“That’s just for you” Helen explained. “These procedures are for this area—it’s different. There is another set of security procedures once we actually get to the specific project—they won’t be as difficult as those were, but you will have to submit to them as well, each and every time. The procedures change depending on which area we’re going to and which projects are active, so they might be easier or harder next time—”
“Harder?”
“This isn’t even the worst of it,” Jon added. “Hangar Seven-Alpha’s classification is only Secret. If you want to go to the Top Secret areas, it’ll be an extra hour. Heck, we’ve gone through three hours of in-processing just to pick up a can of soda because the ice chest was in the wrong lab.”
“How do you get any work done?”
“You get used to it,” Helen said. “You just budget your time accordingly. You learn not to come out here unless you’ve lined up an entire day or more of work, and you stay until the work gets done. We sleep out here all the time. You ask why we invest in the best computers, why we buy two or three systems when we only need one, and don’t use leased equipment—this is part of the reason. Getting a service tech to come out here would be impossible, and it takes even longer to get clearance for a piece of electronic equipment to come in here than it does a person—every diode, microchip, and printed circuit board has to be checked for bugs before it comes in here.”
“This is insane,” Cheryl muttered. “We’ve been involved with many classified projects before, and I’ve never seen security procedures this tight.”
“Getting a briefing or giving a talk on a classified program is one thing,” Jon said. “Actually building a weapon system that won’t officially exist for another five years is another.”
“This is like going to Disneyland,” Kelsey exclaimed happily.
“I love your attitude, kiddo,” Jon said. Her excitement and glee, Jon had to admit, was infectious.
The partnership deal between Jon, Helen, the shareholders of Sky Masters Inc., and Sierra Vistas Partners went through quickly and without any major glitches, once Jon was convinced it was the best for all—thanks to Kelsey. Jon and Helen Masters instantly became multimillionaires, not just on paper but in reality. The price for that newfound liquidity was twofold—having a lot of strange people working around the administration areas, and dealing with a whole new attitude from the board of directors, who overnight went from having virtually no power in the company to having the critical swing vote in every decision in the entire company. They didn’t ask for information anymore—they demanded it. Memos flew, phone calls followed, and the staff was kept hopping keeping up with requests for updates from directors and their attorneys and accountants.
Most of Jon’s day was filled with bringing Kelsey up to date on all of Sky Masters Inc.’s projects and programs, a chore that Jon actually found beneficial. Since very few engineers at the company could match Jon’s intelligence and innovation, Jon rarely talked to others about his projects— when he needed input or help, he usually had to spend more time explaining what he was trying to do. Not so with Kelsey. She listened intently, rarely took notes, could speed- read a page of engineering data in just a few seconds, and always asked intelligent, relevant questions—not just on the basic science, but on future applications or future directions to push the research. Jon found that explaining a project to Kelsey actually helped him rethink the problems and discover a new approach to solving a dilemma or impasse.
Today was the most exciting day for Kelsey—actually going out to the flight line to see some aircraft. Cheryl’s only reason for going along, other than the fact she wanted to be with her daughter as much as possible, was that she had spent so long getting her special Top Secret security clearance that she thought she’d better use it. Now she was regretting that decision. They had flown the company jet from Arkansas to Tonopah Municipal Airport, and then loaded up into a company Suburban for the drive out to the Tonopah Test Range, sixty miles to the southeast along narrow, winding, cracked roads.
“I thought we were going out to Groom Lake,” Cheryl said perturbedly.
“Not likely,” Jon said. “Heck, it took me a year to go out there—and I designed a lot of the stuff they were testing out there! Helen is one of the senior engineers at the company and has been for years, and she’s still never been there! As rough as you might think the security is here, it’s nothing compared to . . . well, out there.” It was obvious Jon was uncomfortable even saying the words “Groom Lake.”
“Security is not just a procedure out there, or part of the cost of doing business—it’s a way of life.”
“So how did that Soviet spy make it in there?” Cheryl asked. “How did—?”
Jon suddenly turned, stepped right in front of Cheryl until he was just inches from her, and held up a finger right in front of her face. “Cheryl,” he began, his voice quiet but deadly serious. His eyes were affixed directly on hers, and it shocked and surprised her. “You have got to learn something right here and right now: We don’t talk about stuff like that. No one does. Not here, not at the company, not anywhere, not anytime, to no one. No one”
“It’s no secret, Jon—”
“Cheryl, listen. . . .”
“Jon, I heard all about it at a bar in Nashville, Tennessee, during a space technology conference,” Cheryl Duffield said with a nervous smile. “Why, I even heard—”
“Cheryl!” Jon interjected—it was the most emotion he had ever displayed in front of anyone before. “Listen, Cheryl, you have got to learn something—security is not something to be taken lightly around here or most anywhere in the company. To call these guys ‘sticklers’ for security would be a gross understatement. A company that gets a reputation for lax security gets aced out of every single contract competition—ask Northrop, ask British Aerospace, ask any of a dozen excellent companies that had one little breach. It doesn’t matter how good your product is— they’ll blackball you in a heartbeat.”
He pointed to a tiny white box on the side of a hangar several dozen yards away. “This place is totally wired for sound—I should know, because I designed most of the systems they use here. We are constantly being scanned for bugs, weapons, recording devices, explosives, stolen components, tracers, communications equipment, chemicals, microwaves—you name it.
“Every word you or I say is recorded and electronically transcribed and analyzed, and any keywords found in the transcript sends a security flag all the way up to FBI, CIA, DIA, and a dozen other government and military security and intelligence agencies in Washington for follow-up,” he went on. “You say the word ‘Soviet,’ ‘bar,’ and ‘Nashville’ in a sentence, and in two days the FBI will have launched an entire investigation of you, all your acquaintances, all the circumstances surrounding your presence at that bar in Nashville, and any other permutation of those words they can think of—and believe me, you’ll be shocked at the shit they’ll come up with.”
“Jon, don’t you think you’re exaggerating just a little?” Cheryl asked with an exasperated smile. “I’ve been involved with some of the most sensitive and intensive security systems out there too, and I’ve never heard of any of that stuff. And why would they be scanning employees out here in the open for things they just got through checking us for at the entrance? And besides ..Just then, Jon put his head down and muttered something under his breath. “What did you say, Jon?”
Moments later they heard, “Hands in the air, all of you!” Cheryl turned and saw a soldier in strange pixilated black, silver, and gray fatigues and helmet aiming an M-16 assault rifle at them from the comer of a building. The strange outfit made him blend in extraordinarily well with the buildings and the shadows at the same time.
“What in the world are you doing? How dare you!”
“I said, hands in the air!” the soldier shouted again.
Jon and Helen raised their hands high. Cheryl grabbed Kelsey as another soldier appeared and aimed his weapon as well.
Kelsey giggled and raised her arms too. “Cheryl, I strongly advise you to do as they say, right now,” Helen said. She turned to her husband, wilted inside when she saw his “I-told-you-so” smile, and asked perturbedly, “Jon, what did you say?”
“I said, ‘Cheryl, are those bombs under your bra there?”’
“Oh, my God,” Helen moaned. “This is not going to be pretty.”
It wasn’t. Three hours later, including over one hour being individually interrogated and debriefed by security personnel and another two hours going through the original searches, ID checks, and scans all over again—including more of the same astounded expressions and whispered comments about the nine-year-old, as if it was the first time they had ever seen her—the four were right back to where they were before, walking toward the large sand-colored Hangar 7A.
“I don’t think that was very funny, Dr. Masters,” Cheryl finally said.
“It wasn’t meant to be funny, Cheryl,” Jon said. “But it’s hard to impress upon anyone how strict security is around here unless they experience it for themselves. Besides, I’ll bet you’ve never been strip-searched before—it’ll make you really watch your p’s and q’s from now on, not just in here but everywhere.”
“Jon, this is not funny. Those security people strip- searched and X-rayed my daughter.”
“It’s not over, Cheryl—in fact, it’s only begun,” Jon said, his voice turning serious again. “Your life will not be your own until what you’re about to see, and every piece of technology associated with it in any way, has been declassified for at least five years. And we’re only going into the Secret area—if you go into the Top Secret or higher areas, you, your entire family, and all your known associates will be under constant scrutiny until you all die—plus five years. It’s the way it is from now on.”
They entered the big hangar, submitted—more humbly this time—to yet another battery of checks and searches, and then proceeded inside. Two dark gray military aircraft filled the hangar; several smaller aircraft and air-launched weapons were on the hangar floor, all closely guarded by Air Force and company security guards, watching not only the hardware and the visitors but one another as well.
“Here they are, ladies—Sky Masters Inc.’s latest air combat projects, in advanced R and D or initial deployment,” Jon said proudly. “The little ones first.” He stepped over to the first weapon. “This is the FlightHawk, our multi-purpose unmanned combat air vehicle. He can do anything a combat aircraft can do—dogfighting, bombing, reconnaissance, minelaying, anything—and do it completely autonomously.
“This is Wolverine, smaller, faster, and much more maneuverable than FlightHawk, primarily designed for standoff attack missions against multiple heavily defended targets—it can outmaneuver even a Patriot missile. It has three weapon sections where it can carry a variety of pay-loads, including thermium nitrate explosive, developed by us, which have ten times the explosive power of TOT by weight. It also uses imaging infrared seeker and millimeter- wave radar for terminal guidance and reattacks. This is Anaconda, our hypersonic long-range air-to-air missile.
“Over there, with all the extra guards around it, is Lancelot, our air-launched near-space weapon,” Jon went on. “It has a three-stage throttleable solid-rocket motor that gives it a range of over three hundred miles in a ballistic flight path or over one hundred miles in altitude in an antisatellite attack profile. They have extra guards because of Lancelot’s warhead: It carries the plasma-yield warhead. It’s most effective above thirty thousand feet, which makes it a perfect antiballistic missile and antisatellite weapon, but we can get a one-quarter- to one-half-kiloton-equivalent yield even at sea level. At higher altitudes, the plasma field created by the explosion is electronically selectable in both yield and size—at maximum yield it can destroy a target twice the size of the International Space Station, and at maximum size it can disrupt the flight path of incoming nuclear warheads spread out over four hundred thousand cubic miles of space. The plasma field does not just destroy a target: It converts it into a state of matter that exists in nature for only billionths of a second—or in the center of a sun.
“All of these weapons are designed to be carried by our combat aircraft, but they can be fitted to be carried by just about any combat-coded aircraft—even transport planes. You probably saw our DC-10 test aircraft outside—we can carry up to three FlightHawks or six Wolverines on board, and we can refit just about any cargo-category aircraft to launch them. The Lancelot, of course, has been deployed in the Air Reserve Forces and is fielded by the One- Eleventh Bombardment Wing, which is based here for now but will soon be based up in Battle Mountain Air Force Base here in Nevada.”
He then moved over to the first warplane. “This is one of our EB-1C Vampire battleships. As you know, it’s a highly modified B-1B Lancer strategic bomber. It can still carry all of the Air Force’s strategic and tactical air weapons, along with all of our new weapons. It’s faster, stealthier, and has longer range and greater warload than the active- duty or Reserve Forces models. It uses laser radar arrays for targeting and terrain-following—it is fully air-to-air capable and can even attack satellites in low-Earth orbit with Anacondas or Lancelots. We have six modified right now out of a planned twelve-plane force, all coming from the B-1B fleet once assigned to the Air Reserve forces.”
Kelsey Duffield had already stepped over to the second plane—she was gently touching it, running the very tips of her fingers across its smooth ebony surface as if it were a skittish young colt. Watching her carefully, she noticed, was the security guard Sandy, with Sasha the red Doberman right beside her. “This must be Dragon,” she said. “It’s very pretty.”
“Right, Kelsey,” Jon said proudly. “Our newest and best project—the AL-52 Dragon airborne laser anti-ballistic missile weapon system. We modified a B-52 H-model Stratofortress bomber to carry a zero-point-seven-five- megawatt diode-pumped solid-state laser, along with laser radar arrays for detection and tracking. I call it our newest system, but it’s actually been in the works for eight years. We were part of the original competition for the Air Force’s Airborne Laser.”
“You just lost out to Boeing, TRW, and their 747 variant,” Cheryl reminded him.
“We didn’t ‘lose out’—Boeing just had a more aggressive marketing strategy,” Jon said defensively. “We spent a tenth of what they did on marketing and almost won it.”
The new bomb doors of the AL-52 Dragon extended halfway up the side of the fuselage, exposing the entire bomb bay and midfuselage space, and Kelsey looked up inside the open doors. There were four large curved devices, the laser generators, on each side of the fuselage. Forward of the generators was a large stainless-steel container, the laser oscillator, with a large steel tube coming from the chamber forward along the inside center of the fuselage. Behind the laser generators were the capacitors that stored enough power to “flash” the diodes to produce a pulse of laser light. “Beautiful,” she said in a tiny voice. “Just beautiful. You did such a good job with those laser generators, Jon. They’re so small, but you can get about fifty thousand kilowatts out of each one, right?”
“That’s right. We can push it probably to two hundred each, but we don’t have enough generating power on board.”
“It looks like we can fit a few more laser modules in there if we make smaller capacitors.”
Jon liked it when Kelsey said “we”—it was that exciting to work with her. He almost hated to say anything negative around her for fear of discouraging or distracting her—it sometimes seemed as if she was talented enough to cure a rainy day. “Doesn’t really matter—we just don’t have enough power on board to make a bigger laser.”
“Can’t we put more generators on board?”
“We’ve got as many as we can hold,” Jon said. “We’re maxed out on capacitor size too—it just generates too much heat to increase the size any more.”
She continued to examine the intricate SSL components, carefully but with sheer, unabashed a
we in her eyes. She paused again at the laser oscillator unit, forward of the laser generators. “This is what you use to combine and channel the laser light?” she asked.
“The Faraday oscillator,” Jon said. He stepped over to the young girl, studying her eyes as she looked at the device. It was as big as the eight laser generators combined, taking up a huge amount of space inside the fuselage.
Jon had not been with Kelsey Duffield that much since her dad’s company became one-third partners in Sky Masters Inc. But Jon had quickly learned one very interesting thing: Kelsey’s eyes were truly windows into her extraordinary brain. He could look at her eyes and see the calculations, the engineering, the mechanics, and the physics coming alive, almost as clear as a computer printout. He tried to guess what she was looking at, figure out what she was studying so intently, and then try to outguess her. It was not an easy task—but it was a constant challenge for him, trying to at least match her lightning-quick mind, and he loved the mental exercise.
That’s why he was so disappointed when she moved on. He thought she figured something out about the oscillator. It was easily the clunkiest and most low-tech component of the SSL—basically just a big airless can with mirrors in it and a big lens in front. The laser fight coming from the generators was directed into the collimator and bounced back and forth and rotated around between liquid-cooled mirrors in the oscillator. When the light was at the precise wavelength and all of the light waves were in perfect alignment, the lens allowed the fight to escape out the front to the argon-filled waveguide, which channeled the laser energy to the deformable mirror in the nose turret.
“What are you thinking about, Kelsey?” Jon asked.
“Energy,” the girl replied.
“What about it?”
“How much we need, how much we have?”
“Relatively speaking, not very much,” Jon replied. “We added just one alternator and one generator to the basic B-52 electrical system to power the laser. Four three-hundred-amp engine-driven alternators, each one supplying power in a separate circuit to four essential AC buses and two emergency AC buses. Four twenty-kilowatt engine-driven generators supplying power to two DC essential buses and one emergency DC bus. Backup power is four engine-driven hydraulically powered alternators and generators, which power only the essential A and emergency A buses.”
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