'Can I take a peek?'
'Ordinarily…. But we're set up for a major test.' 'Room for another observer?'
'Sorry. I don't think so.'
'But I've come so far.'
'I understand. Space inside is very limited.' Gaubatz swiped his card and eyeballed the scanner. The heavy door clicked open. He grasped the handle.
Ilse felt her goal slipping away. On the other hand.. It amounted to double or nothing: If he were in there… 'Are there any South Africans at this test?'
'Er, not to my knowledge.'
'Shouldn't one be, if it's so important? It would be a wonderful way to start my stay among you.'
Gaubatz smiled and held the door for Ilse. 'All right, then. I think you'll find this very interesting.'
Jeffrey and Clayton held back while Montgomery peeked around the next corner.
'Bad news, LT,' Montgomery whispered. 'They've got four guards at the blast interlock to the other half of the lab. Three men, one woman. All with pistols, plus two submachine guns on shoulder slings. They look jumpy.'
'They must have found the dead guard,' Clayton said. 'I'll never make it-past them now.' Jeffrey nodded. The three of them had left all their weapons behind with the enlisted SEALs, because of the scanners and metal detectors. There was no way they could fight past these four naval infantry.
Salih watched Jeffrey from several yards away, pretending to wipe a spot on the floor with a rag.
'Shaj,' Jeffrey said, 'the chief and I can go through together, and leave you here.'
'The problem's not me, it's the gadget. They may have sensors, you know, at that checkpoint. The box's shielding isn't good enough to sneak it by.' Salih tugged at Jeffrey's sleeve. 'You need to sneak your box past the guards?' Jeffrey nodded.
'You two go through here, say you're welders, ja? Me, I'll show the lieutenant the other way, through the air duct.'
'Air duct?' Jeffrey said. Of course, there'd have to be one. But… 'Won't they have intrusion detectors?'
'I can open the grills with my ID — yours won't work, so don't try it. I have access, to crawl through sometimes, to clean out the dust. It's a fire hazard if you let it build up.'
'I know. But won't they have motion sensors inside? They'll know there's two of you going through.'
'The guards disconnected them. Too many false alarms. Mice.'
'Mice?'
'I used a toilet float on a string. Rolled it in, then pulled it back. Drove the guards nuts.'
'You'll need these,' Gaubatz said. He handed Ilse a hearing-protection headset. 'This whole area is sound- isolated, so we don't disturb our colleagues. It's a giant raft that floats on oil and rubber buffers, but the source level inside the chamber can exceed two hundred decibels…. And don't worry, this glass is armored and flameproof, just in case.'
Ilse watched through the viewing port, fascinated, as technicians fueled the missile. The men wore rubberized protective suits. Frost formed on the hose they used. They stood on an antistatic mat. All their equipment was ceramic or plastic. Automatic fire-suppression nozzles ringed the test chamber ceiling.
'It's much smaller than I expected,' Ilse said.
Gaubatz laughed. 'This is a one-fourth-scale test article, made from the same materials as the full-size weapon.'
Ilse blushed. 'What's the capacity of the wind-tunnel?' 'Mach ten, though we won't go that high tonight. We do plan for the future.'
'How do you get such a high speed in this confined space?'
'We've adapted magnetic rail-gun technology. It drives a system of rotary paddles in the high-pressure part of the loop.'
'That must use a lot of power.'
'It does. That's why we run these tests at night, when electric demand in the rest of the country is lower.' 'What about the waste heat?'
'Tremendous heat, and also when the missile propulsion system runs. They just wrapped up a static test of the full-size engine. The cooling system was working hard.'
'The missile's attached to that pylon?'
'Not exactly. You'll understand in a moment.' 'The shape isn't at all what I expected.' Ilse studied the missile, trying to memorize every detail. It wasn't a flying telephone pole, or a shark with wings. It looked like a giant chisel, with stubby winglets near the back. Instead of a tail fin, control surfaces jutted from the edges of the winglets. Below the fuselage was a thin rectangular air intake. From this angle Ilse couldn't see the shape of the scramjet nozzles.
'Why isn't it painted?' The missile was mostly shiny silver or flat gray, but had patches in black or orange- gold.
'We didn't apply the ablative antiradar coating. It would make an awful mess, burning off in the test chamber…. The missile's defensive and targeting sensors are all conformal. They're liquid hydrogen-cooled, which at the same time preheats the fuel for optimum burning.'
'Commander, where does the warhead go?'
'Weapons of mass destruction don't need to be at the front, do they? It's not like an artillery shell that actually hits the target. The payload bus is at the lifting body's center of mass, where the chisel widens.'
The fueling technicians were finished. They withdrew. Others tidied up the test chamber. They left. On Ilse's side of the armored glass, engineers double-checked their instrumentation. The room in which she and Gaubatz stood was crammed with electronics cabinets and consoles, linked by fiber-optic lines and power cables.
'I have another question, Commander,' Ilse said. 'Certainly.'
'If this test is with a fourth-scale model, don't you have to adjust the results for the differences in air viscosity, and proportion the boundary layer turbulence, relative to the size of the full operational missile? That must be an extremely difficult calculation.'
'Ach. Quite so.' He smiled. 'We've perfected the numerical methods involved. The work is done on our supercomputer. The results have already been validated, to a remarkable degree of accuracy.'
'What's the purpose of this next test, then?'
'It relates to what you'll be working on. A key measure of weapon effectiveness is the probability of penetration to an Allied nuclear aircraft carrier through their entire layered defense, from long range. Live firing tests in the Baltic with full-size prototype missiles, and war-game simulations, also on our supercomputer, indicate that probability to be seventy percent.'
'That sounds very good.'
'It's remarkable, for expenditure of just one missile. But these missiles are very expensive, and even with mass production they'll be in short supply at first. We want to enhance the penetration probability to ninety percent.'
Ilse nodded. 'That way a salvo of a dozen would take out a whole carrier battle group, escorts and all…. Hmmm. And I suppose if you, I mean we, wanted to destroy some Allied cities with ten shots, it's better to kill nine of them than seven.'
'The key is better artificial intelligence software for the autonomous counterthreatevasion routines. Tonight we're checking out the latest software upgrade. It goes hand in hand with improvements to the fluidics elevon controls.'
'Now I understand. Penetration probability enhancement research: PEPPER…. Does that team work here in the test center?'
'Oh, no. All that work's done in the computer-aided design-and-engineering lab.'
'Where's that?'
'In the other half of the installation, near the mainframe.' There were two labs?
'They're almost ready now,' Gaubatz said. 'Put on your headphones.' Jeffrey glanced over his shoulder as the interlock's second blast door closed behind. They were in the other half of the installation now. No one was following them, and no one was in earshot.
'You're good,' he said to Montgomery 'Remind me to never play poker with you, Chief. You bluff too well.'
