Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [322]
The General had instructions to be patient, and he was, after his initial outburst. It was his site to command now. "The first principle is to deny information to the other side."
"So we hide it, then?" the engineer asked politely.
"Yes."
"Camouflage netting on the catenary towers?" They'd done it during the construction phase.
"If you have them, it's a good beginning. Later we can consider other more permanent measures."
"By train, eh?" The AMTRAK official noted after the completion of his briefing. "Back when I started in the business, I was with the Great Northern, and the Air Force came to us half a dozen times about how to move missiles around by rail. We ended up moving a lot of concrete in for them."
"So you've actually thought this one over a few times?" Betsy Fleming asked.
"Oh, yeah." The official paused. "Can I see the pictures now?" The goddamned security briefing had taken hours of unnecessary threats, after which he'd been sent back to his hotel to contemplate the forms-and to allow the FBI to run a brief security check, he imagined.
Chris Scott flipped the slide projector on. He and Fleming had already made their own analysis, but the purpose of having an outside consultant was to get a free and fresh opinion. The first shot was of the missile, just to give him a feel for the size of the thing. Then they went to the shot of the train car.
"Okay, it sure looks like a flatcar, longer than most, probably specially made for the load. Steel construction. The Japanese are good at this sort of thing. Good engineers. There's a crane to lift something. How much docs one of these monsters weigh?"
"Figure a hundred tons for the missile itself," Betsy answered. "Maybe twenty for the transporter-container."
"That's pretty heavy for a single object, but not all that big a deal. Well within limits for the car and the roadbed." He paused for a moment. "I don't see any obvious electronics connections, just the usual brake lines and stuff. You expect them to launch off the cars?"
"Probably not. You tell us," Chris Scott said.
"Same thing I told the Air Force twenty-some years ago for the MX. Yeah, you can move them around, but it doesn't make finding them all that hard unless you assume that you're going to make a whole lot of railcars that look exactly alike—and even then, like for the mainline on the Northern, you have a fairly simple target. Just a long, thin line, and guess what, our mainline from Minneapolis to Seattle was longer than all the standard-gauge track in their country."
"So?" Fleming asked.
"So this isn't a launch car. It's just a transport car. You didn't need me to tell you that."
No, but it is nice to hear it from somebody else, Betsy thought. "Anything else?"
"The Air Force kept telling me how delicate the damned things are. They don't like being bumped. At normal operating speeds you're talking three lateral gees and about a gee and a half of vertical acceleration. That's not good for the missile. Next problem is dimensional. That car is about ninety feet long, and the standard flatcar for their railroads is sixty or less. Their railroads are mainly narrow-gauge. Know why?"
"I just assumed that they picked—"
"It's all engineering, okay?" the AMTRAK executive said. "Narrow-gauge track gives you the ability to shoehorn into tighter spots, to take sharper turns, generally to do things smaller. But they went to standard gauge for the Shin-Kansen because for greater speed and stability you just need it wider. The length of the cargo and the corresponding length of the car to carry it means that if you turn too tightly, the car overlaps the next track and you run the risk of collision unless you shut down traffic coming the other way every time you move these things. That's why the missile is somewhere off the Shin-Kansen line. It has to be. Then next, there's the problem of the cargo. It really messes things up for everybody."
"Keep going," Betsy Fleming said.
"Because the missiles are so delicate, we would have been limited to low speed—it would have wrecked