Pulses, page 2
“Where's Mom?” he asked out of breath. “Who are all these people?”
Mrs. Bray took several deep breaths. She tried to say something but no sound came out. She waved for him to come with her, but he spun away and ran across the lawn to his house. One of the strangers on the front porch grabbed for him as he reached the top step. He ducked under the man's hands only to be snatched off his feet as he reached the front door. Stunned, he asked in disbelief and panic, “What's the matter? Where's Mom?”
Through the open door lay something under a white sheet. Rivulets of fresh blood fed larger, still pools of crimson. The sheet glistened red on one end. He didn't need to be told what it was. Then he was being passed from hand to hand back to Mrs. Bray.
“I've already called your father,” she said. “He's out in Albuquerque. He'll fly back tonight.” She hugged Luke to her side as she hurried him along to her house. “You'll stay with me until he gets home. All right?”
Luke could say nothing. When Mrs. Bray had him lie down on the sofa he thought of the school nurse's office. They had wanted to call his mother to come get him, but he had insisted he didn't need her. He wanted somehow to redo that. He thought if only he could go back and change his mind about continuing in the spelling bee, his mom would be okay again. As he thought this through, numbness overcame him and he drifted into sleep.
Luke awoke in a muted darkness full of cooking aromas. He heard Mrs. Bray in the kitchen stirring something on the stove. He sat up in the darkness and peered out the window toward his house. The hedge blocked his view. He slid off the sofa and eased out the front door. Now illuminated by auxiliary lighting, his house stood in garish contrast to the darkness. A police car still squatted ominously in the drive. He peered around the hedge. Two policemen on the front porch conversed in deep tones. Luke wanted to go inside. He needed to be in his own home where his mother cooked dinner in the evenings.
Following the hedge toward the back of Mrs. Bray's house he crawled under without being seen and emerged into the shadowy surroundings of his backyard. The rear door was unlocked. He pushed it open and suddenly remembered something he had noticed as he had run up the front steps earlier that afternoon. The front of the house had holes in it. He peered into the kitchen. There was another hole in the far wall. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he wandered through the kitchen touching the counters, listening to the ticking sounds the house made as it cooled. There were more holes. Some were round, some oblong, and they were very smoothly cut as if the house were a piece of Swiss cheese. The holes went through furniture as well. The dining table lay on its side, one end entirely missing.
Luke moved into the living room where the bloody sheet had been. A pungent odor hit him. Snatches of conversation drifted in from the two policemen on the front steps. One said something about looking for the rest of the body when the relief team arrived. Luke shifted his eyes carefully from side to side; apprehensive about what he might see. The policeman's statement alarmed him, and he had decided to go back to Mrs. Bray's when something fluttered by his ear. He swiped at the side of his head thinking a moth had flitted by. He suspected he wasn't the only one in the room, but he wasn't quite sure how he knew that.
Then something fluttered again several feet away and a dim outline swayed drunkenly in the darkness before him. It wavered as if trying to balance itself before suddenly swerving a dozen feet to the left. It corrected the sidewise movement and returned to its original position in the center of the room. Luke thought about calling for the two policemen outside but wasn't sure how much trouble that might get him into. The apparition seemed to stabilize into a shadowy form outlined against the darkness. It glowered down at him and seemed about to speak when Luke moved and it lost its balance again and careened into the kitchen wall. The contact with the wall left another of the holes and produced a shower of sparks where it cut through electrical wires and the gas line. A brief swirl of light appeared and the thing was gone, replaced by the hiss of gas. Another spark crackled from the severed electrical lines and the room lit up as the gas line ignited.
Chapter 3
That evening found Major Dawson in a corner booth in the mess hall with Captain Tony Wells. Tony had been on site as operations officer for over ten months and was an old-timer as short tours went. He would rotate back to the States in less than two months.
This was Tony's first tour with the Electronic Security Command. His previous jobs had been in computer operations, a career that almost guaranteed a tour in intelligence if you were good. And Tony was. He had designed much of the software for remotely updating targeting information in the Minuteman missiles as they sat on alert in their silos. The Secretary of Defense had given Tony special recognition for his efforts in that program. Unfortunately that effort would do him little good on his promotion to major. Once the promotion board saw his photograph in the selection folder, he was done for.
Tony wasn't exactly officer material. Not with a forty pound overhang around his middle and a bulbous nose that strained to hold up glasses with thick corrective lenses. His dark, wavy hair had a mind of its own when a comb got near it. A heavy beard, which the Air Force required him to shave daily, kept his neck broken out in a shaving rash most of the time. But, if one could overlook all that, Tony was loyal to a fault and a brilliant programmer.
They were finishing supper when Luke spotted Sergeant Redleaf come in through the rear door of the chow hall and enter the serving line. He asked Tony what he knew about Sergeant Redleaf.
“Redleaf? Knows his electronics,” Tony replied with a touch of appreciation for a fellow professional.
“No. I mean off duty?”
“Well, when he's not down at his shop working, he's usually staying in shape. He does push-ups. Runs. But out in the desert.” Tony was obviously impressed. “He's part Indian you know. They can do stuff like that.” He sat for a moment with his mouth ajar. “That's about all, I guess. I don't see too much of the technicians. They usually pal around together.”
Redleaf emerged from the chow line and searched for an empty table as Luke studied him. He kept his hair short on the side so that his scalp showed through. The top grew a little longer, just enough to lie flat. And he held himself with an erectness common to men in top shape. But age was moving in. Deep lines fanned out from his eyes and turned downwards along his cheeks. But, he had a youthful attitude and an inquisitive mind. The younger troops liked him because of his interest in teaching them about electronics and life in general. Luke caught his the sergeant’s eye and motioned him over to the corner booth. Redleaf maneuvered around the tables and scattered chairs and slid his tray onto the gray Formica.
“Evening, major, captain. How's chow today?” He cleared his tray and leaned back to shove it onto an adjacent table before turning to his food.
Luke mentioned that he had already told Captain Wells a little about the extraneous pulses they'd been tracking. Redleaf launched into what he had found during the intervening fourteen hours.
“I think I've got a good handle on the problem now. I don't know yet what's causing the pulses, but whatever it is, I can get it to send the pulses on command. Every time I ask the Pacific site for a pulse on channel 46, I get three extra pulses about a minute later. The extra pulses look almost like the originals that leave the Pacific transmitter before being distorted by the trip across Asia to us. It's just that they're a minute or so late getting here.”
“Any ideas yet about the source?” Luke pushed the salt and pepper shakers down the table toward him.
“Well, at first I thought they might be coming from the comparator. It has the capability to duplicate a low level sounder pulse identical to the Pacific pulses. We use these lower power pulses to calibrate the equipment. I disconnected the comparator, though, and I still got the pulses. I've repeated the process a dozen times since this morning. The boys at the transmitter site are getting a little tight with me about my requests for more pulses.” Redleaf paused to eat a little of his supper.
Tony had been listening with some interest. Luke knew he liked few things better than an unsolved technical problem. Those were his forte. He might be a little on the fat side, but he knew how to get to the bottom of things. His tedious, systematic approach to problem solving usually produced an answer far faster than the hurried, unstructured attempts Luke had seen used so much in the military. “What kinda spacing you got between the pulses?”
Redleaf waved his fork back and forth as he tried to swallow. “Don't know. Ten or fifteen seconds once they start. Haven't measured.” He took a draught of water.
“What direction they coming in from? Maybe the Reds are spoofing you or something.”
“Could be. This morning I thought maybe they were coming in from the east, but now I'm not so sure.”
“Maybe they're coming from some kind of rotating radar antenna somewhere, and every time the thing points this way you get the pulses.” Tony rubbed his hand along his neck as he pondered the possibilities. The rash on his neck reddened.
“No, sir. The pulses are intentional. They're too complex to be produced by accident.”
Tony stroked his jaw as he looked over his shoulder at the rest of the people finishing up their meals. Finally he looked back accusingly at Sergeant Redleaf. “Those damn pulses are probably what's been messing up our channel selection all year.”
Redleaf continued to chew his corn bread while he stared impassively at Tony. “Didn't know you had a channel selection problem, captain. Never saw anything about it in the daily status report.” He took another bite of corn bread.
Tony looked away again. It was the old cat and dog fight between maintenance and ops and Tony was already on the losing end. “It wasn't bad enough to put in the report,” Tony offered. “A couple of times a month maybe. I figured we were bound to get a few flukes. No point in making up a report every time it happened.”
Having neutralized any complaints about maintenance, Redleaf went back to chewing his corn bread.
“I think I can see what happened now,” Tony speculated. “If there are stray pulses that look like fresh signals, and they hit just when your receiver is measuring at that frequency, you'd get a good reading whether the channel was good or not.”
Redleaf stopped chewing for a second then swallowed hard. “That could conceivably happen. We run through the whole channel sequence three times on each test. Do you recall if the problem was on channel 46?”
“We've had it happen on a lot of different channels over the last year.”
Redleaf furrowed his brow. He finally dropped his corn bread and stood up.
“Where're you going? Wait up.” Tony worked his bulk along the seat until he reached the end of the booth.
“If you’ve got a few minutes, come on out to the van, captain? I want to try something, and it'll be easier with your help.” Tony hitched his pants up and followed Sergeant Redleaf out the back door. Luke headed back to his office. He stayed about a week behind in his paperwork. Not that being behind bothered him much.
***
Early the next morning Luke found Tony and Redleaf over in the operations center running signal lines into the rear of the site's backup computer. Luke had been answering pointed questions from an unpleasant colonel in European headquarters about the repeated use of the Pacific transmitter. The colonel, the chief of operations, had let him know the over-the-horizon radar was not there for electron pushers to use as a test bed to troubleshoot electronics problems. Any future use of the equipment beyond a one-time request to verify system integrity after repair action would have to be approved personally by the operations chief at the Pacific site.
Luke called the two men over and explained the situation. Redleaf only rolled his eyes upward, but Tony let the operations room know what he thought about the staff idiots that ran the OHR system.
Luke put his hand on Tony's shoulder, “Let's try to exercise a little patience this morning, captain.” Tony didn't know how to swear properly anyway.
“Well, it doesn't make a hoo-doodle-damn anyway. If the sarge's guess is right we won't be needing their shitin' help. Anyhow, it's more trouble to get their help than it is to work around it. We get a full sounding run every hour anyway. With what we set up last night, we should know where this interference is coming from by dinner.” Tony calmed somewhat at the mention of dinner. He moved to the computer console and busied himself at the keyboard. “With a little luck maybe we can prove the problem is in the Pacific transmitter,” Tony sniffed. He caught Luke's eye and apparently decided not to continue.
Redleaf was already wiring the sounder display console.
“What did you have in mind as a check?” Luke asked.
“We're using the scientific approach, sir. The captain over there said I wasn't going about this very scientifically.” Redleaf glanced briefly over at Tony. “I guess I shouldn't poke fun. I was getting my data one piece here, one there, and using up everyone else's time in the process.” He finished making the connections on the sounder console and straightened up. Across the aisle Tony busily punched in a program change from a sheaf of handwritten notes. They stepped over to him.
“What we're doing is feeding the digital information from the sounder display unit into the backup computer,” Redleaf said. “The captain is setting up a program to have the computer sort all the incoming data and give us a direct printout of the various characteristics of the pulse groups. Duration, time of arrival. Stuff like that.”
“We'll get the whole thing in one try,” Tony interjected, “providing the guys doing this number with the extra pulses are on the air today.” He never looked up from his notes as he spoke. “We tried something last night but didn't get any response.”
“What did you two try last night?”
“Something the captain said last night made me think that we were getting extra pulses on more than just channel 46. We tried to receive a grouping of channels all at one time to see if the pulses were coming in on other channels too. We didn't have much luck. No response. But if everything goes right this morning, we'll get a line on which channels have the extra pulses, how many pulses there are, the pulse duration and spacing, and a list of any patterns the computer might see. We'll have just about everything we need to figure out a reason for the extra pulses except a reading on their bearing and distance.” Redleaf finished the final hookup into the computer and started throwing tools into his carrying bag. “And we'll have it on mag tape so we can play it back as many times as we need to. If this works this morning, I'm going to set up a direction finding antenna after lunch and get a bearing on the extra pulses.”
“We'll be ready in two,” Tony said. “I'm running checks on the program changes right now.” He input several commands from the keyboard. The computer's status display unit flashed rows of lights in cadence with Tony's commands.
“Checks,” Tony said. “Get ready, sarge. The next run is coming up in five seconds.”
Redleaf threw a power switch on the sounder display unit and went over to the computer display to watch the results. The operations clock clicked off the last few seconds. At the stroke of seven the computer's lights raced in a series of flashing status checks. At the end of fifty seconds the flashing continued even though the first pulse train was complete. Tony and Redleaf beamed at each other.
“Alright, sarge. Looks like we got us something to work with now.”
Tony hit the print key on the console and the print head slammed over to the left margin. The printer stuttered out several lines of print. Every few seconds after that another line appeared until several feet of printout protruded from the rear of the machine. The computer console went dark again and Tony hit another key. After almost a minute the printer began to whir again. It printed for several seconds and then fell silent. Tony reached over, tore off the paper, and laid it on top of the computer. Numbers filled the sheet from the left margin to about the middle of the page.
Tony ran his finger down the page while Redleaf peered over his shoulder. When he came to a pattern at the bottom of the page, he studied it for several seconds before he spoke.
“Looks like there's some intent behind the pattern of the extra pulses. They don't just repeat the same sequence every time, but there's a progression pattern there too.” Tony pointed to a triple row of numbers. The first and last row held identical sets of digits. The center row of digits, however, increased incrementally in value. Before Luke could ask what the three rows represented, Tony continued.
“This row here shows the time in seconds between the real sounder pulse on each channel and the first bogus pulse to arrive on that channel. Every time the difference is 43 seconds.”
“Pretty good, captain,” Redleaf said, “for a first try.”
“Hold the applause till you hear the rest of the story. Now this other row here is the difference between the first and last bogus pulse. You'll notice again it’s a constant. Seventeen seconds in every case. I also see we got a reply on every channel.”
That struck Luke as peculiar. He knew that the sounder produced pulses too complex to duplicate without some very sophisticated, and for that matter very classified, equipment. To duplicate them en masse as the signals jumped from channel to channel was impossible to spoof he felt sure. Yet here they were. There was an undercurrent here he didn't have particularly good feelings about. If the problem turned out not to be in the Pacific site's equipment, as Tony hoped, then they were up against someone with a lot of resources at their disposal.
It seemed clear that the bogus pulses were deliberate. There was something more here than equipment malfunction. Luke knew the big questions of who and why lay beyond the capability of his personnel to solve with the resources they had at the site. He would have to send a report of suspected jamming or worse, security compromise. He could delay the report for a day or two on the pretext of not being sure the problem was external to the OHR system. That would allow them time to gather more data. But to what end, Luke asked himself. In the service, the opening of an investigation of the possible compromise of a large scale program led to chaos for months as agents who lacked the real expertise required to do the job right interviewed everyone in sight. The agents had the capability to intimidate most people. But to get to the real truth, Luke knew, would not be the outcome should such an investigation be started at the site.
