The Trigger Read online

  'So you gave them the big finish, to reassure them.'

  'I did,' said Adams. 'Captain, maybe I can't make them forget about everything they saw back there - but half a miracle doesn't make half as good a story, and the difference might just be enough to help them keep their mouths shut. As for your report, tell it straight, but keep it simple -I overruled you on the test protocol, because I wanted the entire munitions inventory included.'

  Weeks took a moment to digest that. 'You know, sir,' she said slowly, 'if the Trigger had more range, it's the Abrams that would have been burning.'

  'Make sure that makes it into your report, too, Captain,' the colonel said with a nod. 'But you'd better not repeat it anywhere else.'

  On a clear, cold January morning, two aircraft roared down a runway at Nellis Air Force Base and climbed into a velvet Nevada sky. Test 11 was made up of a mismatched pair - an elderly Navy F-14 and a sleek Air Force F-22 - but they formed up together and turned to the southeast with the easy grace of the well-trained performing a familiar task. The test sortie was carefully scripted, the aircrews well briefed.

  Still, not every question had been answered, and some could not be asked.

  One was about the target aircraft itself. While most target drones were retired fighters, Test 11's sortie was against a QT-1 Jayhawk, a one-off based on a common twin-engine jet used to train transport and tanker pilots. Even the test director had acknowledged that oddity with a little joke.

  'Yes, it's going to seem like going after a Southwest Airlines commuter out of Salt Lake City,' the general had said. 'So be sure we don't.'

  The mystery was heightened by the weapons loadouts, which were unusually heavy for a test involving a single drone of any type. Captain 'Mojo' Thome's Tomcat was hung with both Phoenix and Sparrow missiles, while Captain 'Rhino' Oatley's Raptor had both Sidewinders and AMRAAMs tucked away in its internal bays. All of the missiles had live warheads. Each fighter also carried a full load of ammunition for its 20mm Vulcan cannon, in a high explosive/lead/tracer mix.

  'Loaded for bear, Mojo,' one of the armorers had said, asking without asking.

  'We'll bring back what we don't need.' Thorne had replied. Privately, he had said to his back-seater, 'Seems like they want a month's data from one sortie.'

  The prospects for getting it, though, seemed dim. They had been told the target would carry an experimental electronic counter-measures package, referred to only as 'the package'. Its principles and capabilities had not been alluded to, much less disclosed. But, experiment notwithstanding, nothing in the air should be able to withstand the onslaught programmed in the sortie script - least of all such a thin-skinned, glass-jawed target.

  It was not their place to ask for or expect explanations. They would fly the mission like professionals, light up the drone, and leave the rest to the managers.

  Accelerating to the high subsonic, the tandem covered the distance to the first waypoint over northwest Utah in a matter of minutes. Wheeling around to the south, they turned on their long-range attack radar and climbed to the specified altitude. Almost at once, they picked up the target drone, which was circling over the range. The Raptor pulled out and fell behind the Tomcat, which was assigned to take the first shot.

  'Flagman, Mojo,' said Thorne, calling the test controller.

  'Mojo, Flagman. Go ahead.'

  'Test 11 is home on the range. Calling Judy.' With that word, control of the intercept passed to Thorne.

  'Roger, Mojo. Proceed. Range is hot.'

  'Contact, twenty left, forty-five miles.'

  'That's your bogey.'

  When his Radio Intercept Officer called thirty-five miles, Thorne selected a Phoenix missile. At thirty, he said, 'Fox one,' and thumbed the firing pickle.

  As the stout projectile jumped off the rails and accelerated to its supersonic cruising speed, the two fighters broke off into a tight check turn to the left, maintaining their distance from the target as the script required. The Phoenix closed that distance so swiftly that only the Tomcat's RIO, twisting her head sideways, saw the explosion with the naked eye.

  'Direct hit!' she said excitedly as the bright yellow flash collapsed into an oily black cloud. 'Splash the drone!' But in the next instant she saw that the drone remained on her radar display. 'Mojo -'

  'I see it. Flagman, Test 11. Do you have a tally on the drone?'

  'Test 11, Flagman, negative splash, drone is still alive. Range is cold.' A long two minutes later, the controller came back. 'Test 11, range is hot. Proceed.'

  The second Phoenix roared away toward the horizon. Again there was a yellow flash, a snarl of black smoke - and again the drone flew on, apparently unscathed.

  Closing to a distance of twenty miles, the Tomcat loosed the first of its medium-range Sparrow missiles. Still the drone flew on.

  'Rhino, check victor,' said Thorne, and switched his own radio to the VHP intraflight frequency.

  'Toop,' his wingman acknowledged.

  'Rhino, whatever they've got hung on that bird, I want one.'

  Before Rhino could answer, there was a sharp, chastening response from a new voice, that belonging to General Thorn Vannigan from the Office of Defense Technology. 'Test 11, this is Goldenrod. Knock off the chatter.'

  'Copy, Goldenrod,' said Thorne, swallowing hard.

  The last of the Tomcat's missiles was as ineffective as the first, and the flight vectored away to set up for the Raptor's turn at bat. By that point Thorne had decided the 'the package' was not only affecting guidance, but causing the missile warheads to detonate prematurely. He expected the F-22's AMRAAM, with its large directed fragmentation warhead, would end the exercise.

  But it did not happen that way. Four times the Raptor's weapons bays opened, and four times the test controller reported, 'Negative splash.'

  'What the hell is that thing?' Thorne muttered to his RIO. 'Eight dean intercepts, eight warheads, and it's still out there?'

  'Maybe it isn't,' she said. 'Maybe it's a damn ghost.'

  'We'll find out in a minute, if they keep to the script.'

  It took five orbits in the loiter circle for the range safety officer and the test controller to both give their approval.

  'Test 11, Flagman.'

  'Flagman, Mojo.'

  'Mojo, close for guns.'

  Almost eagerly, the fighters hurried along the trail their impotent missiles had blazed. Before long, the dot in the tracking circle became a bright red silhouette, and the silhouette a recognizable plane.

  'It really is a T-1,' Thorne said, bleeding off speed. 'A goddamned Beechcraft.'

  'Hardly seems sporting, Mojo,' said the RIO.

  'No honor in the kill,' the Tomcat pilot agreed.

  The headphones crackled. 'Test 11, target is hot. Cleared to engage. Watch your separation.'

  'Copy, I am engaging the target. Rhino, give me some room.'

  As the Raptor peeled away, Thorne zeroed in on the drone. Calling, 'Guns, guns, guns,' he began firing the prescribed one-second bursts at the maximum effective range of his cannon. It seemed to him that the first few bursts exploded in midair like Chinese firecrackers, as though against an invisible wall.

  But something was getting through, because pieces of the Jayhawk began to fly in every direction. Just before Thorne broke off, the drone disintegrated just forward of the engine pods, and the shattered pieces spun out and tumbled toward the salt-frosted desert eight thousand feet below. Wheeling back toward Nevada in a knife-edge turn, the silent aircrew searched the ground for explanations.

  Rhino finally made the call. 'Flagman, splash target. Test 11 returning to center, over,' he radioed, then looked sideways out his bubble cockpit as he eased into formation with the Tomcat.

  'Rhino looks just as pixilated as I am. What the hell did we just see here?' asked the RIO.

  Thorne shook his head in answer to both her words and Rhino's questioning look. 'I know this much - this is gonna be a hard one not to be able to talk about.'

  As far
as Jeffrey Horton was concerned, the smells of the Nevada desert were hot asphalt and concrete dust - the sounds, rivet guns, ratchets and rumbling diesel engines. The Terabyte Laboratories Annex had been continuously under construction for six months, and there was no end in sight. The finished space was already overcrowded, and there were seventy more technicians and engineers already hired but not yet on site, simply because there was no place for them to work.

  Everything had changed, and was still changing. The jouncing cross-country ride Horton had endured was a thing of the past. An extra-wide two-lane asphalt road had been laid down across the scrubland, and more than a dozen tractor-trailers used it every day to bring in more tons of construction material and equipment. There were five new dedicated lab buildings arrayed to the south and east of the original structure, and an entire village of Cardinal manufactured apartments had grown up inside the main gate to accommodate the more than sixty people now living at the Annex.

  Everything was different than Horton had thought it would be, and few of the differences were to his liking. The weeks when he'd been the only member of the Columbus staff at the Annex had been hard - long hours of uninteresting work, unpleasantly hot weather, makeshift quarters with few familiar comforts, a suffocating burden of responsibility, and an isolation that ground at him more with each passing day. He'd survived it in surprisingly good humor by telling himself it was temporary, that soon the old team would be reassembled, and work would be fun again.

  It hadn't worked out that way.

  Lee Thayer now ruled her own ten-thousand-square-foot kingdom and an eighteen-person Instrumentation & Measurement team. She had most of them working on the crucial but - so far - intractable problem of detecting and gauging a Trigger field without pyrotechnics. Outside the lab, she kept to herself. Horton hardly saw her except for the twice weekly team meetings, at which she rarely smiled and never laughed. Horton had no inkling of what had taken all the presence and playfulness out of her, and so far she hadn't given him any opportunities to ask.

  While Lee was only partly there, Gordon Greene had never shown up in Nevada at all. According to Brohier, he'd opted out at the last minute, saying he preferred to change jobs rather than change locales. Unprompted, the director had wondered aloud if a woman was part of that decision. All Horton knew was that he'd left Greene three messages, but never heard back from him.

  The new engineering physicist, Val Bowden, had twice as much space as Lee, and had turned it into a fully equipped Experimental Assembly shop - complete with CAM machinists, hardware engineers, PROMgrammers, composite spinners, and bum tanks. So far, Bowden's team had scratch-built four Mark I variants, one for Lee, one for Horton, and two for the test range. Bowden was personable and talented, and he'd gathered an equally talented group around him - his fourth Mark I was forty percent lighter than his first, and a third more efficient. But at this point, he was strictly a colleague, and Horton missed his wise-cracking, cynical friend.

  Even Brohier was a changed man. In Columbus, he had seemed content behind his desk, resting on his considerable laurels and letting the science staff do the heavy lifting. His visits to the various labs were polite and perfunctory, and he typically evinced more interest in the results than in the work. But since coming to the Annex, Brohier had been revitalized. He had claimed for himself the problem of shaping, aiming, and shielding a Trigger field, and taken an aggressively experimental approach that was keeping Bowden's shop hopping.

  Horton presided over the least space and the smallest staff. His Theoretical Modeling group occupied six small offices encircling a modest conference room. He had brought in two technical researchers, a mathematician, an administrative assistant to keep the files straight and the research record current, and a young physicist with some interesting thoughts about information theory as applied to the CERN system.

  They met informally every morning for an hour or two to share ideas and generate new ones. The brainstorming sessions helped keep them mentally fresh, but the pressure was enormous, since any substantive progress would have immediate dividends in the work of the entire Annex. Though inspired persistence in the experimental sections had yielded some advances, a sound theoretical understanding of the phenomenon was still the keystone of the edifice they were trying to build.

  Alas, progress was slow. Horton's stock characterization of his group was 'good chemistry, so-so physics', and took most of the blame for the latter on himself. Many afternoons found him hiding in his office, feeling overwhelmed by the task before him, fighting the conviction that his ability to think clearly was fading, and that the leap of inspiration necessary to solve the puzzle was beyond his capacity.

  The self-doubt waxed and waned, but never vanished. More and more, it looked to Horton as though the Trigger discovery had been a lucky accident, and someone else would have to be the one to explain it. That was why he had started to press the director on the subject of publishing their findings, or at least circulating them privately among colleagues who might take an interest. But Brohier would not consider it.

  'Mathematical Physics isn't interested in phenomenological anecdotes - and I don't see how it will advance our work to publish in Ripley's Believe It Or Not,' Brohier said. 'In any event, our contract with the Defense Department prevents us from publishing without their blessing - which won't be forthcoming, not at this juncture.'

  'I can't understand why you agreed to that -'

  'Do you not understand the concept of "national secret"? We'll publish when doing so doesn't carry such a high risk of compromising the President's efforts, of compromising international stability -'

  'Which might be fifty years from now - or never.'

  '- In the meantime, the government agreed not to squash or contest our patent applications on the Trigger device.'

  'They agreed we could keep what was ours, so long as we didn't tell anyone about it,' Morton said. 'Somehow I can't see the parity there.'

  'If you think that was no small concession, you haven't had enough contact with the upper echelons of government - any government,' Brohier said. 'Taking what they want and telling themselves that it's in everyone's best interest is a well-ingrained reflex. Only the most honorable manage to resist it. We're fortunate that one of them happens to be President at the moment.'

  'And three years from now, if Breland isn't re-elected?'

  Three years from no w this will be a different world-andlwould not care to sign my name to any prediction more specific than that. No, if you need more skull power, Jeffrey, you can recruit it - you're barely at half your authorized head count, and I speak with some confidence when I say that no one would question a request from you to double it.'

  'You can't get the best people to sign on under these terms -not when I can't even tell them what it is I want them for, not when I can't even tell them where the work is, except that it isn't in Cambridge or Palo Alto.'

  'Maybe you can't, and perhaps even I can't,' Brohier agreed. 'But I wager the President can. If there's someone you know you want -'

  'I wish it were that easy,' Horton said. 'I wish I could hand you a list of ten people I know could help. But how do I know what kind of expertise we need when I can't even properly define the problem? We might as well be looking for experts in metaphysics.'

  Brohier chuckled. 'Perhaps so. Nevertheless, I want to point out one other option. Washington already has a very large number of scientists under contract, working for every branch of the civilian bureaucracy, the Pentagon, and all the agencies and contractors. And while bona fide theoretical physicists might be a bit thin on the ground, I'm sure that there must be someone out there in that mix with the skill set you're looking for - and that Breland would be more than happy to send him - or her - to us. Seniority wouldn't be an issue, either - we could go right to the top of anyone's staff chart. Think about it.'

  An interruption rescued Horton from having to admit that the idea activated his professional territoriality. The interruption came in the f
orm of a courier from the secure signal shack - in local parlance, the telegraph office.

  The four officers assigned to the signal shack were, as far as Horton knew, the only military personnel at the Annex. Horton called this one The Tailor - his business suit and blue tie were so unconvincingly out of place that he might as well have been in uniform.

  'Do you want me to leave?' Horton asked.

  'Nothing in this that I won't tell you tomorrow at the round-up,' Brohier said, signing for the magnetically-sealed portfolio. Before the door had even closed behind the courier, Brohier had entered his security code and was removing the documents within. He skimmed the cover page, grunted once, and glanced at the next sheet. 'Well,' he said, and retreated to the chair behind his desk.

  'What? What is it?'

  The Pentagon's wish list,' said Brohier. 'From the timing, I'd guess that it reflects the results of their testing with the early production units.'

  'And?' Horton asked, settling into a nearby chair.

  'Oh - nothing too surprising. They want it smaller, lighter, and less power-hungry. They want increased range - fifteen hundred meters as soon as possible, three thousand as soon as possible after that.'

  'No hint there that they know that their first two wishes are inherently contradictory.'

  'No hint,' Brohier agreed. They also want a way of shielding or blocking the Trigger effect, or a way of making it directional - or, ideally, both.'

  'So they won't have to give up their own weapons to use it.'

  'Presumably.' Brohier's gaze skimmed down the page. This one's signed by the President, not Stepak.'

  'Karl - we can't give them what they want.'

  It's a wish list, as I said. They don't expect it all on their doorstep in the morning.'

  'That isn't what I meant,' Horton said, leaning forward. The minute we give them directionality, the Trigger stops being a defensive weapon - stops being a force for disarmament. If our military has a directional Trigger, they get to keep all their weapons, and take away everyone else's. If the law enforcement agencies have a directional Trigger, we're looking at the same game - they get to keep all of their weapons, and take away all of ours. Karl, that wasn't the plan - was it? Or was it?'