With the Donovan problem removed, the focus of Ezra once more turned outward to the wider world stage with renewed, practically savage enthusiasm. The specter within his own device had been banished by the Baron's dark sorcery, and he could now concentrate on the much larger device he was building: the American war effort in Korea.
He had established an unofficial "war room" within a secure, below-ground area of the Prentice Applied Science building in New Jersey. It was a room that did not appear on any chart of organization, a command bunker that would have envied the Pentagon. A complete wall was dominated by an enormous, lighted-map of the Korean peninsula on which an army of analysts continuously updated troop movements and supply lines. The room hummed with the clacking of teletype machines and quiet, intense work of men playing for the ultimate stakes.
It was here that he now daily crossed paths with Baron von Hauser. The rapport had evolved. The Baron was more than a consultant now; he was a chief of staff in effect, a strategist whose brief now encompassed far more than intel. He gazed at the Korean map, not as a nationalist, but with the cold-eyed examination of a master craftsman looking at faulty gear.
"Your army is using brutes," the Baron said one afternoon, tracing a finger down the hardened front lines that stretched through the peninsula. "It is a grand sledgehammer. But it is an unsuitable weapon for a war like yours. You have air superiority, naval superiority, and you have an immense industrial base. But you're bogged down in some bloody stalemate with an army of peasantry and some 'volunteer' Chinese divisions. Why?"
He provided the response himself. "Because it is not a war of force. It is information and precision. Your generals never broke away from the thinking of World War Two. They have fought an attrition war. The next war would be won by the army that would have the best view of the battlefield and strike with maximum precision."
Ezra listened, recognizing the logic of the Baron's assessment. He had already applied the principle with his A-1 Guardian tank-busters, but it was only a single, strategic innovation. It was time to revolutionize the very business of war. It would be accomplished with the Korean War as an in-the-field laboratory, a crucible within which the technologies of the age-to-be would be hammered out and refined, all on capital provided by the wild-eyed, blank-check panic of a waging nation.
His first instruction was to his supercomputer project. The massive, vacuum-tube-driven monster, affectionately dubbed by the engineers as "Typhon," was still a finicky beast, but it was now operating. Ezra had them shift gears from theoretical math problems to real-world practical problems. He flew in some of the Army's brightest logistics officers and paired them off with his star math kids. Their task: developing the world's first computerized logistics solutions. They fed the beast with all sorts of data imaginable—shipping tables, railroad capacity, fuel consumption rates, ammunition cost, even fickle weather forecasts. Typhon began churning out optimized supply lines, estimating enemy movement based on their logistics constraints and identifying critical choke points within their supply chains. It was the birth of contemporary military operations research, science that could win battles hundreds of miles removed from the battlefield by starving an enemy division of food or fuel.
His second order went to his rocketry project. David Sterling and Werner Heisenberg were going great on the Neptune vehicle, but it was a long-range undertaking. A short-range vehicle was what he wanted for Korea.
"We need an eye in the sky," he explained. "Something that can give commanders a view of the battlefield that the enemy cannot deny us."
He had them build a high-altitude "sounding rocket," a smaller, more maneuverable version of their larger craft, to be launched off Navy ships at anchor in the Sea of Japan. Each of the rockets would be equipped with the newest high-definition automated camera. The rockets would soar all the way to the upper rim of the atmosphere, long past any anti-aircraft defense, and would take a series of high-definition photographs of enemy installations deep behind the lines before parachuting their prized cargo safely down to the sea for recovery. It provided previously unthinkable, near-real-time intel, revealing troop concentrations, stores of supply, and future offensives.
His third and most revolutionary order went to his brand-new solid-state division. The transistor was still a frail, hand-crafted laboratory curiosity, yet it did function. Ezra ordered his engineers to use these new, minuscule wonder things to build the first in the world of guided munitions. The ideal was crude but functional. A typical 500-pound bomb was fitted with minuscule, variable fins and a simple radio receiver. An A-1 Guardian would, at safe height, routinely release the bomb, while a secondary crewman, using joystick and radio transmitter, would "fly" the bomb at its desired target.
The first battlefield trials were brilliant. One radio-guided bomb, released at ten thousand feet, was pushed vertically into the mouth of a vitally important railway tunnel, jamming it and cutting off a main enemy supply line for many weeks. Another was dropped straight at the command bunker of a Korean general. They were the first "smart bombs," a step forward in military science.
This brand-new technology was not only wildly successful; it was wildly profitable. The Pentagon, clutching at any shred of advantage in the bloody, grinding stalemate in Korea, was now entirely dependent on Ezra's private arsenal. The generals once dubious of his warnings now fawned on him with servile requests instead of demands. No-bid, cost-plus contracts of magnitude that dwarfed his earlier ventures by multiples were granted on his businesses. His company, once bleeding money on the high-cost research and development, was now ballooned with an infusion of government capital. He had perfected von Hauser's formula: leveraging on national emergency as the way of subsidising private inventiveness with government monies, yielding an ideal, self-sustaining mechanism of power and wealth.
In his war room, Baron von Hauser and Ezra stood before the brilliant map, now marked with flags indicating successful deployments of their new technologies. The red lines of the enemy front were already beginning to curve, fracture, under the pressure of this smart new way of war.
"We've created the perfect synergy," proclaimed Ezra, with immense gratification in his voice. "A self-funding engine of national security and research. The profits of war pay for the research, and the research provides the instruments that win the war."
The Baron looked at him, face blank, but eyes with a newfound, larger, and more intimidating want. "We have constructed an engine, yes," he said, voice a soft murmur. "But an engine is but a tool. An engine requires a driver. A driver requires a chart, an end."
He indicated the map of Korea. "A secondary matter. A home war. A laboratory. The end game is the world board. With this technology we have created, with our unparalleled information network... we need not only react to world developments, Mr. Prentice."
He stood and faced Ezra, whose eyes were glittering with the vast, unprincipled stare of someone once in charge of planning the conquest of a continent. "We can begin building them."
The Baron was no longer content being Ezra's problem-solver, his caged consultant. Now he was pushing him, urging him on to a more active, more god-like life on the world stage. He did not see Ezra's magnificent new war engine as an American device, but as the perfect platform for his own frustrated, world-going ambitions.