Cradle (4 page)

‘All right, all right,’ Winters said, first looking around the room and then at the
digital time printout in the upper left corner of the front wall. ‘Let’s get started.
Are you ready, Lieutenant Todd?’ The other officers sat down at the table. At the
last minute another senior staff officer entered the room and took a seat in one of
the chairs at the back.

Todd walked around the table to the front of the room, to a podium with a built-in
keyboard underneath a small monitor, and eyed Commander Winters. ‘Yes, sir,’ he answered.
He activated the computer system in the podium. Todd indicated that he wanted access
to the Top Secret Data Base. He then entered a complicated keyed input that was the
first part of a password system. The interactive monitor in the podium next requested
the password of the day. Todd’s first attempt was unsuccessful, for he hadn’t remembered
the correct spelling. He began to search his pockets for the piece of scrap paper.

The only other keyboard in the room was in the centre of the long table where Winters
was sitting. While Lieutenant Todd fumbled around at the podium, the commander smiled,
entered the password, and then added some code of his own. The centre screen came
alive in vivid colour and showed a stylized woman in a yellow dress, sitting at a
piano, while two young boys played draughts behind her. A sense of red flooded forth
from the picture. It was a reproduction of one of Matisse’s paintings from his late
years in Nice and was magnificently projected at the front of the room. Lieutenant
Todd looked startled. A couple of the senior officers laughed.

Winters smiled engagingly. ‘There are some fairly amazing things that can be done
with the resolution power of a 4K-by-4K image and a nearly infinite data base.’ There
was an awkward silence and then Winters continued. ‘I guess it’s hopeless to keep
trying to expand the education of you young officers on this base. Go on. Continue.
I’ve put you already into the Top Secret Data Base and any new input will override
the picture.’

Todd composed himself.
This man Winters is certainly a queer duck
, he thought. The admiral who was the commanding officer of the Key West base had
assigned the commander last night to lead this important Panther missile investigation.
Winters had an impressive background in missiles and in systems engineering, but whoever
heard of starting such a critical meeting by calling a painting up on the screen?
Todd now entered 17BROKO1 and, after counting the people, the number nine. In a few
seconds a machine in the back corner of the room had copies of the presentation collated
and stapled for the use of the participants. Todd called his first image (entitled
‘Introduction and Background’) to the centre screen with another touch of the keyboard.

‘Yesterday morning,’ he began, ‘a demonstration test for the new Panther missile was
conducted over the North Atlantic. The missile was fired at 0700 from an airplane
at eighty thousand feet off the coast of Labrador. It was aimed at a target near the
Bahamas, one of our old aircraft carriers. After flying a normal ballistic trajectory
into the region where the ship was located, the Panther was supposed to activate its
terminal guidance, which uses the Advanced Pattern Recognition System or APRS. The
missile should then have found the aircraft carrier and, using the reaction control
jets as its primary control authority, made whatever vernier corrections were necessary
to impact the old carrier on the main deck.’

Todd pushed a key on the podium and a line-drawn map of the American east coast, including
the area from Labrador through to Cuba, appeared on the left screen. ‘The missile
was a final test version,’ he continued, ‘in the exact configuration of the production
flight vehicle, except for the command test set and the warhead. This was to be the
longest test flight yet conducted and was designed to demonstrate thoroughly the new
4. 2 version of the software that was recently installed in the APRS. So of course
the missile was not armed.’

The lieutenant picked up a light pen from the podium and drew on the small monitor
in front of him. His markings were immediately translated to the larger screen behind
him so that everyone could easily follow his discussion. ‘On the screen you all can
see the predicted versus actual overflight path of the bird yesterday. Here, roughly
ten miles east of Cape Canaveral on what appeared to be a nominal flight, the sequencer
turned on the cameras. After a couple of hundred calibration images, sort of a self-test
of the APRS, the terminal guidance algorithms were activated as scheduled. As far
as we can tell from the realtime telemetry, nothing strange had occurred until this
time.’

The right screen now showed a detailed map of south Florida and the Keys that included
the target in the Bahamas. The maps on the two flanking screens remained in view during
the rest of his presentation but Lieutenant Todd constantly changed the word charts
in the middle to keep up with the discussion. ‘The
a priori
location of the target, which was where the cameras should first have looked for
the aircraft carrier, was here at Eleuthera, in the Bahamas. The search algorithm
should have fanned out in a circle from there and, if it had operated properly, found
the target in about fifteen seconds. This’ (Todd pointed toward a dotted line on the
more detailed map) ‘
should
have been the impact trajectory.

‘However,’ Todd continued dramatically, ‘based on the telemetry data that we have
analysed to date, it appears that the missile veered sharply westward, toward the
coast of Florida, soon after the terminal guidance system was activated. We have only
been able to reconstruct its path up to this point, where it was about three miles
west of Miami Beach at an altitude of ten thousand feet. After that the telemetry
becomes intermittent and erratic. But we do know that all the terminal guidance engines
were on at the time we lost complete data. Projecting the total control authority
for the missile, the area highlighted here, covering the Everglades, the Keys, and
even as far south as Cuba, represents where the bird might have landed.’

Lieutenant Todd paused for a second and Commander Winters, who had been writing down
major points in a small notebook during the presentation, immediately jumped in and
started taking charge of the meeting. ‘A couple of questions, Lieutenant, before we
proceed,’ Winters began in a businesslike manner with an obvious overtone of authority.
‘First, why was the missile not destroyed soon after it veered off course?’

‘We’re not exactly certain, Commander. The command test set and the small ordnance
had been installed, of course, specifically for that purpose. The change in the motion
of the vehicle was so sudden and so unexpected that we reacted a little slowly at
the beginning. By the time we sent the command, it’s possible that we were out of
range. All we know is that we never saw an explosion of any kind. We can only assume—’

‘We’ll come back to this operational error later,’ Winters interrupted him again.
Todd blanched at the word ‘error’ and fidgeted behind the podium. ‘Where would the
impact point have been according to the guidance constants active at the time of the
last complete telemetry packet? And how long is it going to take us to extract additional
information from the intermittent data?’

Lieutenant Todd noted to himself that the commander was sharp. Winters had obviously
been associated with anomaly investigations before. Todd then explained that
if
the active guidance constants had not changed again, the continued firing of the
terminal engines would have brought the missile to an impact point about twenty miles
south of Key West. ‘However,’ Todd added, ‘the constants were allowed, by the software,
to change every five seconds. And they had changed in two of the last five internal
data updates. So it’s unlikely they stayed the same as they were when our complete
telemetry terminated. Unfortunately, although all the constants—even the future predicted
ones that are being calculated by the APRS—are stored in the onboard computer, because
of bandwidth limitations we only transmit the active constants with the realtime telemetry.
We are now going through the dropout data manually to see if we can find out anything
more about the constants.’

One of the other staff officers asked a question about the probability of the missile
actually having reached Cuba. Lieutenant Todd answered ‘very low’ and then activated
an electronic overlay that placed a dotted and blinking trajectory on the right screen
inset map. The blinking dots followed a path that started just off Coral Gables, south
of the city of Miami, and then continued across a portion of south Florida, into the
Gulf of Mexico, across the Keys, and finally into the ocean again. ‘It is along this
line that we intend to concentrate our search. Unless the bird suddenly changed its
mind, its general heading would have been consistent with a perceived target located
anywhere along this path. And since we have no reports of any land impact near a populated
area, we assume that the missile landed in the Everglades or the ocean.’

Lieutenant Todd had consulted briefly with Winters the previous evening on the agenda
for the meeting. It had been scheduled to last only an hour, but the number of questions
caused it to stretch to an hour and a half. Todd was thorough and precise in his presentation
but was obviously dismayed by Winters’s continued probing into the possibility of
human error. The lieutenant freely admitted that they had blown the procedure to destroy
the missile when it went awry, but defended his men by citing the unusual circumstances
and the nearly perfect previous record enjoyed by the Panther missile. He also explained
that they were going to equip their search vessels with the best possible instrumentation
(‘including the new ocean telescope developed by the Miami Oceanographic Institute’)
and begin searching the outlined areas in earnest the next day.

Winters asked many questions about the possible cause of the missile’s strange behaviour.
Todd told him that he and his staff were convinced that it was a software problem,
that some new or updated algorithm in the 4.2 version of the software had somehow
scrambled both the initialization sequence and the optically stored target parameters.
Winters accepted their opinion eventually, but not until he had ordered them to prepare
a ‘top down’ failure modes analysis that would list every possible hardware, software,
or operational error (Todd winced when Winters mentioned operations again) that could
lead to the kind of problem observed.

Toward the end of the meeting Winters reiterated the secrecy of the activity and pointed
out that the Broken Arrow project was to remain completely unknown to the press. ‘Commander,’
Todd broke in while Winters was explaining the press policy. The lieutenant had begun
the meeting with confidence but was feeling increasingly unsettled. ‘Sir, I had a
call late yesterday afternoon from a reporter, a Carolyn or Kathy Dawson I think,
from the
Miami Herald
. She told me that she had heard of some special activity down here and that I was
supposedly connected with it. She claimed her source was someone in the Pentagon.’

Winters shook his head. ‘Shit, Lieutenant, why didn’t you say something before this?
Can’t you imagine what will happen if the word gets out that one of our missiles wandered
over Miami?’ He paused. ‘What did you tell her?’

‘I didn’t tell her anything. But I think she’s still suspicious. She called the public
affairs office after she talked to me.’

Winters gave an order that the existence of the Broken Arrow investigation was to
be kept classified and that any and all inquiries about it were to be referred to
him. He then called for the next status meeting at 1500 on the following day, Friday,
by which time (he told Lieutenant Todd) the commander expected to see the results
of the analysis of the intermittent telemetry, a more complete logic breakdown of
the failure modes, and a list of recent open items with the 4.2 software.

Lieutenant Richard Todd left the meeting aware that this assignment was going to have
a significant impact on his career. It was clear to the lieutenant that his personal
competence was already being questioned by this Commander Winters. Todd intended to
respond to the challenge in a positive way. First he called a small postmortem meeting
of the junior officers in his group. He told them (they were all young ensigns, just
out of the university after completing a Navy ROTC program) that their collective
ass was on the line. Then he defined a series of action items that would keep all
of them up working for most of the night. It was imperative to Todd that he be properly
prepared for the next meeting.

Key West was proud of its new marina. Completed in 1992 just after the explosion in
cruises had brought an influx of new visitors to the old city, the marina was thoroughly
modern. Scattered around the jetties on high towers were automatic cameras which constantly
surveyed the marina. These cameras and the rest of the electronic surveillance systems
were just one facet of an elaborate security setup which protected the slips when
the boat owners were absent. Another of the new features of the Hemingway Marina (it
was naturally named after the most famous resident of Key West) was a centralized
navigation control centre. Here, using a virtually automatic traffic control system,
a single controller was able to pass instructions to all the vessels in the harbour
and provide for efficient handling of the burgeoning water traffic.

The marina was built on Key West Bight, on what had been a decaying part of the waterfront.
It had slips for almost four hundred boats and its completion changed the nature of
the city’s commerce. Young professionals wanting to be near their boats at the marina
quickly purchased and upgraded all the nineteenth-century houses that lined Caroline
and Eaton Streets on what was known as the Pelican Path. Smart shops, restaurants,
even little theatres crowded into the area around the marina to create an atmosphere
of bustle and excitement. There was even a new Japanese hotel, the Miyako Gardens,
which was famous for its magnificent collection of tropical birds that played in the
waterfalls and ferns of its atrium.