Operation Damocles (20 page)

XXVII

At midnight of February 14, Saint Valentine’s Day, by prior arrangement, a man sitting in a darkened motel room in Titusville, Florida, received a telephone call. Next to the phone was a small electronic box, and the man reached over and threw a switch as soon as he heard the caller’s voice.

He said hello, listened a moment, then said, “Yes, it’s me. Turn on your encryptor. How are you?”

“It’s on. I’m fine.” The voice sounded sad, distant.

The Titusville man said so.

“I’m okay,” assured the second man, in a resigned tone. “I’m just tired, and in a mood today. I’m hopping time zones like a kid playing hopscotch, and working twenty-hour days. I can’t stop thinking about the cost in lives. It’s one thing to contemplate doing something of that enormity, to remotely rationalize the costs versus the long-term benefits to humanity, but it’s such a horrible thing to know you have done it. I can’t help thinking about the innocents—especially the children.”

“I never thought it would really go that far,” said the Titusville man, “when I agreed to help you. I thought I knew you well, and I didn’t think you could go through with it—not all the way, I mean. I had no conception of how powerful that thing is. My God, it could dominate the world! And from what I’m hearing through the grapevine, that is one of several schemes being concocted in certain quarters. As we thought, the Air Force Space Command is planning to try to use Diana to find and destroy it, but there is another group in Washington that wants to gain control of it for their own ends. Can they do it?”

“No. Have no fear of that. It’s equipped with a dead man’s switch. It must be reset every so often, or a preset program takes over. It would destroy ninety-two hundred military and financial center targets—almost every major base and significant outpost in the world—then self-destruct. It would ruin the world economy for a while, but it would keep people busy putting things back together, and the world would recover. In the meantime, it would strip away most of the underworld’s power, and render them incapable of global domination. If I am captured or killed, I want to leave the world with a fighting chance.”

“Do you have a contingency plan for Diana?”

“Yes. Actually, Diana is crucial to our plans. We anticipated their reactivating it, as well as several other tactics they might try. I don’t imagine for a moment that I’ve thought of every conceivable means of attack, but I spent years planning this. A lot of that time went toward keeping up with what is in orbit, and in exploring possible countermeasures they might try. In the end, I decided we were as ready as we would ever be, and time was running out. We had to move now, or lose the opportunity—perhaps forever.”

Suddenly, the Titusville man started at the sound of a loud thud outside the door. The next moment, the door burst inward, and a squad of cursing, shouting men rushed into the darkened room. Spotlights beamed through the window, filling the room with glaring light and stark shadows.

Automatic rifles were trained on the seated figure as he sat holding the phone, the red spots of aiming lasers playing over his body. Blinding light filled the room as the lights were switched on.

“Freeze!” ordered an intent young man with a pistol trained on the seated man. The man did as he was told, sat with hands raised, elbows on the arms of the chair, the phone still in his hand. Another man walked around behind the seated man without getting in the line of fire, took the phone, listened into it, then placed it in the phone cradle. He looked at the first man—shook his head.

The first man stood slowly, holstering his gun. He addressed the seated man: “Mr. Obermiller, I’m with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. You are under arrest for conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.”

“No,” Obermiller said quietly, a look of resignation on his face, “you overthrew it. You don’t represent the country or the people. We are just trying to take it back.”

“Well, isn’t that patriotic?” the agent said sarcastically. “My country, ’tis of thee . . . ? You and your friends murdered a million helpless people. After we find out what we want from you, your government is going to see that you get about six feet of country for your very own, and the People will cheer when they stick the needle in you.”

Turning away, he said to the others, “Cuff him and get him out of here. I want him strip-searched and printed as soon as you get back to base, and get me ten sets of photos ASAP. Make sure he can’t harm himself. I want him in a straitjacket and under constant observation until further notice. If anything happens to him, it’s going to be somebody’s ass. Do it.”

XXVIII

Captain Bill Robinson stood with lieutenants Donald Phelps and Pete Goldman outside SATCOM in the underground complex at Cheyenne Mountain, Wyoming. They were discussing the impending mission that the U.S. Air Force Space Command was calling Operation Damocles and having a final cigarette before relieving the current crew. Robinson was just finishing his tour of duty, and waiting for the new watch officer to relieve him.

Phelps and Goldman were young, brash and eager, and they were excited, as young military men always are on the eve of war. Robinson was a seasoned officer, and a bit less enthused by what he knew, which was a good deal more than the grapevine gossip that Phelps and Goldman were going on.

He had personal reservations about the wisdom of attacking the weapon, the Damocles of current interest, but wasn’t about to communicate his feelings to the two junior officers.

Phelps also seemed more troubled than eager, but was unavoidably excited about the impending action. Everyone throughout the command felt the tension. Goldman was openly cocky, though. No reservations, there, thought Robinson.

“It’s official. We’ve confirmed that it is the weapon,” said Goldman, smiling.

Robinson already knew—had known for some days—what Goldman had just learned, but intended to keep his foreknowledge a secret. He didn’t want to deflate the younger men by stealing their moment. No one in this command had thought of anything else for months. They were frustrated by the waiting, and the news was a much needed break in the monotony.

“Where? How?” he asked, pretending curiosity.

Phelps was the science technician. Without Goldman’s exuberance, he responded, “At about twenty-five degrees above the plane of the ecliptic, something is blocking starlight as it passes between the stars and the earth. We can’t image it. Their cloaking technology is truly amazing. Its shadow seems to be only about a square meter in area. There are ways to make sure, but if they have an anti-surveillance system, they would notice a ranging laser or a radar pinging pulse. We can’t risk assuming they wouldn’t. We would alert them that we have found them, and our signal would direct them right to us. We can’t take the chance. God knows what they would do.”

“We, and this installation, would become a bubble of incandescent gas about ten milliseconds after our pinging signal hit them; that is what ‘they’ would do,” said Robinson. “You guys had better wake up. This isn’t a video game. If you don’t watch your P’s and Q’s, and operate by the book, twenty-first-century technological warfare is going to jump up and bite you on the butt. That isn’t a manned craft up there; you’re not combating other human beings. It’s a sophisticated machine, and if you screw up, you’ll be dead in a heartbeat. We all will.”

“Where is Diana in relation to it? Can we move her within range?” asked Goldman.

“She’s actually only about ten degrees behind, and five degrees south longitude away from their orbital track,” said Phelps. “She has gas thrusters, and enough gas inventory remaining to get her to coincidence.”

“What about her weaponry? Can she kill it?”

“She has a kinetic launcher with twenty-four 300-gram spent-uranium projectiles, each with seventy-four hundred Newton meters of energy. Four are tipped with proximity-fused, high-explosive frag, and two are ion bombs.”

“Why use the solid projectiles at all?’ asked Goldman “Why not just the explosive shells?”

“Because there’s no point in not using them,” said Robinson. “If one of the HE heads should have a defective fuse, and it’s the only one to come within range . . . what then? One of the solids might be the one thing that gets through, especially if Damocles fires back. A slug of molten uranium could do a lot of damage. Even if Damocles doesn’t fire, one of the solids may be the only thing that connects.”

Phelps interjected, responding to Goldman, “Don’t forget, Diana was made for this kind of job. If she can hit a solid section, she can hurt it bad, maybe kill it. Trouble is, we don’t know how the thing is constructed. If we shoot through a thin membrane, such as a solar parasol, we won’t hurt it, we’ll just alert them, and because of the reaction moments of her weapons propellants, Diana must be repositioned after each shot.”

“What kind of absolute range does Diana have?” asked Robinson, curious to see how far the men had been briefed.

Again, it was Phelps who had the technical knowledge. “She’s theoretically accurate on a ten-square-meter target, out to about two kilometers, but she was meant for close-in work—destruction of surveillance and comm satellites. She has a very narrow frontal aspect ratio, deliberately made that way because SDI was thinking of killer satellite counter-defense, and wanted a low profile. She’s about ten centimeters wide, where the projectiles exit—land of like a hatchet head.

“Because of her small radar cross-section, tactical operations thinks that she can get within one klick of Damocles without being discovered. If the terrorists used a common imaging radar system, it won’t image much under half a square meter at that range.

“Ops thinks they may have used something of low discrimination because Damocles is so damned small anyway. He’s probably built for orbit-to-ground attack only, with very limited counter-satellite defensive systems and sensors—at least insofar as combating close-in objects that don’t emit IR signatures from heat engines. The terrorists would probably rely on the stealth cloaking for defense, and use the bulk of the weapon’s mass for power generation.”

“What if it uses a high-discrimination laser interferometer?” asked Robinson, smiling slightly.

“Then we’re screwed,” said Phelps, returning the smile. “Diana’s aiming system is the real worry,” he continued, turning serious again. “She uses an old optical system with twenty-power magnification, and cross-hairs at point of aim. Her sights are mounted in the center of her weapons cluster, but even the four uranium solids closest to the sights are six centimeters away from line of sight.”

“What’s the optimum range at the point of zero parallax?” asked Robinson.

“There is no parallax problem. The Army had the right idea, there. Except for gravitational trajectory, the projectiles stay parallel to line of sight, all the way out. No divergence. The problem is that Damocles is so damned small. Or at least the cross-section that we can see is small. He may be a one-meter tube, twenty meters long, for all we know. Anyway, one minute of angle is twenty-eight centimeters at one kilometer. Add six centimeters of coincidence error, and you’ve got thirty-four centimeters of deviation to play with. Diana’s mean aiming radius is four meters, so a minute of angle is one-point-one-six millimeters of rotation. Her weapons’ phalanx, fired all at once, covers a bit over a square meter of area at the target. At one kilometer, if her optics or her point of aim is off dead center by half a millimeter, we’re dead meat.”

“Bottom line?” asked Robinson.

“She’s going to have to get close enough to Damocles to mate with him, if we’re going to be sure of a kill,” Phelps said with as much drama as he could muster.

Robinson couldn’t help but laugh. “What about his power system?” he asked, genuinely wondering whether or not the boy had heard anything new at the briefing. “Have they managed to pick up anything?”

“Not a glimmer. We still don’t have a clue as to what powers that thing. There’s not a half-degree Kelvin difference between Damocles’ temperature and that of the deep-space background. Disregarding heat from internal circuitry, and that’s a lot to disregard, how in hell do you think they avoid solar heating? That thing has got to be the best insulator ever devised.”

“Dr. Stickle thinks that it gets rid of waste heat by converting the IR energy into a higher frequency, and somehow radiating it away on the beam itself,” Phelps responded, intent on his subject. “It makes a lot of sense, and conserves energy by adding it to the weapon’s output.”

Robinson reflected, with utterly no patronization, “The more we learn about this thing, the more I wonder if we’re even bright enough to play in the same league with these guys. I’m almost ready to believe in the Big Brother-race-of-aliens theory—you know, protecting us from ourselves, for our own good.”

“There’s another danger that we mustn’t forget,” Phelps said. “If we damage its control system without deactivating its weapon system, it could potentially strafe the earth, out of control, and kill millions before it runs out of energy. We aren’t going to be popular if we wing it, and it retaliates.

“People are worried about the threat it carries, but most of them like the way things have changed. They aren’t going to want to go back, especially at the risk of destroying half the planet.”

“They won’t have any choice in the matter,” Goldman answered smugly. “We will carry out our orders, and the civilians will fall in line.”

Robinson looked disappointed at Goldman’s arrogance, and glanced at the smoldering, rebellious face of Phelps. Phelps was considering Goldman, and looked disgusted.

Robinson said, “I’ll leave it with you guys. I’m going to get some sleep.”

He moved away, paused to pass his keys and sidearm to his relief, who had just walked up, and walked away down the corridor. The new officer of the day, Captain Cogdil, passed by the two lieutenants and entered the command center.

“Why haven’t they got a choice, Pete?” Phelps confronted Goldman, speaking just above a whisper. “Why should we go back? Things are better now.”

“Look,” said Goldman, “I can sympathize with your feelings. Things are better for the average Joe Blow, but they aren’t going to stay that way. Whoever controls that thing has a weakness. It may be money, or women, or just having power. Who knows? Sooner or later, they will become corrupt. Everyone does. You’ve heard the old adage: ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’, haven’t you? Well, it’s true. Power is intoxicating, and if we don’t take them out, they will soon be making our lives miserable. That’s the official stand, and it sounds right to me.”

“What if you’re wrong? What if, like the message said, we’re throwing away the only chance we will ever have. I haven’t noticed anyone asking our opinion about the way things are run. Have you?”

“That’s the way the world is, my friend,” Goldman said, putting out his cigarette. “Whether we like it or not.”

“Goldman,” Phelps said, putting a hand on Goldman’s arm, “give me a straight answer. Do you believe in the concept of democracy? Would you rather live under a dictatorship? I mean, I’m doing my hitch for my country, and I understand the need for a military, but I’m getting out after I serve my tour. The structured life may be okay for some, but it’s not for me, and I sure as hell wouldn’t want the whole country to be run by a military regime.”

“Of course I believe in democracy,” said Goldman disdainfully. “I have plans, too. My old man is as capitalistic as the next guy, and I’ll be a VP in his company after my hitch is over. That has nothing to do with the here and now.”

“I think it has everything to do with it,” said Phelps, intent on Goldman’s face. “My folks say the spirit of the country is better now than it has been in fifty years. All kinds of opportunities are springing up. People are getting back their independence. They’re happier, and we can keep it that way. You and I. Right now, Diana is the only hope they have of destroying Damocles. What if we accidentally exhaust her propellant and put her in a decaying orbit? She would burn up, and then nothing could reach Damocles undetected.”

Goldman looked at Phelps as if he had just discovered the man was a leper. “Are you saying you want to stay under the threat of that thing from now on?”

“Why not?” Phelps face went from belligerent to pleading. “Pete, if you’ll get your head out of your ass for a minute, and look at commerce, education, everything—everyone is happier and more productive than they were before. Look at all the positive things that have come out of this. Fewer people are going hungry, disease is being treated, there is general peace worldwide for the first time in the history of the friggin’ world. Don’t you remember how it was? Half the leadership of the country was criminally suspect, from real estate swindles, to kickbacks, to murder, and everything in between. Everybody just looking for an excuse to hate everybody else. Kids killing each other. Half the country on dope, and the other half selling it. You hardly ever hear of any of that crap anymore.

“Who will benefit if Damocles is destroyed? Its destruction is only in the best interests of those scheming bastards who want to take power again. Why must we be robots and help them achieve it? Why can’t we, for once, act in the interests of humanity?”

Phelps eyes were tearing from the intensity of his angry emotion. “Pete, if I have a choice of who dictates our lives, I opt for the present dictator.”

“You have been thinking about this, haven’t you?” asked Goldman, looking at Phelps curiously.

“I’m going to do it, Pete. If you won’t help me, just don’t try to stop me. If you blow the whistle on me, I’ll tell the press what’s going on. I swear it!”

Goldman smiled, clapped Phelps on the arm. “All right, Don. I guess I agree with you when you put it that way. What you say makes sense. What do you want me to do?”

Phelps face lit up with relief. He smiled, excited. “We begin maneuvering checks tomorrow. Connally will give me the control system telemetry codes so that I can program Diana’s thruster firing sequence. You and I report for duty as planned. Once Connally gives me the codes, it will take me about ten minutes to get control of her attitude and propulsion telemetry. You distract Connally. He’ll be supervising the telemetry programming. Just distract him from his master-terminal screen long enough for me to log in and initiate the control sequence. I’ll program the thrusters for maximum burn, and punch in the initiate command. Once I’ve fired her thrusters, Diana will be in a tangential vector, falling inward, and even if Connally gets them shut down within ten seconds, it would still take more propellant than she has to get her back into higher orbit. I’ll say it was a computer glitch—that the program initiated the firing sequence on its own.”