Hmm, Carol was thinking as she recalled Jessica’s party and the clowns and the ponies. That was when I still believed in fairy tales. That was before the separation and divorce . . .
Her watch alarm sounded, breaking her reverie, and Carol turned around in the water and headed back to shore. As she did so, she saw something strange out of the corner of her eye. No more than twenty yards from her a great whale broke the water, sending chills down her spine and adrenaline rushing into her system. The whale disappeared underwater and, despite the fact that Carol treaded water for a couple of minutes and scanned the horizon, she never saw him again.
At length Carol began swimming back toward shore. Her heart rate had started to return to normal after the bizarre encounter and now she was thinking about her lifelong fascination with whales. She remembered having a toy whale from Sea World, in San Diego, when she was seven. What was his name? Shammy. Shamu. Something like that. Then Carol remembered an earlier experience, one she had not thought about for twenty-five years.
Carol was five or six and sitting in her room, ready for bed as requested, and her father came into the room carrying a picture book. They sat together on the bed and leaned against the wallpaper with yellow flowers while he read to her. She loved it when he put his arm around her and turned the pages in her lap. She felt protected and comfortable. He read to her a story about a whale that seemed human and a man named Captain Ahab. The pictures were frightening, one in particular showed a boat being tossed about by a giant whale with a harpoon stuck in his back.
When her father tucked her in that night he seemed to linger in the room, showering her with tender hugs and kisses. She saw tears in his eyes and asked him if anything was wrong. Her father just shook his head and told her that he loved her so much, sometimes it made him cry.
Carol was so deep in this vivid memory that she wasn’t paying attention to where she was swimming. She had drifted west with the current and could now barely see the hotel. It took her a few minutes to orient herself and head back in the right direction.
3
LIEUTENANT Richard Todd waited impatiently while the data processing assistant made the last corrections on the master sheets. “Come on, come on. The meeting is supposed to start in five minutes. And we have a couple more changes to make.”
The poor girl was clearly hassled by the Navy officer hanging over her shoulder while she worked at the design monitor. She corrected a couple of spelling errors on one sheet and pushed the return key. On the screen in front of her appeared a computer line-drawn map of South Florida and the Keys. With a light pen she tried to follow Lieutenant Todd’s instructions and highlight the specific areas described by him.
“There,” he said finally, “that’s good. That finishes the group. Now hit the hard copy repro button. What’s the initial key? 17BROK01? Good. On the Top Secret data base? All right. Today’s password?”
“Matisse, Lieutenant,” she answered, standing up to walk around the machine and pick up a single collated hard copy of his presentation. Todd had a blank look on his face. “He was a French painter,” the girl said sarcastically, “M-A-T-I-S-S-E, in case you’re wondering.”
Todd signed out for his copy of the material and then scribbled the spelling of Matisse on a sheet of scratch paper. He awkwardly thanked the girl in a minimal way and left the room, heading out of the building and across the street.
The conference center for the U.S. Naval Air Station in Key West was next door. It was a brand-new building of modem design, one of the few edifices on the base to break the architectural monotone that could best be described as “white stucco, World War II.” Lieutenant Todd worked in one of the nondescript white buildings as head of Special Projects for the site. Todd and his group were essentially troubleshooters for the command, crackerjack systems engineers who were moved from project to project depending upon where they were needed. Todd himself was twenty-eight, an Annapolis graduate in aerospace engineering, a gung-ho Navy bachelor who had grown up in Littleton, a suburb of Denver in Colorado. Todd was ambitious and in a hurry. He felt as if he were out of the mainstream down here in Key West and longed for a chance to move to somewhere he could really prove his mettle, a weapons design center, for example, or even the Pentagon.
The sign on the door in the conference center read TOP SECRET — BROKEN ARROW. Lieutenant Todd checked his watch. One minute remained before 0930, the time for the meeting. He entered an alphanumeric code into the door lock and walked into the back of a midsized conference room with three large screens in the front. His group of five younger officers and a couple of members of the senior staff had already arrived. They were standing around the coffee and donuts that were on a table at the left. Commander Vernon Winters was sitting alone at the center of a long table that ran across the room and virtually bisected it. He was facing the screens with his back to the entrance.
“All right, all right,” Winters said, first looking around the room and then at the digital time printout in the upper left corner of the front wall, “let’s get started. Are you ready Lieutenant Todd?” The other officers sat down at the table. At the last minute another senior staff officer entered the room and took a seat in one of the chairs at the back.
Todd walked around the table to the front of the room, to a podium with a built-in keyboard underneath a small monitor, and eyed Commander Winters. “Yes, sir,” he answered. He activated the computer system in the podium. Todd indicated that he wanted access to the Top Secret Data Base. He then entered a complicated keyed input that was the first pan of a password system. The interactive monitor in the podium next requested the password of the day. Todd’s first attempt was unsuccessful, for he hadn’t remembered the correct spelling. He began to search his pockets for the piece of scrap paper.
The only other keyboard in the room was in the center of the long table where Winters was sitting. While Lieutenant Todd fumbled around at the podium, the commander smiled, entered the password, and then added some code of his own. The center screen came alive in vivid color and showed a stylized woman in a yellow dress, sitting at a piano, while two young boys played checkers behind her. A sense of red flooded forth from the picture. It was a reproduction of one of Matisse’s paintings from his late years in Nice and was magnificently projected at the front of the room. Lieutenant Todd looked startled. A couple of the senior officers laughed.
Winters smiled engagingly. “There are some fairly amazing things that can be done with the resolution power of a 4K-by-4K image and a nearly infinite data base.” There was an awkward silence and then Winters continued. “I guess it’s hopeless to keep trying to expand the education of you young officers on this base. Go on. Continue. I’ve put you already into the Top Secret Data Base and any new input will override the picture.”
Todd composed himself. This man Winters is certainly a queer duck, he thought. The admiral who was the commanding officer of the Key West base had assigned the commander last night to lead this important Panther missile investigation. Winters had an impressive background in missiles and in systems engineering, but whoever heard of starting such a critical meeting by calling a painting up on the screen? Todd now entered 17BROK01 and, after counting the people, the number nine. In a few seconds a machine in the back corner of the room had copies of the presentation collated and stapled for the use of the participants. Todd called his first image (entitled “Introduction and Background”) to the center screen with another touch of the keyboard.
“Yesterday morning,” he began, “a demonstration test for the new Panther missile was conducted over the North Atlantic. The missile was fired at 0700 from an airplane at eighty thousand feet off the coast of Labrador. It was aimed at a target near the Bahamas, one of our old aircraft carriers. After flying a normal ballistic trajectory into the region where the ship was located, the Panther was supposed to activate its terminal guidance that uses the Advanced Pattern Recognition System or APRS. The missile should then have found the aircraft carrier and, using the reaction control jets as its primary control authority, made whatever vernier corrections were necessary to impact the old carrier on the main deck.”