by Tom Clancy
It was Gregory’s turn again. “Sir, we know that it came from Dushanbe because the only other high-energy laser sites, at Sary Shagan and Semipalatinsk, were under the visible horizon—I mean, they couldn’t see the satellite from there. We know that it wasn’t an infrared laser, because the beam would have been seen by the sensors on the Cobra Belle aircraft. If I had to guess, sir, I’d say that the system uses the free-electron laser—”
“It does,” Judge Moore noted. “We just confirmed that.”
“That’s the one we’re working on at Tea Clipper. It seems to offer the best potential for weapons applications.”
“Can I ask why, Major?” the President asked.
“Power efficiency, sir. The actual lasing occurs in a stream of free electrons—that means they’re not attached to atoms like they usually are, sir—in a vacuum. You use a linear accelerator to produce a stream of the electrons and shoot them into the cavity, which has a low-energy laser shining along its axis. The idea is that you can use electromagnets to oscillate the electrons crosswise to their path. What you get is a beam of light coincident with the oscillation frequency of the wiggler magnets—that means you can tune it, sir, like a radio. By altering the energy of the beam, you can select the exact light frequency you generate. Then you can recycle the electrons back into the linear accelerator and shoot them back into the lasing cavity again. Since the electrons are already in a high-energy state, you gain a lot of power efficiency right there. The bottom line, sir, is that you can theoretically pump out forty percent of the energy you pump in. If you can achieve that reliably, you can kill anything you can see—when we talk about high energy levels, sir, we’re speaking in relative terms. Compared to the electrical power that this country uses to cook food, the amount needed for a laser defense system is negligible. The trick is making it really work. We haven’t done that yet.”
“Why not?” The President was interested now, leaning forward slightly in his chair.
“We’re still learning how to make the laser work, sir. The fundamental problem is in the lasing cavity—that’s where the energy comes off the electrons and turns into a beam of light. We haven’t been able yet to make a very wide one. If the cavity is too narrow, then you have such a high power density that you fry the optical coatings both in the cavity itself and on the mirrors that you use to aim the beam.”
“But they’ve beaten the problem. How do you think they did it?”
“I know what we’re trying to do. As you draw energy into the laser beam, the electrons become less energetic, okay? That means you have to taper the magnetic field that contains them—and remember that at the same time you have to continue the wiggling action of the field, too. We haven’t figured that out yet. Probably they have, and that probably came from their research into fusion power. All the ideas for getting energy out of controlled fusion are concerned with using a magnetic field to contain a mass of high-energy plasma—in principle the same thing we’re trying to do with the free electrons. Most of the basic research in that field comes from Russia, sir. They’re ahead of us because they’ve spent more time and money in the most important place.”
“Okay, thank you, Major.” The President turned to Judge Moore. “Arthur, what does CIA think?”
“Well, we’re not going to disagree with Major Gregory—he just spent a day briefing our Science and Technology people. We have confirmed that the Soviets do have six free-electron lasers at this place. They have made a breakthrough in power output and we’re trying to find out exactly what the breakthrough was.”
“Can you do that?” General Parks asked.
“I said we’re trying, General. If we’re very lucky, we’ll have an answer by the end of the month.”
“Okay, we know they can build a very powerful laser,” the President said. “Next question: is it a weapon?”
“Probably not, Mr. President,” General Parks said. “At least not yet. They still have a problem with thermal blooming because they haven’t learned how to copy our adaptive optics. They’ve gotten a lot of technology from the West, but so far they don’t have that. Until they do, they can’t use the ground-based laser as we have, that is, relaying the beam by orbiting mirror to a distant target. But what they have now can probably do great damage to a satellite in low-earth orbit. There are ways to protect satellites against that, of course, but it’s the old battle between heavier armor and heavier warheads. The warhead usually wins in the end.”
“Which is why we should negotiate the weapons out of existence.” Ernie Allen spoke for the first time. General Parks looked over to him with unconcealed irritation. “Mr. President, we are now getting a taste—just a taste—of how dangerous and destabilizing these weapons might be. If we merely consider this Dushanbe place to be an antisatellite weapon, look at the implications it has for verification of arms-treaty compliance, and for intelligence-gathering in general. If we don’t try to stop these things now, all we’ll get is chaos.”
“You can’t stop progress,” Parks observed.
Allen snorted. “Progress? Hell, we have a draft treaty on the table now to reduce weapons by half. That’s progress, General. In the test you just ran over the South Atlantic, you missed with half your shots—I can take out as many missiles as you can.”
Ryan thought the General might come off his chair at that one, but instead he adopted his intellectual guise. “Mr. Allen, that was the first test of an experimental system, and half of its shots did hit. In fact, all of the targets were eliminated in under a second. Major Gregory here will have that targeting problem beaten by summer—won’t you, son?”
“Yes, sir!” Gregory piped up. “All we have to do is rework the code some.”
“Okay. If Judge Moore’s people can tell us what the Russians have done to increase their laser power, we have most of the rest of the system architecture already tested and validated. In two or three years, we’ll have it all—and then we can start thinking seriously about deployment.”
“And if the Soviets start shooting your mirrors out of space?” Allen asked dryly. “You could have the best laser system ever made on the ground, but it won’t do much more than defend New Mexico.”
“They’ll have to find ‘em first, and that’s a much harder problem than you think. We can put ’em pretty high up, between three hundred and a thousand miles. We can use stealth technology to make them hard to locate on radar—you can’t do that with most satellites, but we can do it with these. The mirrors will be relatively small, and light. That means we can deploy a lot of them. Do you know how big space is, and how many thousands of pieces of junk are orbiting up there? They’d never get them all,” Parks concluded with confidence.
“Jack, you’ve been looking at the Russians. What do you think?” the President asked Ryan.
“Mr. President, the main force we’re going against here is the Soviet fixation on defending their country—and I mean actually defending it against attack. They’ve invested thirty years of work and quite a pile of money in this field because they think it’s something worth doing. Back in the Johnson administration, Kosygin said, ‘Defense is moral, offense is immoral.’That’s a Russian talking, sir, not just a communist. To be honest, I find that a hard argument to disagree with. If we do enter a new phase of competition, at least it would be defensive instead of offensive. Kind of hard to kill a million civilians with a laser,” Jack noted.
“But it will change the whole balance of power,” Ernest Allen objected.
“The current balance of power may be fairly stable, but it’s still fundamentally crazy,” Ryan said.
“It works. It keeps the peace.”
“Mr. Allen, the peace we have is one continuous crisis. You say we can reduce inventories by half—again, so what? You could cut Soviet inventories by two thirds and still leave them with enough warheads to turn America into a crematorium. The same thing is true of our inventory. As I said coming back from Moscow, the reduction agreement now on the table is cosmetic o
nly. It does not provide any degree of additional safety. It is a symbol—maybe an important one, but only a symbol with very little substance.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” General Parks observed. “If you reduce my target load by half, I wouldn’t mind all that much.” That earned him a nasty look from Allen.
“If we can find out what the Russians are doing different, where does that leave us?” the President asked.
“If the CIA gives us data that we can use? Major?” Parks turned his head.
“Then we’ll have a weapons system that we can demonstrate in three years, and deploy over the five to ten years after that,” Gregory said.
“You’re sure,” the President said.
“As sure as I can be, sir. Like with the Apollo Program, sir, it’s not so much a question of inventing a new science as learning how to engineer technology we already have. It’s just working out the nuts and bolts.”
“You’re a very confident young man, Major,” Allen said professorially.
“Yes, sir, I am. I think we can do it. Mr. Allen, our objective isn’t all that different from yours. You want to get rid of the nukes, and so do we. Maybe we can help you, sir.”
Zing! Ryan thought with a hastily concealed smile. A discreet knock came at the door. The President checked his watch.
“I have to cut this one short. I have to go over some antidrug programs over lunch with the Attorney General. Thank you for your time.” He took one last look at the Dushanbe photo and stood. Everyone else did the same. They filed out by the side door, the one concealed in the white plaster walls.
“Nice going, kid,” Ryan observed quietly to Gregory.
Candi Long caught the car outside her house. It was driven by a friend from Columbia, Dr. Beatrice Taussig, another optical physicist. Their friendship went back to undergraduate days. She was flashier than Candi. Taussig drove a Nissan 300Z sports car, and had the traffic citations to prove it. The car fitted well with her clothes, however, and the Clairoled hairstyle, and the brash personality that turned men off like a light switch.
“’Morning, Bea.” Candi Long slipped into the car and buckled the seat belt before she closed the door. Driving with Bea, you always buckled up—though she never seemed to bother.
“Tough night, Candi?” This morning it was a severe, not quite mannish wool suit, topped by a silk scarf at the neck. Long could never see the point. When you spent your day covered in a cheap white lab coat, who gave a damn what was under it—except Al, of course, but he was interested in what was under what was under, she thought to herself, smiling.
“I sleep better when he’s here.”
“Where’d he go?” Taussig asked.
“Washington.” She yawned. The rising sun cast shadows on the road ahead.
“How come?” Bea downshifted as she accelerated the car up the freeway on-ramp. Candi felt herself pressed sideways against the seat belt. Why did her friend have to drive this way? This wasn’t the Grand Prix of Monaco.
“He said that somebody ran a test, and he has to explain it to somebody or other.”
“Hmph.” Beatrice looked at her mirror and left the car in third as she selected a slot in the rush-hour traffic. She matched velocities expertly and slid into a space only ten feet longer than her Z-car. That earned her an angry beep from the car behind. She just smiled. The nondriving part of her psyche took note of the fact that whatever test Al was explaining hadn’t been American. And there weren’t too many people doing tests that this particular little geek had to explain. Bea didn’t understand what Candi saw in Al Gregory. Love, she told herself, is blind, not to mention deaf and dumb—especially dumb. Poor, plain Candi Long, she could have done so much better. If only she’d been able to room with Candi at school... if only there were a way to let her know... “When’s Al going to be back?”
“Maybe tonight. He’s going to call. I’ll take his car. He left it at the lab.”
“Put a towel over the seat before you sit in it.” She chuckled. Gregory drove a Chevy Citation. The perfect car for a geek, Bea Taussig thought. It was filled with the cellophane wrappers from Hostess Twinkies, and he washed it once a year whether the car needed it or not. She wondered what he was like in bed, but stifled the thought. Not in the morning, not after you just woke up. The thought of her friend... involved with that made her skin crawl. Candi was just so naive, so innocent—so dumb! about some things. Well, maybe she’d come around. There was still hope. “How’s the work on your diamond mirror coming?”
“ADAMANT? Give us another year and we’ll know. I wish you were still working with my team,” Dr. Long said.
“I can see more on the administrative side,” Bea answered with remarkable honesty. “Besides, I know I’m not as smart as you.”
“Just prettier,” Candi noted wistfully.
Bea turned to look at her friend. Yes, there was still hope.
Misha had the finished report by four. It was delayed, Bondarenko explained, because all the most-secret-cleared secretaries were busy with other material. It was forty-one pages long, including the diagrams. The young Colonel was as good as his word, Filitov saw. He’d translated all of the engineering gobbledygook into plain, clear language. Misha had spent the previous week reading everything he could find in the files on lasers. While he didn’t really understand the principles of their operation all that clearly, he had the engineering details committed to his trained memory. It made him feel like a parrot. He could repeat the words without comprehending their significance. Well, that was enough.
He read slowly, memorizing as he went. For all his peasant voice and gruff words, his mind was an even sharper razor than Colonel Bondarenko believed. And as things turned out, it didn’t have to be. The important part of the breakthrough appeared simple enough, not a matter of increasing the size of the lasing cavity, but of adapting its shape to the magnetic field. With the proper shape, size could be increased almost at will... and the new limiting factor became a part of the superconducting magnetic-pulse-control assembly. Misha sighed. The West had done it yet again. The Soviet Union did not have the proper materials. So, as usual, the KGB had secured them in the West, this time shipped through Czechoslovakia via Sweden. Wouldn’t they ever learn?
The report concluded that the other remaining problem was in the optical and computer systems. I’ll have to see what our intelligence organs are doing about that, Filitov told himself. Finally, he spent twenty minutes going over the diagram of the new laser. When he got to the point at which he could close his eyes and recall every single detail, he put the report back in its folder. He checked his watch and punched the button for his secretary. The warrant officer appeared at the door in a few seconds.
“Yes, Comrade Colonel?”
“Take this down to Central Files—Section 5, maximum security. Oh, and where’s today’s burn-bag?”
“I have it, Comrade.”
“Get it for me.” The man went back to the anteroom and returned a moment later with the canvas bag that went daily to the document-destruction room. Misha took it and started putting papers into it. “Dismissed. I’ll drop this off on the way out.”
“Thank you, Comrade Colonel.”
“You work hard enough, Yuri Il’ych. Good night.” When the door closed behind his secretary, Misha produced some additional pages, documents that had not originated at the Ministry. Every week or so he took care of the burn-bag himself. The warrant officer who handled Filitov’s clerical work assumed that it was because of his Colonel’s kindness, and perhaps also because there were some especially sensitive papers to be destroyed. In any case, it was a habit that long predated his own service to the Colonel, and the security services viewed it as routine. Three minutes later, on the way to his car, Misha walked into the destruct room. A young sergeant greeted the Colonel as he might have greeted his grandfather, and held open the chute to the incinerator. He watched as the Hero of Stalingrad set down his briefcase and used his crippled arm to open the bag as the good ar
m elevated it, dumping perhaps a kilogram of classified documents into the gas-fed fire in the Ministry’s basement.
He could not have known that he was helping a man destroy evidence of high treason. The Colonel signed off in the log for having destroyed the documents from his section. With a friendly nod, Misha left the burn-bag on its hook and walked out the door to his waiting staff car.
Tonight the ghosts would come again, Misha knew, and tomorrow he’d take steam again, and another package of information would go to the West. On the way to his apartment, the driver stopped off at a special grocery store that was open only to the elite. Here the lines were short. Misha bought some sausage and black bread, and a half-liter bottle of Stolychnaya vodka. In a gesture of comradeliness, he even got one for his driver. For a young soldier, vodka was better than money.
In his apartment fifteen minutes later, Misha extracted his diary from its drawer, and first of all reproduced the diagram appended to Bondarenko’s report. Every few minutes he’d spend a second or two looking at the framed photograph of his wife. For the most part, the formal report had tracked with the handwritten one; he had to write only ten new pages, carefully inserting the critical formulae as he went. CARDINAL reports were always models of brevity and clarity, something that came from a lifetime of writing operational directives. When he was finished, he put on a pair of gloves and walked into the kitchen. Magnetically attached to the back side of the steel panel at the bottom of his West German-made refrigerator was a small camera. Misha operated the camera with ease, despite the inconvenience of the gloves. It took only a minute for him to photograph the new diary pages, after which he rewound the film and extracted the film cassette. He pocketed this and replaced the camera in its hiding place before removing the gloves. Next he adjusted the window shades. Misha was nothing if not careful. Close examination of his apartment’s door would show scratches on the lock, indicating that it had been picked open by an expert. In fact, anyone could make the scratches. When it was confirmed that his report had reached Washington—tire scuff marks on a predetermined section of curb—he’d tear the pages out of the diary, take them to the Ministry in his pocket, put them in the burn-bag, and dump them down the chute himself. Misha had supervised the installation of the document-destruction system twenty years before.
