by Tom Clancy
He saw the face, and tried to decide if she were the right one, approaching his objective more carefully than he would ever do under the fire of German guns. "You were in seat number twelve," she'd said before he could summon the courage to speak. She had a voice! "Yes, Comrade Artist," his reply had stammered out. "Did you enjoy the performance, Comrade Lieutenant?" A shy, but somehow beckoning smile, "It was wonderful!" Of course.
"It is not often that we see handsome young officers in the front row," she observed.
"I was given the ticket as a reward for performance in my unit. I am a tanker," he said proudly. She called me handsome! "Does the Comrade Tanker Lieutenant have a name?"
"I am Lieutenant Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov."
"I am Elena Ivanova Makarova."
"It is too cold tonight for one so thin, Comrade Artist, there a restaurant nearby?"
"Restaurant?" She'd laughed. "How often do you come to Moscow?"
"My division is based thirty kilometers from here, but I not often come to the city," he'd admitted.
"Comrade Lieutenant, there are few restaurants even in Moscow. Can you come to my apartment?"
"Why-yes," his reply had stuttered out as the stage door opened again.
"Marta," Elena said to the girl who was just coming out "We have a military escort home!"
"Tania and Resa are coming," Marta said.
Misha had actually been relieved by that. The walk to the apartment had taken thirty minutes-the Moscow subway hadn't yet been completed, and it was better to walk than wait for a tram this late at night.
She was far prettier without her makeup, Misha remembered. The cold winter air gave her cheeks all the color they ever needed. Her walk was as graceful as ten years of intensive training could make it. She'd glided along the street like an apparition, while he gallumped along in his heavy boots. He felt himself a tank, rolling next to a thoroughbred horse, and was careful not to go too close, lest he trample her. He hadn't yet learned of the strength that was so well hidden by her grace.
The night had never before seemed so fine, though for-what was it? — twenty years there had been many such nights, then none for the past thirty. My God, he thought, we would have been married fifty years this July 14th. My God. Unconsciously he dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief. Thirty years, however, was the number that occupied his mind.
The thought boiled within his breast, and his fingers were pale around the pen. It still surprised him that love and hate were emotions so finely matched. Misha returned to his diary
An hour later he rose from the desk and walked to the bedroom closet. He donned the uniform of a colonel of tank troops. Technically he was on the retired list, and had been so before people on the current colonel's list had been born. But work in the Ministry of Defense carried its own perks, and Misha was on the personal staff of the Minister. That was one reason. The other three reasons were on his uniform blouse, three gold stars that depended from claret-colored ribbons. Filitov was the only soldier in the history of the Soviet Army who'd won the decoration of Hero of the Soviet Union three times on the field of battle, for personal bravery in the face of the enemy. There were others with such medals, but most often these were political awards, the Colonel knew. He was aesthetically offended by that. This was not a medal to be granted for staff work, and certainly not for one Party member to give to another as a gaudy lapel decoration. Hero of the Soviet Union was an award that ought to be limited la men like himself, who had risked death, who'd bled-and all too often, died-for the Rodina. He was reminded of this very time he put his uniform on. Beneath his undershirt were the plastic-looking scars from his last gold star, when a German 88 round had lanced through the armor of his tank, setting the ammo racks afire while he'd brought his 76mm gun around for one last shot and extinguished that Kraut gun crew while his clothing burned. The injury had left him with only fifty percent use of his right arm, but despite it, he'd led what was left of his regiment nearly two more days in the Kursk Bulge. If he'd bailed out with the rest of his crew-or been evacuated from the area at once as his regimental surgeon had recommended-perhaps he would have recovered fully, but, no, he knew that he could not have not fired back, could not have abandoned his men in the face of battle. And so he'd shot, and burned. But for that Misha might have made General, perhaps even Marshal, he thought. Would it have made a difference? Filitov was too much a man of the real, practical world to dwell on that thought for long. Had he fought in many more campaigns, he might have be killed. As it was, he'd been given more time with Elena that could otherwise have been the case. She'd come nearly every day to the burn institute in Moscow; at first horrified by the extent of his wounds, she'd later become as proud of them as Misha was. No one could question that her man had done his duty for the Rodina.
But now, he did his duty for his Elena.
Filitov walked out of the apartment to the elevator, a leather briefcase dangling from his right hand. It was about all the side of his body was good for. The babushka who operate the elevator greeted him as always. They were of an age, said the widow of a sergeant who'd been in Misha's regiment, who also had the gold star pinned on his breast by this very man.
"Your new granddaughter?" the Colonel asked.
"An angel," was her reply.
Filitov smiled, partly in agreement-was there any thing as an ugly infant? — and partly because terms like "angel" had survived seventy years of "scientific socialism."
The car was waiting for him. The driver was a new draftee fresh from sergeant school and driving school. He saluted the Colonel severely, the door held open in his other hand. "Good morning, Comrade Colonel."
"So it is, Sergeant Zhdanov," Filitov replied. Most officers would have done little more than grunt, but Filitov was a combat soldier whose success on the battlefield had resulted from his devotion to the welfare of his men. A lesson that few officers ever understood, he reminded himself.
The car was comfortably warm, the heater had been turned all the way up fifteen minutes ago. Filitov was becoming ever more sensitive to cold, a sure sign of age. He'd just been hospitalized again for pneumonia, the third time in the past five years. One of these times, he knew, would be the last. Filitov dismissed the thought. He'd cheated death too many times to fear it. Life came and went at a constant rate. One brief second at a time. When the last second came, he wondered, would he notice? Would he care?
The driver pulled the car up to the Defense Ministry before the Colonel could answer that question.
Ryan was sure that he'd been in government service too long. He had come to-well, not actually to like flying, but at least to appreciate the convenience of it. He was only four hours from Washington, flown by an Air Force C-21 Learjet whose female pilot, a captain, had looked like a high-school sophomore.
Getting old, Jack, he told himself. The flight from the airfield to the mountaintop had been by helicopter, no easy feat at this altitude. Ryan had never been to New Mexico before. The high mountains were bare of trees, the air thin enough that he was breathing abnormally, but the sky was so clear that for a moment he imagined himself an astronaut looking at the unblinking stars on this cloudless, frigid night.
"Coffee, sir?" a sergeant asked. He handed Ryan a thermos cup, and the hot liquid steamed into the night, barely illuminated by a sliver of new moon.
"Thanks." Ryan sipped at it and looked around. There were few lights to be seen. There might have been a housing development behind the next set of ridges; he could see the halolike glow of Santa Fe, but there was no way to guess how far off it might be. He knew that the rock he stood on was eleven thousand feet above sea level (the nearest level sea was hundreds of miles away), and there is no way to judge distance at night. It was altogether beautiful, except for the cold. His fingers were stiff around the plastic cup. He'd mistakenly left his gloves at home.
"Seventeen minutes," somebody announced. "AH systems are nominal. Trackers on automatic. AOS in eight minutes."
"AOS?" Ry
an asked. He realized that he sounded a little funny. It was so cold that his cheeks were stiff.
"Acquisition of Signal," the Major explained. "You live around here?"
"Forty miles that way." He pointed vaguely. "Practically next door by local standards." The officer's Brooklyn accent explained the comment.
He's the one with the doctorate from State University of New York at Stony Brook, Ryan reminded himself. At only twenty-nine years old, the Major didn't look like a soldier, even less like a field-grade officer. In Switzerland he'd be called a gnome, barely over five-seven, and cadaverously thin, acne on his angular face. Right now, his deep-set eyes were locked on the sector of horizon where the space shuttle Discovery would appear. Ryan thought back to the documents he'd read on the way out and knew that this major probably couldn't tell him the color of the paint on his living-room wall. He really lived at Los Alamos National Laboratory, known locally as the Hill. Number one in his class at West Point, and a doctorate in high-energy physics only two years after that. His doctor's dissertation was classified Top Secret, Jack had read it, and didn't understand why they had bothered-despite a doctorate of his own, the two-hundred-page document might as well have been written in Kurdish. Alan Gregory was already being talked of in the same breath as Cambridge's Stephen Hawking, or Princeton's Freeman Dyson, Except that few people knew his name. Jack wondered if anyone had thought of classifying that.
"Major Gregory, all ready?" an Air Force lieutenant general asked. Jack noted his respectful tone. Gregory was no ordinary major.
A nervous smile. "Yes, sir." The Major wiped sweaty hands-despite a temperature of fifteen below zero-on the pants of his uniform. It was good to see that the kid had emotions.
"You married?" Ryan asked. The file hadn't covered that "Engaged, sir. She's a doctor in laser optics, on the Hill. We get married June the third." The kid's voice had become as brittle as glass. "Congratulations. Keeping it in the family, eh?" Jack chuckled.
"Yes, sir." Major Gregory was still staring at the southwest horizon.
"AOS!" someone announced behind them. "We have signal."
"Goggles!" The call came over the metal speakers. "Everyone put on their eye-protection."
Jack blew on his hands before taking the plastic goggles from his pocket. He'd been told to stash them there to keep them warm. They were still cold enough on his face that he noticed the difference. Once in place, however, Ryan was effectively blinded. The stars and moon were gone.
"Tracking! We have lock. Discovery has established the downlink. All systems are nominal."
"Target acquisition!" another voice announced. "Initiate interrogation sequencing first target is locked auto firing circuits enabled."
There was no sound to indicate what had happened. Ryan didn't see anything-or did I? he asked himself. There had been the fleeting impression of what? Did I imagine it? Next to him he felt the Major's breath come out slowly.
"Exercise concluded," the speaker said. Jack tore off his goggles.
"That's all?" What had he just seen? What had they just done? Was he so far out of date that even after being briefed he didn't understand what was happening before his eyes? "The laser light is almost impossible to see," Major Gregory explained. "This high up, there isn't much dust or humidity in the air to reflect it."
"Then why the goggles?"
The young officer smiled as he took his off. "Well, if a bird flies over at the wrong time, the impact might be, well, kind of spectacular. That could hurt your eyes some."
Two hundred miles over their heads, Discovery continued toward the horizon. The shuttle would stay in orbit another three days, conducting its "routine scientific mission," mainly oceanographical studies this time, the press was told, something secret for the Navy. The papers had been speculating on the mission for weeks. It had something to do, they said, with tracking missile submarines from orbit. There was no better way to keep a secret than to use another "secret" to conceal it. Every time someone asked about the mission, a public-affairs officer would do the "no comments."
"Did it work?" Jack asked. He looked up, but he couldn't pick out the dot of light that denoted the billion-dollar space plane.
"We have to see." The Major turned and walked to the camouflage-painted truck van parked a few yards away. The three-star General followed him, with Ryan trailing behind.
Inside the van, where the temperature might have been merely at freezing, a chief warrant officer was rewinding a videotape.
"Where were the targets?" Jack asked. "That wasn't in the briefing papers."
"About forty-five south, thirty west," the General replied. Major Gregory was perched in front of the TV screen.
"That's around the Falklands, isn't it? Why there?"
"Closer to South Georgia, actually," the General replied. "It's a nice, quiet, out-of-the-way sort of place, and the distance is about right."
And the Soviets had no known intelligence-gathering assets within three thousand miles, Ryan knew. The Tea Clipper test had been timed precisely for a moment when all Soviet spy satellites were under the visible horizon. Finally, the shooting distance was exactly the same as the distance to the Soviet ballistic missile fields arrayed along the country's main east-west railway.
"Ready!" the warrant officer said.
The video picture wasn't all that great, taken from sea level, specifically the deck of the Observation Island, a range instrumentation ship returning from Trident missile tests in the Indian Ocean. Next to the first TV screen was another. This one showed the picture from the ship's "Cobra Judy" missile-tracking radar. Both screens showed four objects spaced in a slightly uneven line. A timer box in the Iowa right-hand corner was changing numbers as though in an Alpine ski race, with three digits to the right of the decimal point. "Hit!" One of the dots disappeared in a puff of green ligth.
"Miss!" Another one didn't.
"Miss!" Jack frowned. He'd half-expected to see the beam of light streaking through the sky, but that happened only movies. There wasn't enough dust in space to denote the energy's path.
"Hit!" A second dot vanished. "Hit!" Only one was left.
"Miss."
"Miss." The last one didn't want to die, Ryan thought.
"Hit!" But it did. "Total elapsed time, one point eight-zero-six seconds."
"Fifty percent," Major Gregory said quietly. "And it corrected itself." The young officer nodded slowly. He managed to keep from smiling, except around the eyes. "It works."
"How big were the targets?" Ryan asked.
"Three meters. Spherical balloons, of course." Gregory was rapidly losing control. He looked like a kid whom Christmas had taken by surprise.
"Same diameter as an SS-18."
"Something like that." The General answered that one.
"Where's the other mirror?"
"Ten thousand kilometers up, currently over Ascension Island. Officially it's a weather satellite that never made its proper orbit." The General smiled.
"I didn't know you could send it that far."
Major Gregory actually giggled. "Neither did we."
"So you sent the beam from over there to the shuttle's mirror, from Discovery to this other one over the equator, and from there to the targets?"
"Correct," the General said.
"Your targeting system is on the other satellite, then?"
"Yes," the General answered more grudgingly.
Jack did some numbers in his head. "Okay, that means you can discriminate a three-meter target at ten thousand kilometers. I didn't know we could do that. How do we?"
"You don't need to know," the General replied coldly.
"You had four hits and four misses-eight shots in under two seconds, and the Major said the targeting system corrected for misses. Okay, if those had been SS-18s launched off of South Georgia, would the shots have killed them?"
"Probably not," Gregory admitted. "The laser assembly only puts out five megajoules. Do you know what a joule is?"
"I check
ed my college phyzzies book before I flew down. A joule is one newton-meter per second, or zero-point-seven foot-pounds of energy, plus change, right? Okay, a megajoule is a million of them seven hundred thousand foot-pounds. In terms I can understand-"
"A megajoule is the rough equivalent of a stick of dynamite. So we just delivered five sticks. The actual energy transferred is like a kilogram of explosives, but the physical effects are not exactly comparable."
"What you're telling me is that the laser beam doesn't actually burn through the target-it's more of a shock effect." Ryan was stretching his technical knowledge to the limit.
"We call it an 'impact kill,' " the General answered. "But, yeah, that's about it. All the energy arrives in a few millionths of a second, a lot faster than any bullet does."
"So all that stuff I've heard about how polishing the missile body, or rotating it, will prevent a burn-through-"
Major Gregory giggled again. "Yeah, I like that one. A ballet dancer can pirouette in front of a shotgun and it'll do her about as much good. What happens is that the energy has to go somewhere, and that can only be into the missile body. The missile body is full of storable liquids-nearly all of their birds are liquid fueled, right? The hydrostatic effect alone will be to rupture the pressure tanks-ka-boom! no more missile." The Major smiled as though describing a trick played on his high-school teacher.
"Okay, now, I want to know how it all works."
"Look, Dr. Ryan-" the General started to say. Jack cut him off.
"General, I am cleared for Tea Clipper. You know that, so let's stop screwing around."
Major Gregory got a nod from the General. "Sir, we have five one-megajoule lasers-"
"Where?"
"You're standing right on top of one of them, sir. The other four are buried around this hilltop. The power rating is per pulse, of course. Each one puts out a pulse-chain of a million joules in a few microseconds-a few millionths of al second."