“Meaning?” DeLuca asked, though he knew the answer.
“Meaning, how much discretionary power do you really want to give to any one individual?” Phil LeDoux said. “It’s not just a defensive weapon. If you think we were worried about Stingers getting into the wrong hands, THEL makes the Stinger look like a popgun. There wouldn’t be a commercial flight in the world that would be safe. We’re not even sure we want our own soldiers in the field to have that much power, because all it would take would be to have one guy have a very bad day and you’d probably kill the whole program.”
“And Cheryl Escavedo was working with the THEL program?”
LeDoux shook his head.
“This is just the background,” LeDoux said. “What’s sensitive here is what was black-budgeted. Nobody really stopped researching antisatellite weapons in 1985—some pretended to be ABM programs and the rest went from white to black. Without getting into specifics, what you need to keep in focus is the degree to which technology has increased its capacity while reducing its size. I had a Kaypro 10 portable computer in 1985 that weighed almost one hundred pounds and had enough memory to store thirty pages of text, and I think I paid three thousand dollars for it. Today there’s more technology in the little pieces of plastic crap they give away in McDonald’s Happy Meals. So, smaller and smaller, and more and more powerful.”
“Nuclear-powered satellites?”
“Oh, yeah,” LeDoux said. “But the problem with satellites is how vulnerable they are—they get wiped out by solar flares, let alone by ASAT systems. Thermal management is critical to their design—internal temperatures have to be maintained within a very narrow range, and they’re not designed to redistribute heat. Most have a lethal radiance of ten watts per square centimeter, plus they don’t maneuver, so ASAT-SBLs could take their time knocking them out. We’ve been armoring our own birds in a variety of ways ever since DOD directive TS.3100a, but we’re still vulnerable. So, what’s the best way to hide a satellite?”
“Make it invisible?” DeLuca guessed.
“You got it,” LeDoux said, clicking on his mouse. The word at the top of the screen read “DARKSTAR,” and beneath it, a photograph of a man standing next to what looked like a large black flashlight, a canister about five feet long and two feet in diameter. LeDoux allowed DeLuca a few moments to absorb the image.
“The nickname is ‘Deathstar,’” Oswald said. “It’s a good thing George Lucas doesn’t sue us for copyright infringement. This is an early prototype, by the way, about ten years old. The new ones are smaller. Darkstar is a fully cloaked satellite, using the same Stealth technology we use to hide our Stealth fighters and our Stealth bombers, more effectively, actually, since in space you don’t have to allow for aerodynamics. NRO was working with the CIA on Stealth birds at a clip of about $9 billion a year, classified as ‘Misty,’ mostly Lockheed-Martin, and Darkstar was piggybacked on a black program. It’s a tunable microwave infrared laser with a two-thousand-megawatt capacity. Minneapolis-St. Paul draws about two thousand megawatts. The problem with atmospherics has been something Space Command has been working on for years. The longer the wavelength, the more atmosphere you can penetrate but the more power you need to push it through. Darkstar was designed as both an ASAT and an ABM weapon, and finally, to perform all the same functions as THEL. It puts it all together. Fully maneuverable, and small enough that you can launch it to geosynchronous with as little as a Delta II platform, though that far out, you start to lose range even at two thousand megawatts. At geotransfer orbit, the dwell is in microseconds for even hardened targets like cruise missiles flying at twenty or thirty meters above the ground. Radar exposure increases only .07 percent when it reconfigures and essentially decloaks to fire, and it’s coated in heat-and light-absorbent materials. In other words, no one is going to see this thing unless we want them to see it. The only way would be to be looking in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, but without being able to track it, it can’t really be done.”
“Wait a minute,” DeLuca said. “This thing can shoot down cruise missiles?”
“That’s right,” Colonel Oswald said.
“Thirty meters above the ground?” DeLuca said. “What’s to stop it from taking out ground targets? They don’t even move.”
Colonel Oswald and Phil LeDoux exchanged glances.
“Where space defense is concerned,” Oswald said, “there’s what we can do, and there’s what the enemy thinks we can do. And it’s always been a delicate balance. It’s game theory, but it’s played for real. We don’t want our enemies knowing what we can do, any more than we want them knowing what we can’t. We want them to think we’re stronger than we really are, because that creates deterrence, but we don’t want them to think we’re so strong that they have to act to defend themselves, because that generates aggression. That’s why this is sensitive—if word of Darkstar were to get out, the first thing the media would start talking about is death rays. Is it a death ray? Yes, actually, it is. It’s a tunable beam, so it can do anything from start a campfire to obliterate a building or an underground bunker to, perhaps, destroy a city.”
“Or a person,” DeLuca said.
“Do you think we wouldn’t take Osama Bin Laden out that way if we could find him?” Oswald said. “Biometrics acquisition is a whole different question. The task range is extremely broad. One of the original applications of Darkstar was to develop a laser that could be used to destroy asteroids headed for earth, and with sufficient dwell time, it could probably actually do that. MIRACL was a cover operation. That is, MIRACL is a fully operational ground-based laser, but it was a Darkstar prototype, firing at the same time, that took out the target. MIRACL was just a big public show to explain what happened.”
“When is Darkstar scheduled for deployment?” DeLuca asked. Oswald and LeDoux again exchanged glances.
“We’ve launched two,” Oswald said. “Prototypes, but operational. Darkstar1 went up dark and Darkstar2 went up lit, but D2 malfunctioned and eventually broke into pieces over the Indian Ocean.”
“What about the other one? D1?” DeLuca said.
“We can’t find it,” LeDoux said. “Maybe the same thing happened to both of them, though they were on opposite sides of the earth when number two went black. No sunspots or solar flares. We can’t seem to light D1 up, and the backup systems to turn it on and decloak it have also failed. The likelihood is that it was damaged and is inoperative.”
“Unless it’s not, and it’s up there, fully operative, and we just don’t know where it is,” DeLuca said.
“I’m afraid that’s about the size of it,” Oswald said. “It’s not going to do anything it’s not told to do—there are semiautonomous systems on it, but it still has to be activated and programmed from ground. Again, we have every reason to believe it’s nonoperational.”
“But?”
“But, two months ago, we had a malfunction on a launch pad at Fort Greely, Alaska. A Titan IV was boosting an NFIRE/KE-ASAT vehicle as part of Brilliant Pebbles when it blew apart on launch.”
LeDoux clicked his mouse to post a map and then a photograph on the monitor, a picture of a burned rocket casing.
“They’re still putting up kinetic energy vehicles?” DeLuca asked. “Why, if we’ve got Darkstar?”
“The official explanation was that Brilliant Pebbles is ongoing and necessary to knock down Russian or Iranian or North Korean ICBMs in their booster phases and/or midcourse, which is what it was designed for,” LeDoux said. “The real reason it was being sent up was to find and destroy the unlit Darkstar before it could be captured and reverse-engineered. Near-Field Infrared is the best space-based infrared system we have.”
“So you think D1 took out the Titan?”
“We don’t know,” Oswald said. “The sci-fi people are going to see that as Darkstar defending itself, even though it has no AI capabilities whatsoever. But a study of the debris suggests a possible laser hosing.”
“Then a w
eek later,” LeDoux added, “in a place called Pine Gap, Australia, a mobile PAVE-PAWS radar truck was struck by lightning, or that’s what it looked like, even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Since then, we’ve lost a Dutch weather satellite, a British telecom bird, and a twenty-year-old Russian milsat, which they said was due to solar flares, but it was in low earth orbit and shadow when it happened. You’ll get full reports on all these events.”
“And you think the missing Darkstar is doing this?”
“Not necessarily,” LeDoux said. “It’s entirely possible that someone else has managed to launch a similar satellite. The idea that someone else could take control of one of our satellites is beyond comprehension, but it wouldn’t be the first supposedly secured system we’ve seen compromised. We just don’t know.”
“Russians?” DeLuca asked. “Ex-Soviet assets?”
“Possibly,” LeDoux said. “Destroying one of their own birds to throw off suspicion. Our best intelligence says there are at least nine countries technologically capable of orbiting space-based lasers, though nobody was supposed to be able to do it for another ten years. How many of them could take it to the level of Darkstar is hard to say, but theoretically, some could. Darkstar was supposed to be the final deterrent and the balance holding THEL in check—the one weapon that would never fall into the wrong hands. We’re not saying that it has. We’re just saying that it’s possible. There may be other explanations for what happened at Greely and at Pine Gap. We have other people looking into those.”
“And how is Cheryl Escavedo connected to any of this?”
“STRATCOM is in charge of Darkstar, run out of Cheyenne Mountain,” LeDoux said. “Apparently some Darkstar data was misfiled and archived by mistake. Sergeant Escavedo was tasked to correct that mistake, even though she wasn’t supposed to know or understand the nature of the files she was pulling. We’re concerned that she did understand them.”
“And/or copy them?” DeLuca asked.
“And/or copy them,” LeDoux confirmed. “I’ve already talked to General Koenig about this briefing, and I’ve told him Team Red is completely read on—he’s fully prepared to help you in any way he can, but he’s also told you most of what he knows about Cheryl Escavedo. I’m also not sure how necessary it’s going to be for you to tell your team about Darkstar. I understand why you felt like you were being given the run-around, because you were. I’ll leave it to your discretion as to what you tell your team and what constitutes need-to-know, but as I’m sure you’ve gathered, the fewer people read on about this, the better. Just as the fewer people who know we’re having problems, the better.”
“I’m flying back to Albuquerque tonight to brief the team,” DeLuca said. “I’ll give it some thought. I’m not going to put anybody in danger just to keep them ignorant.”
“I understand,” LeDoux said. “I wouldn’t expect you to. FYI, Darkstar is held up until this gets resolved. We’re talking over $100 billion. That’s going to come right out of your paycheck if you fuck up.”
“Speaking of funds…”
“Tell Captain Martin what you need.”
He met with his team that evening in his room at the Red Roof Inn, on Mulberry Street, near Kirtland AFB. Walter Ford couldn’t get away from the criminology classes he taught at Northeastern University’s College of Criminal Justice, still one class in Research and Evaluation Methods and another in Statistical Analysis, but this year a third course in Computer Crimes had been added to his course load. Ford said he’d do what he could from home. Ex-cop and Army reservist Sami Jambazian had done as much work on his charter boat as he could and was twiddling his thumbs until the weather improved—he was glad for the chance to fly south into a warmer climate. DeLuca’s flight arrived half an hour before Sami’s, so he waited for him and met him at the gate. Jambazian was in one of his usual sour moods, complaining of how he was never able to strike up a good conversation on an airplane—what was wrong with people?
“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe it’s you and not them?” DeLuca said.
“I’m the world’s friendliest guy,” he said. “If you’re not friendly to me back, then the hell with you.”
“I rest my case.”
Colleen MacKenzie had flown in earlier from California, where Mack had spent Thanksgiving and Christmas with her family after leaving Balad and the Sunni triangle behind, which was more than enough time to drive her crazy. She’d escaped by signing up for a Russian-language refresher course at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, a program she’d cut short when DeLuca called. Dan Sykes had opted to stay in Washington at his father’s D.C. residence, rather than at the family home in San Francisco, and arrived on the flight behind DeLuca, who wondered if there was anything to be read into the fact that Sykes and MacKenzie had been romantically involved during their time in Iraq, but they’d elected to be apart once they were stateside again. “What happens on deployment stays on deployment” was a slogan in the military long before Las Vegas coopted the concept, and it was usually a good idea, a really good idea, to let go of such emotional attachments, which rarely survived divorced from the “Temporary Duty” context in which they were generated. DeLuca just hoped there weren’t any hard feelings between them. Hoolie—Julio Vasquez—was the last to arrive, driving the 750 miles from Los Angeles to Albuquerque in his personal car, an immaculately restored candy-apple-red 1974 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, with an in-dash eight-track cassette player and a box full of Mexican conjunto/Tejano tapes on the floor beside him. It was late by the time the whole team was able to assemble, and everyone was hungry, so Sykes took orders and made a run to the Burger King up the street.
When he got back, DeLuca briefed the team, stopping short of mentioning, at least for now, anything about Darkstar itself. He said only that a United States military satellite program had been compromised and that files concerning it had possibly been stolen, by a girl who was currently missing, as was her roommate, and that the only potential witnesses he’d found so far were an odd group of UFO cultists. He told Sami it would be his job to infiltrate the Brethren of the Light, but he didn’t tell the others why. Years ago, Sami had been following a Mafia-owned tanker truck across the state line when he saw a UFO. He’d made the mistake of telling his story to the poker group, which had not stopped giving him shit about it ever since, which was why DeLuca didn’t mention it to Team Red. Sami would find out if the little girl was truly missing. Hoolie and Mack would concentrate on Leon Lev, who, at the moment, was the only human bad guy DeLuca could point his finger at. Dan Sykes would look for Theresa. Walter Ford could dig into the history and the personality of General Thomas Koenig, as well as that of Major Brent Huston. DeLuca had a hunch about them and just didn’t trust them, even after he understood the reasons for their prior deceptiveness.
“I’ll stay on Cheryl Escavedo,” he said, opening his suitcase on the bed and distributing the contents. “Now for the party favors. In each Ziploc bag, you will find, compliments of Captain Martin, a fully encrypted SATphone for each of you with built-in GPS, with all your call numbers already added to the contact list, as well as encrypted PDAs for sending files. These are for secure communications, but keep your cell phones in case we want to make calls we might want others to listen in on. Spend some time playing with your new toys so we’re all up to speed on how they work.”
As he spoke, the telephone in his kit rang. Hoolie was punching buttons on his own phone through the plastic.
“Phones work,” he said, hanging up.
“You’ll also find some walking-around money and your new government credit cards,” DeLuca continued. “Don’t go crazy, but get what you need and don’t worry about it. You each have the information we’ve compiled so far in your packets, so read ’em tonight, and tomorrow, I’ll tell you how to proceed.”
He didn’t tell them about Darkstar because—was he being paranoid? Overcautious? A mobile radar truck in Australia had been hit by lightning, and Cheryl Escavedo’s
Jeep had been hit by lightning. What were the odds of that? Cheryl Escavedo knew about Darkstar, and she was missing. Theresa knew Cheryl, and now she was missing. Again, what were the odds? Somebody wanted to keep Darkstar a secret, he suspected, just as he suspected somebody was using satellite technology for his own purposes—somebody who’d figured out how to access satellite intel. This meant that people who knew about Darkstar were in greater danger than people who didn’t know. Communications could be intercepted, even from encrypted phones.
After everyone had gone back to their rooms, he stood on the balcony and looked up at the night sky. A refrain from an old song played in his head: “Are the stars out tonight? I don’t care if they’re cloudy or bright, ’cause I only have eyes… for you…” He wondered what eyes were up there, and who was watching from above. Satellites had saved his life, more than once, in Iraq. He’d never thought of them as a threat before.
He didn’t like it, now that he did.
Chapter Six
DELUCA WAS IN THE PARKING LOT BEHIND THE motel the next morning, stretching after his run, when a middle-aged woman stepped out of her shiny stainless-steel Jet Stream motor home to yawn and squint at the rising sun. The name on the back of the motor home, painted in an elaborate pink scroll outlined in gold, was “Ms. Kitty.” The woman was dressed in a gray hooded sweatshirt, shorts that fell well below her knees, flip-flops, and a red plaid flannel bathrobe over it all, untied at the waist. She was about five-foot-two, with short salt-and-pepper curly hair tumbling in disarray above her ears, square black-rimmed glasses, and freckles across the bridge of her nose. She had a stainless-steel travel mug in her hand, which she raised in greeting as she smiled broadly.
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