by Peter Damon
“And at that stage I come in on my white charger and claim it all for Britain, is that right?”
“Precisely,” Sir Richard chuckled.
“I see,” Brain murmured. “And you’re not going to be specific as to what this is?” he asked.
“Can’t. Not now. Not for a while. But as soon as we use it, it will begin sending waves through your and everyone else’s administration,” Sir Richard told him.
“You’re really not helping me much. I’m not sure how I’m going to help you if I don’t recognise it when I see it,” Brian told him, smiling ruefully.
“We’re going to try and use it surreptitiously to begin with. We certainly don’t want our name on it. People will find out, ultimately. By then, we hope to be in the position that no one can steal it from us.” Sir Richard explained.
“But in the mean time, do you need additional police or anything else?” Brian asked.
“Oh no, good heavens no!” Sir Richard shook his head and waved the suggestion aside. “We want to do this as quietly as possible, but at some stage, ‘quiet’ is not going to be an option, and at that stage we’re going to need the Cavalry as well as your white charger!”
“Well, alright then. I’ll watch out for this ‘Thing’, and hope when I do see it, I’ll know what to do,” Brian said, sighing as he rose. “Now, I must get off.”
Sir Richard rose too and firmly clasped his ex-student’s hand. “I appreciate your attention, Prime Minister. I know I can rely upon you to remain quiet on this.”
“I don’t know what it is, sir, so I can hardly bring in the police or the army or God knows what else,” Brian chuckled. “But I’ll keep watching.”
Sir Richard walked with him back to his car, and watched from the car park as the limousine moved silent out of the yard and disappeared around the corner. He stood in silent reflection for a few moments, savouring the stillness and his obscurity, knowing neither would last for long.
November 26th
Michael stood on the beach and wished the wind wasn’t so bitingly cold. It came directly from the North Sea, scented by it as it rushed past his face to hurl itself against the cliffs at his back.
He had left the Cambridge Chronicle business car at the top of the cliff, in a lay-by conveniently placed for those wishing to sit and watch over the sea. A well worn path led from the lay-by to the wire fence designed to stop anyone from falling off the cliff edge. It also stopped anyone from seeing the narrow beach at the bottom of the cliff. But that was only if you stopped at the fence. Michael was worried about the people for whom a fence would never be a deterrent.
Herbert Rolle stood beside him, hands deep in an old tweed overcoat while the old man scowled at the poor weather and continually tried keeping his hair in order. Michael had picked him up from Hull town centre, where Rolle had been visiting a colleague, to drive them the last few miles to the beach. It was a short distance south of Hornsea, far enough to be out of sight and beyond a casual walk. Neither of them had tried to talk in the car, both of them too full of concerns to worry the other.
The twins had driven the newly acquired van down the maintenance road to the beach, and that’s where they all stood, peering into it through the open rear doors while Thomas, or was it David, watched the monitor and sometimes typed in instructions.
To one side of them sat the payload. That was its official title; The Payload. Two cylinders large enough to have held A1 maps, attached to a large a box just short of a metre cubed, a cone that protruded half a metre was fixed to one end, some of it wrapped in gold foil and all seated firmly to a flat metal sheet some one metre square. It could only have been something destined for space.
Professor Rolle had organised this first venture. He had resurrected the experiment and obtained the students to work on it, promising credits wherever necessary so that a legitimate payload could be assembled and prepared in the short time they had available. The boys had placed in on a blanket rather than directly onto the sand, but with the wind blowing, Michael was unsure just how much use the blanket was.
“What’s happening?” he asked.
One of the twins scratched his cheek while the other peered anxiously at the monitor. “I think we’re ready,” he said.
David produced a video camera and Michael shook his head. “No. No video, no pictures, no nothing,” he told the lads, and turned to look up at the cliff top to agonise over who and what might be up there, watching them. The inadequate fence returned to the forefront of his mind, hardly a barrier to those whose job it was to trail them.
“Stop worrying, Michael,” Rolle told him.
Michael grunted. He was there to worry. That was what the professor wanted of him.
One of the twins shrugged and nodded to his brother at the monitor. The Enter key was pressed, and the thing on the blanket rose and hovered three metres above it.
“How long...,” Michael began to ask, stopping as the payload began to move towards the sea.
Its path remained horizontal as it moved away from the cliff, so while the short span of beach slopped down towards the surf, the payload appeared higher and higher, moving out beyond the surf some twenty metres above the water.
Michael lifted large binoculars to his eyes and watched the payload move further and further away, gathering speed as it went. The boys watched the monitor, tracking the payload electronically and nodding to themselves, their whispered words blown away before getting to Michael’s ears.
When Michael could no longer see it, he strode behind the boys to watch the map on the screen and the little white dot moving across it. Data scrolled down the right hand side of the monitor, all of it meaningless to the older man.
“What’s happened?” Michael asked anxiously as the dot stopped.
“Nothing. Forward motion has stopped, is all,” the professor told him, his eyes never leaving the screen. One of the twins keyed an instruction and the electronic view altered to show the vertical plane. Michael licked his lips as he saw the dot rise with ever-increasing speed from the line of the sea.
“Jesus,” he breathed, watching, mesmerized, as the dot rose to a height of ten kilometres, then twelve, fifteen, twenty, thirty, fifty. He found himself holding his breath and made the effort to breathe, his eyes never leaving the screen as it tracked the payload’s height and velocity.
“And you’re sure no one will notice it?” he asked.
The boys were used to the question and answered with a harmonious shake of their heads. They had answered that question three or four times a day for the last month as they had prepared. “Far more likely that they’ll think it a weather balloon gone wrong,” one of them told him yet again.
“You mean they can see weather balloons?” Michael asked. That had never come up in past conversations.
The professor nodded while most of his attention remained on the screen. “Yes, a new development in Radar put on-line just a couple of years ago, mainly after pressure from the CAA and FAA. Too many planes forced down after having hit the things, apparently,” the man replied.
“And even if someone does see it, we’ve angled the trajectory slightly west off north, away from anyone who really cares.”
“And it’s probably the most expensive way of putting an object into space, so very doubtful anyone will consider that as the aim,” Rolle added. “This has all been very carefully calculated,” he assured the nervous man.
“So, it’s working?” Michael asked.
The other three shook their heads. “Haven’t turned it on yet. We’ll turn on the transmitter once the package is in orbit,” he was told.
“For Christ’s sake!” he growled.
Michael wished he still smoked and calmed himself by thinking of all the places he’d not be allowed into if he did, which turned his thoughts to drink. The aggravation of knowing how little in life was actually free diverted him from his two true worries; failure, and detection. The university had provided the payload, but it was Michael’s money th
at had financed the van, the twins’ expenses and the control centre they were currently using to track and control it as it swept into space.
“Is it there yet?” he asked.
“Nearly,” he was told, and the twins returned to their whispered conversation and the occasional press of a few keys. Michael, in an urge to find something to do, retrieved the blanket from the beach and winced as it lifted sand into the wind.
The twins straightened. The Enter key was pressed one last time, and they smiled. “It’s there, it’s on, and it’s working.”
Michael found himself grinning as he looked towards Rolle. Rolle grinned back at him, a rare smile cracking his age worn features. “A whole new enterprise had just been born,” he shouted against the wind, a half bottle of champagne appearing from his overcoat pocket.
“How many other projects are there, did you say?” Michael asked as the champagne was opened and passed to the twins.
“Oh, at least fifty,” the professor chuckled. “And that’s without going out of the university market and into industry. The area where we’ll get most interest are those projects where the teams don’t want items put in orbit, but pushed out into space. None of the Powers-That-Be like those. That added fuel is just too much extra weight,” he pointed out, and passed Michael the champagne.
“I’ll phone Dr Cannon and let her know it worked,” he told Michael with a grin and a wink. Michael passed the champagne back to the twins, sorely tempted to have just a sip.
+++++++++++++++++
100 yards from the old Duxford Aerodrome stood a nondescript office block holding 155 staff on its three floors. The building had been named ‘The Big Wing’ in honour of the role Duxford had played during the Second World War, but otherwise there were no signs to indicate that it was staffed by UK Civil Service personnel working on behalf of the European Federation’s Department of Defence, what had once been the Ministry of Defence. It was European in name, but the department’s aims and immediate reporting structure was still very much British.
On the second floor, facing the old runway and through a door marked ROLID, (Resolution of Late Identification Department) sat a team of five individuals whose desks were manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Their job was to validate any sea or air movement entering the British domain that remained unknown after having been viewed by the relevant authorities in the other and more public-facing civil service departments. Air Flight Controllers tagged aircraft and, more recently, weather balloons, while the Coastguard tagged shipping.
In most cases, the tagging of items coming into the British domain was automatic; a handshake between the onboard computer of the inbound vessel and the British aviation and or coast guard systems that were already anticipating those vessels. Where an automatic handshake hadn’t been confirmed, then the relevant offices stepped in and manually contacted the vehicle to confirm their identity. In this manner, everything entering the British Domain was known and tracked, and Britain remained a safe place to live.
However, there was always the odd item appearing un-tagged, most commonly weather balloons rising from unknown locations, and it was the job of the ROLID team to ensure those last items were resolved and cleared. Clearly, any items remaining untagged had to be viewed as hostile, and the relevant authorities alerted to go out and determine just what the entry was.
ROLID walked a very cautious line when dealing with un-tagged items. It cost a lot of money to send a ship or aeroplane out to investigate un-tagged items. Therefore there was a pressure on the team to tag as much as possible. Clearly, however, they shouldn’t make the mistake of tagging absolutely anything. At the end of the day, they needed to do a risk assessment of the individual occurrence, and make an informed decision. Otherwise, what was the point of having trained individuals monitoring them in the first place?
Graham Ware was the first on watch that day. Only 19 years old and still unable to find a reason to shave more than twice a week, the young man took his responsibilities seriously. Always smart in a shirt and tie, his hair neatly groomed by his mother before he left home each day, his back unconsciously straightened whenever an untagged item remained on his screen for any more than two minutes, becoming that little bit more attentive to the display and the information it provided until the tag was completed and the item fell off the display. He was unaware of the smiles and nudges that this caused the rest of the team, but even had he known it wouldn’t have stopped him, only possibly have caused him to blush.
Truth was, the young man had thought the position in ROLID would move him on to more important tasks. As he’d told Helen as they helped the church to run their Winter Jumble Sale just the previous Saturday; there were great opportunities within the Civil Service, especially where it helped protect the nation against terrorists and the like.
His screen and attention were focused on movement off the east coast from the Thames Estuary to as far north as Newcastle, his back straightening as an item appeared, rising swiftly into the atmosphere.
Graham frowned as he watched the trace on his screen. It appeared some ten miles off the coast and was rising with increasing momentum into the sky. Its trace was similar to that expected from weather balloons, although this one was climbing much faster than the normal ones, but far too slow to have been a missile or rocket. He assumed it was a weather balloon and that something was wrong with it.
Normally he would have tagged it as a rogue weather balloon and ignored it, but he had just been looking at the meteorological report for the area, and the wind was moderate to strong, north, north-east. The supposed weather balloon was rising virtually against the wind.
He watched it for a few moments more while trying to think what else it could be. It certainly wasn’t a missile; he had been trained to recognise the signatures of all known missiles, and this was not a missile. Nor could it be an aircraft, not with that rate of climb. A rocket was another option, but again, the acceleration profile for this object was wrong, and besides, who could be launching a rocket ten miles out from the Humber Estuary?
He printed off both the weather report and the trace of the rogue object and took them through to Mr Preston’s office. Mr Preston was the Department Manager and the first point-of-call should anything untoward occur.
Paul Preston was on the phone when Graham went looking for him. Mr Preston spent most of his time on the phone, Graham had noticed. Nonetheless, feeling that his worry was warranted, Graham knocked on the door and stepped into the office.
“What is it, Ware?” Mr Preston asked, losing his friendly smile the moment Graham knocked on his door. He put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone and waited impatiently for Graham to explain the anomaly he thought he’d found.
Graham felt the need to hurry his explanation, his finger visibly trembling at it followed the trace the object had made as it rose through the air. “You see, it rises against the wind direction,” Graham said, finishing his explanation.
“Yes, yes, leave it there and I’ll look at it in a minute,” Mr Preston told him, and waited pointedly for him to leave the office before his smile returned and his telephone conversation was continued.
Poor Graham, he thought before the giggle on the other end of the phone took all his attention again. A nice lad, always on time for his shift and never trying to leave early, but always finding suspicion where there was none.
+++++++++++++++++
Just outside the town of Omaha, Nebraska is the Offutt Air Force Base, also home of the United States Strategic Command, commonly referred to as USSTRATCOM.
Among many tasks USSTRATCOM undertake, is the surveillance and reconnaissance of satellites and their debris. At Offutt, information gathered from the NASA Orbital Debris Office in Texas, and the Marshall Space Flight Centre in Alabama, is monitored for change.
Here at USSTRATCOM, a display of debris and working satellites from all nations is constantly monitored in real-time from feeds provided by various installations around the globe. Change
s, should any occur, are rapidly passed through specific information channels to the management within NASA and the Military.
Corporal Bill Hoffman was one of a small number of staff who monitored Low Earth Orbit for any changes to its geography. With so much debris in the region, changes caused by collisions needed to be brought to the attention of NASA and the military fairly rapidly. Hence Bill’s screen provided a visual representation of satellites and debris in low earth orbit and would alert him if anything changed.
The image rarely changed, and if it did, such as when a new satellite was launched, specialist software identified it and catalogued it automatically. Bill had little to do with the process. In fact, contrary to the explanation of his job he provided to his friends off base, he had nothing at all to do with the process. His one and only task was to be alert to any changes, and they would be revealed to him by a point on the screen changing to a red.
For a red dot to appear, it would have to be something new, such as a new satellite put into low orbit, but with an unknown, unauthorised launch.
Bill had always thought it funny, that their offices should be situated on Looking Glass Avenue. He was attempting to explain the humour to the new boy on the base as he came round delivering the mail, when his explanation was cut short by a red blinking dot appearing on his screen.
Bill put his coffee down to stare at it. It was the first he had ever seen, and it had no reason to be there.
The first few lines of the manual came rushing back to him; ‘If in doubt, reboot the PC’.
Bill invoked a shutdown, then pulled the power lead from the box, counted to ten, and plugged it back in again. The box wasn’t all that new, so it took several minutes to reload the software it needed to operate. The screen appeared without a blinking red light and Corporal Bill Hoffman sighed with relief. But even as the last of his sigh left him, the light reappeared.
“Oh shit!” he breathed. “Sergeant!” he cried.
Sergeant Chuck Waters, a robust man of middle years, whose chest-full of ribbon bars attested to his tours of duty in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkey, and included the Distinguished Service Medal, came over to Bill’s PC. He looked at the blinking red light and ordered Bill to reboot the PC and they both waited in silence for the process to finish. Once again, the light reappeared, flashing with an air of superiority as if to say “I told you so!”