Shadowplay

by Norman Hartley

  We were flying over a flat stretch of open desert, a plain with boulder-like formations on the horizon in each direction. Inman pointed down at a metal structure that looked like a pair of radio-transmitting aerials.

  ‘One pair of pylons,’ Inman said. ‘One hundred and fifty feet apart. Like gates in a slalom. Starburst will fly through the gates like that, on a twisting, four-hundred-mile course over every kind of terrain. You’re going to see Starburst navigate those gates and find a target no bigger than a normal building.’

  I was tempted to say that Starburst must have flown the course so often it could probably find the mess hall with the guidance system switched off, but I decided against it. I would get nothing out of Inman and there was no point in bickering for the sake of it.

  Apparently the slalom gate was the first on the course, and as we had flown in a direct line from the center, we were almost at the launch area. It looked like a tiny desert township situated at a crossroads, except that the low buildings were all painted in drab military greens and grays. On the edge was a huge fenced-off parking lot, with three missile-carrying vehicles parked in a row, about fifty yards apart. I recognized Starburst immediately. The whole unit was no bigger than one of the big interstate rigs which thundered along the desert highways. The missile itself was barely thirty feet long and was fully enclosed in a rectangular, boxlike structure.

  I looked the launch area over carefully, but there was little I hadn’t already seen in publicity pictures issued by the Sellinger Corporation. For the moment, I was more interested in what was going on in the pilot’s cabin and I could see Inman was too.

  When the Sellingers reappeared, Robert was smiling his political smile, Paul looked cross, and Haxler had the neutral look of a man caught in the middle of something he couldn’t control. The plane banked gently to begin the return flight and we all took our seats again and more drinks were served.

  ‘Well what do you think?’ Haxler said, when we were all settled again.

  ‘Very impressive,’ I said. ‘It should make a spectacular test.’

  Haxler s eyes narrowed. ‘By that you mean great to watch but nothing like battle conditions?’ he said. ‘Just what the hell do you want? You want us to fire simulated Soviet missiles at it? Lay Colorado waste for your entertainment?’

  I saw Robert wince and I thought, Christ, that truce didn’t last very long.

  ‘I’m telling you this baby is ready for battle,’ Haxler said. ‘Anywhere. Any time.’

  ‘And the guidance system is secure?’ I said. I was needling him deliberately now, pinpointing the core of the Starburst controversy. Most of the guidance problems had been known about since the earliest days of the Cruise program and most experts figured that Starburst had solved them—but at a cost. In order to deal with the complexities of matching the images on featureless or confusing terrain, the TIM in the missile nose cone had become so complex that it was—the critics said— too fragile and easy to interfere with. In the early days of the Starburst program, it had been attacked as the missile that could fly faster than it could think. In response, the design team had given Starburst the capacity to slow down in flight, almost to a standstill.

  In theory, if the missile got ‘lost,’ with its radar no longer recognizing the terrain over which it was flying, the engines cut out, then a booster rocket fired to restart them once the on-board computer had made adjustments to the readings and found out where it was again. It was a brilliant system—that much was generally acknowledged—but the critics were still insisting that it had become too complicated and therefore vulnerable to Soviet counter systems which might be able to jam or disorient Starburst.

  The Europeans, who didn’t want the missile deployed anyway, had seized on this as their main reason for seeking delay. Meanwhile, the Black Eagle missile was being developed by a consortium of European countries. It was similar to Starburst in basic concept, but it had a number of extra features: it was made of lightweight plastic to increase speed and range and reduce fuel load, and it was supposed to have a guidance system that was invulnerable to all fooling devices. But in the consortium’s most optimistic forecasts, Black Eagle was five years away. If Starburst really was ready, as the Sellinger Corporation claimed, it was the obvious choice of weapon; if it wasn’t, then Black Eagle probably had a significant edge. I was inclined to favor Starburst, but I didn’t want World News used as a pawn in the Sellingers’ hard-sell campaign if there was no evidence to back up their claims.

  I’d expected my remark to provoke an outburst, but the response by my Grand Inquisitors almost caught me off my guard.

  ‘Mr. Railton,’ Inman said quietly, ‘how far do you feel the Soviets have gotten in developing countermeasures to Starburst?’

  ‘How could I possibly know that?’ I said irritably.

  ‘I’m asking you as an informed observer. The head of a great news agency. Do you believe the rumors that the Soviets are developing a jamming system that can upset the Starburst guidance system?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘But you think they could develop ways?’

  ‘Obviously they could.’

  ‘Well, how soon do you think?’ Haxler interrupted. ‘How much time before the Russkies can throw out a few signals and confuse Starburst? You must be aware of the speculation on this, being right at the heart of the news business.’

  ‘That’s an intelligence matter. Not journalism.’

  ‘Aren’t the two linked?’

  ‘No, dammit, they’re not.’

  ‘You sound angry,’ Haxler said.

  ‘Dammit, I am angry,’ I said. ‘I don’t like being interrogated.’

  Haxler smiled and put his hand on my arm. ‘There’s no need to be sensitive, Mr. Railton. You’re not being interrogated.’

  But I was. This time there was no doubt. These questions were being asked for the record. Every eye in the cabin was on me and I could almost hear the tape recorders turning.

  I decided to take the Chinese approach. If a meeting is going badly, break it off. Give the other side nothing whatever to work with; don’t let the gears mesh at all.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I have to go to the can.’

  The method was crude but effective. If I said nothing further at all, there would be nothing to twist or misinterpret, nothing the Sellingers—or anyone else—could use. It might look cowardly, but the baiting was taking a sinister turn and I needed time to discover what was going on.

  I settled down in the toilet at the rear of the cabin, determined not to emerge until the plane was landing.

  As I took a Sellinger Corporation publicity magazine from the rack, a phrase came to mind that I had seen once on a police file: ‘Subject using toilet. Interrogation interrupted.’

  5

  The Starburst test was beautiful. No other word fits. It was an aesthetic experience more than a military one and it proved very little—except that the Sellinger Corporation’s public relations people really knew their job. We were being invited to witness and applaud an exercise in technical perfection, and it wasn’t presented as reality but as a dream sequence in glorious Technicolor. The end product wasn’t a nuclear holocaust; it was a firework display of surreal, complex, beautifully directed theater.

  And we were seated as for the theater, in the dome at the top of the Missile Control Center with breathtaking views across open desert. The foreground had been cleaned of airplanes and any other distractions to the eye. There was only one focus, three thousand yards away: a dark, menacing structure in brown concrete, a mock-up of a Soviet missile silo. It was ugly and massive with huge buttresses and a roof open to the sky, like the dome of an observatory through which, we were told in Disneyland commentary, SS-36 missiles were being directed at urban complexes in Western Europe. Its only decoration—unlikely but effective—was a gigantic red hammer and sickle covering almost the whole side of the bunkerlike structure.

  As soon as you entered the Missile Center’s dome, you
were taken over by the atmosphere: the glass wall, tinted green to reduce the glare, which gave the desert an unnatural brilliance, and behind and to the sides of the rows of seats, a series of enormous television screens which would record the progress of Starburst from the launch area, around the slalom course, and onto the target.

  We were seated and given drinks and welcomed by the ringmaster of the giant electronic circus, the test director, who introduced himself as Dr. Myron Weizman and gestured toward his team of young, shirt-sleeved technicians as though inviting them to stand up at their monitoring consoles and take a bow. Our chairs were on swivels and after the introduction we were invited to turn our backs to the panoramic window and focus our attention on the first television screen. The screens were all blank but as we turned, the first one was filled with the colorful image of the little township we had flown over an hour before. It looked unchanged, except that it looked more exotic as a TV image.

  In front of me, the A group were ranged in the first three rows of seats. I presumed that some of them were, by now, very drunk, but the great glass amphitheater gave them an air of dignity and the TV coverage of the launching would show no unseemly scenes to the voters back home. Behind them were two rows of mainly military figures, including a sprinkling of women officers. I had a seat in the third section, with a group of men who I gathered were engineers and technicians serving at Fort Benedict.

  The voice of the test director came crisply over the faultless sound system. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, the red alert has been sounded. A Soviet attack is judged to be imminent. The U.S. missile commander has been ordered to make a preemptive strike against predetermined Soviet military targets. Starburst is under target orders.’

  On the screen, the little township seemed to be going about its business unaffected by the red alert. There was some traffic in the town center but no sign of any emergency and still no military activity. Then, without warning, the camera zoomed in on the parking lot and focused on a large silver truck, a refrigeration rig with the words ‘Colorado Meat Processing Plant’ stenciled along the side. There was a whirring sound, deliberately amplified by the sound system, and the roof of the truck began to rise quickly to an angle of forty-five degrees. As it tracked upward, the nose of a Starburst missile appeared, remaining parallel to the rising roof which had now taken on the appearance of a metal shield.

  ‘The missile commander is in a firing situation,’ the test director intoned. ‘Five seconds to firing. Five, four, three, two, one…’ The word ‘zero’ was lost in a dramatic hissing sound. The silver sides of the rig which had looked so solid only seconds before quivered like aluminum foil then the whole vehicle disappeared in a cloud of white smoke.

  By the time the smoke had cleared, the missile was airborne and streaking upward: a gray torpedo-shaped tube, caught by the camera in perfect silhouette against the blue sky.

  ‘Booster burnout complete,’ the test director reported.

  The tracking camera kept the missile in close-up, giving an astonishingly detailed picture of the short, stunted wings that were emerging amidships and the four tiny fins splaying out on the tail.

  ‘Stabilization ailerons in position,’ the test director said, adding in a more conversational tone, ‘Well, I guess we’re off and running. Ladies and gentlemen, the first part of the flight has been kept short in order to reduce the size of the test area. In battle conditions, Starburst can fly up to two thousand miles, powered by its turbo-fan engine—a thoroughly tested form of propulsion which does not need to be demonstrated in more than token form. For this demonstration, Starburst is assumed to be within three hundred miles of its target.’

  The second screen came alive and the test director resumed his magical incantations.

  ‘Approach guidance system activated. Acquisition confirmed. Ladies and gentlemen, that means Starburst has recognized its path to the target. Our baby knows where she is and she’s on her way home to roost.’

  Suddenly all the remaining screens came alive at once, showing different stages along the slalom course. As the missile passed from screen to screen it seemed to be growing larger, and it took me a moment to realize that this was an illusion created by the TV director’s art. At each stage, the camera had been placed closer to the point where the missile was passing, so that Starburst seemed to be growing ominously before our eyes, as we swiveled our chairs, degree by degree, mesmerized by the missile’s progress around the course. No detail had been overlooked. The backgrounds at each stage of the flight illustrated a different type of terrain and they had been designed as carefully as if each were a Starburst commercial, imprinting a lingering, fascinating image on the eye. There were no featureless tracts of scrub.

  The missile began its progress with an elegant swan dive plunging down from its simulated long-distance trajectory, then flattening out at less than two hundred feet to begin its low-level radar-evading run to the target. With the cameras tracking it, the missile twisted and turned eerily, following first a riverbed, then a canyon edge, then turning suddenly to avoid a boulder outcrop. As the terrain grew more complicated, the missile slowed and it really did look as though it were ‘pausing for thought,’ in the test director’s phrase. Then a rebooster fired and the missile sped on—its demonstration of ‘hovering’ complete—looming larger and larger until it was one screen away from the moment when it would appear in direct vision through the panoramic window.

  It was tribute to the image-makers’ art that when Starburst did finally come into direct view, the illusion was so gripping that the panoramic window seemed to have been transformed into a gigantic television screen. There was an amplified whine which set nerves twanging in my spine, then a flash and a roar, and a split second later the familiar red cloud began to billow skyward in chilling mushroom shape.

  The effect was awesome: a vast fiery column which seemed about to burst open and engulf the whole of the desert beneath. Like the rest of the audience, I was hypnotized by it, then the applause began, at first a ripple from the technicians close to me, then quickly taken up by the rest of the amphitheater. People rose in their seats and someone cheered, then—with no sign that it had been rehearsed—the technicians started to sing ‘God Bless America.’ I watched, fascinated, as the dignitaries joined in group by group, until half the audience was standing stiffly, as if saluting the ever-growing mushroom cloud in the desert.

  I felt a tap at my elbow and I turned, irritated at being distracted from this extraordinary moment.

  It was a young hard-faced man in civilian clothes, wearing on his lapel a large identification tag bearing a color photograph.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Haig, sir, Base Security. I’d like you to accompany me please.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘not now. I want to watch the end of the firing.’

  The man edged closer and said in a quiet but determined voice, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Railton, I have to insist. I’ve instructions that unless you agree to accompany me, I am to place you under arrest.’

  6

  I was taken to a small rear elevator and the journey down the tower was like a personal descent into hell. It began in the brilliant bowl of light of the observation dome and ended five minutes later in a dingy corridor at least three levels below the ground. I tried to argue with my escort, but his eyes simply glazed over with an ‘only obeying orders’ look. I didn’t have a single friend or ally in the dome and I knew they wouldn’t let me call Cox. Two other obvious security men were hovering close by and there was no doubt I was going to end up in the elevator. If I went kicking and screaming, it could hardly help my standing as chief executive of World News. Sellinger would be counting on that. I had no doubt at all that he was behind whatever was going on. This might be a U.S. military base, but it was Sellinger country and it wasn’t reassuring that the Family could manipulate military security to do their bidding. No doubt the ‘misunderstanding’ would be cleared up later when the Sellingers had gotten enough mileage out of my ‘arrest.�
�� For the moment, I could only bide my time and, as consolation, I spent the ride down in the elevator rehearsing some of the more brutal military police tricks I could use against the fragile parts of Paul’s body.

  When we reached the sub-sub-subbasement level, I made another try at protesting, bringing in every threat I could think of that might possibly redound on the young soldier’s career.

  He let me finish, then he said, ‘Mr. Railton, I was told that if you continued to protest, I was to tell you to ‘think of it as going to the OK Corral.’ I presume that means something to you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it does.’

  The words changed everything. If the man who had sent me that message was involved, then there was a lot more to this than psychological warfare by Paul Sellinger. The soldier saw my change of mood, but realized that I wasn’t going to tell him what the message meant and led me down the corridor to a brown metal door. Inside, it looked like a maintenance men’s restroom. There were a long metal table, some canvas chairs, a line of pegs with overalls hanging on them, and a large coffee-vending machine with a sticker pasted across it on which someone had scrawled, ‘This machine is in its nonfunctional mode again.’

  The officer stood uneasily by the door, watching as I walked around inspecting the room, then, as the door opened again, he almost knocked over a chair as he came to attention, snapping his neck so far back that he was looking right over the head of the man who came into the room.

  Bob Ryder nodded at him. ‘At ease, soldier. That’s okay. You can leave us.’ I smiled. I couldn’t help it. Bob Ryder was such an unlikely figure of awe. He was small, slightly built, and walked with a pronounced limp. Now that he was the CIA’s deputy director of operations, young agents usually assumed that he had acquired the limp during one of his many covert operations and that his spare frame concealed vast reserves of strength. But I had known him since we were both no older than the kid who had just left; I knew the limp came from childhood polio and that Ryder was exactly the kind of non-physical intellectual he looked.