White Collar, Green Flame - A Technothriller

by Shain Carter

  During these demonstrations Dawson occasionally looked over at Meredith and the foreman. They stood around a table, carefully going over a set of blueprints. For the first twenty minutes their discussion seemed quiet enough, but then it took a turn for the worse. They were disagreeing on something. Meredith kept pointing to a spot on the blueprint, at first with restraint, but then jabbing her finger down hard on it. The old man shook his head vigorously. Their voices rose, but Dawson couldn’t make out anything either said, until, just as Dawson was being shown the last machine, he heard Meredith call out his name.

  Dawson excused himself and went towards the table. The foreman was brusquely rolling up the blueprint. Meredith curtly asked Dawson if he was ready to go. Dawson nodded, and they walked outside, were they found Abdu smoking with the two sentries. They climbed into the car wordlessly.

  Meredith stared out the window distractedly as they pulled back out of the complex. They traveled along in silence for several minutes, then Dawson asked her if everything was proceeding on schedule.

  “Yes, for the most part,” she began, then paused. “But I did have one rather unsettling discovery. An important interlock was missing on the blueprints, and the foreman refused to even listen to me when I told him we needed to put it in.”

  Meredith explained that the interlock was a safety device used to prevent a runaway chain reaction from occurring. In order to produce the maximum possible temperatures, she told him, the reactor needed to be brought very close to criticality. This was done by splitting the plutonium into two enclosed containers. One container was fixed within the interceptor craft, while the other rode on a sled that traveled over a rail, towards and away from the fixed container. A computer controlled the sled, keeping the distance between the plutonium containers just right for maximum heat without losing control of the reaction.

  In theory, the computer should keep the two components far enough apart to prevent them from going critical. However, Meredith had been concerned that the fuel could be jarred during rocket liftoff or craft deployment and the two components pushed too close to one another.

  Meredith’s solution to this problem was to use a passive interlock. The interlock was simply a group of four steel pins that were attached to the sled rail. They physically prevented the sled from getting too close to the fixed plutonium. This was the most important safety feature of the reactor, Meredith felt, and she had emphasized the need for these pins and their proper positioning in the blueprints.

  “The foreman insisted he wasn’t going to put them in. I know we’re in a big hurry on this project, but we can’t be lax on safety features. Leaving it out won’t even save them any time. Besides, if I hadn’t caught it now, the reactor wouldn’t have worked even if the launch was a total success. I’ve written the computer code so that the reactor won’t power-up if the pins are missing.”

  Dawson nodded thoughtfully. The pins certainly sounded like a good idea. They had all been assuming that the rocket would work properly, but there was a real chance that it could fail, especially since they wouldn’t be able to rigorously test either the two stage design or the new fuel before the actual flight. If they were able to deliver the interceptor into space, the last thing they wanted was for it to then explode because a simple safety feature had been left out.

  “I think I got it all straightened out, though,” Meredith continued, “but with the language barrier it’s hard to tell. Plus these guys aren’t real thrilled about taking instructions from a woman. They have zero respect for women’s abilities, not like back home.”

  Dawson felt his face redden as he suddenly recalled of the comment he made to Burt at Derek's house, about Meredith looking pretty but being heavy around the hips. He glanced furtively at Meredith to see if she noticed his embarrassment, but she had gone back to staring out her window.

  "Well, at least you caught it now,” Dawson told her. "It made the trip worthwhile, and it will make us that much more careful in the future."

  Meredith nodded and they both settled back in their seats. After a while Dawson could see that Meredith was asleep. Dawson felt tired, too, but he also felt an uneasiness about their visit to the machine shop. He thought about it for a while, trying to figure out what it was exactly that was bothering him, then realized it was their encounter with the young guard. Meredith had been so certain that the picture around his neck was of Avi Mustafi. She could have been wrong, of course, but she was closer to the guard than was Dawson. And she was a careful observer and not prone to jumping to conclusions. Dawson sighed and reached into his pocket for the hip flask he brought with him. He took a deep drink, leaned back and drifted off to sleep.

  Meredith’s mood had improved little by the time they got back to the dormitory. They were late for dinner, and only Ted, Burt and Alec were still in the dining room when they came in. As they came in, Dawson remembered the memory stick that he found in the car. He slipped it out of his pocket and handed it to Alec.

  “I found this in the car. I thought it was probably yours.”

  Alec brought it close to his face and turned it over in his hands. “Sorry, Dawson, it’s not mine.”

  Burt grabbed it out of Alec’s hand. “Actually, it’s mine,” he blurted. “I was wondering what had happened to it.”

  Burt slipped it into his pocket, then turned back to Meredith and asked how the trip went. Meredith recounted her run-in with the foreman. None of them seemed particularly upset - or even surprised - that the passive interlock was missing. “These things are bound to happen,” Alec told Meredith. “That’s why we go out and check the work ourselves.”

  Dawson could see that Burt and Alec’s light treatment of the issue only made matters worse. They misinterpreted the cause of her irritation, that the foreman had treated her with such contempt. Meredith picked at her food silently for a few minutes. George had the misfortune of choosing that moment to enter the dining room.

  “How was the trip?” he asked Meredith cheerfully. “Will the reactor work?”

  “No.” Meredith threw her fork into her plate. Her response caught George completely off guard, and for several seconds he stared at her in surprise.

  “What’s wrong with it?” he finally asked.

  Meredith pushed her chair back noisily. Standing, she told George she didn’t want to discuss it then. “We can talk about it at group meeting,” she told him over her shoulder, barely pausing as she left the room. George watched mutely, uncertainty written on his face. He took a step after her, then stopped and turned to the others.

  “What is wrong with the reactor?” he demanded. “Why won’t it work?”

  Burt shrugged. “She won’t know for sure until she tries it out with the plutonium.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The next morning Dawson was quieter than usual at breakfast. He was still bothered by the trip to the machine shop, and it wasn’t just the boy’s picture. There was something very odd about the way the foreman had argued against the passive interlock - thinking back on the glimpses he saw of the argument, Dawson now thought that it was more than just the old man not wanting to follow instructions from a woman. He had seemed quite adamant that she didn’t know what she was talking about.

  Meredith looked across her bowl of cold cereal. “A penny for your thoughts?” she asked. Dawson replied in a low voice that they could talk later. He and Meredith ate slowly, letting the others finish first and leave.

  “How sure are you about that picture?” Dawson asked once they were alone.

  “The picture of Avi Mustafi that boy was wearing? I’m certain. Don’t ask me why he was wearing it, but he was.”

  Dawson took in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I thought about this all night. As I see it, there are only two possible explanations. Either you’re wrong, or we aren’t in Turkey.”

  There was more than a hint of amusement in Meredith’s voice when she responded. “O. K., Sherlock, where are we then?”

  “There’s only one pl
ace where Mustafi would be tolerated, let alone idolized. I think we’re in Iraq. That’s the only way it makes any sense.”

  Meredith looked doubtful. “I think you’re making way too much out of one picture. Besides, there are surely other reasonable explanations. We’ve been out of touch with the rest of the world for a long time. Maybe Mustafi made nice with his neighbors and now he and the Turks are friends. That would certainly fit in with his plans to pacify the U. N.”

  Dawson shook his head. "Even if Mustafi changed his tune about reuniting southeast Turkey with Iraq, I doubt very much that the Turk’s would believe him. They’d need a lot longer than a few months to judge whether he was being sincere. Besides..." Dawson's voice trailed off as a young man came out of the kitchen and began gathering the breakfast dishes. Dawson motioned Meredith and they left for the long walk to the lab.

  Once they were away from the dormitory, Dawson continued. "Your point is well taken. Sure, there are other plausible explanations for what you saw. But this isn't the only strange happening that we've come across. The whole program has been bothering me since the beginning, but I could never find any single, concrete thing I could look at and say 'this doesn't make sense,' at least until now."

  Meredith still looked doubtful, but she didn't argue with Dawson. Instead she asked him what he was going to do about it.

  "Very simple. I'm going to find out exactly where we are. This afternoon I’m going to measure our precise latitude and longitude."

  Meredith rolled her eyes. "Oh, come on, Jones,” she laughed. "You're talking about a pretty sophisticated measurement to be doing out in the middle of the nowhere, and without any special equipment."

  "Who needs special equipment?" Dawson’s voice was more hurt than defensive. "After all, navigators used primitive astronomical observations for hundreds of years to determine their precise locations. Look at Magellan - he navigated his way around the world by measuring the position of the sun and stars and looking up data in some tables. I don't have any tables to use, but I do have a calculator, and I know enough geometry to be able to figure out how to translate my measurements into latitude and longitude."

  Meredith still looked amused. "And what, exactly, are you going to measure?” she asked.

  “I thought about that a lot last night, as a matter of fact,” Dawson replied. He explained that he could calculate their latitude - their distance north of the equator - by measuring the angle of the noon-time sun at its highest point in the sky. He could determine their longitude, their location in the east/west direction, from the exact time that the sun reached its high point.

  Meredith remained unconvinced, but offered to help nonetheless.

  "Thanks, but no,” Dawson told her. "Right now I just need to plan the measurements and figure out the equations I'll need to convert the readings into latitude and longitude. With any luck I’ll work out the math this morning and make the measurement at noon."

  Jones spent much of the morning at his desk, pad of paper and calculator in hand, deriving the equations he needed. It was a trickier calculation than he originally anticipated, and each time he thought he had it, he remembered some factor that he had omitted. After double checking his final calculation he was confident that at last he had the right set of equations.

  Next he set about assembling the supplies he needed to measure the sun’s angle at its maximum height. He decided the easiest way to do this was to stick a rod into the ground and keep track of the length of its shadow. This length would change as the sun moved across the sky, first getting shorter as the sun climbed, then lengthening as it began to fall. By measuring the shadow often enough, Dawson could determine both the time that the sun reached its highest point and the minimum length of the shadow. By comparing this length to the height of the rod, he could compute the angle he needed to calculate latitude.

  After an extensive search of the lab, Dawson found what he needed - a ruler and a long wooden dowel. He carefully made a mark exactly fifty centimeters from one end of the dowel, then, satisfied he was ready to make his measurements, he poured some alcohol into a beaker and relaxed for an hour, waiting for the sun to climb higher in the sky. At eleven-fifteen he gathered his things and went downstairs. He didn’t want to advertise what he was doing, so he slipped quietly out the stairwell exit door, then walked along the back of the building to the area that had been badly damaged. There, out of sight from the rest of the complex, he began to assemble the crude equipment for his measurement.

  Using the ruler, Dawson scraped a large flat area on the ground. He pushed the dowel into the dry dirt until the mark he had made just showed above the ground. He then sat back, studied the dowel, then groaned and shook his head. He knew that the dowel would have to stick straight up out of the ground if he was to have any hope of getting an accurate reading. He could see, though, that it was at a bit of an angle. He pulled the rod out and tried again. Again the dowel was at a slight angle. He tried three more times, but each time the dowel was a little tilted. He checked his watch and decided that this would have to do - if he spent any more time trying to get the dowel straight he would miss the sun at its highest point. Besides, he decided, the dowel was probably true enough to get at least a rough idea of their position. He could redo the measurement the next day if he needed to.

  Jones next placed the ruler on the ground to measure the shadow length. Again he groaned. Because the sun occupies an area of the sky, rather than a point in the sky, the top edge of the shadow was gray and fuzzy, rather than black and sharp. He needed to accurately measure its length, but wasn’t sure where exactly to measure to - where the shadow transitioned from black to gray, or where it faded away completely? He thought for a minute, then decided to use the point where the shadow just began to look gray. He was now ready to begin the actual measurements. Twice a minute he carefully recorded the time and shadow length on a sheet of paper he had brought along.

  After thirty minutes Dawson studied his readings. The shadow length was changing very, very slowly. For one sixteen minute period, in fact, it had not changed enough to detect. This meant, he realized, that the experiment was not going to work. When deriving his formulas earlier that morning he calculated that he needed to know the time at which the shadow was the shortest to within no more than a minute, and clearly he was not going to get that information from his data. Dawson stood and grabbed the dowel roughly out of the ground. In frustration he broke it in half.

  A voice called out from behind him. “I give up, Jones. What the hell are you doing?”

  Dawson spun around to find Ted loping towards him, grinning broadly.

  “I’ve been watching you for ten minutes,” he told Dawson. “I can’t figure out what you’re up to.”

  “I’ve been trying to come up with a science experiment for the kids,” Dawson lied blandly. “They’re interested in the lab work I’m doing, and seem to be interested in science in general, so I thought I’d try encouraging them. I thought they could try to calculate our latitude and longitude using the sun.”

  Ted looked around. “So, where are the kids?”

  “Well, I wanted to do a dry run first, just to be sure it worked. I didn’t want to discourage them with an experiment that didn’t work. You know how easily kids get frustrated.”

  Ted looked down at the broken rod in Dawson’s hands and they both laughed. Dawson tossed the pieces aside.

  “Anyway,” Dawson continued, “I can see now that I should have asked you about it first. You’re the astronomer - is there any way the kids can figure out our latitude and longitude? Using the sun doesn’t seem to be a good way, but what about measuring the position of a bright star?”

  Ted thought it over for a minute. “I doubt it,” he finally said. He explained that it could be done in theory. In practice, though, doing it here at Anjawan was impossible.

  “You’d need a good sextant,” Ted told Dawson, “in order to accurately measure the position of the star you’re surveying. I don’t thin
k you’ll find a sextant - or be able to improvise one - around here.”

  Dawson nodded. “Is there any other way you can think of for the kids to measure our location?” he asked.

  Ted laughed. “The kids, Jones? I think it’s you that’s interested in our location.”

  Dawson feigned a look of surprise. “Why would you think that?” he asked.

  “Come on, Jones,” Ted grinned. “You were the most skeptical about this whole program to begin with, and I can understand skepticism. When I step back and look at this whole dinosaur business, and the messenger probe making a flyby, I can’t help wondering myself if this is all for real.”

  Jones nodded. “So, can you determine our location?”

  “Maybe.” Ted clasped his hands behind his back, and, staring intently at the ground, followed Dawson back around to the front of the building and towards the dormitory for lunch. When they reached the main road, Meredith emerged from the front entrance and ran out to them. She caught up with them quickly and tugged at Dawson’s arm.

  “Any luck, Magellan?” she teased.

  Dawson shook his head and held a finger to his lips, then pointed at Ted and mouthed, “He’s thinking.”

  Meredith smiled good-naturedly, and the three walked in silence for several minutes.

  Suddenly Ted let out a sharp cry and stopped dead. He looked to the sky thoughtfully and rubbed his chin, then cocked his head back in forth several times, as if having an argument with himself. Finally he nodded his head decisively and turned to Dawson.

  “Yep,” he said with a triumphant smile, “we can do it. We’ll use iridium flares.”

  Dawson frowned. “Where are we going to get iridium out here?” he asked.

  Ted burst out laughing. “Not iridium metal,” he hooted, “Iridium satellites. They’re a type of low orbit communications satellites. There are sixty-six of them in all, and they form a sort of net around the earth. Anywhere you go there is always at least one overhead. There’s at least one above us right now.” He motioned up towards the sky. “The sky’s just too bright for us to see it.”