Kim Robinson: The Gold Coast

McPherson cringes at the reference to the Hacksaw disaster, a gun program axed by the DOD for incompetence; it was the beginning of the end for Danforth Aerospace, which is now just a name in the corporate history books. That kind of thing could still happen; a big program could go bad so disastrously that it got the axe and brought its whole company down.…

So. Great lunch. McPherson tries to remember what he ate as he makes notes of the conversation, in the LSR offices on the top floor they rent in the Aerojet Tower. Apparently it didn’t agree with him. Salad? No matter. He spends the rest of the afternoon on the phone to OC, and then to White Sands, to tell Dan Houston that the heat is on. Dan knows that already, and in an anxious, almost frightened voice, he asks for help. McPherson agrees to do what he can. “But it’s not my program, Dan. Lemon may not give me the time to do anything. Besides, I’m not sure what I can do.”

That evening Major Tom Feldkirk comes by and picks him up, and they track over the river into Georgetown.

Feldkirk is around forty-five, ex-flyer, wears his black hair longer than they’d like it back on base, in a swoop over his forehead and well down his back. He’s dressed casually, sport shirt, slacks, loafers. McPherson has dealt with him twice before, likes him all right. They park in an underground lot, walk up onto a brick sidewalk and into the usual Georgetown crowd. They could be two lawyers, two congressmen, two of any part of Washington’s success structure. They discuss Georgetown, the fashionable bars, the crowds. McPherson is familiar with the area by this time, and can mention favorite restaurants and the like.

“Have you been to Buddha In The Refrigerator?” Feldkirk asks.

McPherson laughs. “No.”

“Let’s try it, then. It’s not nearly so bad as it sounds.”

He leads them down M Street, then up one of the little sidestreets, where it looks like it could be 1880, if you ignored the tracks out on the cobblestone street. Or thought of them as streetcar tracks. McPherson has a brief vision of monorailed antique street cars, then reins in his thoughts. This is business, here.…

Inside, the restaurant looks Indian. Cloth prints of Buddha and various Hindu deities hang on the walls: six-armed, elephant-headed, outlandish stuff. McPherson’s a bit worried, he prefers not to eat food he doesn’t recognize, but then the menu turns out to have twenty pages, and you can order anything you can think of, but with every meal you’ll get some fine Buddhist vegetables. That’s okay. He orders salmon fillet. Feldkirk orders some kind of Asian soup. He was stationed on Guam for several years, and developed a taste for the food. They discuss the Pacific situation for a bit. “The Soviets have got the choke points,” says Feldkirk, “but now we’re stationed outside them all, so it doesn’t really matter.”

“Leaves Japan and Korea kind of hanging.”

“True. But with the Japanese arming themselves so well, they can take the front line of their own defense. We can cover them from behind. It’s not a bad situation.”

“And Korea?”

“Well!…”

Their meals are served, and as they eat they discuss the Redskins and the Rams, then technical aspects of the war in Burma. McPherson begins to enjoy himself a bit. He likes this man, he can get along with him, he’s sort of a kindred spirit. Feldkirk talks ruefully about his two sons, both now at Annapolis. “I took them sailing a lot when we were on Guam, but I never thought it would lead to this.” McPherson laughs at his expression. Still, Annapolis is awfully hard to get into. “And your kids?” Feldkirk asks.

“Just one. He’s still hanging out in Orange County, teaching night classes and working in a real estate office part-time.” McPherson shakes his head. “He’s a strange one. A brain without a program.” And Feldkirk laughs.

Then the meals are done, they’re lingering over drinks and cheesecake, watching Washington’s finest chattering around them. Feldkirk leans back in his chair. “You’re probably wondering what I’ve got in mind for tonight.”

McPherson lifts his eyebrows: here it comes. “Sure,” he says with a smile.

“Well, we have an idea for a system that I want to discuss with you. You see, the RX-16 is almost operational now.”

“Is it?” The RX-16 is Northrop’s RPV, a remotely piloted vehicle, which in certain quarters of the Electronic Systems Division is all the rage now: a robot jet craft with classified speeds, perhaps up to Mach 7, and capable of turns and rolls that would kill a pilot. Made of kevlar and other lightweight stealth materials, it has the radar signature of a bee. It’s one of Northrop’s most successful recent contracts, and McPherson was in fact aware it is about to go into production, but he didn’t want to say so.

“Yeah. Great plane.” Feldkirk looks wistful. “I bet it would be a real kick to fly one. But the time for manned fighter planes has passed, it looks like. Anyway, we’ve got some ideas for the use of this RX-16 in the European theater.”

Use against the threat of the Warsaw Pact invasion, then, the Big Contingency that has stimulated so much of the conventional weapons upgrade spiral between the superpowers. McPherson nods. “Yeah?”

“Well, here’s what we’re thinking. The RX is ready, and for some time to come we think it’ll be a good deal faster and more maneuverable than anything that the Soviets will have. Now if the tanks ever roll, we’d like to be able to use the RXs against them, because if we can do that, it might turn into a shooting gallery situation. We have in mind flying the RXs straight down at full speed from sixty thousand feet to terrain-following level, having them make covert runs down there, finding a dozen tanks and clotheslining the Harris Stalker Nine missiles to them, then popping out and up. And turning around for other runs, until the missiles and fuel run out.”

“Stuka pilots would recognize the flight pattern,” McPherson remarks, thinking about it. “So you need a navigation system for the terrain following.” Tree-top contouring at a mile a second or more.…

“That’s right.”

“And covert, you say.” Which means they don’t want the plane sending out investigating signals that can be picked up by enemy detection systems. This contradicts the desire for tight navigation and makes things tough.

“That’s right.” The standard device for locating targets, Feldkirk goes on, a YAG laser operating at the 1.06 micron wavelength, won’t do anymore. The new window for targeting lasers is from about eight to fourteen microns, which fits between the upper and lower ends of the Soviets’ latest radar systems. “This means a CO-two laser, probably.”

But CO2 lasers don’t penetrate cloud anywhere near as well as those using yttrium/aluminum/garnet. “You want it all-weather?” McPherson asks.

“No, just under the weather, day and night.”

So they weren’t concerned about fog, for instance. McPherson suddenly imagines the Soviet tanks waiting for fog to start World War Three.…

“How much weight?”

“We’d like it under five hundred pounds, if you’ve got it in a single pod. Maybe seven fifty if you put it in two wing pods. We can work that out later.”

McPherson lets out a breath. That’s a constraint for you. “And how much power can the plane give the system?”

“Maybe ten KVA. Ten point five, tops.”

Another constraint. McPherson thinks about it, putting all the factors together in his mind. The components of such a system exist; it’s a matter of putting them together, making them work on this new robot jet.

“Sounds interesting,” he says at last. “I think we could make a proposal, given that my boss likes the idea, of course.”