Todd immediately defended himself against the reproach. “Commander Winters, sir,” he replied, “I believe that what we have here is a major international incident, far too big to be handled by special projects and systems engineering alone. I left word on your telemail interrupt at 0830 this morning for you to contact me ASAP, that there was a significant new development in the Broken Arrow project. When I had not heard from you by 1000, even though I had tried several additional times to reach you by telephone, I became worried that we might be losing valuable time. I then contacted Ramirez so that he and his men could start their work.”
Todd stood up from his chair. “Sir,” he began again, the excitement rising in his voice, “maybe I didn’t make it clear enough in my telemail message. We have hard evidence that someone commanded the Panther to go astray, right after the APRS was activated. We have confirmed from a special manual search of the intermittent telemetry data that the command receipt counters went crazy during a two-second period just before the missile veered off course.”
“Calm down, Lieutenant Todd, and sit down again. “Winters was irritated, not just by Todd’s nonchalant dismissal of the regulations issue, but also by his undisguised accusation that Winters had been delinquent in responding to his messages. The commander’s day had begun with a meeting with the admiral who ran the air station. He had wanted a briefing on all this Broken Arrow business. So Winters had not even been in his office, except for a couple of minutes, until after he came back from the public relations department.
When Todd was again seated, Winters continued carefully, “Now spare me the hysteria and your personal conclusions. I want you to give me the facts, only the facts, slowly and without prejudice. The accusations you made a few moments ago are very very serious. In my eyes, if you have jumped to unsubstantiated conclusions too quickly, your fitness as an officer may be in doubt. So start at the beginning.”
There was a flash of anger in the lieutenant’s eyes and then he opened his notebook. When he spoke, his voice was a monotone, carefully modulated to be free of all emotion. “At precisely 0345 this morning,” he began, “I was awakened by Ensign Andrews, who had been working most of the night on the telemetry dumps that we recalled both from the Canaveral station and the tracking ship near Bimini. His assignment had been to go through the scheduled sequence of events onboard the Panther missile and determine, from the scattered telemetry if possible, if any anomalous events had occurred onboard just before the missile went off course. We thought that this way we might have a chance to isolate the cause of the problem.
“Basically Ensign Andrews was a detective As you know, the data system is quite constrained by the limited downlink bandwidth. So the packets of telemetry data come out in a somewhat artificial way, meaning that many of the data values governing the behavior of the bird at the time it changed direction would not have been sent to the Earth until several minutes later, after the missile had gone awry and the tracking stations had already dropped and regained lock a couple of times.
“Ensign Andrews showed me that in the intermittent data there were four discrete measurements taken from the command receipt counter, a simple buffer in the software that increments by one every time a new command message is correctly received by the missile. At first we did not believe what we were seeing. We thought perhaps someone had made an error or that the decommutation maps were wrong. But by 0700 we had both checked the values from the two tracking sites and verified that we were indeed looking at the correct channel. Commander, in the 1.7 seconds after the APRS was activated, the command receipt counter registered over three hundred new messages. And then the missile swerved away from its intended target.”
The commander was writing in a small spiral notebook while Todd was talking. It took him almost half a minute to finish his notes. Then he looked up at Todd and Ramirez. “Am I to believe then,” he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm, “that this is the entire data set upon which you wish to base your indictment of the Soviet Union and put our Navy intelligence community on alert? Or is there something else?”
Todd looked confused. “You think it’s more likely,” Commander Winters continued, his voice now rising, “that the Russians knew the code for the command test set and transmitted three hundred messages in less than two seconds, exactly at the right time and from somewhere off the Florida coast, than it is that somewhere in the 4.2 software system there is an error that is improperly incrementing the command receipt counter? My God, Lieutenant, use your head. Are you seeing bogeymen at night? This is 1994. There is virtually no tension on the international scene. You believe that the Russians are so colossally stupid that they would risk detente to command a Navy cruise missile off course while it is still under test? Even if they could somehow command the missile to a specific location and then recover it and understand it thoroughly by reverse engineering, why would they take such a horrendous chance for such a comparatively small return?”
Todd and Ramirez said nothing during the commander’s harangue. Ramirez was starting to look uncomfortably embarrassed toward the end. Todd’s boyish self-confidence had faded as well and he began to wring his hands and pop his knuckles absentmindedly. After a long pause Winters continued, firmly but without some of the exasperation of his initial speech.
“We assigned some specific work items yesterday, Lieutenant. They were supposed to be addressed by today. Look again at the 4.2 software, particularly to see if there were any errors in the interface with the command test set that showed up during module or integration testing. Maybe there was a bug in the command receipt counter subroutine that did not get corrected in the new release. And for the meeting this afternoon, I want you to show me a list of possible failure modes that would explain the telemetry data, other than commands being sent from a foreign power. And then show what you are planning to do to analyze each failure mode and reduce the length of the list.”
Ramirez stood up to leave. “Under the circumstances, Commander, I feel that my presence here is a little, uh, improper. I have briefed a couple of my men already and have kicked off some investigative work to see if there is now or has been recently any Russian military or civilian activity in the area. I had put a top priority on the effort. In view of this conversation, I feel I should suspend—”
“Not necessarily,” Commander Winters interrupted him. “It might be very difficult for you to explain at this juncture.” He looked at both of the squirming young lieutenants. “And it is not my wish to be vindictive and put you both on report, although I think you both acted hastily and outside regulations. No, Lieutenant, continue with the intelligence gathering, it may eventually be of some importance. Just don’t make a big deal out of it. I’ll accept the responsibility.”
Ramirez walked toward the door. He was clearly grateful. “Thank you, Commander,” he said sincerely, “for a minute there I thought maybe I had crapped in my mess kit. I’ve learned a very valuable lesson.”
Winters saluted the intelligence officer and motioned Todd, who was apparently also preparing to leave, back to his seat. The commander walked over in front of the Renoir painting and appeared to be studying it. He spoke quietly, without turning to face the junior lieutenant. “Did you say anything to that reporter Miss Dawson about a missile, or did she mention a missile to you while you were talking to her?”
“No, sir, there was nothing like that,” Todd asserted. “She was even vague when I asked her what she had heard.”