less expensively.
'It never occurred to you to hide the site?' the Japanese general demanded.
'How could anyone find this?' the senior engineer shot back.
'They have cameras in orbit that can pick up a packet of cigarettes lying on the ground.'
'And a whole country to survey.' The engineer shrugged. 'And we are in the bottom of a valley whose sides are so steep that an inbound ballistic warhead can't possibly hit it without striking those peaks first.' The man
pointed. 'And now they do not even have the missiles they need to do it,' he added.
The General had instructions to be patient, and he was, after his initial outburst. It was his site to command now. 'The first principle is to deny information to the other side.'
'So we hide it, then?' the engineer asked politely.
'Yes.'
'Camouflage netting on the catenary towers?' They'd done it during the construction phase.
'If you have them, it's a good beginning. Later we can consider other more permanent measures.'
'By train, eh?' The AMTRAK official noted after the completion of his briefing. 'Back when I started in the business, I was with the Great Northern, and the Air Force came to us half a dozen times about how to move missiles around by rail. We ended up moving a lot of concrete in for them.'
'So you've actually thought this one over a few times?' Betsy Fleming asked.
'Oh, yeah.' The official paused. 'Can I see the pictures now?' The goddamned security briefing had taken hours of unnecessary threats, after which he'd been sent back to his hotel to contemplate the forms-and to allow the FBI to run a brief security check, he imagined.
Chris Scott flipped the slide projector on. He and Fleming had already made their own analysis, but the purpose of having an outside consultant was to get a free and fresh opinion. The first shot was of the missile, just to give him a feel for the size of the thing. Then they went to the shot of the train car.
'Okay, it sure looks like a flatcar, longer than most, probably specially made for the load. Steel construction. The Japanese are good at this sort of thing. Good engineers. There's a crane to lift something. How much docs one of these monsters weigh?'
'Figure a hundred tons for the missile itself,' Betsy answered. 'Maybe twenty for the transporter- container.'
'That's pretty heavy for a single object, but not all that big a deal. Well within limits for the car and the roadbed.' He paused for a moment. 'I don't see any obvious electronics connections, just the usual brake lines and stuff. You expect them to launch off the cars?'
'Probably not. You tell us,' Chris Scott said.
'Same thing I told the Air Force twenty-some years ago for the MX. Yeah, you can move them around, but it doesn't make finding them all that hard unless you assume that you're going to make a whole lot of railcars that look exactly alike—and even then, like for the mainline on the Northern, you have a fairly simple target. Just a long, thin line, and guess what, our mainline from Minneapolis to Seattle was longer than all the standard-gauge track in their country.'
'So?' Fleming asked.
'So this isn't a launch car. It's just a transport car. You didn't need me to tell you that.'
'The Air Force kept telling me how delicate the damned things are. They don't like being bumped. At normal operating speeds you're talking three lateral gees and about a gee and a half of vertical acceleration. That's not good for the missile. Next problem is dimensional. That car is about ninety feet long, and the standard flatcar for their railroads is sixty or less. Their railroads are mainly narrow-gauge. Know why?'
'I just assumed that they picked—'
'It's all engineering, okay?' the AMTRAK executive said. 'Narrow-gauge track gives you the ability to shoehorn into tighter spots, to take sharper turns, generally to do things smaller. But they went to standard gauge for the Shin-Kansen because for greater speed and stability you just need it wider. The length of the cargo and the corresponding length of the car to carry it means that if you turn too tightly, the car overlaps the next track and you run the risk of collision unless you shut down traffic coming the other way every time you move these things. That's why the missile is somewhere off the Shin-Kansen line. It has to be. Then next, there's the problem of the cargo. It really messes things up for everybody.'
'Keep going,' Betsy Fleming said.
'Because the missiles are so delicate, we would have been limited to low speed—it would have wrecked our scheduling and dispatching. We never wanted the job. The money to us would have been okay, but it would probably have hurt us in the long run. The same thing would be true of them, wouldn't it? Even worse. The Shin- Kansen line is a high-speed passenger routing. They meet timetables like you wouldn't believe, and they wouldn't much like things that mess them up.' He paused. 'Best guess? They used those cars to move the things from the factory to someplace else and that's all. I'd bet a lot of money that they did everything at night, too. If I were you I'd hunt around for these cars, and expect to find them in a yard somewhere doing nothing. Then I'd start looking for trackage off the mainline that doesn't go anywhere.'
Scott changed slides again. 'How well do you know their railroads?'
'I've been over there often enough. That's why they let you draft me.'
'Well, tell me what you think of this one.' Scott pointed at the screen.
'That's some bitchin' radar,' a technician observed. The trailer had been flown up to Elmendorf to support the B-1 mission. The bomber crews were sleeping now, and radar experts, officer- and enlisted-rank, were going over the taped records of the snooper flight.
'Airborne phased array?' a major asked.
'Sure looks that way. Sure as hell isn't the APY-1 we sold them ten years back. We're talking over two million watts, and the way the signal strength jumps. Know what they've got here? It's a rotating dome, probably a single planar array,' the master sergeant said. 'So it's rotating, okay. But they can steer it electronically, too.'
'Track and scan?'
'Why not? It's frequency-agile. Damn, I wish we had one of these, sir.'
The sergeant picked up a photo of the aircraft. 'This thing is going to be a problem for us. All that power— makes you wonder if they might get a hit. Makes me wonder if they were tracking the is, sir.'
'From that far out?' The B-1B was not strictly speaking a stealthy aircraft. From nose—on it did have a reduced radar signature. From abeam the radar cross section was considerably larger, though still smaller than any conventional airplane of similar physical dimensions.
'Yes, sir. I need to play with the tapes some.'
'What will you look for?'
'The rotodome probably turns at about six rpm. The pulses we're recording ought to be at about that interval. Anything else, and they were steering the beam at us.'
'Good one, Sarge. Run it down.'
34—All Aboard
Yamata was annoyed to be back in Tokyo. His pattern of operation in thirty years of business had been to provide command guidance, then let a team of subordinates work out the details while he moved on to other strategic issues, and he'd fully expected it to go easier in this case rather than harder.
After all, the twenty most senior zaibatsu were his staff now. Not that they thought of themselves that way. Yamata-san smiled to himself. It was a heady thought. Getting the government to dance to his tune had been child's play. Getting these men onboard had taken years of cajolery. But they were dancing to his tune, and they just needed the bandmaster around from time to time. And so he'd flown back on a nearly empty airliner to steady down their nerves.
'It's not possible,' he told them.
'But he said—'
