“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 Was he so far out of date that even after being briefed he didn’t understand what was happening before his eyes?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 Navy 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 lower 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 light.
“Miss!” Another one didn’t.
“Miss!” Jack frowned. He’d half-expected to see the beams of light streaking through the sky, but that happened only in 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 checked 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 a second.”
“And they recharge in ... ?”
“Point zero-four-six seconds. We can deliver twenty shots per second, in other words.”
“
But you didn’t shoot that fast.”
“We didn’t have to, sir,” Gregory replied. “The limiting factor at present is the targeting software. That’s being worked on. The purpose of this test was to evaluate part of the software package. We know that these lasers work. We’ve had them here for the past three years. The laser beams are converged on a mirror about fifty meters that way”—he pointed—“and converted into a single beam.”
“They have to be—I mean, the beams all have to be exactly in tune, right?”
“Technically it’s called a Phased-Array Laser. All the beams have to be perfectly in phase,” Gregory answered.
“How the hell do you do that?” Ryan paused. “Don’t bother, I probably wouldn’t understand it anyway. Okay, we have the beam hitting the downside mirror ...”
“The mirror is the special part. It’s composed of thousands of segments, and every segment is controlled by a piezoelectric chip. That’s called ‘adaptive optics.’ We send an interrogation beam to the mirror—this one was on the shuttle—and get a reading on atmospheric distortion. The way the atmosphere bends the beam is analyzed by computer. Then the mirror corrects for the distortion, and we fire the real shot. The mirror on the shuttle also has adaptive optics. It collects and focuses the beam, and sends it off to the ‘Flying Cloud’ satellite mirror. That mirror refocuses the beam on the targets. Zap!”
“That simple?” Ryan shook his head. It was simple enough that over the previous nineteen years, forty billion dollars had gone into basic research, in twenty separate fields, just to run this one test.
“We did have to iron out a few little details,” Gregory acknowledged. These little details would take another five or more years, and he neither knew nor cared how many additional billions. What mattered to him was that the goal was now actually in sight. Tea Clipper wasn’t a blue-sky project anymore, not after this system test.
“And you’re the guy who made the breakthrough on the targeting system. You figured a way for the beam to provide its own targeting information.”
“Something like that,” the General answered for the kid. “Dr. Ryan, that part of the system is classified highly enough that we will not discuss it further without written authorization.”
“General, the purpose in my being here is to evaluate this program relative to Soviet efforts along similar lines. If you want my people to tell you what the Russians are up to, I have to know what the hell we’re supposed to look for!”
This did not elicit a reply. Jack shrugged and reached inside his coat. He handed the General an envelope. Major Gregory looked on in puzzlement.
“You still don’t like it,” Ryan observed after the officer folded the letter away.
“No, sir, I don’t.”
Ryan spoke with a voice colder than the New Mexico night. “General, when I was in the Marine Corps, they never told me that I was supposed to like my orders, just that I was supposed to obey them.” That almost set the General off, and Jack added: “I really am on your side, sir.”
“You may continue, Major Gregory,” General Parks said after a moment.
“I call the algorithm ‘Fan Dance,’ ” Gregory began. The General almost smiled in spite of himself. Gregory could not have known anything about Sally Rand.
“That’s all?” Ryan said again when the youngster finished, and he knew that every computer expert in Project Tea Clipper must have asked himself the same thing: Why didn’t I think of that! No wonder they all say that Gregory is a genius. He’d made a crucial breakthrough in laser technology at Stony Brook, then one in software design. “But that’s simple!”
“Yes, sir, but it took over two years to make it work, and a Cray-2 computer to make it work fast enough to matter. We still need a little more work, but after we analyze what went wrong tonight, another four or five months, maybe, and we got it knocked.”
“Next step, then?”
“Building a five-megajoule laser. Another team is close to that already. Then we gang up twenty of them, and we can send out a hundred-megajoule pulse, twenty times per second, and hit any target we want. The impact energy then will be on the order of, say, twenty to thirty kilograms of explosives.”
“And that’ll kill any missile anybody can make ...”
“Yes, sir.” Major Gregory smiled.
“What you’re telling me is, the thing—Tea Clipper works.”
“We’ve validated the system architecture,” the General corrected Ryan. “It’s been a long haul since we started looking at this system. Five years ago there were eleven hurdles. There are three technical hurdles left. Five years from now there won’t be any. Then we can start building it.”
“The strategic implications ...” Ryan said, and stopped. “Jesus.”
“It’s going to change the world,” the General agreed.
“You know that they’re playing with the same thing at Dushanbe.”
“Yes, sir,” Major Gregory answered. “And they might know something that we don’t.”
Ryan nodded. Gregory was even smart enough to know that someone else might be smarter. This was some kid.
“Gentlemen, out in my helicopter is a briefcase. Could you have somebody bring it in? There are some satellite photos that you might find interesting.”
“How old are these shots?” the General asked five minutes later as he leafed through the photos.
“A couple of days,” Jack replied.
Major Gregory peered at them for a minute or so. “Okay, we have two slightly different installations here. It’s called a ‘sparse array.’ The hexagonal array—the six-pillar one—is a transmitter. The building in the middle here is probably designed to house six lasers. These pillars are optically stable mounts for mirrors. The laser beams come out of the building, reflect off the mirrors, and the mirrors are computer-controlled to concentrate the beam on a target.”
“What do you mean by optically stable?”
“The mirrors have to be controlled with a high degree of accuracy, sir,” Gregory told Ryan. “By isolating them from the surrounding ground you eliminate vibration that might come from having a man walk nearby, or driving a car around. If you jiggle the mirrors by a small multiple of the laser-light frequency, you mess up the effect you’re trying to get. Here we use shock mountings to enhance the isolation factor. It’s a technique originally developed for submarines. Okay? This other diamond-shaped array is ... oh, of course. That’s the receiver.”
“What?” Jack’s brain had just met another stone wall.
“Let’s say you want to make a really good picture of something. I mean, really good. You use a laser as your strobe light.”
“But why four mirrors?”
“It’s easier and cheaper to make four small mirrors than one big one,” Gregory explained. “Hmph. I wonder if they’re trying to do a holographic image. If they can really lock their illuminating beams in phase ... theoretically it’s possible. There are a couple of things that make it tricky, but the Russians like the brute-force approach ... Damn!” His eyes lit up. “That’s one hell of an interesting idea! I’ll have to think about that one.”
“You’re telling me that they built this place just to take pictures of our satellites?” Ryan demanded.
“No, sir. They can use it for that, no sweat. It makes a perfect cover. And a system that can image a satellite at geosynchronous altitude might be able to clobber one in low earth orbit. If you think of these four mirrors here as a telescope, remember that a telescope can be a lens for a camera, or part of a gunsight. It could also make a damned efficient aiming system. How much power runs into this lab?”
Ryan set down a photo. “The current power output from this dam is something like five hundred megawatts. But—”
“They’re stringing new power lines,” Gregory observed. “How come?”
“The powerhouse is two stories—you can’t tell from this angle. It looks like they’re activating the top half. That’ll bring their peak power output to something like e
leven hundred megawatts.”
“How much comes into this place?”
“We call it ‘Bach.’ Maybe a hundred. The rest goes to ‘Mozart,’ the town that grew up on the next hill over. So they’re doubling their available power.”
“More than that, sir,” Gregory noted. “Unless they’re going to double the size of that town, why don’t you assume that the increased power is just going to the lasers?”
Jack nearly choked. Why the hell didn’t you think of that! he growled at himself.
“I mean,” Gregory continued, “I mean ... that’s like five hundred megawatts of new power. Jesus, what if they just made a breakthrough? How hard is it to find out what’s happening there?”
“Take a look at the photos and tell me how easy you think it would be to infiltrate the place,” Ryan suggested.
“Oh.” Gregory looked up. “It would be nice to know how much power they push out the front end of their instruments. How long has this place been there, sir?”
“About four years, and it’s not finished yet. Mozart is new. Until recently the workers were housed in this barracks and support facility. We took notice when the apartment building went up, same time as the perimeter fence. When the Russians start pampering the workers, you know that the project has a really high priority. If it has a fence and guard towers, we know it’s military.”
“How did you find it?” Gregory asked.
“By accident. The Agency was redrawing its meteorological data on the Soviet Union, and one of the technicians decided to do a computer analysis of the best places over there for astronomical observation. This is one of them. The weather over the last few months has been unusually cloudy, but on average the skies are about as clear there as they are here. The same is true of Sary Shagan, Semipalatinsk, and another new one, Storozhevaya.” Ryan set out some more photographs. Gregory looked at them.
“They sure are busy.”
“Good morning, Misha,” Marshal of the Soviet Union Dmitri Timofeyevich Yazov said.
“And to you, Comrade Defense Minister,” Colonel Filitov replied.
A sergeant helped the Minister off with his coat while another brought in a tray with a tea setting. Both withdrew when Misha opened his briefcase.