"James P. Hogan - Endgame Enigma" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

the Earth's surface with respect to an electronic navigation grid laid down by
Soviet satellites. What Pilot Officer Abel Mungabo didn't know when he took
off on a training flight from Ziganda, one of the two Madagascar states into
which the former Malagasy Republic had fragmented, was that aboard the
Australian destroyer cruising fifty miles offshore was a group of professional
mischiefmakers with some highly classified equipment, which in conjunction
with transmissions from the USAF high-altitude bomber that just happened to be
passing over at the time, was causing Mungabo's black box to come up with
wrong numbers. He turned back after becoming hopelessly lost over the ocean,
but missed the tip of Madagascar completely and ended up off the coast of the
South African mainland. There he ran out of fuel and bailed out.
What happened after that was never cleared up officially. Mungabo swore
upon his return that he saw the plane go down in the sea. The South Africans
said he must have been mistaken: the plane crashed on the shore and exploded.
They even produced pieces of twisted wreckage to prove it. But the Soviet
engineers who arrived in Ziganda to examine the remains were suspicious. The
damage, they said, was more consistent with demolition by explosives than with
a crash. And it seemed strange that not one piece of the more sensitive
electronics devices aboard the aircraft had been recovered. The South Africans
shrugged and said that was the way it was, and the ensuing diplomatic
accusations and denials continued for a while longer.
But by that time, specialists in several Western military laboratories
were already acquiring some interesting new toys to occupy them. The OC-27/K
target-designating and -tracking computer found its way to the US Air Force
Systems Command's Cambridge Research Labs at Hanscom Field, near Bedford,
Massachusetts.


CHAPTER ONE

Dr. Paula Bryce brushed a curl of blond hair from her forehead and
studied the waveforms on one of the display screens surrounding her desk. She
tapped a code into a touchpad, noted the changes in one of the pulse patterns
and the numbers that appeared alongside it, and commanded a reconfiguration of
the circuit diagram showing on another screen. "That's better," she said.
"D-three has to be the synch. E-six is coupled capacitively to the
second-stage gate."
On a bench a few feet away, the Russian computer had been stripped down
into an assortment of frames and subassemblies that were now lying spread out
amid tangles of interconnecting wires and test leads. Ed Sutton, another Air
Force communications scientist, peered through a microscope at a detail of one
of the boards and repositioned a miniature probe clipped to it, "That's it
again with the input on both," he said. "Anything now?"
Paula looked at the waveforms again. "Aha!"
"Bingo?"
"It's triggering.... Threshold's about point two of a volt."
"So it is differential?"
"Come and look."
"But not for noise rejection?"
"Uh-uh. That wouldn't figure."