Fade Out (3 page)

‘Pull in the best men, Arnold. Get whoever you need.'

‘And let's hope they come up with something,' growled Wills. ‘We don't want to get caught in this kind of mess again.'

Wedderkind felt honour bound to defend the cause of science. ‘If we are, the one thing you
can
be sure of is that the Russians will be in big trouble too.'

‘Arnold,' said Wills, ‘don't ever confuse Russian scientists with Russian soldiers. They can still fight without all this electronic shit. And if they ever run out of guns and ammunition, they'll try to beat us to death with their mess tins. Take it from me, Arnold, we're the ones who need the radar.'

‘Point taken,' said the President, perversely pleased to see his trusty friend put down. ‘Looks like the ball's in your court, Arnold.'

It was indeed. Wedderkind didn't say anything, but a sharp increase in his blink rate signalled a direct hit.

After the others had gone, Connors poured out two cups of coffee. Both he and the President were on artificial sweeteners. Connors had gone off sugar after reading somewhere that it was destroying his brain cells.

The President was back behind his heavy blue leather-topped desk. He had swung his chair around to gaze out of the window.

‘Would you like a roll with it?'

‘No.'

Connors put the coffee down on the desk. ‘I like Wills. He knows where it's at.'

‘Yes, he's a good man. It's Garrison that gets me. The Navy ought to ship him out.'

‘He's okay. You just didn't have time for him today.'
Connors' support for Garrison stemmed from the fact that he too had briefly been a sailor. He had interrupted his college education to join the Navy as a trainee carrier pilot during the Vietnam War. The day he'd soloed at San Diego, they had begun air-lifting people off the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon.

In the long term, it had been a good career move but in the short term it had proved a social disaster. Resuming his studies at UCLA, Connors discovered that vets from 'Nam and would-be heroes like himself were as welcome as dog-turds on the living-room carpet. Patriotism was a dirty word, draftcard burners were the new elite. It had taken a good ten years for the scars to heal, for the dead to be honoured, for the survivors to walk tall again and for the flag to be carried aloft with pride.

The President, who had seen action as a pilot in the Pacific, had ended up as a full colonel in the California Air National Guard. On bad days in the State Department, Connors and the President were referred to as Snoopy and the Red Baron. The practice had spread to Mel Fraser and his cronies in the Department of Defense. Oddly enough, although flying was about the only thing the two men had in common, it was something they had never discussed.

‘Bob – '

‘Yes?'

‘Do you think the Russians could be putting something over on us?'

‘No.' They can't be, thought Connors. Not after all the hard work we've put in.

The President swung his chair away from the window. ‘I hope Arnold and Chuck are right about where this interference is coming from. But what the hell do we do if it happens again? The next time, the radar may be knocked out for hours, not minutes.' The President shook
his head. ‘And how do we know this isn't the beginning of some major change in the earth's environment?'

We don't, thought Connors.

The President stood up. ‘It's incredible. The whole of our defence system depends on radar. If that doesn't work, nothing works. We have no early warning, we can't track hostile aeroplanes or missiles or compute interception courses. Our own ground-to-air and air-to-air missiles can't lock on to their targets, our ships and planes can't find their way around – '

‘Oh, hold on. We have plenty of planes and missiles fitted with inertial guidance systems. And there's always astronavigation.'

‘Yes, and in daytime, they can always fly along the railroad tracks. Come on, Bob. You know what I mean. What are we going to do if it
is
the Russians?'

The Russians. Always the Russians… ‘The first thing we have to do is stay loose,' said Connors.

The President waved his hand impatiently. ‘Just give it to me without the bullshit.'

‘It's not the Russians. Don't ask me why. I don't have any proof. I just know it isn't them. Call it a gut reaction if you like.'

‘Okay. What happens if Fraser – '

‘If Fraser finds something, ask me again.'

‘If he does, I may not bother.'

Connors shrugged. ‘Everybody's allowed one mistake.'

‘Not about something like this.'

‘You're the boss.' As he said it, Connors thought, If the Russians have cracked us wide open then we'll all be out of a job…

The President sank back deep in his chair and pressed his lips together. ‘Do you think I still ought to go to Houston?'

‘Yes. Everybody's expecting you. If you don't turn up, people will start to worry.'

‘I think we were right to keep the alert secret, don't you?'

‘Hell, yes,' said Connors. ‘With what happened to the airlines yesterday, the papers have got enough to chew on for one weekend. The press statements we're putting out will all play up the solar-flare angle until we can come up with something better. The vital thing is to keep the Russians out of it.'

‘Yeah…' The President closed his eyes, massaged the bridge of his nose for a few seconds, then looked up at Connors. ‘Okay, we'll go to Houston.'

‘Good.' Connors checked his watch. ‘If we leave in – let's say half an hour, we can still make Houston in time for your lunch date. Then we can go on to Dallas for dinner. Sunday as planned, the Western White House. We can have some of the boys take pictures of you hooking a sailfish out of the Pacific. Monday morning, back here. Check with Clayson and Arnold to find out how far their boys got over the weekend. How does it sound?'

‘Fine. Call Marion and have her tell my wife that the trip is on.'

Marion Wilson was the President's private secretary.

‘She knows,' said Connors. ‘She's all packed and ready to go.' He tried hard not to smile but his mouth gave way at the edges. ‘We, ah… both kind of guessed what your decision would be.'

‘In that case,' said the President, ‘we'd better not keep her waiting.'

Connors ignored the deadpan look. It was one of several they had rehearsed to help the President deal with difficult interviewers on face-to-face TV shows.

Despite the fact that the big Sikorsky helicopter was as safe as human ingenuity could make it, Anne, the President's wife, hated every minute of the short trip to Andrews Air Force Base. She preferred, as she put it, ‘things with wings on'.

Connors watched the brief moment of almost fussy attentiveness the President accorded his wife. One could almost believe they were still in love with each other. It was an idea that hadn't really occurred to Connors before.

Safe aboard Air Force One and climbing skyward, the First Lady relaxed while her husband went back to work. The Secretary of the Treasury and the Congressional Party Leader had joined the Presidential party at Andrews Field and most of the inflight time was spent putting the finishing touches to a fiscal aid package designed to rescue the newly impoverished Texas oil barons, many of whom were down to their last Learjet.

At his lunch with Houston businessmen and industrialists, the President vigorously outlined his plans for a renewed effort to insulate America from the destabilizing effects of the latest round in the price/production war between the member states of the crumbling OPEC oil cartel. Judging by the applause, it seemed to be what everyone wanted to hear.

The dinner in Dallas was a fund-raising affair. Texas was a state the President wanted to win over. Connors watched him at work among the Party faithful, cheerful, smiling, attentive, handshaking, backslapping, shouldergripping. The man was great on body contact. An ear and a word for everyone, and great on names too. There was nothing more wonderful than to feel insignificant and then find your presence acknowledged, your face recognized, your name remembered.

At 22:30, the Presidential jet lifted off the runway at Love Field and headed westward for the seventeen-hundred-mile run to Hamilton AFB just north of San Francisco. Up front, over the Rockies, the sky was a deep purple. The setting sun had got a head start, but with an air speed of over six hundred miles an hour, they would be chasing it all the way to the coast.

In the staterooms, most of the staff were dozing. Jerry Silvermann, the White House Press Secretary, had a small card game going at one of the tables. The President's wife was lying down in their private suite. Connors went through to see the President. He found him slumped back in a window seat, his chin cupped in one hand. He had taken off his shoes and dimmed the cabin lights. A wad of briefing papers lay pushed aside on the table in front of him.

‘Everything okay?'

‘Yes, fine…' The President turned his attention back to the darkness outside the window. Connors carefully chose an armchair that was not too close and sat down. He yawned silently, stretched a little and loosened his tie. Beyond and below the starboard wingtip, Las Vegas glittered diamond-bright against the black sand.

In the three years he had spent working his way upstream to his present position, Connors had become finely attuned to the President's abrupt shifts of mood. Connors was devious enough to appreciate the intricate structure and infinite variability of their relationship. He knew just when to be dominant, subservient, reassuring, knowledgeable, or blandly innocent. Now was a time for being near and saying nothing. Connors found himself wondering yet again if he had really finagled himself into the job or whether, in fact, the President had masterminded him into accepting it.

We all have a death wish, he thought. If we hadn't, I
wouldn't be where I am, and you wouldn't be thinking of running for a second term.

Situated some twenty miles south of Manchester, Jodrell Bank is the home of what was, at one time, the world's largest fully-steerable radio telescope. Operated by a research team that had pioneered many of the present techniques in radio astronomy, the 250-foot-diameter Mark One ‘Big Dish' stands surrounded by rich farmland, studded with oak trees and grazing cattle.

Jodrell Bank began operations in 1957, contributing valuable research data to the first co-ordinated global research program – the first Geophysical Year. Soon afterward, the original installation was augmented with a 125-foot-long oval Mark Two dish. Mark Three, a smaller, circular dish, took over the job of tracking satellites.

Following the Friday fade-out, which had hit England in the early evening, the team on the big Mark One dish decided to run a quick calibration test to check out the installation on Saturday morning.

The test consisted of bouncing pulsed radar signals off the surface of the moon and checking the measurements obtained against previously recorded data. To the team's surprise, in the middle of the test transmission, one of the pulses bounced off something much nearer.

As one of the contributing sensor stations to the United States Air Force's SPACETRACK program, Jodrell Bank had a current catalogue of all manmade objects in space. The SPACETRACK centre in Colorado also supplied them with a constantly updated Look Angle List, which gave each station the exact position of all known objects in space in relation to their own ground location.

The Mark One team fed the co-ordinates of the mystery object into the computer for comparison with all currently listed items. The co-ordinates didn't match up with anything on the list. That meant it was new – and worth watching. The movement of the radio telescope was also controlled by the computer. New instructions were hurriedly keyed in and, as the Earth rotated, it kept the big dish pointed towards the same spot in the sky.

Four hours after the first unexpected blip, another radar pulse bounced back. The signal was as fuzzy as the first, but to Jodrell Bank it was a clear indication that something was orbiting the Earth once every four hours. From the two observations they were able to arrive at an approximation of its size and its height above the Earth.

Alerted by Jodrell Bank, a satellite tracking station in Carnarvon, Western Australia, pointed its radar antennae skyward. In Australia, it was already Sunday. After several hours' search, they picked up Jodrell Bank's target and were able to establish its speed, height, and plane of orbit.

Carnarvon transmitted its data by teleprinter to England where it was processed by Jodrell Bank's computer. By five o'clock on Sunday afternoon, the Mark Three dish was skin-tracking the spacecraft. A new printout from the computer showed that it had been launched into a perfect circular orbit.

The acquisition of the spacecraft coincided with the arrival of Jodrell Bank's director, Dr Geoffrey Cargill, at his home in the nearby village of Twemlow Green. Cargill had been in Russia attending a scientific symposium at the Moscow Academy of Sciences. One of the unscheduled items on the agenda had been some lively theorizing about Friday's twenty-minute radar fade-out. Cargill had got his luggage as far as the hall when his deputy director phoned and told him the news. Cargill abandoned the
cucumber sandwiches and tea his housekeeper had prepared and took three minutes off his previous best door-to-door time.

While he had been in Moscow, Cargill had pumped his Russian colleagues for details of their forthcoming space program. As usual, the Russians had sidestepped his questions. All he'd managed to cull were vague generalizations about some of their long-range research objectives. It was infuriating. There was absolutely no need for the blighters to be so damned cagey. Admittedly Jodrell Bank had close links with the American space program, but the place was still British, thank God. The chaps in Moscow obviously thought he was working for the CIA.