October's Ghost

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  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.

  “SS-Nineteen,” Harry said as information on the Russian-produced missile, known to the SRF as the RS-18, came up.

  “About twenty feet too short and a foot too thin,” Jenny responded. “Man, this is a big thing.”

  Several more candidates for a match scrolled by. “This is too short for an SS-Eighteen,” Jenny observed, referring to the Russian heavy missile known by its NATO designation Satan, an altogether appropriate choice of nomenclature. “And the one we have is too fat by about a foot. Damn...”

  “That’s all of the possible Russian ones,” Harry said. “And it’s not one of ours.”

  “The Cubans certainly didn’t build it,” Jenny said assuredly. She’d seen enough from above to know that Castro’s inept government-controlled industrial capacity could be generously given the label of “backward.” The capacity had been there at one time, but they’d never exploited it. Another good example of the bearded wonder’s lack of foresight.

  “But who, then? If it isn’t Russian or American, then who? Who builds them that big besides us and them?”

  There was one other possibility, but it was a stretch. “The Chinese.”

  Harry watched intently as Jenny switched to information on the PRC’s missiles. “Whoa. Lots of big clunkers.”

  “They don’t build them pretty,” Jenny said, scrolling through until two measurements caught her eye. “But they do build them the right size.” That’s how...

  “CSS-Four,” Harry read off the screen. “Exact match on the diameter. Just a foot off on the length. Throw weight of three thousand and eighty pounds. The SS-Four warhead was three thousand pounds. But how?”

  “The DF-Five, Harry. The DOD designation is CSS-Four, but the Chinese call it Dong Feng Five. That means ‘east wind.’ The DF-Five is also the basis for the CZ-Three series of space-launching boosters. It’s an exact duplicate except for the payload and guidance systems, actually. One carries satellites, the other a very big bomb.”

  Fastwater, in preparation for his assignment to work with MacNamara on the monitoring of the Cuban military during the rebellion, had versed himself in the goings-on of the past decade as they applied to the capabilities of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces and associated elements. One of those elements was the short-lived Cuban Space Exploration Center project, a farcical attempt by Fidel Castro to construct a launch facility for satellites in the Caribbean to rival that of the French in Guyana. An attempt that received funding and technical support from the People’s Republic of China.

  “That space fiasco.”

  Jenny nodded at the screen. “One warhead. One booster. One very big problem.”

  Harry stared at the visual of the missile squared off in a box to one side of the screen. “It’s really big. How far can it fly?”

  “Three stages to push it out to seventy-five-hundred miles,” Jenny answered. “It can hit anywhere in the United States.”

  “And a lot of other places,” Harry added, as the senior technician picked up the phone and quickly dialed the number she had been told to call immediately if anything was found. It rang on Langley’s seventh floor a second later.

  * * *

  “Pull over. Pull over. Here.”

  The Jeep rolled to an illegal stop next to Pershing Square just across Fifteenth Street from the White House. The morning rush was flowing into D.C., filling the street on the east side of the presidential mansion with legions of cars. Chick Hill looked right past those to the South Lawn.

  “This is a ticket here,” the wannabe reporter said worriedly, his head looking back, left, and forward for any sign of D.C. cops.

  “Stop your whining.” Hill opened his door and stepped out onto the sidewalk, taking a few steps forward for a better vantage point looking over the Jeep’s hood. The expanse of green between the White House and the ellipse was visible through the bare trees; autumn had taken its hold on the nation’s capital.

  The driver leaned across the front seat to the open door. “What are you looking for?”

  “Anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Everything looked fine from the front.” They had first taken a drive past Lafayette Park
to survey the north side of the White House.

  “That’s the ‘show’ side, kiddo,” Hill explained. “The South Lawn is where things happen.”

  Hill scanned the area, looking for that one tidbit that would jump out, but from this distance any tidbits faded to clumps of colors blended in with the fall foliage. “Outside pocket of my bag, hand me the binocs.”

  The driver retrieved the compact Bushnells and passed them out. “Why do you carry binoculars?”

  Hill pushed his thick glasses atop his head and began scrutinizing the South Lawn through the 7X binoculars. “Kid, when your eyes get this bad, you learn to adapt. The photogs aren’t the only ones who need to see things.”

  The back of the mansion looked normal, no obvious extra personnel. He swept left, farther south, the ugly gray of Old Executive in the background. The pad used by Marine One was empty. That caused his hopes for some connection to drop. Why pull Kneecap out and have no way to get the President to it? It was looking like some sort of practice run was under way, Granger and all. He continued left. Well, it had been worth a shot. Now he’d have to just go back to Limp Dick’s denials about Delta. Oh, we—

  What is that doing there? Hill instinctively lowered the glasses away and squinted to see with just his eyes, but the streaking blurs of cars convinced him to give it up. He rolled the focus knob, zeroing in on the aircraft. It wasn’t the big one out of Anacostia, he knew. This one was low and sleek, its body a gleaming white with a thin stripe of blue along its side. It had to be from the 89th. He looked for details, of which there were none immediately obvious. There were two people on board, in the pilots’ seats, and a few outside looking very serious. Fully crewed? His hopes began to rise again. What else? This had to be a VH-60, one of those airborne VIP taxis that government honchos had at their beck and call. No. He’d been on one of those, up close enough to see that this one was different. All sorts of bulges and small, dorsal-like antennae protruded from the fuselage, and there was a—refueling probe?—coming out from the nose. Hill’s mind searched the mental files he’d made since joining the Pentagon beat. This was that command-post variant of the VH-60, the one supposed to be used by the President during crises when transiting between a ground station and the location of a more fully equipped airborne command post, such as... Kneecap.

  “Black phone book,” Hill told the driver. “Same pocket as the binocs. Look up Congressman Vorhees’s office number.”

  “Didn’t you just...never mind.” He flipped to the Vs and read off the number, Hill punching it into his cell.

  “Congressman Vorhees’s office.”

  Chick set the binoculars on the hood of the Jeep. “Yes, this is Chick Hill from the Post for the congressman. Is he back from Andrews?”

  “Yes. I trust you enjoyed your trip with him. One moment.”

  The moment stretched into four, but Hill had nowhere to be. His companion, however, was still sweating in anticipation of a hefty parking fine.

  “Chick, so soon?”

  “You know how much I miss you, Dick. Listen, I wonder if you’d care to comment on some peculiar things going on at Andrews and the White House.”

  A playful chuckle came over the phone. “Sure, why not?”

  “Kneecap was rolled out at Andrews when we landed; I believe one of your staffers commented on it. That’s what got me to looking. The funny thing was that chairman, Joint Chiefs, was there, running up the steps. Then, I drive by the White House, and what’s here but that fancy command-post chopper from the Eighty-ninth. Crown Helo is what they call it, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “You’re not.” The congressman’s tone changed perceptibly.

  “Anything to this?” Hill listened to the silence.

  “The Pentagon runs the show, Chick. You know the routine. They can run readiness exercises whenever they want.”

  “It’s a readiness exercise, then?”

  “Must be.” What wasn’t said, said it all.

  “Okay, Dick. Thanks.” Hill ended the call, but kept his phone in hand.

  “What was that all about?”

  “That was nothing, kid. Watch this.” He pressed last-number redial.

  “Congressman Vorhees’s office.”

  “Hi. Chick Hill again.”

  “Well, hello. The congressman is on the phone right now.”

  “Oh. He’s still on with the White House,” Hill said innocently, trying to remove any hint of a question from his words.

  “Still? He just got on.”

  Hill smiled into the phone. “Oh. No problem. I’ll call back later.”

  The driver stopped his worrying long enough to admire the devious digging just witnessed. “Tricky, but what does that get you?”

  “It gets me a lead,” Hill said after climbing back into the Jeep. “The sudden, unplanned deployment of emergency airborne command posts at the White House and Andrews Air Force Base prompted Congressman Richard Vorhees, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, to contact unnamed White House officials for an explanation of the actions.”

  “How can you spin that from the call?” the driver asked incredulously.

  “All true, kid.” It occurred to Chick that he didn’t even know the kid’s name. “Just deductive reasoning.”

  It sure wasn’t what the driver had learned at Columbia. “I don’t know. What comes after that is weak.”

  “Kid, lesson number last: The lead is everything.” Chick watched the White House disappear behind the balding trees. “What comes next is fluff. Anyone can fill in the body. Only a pro can give you a winning lead.”

  “Fluff?” the driver asked with more disbelief than before. “What about facts?”

  Hill snickered at the traffic ahead. “The best facts are guesses that turn out to be on target.”

  * * *

  Major Sean Graber took the SATCOM radio’s handset from the Pave Hawk’s crew chief. “Graber.”

  “Major,” Colonel Cadler drawled. “The spooks found you a target.” He went on to explain the location.

  “What’s the aim point?” Sean asked. As in practice, you did not just fire wildly at a target—you chose a specific point on it. “The missile is one thing, sir, but it sounds like the way it’s set up now doesn’t point to someone just standing there and pushing a button.”

  “My thought exactly, Major. The eagle eyes found one of those prefab sons o’ bitches that smacks of Chinese construction. Real close to those control bunkers we took a look at in Iran last summer.”

  Sean had been up close and personal for that one. Almost too close. “And once we secure it?” He never thought in terms of “if’ when it came to a mission’s outcome.

  “There’s a DOE tech guy comin’ down with the gear y’all ordered from Wally World.” Cadler didn’t expand, an unseen smile on his muscular face.

  Another one of those. Sean knew Delta didn’t have a stellar record in keeping technicians from the Department of Energy safe when in their care. His thoughts momentarily went back to the man condemned to death during the last and only mating of their talents. He wondered how Anderson was doing.

  “We’ll try and give this one back in one piece,” Sean said with some levity.

  “Deal. Any assets you think y’all might need?”

  “Let me talk to Lieutenant Duc.” Lieutenant Cho Duc was the Pave Hawk’s pilot. “We’ll run through an insertion to see. Are there photos on the way down?”

  “The com center o’er on Crocodile Road should have ‘em ‘bout now.”

  “Okay. We’ll get to it.”

  “Fingers crossed, Major.”

  “Fingers crossed, sir.”

  The satellite photos were retrieved from the Cape’s com center and delivered to Sean and Lieutenant Duc, who were sitting in the open port-side door of the Pave Hawk. Duc, a twenty-eight-year-old child of the Nam experience whose earliest memory was of the American Hueys buzzing his family’s village north of Saigon, was a member of the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviatio
n Regiment, commonly referred to as the Nightstalkers for their inhuman ability to fly low and fast in total darkness. They were less well known as Delta’s taxi service.

  “Long flight,” Duc commented, looking at the map. He was a small, thin man, whose neck was strangely overdeveloped from the constant wearing of NVGs during the Nightstalkers’ “normal mission profile” flights.

  Sean watched him trace a line around the east end of the island before turning west, past Guantanamo Naval Base, to their target west of Cienfuegos. “Not overland?”

  “Not with a war going on,” Duc answered, his voice inflected with the choppy influence of his native tongue. “We got two AW ACS up, one in the Gulf and the other this side of the keys. They say there’s still a bunch of SAM radars up and running. Plus, one lucky shot can ruin your whole day.”

  “Then we go around past Guantanamo and come in from the water. We’ll have to tank, right?”

  Duc nodded. “Ten men, four crew, a little gear. Probably a six-hour flight to avoid getting shot at until we want that.” He smiled deviously. “We’ll tank once east of the island and once right before we go in.”

  “We should get a Combat Talon alerted,” Sean said. “The MC-130H Combat Talon was a Special Operations version of the C-130 Hercules. Its capabilities included communication, navigation, refueling, and in-flight extraction of troopers using the Fulton STAR recovery system, an E-ticket ride if there ever was one.

  “You didn’t know? The Talons are all grounded,” Duc said.

  “What? Why?”

  “One of them took a beaucoup beating yesterday when one of the nose prongs came off in flight. Knocked out two engines and took a chunk of wing with it.” The nose prongs, normally folded back against the fuselage, were extended to form a forward-facing V when a pickup using the Fulton system was in progress. The prongs would catch a line hoisted skyward by a helium balloon and hold it until it could be fed into a winch system. On the other end of the line a trooper or troopers would be yanked from their earthly bonds and pulled into the aircraft. “They want to make sure it’s not metal fatigue.”