“We had to spell it out for the Ministry of Defence,” Hargreaves replied. “Took them three or four years to catch on, which is about par for the military mind. Look at the admirals and their battleships. The other great drawback of the Blue Streak, of course, is that it would have required a huge launching installation, all the ramps, gantries, and blockhouses, the enormous trailers of helium and liquid nitrogen to pump in the kerosene and liquid oxygen under pressure, and, finally, the vast size of the rocket itself. This meant a permanent and fixed installation, and with all those hordes of British and American planes flying over Russian territories, Russian planes flying over American and British territories-and for all I know, British and Americans flying over one another’s territories-those locations have become so well known that practically every launching base in the U.S. and Russia has a corresponding ICBM from the other country zeroed in on it.
“What was wanted, then, was a rocket that could be fired instantaneously-and a rocket that was completely mobile, completely portable. This was impossible with any known missile fuel. Certainly not with the kerosene-kerosene, in this day and age!-which along with liquid oxygen still powers most of the American rockets. Certainly, either, not with the liquid hydrogen engines the Americans are working on today, the boiling point of -423 °F. makes them ten times as tricky to handle as anything yet known. And they’re far too big.”
“They were working on cesium and ion fuels,” I said.
“They’ll be working on them for a long time to come. They’ve got a dozen separate firms working on those and you know the old saw about too many cooks. And so the mobile rocket ready for instant firing was impossible with any known propellant-until Hargreaves came up with a brilliantly simple idea for solid fuel, twenty times as powerful as used in the American Minuteman. It’s so brilliantly simple,” Hargreaves admitted, “that I don’t know how it works.”
Neither did I. But I’d learnt enough from Fairfield to learn how to make it work. But here and now I never would.
“You’re sure it really does work?” I asked.
“We’re sure, all right. On a small scale, that is. Dr. Fairfield fitted a twenty-eight pound charge to a specially constructed miniature rocket and fired it from an uninhabited island off the west coast of Scotland. It took off exactly as Fairfield had predicted, very slowly at first, far more slowly than conventional missiles.” Hargreaves smiled reminiscently. “And then it started accelerating. We-the radar scanners- lost it about 60,000 feet. It was still accelerating and doing close on 16,000 miles an hour. Then more experiments, scaled down charges, till he got what he wanted. Then we multiplied the weight of the rocket, fuel, simulated warhead and brain by 400. And that’s the Black Shrike.”
“Maybe multiplying by 400 brings in some fresh factors.”
“That’s what we’ve got to find out. That’s why we’re here.”
“The Americans know about this?”
“No.” Hargreaves smiled dreamily. “But we hope they will one day. We hope to supply them with it in a year or two, that’s why it’s been designed far in excess of our own requirements, designed to carry a two-ton hydrogen bomb six thousand miles in fifteen minutes, reaching a maximum speed of 20,000 miles per hour. Sixteen tons compared to the 200 tons of their own ICBM’s. 18 feet high compared to a hundred. Can be carried and fired from any merchant ship, coaster, submarine, train or heavy truck. All that and instant firing.” He smiled again, and this time the dreaminess was suffused with a certain complacency. “The Yanks are just going to love the Black Shrike.”
I looked at him.
“You’re not seriously suggesting that Witherspoon and Hewell are working for the Americans, are you?”
“Working for the-” He pulled the spectacles down his nose and peered at me over the thick horn-rims, eyes wide in myopic astonishment. “What on earth do you mean?”
“I just mean that if they aren’t I don’t see how the Americans are going to have a chance to look at the Shrike, far less love it.”
He looked at me, nodded, looked away and said nothing. It seemed a shame to destroy his scientific enthusiasm.
The dawn was in the sky now, even with the lamps still burning inside the quonset we could see the lightening grey patches where the windows lay. My arm felt as if the Doberman were still clinging to it. I remembered the half-finished glass of whisky on the table, reached up for it and said, “Cheers.” No one said cheers back to me but I disregarded their unmannerly attitude and downed it all the same. It didn’t do me any good that I could feel. Farley, the infra-red guidance expert, gradually recovered his colour, courage and indignation and carried on a long and bitter monologue, in which the two words ‘damnable’ and ‘outrage’ were the recurring theme. He didn’t say anything about writing his M.P. Nobody else said anything at all. Nobody looked at the dead man on the floor. I wished that someone would give me some more whisky, or even that I knew where Anderson had found the bottle. It seemed all wrong that I should be thinking more about the bottle than the dead man who’d given me my first drink from it. But then everything was wrong that morning, and besides, the past was past, the future-what remained of it-was to come and, while the whisky might help, nothing was surer than that Anderson would never help anyone again.
Hewell returned at the dawn.
He returned at the dawn and he returned alone, and it didn’t need the sight of his blood-stained left forearm to tell me why he had returned alone. The three guards by the wire must have been more watchful and more capable than he had imagined, but they hadn’t been capable enough. If Hew-ell was worried by his wound, the death of yet another of his men or the murder of three seamen, he hid his worry well. I looked round the faces of the men in the quonset, faces grey and strained and afraid, and I knew I didn’t need to spell out for them what had happened. In different circumstances-in very different circumstances-it would have been funny to watch the play of expression on their faces, the utter disbelief that this could be happening to them struggling with the frightening knowledge that it was indeed happening to them. But right there and then it wasn’t any strain at all not to laugh.
Hewell wasn’t in a word-wasting mood. He pulled out his gun, gestured to Hang to leave the hut, looked us over without expression and said the single word: “Out”.
We went out. Apart from a sprinkling of palms down by the water’s edge there weren’t any more trees or vegetation on this side of the island than there had been on the other. The central mountain was much steeper on this side, and the great gash that bisected its southward side was well in sight, with one of the spurs running down from the north-east obscuring our view to the west and north.
Hewell didn’t give us any time to admire the view. He formed us into a rough column of two, ordered us to clasp our hands above our heads-I paid no attention, I doubt whether I could have done it anyway and he didn’t press the matter-and marched us off to the north-west, over the low spur of rock.
Three hundred yards on, just over the first spur-another still lay ahead of us-I noticed about fifty yards away on my right a pile of broken rock, of very recent origin. From my lower elevation I couldn’t see what was behind that pile but I didn’t have to see to know: it was the exit of the tunnel where Witherspoon and Hewell had broken through in the early hours of the morning. I looked carefully all around me, plotting and remembering its position against every topographical feature I could see until I felt fairly certain that I could find it without trouble even on the darkest night. I marvelled at my incurable penchant for assimilating and storing away information of the most useless character.
Five minutes later we were over the low crest of the second spur and could see the whole of the plain on the west side of the island stretched out in front of us. It was still in the shadow of the mountain, but it was full daylight now and easy to make out every feature.
The plain was bigger than the one to the east, but not much, maybe a mile long from north to south and four hundred yards wide between the sea and the first slopes of the mountain. There wasn’t a single tree to be seen. In the south-west corner of the plain a long wide pier stretched far out into the glittering lagoon: at our distance of four or five hundred yards this jetty seemed to be made of concrete but was more likely of coral blocks. At the far end of the pier, mounted on rails, with its supporting legs set very far apart, was a heavy crane of the type I’d seen in graving yards for ship repair work: the entire super-structure and jib-there was no counter-balance-were mounted on a ring of live rollers. This was the crane the phosphate company would have used to load its ships-and it was also the crane that must have formed one of the deciding factors in the Navy’s decision to set up its rocket installation on the island. It wasn’t often, I thought, that you would find ready-made unloading facilities with a pier and crane that looked as if it might be good for thirty tons in a deserted island in the South Pacific.