The capability, which had revolutionized her job, was made possible by the SAR. Actually a grouping of thousands of small radar transceivers and receivers arrayed along a long, flat slab, the SAR took a radar picture of a target as it moved over its area of observation. What resulted were detailed pictures of a target from a variety of angles. These images were then combined to form a stereoscopic contour world consisting of billions of bits of digitized data, portions of which could then be called up for close analysis.
A series of quick beeps signaled the end of the computer’s task. Jenny slid back to the workstation’s thirty-inch monitor. “Harry, it’s up.”
Her assistant, Harrold Fastwater, moved to the adjacent identical display. Grandson of one of the famed Navajo codetalkers of World War II, he had come to NPIC after a stint in the Navy, following the same career path as his senior partner. The Navy, as was recognized by those not in the rival armed services, had a superior cadre of image analysts, and surprisingly allowed them to migrate to other government agencies quite easily. Spreading the blood around, the Navy brass quietly joked.
“Jesus!” Fastwater exclaimed at the data count on his screen.
“Ain’t nothing, Harry. Remember, you’re not playing with that real-time garbage anymore.” Jenny herself had graduated to the more complex assembly-and-analysis process eight months before. “You want to watch TV, tune in the soaps. This is big-time data.”
Harry shook his head. He had only been on board with MacNamara for a week, but he still didn’t understand her disdain for real-time imagery. To him it was damn exhilarating watching things from a hundred or more miles up as they happened. But his enthusiasm for the former was about to be dampened.
Jenny typed a command on the keyboard before switching her right hand to the mouse like digitizer. Upon the two-and-a-half-foot diagonal screen a jagged finger of green and brown appeared, a field of blue surrounding it. “Welcome to Cuba, Harry.”
Harry noted that the detail was on a strategic scale. The topography looked as it would on a visible-light topographic plate, but this was done with radio waves? “Yeah, it’s good, but…”
“But nothing,” Jenny said. “Watch.”
She moved the digitizer to the right, a cursor appearing on the screen and mimicking the track of her hand. A click brought one corner of a box to the screen, somewhere in the central part of the island, and a drag expanded the area of its coverage. “Area one.”
A touch of the digitizer brought a zoom down to the bordered area, which now filled the screen with increased clarity.
“Wow,” Harry commented. He had expected to see a degradation in detail, not enhancement.
“Your first SAR shot, eh?” she asked, smiling at the image, which was taken down two more steps.
“Uh-huh.” Fastwater stared wide-eyed at the image. “Incredible.”
“You think this is something, wait till next year this time.” The image of the area north of Cienfuegos became the focus of Jenny’s attention. “Your clearance covers it, so no big deal in telling you, but once we get those stacked-parallel machines in here, we’ll be doing flybys just like that Grand Canyon stuff you’ve seen.”
“No shit?”
Jenny looked to her left. “No shit, buddy.”
It was time for work. “Okay, let’s find out what’s there.”
Harry, manipulating his own controls, started tagging objects as man-made that didn’t fit into the natural terrain. The anomalies were distinct from the usually smooth surrounding terrain because of their boxy shape. Most were buildings, but those showing a computer-enhanced motion distortion were obviously vehicles. Dimensions were extrapolated by their relation to known objects, a job the computer handled with a simple command.
“Lots of trucks going somewhere. Zil models, looks like,” Jenny guessed, the computer unable to distinguish between the several models of the Russian-built transports. “Look at this.”
“What?” Fastwater, his screen duplicating what the senior analyst’s showed, focused his attention on a group of dark rectangles in a line. A convoy.
“See how the outlines are sharper on this — let’s see, that’s south — on the south side?”
“Yeah.”
Jenny swept the area with the bright dot, drawing an imaginary circle around the convoy. “Those are the front ends of the trucks. See, there’s more distortion at the other end, which means the SAR got fewer returns from the objects as it passed over. Just like a picture of a runner in motion. From a camera it’d be like the effect from a slow shutter speed.”
“Or an IR image,” Fastwater added, catching on to Jenny’s explanation. “On that you have a ghost trail when there’s movement.”
“Right. Same thing here. So what does it tell us?”
“Other than the obvious?” Harry asked, aware of the senior analyst’s rep as a near photo-psychic.
“All of it.” Jenny rotated the chair and faced her partner.
“Well, they’re moving south. We can peg the road designation and tell where, more or less, they’re going.”
“And…” Jenny knew what she wanted him to see.
Harry looked back at the scene and shrugged his shoulders. “Correlate with the camera shots to peg the units involved.”
“Harry, which is more important: going to the grocery store or coming from it?” Jenny drilled the question into her partner with her eyes. Come on.
Fastwater knew there had to be more to the question than the obvious, but… “Coming home.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve got… Because I’ve got the goodies!” Harry’s eyes lit up.
“Do they have the goodies? Are they running full or empty?” Jenny turned back to the display, her point now ready to act on. “If they’re running south empty, toward their supply bases around Cienfuegos, then it means they’re going back for more.”
“Might make a nice artillery ambush,” Fastwater mused.
“That’s up to the boys with the guns. But what if they’re running full?”
“Why would they go back with supplies?” Harry couldn’t fathom that.
“You don’t have to return with the same load you left with,” Jenny observed as she took the view down farther to a point just behind the lead truck in the convoy.
“Troops.” It was said as both a realization and a hope. “You think they might be retreating?”
“We’ll know soon enough.” Jenny manipulated the enhancement functions of the workstation on the SAR data. Besides being able to construct a photo-mosaic representation of the surface of a target, the SAR could also penetrate into the soil or water a few feet, depending on conditions. This function had such diverse abilities as determining subterranean structures helpful to oil exploration and also in detecting minute subsurface ocean displacements to aid in the hunt for submarines. But when in the hands of a skilled image analyst, it could do much more.
“What are you doing?” Harry gave up trying to follow Jenny’s actions on his own display and rolled his chair next to hers.
“Well, we’re going to do this by the numbers. See, behind the first truck. The tread impressions.”
“Right,” Fastwater said. “We determine the depth, and we can extrapolate the load.”
Jenny glanced at her partner. “Hey, I’m not a witch. It ain’t that easy, anyway. There’s been rain, so we won’t have a uniform depression depth. Just thank God they’re keeping off the paved roads.”
“Guess they’re getting hit hard there,” Harry surmised correctly.
“Yeah. So, we have to go with this first truck’s tracks before any of the ones behind it roll through them. Now, we’re going to take a subsurface reading on the depression and measure the lateral spread. Then we go to the soils book.