Distraction - Bruce Sterling [118]
“Oscar, I’m glad that you’re having fun at the lab, but forget the big glass snow globe. We need you here in DC, right away. Our anti-Huey campaign just crashed and burned.”
“What? Why? I don’t need to go to Washington to feud with Huey. I’ve got Huey on the ropes right here. We’ve fingered all his cronies in the lab. I’ve got people here who are literally picketing them. Give me another week, and we’ll purge all the local cops, too. Once those clowns are out of the picture, I can get to some serious work around here.”
“Oscar, try to stick to the point. That lab is just a local sideshow. We have a national-security crisis here. Huey has a radar hole.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means the North American radar coverage. The Air Force military radar. Part of the Southern U.S. radar boundary was run out of that Louisiana air base. Now that radar’s gone, and there’s a missing overlap between Texas and Georgia. The bayous have gone black. They’ve dropped right out of military surveillance.”
Oscar put his fork down. “What the hell does that have to do with anything? I can’t believe that. How is that even possible? No radar? A ten-year-old child can do radar!” He took a breath. “Look, surely they’ve still got air traffic control radar. New Orleans wouldn’t last two days without air traffic. Can’t the Air Force use the civilian radar?”
“You’d think so, but it just doesn’t work that way. They tell me it’s a programming problem. Civilian radar runs off a thousand decentralized cells. It’s distributed radar, on packet networks. That doesn’t work for the Air Force. The military has a hierarchical system architecture.”
Oscar thought quickly. “Why is that a political problem? That’s a technical issue. Let the Air Force handle that.”
“They can’t handle it. Because those are old federal missile-detection systems, they date back to Cold War One! They’re mil-spec hardware running antique code. That system just isn’t flexible—we’re lucky it still runs at all! But the point is, there’s no federal radar coverage in Louisiana. And that means that enemy aircraft can invade the United States! Anywhere from Baton Rouge south!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Leon. It can’t possibly be that bad,” Oscar said. “How could the military miss a problem that size? There must be contingency plans. Who the hell was keeping track of all that?”
“No one seems to know,” Sosik said mournfully. “When the Emergency committees took over the base closures, the radar issue got lost in competing jurisdictions.”
Oscar grunted. “Typical.”
“It is typical. It’s totally typical. There’s just too much going on. There’s no clear line of authority. Huge, vital issues just fall through the cracks. We can’t get anywhere at all.”
Oscar was alarmed to hear Sosik sound so despondent. Clearly Sosik had been spending rather too much time at the Senator’s bedside. Bambakias became ever more fluent and compelling as his grip on reality faded. “All right, Leon. I agree with that diagnosis, I concede your point. I am with you all the way there. But let’s face it—nobody’s going to invade the United States. Nobody invades national boundaries anymore. So what if some idiot Emergency committee misplaced some ancient radar? Let’s just ignore the problem.”
“We can’t ignore it. Huey won’t let us. He’s making real hay out of the issue. He says this proves that his Louisiana air base was vital to national security all along. The Louisiana delegation is kicking our ass in Congress. They’re demanding that we build them a whole new air base from the ground up, immediately. But that’ll cost us billions, and we just don’t have the funds. And even if we can swing the funding, we can’t possibly launch a major federal building program inside Louisiana.”
“Obviously not,” Oscar said. “Roadblocks, NIMBY suits, eminent-domain hassles … that’s tailor-made for Huey. Once he’s got federal contractors stuck knee-deep in the swamp, he could rip off a leg and bleed the whole budget to death.”
“Exactly. So we’re stuck. We