2.
Tea Clipper
“More photos of Dushanbe coming in,” the phone told Ryan.
“Okay, I’ll be over in a few minutes.” Jack rose and crossed the hall to Admiral Greer’s office. His boss had his back to the blazing white blanket that covered the hilly ground outside the CIA headquarters building. They were still clearing it off the parking lot, and even the railed walkway outside the seventh-floor windows had about ten inches’ worth.
“What is it, Jack?” the Admiral asked.
“Dushanbe. The weather cleared unexpectedly. You said you wanted to be notified.”
Greer looked at the TV monitor in the corner of his office. It was next to the computer terminal that he refused to use—at least when anyone might watch his attempts to type with his index fingers and, on good days, one thumb. He could have the real-time satellite photos sent to his office “live,” but of late he’d avoided that. Jack didn’t know why. “Okay, let’s trot over.”
Ryan held open the door for the Deputy Director for Intelligence, and they turned left to the end of the executive corridor on the building’s top floor. Here was the executive elevator. One nice thing about it was that you didn’t have to wait very long.
“How’s the jet lag?” Greer asked. Ryan had been back for nearly a day now.
“Fully recovered, sir. Westbound doesn’t bother me very much. It’s the eastbound kind that still kills me.” God, it’s nice to be on the ground.
The door opened and both men walked across the building to the new annex that housed the Office of Imagery Analysis. This was the Intelligence Directorate’s own private department, separate from the National Photographic Intelligence Center, a joint CIA-DIA effort which served the whole intelligence community.
The screening room would have done Hollywood proud. There were about thirty seats in the mini-theater, and a twenty-foot-square projection screen on the wall. Art Graham, the chief of the unit, was waiting for them.
“You timed that pretty well. We’ll have the shots in another minute.” He lifted a phone to the projection room and spoke a few words. The screen lit up at once. It was called “Overhead Imagery” now, Jack reminded himself.
“Talk about luck. That Siberian high-pressure system took a sharp swing south and stopped the warm front like a brick wall. Perfect viewing conditions. Ground temp is about zero, and relative humidity can’t be much higher than that!” Graham chuckled. “We maneuvered the bird in specially to take advantage of this. It’s within three degrees of being right overhead, and I don’t think Ivan has had time to figure out that this pass is under way.”
“There’s Dushanbe,” Jack breathed as part of the Tadzhik SSR came into view. Their first look was from one of the wide-angle cameras. The orbiting KH-14 reconnaissance satellite had a total of eleven. The bird had been in orbit for only three weeks, and this was the first of the newest generation of spy satellites. Dushanbe, briefly known as Stalinabad a few decades earlier—that must have made the local people happy! Ryan thought—was probably one of the ancient caravan cities. Afghanistan was less than a hundred miles away. Tamurlane’s legendary Samarkand was not far to the northwest ... and perhaps Scheherazade had traveled through a thousand years earlier. He wondered why was it that history worked this way. The same places and the same names always seemed to show up from one century to the next.
But CIA’s current interest in Dushanbe did not center on the silk trade.
The view changed to one of the high-resolution cameras. It peered first into a deep, mountainous valley where a river was held back by the concrete and stone mass of a hydroelectric dam. Though only fifty kilometers southeast of Dushanbe, its power lines did not serve that city of 500,000. Instead they led to a collection of mountaintops almost within sight of the facility.
“That looks like footings for another set of towers,” Ryan observed.
“Parallel to the first set,” Graham agreed. “They’re putting some new generators into the facility. Well, we knew all along that they were only getting about half the usable power out of the dam.”
“How long to bring the rest on-stream?” Greer asked.
“I’d have to check with one of our consultants. It won’t take more than a few weeks to run the power lines out, and the top half of the powerhouse is already built. Figure the foundations for the new generators are already done. All they have to do is rig the new equipment. Six months, maybe eight if the weather goes bad.”
“That fast?” Jack wondered.
“They diverted people from two other hydro jobs. Both of them were ‘Hero’ projects. This one has never been talked about, but they pulled construction troops off two high-profile sites to do this one. Ivan does know how to focus his effort when he wants to. Six or eight months is conservative, Dr. Ryan. It may be done quicker,” Graham said.
“How much power’ll be available when they finish?”
“It’s not all that big a structure. Total peak output, with the new generators? Figure eleven hundred megawatts.”
“That’s a lot of power, and all going to those hilltops,” Ryan said almost to himself as the camera shifted again.
The one the Agency called “Mozart” was quite a hill, but this area was the westernmost extension of the Himalayan Range, and by those standards it was puny. A road had been blasted to the very top—there wasn’t a Sierra Club in the USSR—along with a helicopter pad for bringing VIPs out from Dushanbe’s two airports. There were sixteen buildings. One was for apartments, the view from which must have been fantastic, though it was a prototypical Russian apartment building, as stylish and attractive as a cinderblock, finished six months before. A lot of engineers and their families lived in it. It seemed strange to see such a building there, but the message of the building was: The people who lived here were privileged. Engineers and academicians, people with enough skill that the State wanted to look after them and their needs. Food was trucked up the new mountain road—or, in bad weather, flown in. Another of the buildings was a theater. A third was a hospital. Television programming came in via satellite earth-station next to a building that contained a few shops. That sort of solicitude was not exactly common in the Soviet Union. It was limited to high Party officials and people who worked in essential defense projects. This was not a ski resort.
That was also obvious from the perimeter fence and guard towers, both of which were recent. One of the identifiable things about Russian military complexes was the guard towers; Ivan had a real fixation for the things. Three fences, with two ten-meter spaces enclosed. The outer space was usually mined, and the inner one patrolled by dogs. The towers were on the inner perimeter, spaced two hundred meters apart. The soldiers who manned the towers were housed in a better-than-average new concrete barracks—
“Can you isolate one of the guards?” Jack asked.
Graham spoke into his phone, and the picture changed. One of his technicians was already doing this, as much to test camera calibration and ambient air conditions as for the purpose Ryan intended.
As the camera zoomed in, a moving dot became a man-shape in greatcoat and probably a fur hat. He was walking a big dog of uncertain breed and had a Kalashnikov rifle slung over his right shoulder. Man and dog left puffs of vapor in the air as they breathed. Ryan leaned forward unconsciously, as though this would give him a better view.
“That guy’s shoulder boards look green to you?” he asked Graham.
The reconnaissance expert grunted. “Yep. He’s KGB, all right.”
“That close to Afghanistan?” the Admiral mused. “They know we have people operating there. You bet they’ll take their security provisions seriously.”
“They must have really wanted those hilltops,” Ryan observed. “Seventy miles overland are a few million people who think killing Russians is God’s will. This place is more important than we thought. It isn’t just a new facility, not with that kind of security. If that’s all it was, they wouldn’t have had to put it here, and they for damned sure wouldn’t have picked a place where they had to build a new power supply and risk exposure to hostiles. This may be an R and D facility now, but they must have bigger plans for it.”
“Like what?”
“Going after my satellites, maybe.” Art Graham thought of them as his.
“Have they tickled any of ’em recently?” Jack asked.
“No, not since we rattled their cage last April. Common sense broke out for once.”
That was an old story. Several times in the past few years, American reconnaissance and early-warning satellites had been “tickled”—laser beams or microwave energy had been focused on the satellites, enough to dazzle their receptors but not enough to do serious harm. Why had the Russians done it? That was the question. Was it merely an exercise to see how we’d react, to see if it caused a ruckus at the North American Aerospace Defense Command—NORAD—at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado? An attempt to determine for themselves how sensitive the satellites were? Was it a demonstration, a warning of their ability to destroy the satellites? Or was it simply what Jack’s British friends called bloody-mindedness? It was so hard to tell what the Soviets were thinking.
They invariably protested their innocence, of course. When one American satellite had been temporarily blinded over Sary Shagan, they said that a natural-gas pipeline had caught fire. The fact that the nearby Chimkent-Pavlodar pipeline carried mostly oil had escaped the Western press.
The satellite pass was complete now. In a nearby room a score of videotape recorders were rewound, and now the complete camera coverage would be reviewed at leisure.
“Let’s have a look at Mozart again, and Bach also, please,” Greer commanded.
“Hell of a commute,” Jack noted. The residential and industrial site on Mozart was only one kilometer or so from the emplacement on Bach, the next mountaintop over, but the road looked frightful. The picture froze on Bach. The formula of fences and guard towers was repeated, but this time the distance between the outermost perimeter fence and the next was at least two hundred meters. Here the ground surface appeared to be bare rock. Jack wondered how you planted mines in that—or maybe they didn’t, he thought. It was obvious that the ground had been leveled with bulldozers and explosives to the unobstructed flatness of a pool table. From the guard towers, it must have looked like a shooting gallery.
“Not kidding, are they?” Graham observed quietly.
“So that’s what they’re guarding ...” Ryan said.
There were thirteen buildings inside the fence. In an area perhaps the size of two football fields—which had also been leveled—were ten holes, in two groups. One was a group of six arranged hexagonally, each hole about thirty feet across. The second group of four was arrayed in a diamond pattern, and the holes were slightly smaller, perhaps twenty-five feet. In each hole was a concrete pillar about fifteen feet across, planted in bedrock, and every hole was at least forty feet deep—you couldn’t tell from the picture on the screen. Atop each pillar was a metal dome. They appeared to be made of crescent-shaped segments.
“They unfold. I wonder what’s in them?” Graham asked rhetorically. There were two hundred people at Langley who knew of Dushanbe, and every one wanted to know what was under those metal domes. They’d been in place for only a few months.
“Admiral,” Jack said, “I need to kick open a new compartment.”
“Which one?”
“Tea Clipper.”
“You’re not asking much!” Greer snorted. “I’m not cleared for that.”
Ryan leaned back in his chair. “Admiral, if what they’re doing in Dushanbe is the same thing we’re doing with Tea Clipper, we sure as hell ought to know. Goddammit, how are we supposed to know what to look for if we’re not told what one of these places looks like!”
“I’ve been saying that for quite a while.” The DDI chuckled. “SDIO won’t like it. The Judge will have to go to the President for that.”
“So he goes to the President. What if the activity here is connected with the arms proposal they just made?”
“Do you think it is?”
“Who can say?” Jack asked. “It’s a coincidence. They worry me.”
“Okay, I’ll talk to the Director.”
Ryan drove home two hours later. He drove his Jaguar XJS out onto the George Washington Parkway. It was one of the many happy memories from his tour of duty in England. He loved the silky-smooth feeling of the twelve-cylinder engine enough that he’d put his venerable old Rabbit into semi-retirement. As he always tried to do, Ryan set his Washington business aside. He worked the car up through its five gears and concentrated on his driving.
“Well, James?” the Director of Central Intelligence asked.
“Ryan thinks the new activity at Bach and Mozart may be related to the arms situation. I think he might be correct. He wants into Tea Clipper. I said you’d have to go to the President.” Admiral Greer smiled.
“Okay, I’ll get him a written note. It’ll make General Parks happier, anyway. They have a full-up test scheduled for the end of the week. I’ll set it up for Jack to see it.” Judge Moore smiled sleepily. “What do you think?”
“I think he’s right: Dushanbe and Tea Clipper are essentially the same project. There are a lot of coarse similarities, too many to be a pure coincidence. We ought to upgrade our assessment.”
“Okay.” Moore turned away to look out the windows. The world is going to change again. It may take ten or more years, but it’s going to change. Ten years from now it won’t be my problem, Moore told himself. But it sure as hell will be Ryan’s problem. “I’ll have him flown out there tomorrow. And maybe we’ll get lucky on Dushanbe. Foley got word to CARDINAL that we’re very interested in the place.”
“CARDINAL? Good.”
“But if something happens ...”
Greer nodded. “Christ, I hope he’s careful,” the DDI said.
Ever since the death of Dmitri Fedorovich, it has not been the same at the Defense Ministry, Colonel Mikhail Semyonovich Filitov wrote into his diary left-handed. An early riser, he sat at a hundred-year-old oak desk that his wife had bought for him shortly before she’d died, almost—what was it? Thirty years, Misha told himself. Thirty years this coming February. His eyes closed for a moment. Thirty years.
Never a single day passed that he did not remember his Elena. Her photograph was on the desk, the sepia print faded with age, its silver frame tarnished. He never seemed to have time to polish it, and didn’t wish to be bothered with a maid. The photo showed a young woman with legs like spindles, arms high over her head, which was cocked to one side. The round, Slavic face displayed a wide, inviting smile that perfectly conveyed the joy she’d felt when dancing with the Kirov Company.
Misha smiled also as he remembered the first impression of a young armor officer given tickets to the performance as a reward for having the best-maintained tanks in the division: How can they do that? Perched up on the tips of their toes as though on needle-point stilts. He’d remembered playing on stilts as a child, but to be so graceful! And then she’d smiled at the handsome young officer in the front row. For the briefest moment. Their eyes had met for almost as little time as it takes to blink, he thought. Her smile had changed ever so slightly. Not for the audience any longer, for that timeless instant the smile had been for him alone. A bullet through the heart could not have had a more devastating effect. Misha didn’t remember the rest of the performance—to this day he couldn’t even remember which ballet it had been. He remembered sitting and squirming through the rest of it while his mind churned over what he’d do next. Already Lieutenant Filitov had been marked as a man on the move, a brilliant young tank officer for whom Stalin’s brutal purge of the officer corps had meant opportunity and rapid promotion. He wrote articles on tank tactics, practiced innovative battle drills in the field, argued vociferously against the false “lessons” of Spain with the certainty of a man born to his profession.
But what do I do now? he’d asked himself. The Red Army hadn’t taught him how to approach an artist. This wasn’t some farm girl who was bored enough by work on the kolkhoz to offer herself to anyone—especially a young Army officer who might take her away from it all. Misha still remembered the shame of his youth—not that he’d thought it shameful at the time—when he’d used his officer’s shoulder boards to bed any girl who’d caught his eye.
But I don’t even know her name, he’d told himself. What do I do? What he’d done, of course, was to treat the matter as a military exercise. As soon as the performance had ended, he’d fought his way into the rest room and washed hands and face. Some grease that still remained under his fingernails was removed with a pocketknife. His short hair was wetted down into place, and he inspected his uniform as strictly as a general officer might, brushing off dust and picking off lint, stepping back from the mirror to make sure his boots gleamed as a soldier’s should. He hadn’t noticed at the time that other men in the men’s room were watching him with barely suppressed grins, having guessed what the drill was for, and wishing him luck, touched with a bit of envy. Satisfied with his appearance, Misha had left the theater and asked the doorman where the artists’ door was. That had cost him a ruble, and with the knowledge, he’d walked around the block to the stage entrance, where he found another doorman, this one a bearded old man whose greatcoat bore ribbons for service in the revolution. Misha had expected special courtesy from the doorman, one soldier to another, only to learn that he regarded all the female dancers as his own daughters—not wenches to be thrown at the feet of soldiers, certainly! Misha had considered offering money, but had the good sense not to imply the man was a pimp. Instead, he’d spoken quietly and reasonably—and truthfully—that he was smitten with a single dancer whose name he didn’t know, and merely wanted to meet her.
“Why?” the old doorman had asked coldly.
“Grandfather, she smiled at me,” Misha had answered in the awed voice of a little boy.
“And you are in love.” The reply was harsh, but in a moment the doorman’s face turned wistful. “But you don’t know which?”
“She was in—the line, not one of the important ones, I mean. What do they call that?—I will remember her face until the day I die.” Already he’d known that.
The doorman looked him over and saw that his uniform was properly turned out, and his back straight. This was not a swaggering pig of an NKVD officer whose arrogant breath stank of vodka. This was a soldier, and a handsome young one at that. “Comrade Lieutenant, you are a lucky man. Do you know why? You are lucky because I was once young, and old as I am, I still remember. They will start to come out in ten minutes or so. Stand over there, and make not a sound.”
It had taken thirty minutes. They came out in twos and threes. Misha had seen the male members of the troupe and thought them—what any soldier would think of a man in a ballet company. His manhood had been offended that they held hands with such pretty girls, but he’d set that aside. When the door opened, his vision was damaged by the sudden glare of yellow-white light against the near blackness of the unlit alley, and he’d almost missed her, so different she looked without the makeup.
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. Is 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 do 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 to 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 so 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 to men like himself, who had risked death, who’d bled—and all too often, died—for the Rodina. He was reminded of this every 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 been killed. As it was, he’d been given more time with Elena than 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 that side of his body was good for. The babushka who operated the elevator greeted him as always. They were of an age, she 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 such 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 his 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. Too bad.
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. “All systems are nominal. Trackers on automatic. AOS in eight minutes.”
“AOS?” Ryan 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 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 eleven 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.
“So, Misha, what does my day look like?” Yazov poured two cups of tea. It was still dark outside the Council of Ministers building. The inside perimeter of the Kremlin walls was lit with harsh blue-white floods, and sentries appeared and disappeared in the splashes of light.
“A full one, Dmitri Timofeyevich,” Misha replied. Yazov wasn’t the man that Dmitri Ustinov was, but Filitov had to admit to himself that he did put in a full day’s work as a uniformed officer should. Like Filitov, Marshal Yazov was by background a tank officer. Though they had never met during the war, they did know one another by reputation. Misha’s was better as a combat officer—purists claimed that he was an old-fashioned cavalryman at heart, though Filitov cordially hated horses—while Dmitri Yazov had won a reputation early on as a brilliant staff officer and organizer—and a Party man, of course. Before everything else, Yazov was a Party man, else he would never have made the rank of Marshal. “We have that delegation coming in from the experimental station in the Tadzhik SSR.”
“Ah, ‘Bright Star.’ Yes, that report is due today, isn’t it?”
“Academicians,” Misha snorted. “They wouldn’t know what a real weapon was if I shoved it up their asses.”
“The time for lances and sabers is past, Mikhail Semyonovich,” Yazov said with a grin. Not the brilliant intellect that Ustinov had been, neither was Yazov a fool like his predecessor, Sergey Sokolov. His lack of engineering expertise was balanced by an uncanny instinct for the merits of new weapons systems, and rare insights into the people of the Soviet Army. “These inventions show extraordinary promise.”
“Of course. I only wish that we had a real soldier running the project instead of these starry-eyed professors.”
“But General Pokryshkin—”
“He was a fighter pilot. I said a soldier, Comrade Minister. Pilots will support anything that has enough buttons and dials. Besides, Pokryshkin has spent more time in universities of late than in an aircraft. They don’t even let him fly himself anymore. Pokryshkin stopped being a soldier ten years ago. Now he is the procurer for the wizards.” And he is building his own little empire down there, but that’s an issue we’ll save for another day.
“You wish a new job assignment, Misha?” Yazov inquired slyly.
“Not that one!” Filitov laughed, then turned serious. “What I am trying to say, Dmitri Timofeyevich, is that the progress assessment we get from Bright Star is—how do I say this?—warped by the fact that we don’t have a real military man on the scene. Someone who understands the vagaries of combat, someone who knows what a weapon is supposed to be.”
The Defense Minister nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I see your point. They think in terms of ‘instruments’ rather than ‘weapons,’ that is true. The complexity of the project concerns me.”
“Just how many moving parts does this new assembly have?”
“I have no idea—thousands, I should think.”
“An instrument does not become a weapon until it can be handled reliably by a private soldier—well, at least a senior lieutenant. Has anyone outside the project ever done a reliability assessment?” Filitov asked.
“No, not that I can recall.”
Filitov picked up his tea. “There you are, Dmitri Timofeyevich. Don’t you think that the Politburo will be interested in that? Until now, they have been willing to fund the experimental project, of course, but”—Filitov took a sip—“they are coming here to request funding to upgrade the site to operational status, and we have no independent assessment of the project.”
“How would you suggest we get that assessment?”
“Obviously I cannot do it. I am too old, and too uneducated, but we have some bright new colonels in the Ministry, especially in the signals section. They are not combat officers, strictly speaking, but they are soldiers, and they are competent to look at these electronic marvels. It is only a suggestion.” Filitov didn’t press. He had planted the seed of an idea. Yazov was far easier to manipulate than Ustinov had ever been.
“And what of the problems at the Chelyabinsk tank works?” Yazov asked next.
Ortiz watched the Archer climbing the hill half a mile away. Two men and two camels. They probably wouldn’t be mistaken for a guerrilla force the way that twenty or so would have. Not that this had to matter, Ortiz knew, but the Soviets were to the point now that they attacked almost anything that moved. Vaya con Dios.
“I sure could use a beer,” the Captain observed.
Ortiz turned. “Captain, the thing that allowed me to deal with these people effectively is that I live the way they do. I observe their laws and respect their ways. That means no booze, no pork; that means I don’t fool with their women.”
“Shit.” The officer snorted. “These ignorant savages—” Ortiz cut him off.
“Captain, the next time I hear you say that, or even think it real loud, will be your last day here. These people are working for us. They’re bringing us stuff that we can’t get any place else. You will, repeat will treat them with the respect they deserve. Is that clear!”
“Yes, sir.” Christ, this guy’s turned into a sand nigger himself.