Zen was still trying to decide exactly what he would say when he entered the mess tent. Breanna was there, sitting next to Mack Smith.
Zen pushed himself toward the serving tables. A small refrigerator held drinks; there was a pile of sandwiches next to it and a large metal pot of soup, or at least something that smelled like soup. Zen took two of the sandwiches and a Coke and wheeled himself over to the table.
“Hey,” he said to Breanna.
“Hey there, robot brain,” said Mack. “Have fun this morning?”
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“I always have fun, Mack.” Zen pushed his chair as close to the end of the table as he could get it, but that still left a decent gap between his chest and the surface.
He had to lean forward to put his soda and sandwiches down.
“Those sandwiches are about a week old,” said Mack.
“Check ’em for mold before you take a bite.”
Zen bit into them defiantly. He was halfway through the second when Danny Freah, Chris Ferris, Captain Fentress, and the two mission specialists crewing Quicksilver came in. Fentress had a map rolled up under his arm, along with a pair of folded maps in his hand.
“Majors, Captain,” said Danny. “Just talked with Major Alou. He’s inbound. We want to have a briefing over in the trailer as soon as he’s down. CentCom is going to nail that SA-2 site we picked up and they need our help.”
“Is that what got the Tornado?” Zen asked.
“No one’s sure,” said Danny. “At this point it’s possible he wasn’t even shot down. But CentCom wants to hit something, and it’s the biggest target in the area. Even if it didn’t get them—and I don’t think it did—it should be taken down.”
“How close were the MiGs Major Stockard saw?” Breanna asked O’Brien.
“It’s possible they could have gotten the RAF flight if they were using very long-range missiles,” said Chris Ferris, answering for the radar specialist. “But we didn’t sniff anything in the air, and as far as we know, the AWACS didn’t have any contacts either. Not even the Eagles could find them.”
“Nothing,” added O’Brien. “If they fired Alamos, we would have known it. Their guidance systems would have given them away.”
“Alamos with heat sensors,” suggested Zen. The Alamo missiles—Russian-made AA-10s—came in at RAZOR’S EDGE
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least three varieties, including a heat-seeker. But the longest-range version known to the West, the AA-10C, had a range of roughly twenty-two miles and used an active radar, which would have been detected. The infrared or heat-seeking version would have a much shorter range.
“Million-in-one shot,” said Ferris.
“Alamos at twenty-five miles?” said Mack. “What the hell are you guys talking about?”
As Ferris explained, Zen looked at Breanna. She was still steaming, he could tell. He tried to send his apology via ESP, but it didn’t take.
“Had to be a laser,” said Mack when he heard the details. “Only explanation.”
“So where is it, then? With the SA-2s?” said Ferris.
“Shit, they’d hide it in a mosque or something,” said Mack. “You know these ragheads.”
“That might be right,” said Danny.
“Maybe it’s with one of these radars that flicks on and off,” said Zen.
“Possible,” said Ferris. “On the other hand, none of the sites seem large enough to house an energy weapon.”
“It doesn’t have to be that big,” said Zen. “Razor’s not big at all. It moves a tank chassis.”
“I don’t think the Iraqis could make it that small,” said Ferris.
“I bet it’s in a mosque,” said Mack.
“Whatever size, they’d try to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible,” said Bree.
“There—we look for what’s inconspicuous,” said Mack.
He meant it as a joke, but nobody laughed.
“Our best lead is the radars,” said Zen. “Because even if it were mobile, it would have to be getting a feed from them somehow. Maybe it can go from one unit to another.”
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“Or they have a dedicated landline, with high speed connections, fiber optics,” suggested Bree.
“You really think the Iraqis can do that?” said Ferris.
“They’re doing something,” said Mack.
“I think I can narrow the area down on where that Slot Back radar was if you give me a half hour,” said O’Brien.
“It wasn’t briefed. There may even be another one down there, though the signal was really weak. I’ll tell you one thing,” he added, “either the operator is damn good or they’ve got some sort of new equipment down there, because the computer couldn’t lock it down.”
JENNIFER GLEASON FOLDED HER HANDS OVER HER MOUTH
and nose almost if she were praying. She had only a rudi-mentary notion of how the coding for the program governing the IR detection modes worked, and without either the documentation or the raw power of Dreamland’s code analyzers, she could only guess how to modify it. The secure data-link with Dreamland was still pending; once it was in place, she would be able to speak with the people there who had developed the detector. But the pilots wanted the plane to fly before then, and she thought it shouldn’t be that hard to figure out. She replayed the EB-52’s recorded inputs from the last mission, watching the coding to see how she might tweak the IR detector to find a momentary burst in the infrared spectrum.
Shorter than a launch, but stronger?
Jennifer reached for her soda on the floor of Quicksilver’s flight deck, pulling it up deliberately. She took two sips and then set it down, all the while staring at the blank multipurpose screens at the radar-intercept operator’s station. She ran the detection loops over again, watching her laptop screen where the major components of the code were displayed. The interface program took data from different sensors and configured it for the RAZOR’S EDGE
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screens; it was monstrously complex because it had to accept data from a number of different sensors, which had been designed without a common bus.
Her laptop flagged a bug in the interface that had to do with an errant integer cache. It was minor—the interface program simply ignored the error.
Odd. It should have been trapped out by the interface.
The error handling section was comprehensive, and in any event included an “if all else fails” section where anything unexpected should have gone.
But it hadn’t. Jennifer traced the error to an ambient reading from the sensor. The detector had flicked onto something and sent a matrix of information about it on to the interface. The interface didn’t understand one of the parameters.
An error in the sensor that hadn’t been caught during the rigorous debugging of the interface at Dreamland?
Certainly possible. Happened all the time.
Except …
Jennifer reached down for her soda again. It could just be an error—there must have been a million lines of code there, and mistakes were inevitable.
But if it wasn’t a mistake, it would be what they were looking for.
Well, no, it could be anything. But anything wasn’t what she was interested in. She needed a theory, and this was it.
She could get a base line with some flares, see what happened, try to screw it up. Use those numbers to compare to the error, calculate.
Calculate what, exactly?
Something, anything. She just needed a theory.
If Tecumseh were here, she thought, he would tell her to figure it out. He would fold his arms around her and rub her breasts and tell her to figure it out.
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Jennifer jumped up from the station, scooped up her can of soda, and ran to find Garcia.
Incirlik, Turkey
1230
TORBIN FINISHED HIS TAE KWON DO ROUTINE, BOWING TO
the blank wall. He was alone in the workout room, still a leper despite the semiofficial admission from General Harding that his gear and the mission tapes checked out; he wasn’t at fault in the shoot-downs.
Not at fault, but impotent nonetheless. The Phantom remained grounded until further notice. Its next flight would undoubtedly be to the boneyard.