The general glared as if he wanted to kill someone. Now.
“Well, if they’re real why the hell can’t our pilots find them?”
“By the time we can get there they are always gone,” the intelligence
officer said. “Besides, that whole area is a fog bank.”
“That’s unusual in itself, isn’t it?”
“No, sir, not exactly,” the base weather officer put in. “As you know
fog’s not unusual in that part of the Bering Sea. More like the normal
thing.”
“Is it normal for the same patch of ocean to stay fogged in for weeks?”
The weather officer shrugged. “Not quite so far north, no. But it’s not
unheard of either.”
“What’s causing that?”
“Cold air moving over warm water. Telemetry shows the water’s somewhat
warmer there than in the surrounding parts of the ocean.”
“Why?”
Again the shrug. “We don’t understand the weather patterns in this part of
the world that well. An upwelling current, a vortex breaking off one of
the regular warm currents, we just don’t know.”
“And you don’t know what’s playing hide-and-seek with our radar?”
“Whatever it is, it’s not meteorological.”
The general turned to his radar officer.
“And you don’t know either?”
“No, sir. I can tell you something is showing up intermittently and
whatever it is is probably not an artifact of the equipment, but that’s
all I can say.”
“And patrols through that show nothing?”
“Nothing but fog. Sometimes our equipment works perfectly. Sometimes
everything goes to hell. Radar, radios. I even had one case where the
inertial navigation systems started acting up.”
He scowled at the thought. This far north compasses were unreliable. If
the INS failed, the pilot was reduced to dead reckoning and quite possibly
a very chilly bath.
The general nodded again. In peacetime the base only kept one pair of
F-15s sitting as CAP-combat air patrol-and they were not launched except
at definite targets. They were well positioned to intercept something
coming in to the Alaskan mainland, but not to go chasing things out over
the Bering Sea.
He looked over at his intelligence officer, who merely shook his head. “It
doesn’t match anything we know of.”
The general thought hard. “Thank you, gentlemen.” The officers rose to go,
but the general motioned his intelligence officer back into his chair.
“Matt, stay behind for a minute, will you?”
“Now,” the general said when the others had filed out and closed the door
behind them. “What do you think this thing is?”
The intelligence officer frowned and shook his head.
“I don’t have the faintest idea. If it is Soviet, it’s stealthed well
beyond what we thought they could do and it’s carrying one holy hell of an
electronic counter-measures suite. I don’t know anything that could
produce returns like that, or the kind of interference that’s coming out
of that area.” He paused significantly. The northern border was so
sensitive that if the intelligence officer at this base didn’t know, no
one in the Air Force knew.
“I’ll tell you something else,” he went on at last. “From what I’m
hearing, I don’t think the spooks know what those things are either. CIA
and NSA don’t tell us everything, but the reactions I’m getting tell me
they’re in the dark and they’re plenty worried.”
It was the general’s turn to frown. “Why so?”
“The arms control talks. If the Soviets can produce something that good
without our having an inkling of it, then our ‘national technical means of
verification’ aren’t worth a damn. If we can’t catch them with our
satellites and spy planes then we can’t make sure they aren’t cheating.”
He made a throw-away gesture. “Poof, no treaty.”
The general didn’t say anything for a long, long time.
“Would they really blow a treaty over some anomalous returns?”
“It sure as hell wouldn’t help.”
“But why the hell would the Soviets take something like that out over the
ocean? Haven’t they got enough places to test it where it would be
secure?”
The intelligence officer shrugged. “Ask me another one. But don’t be
surprised if we get some company before long. Important company.”
The general cracked the knuckles in one fist and then the other, like a