“Not at all. The explosives will be remotely triggered from here only, and will require a key which you will carry. It is an engineering problem for you. We want the anchor lines to break first, then the casing to detonate. The platforms will float freely away.”
“You are very certain that this can be accomplished, Herr General.”
“Of course. I have already ordered the plastic explosive and the radio equipment. Admiral Schmidt’s frogmen will assist you.”
If he did not count food, engineering problems were Diederman’s joy. The anger faded from his face as he said, “You have forgotten the injection wells. They will also have to be severed, and… ”
Amy Pearson was in her office cubicle, performing a routine visual check of the station. It was not an assigned task — Brad Mitchell had that duty, but it had become a habit for her. She liked to know what was going on around her.
With her fingers tapping out camera numbers on the keyboard, she watched the screen as it jolted from one view to the next. Interior shots of corridors, spokes, modules, priority compartments like the nuclear reactor or the Honey Bee receiving docks. The exterior shots came from six cameras mounted on the spokes. She hesitated when the exterior view of the hangars came up on Spoke Fifteen’s camera. Delta Blue was departing, slowly sliding away from the station.
She wasn’t certain that she was totally in favor of McKenna’s mission. He had had to spend nearly an hour with her, finally convincing her — almost convincing her — of the soundness of his logic.
She had finally signed off on the plan, as had General Overton, but her signature included the statement, “with reservations.”
McKenna was so damned stubborn.
But he kisses pretty well.
She brushed away that thought quickly and asked Donna Amber on the intercom to connect her with the National Security Agency at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland.
The giant facility tapped in on almost all of the television, telephonic, and radio communications in the world. The sonobuoys and listening posts that the MakoSharks had scattered from Europe to South America were monitored by the Agency.
When Amber had the connection made, Pearson asked for the German section.
“MacDonald.”
“I thought you might be on duty, Walt. This is Amy Pearson.”
“Hello there, honey. You up in the cold blue sky?”
“I think we’re just about directly over Tokyo.”
“Boy, I tell you. If my heart were up to it, I’d take you up on your invitation to visit.”
She had never met MacDonald in person, and she didn’t know whether he truly had a heart condition or just weak nerves.
“You’re missing the best view ever.”
“Don’t I know it. What’s up?”
“I wanted to see if you’ve had any action on some of our listening posts.” She read him the list of code numbers she had compiled.
MacDonald was the section chief, and he yelled for one of his subordinates to go check the machines. With voice communications, the NSA had computers similar to Val Arguento’s to scan for key words in the millions of dialogues. With sonobuoys not covered by the navy, the continuous output was recorded on tape machines. The listening posts were more sophisticated, collecting sounds for half an hour at a time and then compressing them digitally into a sixty-second blurts radioed to a satellite.
On the NSA’s end, the messages were decompressed into real time, then saved on tape.
She and MacDonald chatted for several minutes, then he said, “Here we go, Amy. On your sixteen sonobuoys in the Norwegian and Greenland seas, only four are still operational. We have the Bohemian passing through seventy-five degrees north, but that was three hours ago. Farther south, on buoy three, we picked up the screws of a fishing boat.
“The Elbe River LP’s at Köthen show a marked increase in the frequency of traffic, Amy.”
“Which way, Mac?”
“Northward. Sounds like heavy tugboats, so there’s probably long strings of barges.”
It could be increased industrial goods, but she suspected that military material was being moved.
“How about Peenemünde?” she asked.
“No dramatic changes,” MacDonald told her. “Automobile traffic. Once in a while, we hear machine tools.”
“Okay, thanks, Mac. Look, if you hear anything out of the norm at Peenemünde, give me a call, will you?”
“Sure. In fact, I’ll program what we have into the computer as a base pattern, so we can get an automatic alert if there’s anything strange that comes up.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Come and see me some time.”
After she signed off with MacDonald, Pearson spent half an hour thinking about McKenna’s proposal. Thinking about what could go wrong.
Resetting her tether straps to give her a little more freedom, Pearson switched on her computer and keyed in her access code to the main database. She called up the photographs taken of well number eight, selected the clearest low-light shot, and then transferred it into her graphics program. That program let her manipulate the image, and she duplicated it, side by side, then rotated one so that she had a top and side view of the dome and platform. The side view looked a little squashed, so she elongated it until the dome appeared round again.
The top view displayed the openings created by Mabry Evan’s warheads. Through the holes, she could discern three distinct partitions, dividing the diameter into three almost equal sections, so she erased the remaining portion of the top of the dome, then drew in the partitions. The section containing the wellhead and turbine equipment, which were blurred in this photo, was at the back of the platform, opposite the helicopter pad.
She wished she could erase the ceilings of interior spaces and see what was below them, but had to guess that they were housing and operational spaces. Probably five or six floors of them.
Erasing the dome face in the side view, she sketched in approximate floor levels. The dome’s diameter was constant from the deck of the platform up to midheight, then it began to curve in toward the middle. For the upper hundred feet, any floor installed would be smaller in area than the floor below it. Still, it would be possible to fit in as many as fifteen floors with adequate head room and floors thick enough to carry ventilation, power, and plumbing.
She went back to her top view. Peering closely at the photograph, it seemed to her that there was a fair amount of distance between the top of the dome and the first apparent ceiling on the inside. As a guess, she would say at least fifty feet. She went back to the side view and erased several top floors.
What seemed logical to her is that the dome on every platform was similar. They were, after all, mass-produced as preformed parts. The well itself would be at the back of each platform. There was something else she knew.
What was it?
On the electromagnetic maps.
She called up the maps on a second screen and studied them closely.
Wells one and eleven gave off more electromagnetic pulses than did the other wells. For the most part, the pattern indicated that the power cables from most of the platforms converged upon both one and eleven.
Primary and secondary collection and distribution centers. Well number one would be the primary, since it was drilled first.
She looked at her manipulated drawings and thought that maybe McKenna was right.
Again.
Damn him, anyway.
“Sorry to drag you all this way, Colonel, but with something of this magnitude, I like to see the face of the man with the proposition,” Adm. Hannibal Cross said.
“I don’t mind the trip, if you don’t mind the hour, Admiral,” McKenna said.