by Tom Clancy
“Yessir.”
“What went wrong?” Morozov asked. The engineer stared at his console, an angry frown on his face.
“Thermal blooming. Damn! I thought we’d put that one behind us.”
Across the room, the low-powered laser system was making another image of the target. The monocolor image was like a close-up black-and-white photograph, though what would have been black was maroon instead. The television technicians made up a split-screen image to compare before and after.
“No holes,” Pokryshkin noted sourly.
“So what?” Bondarenko said in surprise. “My God, man, you melted the thing! That looks like it was dipped in a ladle of molten steel.” And indeed it did. What had been flat surfaces were now rippled from the intense heat that was still radiating away. The solar cells arrayed on the body of the satellite—which were designed to absorb light energy—appeared to be burned off entirely. On closer inspection, the entire satellite body was distorted from the energy that had blasted it.
Pokryshkin nodded, but his expression hadn’t changed. “We were supposed to have chopped a hole right through it. If we can do that, it would look as though a piece of orbiting space junk had impacted the satellite. That’s the kind of energy concentration we were looking for.”
“But you can now destroy any American satellite you wish!”
“Bright Star wasn’t built to destroy satellites, Colonel. We can already do that easily enough.”
And Bondarenko got the message. Bright Star had, in fact, been built for that specific purpose, but the power breakthrough that had justified the funding for the installation exceeded expectations by a factor of four, and Pokryshkin wanted to make two leaps at once, to demonstrate an antisatellite capability and a system that could be adapted to ballistic-missile defense. This was an ambitious man, though not in the usual sense.
Bondarenko set that aside and thought about what he’d seen. What had gone wrong? It must have been thermal blooming. As the laser beams chopped through the air, they’d transferred a fractional amount of their power as heat in the atmosphere. This had roiled the air, disturbing the optical path, moving the beam on and off the target and also spreading the beam wider than its intended diameter.
But despite that, it had still been powerful enough to melt metal one hundred eighty kilometers away! the Colonel told himself. This was no failure. It was a giant leap toward a wholly new technology.
“Any damage to the system?” the General asked the project director.
“None, otherwise we’d not have gotten the follow-up image. It would appear that our atmospheric-compensation measures are sufficient for the imaging beam but not for the high-power transmission. Half a success, Comrade General.”
“Yes.” Pokryshkin rubbed his eyes for a moment and spoke more firmly. “Comrades, we have demonstrated great progress tonight, but there is still more work to be done.”
“And that’s my job,” Morozov’s neighbor said. “We’ll solve this son of a bitch!”
“Do you need another man for your team?”
“It’s part mirrors and part computers. How much do you know about those?”
“That is for you to decide. When do we begin?”
“Tomorrow. It’ll take twelve hours for the telemetry people to organize their data. I’m going to catch the next bus back to my flat and have a drink. My family is away for another week. Care to join me?”
“What do you think that was?” Abdul asked.
They had just gotten to the top of a ridge when the meteor had appeared. At least, it had looked like a meteor’s fiery track across the sky at first. But the thin golden line had hung there, and actually marched upward—very quickly, but it had been discernible.
A thin golden line, the Archer thought. The air itself had glowed. What made the air do that? He forgot where and who he now was for a moment, thinking back to his university days. Heat made air do that. Only heat. When a meteor came down, the friction of its passage ... but this line could not have been a meteor. Even if the upward stroke had been an illusion—and he wasn’t sure of that; eyes could play tricks—the golden line had lasted for nearly five seconds. Perhaps longer, the Archer reflected. Your mind couldn’t measure time either. Hmph. He sat down abruptly and pulled out his note pad. The CIA man had given him that and told him to keep a diary of events. A useful thing to do; it hadn’t ever occurred to him. He wrote down the time, date, place, and approximate direction. In a few more days he’d be heading back to Pakistan, and perhaps the CIA man would find this interesting.
6.
One if by Land
IT was dark when he arrived. Gregory’s driver came off the George Washington Parkway toward the Pentagon’s Mall entrance. The guard raised the gate, allowing the nondescript government Ford—the Pentagon was buying Fords this year—to proceed up the ramp, loop around the handful of parked cars, and drop him off at the steps right behind a shuttle bus. Gregory knew the routine well enough: show the guard the pass, walk through the metal detector, then down the corridor filled with state flags, past the cafeteria, and down the ramp to the shopping arcade lit and decorated in the style of a 12th-century dungeon. In fact, Gregory had played Dungeons and Dragons in high school, and his first trip to the dreary polygon of a building had convinced him that the authors’ inspiration had come from this very place.
The Strategic Defense Initiative Office was beneath the Pentagon’s shopping concourse (its entrance, in fact, directly under the pastry shop), a space about a thousand feet long that had previously been the bus and taxi stand—before the advent of car bombs had persuaded the nation’s defense community that automobiles were not all that fine a thing to have under the E-ring. This portion of the building, therefore, was the newest and most secure office—for the nation’s newest and least secure military program. Here Gregory took out his other pass. He showed it to the four people at the security desk, then held it against the wall panel that interrogated its electromagnetic coding and decided that the Major could enter. This took him through a waiting room to double glass doors. He smiled at the receptionist as he went through, then at General Parks’s secretary. She nodded back, but was annoyed to be staying so late and was not in a smiling mood.
Neither was Lieutenant General Bill Parks. His spacious office included a desk, a low table for coffee and intimate talks, and a larger conference table. The walls were covered with framed photographs of various space activities, along with numerous models of real and imagined space vehicles ... and weapons. Parks was usually a genial man. A former test pilot, he’d marched through a career so accomplished that one would expect a bluff-hearty handshaker to have done it. Instead, Parks was an almost monkish person, with a smile that was at once engagingly shy and quietly intense. His many ribbons did not adorn his short-sleeved shirt, only a miniature of his command-pilot’s wings. He didn’t have to impress people with what he’d done. He could do so with what he was. Parks was one of the brightest people in government, certainly in the top ten, perhaps in the top one. Gregory saw that the General had company tonight.
“We meet again, Major,” Ryan said, turning. In his hands was a ring binder of perhaps two hundred pages that he was halfway through.
Gregory came to attention—for Parks—and reported-as-ordered, sir.
“How was the flight?”
“Super. Sir, is the soda machine in the same place? I’m a little dried out.”
Parks grinned for half a second. “Go ahead, we’re not in that much of a hurry.
“You have to love the kid,” the General said after the door closed behind him.
“I wonder if his mom knows what he’s doing after school.” Ryan chuckled, then turned serious. “He hasn’t seen any of this yet, right?”
“No, we didn’t have time, and the Colonel from the Cobra Belle won’t be here for another five hours.”
Jack nodded. That was why the only CIA people here were himself and Art Graham from the satellite unit. Everyone else woul
d get a decent night’s sleep while they prepared the full briefing for tomorrow morning. Parks could have skipped it himself and left the work to his senior scientists, but he wasn’t that sort of man. The more Ryan saw of Parks, the more he liked him. Parks fulfilled the first definition of a leader. He was a man with a vision—and it was a vision with which Ryan agreed. Here was a senior man in uniform who hated nuclear weapons. That wasn’t terribly unusual—people in uniform tend to be rather tidy, and nuclear weapons make for a very untidy world. Quite a few soldiers, sailors, and airmen had swallowed their opinions and built careers around weapons that they hoped would never be used. Parks had spent the last ten years of his career trying to find a way to eliminate them. Jack liked people who tried to swim against the tide. Moral courage was more rare a commodity than the physical kind, a fact as true of the military profession as any other.
Gregory reappeared with a can of Coca-Cola from a machine near the door. Gregory didn’t like coffee. It was time for work.
“What gives, sir?”
“We have a videotape from Cobra Belle. They were up to monitor a Soviet ICBM test. Their bird—it was an SS-25-blew, but the mission commander decided to stay up and play with his toys. This is what he saw.” The General lifted the remote-control for the VCR and thumbed the Play button.
“That’s Cosmos-1810,” Art Graham said, handing over a photograph. “It’s a recon bird that went bad on them.”
“Infrared picture on the TV, right?” Gregory asked, sipping at his Coke. “God!”
What had been a single dot of light blossomed like an exploding star in a science-fiction movie. But this wasn’t science fiction. The picture changed as the computerized imaging system fought to keep up with the energy burst. At the bottom of the screen a digital display appeared, showing the apparent temperature of the glowing satellite. In a few seconds the image faded, and again the computer had had to adjust to keep track on the Cosmos.
There was a second or two of static on the screen, then a new image began to form.
“This is ninety minutes old. The satellite went over Hawaii a few orbits later,” Graham said. “We have cameras there to eyeball the Russian satellites. Look at the shot I gave you.”
“‘Before’ and ‘After,’ right?” Gregory’s eyes flicked from one image to another. “Solar panels are gone ... wow. What’s the body of the satellite made of?”
“Aluminum, for the most part,” Graham said. “The Russians go in for ruggeder construction than we do. The internal frames may be made of steel, but more likely titanium or magnesium.”
“That gives us a top-end figure for the energy transfer,” Gregory said. “They killed the bird. They got it hot enough to fry the solar cells right off, and probably enough to disrupt the electrical circuitry inside. What height was it at?”
“One hundred eighty kilometers.”
“Sary Shagan or that new place Mr. Ryan showed me?”
“Dushanbe,” Jack said. “The new one.”
“But the new power lines aren’t finished yet.”
“Yeah,” Graham observed. “They can at least double the power we just saw demonstrated. Or at least they think they can.” His voice was that of a man who had just discovered a fatal disease at work on a family member.
“Can I see the first sequence again?” Gregory said. It was almost an order. Jack noted that General Parks carried it out at once.
This continued for another fifteen minutes, with Gregory standing a bare three feet from the television monitor, drinking his Coke and staring at the screen. The last three times, the picture was advanced frame by frame while the young Major took notes at every one. Finally he’d had enough.
“I can have you a power figure in half an hour, but for the moment, I think they’ve got some problems.”
“Blooming,” General Parks said.
“And aiming difficulty, sir. At least, it looks like that, too. I need some time to work, and a good calculator. I left mine at work,” he admitted sheepishly. There was an empty pouch on his belt, next to his beeper. Graham tossed one over, an expensive Hewlett-Packard programmable.
“What about the power?” Ryan asked.
“I need some time to give you a good number,” Gregory said as though to a backward child. “Right now, at least eight times anything we can do. I need a quiet place to work. Can I use the snack room?” he asked Parks. The General nodded, and he left.
“Eight times ...” Art Graham observed. “Christ, they might be able to smoke the DSPS birds. It’s for damned sure they can wreck any communications satellite they want. Well, there are ways to protect them ...”
Ryan felt a little left out. His education was in history and economics, and he hadn’t quite learned the language of the physical sciences yet.
“Three years,” General Parks breathed as he poured some coffee. “At least three years ahead of us.”
“Only in power throughput,” Graham said.
Jack looked from one to another, knowing the significance of what they were worried about, but not its substance. Gregory came back in twenty minutes.
“I make their peak power output something between twenty-five and thirty million watts,” he announced. “If we assume six lasers in the transmission assembly, that’s—well, that’s enough, isn’t it? It’s just a matter of racking enough of them together and directing them at a single target.
“That’s the bad news. The good news is, they definitely had blooming problems. They only delivered peak power on target for the first few thousandths of a second. Then it started blooming out on them. Their average power delivery was between seven and nine megawatts. And it looks like they had an aiming problem on top of the blooming. Either the mounts aren’t shock-mounted properly or they can’t correct for the earth’s rotational jitter. Or maybe both. Whatever the actual reason, they have trouble aiming more accurately than three seconds of arc. That means they’re only going to accurate plus or minus two hundred forty meters for a geo-stationary satellite—of course, those targets are pretty stationary, and the movement factor could count either way.”
“How’s that?” Ryan asked.
“Well, on one hand, if you’re hitting a moving target—and low-earth-orbit birds move across the sky pretty fast; something like eight thousand meters per second—there are fourteen hundred meters per degree of arc; so we’re tracking a target that’s moving about five degrees per second. Okay so far? Thermal blooming means that the laser is giving up a lot of its energy to the atmosphere. If you’re tracking across the sky rapidly, you keep having to drill a new hole in the air. But it takes time for the bloom to get real bad—and that helps you. On the other hand, if you’ve got vibration problems, every time you change your aiming point, you add a new variable into your targeting geometry, and that makes things a lot worse. Shooting at a fairly stationary target, like a communications satellite, you simplify your aiming problem, but you keep shooting up the same thermal bloom until you lose almost all your energy into the air. See what I mean?”
Ryan grunted agreement, though his mind had again reached beyond its limit. He barely understood the language the kid was speaking, and the information Gregory was trying to communicate was in a field that he simply didn’t understand. Graham jumped in.
“Are you telling me we don’t have to worry about this?”
“No, sir! If you got the power, you can always figure out how to deliver it. Hell, we’ve already done that. That’s the easy part.”
“As I told you,” the engineer told Morozov, “the problem isn’t getting the lasers to put the power out—that’s the easy part. The hard part is delivering the energy to the target.”
“Your computer cannot correct for—what?”
“It must be a combination of things. We’ll be going over that data today. The main thing? Probably the atmospheric-compensation programming. We’d thought that we could adjust the aiming process to eliminate blooming—well, we didn’t. Three years of theoretical work went into yesterd
ay’s test. My project. And it didn’t work.” He stared off at the horizon and frowned. The operation on his sick child hadn’t quite been successful but, the doctors said, there was still hope.
“So the increase in laser output came from this?” Bondarenko asked.
“Yes. Two of our younger people—he’s only thirty-two and she’s twenty-eight-came up with a way to increase the diameter of the lasing cavity. What we still need to do, however, is come up with better control of the wiggler magnets,” Pokryshkin said.
The Colonel nodded. The whole point of the free-electron laser that both sides were working on was that one could “tune” it much like a radio, choosing the light frequency that one wished to transmit—or that was the theory. As a practical matter, the highest power output was always in about the same frequency range—and it was the wrong one. If they’d been able to put out a slightly different frequency the day before—one that penetrated the atmosphere more efficiently—the thermal blooming might have been reduced by fifty percent or so. But that meant controlling the superconducting magnets better. They were called wigglers because they induced an oscillating magnetic field through the charged electrons in the lasing cavity. Unfortunately, the breakthrough that made the lasing cavity larger had also had an unexpected effect on their ability to control magnetic-field flux. There was no theoretical explanation for this as yet, and the thinking of the senior scientists was that there was a minor, though undiscovered, engineering problem in the magnet design. The senior engineers, of course, said that there was something wrong in the theorists’ explanation for what was happening, because they knew the magnets worked properly. The arguments that had already rocked the conference rooms were spirited but cordial. A number of very bright people were struggling together to find Truth—the scientific kind that did not depend on human opinion.
Bondarenko’s mind reeled at the details even as he scribbled down his notes. He’d thought himself knowledgeable on lasers—he had, after all, helped to design a wholly new application for them—but looking at the work that had been done here, he thought himself a toddling child wandering through a university laboratory and wondering at the pretty lights. The principal breakthrough, he wrote, was in the lasing-cavity design. It allowed the enormous increase in power output, and had been made over a table in the canteen when an engineer and a physicist had jointly stumbled across a piece of Truth. The Colonel smiled to himself. Pravda was actually the word they used. “Truth” was the exact translation, and the two young academicians had spoken it so artlessly. Indeed, that was a word that had gained currency at Bright Star, and Bondarenko wondered how much of that was an inside joke of some sort or another. “But is it pravilno,” they would ask of a fact. “Is it truthful?”