October's Ghost (35 page)

Hill kept his attention focused on the hangar where the—what was the damned military designation? E-4B. That was it. He scanned the area around the E-4B. There was nothing else untoward, just a few guards. That was to be expected, he figured. But something still was stuck in his nosy craw.
Granger running?
It wasn’t a story; it wasn’t even a lead. Yet.

The Gulfstream came to a stop five minutes later, more than two miles away from the aircraft that had sparked Chick Hill’s curiosity. The congressman politely accompanied him to the terminal, benignly thanking him for the company and bidding him an appropriately smiling farewell.

“Thanks for nothing, Dick,” Hill said after the congressman had gotten into the car waiting for him.
I wonder why that perk hasn’t been cut.
The
Post
reporter saw his perk waiting farther away.

“Welcome back,” the Jeep’s driver said when Hill climbed in, tossing his two-suiter in the back. The kid was low on the totem pole at the paper, hardly more than an intern, actually, and drew the gofer duties often. “Back to the grindstone.”

“No. Not just yet.” Hill took his cell out, an idea rising. “I’ve gotta check something out. You just drive.”

“Drive where?”

Hill told him as he plotted out what he’d have to do to get a story out of this, even if there wasn’t one. He almost laughed at that doubt.
Anything
could be made into a story.

*  *  *

Jenny MacNamara stared at the thirty-inch display like a child in awe of a new release from Nintendo. But this was no game.

“Where do we start?” Harry Fastwater asked.

“Your ancestral abilities would be much appreciated now,” she said, trying to inject some humor into the very serious atmosphere. SCI didn’t mean that those restricted by its conditions were without imagination. When one was told to look for an SS-4 missile, especially if that person or persons were blessed with half a brain and a rudimentary schooling in Cold War history, then forming a supposition of what might be unfolding did not enter the category of a difficult undertaking. “Barring that...”

Before them was a computer-generated ten-thousand-acre haystack. Somewhere in it was a needle that had the sting of a lance.

“We have to look for the proper access to all those buildings,” Jenny said. “Doors big enough to move the thing in and out.” She brought the magnification up until the boundaries of the Juragua Nuclear Generating Plant, a complex roughly the shape of a fat inverted
T
, filled the screen. The top of the
T
, at the screen’s bottom, almost touched the rough beaches west of the inlet to the Bay of Cienfuegos.

“What about the north and south sides of those buildings?” Harry inquired. As the platform passed over the target from west to east, it achieved excellent three-dimensional coverage, with extremely high detail of the structured surfaces in line with the axis of the pass—the east and west walls, or those obliquely aligned with that direction of travel. Those surfaces on the north and south of the buildings received less detail coverage because there hadn’t been time to make a corresponding pass on a north-south axis.

“We have some old stills we can use if we don’t find anything here.” The senior technician entered a command that rotated the view to one that approximated the path of the sensor as it approached the plant, though from a much closer vantage. “Okay, we’re going to follow the pass over at ten percent speed. You mark all the access openings that fit the bill from the centerline north, and I’ll take the south.”

Twenty minutes later the pair had eighty-six “possibles” marked on the working video of the pass.

“Now we do some geometry.”

“How so?” Fastwater asked. His real question was a dumbfounded
huh?

“Well, even with eighty-plus ten-foot access doors scattered all over, it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good to put the thing in there if the structure doesn’t have sufficient interior space to hold it.”

“Yeah, I get that. We make sure there’s more than seventy-eight feet possible clearance beyond the door. But where does geometry come in?”

I should have been a teacher, MacNamara thought, not really minding. “You ever back a car around a corner?”

“Sure.”

“Then there’s no reason they couldn’t have maneuvered the thing in at an angle, kinda like doing a fifty-point turn, or whatever it would take.”

The recognition flashed from the junior technician’s eyes. “I see. Yeah. So we don’t necessarily need a straight shot back from the door.”

Jenny nodded. Her junior was a fast learner. “Could be a right angle. Plus, we’ve got to make sure there’s enough room on the outside of the building to get the missile and TEL out. Some of those are pretty closely spaced.” She ran a quick computer simulation to come up with the requisite dimensions. “Let’s check them.”

This process took half as much time as finding the doors.

“Thirty-nine possibles left.” Jenny frowned at the display. “Widely scattered, too.”

Fastwater noted that a full third of the doors left in their search were in and around a gathering of eight large structures at the southern fringes of the facility, a quarter-mile from the beach. “What are those?”

“Reactor buildings and cooling towers,” Jenny answered after a quick check of the database. “Damn!”

“What?”

“There’s too many, Harry! We can’t send this up saying ‘We’ve got almost forty possible locations. Happy hunting.’ There has to be a better way.” She took the magnification down in each of the sixteen-square-mile quadrants that she had divided the complex into. A few minutes later the computer spit out a reading of objects that it considered to be nonstructural.

“Big concentration of trucks by the number-four reactor building,” Harry pointed out. He scanned some of the visible light images of the same quadrant, but the shadow cast by the tall cooling tower blotted out much of the possible detail. “What kind?”

These readings from the SAR data allowed the computer to guess at the type. “GAZ tankers. Five-thousand-liter jobs.” Jenny counted them, and the other vehicles. “Oops, that’s one mistake.” She zoomed in on a fifty-by-fifty object, a hundred yards from the trucks, that the computer said was a nonstructural—in essence, a vehicle. “That’s a prefab building of some kind. A couple vehicles around it. Any heat sources?”

Harry ran through the IR images. The pass had taken place in the early morning, before the heat of the day could fully rob objects of their infrared images. “Nothing special, but there is some.”

Hmm
. “Okay, mark that for reference.” She zoomed back in on the tankers. “Any people on the vis?”

The junior technician juggled back to the digitized photos, taking the contrast up to compensate for the shaded area. “Yeah, there’s some folks down there. Seem to be pretty busy, all hanging out around that—what is that? A pipe?”

“Pipes,” Jenny corrected. “Hmm. Tank trucks. Pipes. Looks like hoses on the ground.” She looked to her partner. “You thinking what I am?”

“Fueling.” Harry got a sullen nod in response. They weren’t stupid enough to overlook what might be going on. “Jesus.”

“I think we may be looking in the right area. But where specifically?” Jenny locked her display in on the area surrounding the four big reactor buildings. The missile itself was big, but it was lost somewhere in there.
Hey. Yeah!
“That’s a heavy thing we’re looking for, right?”

“We aren’t following tracks in the mud, Jen.”

“No, but a beaten path still shows wear.” She took the pass back to a point just before it traveled directly over the plant. “It’s slim, I admit, but it’s possible.”

Harry wasn’t hopeful. He watched as she entered a command into the computer, telling the signal-processing subprogram to run the data back in raw numbers directly as received, but adding the proper algorithmic processing loop that would distinguish fine surface detail. The result was a simple forced-choice order for the program, which took the tangible data and processed it through a finite series of “fuzzy-logic” filters to come up with micro-processor-generated guesses. Those suppositions were then compared with their like, and if a pattern could be established, the computer would decide that something was there.

That “something” in this case would be a shallow channel of wear on the concrete surface of the facility where the tires of heavy vehicles might have worn the pavement away, possibly in removing and returning the missile to its hiding place. If a parallel set of grooves running into one of the access doors could be found, then an educated finger could be pointed, allowing for greater scrutiny.

“Flyby time,” Jenny said, taking the pass over the plant another time. This one was slower, as the raw-data package was being assembled as the imaginary sensor platform flew over the area. Concentrating on just the small sector encompassing the reactor buildings and their associated structures kept the duration manageable. This was a time-critical task. “Nothing. Huh, that looks like something from that prefab building.” A discernible channel ran from the square structure to one of the cooling towers. “Must have been a trench they covered up. Forward.” Her eyes bore into the display. “Nothing. Noth— Stop.” Her eyes fixed on an anomaly in the signal return, though not from where she had expected. “That’s gotta be a data flutter.” The bits of digital imagery were sometimes prone to electronic bugs, just as a visible-light image could be affected by a smudge on the camera lens. “No, that’s too uniform.” The light went off instantly. “Shut the process down and zoom in on this, Harry.”

Fastwater ordered the signal processor to disengage from the data package and focused in on the desired area. “Fill the screen?”

“All of it.” Jenny watched as the circular structure came up toward her. It was like the other three cooling towers for the reactors. In its intended use the nonradioactive water used to draw thermal energy away from the heat exchangers carrying the reactor coolant would be vented through steam pipes into the two-hundred-foot concrete towers, which were roughly the shape of hourglasses with the extreme top and bottoms sheared off (people had become familiar with the shape while watching coverage of the Three Mile Island disaster in the seventies). The majority of the steam would then condense on the walls, falling back into collecting basins in the interior base of the tower for recirculation.

But there was something different about tower number one.

“Signal strength, pure return,” Jenny directed. “Process for strong return and detail.”

Harry ran the corresponding data through a simple program that gave high precedence to strong returns from whatever was in tower number one. This gave it a clear, almost photorealistic representation. “Wow.”

There it was, dead center in the tower that was now serving as a silo. “Those smart bastards. That thing would never have been seen by the cameras down in there. Not enough light. Check the heat signature.”

It took only a minute. “Just ambient.”

Jenny surveyed the structure itself. At the base of the tower were several rectangular voids where the radar return had been judged insufficient to process as strong. “There. Look, those are vents. The other towers don’t have those. No cooling tower should. Cool air is drawn in and goes upward. That keeps the interior temp to just an ambient level.”

“An IR shadow,” Harry observed correctly.

“Brilliant.” Her head shook at the simplistic artistry of it. “And they can also serve as vents for the launch gases.” Jenny slumped back in the chair, looking to the quarry that had just been found. The lance aimed at her country. It was a big sucker. Real big. Her eyes narrowed as she sat forward.
Too big
.

Harry caught her puzzled look. “What is it?”

“What’s the diameter of the top of the tower?”

He clicked the digitizer on the extreme opposite sides of the circular opening. “Thirty-nine-point-six feet.”

“Diameter of the object?”

He wondered why she didn’t call it, “the missile.” “Ten-point-eight feet. What... Wait.” He looked at the specs of what they had been looking for. It wasn’t what they had found. “Jen, the SS-4 has a diameter of five-point-three feet. This thing’s twice that!”

“I know.” She saw that the top of the object had a two-step taper from the sharply pointed nose down to about half the radius, then out further to the full radius. “Take a height measurement.”

The difference between the returns from the interior floor of the tower and from the nose of the object yielded the measurement. “One-hundred-and-eight-point-two feet. Christ, Jen, that’s more than thirty feet longer than the SS-4! What is that thing?”

Jenny did her own measurements on the strangely tapered nose. The top section, an almost perfect cone, was something to be expected. “Thirteen-point-two in length, five-point-three in diameter.” She turned to her partner. “That’s an SS-4 warhead nose cone.”

“And the section below is just a tapered fairing to connect it to the...what?”

“Let’s find out.” Jenny swiveled her chair to the right to face the second of three terminals arrayed around her workspace. “Let’s just call up the missile data here and see what we’re looking at.”

“Comparison search?” Harry asked as he slid closer, looking over his partner’s shoulder.

“Manual, Harry. The discriminator on the database has never been my favorite.” The desired data file, “Missile Dimensional Characteristics,” came up from NPIC’s central computer, which was wholly isolated from phone lines leading to the outside world. No possibility of “unclean” data infiltrating the system existed. “Okay, our guidelines here are twofold: liquid-fueled missiles and the proper dimensions. I’m more concerned with the diameter than the height, though we have to be close there also. But that damn fairing is going to throw off any purely identical comparison.”

“I can’t believe it. They just strapped the warhead to another missile!”

“A bigger one, Harry,” Jenny pointed out. She scrolled through the information on known missile systems produced and fielded in the past forty years by any and all nations. “The size of this scratches a lot of the candidates.