Fastwater ordered the signal processor to disengage from the data package and focused in on the desired area. “Fill the screen?”
“All of it.” Jenny watched as the circular structure came up toward her. It was like the other three cooling towers for the reactors. In its intended use the nonradioactive water used to draw thermal energy away from the heat exchangers carrying the reactor coolant would be vented through steam pipes into the two-hundred-foot concrete towers, which were roughly the shape of hourglasses with the extreme top and bottoms sheared off (people had become familiar with the shape while watching coverage of the Three Mile Island disaster in the seventies). The majority of the steam would then condense on the walls, falling back into collecting basins in the interior base of the tower for recirculation.
But there was something different about tower number one.
“Signal strength, pure return,” Jenny directed. “Process for strong return and detail.”
Harry ran the corresponding data through a simple program that gave high precedence to strong returns from whatever was in tower number one. This gave it a clear, almost photorealistic representation. “Wow.”
There it was, dead center in the tower that was now serving as a silo. “Those smart bastards. That thing would never have been seen by the cameras down in there. Not enough light. Check the heat signature.”
It took only a minute. “Just ambient.”
Jenny surveyed the structure itself. At the base of the tower were several rectangular voids where the radar return had been judged insufficient to process as strong. “There. Look, those are vents. The other towers don’t have those. No cooling tower should. Cool air is drawn in and goes upward. That keeps the interior temp to just an ambient level.”
“An IR shadow,” Harry observed correctly.
“Brilliant.” Her head shook at the simplistic artistry of it. “And they can also serve as vents for the launch gases.” Jenny slumped back in the chair, looking to the quarry that had just been found. The lance aimed at her country. It was a big sucker. Real big. Her eyes narrowed as she sat forward. Too big.
Harry caught her puzzled look. “What is it?”
“What’s the diameter of the top of the tower?”
He clicked the digitizer on the extreme opposite sides of the circular opening. “Thirty-nine-point-six feet.”
“Diameter of the object?”
He wondered why she didn’t call it, “the missile.” “Ten-point-eight feet. What… Wait.” He looked at the specs of what they had been looking for. It wasn’t what they had found. “Jen, the SS-4 has a diameter of five-point-three feet. This thing’s twice that!”
“I know.” She saw that the top of the object had a two-step taper from the sharply pointed nose down to about half the radius, then out further to the full radius. “Take a height measurement.”
The difference between the returns from the interior floor of the tower and from the nose of the object yielded the measurement. “One-hundred-and-eight-point-two feet. Christ, Jen, that’s more than thirty feet longer than the SS-4! What is that thing?”
Jenny did her own measurements on the strangely tapered nose. The top section, an almost perfect cone, was something to be expected. “Thirteen-point-two in length, five-point-three in diameter.” She turned to her partner. “That’s an SS-4 warhead nose cone.”
“And the section below is just a tapered fairing to connect it to the…what?”
“Let’s find out.” Jenny swiveled her chair to the right to face the second of three terminals arrayed around her workspace. “Let’s just call up the missile data here and see what we’re looking at.”
“Comparison search?” Harry asked as he slid closer, looking over his partner’s shoulder.
“Manual, Harry. The discriminator on the database has never been my favorite.” The desired data file, “Missile Dimensional Characteristics,” came up from NPIC’s central computer, which was wholly isolated from phone lines leading to the outside world. No possibility of “unclean” data infiltrating the system existed. “Okay, our guidelines here are twofold: liquid-fueled missiles and the proper dimensions. I’m more concerned with the diameter than the height, though we have to be close there also. But that damn fairing is going to throw off any purely identical comparison.”
“I can’t believe it. They just strapped the warhead to another missile!”
“A bigger one, Harry,” Jenny pointed out. She scrolled through the information on known missile systems produced and fielded in the past forty years by any and all nations. “The size of this scratches a lot of the candidates.
“SS-Nineteen,” Harry said as information on the Russian-produced missile, known to the SRF as the RS-18, came up.
“About twenty feet too short and a foot too thin,” Jenny responded. “Man, this is a big thing.”
Several more candidates for a match scrolled by. “This is too short for an SS-Eighteen,” Jenny observed, referring to the Russian heavy missile known by its NATO designation Satan, an altogether appropriate choice of nomenclature. “And the one we have is too fat by about a foot. Damn…”
“That’s all of the possible Russian ones,” Harry said. “And it’s not one of ours.”
“The Cubans certainly didn’t build it,” Jenny said assuredly. She’d seen enough from above to know that Castro’s inept government-controlled industrial capacity could be generously given the label of “backward.” The capacity had been there at one time, but they’d never exploited it. Another good example of the bearded wonder’s lack of foresight.
“But who, then? If it isn’t Russian or American, then who? Who builds them that big besides us and them?”
There was one other possibility, but it was a stretch. “The Chinese.”
Harry watched intently as Jenny switched to information on the PRC’s missiles. “Whoa. Lots of big clunkers.”
“They don’t build them pretty,” Jenny said, scrolling through until two measurements caught her eye. “But they do build them the right size.” That’s how…
“CSS-Four,” Harry read off the screen. “Exact match on the diameter. Just a foot off on the length. Throw weight of three thousand and eighty pounds. The SS-Four warhead was three thousand pounds. But how?”
“The DF-Five, Harry. The DOD designation is CSS-Four, but the Chinese call it Dong Feng Five. That means ‘east wind.’ The DF-Five is also the basis for the CZ-Three series of space-launching boosters. It’s an exact duplicate except for the payload and guidance systems, actually. One carries satellites, the other a very big bomb.”
Fastwater, in preparation for his assignment to work with MacNamara on the monitoring of the Cuban military during the rebellion, had versed himself in the goings-on of the past decade as they applied to the capabilities of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces and associated elements. One of those elements was the short-lived Cuban Space Exploration Center project, a farcical attempt by Fidel Castro to construct a launch facility for satellites in the Caribbean to rival that of the French in Guyana. An attempt that received funding and technical support from the People’s Republic of China.
“That space fiasco.”
Jenny nodded at the screen. “One warhead. One booster. One very big problem.”