Cradle (23 page)

Greta stared at him for a moment with her crystal-clear eyes. She was wearing no make-up.
She looked like a little girl except for the wrinkles on her face. ‘Are you still
so angry, Nick? After all these years?’ She came up next to him and smiled knowingly
into his eyes. ‘I remember one night, almost five years ago,’ she said playfully,
‘when you were not so angry. You were glad to see me. You asked me if I would have
you for one night, no questions asked, and I agreed. You were great.’

In a momentary flash Nick remembered the rainy night when he had stopped Greta just
as she was leaving the pier. He recalled also how desperately he had needed to touch
someone, anyone, on that particular night. ‘That was the day after my father’s funeral,’
he said roughly, ‘and didn’t mean shit anyway.’ He looked away. He did not want to
return her piercing gaze.

‘That wasn’t the impression I had,’ Greta continued in the same playful but otherwise
emotionless tone. ‘I felt you inside me, I tasted your kisses. You can’t tell me—’

‘Look,’ interrupted Nick, irritated, ‘what do you want? I don’t want to stand here
all morning arguing with you about some stupid night five years ago. Now I know that
you’re here for a reason. What is it?’

Greta backed off a step and her face hardened. ‘You are a very difficult man, Nick.
It could be such fun doing business together if you weren’t such a, how do you say,
pain in the ass.’ She stopped for a moment. ‘I
have
come from Homer. He has a proposition for you. He wants to see what you found yesterday
in the ocean and maybe discuss a partnership.’

Nick laughed triumphantly. ‘So I was right all along. You were sent to find me. And
now that bastard wants to discuss a partnership. Hah. Not a fucking chance. You won’t
steal from me again. Tell your employer or lover or whatever he is to cram his proposition
up his ass. Now if you’ll excuse me….’

He started to walk around Greta and open his car door. Her strong hand grabbed his
forearm. ‘You’re making a mistake, Nick.’ Her eyes bored into his again. ‘A big mistake.
You can’t afford to do it on your own. What you found is probably worthless. If it
is, let
him
spend the money.’ Her chameleon eyes shifted one more time. ‘And it would be such
fun to work together again.’

Nick climbed into his car and turned on the engine. ‘No dice, Greta. You’re wasting
your time. Now I’ve got to go.’ He backed out of the parking place and then drove
into the narrow street. The treasure was in the forefront of his mind again. He had
been momentarily depressed by what Amanda had told him about the trident, but the
fact that Homer wanted to see it gave Nick a feeling of power.
But
, he asked himself,
how does he know already? Who talked? Or could someone have seen us?

When Commander Winters returned to his office after a scheduled meeting with the public
relations department, his secretary, Dora, was conspicuously reading the Key West
newspaper. ‘Ahem,’ she said, deliberately attracting his attention. ‘Is the Vernon
Winters starring in
The Night of the Iguana
at the Key West Playhouse tonight anyone I know? Or are there two of them in this
town?’

He laughed. He liked Dora. She was almost sixty, black, a grandmother more than a
dozen times, and one of the few secretaries on the base who actually had some pride
in her work. She treated everybody, including Commander Winters, like one of her children.
‘So why didn’t you tell me?’ she said with feigned outrage. ‘After all, what if I
had missed it altogether? I told you last year to make certain that you always told
us when you were performing.’

He took her hand and gave it a little squeeze. ‘I had intended to tell you, Dora,
but somehow it just slipped my mind. And you know that my thespian activities are
not exactly embraced by the Navy, so I don’t ballyhoo them about so much. But I’ll
have some tickets for you and your husband in a couple of weeks.’ He looked at the
stack of message notes on her desk. ‘That many, huh? And I was only gone a little
over two hours. It never rains but it pours.’

‘Two of these are supposedly urgent,’ Dora looked at her watch. ‘A Miss Dawson from
the
Miami Herald
will call back in about five minutes and that Lieutenant Todd has been calling all
morning. He insists that he must see you
before
lunch or he can’t be properly prepared for the meeting this afternoon. Apparently
he left a long message on your Top Secret telemail sometime this morning. Right now
he’s furious with me because I wouldn’t interrupt your meetings to tell you about
his message. Is it really that important?’

Commander Winters shrugged his shoulders and opened the door to his office.
I wonder what Todd wants
, he thought.
I guess I should have checked my telemail before running off to the meeting with the
chief
. ‘Did you put all the rest of the messages on the computer?’ he asked Dora before
he closed the door. She nodded. ‘Okay, I’ll talk to Miss Dawson when she calls. Tell
Todd that I will see him in fifteen minutes.’ He sat down at his desk and turned on
his computer. He activated his telemail subdirectory and saw that he had three new
entries already this morning, one in the top secret queue. Commander Winters identified
himself, entered the top secret code word, and started to read Lieutenant Todd’s transmission.

The phone rang. After a few seconds Dora buzzed him and told him that it was Miss
Dawson. Before they started, Commander Winters agreed that the interview could be
on the videophone and that it could be taped. He recognized Carol immediately from
her occasional appearances on television. She explained to him that she was using
the communications facility at the Miami International Airport.

‘Commander Winters,’ she said, wasting no time, ‘we have an uncorroborated report
that the Navy is engaged in a search for something important, and secret, in the Gulf
of Mexico between Key West and the Everglades. Your press people and a Lieutenant
Todd have both denied the report and referred all questions to you. Our source also
told us, and we have subsequently verified both of these facts, that there are today
a large number of technology ships sailing in the Gulf and that you have been trying
to rent sophisticated ocean telescopes from the Miami Oceanographic Institute. Do
you have any comment?’

‘Certainly, Miss Dawson.’ The commander wore his best acting smile. He had carefully
rehearsed the response in his morning meeting with the admiral. ‘It’s really amazing
how rumours fly, particularly when someone suspects the Navy of nefarious deeds.’
He chuckled. ‘All the activity is just preparation for some routine manoeuvres next
week. A few of the sailors who man the technology ships are a little rusty and wanted
some practice this week. As for the MOI telescopes, we intend to use them in our manoeuvres
to check their value in assessing underwater threats.’ He looked directly at the camera.
‘That’s it, Miss Dawson. There’s nothing special going on.’

Carol watched the commander on the monitor at the airport. She had expected someone
with an imposing air of authority. This man had a softness in his eyes, a hint of
sensitivity that was unusual in a career military officer. Carol had a sudden idea.
She walked up close to her own camera. ‘Commander Winters,’ she said pleasantly, ‘let
me ask you a hypothetical question. If the Navy were testing a new kind of missile
and one test flight went astray, possibly even threatening population centres, wouldn’t
it be likely that the Navy, claiming national security reasons as its defence, would
deny that such a thing had happened?’

For a fleeting fraction of a second the expression in the eyes of Commander Winters
wavered. He looked shocked. Then he regained control. ‘It is difficult to answer such
a hypothetical question,’ he intoned formally, ‘but I can tell you that it is Navy
policy to keep the public informed about its activities. Only when the flow of information
to the public could significantly undermine our national security would any kind of
censorship take place.’

The interview wound up quickly. Carol had accomplished her objective.
Damn
, said Commander Winters to himself as Dora announced that Lieutenant Todd was waiting
to see him.
I should have expected that question. But how did she know that? Did she somehow trick
Todd or one of the other officers? Or did someone in Washington spill the beans?

Winters opened the door to his office and Lieutenant Todd nearly stormed into the
room. With him was another tall young lieutenant, thick-shouldered with a bushy moustache,
whom Todd introduced as Lieutenant Ramirez of the Naval Intelligence Division. ‘Did
you read my telemail message? What did you think? My God, it’s almost unbelievable
what those Russians have done. I had no idea they could be so clever.’ Todd was almost
shouting as he paced excitedly around the office.

Winters watched Todd jumping around the room.
This young lieutenant
, he thought,
is in a big hurry to get somewhere. His impatience is oozing out of every pore. But
what in the world is he saying about the Russians? And why is this Mexican muscleman
here with him?

‘Sit down, please,’ the commander replied, motioning at the two chairs opposite his
desk. He looked sternly at Lieutenant Todd. ‘And start by explaining why Lieutenant
Ramirez is here. You know the regulations; we were all briefed on them again last
week. Only officers at the rank of commander or higher can authorize sharing information
on a need to know basis.’

Todd immediately defended himself against the reproach. ‘Commander Winters, sir,’
he replied, ‘I believe that what we have here is a major international incident, far
too big to be handled by special projects and systems engineering alone. I left word
on your telemail interrupt at 0830 this morning for you to contact me ASAP, that there
was a significant new development in the Broken Arrow project. When I had not heard
from you by 1000, even though I had tried several additional times to reach you by
telephone, I became worried that we might be losing valuable time. I then contacted
Ramirez so that he and his men could start their work.’

Todd stood up from his chair. ‘Sir,’ he began again, the excitement rising in his
voice, ‘maybe I didn’t make it clear enough in my telemail message. We have hard evidence
that someone
commanded
the Panther to go astray, right after the APRS was activated. We have confirmed from
a special manual search of the intermittent telemetry data that the command receipt
counters went
crazy
during a two-second period just before the missile veered off course.’

‘Calm down, Lieutenant Todd, and sit down again.’ Winters was irritated, not just
by Todd’s nonchalant dismissal of the regulations issue, but also by his barely-disguised
accusation that Winters had been delinquent in responding to his messages. The commander’s
day had begun with a meeting with the admiral who ran the air station. He had wanted
a briefing on all this Broken Arrow business. So Winters had not even been in his
office, except for a couple of minutes, until after he came back from the public relations
department.

When Todd was again seated, Winters continued carefully, ‘Now spare me the hysteria
and
your personal conclusions. I want you to give me the facts, only the facts, slowly
and without prejudice. The accusations you made a few moments ago are very very serious.
In my eyes, if you have jumped to unsubstantiated conclusions too quickly, your fitness
as an officer may be in doubt. So start at the beginning.’

There was a flash of anger in the lieutenant’s eyes and then he opened his notebook.
When he spoke, his voice was a monotone, carefully modulated to be free of all emotion.
‘At precisely 0345 this morning,’ he began, ‘I was awakened by Ensign Andrews, who
had been working most of the night on the telemetry dumps that we recalled both from
the Canaveral station and the tracking ship near Bimini. His assignment had been to
go through the scheduled sequence of events on board the Panther missile and determine,
from the scattered telemetry if possible, if any anomalous events had occurred on
board just before the missile went off course. We thought that this way we might have
a chance to isolate the cause of the problem.

‘Basically Ensign Andrews was a detective. As you know, the data system is quite constrained
by the limited downlink bandwidth. So the packets of telemetry data come out in a
somewhat artificial way, meaning that many of the data values governing the behaviour
of the bird at the time it changed direction would not have been sent down to Earth
until several minutes later.
After
the missile had gone awry and the tracking stations had already dropped and regained
lock a couple of times.

‘Ensign Andrews showed me that in the intermittent data there were four discrete measurements
taken from the command receipt counter, a simple buffer in the software that increments
by one every time a new command message is correctly received by the missile. At first
we did not believe what we were seeing. We thought perhaps someone had made an error
or that the decommutation maps were wrong. But by 0700 we had both checked the values
from the two tracking sites and verified that we were indeed looking at the correct
channel. Commander, in the 1.7 seconds after the APRS was activated, the command receipt
counter registered over three
hundred
new messages. And then the missile swerved away from its intended target.’

The commander was writing in a small spiral notebook while Todd was talking. It took
him almost half a minute to finish his notes. Then he looked up at Todd and Ramirez.
‘Am I to believe then,’ he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm, ‘that this is the
entire
data set upon which you wish to base your indictment of the Soviet Union and put
our Navy intelligence community on alert? Or is there something else?’