mission and stress load catches up with him. End of tough young man.» He glowered at Blade through thick-lensed glasses. «With a war on we can't afford this, even if you think you can.»

So Blade spent three days catching up on lost sleep, missed meals and intelligence reports that had come in while he was out in the field. He didn't mind three days of it, but he was glad it ended before boredom set in.

He spent a number of hours during those three days studying the files on the huge VTOL transport planes. Officially they were Avro Model 167 Assault Transports. Unofficially they were «the Elephants.» Blade's status as an Independent Operations man gave him an acceptable «Need to know» for information about them, and about a good many more of the latest Imperial weapons and devices.

As Blade told the chief clerk, «I may be traveling in one of the Elephants before too long.»

The clerk looked dubious. «Maybe, captain, and maybe not. They're lovely great machines, no doubt of it. But they've got a ways to go before anybody except the test pilots will be riding in them anywhere.» Blade nodded politely, dropped the files into the attache case chained to his wrist, and returned to his room.

The clerk had probably been giving him a cover story. The existence of the transports could not be kept a secret, so somebody must have decided to do the next best thing-give out a story that they were still full of bugs. Blade was quite certain that the assault transports were much closer than that to being ready for combat.

After reading the files, he was even more certain that the Empire had to be saving the Elephants as a nasty surprise for the Red Flames. It certainly would be a nasty surprise when it came. The big planes could carry fifty tons of cargo or two hundred fully equipped soldiers two thousand miles, land vertically, unload, take off vertically, and return to base. They could exceed the speed of sound at low altitude and move even faster higher up. The variable-sweep wing helped give them an incredible combination of speed, range, and maneuverability.

As Blade expected, these qualities required a number of technological breakthroughs. At least three new alloys were involved in the construction of the assault transports, all superior in strength-to-weight ratios and heat resistance to anything else in existence. So was a new chemical fuel, five times as powerful as the best of conventional jet fuels.

There was no hard data in the files on either the alloys or the fuel. Blade didn't expect to find any. The fuel and the alloys were undoubtedly classified several degrees beyond MOST SECRET. It would be a long time before he would be able to prove any «Need to Know» for them.

It took time, though, to build the factories and refineries to produce the new alloys and the new fuel. Until these were ready, the assault transports would have to remain experimental and secret. After that, they could be turned out fifty or a hundred each month, instead of two or three. Then the Empire of Englor would be able to fly whole divisions thousands of miles and land them in the Red Flames' vital areas. Then the Red Flames would have to worry about every square mile of their immense territories. Englor might never land a single soldier inside Russland. But the fear that they might do so could keep hundreds of enemy leaders awake at night and hundreds of thousands of enemy soldiers tied up on local-defense duties. The whole balance of the war might shift in Englor's favor.

After the three days of rest and reading, Blade was assigned to his light duty. This meant more reading of more files, four to six hours a day. It also meant occasional administrative decisions. Some were routine, some not. There was one occasion when he was asked for a decision on whether a certain pro-independence politician in one of Englor's African colonies should be assassinated. Blade advised against it.