The Cardinal of the Kremlin

  “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 yesterday’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?”

  Well, he told himself, one thing was truthful enough. Those two people who’d met to discuss their love life—Bondarenko had already heard the story in greater detail—over a canteen table had combined to make a colossal leap forward in laser power. The rest would come in good time, Bondarenko told himself. It always did.

  “So it appears that your main problem is computer control, both of your magnetic flux field and the mirror array.”

  “Correct, Colonel.” Pokryshkin nodded agreement. “And we need some additional funding and support to correct these difficulties. You must tell them in Moscow that the most important work has already been done, and proven to work.”

  “Comrade General, you have won me over.”

  “No, Comrade Colonel. You merely have the intelligence to perceive the truth!” Both men had a good laugh as they shook hands. Bondarenko couldn’t wait for the flight back to Moscow. The time had long passed when a Soviet officer needed to fear at the delivery of bad news, but the delivery of good news was always good for one’s career.

  “Well, they can’t be using adaptive optics,” General Parks said. “What I want to know is where their optical coatings came from.”

  “That’s the second time I heard about that one.” Ryan stood and walked around the table to get his circulation going. “What’s the big deal about the mirror? It’s a glass mirror, isn’t it?”

  “Not glass—can’t handle the energy. Right now we’re using copper or molybdenum,” Gregory said. “A glass mirror has its reflecting surface at the back. This kind of mirror, the reflecting surface is on the front. There’s a cooling system on the back.”

  “Huh?” You should have taken more science courses at BC, Jack.

  “Light doesn’t reflect off the bare metal,” Graham said. It seemed to Ryan that he was the only dummy in the room. And he, of course, was the one tapped to write the Special National Intelligence Estimate. “It reflects off an optical coating. For really precise applications—an astronomical telescope, for example—what’s on the face of the mirror looks like a skim of gasoline on a puddle.”

  “Then why use metal at all?” Jack objected. The Major answered.

  “You use metal to keep the reflecting surface as cool as possible. We’re trying to get away from it, as a matter of fact. Project ADAMANT: Accelerated Development of Advanced Materials and New Technologies Group. We’re hoping the next mirror will be made out of diamond.”

  “What?”

  “Artificial diamond made from pure Carbon-12—that’s an isotopic form of regular carbon, and it’s perfect for us. The problem is energy absorption,” Gregory went on. “If the surface retains much of the light, the heat energy can blast the coating right off the glass, then the mirror blows apart. I watched a half-meter mirror let go once. Sounded like God snapping His fingers. With C-12 diamond you have a material that’s almost a superconductor of heat. It permits increased power density, and a smaller mirror. General Electric just learned how to make gemstone-quality diamond out of Carbon- 12. Candi’s already working to see how we can make a mirror out of it.”

  Ryan looked through his thirty pages of notes, then rubbed his eyes.

  “Major, with the General’s permission, you’re coming up to Langley with me. I want you to brief our Science and Technology people, and I want you to see everything we’ve got on the Soviet project. Okay with you, sir?” Jack asked Parks. The General nodded.

  Ryan and Gregory left together. It turned out that you needed a pass to get out of here, too. The guards had changed shifts, but looked at everyone just as seriously. On reaching the parking lot, the Major thought Jack’s XJS was “boss.” Do they still say that? Jack asked himself.

  “How does a Marine get to work for the Agency?” Gregory asked as he admired the interior leather. And where does he get the coin to afford this?

  “They invited me. Before that, I taught history at Annapolis.” Nothing like being the famous Sir John Ryan. Well, I don’t suppose they have me listed in any laser textbooks . ...

  “Where’d you go to school?”

  “Bachelor’s at Boston College, and I got my doctorate right across the river there, at Georgetown.”

  “You didn’t say you were a doctor,” the Major observed.

  Ryan laughed at that. “Different field, pal. I have a lot of trouble understanding what the hell you’re up to, but they stuck me with the job of explaining what it all means to—well, to the people who do the arms negotiations. I’ve been working with them on the intelligence sid
e for the last six months.” This drew a grunt.

  “That bunch wants to put me out of business. They want to trade it all away.”

  “They have their job, too,” Jack allowed. “I need your help to persuade them that what you do is important.”

  “The Russians think it’s important.”

  “Yeah, well, we just saw that, didn’t we?”

  Bondarenko got off the plane and was agreeably surprised to find an official car waiting for him. It was a Voyska PVO car. General Pokryshkin had called ahead. The working day was over, and the Colonel instructed the driver to take him home. He’d write up his report tomorrow and present it to Colonel Filitov and later, perhaps, brief the Minister himself. He asked himself over a glass of vodka whether Pokryshkin had handled—he didn’t know the Western expression “stroked”—him enough to create a false impression. Not enough, he told himself. The General had done quite a job of selling both his program and himself, but this was not mere pokazhuka. They hadn’t faked the test, and they’d been honest in detailing their problems. All they were asking for was what was really needed. No, Pokryshkin was a man with a mission, willing to put his career—well, if not behind it, then at least alongside it; and that was all anyone could reasonably ask. If he was building his own empire, it was an empire worth building.

  The pickup was made in a way that was both unique and routine. The shopping mall was quite ordinary, a roofed-over promenade of ninety-three shops, plus a cluster of five small-screen theaters. There were six shoe stores, and three for jewelry. In keeping with the western location of the place, there was a sporting-goods store that catered to sportsmen, and had a wall full of Winchester Model 70 hunting rifles, something one does not often see in the East. Three up-scale men’s clothing establishments dotted the concourse, along with seven for women. One of the latter adjoined the gunshop.

  That suited the owner of Eve’s Leaves, since the gunshop had an elaborate burglar-alarm system; this, combined with the mall’s own security staff, allowed her to maintain a sizable stock of exclusive women’s fashions without an overly expensive insurance package. The shop had started shakily enough—the fashions of Paris, Rome, and New York do not translate well west of the Mississippi River, except perhaps along the Pacific Coast—but much of the academic community came from both coasts, and clung to their ways. It didn’t take much exposure at the country clubs for Anne Klein II to become a hot item even in the Rocky Mountains.

  Ann strolled into the shop. She was a very easy customer to fit, the owner knew. A perfect six, she put the clothing on only to see how it looked. She never needed any alterations, which made life easy on everyone and allowed the owner to discount what she bought by five percent. In addition to being easy to fit, she also spent a lot of her money here, never less than $200 per visit. She was a regular, coming in every six weeks or so. The owner didn’t know what she did, though she looked and acted like a doctor. So precise, so careful about everything. Oddly, she paid cash, the other reason for the discount she got, since credit card companies got a percentage of the sales figure in return for a guarantee of payment. This returned the five percent to the owner, and then some. It was a pity, she thought, that all of her customers couldn’t be like this. Ann had brown bedroom eyes and hair, the latter shoulder-length and slightly wavy. Willowy, with a petite figure. The other odd thing was that she didn’t ever seem to use perfume of any kind; that’s what made the owner think she was a doctor. That and the hours she came in—never when it was crowded, as though she were entirely her own boss. That had to be true, and the “doctor” dressed the part. This appealed to the owner. Every time she moved about, you could see the purpose in her stride.

  She picked up the skirt and blouse combination, leaving for the dressing rooms in the back. Though the store owner didn’t know it, Ann always used the same dressing cubicle. While in there, she unzipped her skirt, unbuttoned her blouse, but before she put the new set on, she reached under the plain wooden shelf that you could sit on and removed a cassette of microfilm that had been taped there the evening before. This went into her purse. Next she dressed and paraded outside to the mirrors.

  How can American women wear this garbage? Tania Bisyarina asked her smiling image in the mirror. A captain in Directorate S of the First Chief (also known as the “Foreign”) Directorate of the KGB, she reported to Directorate T, which oversees scientific espionage and works in cooperation with the State Committee for Science and Technology. Like Edward Foley, she “ran” a single agent. That agent’s code name was Livia.

  The cost of the outfit was two hundred seventy-three dollars, and Captain Bisyarina paid in cash. She told herself that she’d have to remember to wear this outfit the next time she came back, even if it did look like rubbish.

  “See you soon, Ann,” the shop owner called to her. That was the only name by which she was known in Santa Fe. The Captain turned and waved back. The owner was a pleasant-enough woman, for all her stupidity. Like any good intelligence officer, the Captain looked and acted quite ordinary. In the context of this area, that meant dressing in what passed for a moderately fashionable way, driving a decent but not flashy car, and living in a style that denoted comfort short of actual wealth. In this sense, America was an easy target. If you had the right lifestyle, nobody questioned where it came from. Getting across the border had been almost a comic exercise. All the time she’d spent getting her documents and background “legend” exactly right, and all the Border Patrol had done was to have a dog sniff the car for drugs—she’d come in over the Mexican border at El Paso—and wave her through with a smile. And for that—she smiled to herself eight months later now—I actually got excited.

  It took forty minutes for her to drive home, checking as always to be sure that she didn’t have anyone following her, and once there she developed the film and made her copies; not quite the same way Foley did, but close enough not to matter. In this case she had photographs of actual government documents. She placed the developed film in a small projector and focused the frame on the white paint of her bedroom wall. Bisyarina had a technical education, one of the reasons for her current assignment, and knew a little about how to evaluate what she’d just received. She was sure it would make her seniors happy.

  The next morning she made her drop, and the photographs traveled across the border into Mexico on a tractor-trailer rig belonging to a long-haul concern based in Austin. It was delivering oil-drilling machinery. By the end of the day the photos would be in the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. The day after that, in Cuba, where they would be placed on an Aeroflot flight direct to Moscow.

  7.

  Catalysts

  “So, Colonel, what is your assessment?” Filitov asked.

  “Comrade, Bright Star may be the most important program in the Soviet Union,” Bondarenko said with conviction. He handed over forty handwritten pages. “Here is the first draft of my report. I did that on the airplane. I’ll have a proper copy typed today, but I thought that you’d—”

  “You thought correctly. I understand that they ran a test ...”

  “Thirty-six hours ago. I saw the test, and I was allowed to inspect much of the equipment both before and after. I was profoundly impressed with the installation and the people who run it. If I may be permitted, General Pokryshkin is an outstanding officer, and the perfect man for that post. He is decidedly not a careerist, but rather a progressive officer of the finest type. To manage the academics on that hilltop is no easy task—”

  Misha grunted agreement. “I know about academicians. Are you telling me he has them organized like a military unit?”

  “No, Comrade Colonel, but Pokryshkin has learned how to keep them relatively happy and productive at the same time. There is a sense of ... a sense of mission at Bright Star that one rarely encounters even in the officer corps. I do not say this lightly, Mikhail Semyonovich. I was most impressed by all aspects of the operation. Perhaps it is the same at the space facilities. I have heard such, but having
never been there, I cannot draw the comparison.”

  “And the systems themselves?”

  “Bright Star is not yet a weapon. There are still technical difficulties. Pokryshkin identified and explained them at length to me. For the moment, this is still nothing more than an experimental program, but the most important breakthroughs have been made. In several years, it will be a weapon of enormous potential.”

  “What of its cost?” Misha asked. That drew a shrug.

  “Impossible to estimate. It will be costly, but the expensive part of the program, the research and development phase, is largely completed. The actual production and engineering costs should be less than one might expect—for the weapon itself, that is. I cannot evaluate the costs of the support equipment, the radars, and surveillance satellites. That was not part of my brief in any case.” Besides, like soldiers all over the world, he thought in terms of mission, not cost.

  “And the system reliability?”

  “That will be a problem, but a manageable one. The individual lasers are complex and difficult to maintain. On the other hand, by building more than the site actually needs, we could easily cycle them through a regular maintenance program, and always have the necessary number on-line. In fact, this is the method proposed by the chief project engineer.”

  “So they’ve solved the power-output problem, then?”

  “My draft report describes that in rough terms. My final paper will be more specific.”

  Misha allowed himself a smile. “So that even I can understand it?”

  “Comrade Colonel,” Bondarenko replied seriously, “I know that you have a better understanding of technical matters than you care to admit. The important aspects of the power breakthrough are actually quite simple—in theory, that is. The precise engineering details are rather complex, but can easily be deduced from the redesign of the lasing cavity. As with the first atomic bomb, once the theory is described, the engineering can be worked out.”