00.19.30 COSMONAUT. Vyssotsky is singing.
00.19.36 GC. Glad to hear you’re all happy. We await your systems report at 175 hours GET. Ground control out.
Heilbron rewound the tape. Hooper picked a winged insect out of his tea and flicked it into the shadows. He said: “It’s a bit late for quiz games, Rich.”
Wallis said: “The guy on board answered pretty damn smart.”
Sacheverell, who had also noticed the fact, looked at the colonel with respect. He said: “Distance is 3.3 million kilometres. With a speed of light of three hundred thousand kilometres a second, that gives a round trip, from the question asked at Tyuratam to the answer intercepted at Menwith Hill, of twenty-two seconds. It fits with all the pauses except the last one.”
“I can see we’re in smart company tonight,” Heilbron said. “Excellent. We can use all the brains we can get on this one. Yes Sacheverell, all the pauses except the last one. What is that horrible noise? Then there’s a nineteen-second delay and the reply, ‘Vyssotsky is singing.’ ”
“Meaning?” Wallis asked.
“Now hold on, Heilbron,” General Hooper interrupted. “Are you trying to tell me the cosmonaut answered the question before he got it?”
“Precisely.”
“Christ, Sam, maybe Menwith just screwed up their tapes.”
“Negative. We’ve checked out the technical side.”
“What’s your conclusion, Mister Heilbron?”
“Patience, Colonel Wallis, there’s more, much more. We hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the Phobos launch until then, you understand. Plenty of stuff on tape etcetera but processing it wasn’t a high priority. The timing hiatus had been picked up by one of my bright young geniuses, a guy by the name of Pal. So I put him in charge of a small team, a sort of Operation Phobos. They found this — listen. This is from a conversation three days later. I haven’t bothered with a transcript. Listen to the timing pulses.” They listened to the high-pitched, frightened bat, coming between the deep Slavic tones of the man in the spaceship. Heilbron replayed it several times. The military men shook their heads. Sacheverell frowned.
“It’s impure,” he said. “Structured.” He was beginning to feel light-headed, whether from tiredness or the narcotic effect of the scented narcissus he couldn’t tell.
Heilbron nodded encouragingly. “Another Brownie point for our young friend. Now here’s the same timing pulse slowed down ten thousand times.” He wound the tape on, missed the start, wound it back again and then played it. Sacheverell felt the hair on the back of his neck prickling as the clandestine message came over, a clear, Morse-like, intelligent signal spreading out from the circle of light, through the Guatemalan jungle, over the big lawn and into the dark woods beyond. Heilbron let it run a minute and then stopped it. He said:
“They’ve slipped in a burst transmission. It goes on for hours. I’ve had my best people on it for a week, fifth-generation machines trying to talk to it. It even beat the NSA’s Cray T3D at Fort Meade.” Sacheverell recalled that more mathematicians were employed at the National Security Association’s Maryland headquarters than anywhere else on Earth. Heilbron went on: “The consensus now is that it’s some sort of one-way encryption system, unbreakable unless you have the key. And the conversation is phoney — the voice people tell me the acoustics aren’t quite right or something. What’s up there on Phobos Five is a tape recorder. They’re playing some sort of charade, ground control asking questions in anticipation of the answers on the tape. Only the tape carries messages and the guy on the ground mistimed, just once.”
“What are you telling us? That the Soyuz is unmanned?” Hooper asked.
“Three cosmonauts climbed on board. We took pictures.”
“Jesus, Rich,” said the Chairman, JCS, in exasperation. “First you tell us some machine on the spacecraft is answering pre-set questions, then you say there are people on board. Why don’t they just do their own talking instead of playing an answering machine?”
“Because they’re not there any more.”
Hooper gave the CIA chief a sceptical stare. “They jumped out?”
Heilbron said, “Take a look at Exhibit B.” There was a rustle as envelopes, about a foot square, were opened. Sacheverell, baffled, helped himself to more iced tea. The CIA Director produced a small red pill from a packet and swallowed it with his tea.
“Like I said,” Heilbron continued, “nobody was paying much attention to Phobos at the time and the pictures you’re going to see were just filed away at first. Look at the first one. This came from the French. It’s an unclassified Spot picture. What you’re looking at is the Baikonur cosmodrome. The scale’s about a hundred miles. Aral Sea’s off the picture to the left. The river”—a thin blue ribbon wandered left to right across the picture, passing through a city—“is the Sar-Daya.”
“What’s the town?” Wallis asked.
“The former Leninsk. It’s a hundred miles east of the Aral Sea. Following the Red Army takeover, the whole region has been closed again to Westerners. Leninsk is one of the new science cities: cinemas, culture palaces, sports stadiums and so on. They’ve built it on to Tyuratam old town — that’s the darker colouring on the left.”
“What are the arrows?” Wallis again.
“The one in the middle is the Cosmonaut Hotel. We’ve a first class source there, a lady who’s been with us since the old days.” Heilbron’s pipe gurgled and he poked at it. “Now look at the next few pictures, Sam, and despair.”
There was a rustle and Sacheverell found himself looking at a large black and white photograph with a “classified” stamp on its border. Heilbron continued: “You can just see the railway line and the highway next to it coming in from the bottom. It’s a busy line, all the way up from Leninsk. The big grey squares you see in the middle are the Soyuz assembly buildings. We think the ones on the left are for type G and Energia assembly — the brute force boosters. Now the tracks go further north and the railway line carries on. The next photo”—more rustle—“shows the launch complex. The little arrows show what used to be their ICBM silos before Salt Two. Mostly the old SS-X series. Forget them. It’s the Energia facility that’s got me running to the john. You see it in the next picture. We’d taken routine high-level reconnaissance pictures of the launch, and this was taken by a big Bird on a perigee passage. The thing that’s circled”—there was something like a full stop with a white circle round it—“is a military transport. You see the launch vehicle just to the right. On the next photo you see them putting up netting over everything. They’ve got something to hide.”
A cluster of tiny dots, each one a man, was scattered around between the vehicles. They seemed to be pulling something over the ground. “The netting’s up in the next picture. Perspective has changed a bit; we’re using a different satellite.” The same pattern of buildings was there, but now they were throwing long evening shadows. Cloud had edged in and some of the ground was obscured. A solitary dot threw a long shadow on the ground, arms and legs clearly visible. Sacheverell thought he could detect a moustache.
“They screwed up. Look at the next one.” The next one showed the netting in place, hiding truck, rocket and launch pad from prying satellite eyes. The sun had almost set.
“What am I supposed to see?” asked Hooper.
“Look at the shadows,” said Heilbron. “The sun was shining under the netting. My geniuses used the outline of the shadows and the angle of the sun and they got the next picture.” They stared uncomprehendingly at a large Rorschach ink blot; Sacheverell thought he saw a squid with a huge quill pen.