"Cradle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clarke Arthur C., Lee Gentry)

5

WHEN Commander Winters returned to his office after a scheduled meeting with the public relations department, his secretary, Dora, was conspicuously reading the Key West newspaper. “Ahem,” she said, deliberately attracting his attention. “Is the Vernon Winters starring in The Night of the Iguana at the Key West Playhouse tonight anyone I know? Or are there two of them in this town?”

He laughed. He liked Dora. She was almost sixty, black, a grandmother more than a dozen times, and one of the few secretaries on the base who actually had some pride in her work. She treated everybody, including Commander Winters, like one of her children. “So why didn’t you tell me?” she said with feigned outrage. “After all, what if I had missed it altogether? I told you last year to make certain that you always told us when you were performing.”

He took her hand and gave it a little squeeze. “I had intended to tell you, Dora, but somehow it just slipped my mind. And you know that my thespian activities are not exactly embraced by the Navy, so I don’t ballyhoo them about so much. But I’ll have some tickets for you and your husband in a couple of weeks.” He looked at the stack of message notes on her desk. “That many, huh? And I was only gone a little over two hours. It never rains but it pours.”

“Two of these are supposedly urgent.” Dora looked at her watch “A Miss Dawson from the Miami Herald will call back in about five minutes and that Lieutenant Todd has been calling all morning. He insists that he must see you before lunch or he can’t be properly prepared for the meeting this afternoon. Apparently he left a long, message on your Top Secret telemail sometime this morning. Right now he’s furious with me because I wouldn’t interrupt your meetings to tell you about his message. Is it really that important?”

Commander Winters shrugged his shoulders and opened the door to his office. I wonder what Todd wants, he thought. I guess I should have checked my telemail before running off to the meeting with the chief. “Did you put all the rest of the messages on the computer?” he asked Dora before he closed the door. She nodded. “Okay, I’ll talk to Miss Dawson when she calls. Tell Todd that I will see him in fifteen minutes.” He sat down at his desk and turned on his computer. He activated his telemail subdirectory and saw that he had three new entries already this morning, one in the TOP SECRET queue. Commander Winters identified himself, entered the top secret code word, and started to read Lieutenant Todd’s transmission.

The phone rang. After a few seconds Dora buzzed him and told him that it was Miss Dawson. Before they started, Commander Winters agreed that the interview could be on the videophone and that it could be taped. He recognized Carol immediately from her occasional appearances on television. She explained to him that she was using the communications facility at the Miami International Airport.

“Commander Winters,” she said, wasting no time, “we have an uncorroborated report that the Navy is engaged in a search for something important, and secret, in the Gulf of Mexico between Key West and the Everglades. Your press people and a Lieutenant Todd have both denied the report and referred all questions to you. Our source also told us, and we have subsequently verified both of these facts, that there are today a large number of technology ships sailing in the Gulf and that you have been trying to rent sophisticated ocean telescopes from the Miami Oceanographic Institute. Do you have any comment?”

“Certainly, Miss Dawson.” The commander wore his best acting smile. He had carefully rehearsed the response in his morning meeting with the admiral. “It’s really amazing how rumors fly, particularly when someone suspects the Navy of nefarious deeds.” He chuckled. “All the activity is just preparation for some routine maneuvers next week. A few of the sailors who man the technology ships are a little rusty and wanted some practice this week. As for the MOI telescopes, we intended to use them in our maneuvers to check their value in assessing underwater threats.” He looked directly at the camera. “That’s it, Miss Dawson. There’s nothing special going on.”

Carol watched the commander on the monitor at the airport. She had expected someone with an imposing air of authority. This man had a softness in his eyes, some kind of sensitivity that was unusual in a career military officer. Carol had a sudden idea. She walked up close to her own camera. “Commander Winters,” she said pleasantly, “let me ask you a hypothetical question. If the Navy were testing a new kind of missile and one test flight went astray, possibly even threatening population centers, wouldn’t it be likely that the Navy, claiming national security reasons as its defense, would deny that such a thing had happened?”

For a fleeting fraction of a second the expression in the eyes of Commander Winters wavered. He looked shocked. Then he regained control. “It is difficult to answer such a hypothetical question,” he intoned formally, “but I can tell you that it is Navy policy to keep the public informed about its activities. Only when the flow of information to the public could significantly undermine our national security would any kind of censorship take place.”

The interview wound up quickly. Carol had accomplished her objective. Damn, said Commander Winters to himself as Dora announced that Lieutenant Todd was waiting to see him. I should have expected that question. But how did she know that? Did she somehow trick Todd or one of the other officers? Or did someone in Washington spill the beans?

Winters opened the door to his office and Lieutenant Todd nearly stormed into the room. With him was another tall young lieutenant, thick shouldered with a bushy mustache whom Todd introduced as Lieutenant Ramirez of the Naval Intelligence Division. “Did you read my telemail message? What did you think? My God, it’s almost unbelievable what those Russians have done. I had no idea they could be so clever.” Todd was almost shouting as he paced excitedly around the office.

Winters watched Todd jumping around the room. This young lieutenant, he thought, is in a big hurry to get somewhere. His impatience is oozing out of every pore. But what in the world is he saying about the Russians? And why is this Mexican muscleman here with him?

“Sit down. please,” the commander replied, motioning at the two chairs opposite his desk. He looked sternly at Lieutenant Todd. “And start by explaining why Lieutenant Ramirez is here. You know the regulations; we were all briefed on them again last week. Only officers at the rank of commander or higher can authorize sharing information on a need-to-know basis.”

Todd immediately defended himself against the reproach. “Commander Winters, sir,” he replied, “I believe that what we have here is a major international incident, far too big to be handled by special projects and systems engineering alone. I left word on your telemail interrupt at 0830 this morning for you to contact me ASAP, that there was a significant new development in the Broken Arrow project. When I had not heard from you by 1000, even though I had tried several additional times to reach you by telephone, I became worried that we might be losing valuable time. I then contacted Ramirez so that he and his men could start their work.”

Todd stood up from his chair. “Sir,” he began again, the excitement rising in his voice, “maybe I didn’t make it clear enough in my telemail message. We have hard evidence that someone commanded the Panther to go astray, right after the APRS was activated. We have confirmed from a special manual search of the intermittent telemetry data that the command receipt counters went crazy during a two-second period just before the missile veered off course.”

“Calm down, Lieutenant Todd, and sit down again. “Winters was irritated, not just by Todd’s nonchalant dismissal of the regulations issue, but also by his undisguised accusation that Winters had been delinquent in responding to his messages. The commander’s day had begun with a meeting with the admiral who ran the air station. He had wanted a briefing on all this Broken Arrow business. So Winters had not even been in his office, except for a couple of minutes, until after he came back from the public relations department.

When Todd was again seated, Winters continued carefully, “Now spare me the hysteria and your personal conclusions. I want you to give me the facts, only the facts, slowly and without prejudice. The accusations you made a few moments ago are very very serious. In my eyes, if you have jumped to unsubstantiated conclusions too quickly, your fitness as an officer may be in doubt. So start at the beginning.”

There was a flash of anger in the lieutenant’s eyes and then he opened his notebook. When he spoke, his voice was a monotone, carefully modulated to be free of all emotion. “At precisely 0345 this morning,” he began, “I was awakened by Ensign Andrews, who had been working most of the night on the telemetry dumps that we recalled both from the Canaveral station and the tracking ship near Bimini. His assignment had been to go through the scheduled sequence of events onboard the Panther missile and determine, from the scattered telemetry if possible, if any anomalous events had occurred onboard just before the missile went off course. We thought that this way we might have a chance to isolate the cause of the problem.

“Basically Ensign Andrews was a detective As you know, the data system is quite constrained by the limited downlink bandwidth. So the packets of telemetry data come out in a somewhat artificial way, meaning that many of the data values governing the behavior of the bird at the time it changed direction would not have been sent to the Earth until several minutes later, after the missile had gone awry and the tracking stations had already dropped and regained lock a couple of times.

“Ensign Andrews showed me that in the intermittent data there were four discrete measurements taken from the command receipt counter, a simple buffer in the software that increments by one every time a new command message is correctly received by the missile. At first we did not believe what we were seeing. We thought perhaps someone had made an error or that the decommutation maps were wrong. But by 0700 we had both checked the values from the two tracking sites and verified that we were indeed looking at the correct channel. Commander, in the 1.7 seconds after the APRS was activated, the command receipt counter registered over three hundred new messages. And then the missile swerved away from its intended target.”

The commander was writing in a small spiral notebook while Todd was talking. It took him almost half a minute to finish his notes. Then he looked up at Todd and Ramirez. “Am I to believe then,” he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm, “that this is the entire data set upon which you wish to base your indictment of the Soviet Union and put our Navy intelligence community on alert? Or is there something else?”

Todd looked confused. “You think it’s more likely,” Commander Winters continued, his voice now rising, “that the Russians knew the code for the command test set and transmitted three hundred messages in less than two seconds, exactly at the right time and from somewhere off the Florida coast, than it is that somewhere in the 4.2 software system there is an error that is improperly incrementing the command receipt counter? My God, Lieutenant, use your head. Are you seeing bogeymen at night? This is 1994. There is virtually no tension on the international scene. You believe that the Russians are so colossally stupid that they would risk detente to command a Navy cruise missile off course while it is still under test? Even if they could somehow command the missile to a specific location and then recover it and understand it thoroughly by reverse engineering, why would they take such a horrendous chance for such a comparatively small return?”

Todd and Ramirez said nothing during the commander’s harangue. Ramirez was starting to look uncomfortably embarrassed toward the end. Todd’s boyish self-confidence had faded as well and he began to wring his hands and pop his knuckles absentmindedly. After a long pause Winters continued, firmly but without some of the exasperation of his initial speech.

“We assigned some specific work items yesterday, Lieutenant. They were supposed to be addressed by today. Look again at the 4.2 software, particularly to see if there were any errors in the interface with the command test set that showed up during module or integration testing. Maybe there was a bug in the command receipt counter subroutine that did not get corrected in the new release. And for the meeting this afternoon, I want you to show me a list of possible failure modes that would explain the telemetry data, other than commands being sent from a foreign power. And then show what you are planning to do to analyze each failure mode and reduce the length of the list.”

Ramirez stood up to leave. “Under the circumstances, Commander, I feel that my presence here is a little, uh, improper. I have briefed a couple of my men already and have kicked off some investigative work to see if there is now or has been recently any Russian military or civilian activity in the area. I had put a top priority on the effort. In view of this conversation, I feel I should suspend—”

“Not necessarily,” Commander Winters interrupted him. “It might be very difficult for you to explain at this juncture.” He looked at both of the squirming young lieutenants. “And it is not my wish to be vindictive and put you both on report, although I think you both acted hastily and outside regulations. No, Lieutenant, continue with the intelligence gathering, it may eventually be of some importance. Just don’t make a big deal out of it. I’ll accept the responsibility.”

Ramirez walked toward the door. He was clearly grateful. “Thank you, Commander,” he said sincerely, “for a minute there I thought maybe I had crapped in my mess kit. I’ve learned a very valuable lesson.”

Winters saluted the intelligence officer and motioned Todd, who was apparently also preparing to leave, back to his seat. The commander walked over in front of the Renoir painting and appeared to be studying it. He spoke quietly, without turning to face the junior lieutenant. “Did you say anything to that reporter Miss Dawson about a missile, or did she mention a missile to you while you were talking to her?”

“No, sir, there was nothing like that,” Todd asserted. “She was even vague when I asked her what she had heard.”

“She either has some inside information or is very very lucky,” the commander said abstractedly, almost to himself. He walked over closer to the painting and imagined that he could hear the piano being played by the younger of the two sisters. Today he heard a Mozart sonata. But it was not the right time to listen. This young man needs a good lesson out of all this, Winters thought as he turned around.

“Do you smoke. Lieutenant?” he asked, offering Todd a cigarette and placing one in his own mouth. The younger man shook his head. “I do,” said Winters, lighting his Pall Mall, “even though there are a thousand reasons why I shouldn’t. But I almost never smoke around people who don’t. It’s a question of consideration.”

Winters walked over to look out the window and blew the smoke slowly out his mouth. Todd looked puzzled. “And right now,” Winters continued, “I’m smoking, strangely enough, also out of consideration. For you. You see, Lieutenant Todd,” he said, wheeling around dramatically, “I’m calmer after I smoke. That means I can deal better with my anger.”

He walked directly over in front of the lieutenant. “Because I’m goddamn mad about this, young man. Make no mistake about that. There’s a part of me that wants to make an example of you, maybe even court martial you for not following regulations. You’re too cocky, too sure of your own conclusions. You’re dangerous. If you had slipped and made some of the comments you made in here to that woman reporter, then it would be Katie bar the door. But”—Winters walked around behind his desk and stubbed out his cigarette,—“it has always been my belief that people should not be crucified for a single mistake.”

The commander sat down and leaned back in his chair. “Just between us guys, Lieutenant, you’re on probation with me. I don’t want to hear any more nonsense about an international incident. This is a simple case of a malfunctioning test missile. Do your job thoroughly and carefully. Don’t worry, you’ll be noticed if the work is done properly. The system is not blind to your ambition or your talent. But if you run off half-cocked one more time on this problem, I will personally see to it that your personnel file is ruined.”

Todd could tell that he was being dismissed. He was still angry, now at himself mostly, but he knew better than to let any of it show. He considered Commander Winters to be a marginally competent old fart, and he hated being lectured by him. As of now, however, I have no choice but to accept it, he said to himself as he left the commander’s office.