第 7 页

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Just north of the gambling capital of Las Vegas in Nevada lies the huge sprawl of Nellis Air Force Range, where gambling is definitely not on the agenda. For the 11,274-acre base broods over the United States? most secret weapons-testing range, the Tonopah Test Range, where any stray private air-craft penetrating its 3,012,770 acres of test-ground during a test is likely to be given one warning and then shot down.

It was here, on a bright crisp morning in December 1990, that two groups of men disembarked from a convoy of limousines to witness the first testing and demonstration of a revolutionary new weapon. The first group comprised the manufacturers of the multi-launch rocket vehicle, which was the base of the system, and they were accompanied by men from the two associated corporations who had built the rock-ets and the electronics/avionics programs incorporated in the weapon. Like most modern hardware, Despot, the ultimate tank-destroyer, was not a simple device but involved a net of complex systems that in this case had come from three sepa-rate corporations.

Peter Cobb was chief executive officer and major share-holder in Zodiac AFV, Inc., a company specializing in ar-mored fighting vehicles?hence the initials in its name. For him personally, and for his company, which had developed Despot at their own expense over seven years, everything hung on the weapon?s being accepted and bought by the Pen-tagon. He had little doubt; Despot was years ahead of Boe-ing?s Pave Tiger system and the newer Tacit Rainbow. He knew it responded completely to an abiding concern of NATO planners?isolating the first wave of any Soviet tank attack across the central German plain from the second wave.

His colleagues were Lionel Moir of Pasadena Avionics in California, who had built the Kestrel and Goshawk com-ponents, and Ben Salkind ofECK Industries, Inc., in the Silicon Valley near Palo Alto, California. These men also had crucial personal as well as corporate stakes in the adop-tion of Despot by the Pentagon.ECK Industries had a slice of the prototype-stage B2 Stealth bomber for the Air Force, but this was an assured project.

The Pentagon team arrived two hours later, when everything was set up. There were twelve of them, including two generals, and they comprised the technical group whose recommendation would be vital to the Pentagon decision. When they were all seated under the awning in front of the battery of TV screens, the test began.

Moir started with a surprise. He invited the audience to swivel in their seats and survey the nearby desert. It was flat, empty. They were puzzled. Moir pressed a button on his con-sole. Barely yards away the desert began to erupt. A great metal claw emerged, reached forward, and pulled. Out of the sand where it had buried itself, immune to hunting fighter planes and downward-looking radar, came the Despot. A great block of gray steel on wheels and tracks, windowless, independent, self-contained, proof against direct hit by all but a heavy artillery shell or large bomb, proof against nu-clear, gas, and germ attack, it hauled itself out of its self-dug grave and went to work.

The four men inside started the engines that powered the systems, drew back the steel screens that covered the reinforced glass portholes, and pushed out their radar dish to warn them of incoming attack, and their sensor antennae to help them guide their missiles. The Pentagon team was im-pressed.

?We will assume,? said Cobb, ?that the first wave of Soviet tanks has crossed the Elbe River into West Germany by several existing bridges and a variety of military bridges thrown up during the night. NATO forces are engaging the first wave. We have enough to cope. But the much bigger second wave of Russian tanks is emerging from their cover in the East German forests and heading for the Elbe. These will make the breakthrough and head for the French border. The Despots, deployed and buried in a north-south line through Germany, have their orders. Find, identify, and destroy.?

He pressed another button and a hatch opened at the top of the AFV. From it, on a ramp, emerged a pencil-slim rocket. Twenty inches in diameter, an eight-foot tube. It ig-nited its tiny rocket motor and soared away into the pale-blue sky where, being pale blue itself, it disappeared from view. The men returned to their screens, where a high-definition TV camera was tracking the Kestrel. At 150 feet its high-bypass turbofan jet engine ignited, the rocket died and dropped away, short stubby wings sprouted from its sides, and tail fins gave it guidance. The miniature rocket began to fly like an airplane, and still it climbed away down the range. Moir pointed to a large radar screen. The sweep arm circled the disk but no responding image glowed into light.

?The Kestrel is made entirely ofFiberglas, ?intoned Moir proudly. ?Its engine is made of ceramic derivatives, heat-resistant but nonreflective to radar. With a little ?stealth? technology thrown in, you will see it is totally invisible?to eye or machine. It has the radar signature of a strawberry finch. Less. A bird can be radar-detected by the flapping of its wings. Kestrel doesn?t flap, and this radar is far more sophisticated than anything the Soviets have got.?

In war the Kestrel, a deep-penetration vehicle, would penetrate two hundred to five hundred miles behind enemy lines. In this test it reached operating altitude at fifteen thou-sand feet, hauled in at one hundred miles downrange, and began to circle slowly, giving it ten hours of endurance at one hundred knots. It also began to look down electronically. Its range of sensors came into play. Like a hunting bird it scanned the terrain beneath, covering a circle of land seventy miles in diameter.

Its infrared scanners did the hunting; then it interro-gated with millimeter-band radar.

?It is programmed to strike only if the target is emitting heat, is made of steel, and is moving,? said Moir. ?Target must emit enough heat to be a tank, not a car, a truck, or a train. It won?t hit a bonfire, a heated house, or a parked vehicle, because they aren?t moving. It won?t hit angle-reflectors for the same reason, or brick, timber, or rubber, because they are not steel. Now look at the target area on this screen, gentlemen.?

They turned to the giant screen whose image was being piped to them from the TV camera a hundred miles away. A large area had been fitted out like a Hollywood set. There were artificial trees, wooden shacks, parked vans, trucks, and cars. There were rubber tanks, which now began to crawl, pulled by unseen wires. There were bonfires, gasoline-ignited, which blazed into flame. Then a single real tank began to move, radio-controlled. At fifteen thousand feet the Kestrel spotted it at once and reacted.

?Gentlemen, here is the new revolution, of which we are justly proud. In former systems the hunter threw itself downward on the target, destroying itself and all that expen-sive technology. Very cost-inefficient. Kestrel doesn?t do that; it calls up a Goshawk. Watch the Despot.?

The audience swiveled again, in time to catch the flicker of the rocket of the yard-long Goshawk missile that now obeyed the Kestrel?s call and headed for the target on command. Salkind took up the commentary.

?The Goshawk will scream up to one hundred thousand feet, keel over, and head back down. As it passes the Kestrel, the remotely piloted vehicle will pass on final target infor-mation to the Goshawk. Kestrel?s onboard computer will give the target?s position when the Goshawk hits zero feet, to the nearest eighteen inches. Goshawk will hit within that cir-cle. It?s coming down now.?

Amid all the houses, shacks, trucks, vans, cars, bon-fires, angle-reflectors dug into the sand of the target area; amid the decoy rubber tanks, the steel tank (an old Abrams Mark One) rumbled forward as to war. There was a sudden flicker and the Abrams seemed to have been punched by a massive fist. Almost in slow motion it flattened out, its sides burst outward, its gun jerked upward to point accusingly at the sky, and it burst into a fireball. Under the awning there was a collective letting-out of breath.

?How much ordnance do you have in the nose of that Goshawk　 asked one of the generals.

?None, General,? said Salkind. ?Goshawk is like a smart rock. It?s coming down at close to ten thousand miles per hour. Apart from its receiver for getting information from Kestrel and its tiny radar for following instructions to the target for the last fifteen thousand feet, it has no technol-ogy. That?s why it?s so cheap. But the effect often kilograms of tungsten-tipped steel at that speed hitting a tank is like ... well, like firing an air-gun pellet onto the back of a cock-roach at point-blank range. That tank just stopped the equiv-alent of two Amtrak locomotives at a hundred miles per hour. It was just flattened.?

The test continued for another two hours. The manufac-turers proved they could reprogram the Kestrel in flight; if they told it to go for steel structures with water on each side and land at each end, it would take out bridges. If they changed the hunting profile, it would strike at trains, barges, or moving columns of trucks. So long as they were moving. Stationary, except for bridges Kestrel did not know if an ob-ject was a steel truck or a small steel shed. But its sensors could penetrate rain, cloud, snow, hail, sleet, fog, and dark-ness.

The groups broke up in mid-afternoon, and the Penta-gon committee prepared to board its limousines for Nellis and the flight to Washington.

One of the generals held out his hand to the manufactur-ers.

?As a tank man,? he said, ?I have never seen anything so frightening in my life. It has my vote. It will worry Frunze Street sick. To be hunted by men is bad enough; to be hunted like that by a goddam robot?hell, what a night-mare!?

It was one of the civilians who had the last word.

?Gentlemen, it?s brilliant. The best RPV deep-strike tank-buster system in the world. But I have to say, if this new Nantucket Treaty goes through, it looks like we?ll never or-der it.?

Cobb, Moir, and Salkind realized as they shared a car back to Las Vegas that Nantucket was facing them, along with thousands of others in the military-industrial complex, with utter corporate and personal ruin.

* * *

On the eve of Christmas there was no work inAlc?ntara del Rio but much drinking was done and it went on until late. When Antonio finally closed his little bar it was past mid-night. Some of his customers lived right there in the village; others drove or walked back to their scattered cottages spread across the hillsides around the villages. Which was whyJos? Francisco, called Pablo, was lurching happily along the track past the house of the tall foreigner, feeling no pain save a slight bursting of the bladder. Finding he could go no farther without relief, he turned to the rubble wall of the yard in which was parked the battered SEAT Terra mini-jeep, unzipped his fly, and devoted himself to enjoyment of man?s second greatest single pleasure.

Above his head the tall man slept, and again he dreamed the awful dream that had brought him to these parts. He was drenched in sweat as he went through it all for the hundredth time. Still asleep, he opened his mouth and screamed,? No ... o... o... o!?

Down below, Pablo leaped a foot clear in the air and fell back in the road, soaking his Sunday-best trousers. Then he was up and running, his urine sloshing down his legs, his zipper still undone, his organ receiving an unaccustomed breath of fresh air. If the big, rangy foreigner was going to get violent, then he,Jos? FranciscoEchevarr?a, by the grace of God, was not going to stick around. He was polite, all right, and spoke good Spanish, but there was something strange about that man.

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In the middle of the following January a young freshman came cycling down St. Giles Street in the ancient British city of Oxford, bent upon meeting his new tutor and enjoying his first full day at Balliol College. He wore thick corduroy trou-sers and a down parka against the cold, but over it he had insisted on wearing the black academic gown of an under-graduate at Oxford University. It flapped in the wind. Later he would learn that most undergraduates did not wear them unless eating in hall, but as a newcomer he was very proud of it. He would have preferred to live in college, but his family had rented him a large house just off the Woodstock Road. He passed the Martyrs? Memorial and entered Magdalen Street.

Behind him, unperceived, a plain sedan came to a halt. There were three men in it, two in the front and one in the back. The third man leaned forward.

?Magdalen Street is restricted access. Not for cars. You?ll have to continue on foot.?

The man in the front passenger seat swore softly and slipped to the pavement. At a fast walk he glided through the crowd, intent on the cycling figure ahead of him. Directed by the man in the back, the car swerved right into Beaumont Street, then left into Gloucester Street and another left down George Street. It stopped, having reached the bottom end of Magdalen, just as the cyclist emerged. The freshman dis-mounted a few yards into Broad Street, across the junction, so the car did not move. The third man came out of Magda-len, flushed from the icy wind, glanced around, spotted the car, and rejoined them.

?Damn city,? he remarked. ?All one-way streets and no-entry areas.?

The man in the back chuckled.

?That?s why the students use bicycles. Maybe we should.?

?Just keep watching,? said the driver without humor. The man beside him fell silent and adjusted the gun under his left arm.

The student had dismounted and was staring down at a cross made of cobblestones in the middle of Broad Street. He had learned from his guidebook that on this spot in 1555 two bishops, Latimer and Ridley, had been burned alive on the orders of Catholic Queen Mary. As the flames took hold, Bishop Latimer called across to his fellow martyr: ?Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle by God?s grace in England as I trust shall never be put out.?

He meant the candle of the Protestant faith, but what Bishop Ridley replied is not recorded, since he was burning brightly at the time. A year later, on the same spot in 1556, Archbishop Cranmer followed them to death. The flames from the pyre had scorched the door of Balliol College a few yards away. Later that door was taken down and rehung at the entrance to the Inner Quadrangle, where the scorch marks are plainly visible today.

?Hello,? said a voice by the student?s side and he glanced down. He was tall and gangly; she, short with dark bright eyes and plump as a partridge. ?I?m Jenny. I think we?re sharing the same tutor.?

The twenty-one-year-old freshman, attending Oxford on a junior-year-abroad program after two years at Yale, grinned.

?Hi. I?m Simon.?

They walked across to the arched entrance to the col-lege, the young man pushing his bicycle. He had been there the day before to meet the master, but that had been by car. Halfway through the arch they were confronted by the amia-ble but implacable figure of Tim Ward-Barber.