Masters sat upright, put down the Pepsi, and quickly checked his readouts. “College, this is Masters One, I—” He did a double-take. Seconds ago he’d been getting a stream of position and velocity readouts from the NIRTSat in its orbit.
Now the readouts were zero.
Masters sighed. “Confirmed on this end. Stand by. I’ll try to re-establish communications.” On the interphone to his crew, he said, “Give me a turn westbound and a climb to best altitude. We’ve got a problem with the satellite.”
Helen Kaddiri entered the flight deck. “What is it, Jon?”
“We lost contact with the satellite.”
She looked at him as if to say, I’m not surprised. Instead, she said, “Same problem we had before?”
“That was a loose plug, Helen, this” — he scratched his head in an uncharacteristic moment of confusion — “has got to be something else. But what, I don’t know.”
McLanahan began programming the final launch instructions on his Super Multi Function Display so they could take out the last few sortie targets in General Jarrel’s setup and then head home.
The display shimmered and abruptly changed.
“What the—” McLanahan muttered.
Instead of the gently rolling hills and dry gullies of southeastern Montana, the SMFD showed a confusing pattern of light spots in a blank, featureless background. It did have one very prominent terrain feature — a mountain nearly twenty thousand feet high and sixty miles wide. It was as if Mount Everest had just been transplanted into the middle of the Great Plains.
“I don’t believe this…” McLanahan said, staring at the SMFD.
“What is it?” Ormack asked. “That doesn’t look like the target area.”
“The computer must be decoding the signal wrong,” McLanahan guessed.
Amazingly, the computer began plotting a recommended course on the erroneous computer display, with sharp changes in heading away from the larger moving spots but fairly close to the smaller, non-moving ones. The computer even made weapon selections, although with only two weapons on board the choice was relatively simple — the longer- range SLAM missile for the large moving spots that were to be circumnavigated, and the STRIKER glide-bomb for the smaller, stationary ones.
The strike computer began the arming and countdown procedures to attack these “targets,” and that’s when McLanahan got tired of this. “There’s some glitch in the system and it’s not clearing. I’ll reset the system and go manually until I get a usable display back.” But he did not simply reset the computers — he used the on-board computer memory to save the last few seconds of images first before clearing the bogus display.
“What do you think is the problem?” Ormack asked.
“I don’t know,” McLanahan replied. “I’ll check switches — the system will report on any switches out of position in the post-mission computer dump. Maybe there was a glitch in the satellite. Who knows?” He bent toward the screen and began identifying radar aimpoints, getting ready for the “bomb” releases. “Probably something minor…”
But that new satellite image did not look like something minor, McLanahan thought uneasily. It was more than a glitch. The computer was processing the data it received from NIRTSat as if it were real, uncorrupted data, and he knew enough about the NIRTSat system to know that the computer would reject false data.
No, whatever that twenty-thousand-foot-high “mountain” was, McLanahan thought, it was real. Something very serious had just happened somewhere in the world.
“What the
“Must be a sensor glitch… a solar flare or a power spike,” Major Kelvin Carter tried. He spoke with the technicians, but none of those present could understand the display. “Whatever it is, it killed the satellite,” Carter said. “This is the last image received; the satellite is off the air.” “Too bad,” Wyatt said. “McLanahan’s run was looking real good, too.”
Captain Ken James’ attention was riveted on the display frozen on the screen. “It’s a weird picture, but the computer is displaying valid data on it,” he said. “Look: height, width, speed, density, course — the thing is moving and growing all at once.”
“But it’s showing it as terrain, Ken,” Carter said. “That can’t be right. We were looking at the Philippines first, then at Montana. There’s no mountain in either place.”
Wyatt shrugged, then began packing up his notebook. “It was still a spectacular display, gents,” he said, “but I—”
“Sir, phone call for you,” one of the technicians said. “Urgent from NMCC.”
As Wyatt trotted to the phone, James turned to Carter and asked, “Nimic? What’s that?”
“National Military Command Center,” Carter replied. “The War Room at the Pentagon.”
