Shadowplay

by Norman Hartley

  I couldn’t bear to think about it. The coach was almost empty now and the last of the VIPs were boarding the plane. It was almost too late. The Missile Corps officer was standing by the bar watching me as I fretted at the window. He looked relieved. His job was to stall me, and he knew he had almost won.

  But not quite. I strode over to him and put my hand on his forearm, in a deliberately bruising grip.

  ‘Major,’ I said, ‘we’re going to catch that plane. You have a straight choice. You can either escort me, or you can decide now that you’re going to physically hold me back…’

  4

  ‘John, what on earth are you getting so upset about?’ Sellinger said, shielding his eyes from the glare of the tarmac. The heat bouncing off the runway was already beginning to crinkle my suit again and Sellinger’s bulk left no room for me in the shadow of the aircraft tail.

  ‘I’m sorry about the delays at the gate,’ Sellinger said, ‘and I’m sorry there wasn’t enough ice at the bar. Major Kilburn told me how upset you were. I’d see it’s put right, but everyone’s pretty tied up right now.’

  ‘Paul, to hell with the ice,’ I snapped. ‘That’s not the issue here, as you damn well know. Why wasn’t I on the flight to the proving ground?’

  Sellinger looked surprised.

  ‘That’s where we’re going now, if you’ll calm down,’ he said. ‘We’re just waiting for the other passengers.’ Adding, after a deliberate pause, ‘Everyone has to have a special check on their clearances.’

  He gestured vaguely across the field to where the first executive jet was completing its takeoff circuit.

  ‘I assumed you didn’t want to go with all those drunken politicos, so I put you in the B group. You’ll be getting top-grade technical briefings instead of the mush we have to pump out to the As. I thought you’d rather have the serious information. But I will try to see the drinks are cold too.’

  I had to admit it was round one to Sellinger. He pointed toward the foot of the Missile Control Center.

  ‘Here’s the rest of the party. Come on, I’d like you to meet General Morton Haxler, Jr., our Director of Public Information. He’ll be with us on the flight.’

  Sellinger took my arm and started to lead me across the tarmac. ‘Take a tip from me, John,’ he said confidentially. ‘Go easy on the gin. Morton’s our chief lobbyist. Doing a fine job in Washington. Likes to come on as a homespun old redneck, but he’s a real sharp animal. You’ll need to be sober to match wits with him.’

  Before I could hit back, Haxler was striding toward us. He was a chunky man of fifty with a high-domed bald head and a lot of muscle packed into his lightweight gray civilian suit. He greeted Sellinger and thrust his hand out toward me.

  ‘Mr. Railton? Pleased to make your acquaintance, sir. Paul’s told me a lot about you.’

  He took my hand in an overhand grip and applied the kind of pressure that could have dislocated a finger if I hadn’t been wary. But I’ve been playing those games since I walked into my first gymnasium and I let off some of my anger with a counter-grip that made him catch his breath. I released it just as he was getting flushed and he pulled his hand back quickly.

  ‘That’s quite a grip, Mr. Railton, quite a grip. Are you a military man, by any chance?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Just a simple civilian.’

  Sellinger saw Haxler’s discomfiture.

  ‘John’s being too modest,’ he said. ‘He spent two years in the British army.’

  ‘That doesn’t count,’ I said. ‘It was strictly peacetime soldiering. Never saw a shot fired in anger.’

  ‘Still does a man good,’ Haxler said, trying unobtrusively to shake his fingers to get the circulation going again.

  ‘What rank did you reach?’

  ‘Corporal.’

  Instantly, Haxler looked gratefully at Sellinger for raising the subject.

  ‘What went wrong?’ he said. ‘Bad day at the officer selection board?’

  ‘No. I didn’t apply for a commission.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘General,’ I said, ‘I don’t think my military service of twenty years ago has anything to do with anything. Shall we go on board?’

  Haxler nodded. ‘Of course.’ But his smile told me he would return to the topic when he needed to regain an edge.

  Paul wanted me to go on board immediately, even though there was no sign of any other passengers, but I was partway up the steps of the aircraft when Robert Sellinger appeared from under the belly of the plane, looking very angry. Paul gestured to me to carry on, but I paused to watch the scene below. Robert took Paul aside and it wasn’t easy to work out what was going on. It was a tenet of the Family—laid down by Jacob with absolutist authority—that Sellingers were always united in public, and the argument on the tarmac was conducted like a street brawl between professionals in which there is no swinging and cursing, only tight, close-in grappling.

  But reading body language is one of a correspondent’s basic skills and I had had plenty of practice at reconstructing situations at a distance, from the wrong side of a police cordon. I gathered that the argument was about Haxler, who had paused at the foot of the aircraft steps. Robert didn’t want Haxler to come with us and Paul was blocking Robert’s attempts to take him away. As I watched, it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard any aircraft taking off in the past few minutes and the VIP plane must still be on the tarmac, waiting, I guessed, for Robert to take Haxler over to it. The argument lasted several minutes then Robert gave in, clearly with bad grace, and disappeared behind the tail plane. I went on up the steps and Haxler followed.

  The plane was a thirty-seat Piper Worldrover, arranged inside like a small conference room. At the nose end were three high-backed chairs facing the cabin; the rest of the seats were in a normal configuration except that small note-taking tables had been added to the armrests.

  There were several men already seated in the cabin. They all looked military despite their civilian clothes, but there was no one I recognized. A Sellinger Corporation attendant showed me to a front-row seat, directly facing the cluster of three chairs.

  Haxler stayed by the cabin door, then Paul came on board, accompanied by a youngish, bland-faced man in a creaseless white suit whom I recognized immediately. His name was Ralph Inman and he was the Sellinger Corporation’s house zealot, a lobbyist and publicist who presumably worked under Haxler but who was well-known in his own right as one of the carriers of the flame of neo-McCarthyism on Capitol Hill.

  Currently he was acting as advisor to a bipartisan coalition that was trying to push a resolution through Congress which would commit the United States to achieving and maintaining nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union, but his role was much wider. The Sellinger Corporation, in concert with a number of other defense-oriented corporations, kept a voting index of members of both houses who supported pro-defense and anti-Communist bills and amendments. Inman kept the score and channeled the rewards—as well as the punishments.

  The team in charge of the briefing was already looking pretty high-powered; then, after several more men I didn’t recognize had filed into the cabin, Robert Sellinger appeared at the door. Paul and Robert said nothing to each other and there was no discussion of the seating arrangements. Haxler, Paul, and Inman took the three seats directly facing me and Robert sat down at the end of the front row after giving me a curt and, I thought, rather embarrassed greeting.

  By the time we took off, I was beginning to feel very uneasy. The composition of this passenger list was all wrong. Twenty minutes before, I’d been irritated that I wasn’t getting enough attention; now I seemed to be getting far too much. Apart from Inman and the Sellingers, there was no one who had ever come to my attention in the media, which was absurd given the invitation list for the test firing. As far as I could tell, there were no congressmen, no obvious military brass, no one in fact who seemed surprised that I should have been given the place of honor.

  In the other plane were som
e of the best-known names in American politics. Admittedly Paul was probably right when he said they were more interested in champagne than in missile data, but they still should have had Haxler with them. Instead we had him, as well as his notorious deputy, not to mention Robert himself, who had apparently decided that it was more important to keep an eye on what was happening in our plane than to look after his principal guests himself.

  When we were airborne, a steward served drinks and General Haxler proposed a toast.

  ‘Gentlemen, I give you Starburst—the greatest weapon ever placed in the hands of our armed services. The missile for the twenty-first century that is ready now.’

  The steward refilled the glasses, then Inman announced that General Haxler would continue the briefing with the history of the development of Starburst.

  After a few polite preliminaries, Haxler began with the Cruise missile, explaining that it was a form of flying bomb. Launched from the ground or from the air or from a ship or submarine, and armed with a nuclear warhead, Cruise flew toward its target by normal inertial navigation. Then, for the last five hundred miles or so, it navigated by an ingenious terrain-following radar known as Tercom. A computer memory in the nose of the missile carried a ‘map’ of the territory it was flying over. It flew low—sometimes as low as a hundred feet— to avoid enemy radar, and it used its own radar altimeter to scan the ground below and ‘match’ it to the map in its nose, so that the missile ‘knew’ where it was, to an accuracy of a few feet.

  ‘Cruise was the beginning,’ Haxler said, ‘but Starburst took over where Cruise left off. Whereas Cruise flew at about five hundred miles an hour—just below the speed of sound—Star-burst is a variable-speed missile. It can fly up to twice the speed of sound, or it can hover almost stationary if the guidance system needs to verify a location; but when it decides it knows where it’s going, boy, no radar in the world can spot that baby.’

  ‘You mean it’s invisible to the enemy, General?’ someone asked from behind me.

  The general grinned. ‘No, sir, we do not make unwise claims of that nature. We do not say that Starburst is invisible. We just say you can’t goddamn well see it.’

  The exchange irritated me. It was as obvious as the stooge shareholder primed to ask at the annual general meeting how the chairman saw the future of the company. Worse still, the whole briefing seemed to be a charade, gone through for the form, teaching no one, including me, anything they didn’t know already. While Haxler had been talking, I had glanced around several times and noticed that most eyes were on me, not on him.

  I decided it was time to take the initiative. Coming all the way to Colorado to be baited by the Sellingers was bad enough, and I certainly didn’t intend to go away without at least trying to get at some of the crucial issues surrounding Starburst.

  ‘General Haxler,’ I interrupted, ‘can we talk about trees?’

  ‘Trees?’ Haxler said. He gave me an ironic little smile as though he was being patient with the irrelevant questions of a non-expert, but he knew very well what I was getting at.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I want to talk about the Starburst guidance system. As I understand it, General, the information in the computer memory of Starburst’s guidance system—TIM, Terrain Identification and Matching, isn’t it?—comes from satellites which take high-resolution photographs from twenty-two thousand miles up. The images picked up by the radar altimeter when Starburst is skimming over the ground a couple of hundred feet up aren’t in the same form. You’re not comparing like with like. I gather the problem’s much more difficult when the missile has to navigate across great flat snow-covered expanses, or thousands of miles of forests in Eastern Europe with the trees looking completely different on satellite pictures with their leaves on and off.’

  ‘The problem’s been cracked,’ Haxler said. ‘We’ve done tests in Northern Canada. A first-rate simulation of Soviet forests.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re feeding the missile data prepared by the U.S. mapping agency. Highly accurate stuff. Far better than any satellite picture you have of the Soviet Union.’

  Haxler looked at me angrily.

  ‘You seem to know a lot about our system, Mr. Railton.’

  ‘I’ve learned what I can,’ I said. ‘I came here to try to learn more.’

  ‘What you’re asking for is classified information.’

  ‘I don’t want details,’ I said irritably, ‘I just want to get some sense of the progress you’ve made with the problems that have bedeviled Starburst—and Cruise before it, for that matter.’

  General Haxler’s eyes darkened.

  ‘Mr. Railton, why the hell don’t you just leave that stuff to the experts and get on the goddamn team? There’s great work to be done. A message to carry. Why won’t you help us convince all those damn pinko governments in Western Europe, our so-called allies, that they’ll be irradiated ducks without Starburst?’

  ‘Starburst’s public relations are your field, General,’ I said. ‘Mine is to look for facts and make objective judgments.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ Haxler roared. ‘There are two teams. Us and Them. You’ve gotta choose sides, Railton.’

  ‘I’ve chosen my side,’ I said sharply. ‘But being a patriot doesn’t mean giving carte blanche to the defense industry.’

  I glanced at Paul and I could see he was enjoying the baiting session he had set up, especially with Haxler coming nicely to the boil. But Robert wasn’t enjoying it; he was leaning forward in his seat, frowning, watching intently.

  ‘Morton, I think we should deal with the issues in a more general way,’ Robert said finally, looking hard at Haxler.

  Haxler grunted. He was obviously irritated at being reined in, but as a military man he understood hierarchies. Paul might be the natural leader of the Sellinger pack—if Robert and Paul had been jungle rivals instead of brothers, Paul would probably have snapped Robert’s neck with a single heedless bite—but as president of the Sellinger Corporation, Robert was still the boss.

  Making an obvious effort to sound more reasonable, Haxler turned back to me.

  ‘The big problem,’ he said, ‘is that it’s very hard to farm out subcontracts for Starburst components in Europe. She’s really a homegrown baby. If we could just find a way of dividing up the cake a bit—help the European economies create a few jobs—we’d be home free, don’t you agree?’

  Even in the interests of preventing another flare-up, I couldn’t let that pass.

  ‘General Haxler,’ I said drily, ‘there are a few other objections to Starburst in Europe.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like the fact that Starburst can only function if it’s programmed by information from U.S. surveillance satellites. If it’s deployed in Europe, America still calls the shots. The European nations want some control of the system that’s defending them. Your people say that Starburst will make Western defenses more flexible than ICBMs, creating a middle ground between surrender and Armageddon. A lot of Europeans are saying that’s fine except that Europe will be the middle ground and it doesn’t make them very keen on theater nuclear weapons, especially wholly American-controlled systems like Starburst.’

  Ralph Inman leaned forward in his seat.

  ‘Tell me, Mr. Railton,’ he said in a calm, almost unnatural voice. ‘How do you feel about that personally?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean how do you feel about that as a European?’

  ‘Mr. Inman, my views are not the issue here.’ I said it with the kind of bluntness that either stops a conversation dead or flares into an argument, but Inman’s stare didn’t flicker. I knew the look well; there was no arguing with such people. He had the kind of distant gaze that parents are terrified of seeing in their children as they come home to announce that they’ve seen the light and must serve God through whatever idiotic prophet is currently holding sway in the true-believer department.

  ‘Mr. Railton, it’s not your decision whether your views are an issue,’ I
nman said. ‘Other people have to make that determination. We have to identify our critics. There are too many people gnawing at the fabric of our great country.’

  ‘Inman, do grow up,’ I said angrily. ‘You’re not talking to some thickheaded anti-gun-control lunatic.’

  ‘So just who am I talking to?’ Inman said, preparing to bear down. ‘Some kind of pacifist who wants the Russians to walk into Europe? Is that it? You’ll let them take over, then work on their better natures while they’re the occupying force?’

  I whirled on Paul.

  ‘What the hell is this? A briefing or a loyalty hearing? Call off your dogs.’

  Before Paul could answer, Robert Sellinger stood up.

  ‘Ralph, you’re getting carried away here,’ Robert said. ‘John’s a good friend of the Sellinger Corporation. If he has doubts, it’s our job to satisfy them. I think it’s time we took a break.’

  He glanced out of the cabin window.

  ‘We’re well over the testing ground. I have to communicate with the control center. Paul, I’ll need you standing by during the call. And you, Morton. Ralph, perhaps you’d like to explain the slalom system to John.’

  It was all very blatant; there was no room for subtle maneuvering in the aircraft cabin. He wanted to read the riot act to Paul and Haxler, but I still hadn’t worked out the dynamics of what was going on. Paul had brought in Haxler and Inman to do their Grand Inquisitor number to bait me, perhaps, to throw me off some scent, or even drive me away from Fort Benedict. But Paul couldn’t really believe that I would quit that easily, and why was Robert on my side? He seemed to disapprove of what was happening—and who were the rest of the nondescript group on the plane? They seemed to be some kind of jury at the inquisition, but no one was paying them any particular attention and they didn’t seem particularly subservient to the Sellingers.

  When Paul and Robert and Haxler had gone into the pilot’s cabin, ostensibly to talk to the Control Center, Inman began to explain the landscape we were flying over. He wasn’t happy about the situation. He reminded me of a Doberman who has been prevented from tearing an intruder apart and told, ‘Friend! Sit!’ Inman was sitting, because that was what he had been ordered to do, but he didn’t believe I was a friend and he assumed his masters would soon come to their senses and issue fresh instructions.