‘Number One, show the Admiral why not.’
Van Gelder produced a sheaf of photographs and handed them to Hawkins who flipped through them quickly, and then, more slowly, a second time. He sighed and looked up.
‘Intriguing, I suppose, if you’re a connoisseur of the pattern effects of smoke and flame. I’m not. All I can make out is what I take to be the outer port engine and that’s no help at all. And it gives no indication as to the source or cause of the ore.’
‘I think Van Gelder would disagree with you, sir,’ Talbot said. ‘He’s of the opinion that the fire originated in the nose cone and was caused by an internal explosion. I agree with him. It certainly wasn’t brought down by ship-based antiaircraft fire. We would have known. The only alternative is a heat-seeking missile. Two objections to that. Such a missile would have targeted on the engines, not the fuselage and, more importantly, there are no vessels in the area. Our radar would have picked them up. As a corollary to that, the missile didn’t come from an aircraft, either. The Admiral will not need reminding that the radar aboard the Ariadne is as advanced as any in the world.’
‘That may no longer be true, sir! Denholm’s tone was deferential but not hesitant. ‘And if it is true, then we can’t discount missiles just like that. This is not a dissenting opinion, I’m just exploring another possibility.’
‘Explore away, Lieutenant,’ Hawkins said. ‘Any light that can illumine the darkness of our ignorance, etcetera, etcetera.’
‘I’m not sure I’m all that good as a beacon, sir. I do know that I don’t go along with the belief that the Soviets always trail the West in technological advancement. Whether this belief is carefully and officially nurtured I do not know. I admit that the Soviets spend a certain amount of time and trouble in extracting military secrets from the West. I say “certain” because they don’t have to try all that hard: there appears to be a steady supply of scientists, both American and British, who, along with associates not necessarily involved in direct research at all, are perfectly willing to sell the Soviets anything they want — provided, that is, the price is right. I believe this to be true in the case of computers where they do lag behind the West: I do not believe it in the case of radar.
‘In this field, Plessey, of Britain, probably leads the West. They have developed a revolutionary new radar system, the Type 966, which is fitted, or about to be fitted, to Invincible-class aircraft-carriers, the Type 41 Sheffield-class destroyers and the new Type 2.3 Norfolk-class frigates. This new radar is designed not only to detect and track aircraft and sea-skimming missiles, but it also — ‘
Hawkins cleared his throat. ‘Sorry to interrupt, Denholm. You may know this but surely it comes under the heading of classified information?’
‘If it did, I wouldn’t talk about it even in this company, sir. It’s in the public domain. As I was about to say, it’s also able to control Sea Dart and Seawolf missiles in flight and home them in on their targets with great accuracy. I also understand they’re virtually immune to jamming and radar decoys.
‘If Plessey have done this, the Soviets may well have also. They’re not much given to advertising such things. But I believe they have the know-how.’
Hawkins said: ‘And you also believe, in this case, that a missile was the culprit?’
‘Not at all, sir. I’m only suggesting a possibility. The Captain and Lieutenant-Commander Van Gelder may well be right. Trouble is, I know nothing about explosives. Maybe there are missiles with such a limited charge that they cause only limited damage. I would have thought that a standard missile would have ensured that a plane it brought down would not have struck the sea with its fuselage relatively intact but in a thousand pieces. Again, I simply don’t know. I just wonder what the security was like at the base from which that plane took off in the States.’
‘Security? In the case of a super-sensitive plane such as this? Total.’
‘Does the Admiral really believe there is such a thing as total security?’ The Admiral didn’t say what he believed, he just sipped his scotch in silence. ‘There were four major air disasters last year, all four planes involved having taken off from airports which were regarded as having maximum security. In all four cases terrorists found the most stringent airport checks childishly easy to circumvent.’
‘Those were civilian airports. This would be a top-secret US Air Force base, manned exclusively by US Air Force personnel, specially chosen for their position, rigidly screened, backgrounds exhaustively researched, and all subjected to lie-detector tests.’
‘With respect to the Vice-Admiral, and our American friends, lie-detector tests — more accurately, polygraph tests — are rubbish. Any moderately intelligent person can be trained to beat the polygraph test, which, after all, depends on crudely primitive measurements of pulse rate, blood pressure and perspiration. You can be trained to give right answers, wrong answers or merely confusing ones and the scrutineer can’t tell the difference.’
‘Doesn’t measure up to your idea of electronics, eh?’
‘Nothing to do with electronics, sir. Polygraphs belong to the horse-and-buggy era. You’ve just used the word super-sensitive, sir. The Ariadne, if I may put it that way, is a hotbed of super-sensitivity. How many members of this crew have ever been subjected to a polygraph test? None.’
Hawkins considered his glass for a few moments, then looked up at Talbot. ‘Should the need arise, Captain, how long would it take you to contact the Pentagon?’
‘Immediately. Well, half a minute. Now?’
‘No. Wait. Have to think about it. Trouble is, even the Pentagon is having difficulty in extracting information from this Air Force base which is, I believe, somewhere in Georgia. The Pentagon’s own fault, really, although you can’t expect them to admit this. They’ve so inculcated this passion for absolute secrecy into the senior officers of all four services that no one is prepared to reveal anything without the permission of the commanding officer of the Air Force base or ship or whatever. In this particular case, the commanding officer who, to the Pentagon’s distress, would appear to have a human side to his nature, has elected to take twenty-four hours off. No one appears to know where he is.’
Van Gelder said: ‘Makes it a bit awkward, sir, doesn’t it, if war breaks out in the next half-hour?’
‘No. Base remains in full operational readiness. But there’s still no relaxation of the iron-bound rules concerning the release of classified information.’
Talbot said: ‘You wouldn’t be sitting here unless they’d released some information.’
‘Naturally not. The news they’ve released is vague and incomplete but all very, very bad. One report says there were twelve nuclear weapons aboard, another fifteen. Whether they were missiles or bombs was not disclosed: what was
disclosed was that they were hydrogen devices, each one in the monster megaton range, twelve to fifteen megatons. The plane was also understood to be carrying two of the more conventional atom bombs.’
‘I think I’ll break a self-imposed regulation and have a scotch myself,’ Talbot said. A half-minute passed in silence, then he said quietly: This is worse than I ever dreamed.’
‘Dream?’ Grierson said. ‘Nightmare.’
‘Dream or nightmare, it won’t matter to us,’ Lieutenant Denholm said. ‘Not when we’re drifting through the stratosphere in vaporized orbit.’
‘A hydrogen bomb, Dr Wickram,’ Talbot said. ‘Let’s call it that. Is there any way it can spontaneously detonate?’
‘In itself, impossible. The President of the United States has to press one button, the man on the spot another: the radio frequencies are so wildly different that the chances of anyone happening on the right combination are billions to one.’
‘Is there a chance — say a billion to one — that the Soviets might have this combination?’
‘None.’
‘You say it’s impossible to detonate in itself. Is there any other way, some external means, whereby it could be detonated?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Does that mean you’re not saying or that you’re not sure? I don’t think, Dr Wickram, that this is the time to dwell on such verbal niceties.’
‘I’m not sure. If there were a sufficiently powerful explosion close by it might go up by sympathetic detonation. We simply don’t know.’
‘The possibility has never been explored? I mean, no experiments?’
‘I should hope not,’ Lieutenant Denholm said. ‘If such an experiment were successful, I wouldn’t care to be within thirty or forty miles at the time.’
‘That is one point.’ For the first time, Dr Wickram essayed a smile, but it was a pretty wintry one. ‘In the second place, quite frankly, we have never envisaged a situation where such a possibility might arise. We could, I suppose, have carried out such an experiment without the drastic consequences the Lieutenant has suggested. We could detonate a very small atom bomb in the vicinity of another. Even a charge of conventional explosive in the vicinity of a small atom bomb would suffice. If the small atom bomb went up, so then would the hydrogen bomb. Everybody knows that it’s the fissioning of an atom bomb that triggers off the fusion of a hydrogen bomb.’