Skydancer (7 page)

Scalding his mouth on coffee sipped too eagerly, he hurriedly scanned the rest of the paper, but found no other reference to the story.

The admiral was acutely concerned to know more, remembering that HMS
Retribution
was now approaching the final proving trials of the new Skydancer warheads. Rising from the table, he strode to his study to telephone the First Sea Lord at his official residence in Admiralty Arch overlooking the Mall.

‘Good morning, First,' the C-in-C began. ‘I hope I'm not disturbing your breakfast.'

‘Don't worry,' Admiral Baker replied. ‘Had my breakfast ages ago. Been up for hours. Got a morning call from Marcus Beckett at six o'clock. I suppose you're ringing about the same thing.'

‘The story in the
Express
– I assume you've seen it?'

‘Certainly have!' Admiral Baker confirmed. ‘The PM is calling a crisis meeting at 9.30, so it looks serious. Whatever you do, don't let them go ahead with that test until you've found out how bad things are.'

The Royal Navy was extremely proud of its role as keeper of the British Strategic nuclear deterrent. If the weapon's secret new ability to penetrate the strengthened Soviet defences had been lost to the Russians, it could be like cutting off Samson's hair, the two admirals agreed. If that happened, the damaging effect on the Navy's status could be dramatic.

Precisely at half-past nine, eight men sat themselves down at the table in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. The angriest of them was Michael Hawke, the Secretary of State for Defence, who was clearly furious
that his most senior civil servant had failed to inform him of such a monumental security breach. Hawke had entered politics late in life, and was fiercely ambitious. The fact that the Prime Minister had learned of this security leak before he had would not look good on his record.

The most unhappy man at the table was the Permanent Undersecretary himself, whose efforts to keep the politicians out of the investigation had failed so dismally.

They all stood up as the Prime Minister stormed in. It was the sort of formality he expected in his efforts to show that he was as tough and domineering as the woman who had preceded him in office.

Sir Richard Sproat, Director of MI5, was the first to be called on. Conscious of heading an organisation for which he was still struggling to regain public confidence, he looked uncomfortable as he admitted their investigations had made little progress.

‘We have learned one thing,' he assured the meeting. ‘The
Daily Express
got their story from some anonymous caller with a well-spoken voice. An English voice at that. He rang their defence correspondent. The quotes from General Twining were then elicited by a newspaper reporter posing on the telephone as someone from the Defence Ministry seeking clarification on precisely where the document had been found. The general was most indignant to find himself quoted all over the
Express
this morning, and he is demanding that the Government refer the matter to the Press Council.'

Most of those sitting around the table had felt themselves to be victims of the media at some stage in their careers, and there was a murmur of agreement.

‘It's still far from clear what this security leak amounts to,' Sproat continued. ‘Some or all of the plans
for the new Polaris warheads have apparently been photocopied, and one page has mysteriously found its way in a Defence Ministry folder to a rubbish bin on Hampstead Heath. Now this may well have been a dead-letter box, and the handover to some foreign power may have been aborted by the tramp – we haven't traced him yet, by the way – and by the general taking his morning constitutional. We don't know that for sure – but there could well be some other explanation, too. We're putting out feelers both here and abroad to discover if the Soviets are really behind it, and whether or not they've already received other pages from the blueprint.'

‘The point is this,' the Prime Minister broke in, aggravated by the lack of firm information, ‘we
have
to assume the Russians have acquired the papers – all of them. It's simply not safe to assume anything else. And we've got to make plans to counter whatever advantage the Soviets might now have over us.'

The PM turned to study the faces of the other men present. The Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary were there from his Government, joined by the head of MI6, the First Sea Lord, and the Chief of the Defence Staff. None of them, though, was fully qualified to assess exactly what was at risk in this affair.

‘It's time to call in that chap we've got waiting outside,' the PM then announced. ‘Would you mind, Marcus?'

Beckett crossed the room to the door and called down the corridor, ‘Would you come in now, Mr Joyce?'

As he entered the room, Peter Joyce noticed a look combining both expectation and hostility on the faces of the various politicians. He knew they needed him to tell them precisely what was what – since they were
ignorant of the technology – but that they resented the power that his knowledge now gave him. He quietly took the spare chair that Beckett gestured him towards.

‘Now then, Mr Joyce,' the Prime Minister continued, ‘we need your technical expertise so that we can judge the seriousness of this affair. Would you be so good as to explain, in the simplest terms possible, just what the stolen plans revealed. And please remember that most of us in this room are laymen when it comes to the business of ballistic missiles.'

Peter stood up so that he could get a clearer view of the nine other men around the table. He looked from one face to the next, to see who he recognised. Despite what the PM had just said, four of the men were from the Defence Ministry, so had already been briefed on the project. The security men were the only ones unfamiliar to him.

‘Well, gentlemen, as you know, the document found on Parliament Hill was part of the secret plans for Skydancer,' he began. ‘Perhaps the first thing I should do is remind you why Skydancer was set up to start with. About five years ago, the Soviet Union began to spend a great deal of extra money on Ballistic Missile Defence – literally defences against incoming ballistic missiles. The Americans had already launched their own BMD programme, the Strategic Defence Initiative, the one the media called Star Wars, and, as you will remember, the 1972 ABM treaty between the two countries, which had limited BMD systems, rather fell by the wayside as a result of the technical advances being made.

‘We in Britain were faced with a dilemma. We were investing ten billion pounds in the Trident system to replace Polaris, but suddenly faced the danger that the new Soviet Defences might make Trident obsolete early
in the next century, only giving us a few years use of it as an invulnerable deterrent. As a nation, Britain cannot really afford defences against Russian missiles, so not only could we not defend ourselves against nuclear attack; we soon wouldn't have been able to deter one either.

‘Well, faced with all this, the Government, as you remember, took a crucial three-pronged decision. The first factor was to cancel Trident as being a waste of money. The second was to launch a new investigation into what form of nuclear deterrence might still be feasible in the twenty-first century. And the third – and this is where I came in – was to instruct Aldermaston to make further modifications to the old Polaris missiles to enable them to penetrate Soviet defences for the next decade or so. And to do that as cheaply as possible.'

Michael Hawke glanced at his ministerial colleagues and winced, knowing full well that Skydancer had been anything but cheap. The expenditure of hundreds of millions of pounds on the project had been the source of constant complaint from other ministers in the Cabinet.

‘So we set up the Skydancer programme,' Joyce continued firmly, ‘to design and build a new front end for the Polaris rockets, which would be clever enough to get through the Russian defences.'

‘I think we all know the history bit, Mr Joyce,' the Prime Minister interjected impatiently. ‘Perhaps you would get to the point now. What we want to know is how much of the project may have been compromised.'

Peter turned to the PM and nodded. He smoothed back his hair and continued.

‘Very well, then. The Russian defences consist of a mixture of technologies, both missiles and high-powered lasers. The key to those defences lies not in the weapons themselves, but in the radar and
electro-optical detection systems used to spot the incoming missile warheads, and to track them accurately so that the defending weapons can attack them. Our task with Skydancer was to devise new gadgets that would deceive, blind or mislead those Russian detection systems.'

He paused to scan the faces of his audience, to see if they were still following him.

‘Skydancer itself is what we call a “space-bus”, something that sits on the front end of the missile and separates from the rocket part after it's been launched from the submarine and gets outside the earth's atmosphere. This “bus” can manoeuvre in space and change course in a way which makes its future path difficult for observers on the ground to predict, hence its name “Skydancer”.

‘Now, into that “bus” fit the re-entry vehicles, the six objects that will eventually plummet down from space towards the target on the ground. Some of those RVs are warheads with nuclear bombs inside them, but the others carry an assortment of electronic and mechanical devices designed to help make the warheads themselves “invisible” to the scanners on the ground. Once released from the space-bus, those re-entry vehicles are in free fall; they just drop straight down. So, as you can imagine, the accuracy of the weapon depends entirely on the position and attitude of the space-bus when the RVs are ejected from it. And the plans that seem to have been stolen describe with mathematical precision the pattern for the ejection of those RVs.'

He paused there and waited to see if there were any questions.

It was the Home Secretary who was the first to speak. He harboured a deep suspicion of scientists in the defence industries, always suspecting them of inventing
new problems in an effort to suck more money out of the public purse for their projects. He half suspected the Aldermaston men of setting up this whole spy scare for their own ends.

‘Are you trying to tell us, Mr Joyce,' he whined sarcastically, ‘that all these clever inventions of yours have suddenly become worthless – if the Russians have learned how your bus scatters its goodies over the earth?' He glared at the scientist with the icy stare he had perfected during years of withering interrogation of civil servants.

‘No, I'm not saying that, Home Secretary,' Peter Joyce replied. ‘It's not that easy. The problem is this. Suppose one of our missiles is fired at Moscow; the observers manning the Soviet defences round the city would see four objects falling very rapidly out of the sky towards them. Only there wouldn't be four objects, in fact. There would be six, but two would be invisible, do you follow? So the Russians would most probably attack those four “warheads” and destroy them; but seconds later the two real bombs would have detonated and flattened most of Moscow.'

The Home Secretary's brow knitted in a frown.

‘So,' Joyce continued, ‘if the Russians know how many objects they should be seeing, and know the exact pattern in which they started their journey downwards from space, they might just be able to do some very clever calculations. With a high-powered computer they could feed in the positions and the trajectories of the objects they
can
see, and calculate the exact positions of the ones they
can't
.'

He could sense that his message had struck home painfully.

‘And if they can calculate where the bombs are, they can shoot them down even if they can't actually see them?' the Prime Minister asked incredulously.

Peter Joyce nodded uncomfortably. ‘It
is
possible, Prime Minister,' he conceded.

‘Good God!' the First Sea Lord muttered under his breath. Admiral Barker had a sudden vision of his prized new weapon, designed to keep the Royal Navy's proudly-held nuclear deterrent viable, being humiliatingly still-born.

‘And if the Russians believe they can defeat our nuclear deterrent,' the Prime Minister continued, still thinking through the implications of what he had been told, ‘then it won't be a deterrent any more. It won't stop them launching a nuclear attack on us if they feel like it.'

‘And it'll be a complete waste of hundreds of millions of pounds of tax-payers' money,' the Home Secretary grunted. The political implications of that would not be lost on the Prime Minister.

‘Now, look here,' intervened Field-Marshal Buxton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, annoyed at the panic around the table and the paranoia of his naval subordinate, who appeared to fear most the loss of a role and the consequent diminution of his own service. ‘You're assuming one hell of a lot from the Russians, Mr Joyce. If they did decide to develop a counter to Skydancer, it would cost them a packet, wouldn't it?'

‘Well, it wouldn't be cheap,' Peter conceded.

‘And they're already up to their eyes in financial problems, building the BMD system to defend against the older missiles, so they'd have to be pretty certain they could beat our new warheads before they decided to spend the money on it.'

‘You could be right,' the scientist nodded.

‘So, what are you saying, Field-Marshal?' the Prime Minister interjected. ‘You think we should forget all about it?'

‘Certainly not, Prime Minister. What I'm saying is
that the Russians would need to be convinced that the Skydancer plans they have, if they have them at all, are the right ones. Before they pour money into new computer systems, they'd need to be certain that the problem the computer is intended to solve is the right problem, if you get me.'