Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 10 (28 page)

           
“Security is not just a procedure
out there, or part of the cost of doing business—it’s a way of life.”

 
          
“So
how did that Soviet spy make it in there?” Cheryl asked. “How did—?”

 
          
Jon
suddenly turned, stepped right in front of Cheryl until he was just inches from
her, and held up a finger right in front of her face. “Cheryl,” he began, his
voice quiet but deadly serious. His eyes were affixed directly on hers, and it shocked
and surprised her. “You have got to learn something right here and right now:
We don’t talk about stuff like that. No one does. Not here, not at the company,
not anywhere, not anytime, to no one.
No
one”

 
          
“It’s
no secret, Jon—”

 
          
“Cheryl,
listen. . . .”

 
          
“Jon,
I heard all about it at a bar in
Nashville
,
Tennessee
, during a space technology conference,” Cheryl Duffield said with a
nervous smile. “Why, I even heard—”

 
          
“Cheryl!”
Jon interjected—it was the
most emotion he had ever displayed in front of anyone before. “Listen, Cheryl,
you have got to learn something—security is not something to be taken lightly
around here or most anywhere in the company. To call these guys ‘sticklers’ for
security would be a gross understatement. A company that gets a reputation for
lax security gets aced out of every single contract competition—ask Northrop,
ask British Aerospace, ask any of a dozen excellent companies that had one
little breach. It doesn’t matter how good your product is— they’ll blackball
you in a heartbeat.”

 
          
He
pointed to a tiny white box on the side of a hangar several dozen yards away.
“This place is totally wired for sound—I should know, because I designed most
of the systems they use here. We are constantly being scanned for bugs,
weapons, recording devices, explosives, stolen components, tracers,
communications equipment, chemicals, microwaves—you name it.

 
          
“Every
word you or I say is recorded and electronically transcribed and analyzed, and
any keywords found in the transcript sends a security flag all the way up to
FBI, CIA, DIA, and a dozen other government and military security and
intelligence agencies in Washington for follow-up,” he went on. “You say the
word ‘Soviet,’ ‘bar,’ and ‘Nashville’ in a sentence, and in two days the FBI
will have launched an entire investigation of you, all your acquaintances, all
the circumstances surrounding your presence at that bar in Nashville, and any
other permutation of those words they can think of—and believe me, you’ll be
shocked at the shit they’ll come up with.”

           
“Jon, don’t you think you’re
exaggerating just a little?” Cheryl asked with an exasperated smile. “I’ve been
involved with some of the most sensitive and intensive security systems out
there too, and I’ve never heard of any of that stuff. And why would they be
scanning employees out here in the open for things they just got through
checking us for at the entrance? And besides ..Just then, Jon put his head down
and muttered something under his breath. “What did you say, Jon?”

 
          
Moments
later they heard,
“Hands in the air, all
of you!”
Cheryl turned and saw a soldier in strange pixilated black,
silver, and gray fatigues and helmet aiming an M-16 assault rifle at them from
the comer of a building. The strange outfit made him blend in extraordinarily
well with the buildings and the shadows at the same time.

 
          
“What
in the world are you doing? How dare you!”

 
          
“I
said,
hands in the air!”
the soldier
shouted again.

 
          
Jon
and Helen raised their hands high. Cheryl grabbed Kelsey as another soldier appeared
and aimed his weapon as well. Kelsey giggled and raised her arms too. “Cheryl,
I
strongly
advise you to do as they
say,
right now
,” Helen said. She
turned to her husband, wilted inside when she saw his “I-told-you-so” smile,
and asked perturbedly, “Jon,
what
did
you say?”

 
          
“I
said, ‘Cheryl, are those bombs under your bra there?”’

 
          
“Oh,
my God,” Helen moaned. “This is not going to be pretty.”

 
         
It
wasn’t. Three hours later, including over one hour being individually
interrogated and debriefed by security personnel and another two hours going
through the original searches, ID checks, and scans all over again—including
more of the same astounded expressions and whispered comments about the
nine-year-old, as if it was the first time they had ever seen her—the four were
right back to where they were before, walking toward the large sand-colored
Hangar 7A.

 
          
“I
don’t think that was very funny, Dr. Masters,” Cheryl finally said.

 
          
“It
wasn’t meant to be funny, Cheryl,” Jon said. “But it’s hard to impress upon
anyone how strict security is around here unless they experience it for
themselves. Besides, I’ll bet you’ve never been strip-searched before—it’ll
make you really watch your p’s and q’s from now on, not just in here but
everywhere.”

 
          
“Jon,
this is not funny. Those security people strip- searched and X-rayed my
daughter
.”

 
          
“It’s
not over, Cheryl—in fact, it’s only begun,” Jon said, his voice turning serious
again. “Your life will not be your own until what you’re about to see, and
every piece of technology associated with it in any way, has been declassified
for at least five years. And we’re only going into the Secret area—if you go
into the Top Secret or higher areas, you, your entire family, and all your
known associates will be under constant scrutiny until you all die—plus five
years. It’s the way it is from now on.”

 
          
They
entered the big hangar, submitted—more humbly this time—to yet another battery
of checks and searches, and then proceeded inside. Two dark gray military
aircraft filled the hangar; several smaller aircraft and air-launched weapons
were on the hangar floor, all closely guarded by Air Force and company security
guards, watching not only the hardware and the visitors but one another as
well.

 
          
“Here
they are, ladies—Sky Masters Inc.’s latest air combat projects, in advanced R
and D or initial deployment,” Jon said proudly. “The little ones first.” He
stepped over to the first weapon. “This is the FlightHawk, our multi-purpose
unmanned combat air vehicle. He can do anything a combat aircraft can
do—dogfighting, bombing, reconnaissance, minelaying, anything—and do it
completely autonomously.

 
          
“This
is Wolverine, smaller, faster, and much more maneuverable than FlightHawk,
primarily designed for standoff attack missions against multiple heavily
defended targets—it can outmaneuver even a Patriot missile. It has three weapon
sections where it can carry a variety of pay-loads, including thermium nitrate
explosive, developed by us, which have ten times the explosive power of TOT by
weight. It also uses imaging infrared seeker and millimeter- wave radar for
terminal guidance and reattacks. This is Anaconda, our hypersonic long-range
air-to-air missile.

 
          
“Over
there, with all the extra guards around it, is Lancelot, our air-launched
near-space weapon,” Jon went on. “It has a three-stage throttleable
solid-rocket motor that gives it a range of over three hundred miles in a
ballistic flight path or over one hundred miles in altitude in an antisatellite
attack profile. They have extra guards because of Lancelot’s warhead: It
carries the plasma-yield warhead. It’s most effective above thirty thousand
feet, which makes it a perfect antiballistic missile and antisatellite weapon,
but we can get a one-quarter- to one-half-kiloton-equivalent yield even at sea
level. At higher altitudes, the plasma field created by the explosion is
electronically selectable in both yield and size—at maximum yield it can
destroy a target twice the size of the International Space Station, and at
maximum size it can disrupt the flight path of incoming nuclear warheads spread
out over four hundred thousand cubic miles of space. The plasma field does not
just destroy a target: It converts it into a state of matter that exists in
nature for only billionths of a second—or in the center of a sun.

 
          
“All
of these weapons are designed to be carried by our combat aircraft, but they
can be fitted to be carried by just about any combat-coded aircraft—even
transport planes. You probably saw our DC-10 test aircraft outside—we can carry
up to three FlightHawks or six Wolverines on board, and we can refit just about
any cargo-category aircraft to launch them. The Lancelot, of course, has been
deployed in the Air Reserve Forces and is fielded by the One- Eleventh
Bombardment Wing, which is based here for now but will soon be based up in
Battle Mountain Air Force Base here in
Nevada
.”

 
          
He
then moved over to the first warplane. “This is one of our EB-1C Vampire
battleships. As you know, it’s a highly modified B-1B Lancer strategic bomber.
It can still carry all of the Air Force’s strategic and tactical air weapons, along
with all of our new weapons. It’s faster, stealthier, and has longer range and
greater warload than the active- duty or Reserve Forces models. It uses laser
radar arrays for targeting and terrain-following—it is fully air-to-air capable
and can even attack satellites in low-Earth orbit with Anacondas or Lancelots.
We have six modified right now out of a planned twelve-plane force, all coming
from the B-1B fleet once assigned to the Air Reserve forces.”

 
          
Kelsey
Duffield had already stepped over to the second plane—she was gently touching
it, running the very tips of her fingers across its smooth ebony surface as if
it were a skittish young colt. Watching her carefully, she noticed, was the
security guard Sandy, with Sasha the red Doberman right beside her. “This must
be Dragon,” she said. “It’s very pretty.”

 
          
“Right,
Kelsey,” Jon said proudly. “Our newest and best project—the AL-52 Dragon
airborne laser anti-ballistic missile weapon system. We modified a B-52 H-model
Stratofortress bomber to carry a zero-point-seven-five- megawatt diode-pumped
solid-state laser, along with laser radar arrays for detection and tracking. I
call it our newest system, but it’s actually been in the works for eight years.
We were part of the original competition for the Air Force’s Airborne Laser.”

 
          
“You
just lost out to Boeing, TRW, and their 747 variant,” Cheryl reminded him.

 
          
“We
didn’t ‘lose out’—Boeing just had a more aggressive marketing strategy,” Jon
said defensively. “We spent a tenth of what they did on marketing and almost
won it.”

 
          
The
new bomb doors of the AL-52 Dragon extended halfway up the side of the
fuselage, exposing the entire bomb bay and midfuselage space, and Kelsey looked
up inside the open doors. There were four large curved devices, the laser
generators, on each side of the fuselage. Forward of the generators was a large
stainless-steel container, the laser oscillator, with a large steel tube coming
from the chamber forward along the inside center of the fuselage. Behind the
laser generators were the capacitors that stored enough power to “flash” the
diodes to produce a pulse of laser light. “Beautiful,” she said in a tiny
voice. “Just beautiful. You did such a good job with those laser generators,
Jon. They’re so small, but you can get about fifty thousand kilowatts out of
each one, right?”

 
          
“That’s
right. We can push it probably to two hundred each, but we don’t have enough
generating power on board.”

           
“It looks like we can fit a few
more laser modules in there if we make smaller capacitors.”

           
Jon liked it when Kelsey said
“we”—it was that exciting to work with her. He almost hated to say anything
negative around her for fear of discouraging or distracting her—it sometimes
seemed as if she was talented enough to cure a rainy day. “Doesn’t really
matter—we just don’t have enough power on board to make a bigger laser.”

 
          
“Can’t
we put more generators on board?”