SAGE had been created at such immense cost and effort to enable NORAD to command the skies over North America.
At the touch of a button interceptors and missiles could be brought to readiness, launched, and vectored manually or automatically, or via Buck Rogers’s type electronic uplinks directly to aircraft or formations in the field. Air raid warnings could be ordered or cancelled, the vast aerial battlefield intricately managed at ranges of hundreds and thousands of miles. Every air defence sensor and fighting asset available to either the United States or to the Canadian Government was at the finger tips of the men in the NORAD Air Direction Control Room in this single shallow bunker located in the Knob Hill district of Pasadena, Colorado Springs.
However, all was not what it seemed.
Given the gargantuan outlay of national treasure and the priority re-direction of a huge proportion of the United States of America’s intellectual capital to SAGE over a period of well over a decade, a reasonable person might reasonably have entertained with a high level of confidence, that Americans ought to have been able to sleep soundly in their beds that night.
While day by day the crisis over Cuba ratcheted up Strategic Air Command had been at DEFCON 2, Codename ‘FAST PACE’ at six hours notice to deploy and engage the enemy for the last five days.
NORAD had been on a war footing, ready to go to DEFCON 1, ‘COCKED PISTOL’ for over a hundred straight hours.
And then the signal had come through to NORAD like a bolt of lightning.
WAR!
The uplink to Offutt Air Force Base, the Headquarters of Strategic Air Command, near Omaha, Nebraska, was automatically updating NORAD plots, likewise updating the tactical inputs and outputs from the network of ADCs, and fighter and missile bases from Alaska to Florida.
Carl Drinkwater glanced periodically at the central wall projection.
SAGE was undoubtedly the greatest technological marvel of the age; the one unfortunate fly in the ointment was that SAGE was a magnificent technological solution to a pre-space age problem.
And unfortunately it did not actually work.
Having struggled for years to reliably differentiate airborne threats from flocks of migrating geese and other infuriatingly intractable obstacles to its supposed perfection, like thunder clouds, poorly regulated civilian air traffic and myriads of buggy SAGE software generated ‘ghosts’, very soon now everybody in the whole World would know what insiders had known for years.
The moment of truth — that dreadful moment when they had all realised that SAGE was a comprehensively ‘busted flush’ — had been just over five years ago when the Soviets had put a satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit. Even had SAGE been everything its designers and promoters claimed it to be — which it was not — after that day anybody who pretended NORAD could guarantee that American citizens could, or would ever sleep safely in their beds again, was either a fool or a charlatan, in denial, a senior executive of an American computer corporation, or a spokesman for the US Air Force. It was not as if the people ‘in the know’ had not expected that the day would inevitably arrive when the battle for space would begin in earnest. In war the high ground was, is and always will be everything and no ground is higher than space. In retrospect only the politicians had honestly believed that they could buy real safety with billions of dollars of other people’s money; and nobody in the Air Force or in the boardrooms of corporate America had wanted to be the first to admit that SAGE had no clothes.
Carl Drinkwater sometimes felt he ought to feel a little ashamed of his part in burning through the Government’s limitless stream of ‘free money’. But that would have been dishonest on several levels. Back in the fifties they had all genuinely believed that NORAD, underpinned by SAGE, would probably safeguard the American people at least until the mid-1960s. The CIA ought to have known the Soviets were marching ahead in the space race, and besides, just because the party was over it did not mean that he did not have enormously happy memories of the decade long Mardi Gras.
It had been a Helluva ride!
SAGE and its client, NORAD, were technological achievements without compare that had launched the American computer and electronics industry to a position of total commercial global dominance. For a short period it had also promised to protect the continent from all airborne evil. But that day was gone and the pre-eminence of the United States of America’s high technology was about to count for precisely nothing in the brave new World in which the survivors of the cataclysm would awaken to in the morning.
If NORAD survived long enough it would almost certainly shoot down anything that flew into its airspace; except, that was, the incoming Soviet inter-continental ballistic missiles which had just appeared on the master plot.
Nothing could shoot down the Soviet ICBMs tracking down across the Arctic and the frozen wilderness of northern Canada, remorselessly falling towards the United States borderlands with Canada in unstoppable hypersonic sub-orbital trajectories.
One had already come down somewhere east of Vancouver.
One had hit in the Seattle area.
More were falling towards Chicago, Nebraska, and New England.
It was no swarm of missiles; the Soviets had obviously been caught relatively unprepared. The enemy was retaliating as best he could, launching a counter-strike through the nightmare firestorm that must by now be consuming his heartlands.
New tracks appeared on the plot; two tracks terminating somewhere in Washington State, and another pair…
A loud bell rang.
“Now hear this! Now hear this! Initial telemetry indicates that we have two incoming tracks targeting THIS area!”
Chapter 4
Sam Brenckmann had not objected when Judy had done her best to meld with him beneath the table in the corner of the bar. Her hair smelled good; so good that it had almost, but not quite taken his mind off being terrified until he remembered exactly what the warning sirens meant and what the flash of the distant air burst that had turned night into day inside a building tens of miles away signified.