Magnum Force in the Anti-Radar Game

摘要

When grey-haired missile engineers meet for drinks in the UK town of Stevenage, the home base of MBDA UK, one of the stories that they reminisce over is likely to be what a fictional detective such as Sherlock Holmes or Philip Marlow might have described as "The Tale of the Terrified Typist". Like all legends, it has probably been embellished with each retelling, but the original version - as told to this writer soon after the event that gave rise to it -was as follows: Early in 1991, the company (which was then BAe Dynamics) had an important package that had to delivered to the UK Royal Air Force (RAF) transport base at Brize Norton in Wiltshire, from which a waiting aircraft would rush it to the Gulf, where the war to liberate Kuwait was about to begin. The package in question was so highly- classified that it had to be hand-delivered, a task that was entrusted to one of the company's secretaries.