‘Which is?’ Richter interrupted.
‘It’s determined by the laws of physics and the height of the platform. For a satellite at normal orbital elevation, it’s just under four inches. The Blackbird flies a lot lower, of course, so the maximum resolution is greater – in this case, a little under two inches. To put that into slightly more comprehensible terminology, if you were sitting on a park bench reading a newspaper and one of these cameras took a photograph of you from fifteen miles up, an analyst would not quite be able to read the headlines in your paper, but he would almost certainly be able to identify what newspaper it was.’
‘That,’ said Richter, ‘is very impressive.’
‘You’d be surprised at what the eye in the sky can see, and has been able to see for some time, actually. Those cameras were working independently, taking one frame every half second, one using a very high-speed monochrome film and the other high-speed colour, and covering a narrow strip of territory. The other two cameras were of a much less sophisticated design, and were working together, exposing one frame simultaneously every two seconds. They were obviously intended to supply stereoscopic photographs of the whole area that the Blackbird was flying over.’
As Kemp paused there was a knock at the door, so coincidentally timed that Richter knew whoever it was had waited until Kemp had stopped talking before knocking. The door opened and two men and a girl filed in. Richter looked at her first, because he always looked at women first. She was wearing the uniform of a sub lieutenant WRNS – what used to be third officer in the old days before the Navy began taking women to sea – and Richter was surprised to see her. Not her personally, but a Wren in a highly restricted RAF establishment. She had piercing blue eyes and a mass of blonde hair presently tightly constrained in the regulation bun on the back of her head, but which Richter had no doubt would tumble free as soon as she was off duty. The two RAF officers, in contrast, paled into insignificance. Kemp ushered them all in and made the introductions.
‘Lieutenant Commander Richter, let me introduce the team which has been burning the midnight oil over these films since Sunday evening. First of all, Sub Lieutenant Penny Walters, who is here on exchange from the Royal Navy.’
She smiled at Richter. He gave her his nice smile and turned to Kemp. ‘I don’t know what you exchanged her for, but I think you got the better end of the deal.’
Kemp laughed and she blushed slightly.
‘The home team consists of Flight Lieutenant Keith George and Flying Officer Dick Tracey. Dick’s real name is William, but he’s been known as Dick since the day he arrived at Cranwell, and I think he’s finally started to get used to it.’
Richter said he was pleased to meet them all, and got a chorus of ‘Good morning, sir’ in return. Kemp announced that he had almost finished the general briefing, and invited the three of them to take seats while he wrapped up the loose ends.
‘What you will see,’ Kemp continued, ‘is an unusual presentation of the photographs we received. As I said, we invariably view stills taken from a picture sequence on an illuminated table through a shifty-scope or on a computer monitor. You’re not PI-trained, and we didn’t think you would be able to learn anything that way, so we decided to radically change the presentation.
‘There was also the problem of the vast amount of material we had available. As you will appreciate, with the cameras taking one frame every half second, the total mass of the film is huge, almost three thousand frames. What we’ve done is effectively condense it by photographing the frames with a thirty-five millimetre cine camera – video doesn’t have the definition we need – and then we can project it as a movie film. The effect you’ll see is as if you were actually in the moving aircraft, looking downwards through a very good pair of binoculars at the landscape underneath you.’
Kemp tugged at the base of the map of Russia and it rattled back into its box, then he pressed a button on the lectern and spoke into the microphone. ‘Are you ready, projectionist?’ There was a muffled grunt from a speaker on the rear wall, and Kemp sat down beside Richter. The lights dimmed – the projectionist obviously had a rheostat control – and the screen at the end of the room was suddenly brilliantly illuminated by white light. A few flickers, then the title sequence ran. The screen went dark and Richter leaned forward.
Less than a minute later he leaned back again. He didn’t know exactly what he had been expecting, but it wasn’t the incomprehensible melange of blacks, whites and various shades of grey that were moving jerkily across the screen. It made absolutely no sense to him, and he said as much to Kemp.
‘I’m not surprised,’ Kemp replied. ‘PI is definitely an acquired art.’ He went to the lectern and spoke into the microphone. ‘Freeze it.’ The film flickered for a second or two, then stopped. Kemp pointed at the screen. ‘Can you identify anything on that?’
Richter studied it carefully. It looked to him more like a surrealist painting than anything else. A bad surrealist painting, possibly hanging upside down. He shook his head. ‘Not a thing.’
‘Penny, would you mind?’
‘Not at all, sir.’ Penny Walters got up and walked forward to the lectern. Taking another pointing stick, this one with a tiny light in the end, she turned to the screen.
Among the blacks, whites and greys on the photograph Richter could pick out three definable features; a meandering line running more or less north-west, assuming that the top of the screen was north which, on reflection, he decided it probably wasn’t. There was a small squarish grey blob in the bottom right-hand corner, and a larger, darker oblong patch just above the blob. It was all as clear as gravy as far as he was concerned. Sub Lieutenant Walters, however, seemed unperturbed.
‘This was taken early in the run, a few miles to the south-west of Vorkuta. The diagonal line here is the course of a river, and if you look here and here you can clearly see two feeder streams. The river was fairly dry when this film was taken. This is shown by the irregular outline of the banks and the colour changes – the dark in the centre is fairly shallow water while the slightly lighter outline is drying mud. The much lighter area is the riverbank.’
She moved the illuminated pointer down a little. ‘This square structure is the remains of a large hut, possibly originally used as a barn or byre. There isn’t sufficient left standing to clearly indicate its original purpose, but its size – about fifty feet by thirty – would suggest that it was probably a small barn. The very large dark oblong patch adjacent to the remains is a once-cultivated but now overgrown field. The darker colour is caused by the increased weed and grass growth after the fertilization of the soil that would have taken place during cultivation. There is little else of note on the frame – just fairly typical early summer tundra.’
Richter couldn’t think of anything remotely sensible to say, so he didn’t. Penny Walters smiled at him. ‘That may seem like magic, sir, but I’m very familiar with this film, and I’ve had the benefit of studying it frame by frame under high magnification.’
Richter turned to Kemp. ‘Perhaps you could talk me through the rest of it. It obviously won’t make a great deal of sense to me, but I’d like to see it anyway.’
‘Certainly. In fact, as Penny is already at the screen, she can supply the running commentary. OK, Penny? Projectionist – run it.’
Ten minutes later lights came on again in the room and Penny returned to her seat. Kemp asked if it had been any help.
‘Well, not really,’ Richter replied honestly. He thought for a few seconds. ‘I suppose you’ve done comparison studies with previous satellite films of the area?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Kemp. ‘There haven’t been many for the last two months or so, because that area has had a fair degree of cloud cover, but there appear to have been no significant changes since the last set of high-level pictures.’
‘OK,’ Richter said, ‘forget about significant changes. Were there any changes at all?’
‘Of course. There are always minor changes, like vehicles parked in different places, houses that sprout sheds or porches, or lose them, but nothing out of the ordinary, as far as I’m aware. Have any of you seen anything that seems unusual?’
The two RAF officers shook their heads, looking slightly bored. Penny Walters didn’t shake her head, which Kemp and Richter both noticed.
‘Penny?’
She grinned, somewhat shyly. ‘Well, there was something, but I’m sure it’s of no real significance.’
She paused, and Kemp prompted her. ‘Trust the blasted Navy to see something that the RAF missed. Come
