“Nothing like it, Bert.”
Embry pushed off for an intercom station, to order his assistant to start moving pylons and missiles from the storage lockers, and Shalbot began to remove the access panel to the right outboard hard point. Each hard point had a number of alternative electronic hookups, depending on which pylon, and which pod was to be utilized.
McKenna had selected the longer pylon for the missiles in order to have room for the thirteen-foot-long, fifteen-inch-diameter Phoenix, as well as the nine-foot-long Sidewinder and the shorter Wasps. On the shorter pylon, they could mount the gun pod, four Wasp, three Sidewinder, or two Phoenix missiles.
It was, as far as McKenna was concerned, the minimal ordnance load. Despite the heat shielding on the modified missiles, some did not survive the temperatures of reentry. On average, they lost 12 percent of their missiles to heat-caused malfunction. So far, they had never had one of the 20-millimeter M61 rotating barrel guns fail. But McKenna had been in the air force for too many years. He knew there was a first time for everything.
“Colonel McKenna,” the PA blared. “Colonel McKenna, please report to the Command Center.”
“You set that up, didn’t you, Colonel?” Shalbot called to him.
“Set up what, Benny?”
“Get yourself paged, just when the work is supposed to start.”
“Damned right.” McKenna grinned at him.
It took him four minutes to make the passage, and he found Overton, Pearson, and Sgt. Donna Amber waiting for him, gathered around the primary console below the port.
Amy Pearson had one of his reconnaissance photographs up on the main screen.
“Damn. I’m a pretty good photographer,” McKenna said. “The best I know, in fact.”
Amber smiled at him.
Pearson said, “The photos are okay.”
“Just okay?”
“They’ll do. This is the close-up of well number twenty-three. In configuration and dimension, it matches all of the others. The offshore units, of course, are on somewhat triangular platforms with three protruding leg mounts. The ice-based units have a similar, though smaller, subplatform, and they are also fitted with three short legs. That allows them to adjust for irregularities in the terrain.”
McKenna saw that the platform was actually several feet above the ice, rather than placed directly on it. The one platform leg that was clearly visible in the picture appeared to have a spade-footed base that dug into the ice.
“We used the helicopter on well number twenty as a dimension reference,” Pearson said. “It was an MBB B0105, marked for the navy, and it has thirty-two-foot rotors. The helicopter pad is seventy-five feet by seventy-five feet. They could actually get three or four choppers on it with a little juggling.
“On the ice is a twenty-by-twenty shed, which I am assuming contains equipment, storage, and perhaps a couple of tracked vehicles. Except for the leg-adjustment motors and several antennas on top of the dome, all equipment is contained within the dome. The dome has a two hundred and twenty-foot diameter.”
Which was close to what McKenna had guessed. “Is that tall enough for a drilling rig, Amy?”
She nodded. “More than enough. I’d guess, however, that the dome skin is particularly thick, for insulation purposes. The antennas on top suggest VLF, UHF, VHF, and FM radio frequency capability. Additionally, the offshore platforms also have radar antennas. From the antenna design, we’re estimating something similar to the High Lark radar used on the MiG-twenty-three. It would have an effective radius of forty-five miles.”
“All of the offshore wells?”
“All of them.”
“They’re operating on I-Band,” McKenna said. “We picked up a few of them on the threat receiver.”
“As a guess,” General Overton said, “they’d have to stay alert to drifting icebergs. There’s a lot of those this time of year. And if they protrude out of the water far enough, radar might help spot them.”
“Which suggests that their fleet should include a few ocean-going tugboats,” McKenna said.
Pearson agreed. “I would think so, but we haven’t seen one as yet”
“Some of those big bergs would be damned hard to divert,” Overton said.
“Still, three or four tugs working at the same time could effect enough deviation in course to clear a well,” Pearson countered.
“Probably. The wells are all still there.”
“Back to the platforms,” Pearson said. “On the side of the dome opposite the helicopter pad are five storage tanks, perhaps with ten thousand gallons capacity each. On each well, tank number five vents a white, almost translucent, vapor. I’m going to run a spectrograph on it, but I suspect that the tank contains a heating apparatus of some sort.
“And that’s about all that we’ve learned from these pictures.”
Pearson tapped a few keys, and one of the infrared photos appeared on the screen.
“This is well number eight, but all of the offshore platforms have essentially the same characteristics.”
There wasn’t much to the picture. A hot red center expanding into lighter shades of red, then orange, then yellow, then blue.
“Given the film we used,” McKenna said, “doesn’t that thing look hotter than it should be?”
Amber grinned at him. “Right on, Colonel.”
Pearson looked up, then said begrudgingly, “Yes. It does. I would expect the dome to be exceptionally well-insulated, to allow men to work in that environment, but we’re seeing more heat loss than we should. Then, too, there’s some heat loss into the sea that surprises me.”
“There might be some heat generated by the pumping of oil through the casing,” Overton suggested.
“Or from rotating drills, if they’re still drilling,” McKenna added.
“But not that much, McKenna,” Pearson said.
“So you want more IR?”
“Yes. We’ll use Type thirty-fifty on one camera and Type thirty-ninety on the other. Maybe I can extrapolate from the two sensitivities.”
“When?”
“The sooner the better.”
“Donna, you want to page the troops for me? We’ll meet in the exercise compartment.”
“Sure thing, Colonel”
As McKenna waited for the door to open, he heard Amber’s voice on the PA. “First AS flight crews report to Compartment A-four-seven.”
On board Themis, the flight crews were assigned to separate residential spokes, again for safety reasons. When they met as a squadron, they used the large exercise space in the hub as a briefing room.
When he floated through the hatchway into the exercise compartment, he found all but Munoz accounted for. The fitness maven, Nitro Fizz Williams, was pumping spring-loaded iron, his feet planted firmly against a wall. Dimatta was upside down, chinning himself on the upper bar of a Nautilus machine, which might have required a couple ounces of effort. Will Conover was dressed in a pair of blue shorts and a T-shirt, the scars on his arms white against otherwise tanned flesh. He had ridden an F-16 into Edwards with landing gear that collapsed on touchdown. He tore up his arms getting out of the flaming wreckage. Do-Wop Abrams had a cassette stereo pounding out Bo Diddley’s “Detour.”
This was the first time they had all been together in over a week. Since most of their assigned missions could be accomplished by one MakoShark, they frequently missed each other in the transit between the space station and the earth side bases.
Dimatta aimed a pouch of Coke at him, then gave it a nudge with his finger. “Here you go, Kev.”
“Thanks, Cancha. Where’s Tony?”
“Where else?”
“Asleep. We’ll give him a couple minutes.” McKenna caught the floating soft drink, pulled the flexible straw loose from the side of the pouch, and sucked on it. The Coke was cold.