Operation Damocles (4 page)

“This weapon does the same thing, and with enough precision that it could burn a picture onto the ground. As we’ve seen in the aerial slides presented earlier, the target area is sharply defined. The weapon has incredible power, perhaps forty trillion kilowatts in the beam. At least a hundred kilojoules per square centimeter at the Eidermann site.”

“How do you know all this?” asked Harford.

“By analyzing the satellite pictures, and by cursory examination of the site, Senator. The recorded satellite imagery can be slowed down, and transitory events measured against a precision oscillator, or computer clock. The satellite isn’t equipped for very high-speed recording, so we can’t actually see the trace sweep, but we can slow down the recorded signal enough to approximate a slow-motion film. In slow motion we can see the advance of the destruction as it traverses the length of the target area. It looks like the ground is erupting along a moving, parallel front. It took approximately half a second to traverse five miles. To those in the area, it seemed like just one colossal explosion.”

Stickle motioned to his fellow scientist, who began taking papers from a briefcase. Stickle returned to his seat, but remained standing, taking various papers as his colleague handed them to him. He continued speaking as he shuffled through the documents.

“Metals, such as the steel of the armored vehicles and the aluminum in the electrical power lines that cross the area, have specific melting temperatures, vaporization energies, et cetera.”

He studied a paper briefly, then read an excerpt from the report. “The metallic aluminum from the power lines was found in a condition of melted slag, with approximately thirty percent of the expected mass missing.” He looked at Harford briefly.

“Vaporized, in other words. Based on the estimated beam diameter and sweep rate, any given object was in the beam for a period of about two microseconds—millionths of a second. The duration of exposure and the enthalpic energy necessary to vaporize the missing aluminum, along with other factors, gives us an approximation of the energy in the beam.

“Regarding the frequency of the energy beam, the penetration of the earth and the anomalous magnetic fields in some of the affected materials give us a few clues, also. The Marines who reached the site almost immediately after the blast reported burning throats and eyes from high concentrations of ozone, meaning the air was strongly ionized to the point that high-voltage, high-amperage electric currents had flowed through it. Given all that, we believe the beam is in the X-ray, or hard ultraviolet portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.”

“How could they accomplish such a weapon system when we couldn’t do it?” Harford demanded. “We spent billions on research. If it’s feasible, why don’t we have the damn thing?”

“We don’t have it, Senator, because you, among others, cut the funding for the research, even before the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Even worse, what funds were put into directed-energy weapons research were mostly given to favored defense contractors with heavy political clout, rather than to innovative companies that might have solved some of the problems. Space sciences and defensive weapons systems have all suffered tremendous cutbacks since 1988.”

“I’ll ignore your insolence, Doctor. The important question now is, can you defend against it?”

“Possibly, in time.”

Harford persisted. “Can you shield buildings from it . . . erect some sort of heat shield?”

“We don’t yet know the specific frequency of the beam, Senator, or its exact makeup, but laser energy can be defeated by reflective and ablative coatings. Reflective coatings act to reflect the energy away, as a mirror reflects sunlight. Ablative coatings are surface films which absorb the energy of the beam and flash into vapor, thus dissipating the energy and leaving the coated object intact.

“Trouble is, we don’t know how much control they have of the weapon. They can potentially sweep the target area repeatedly, several times per second. Ablative coatings would be gone after the first sweep. Reflective surfaces require highly precise coating techniques, especially in the higher-frequency end of the spectrum; it’s not simply a paint job. At X-ray and hard UV frequencies, some solid objects are transparent, which further baffles everyone about the Eidermann site. Many of the objects at the depot should not have absorbed the energy of the beam at those frequencies, yet they did.”

Stickle regarded Senator Harford, his look indecipherable. “Even if a protective coating was simply a matter of applying a coat of paint, how do you propose to paint every city in America? We could conceivably minimize the damage to some things by using conventional site-hardening techniques, such as covering exposed sites with rammed earth or foamed concrete, but we don’t have the time. Assuming they keep their word, and use the weapon again within thirty days of the Eidermann warning shot, the deadline is now only twenty-five days away. Even if we had enough deep basements and caves, how could we possibly get several million people into them, and equip and provision them, in three weeks’ time? Who would dig them out afterward? If these people have the power they claim, then they have the power to do any damned thing they want, and the government has no option but to give them whatever they demand.”

“I can’t accept that,” said Harford, his assurance returning. “You said that in time, it might be possible to defend against it. What did you mean?”

“I mean that we need time to learn. We have no information to work with yet. Neither the Defense Department nor NASA can locate the weapon. We’ve been searching for it with everything we’ve got, for the past five days. We’ve found nothing. It possesses advanced, stealth, cloaking technology. We don’t know how it works, what its fuel and energy limits are, how it is controlled, or where it is controlled from.

“If it has finite resources—for example, if its power plant is chemically fueled—it could literally run out of gas. It may already be out of fuel. For all we know, it could be a one-shot device designed to throw a scare into the United States government. We don’t believe that’s the case though.

“We’ve found no trace of an energy-emissions signature in space—a cloud of hydrocarbon gas such as a chemically fueled generator would produce. If it does have extended operating capability, such as a nuclear power supply, then our defensive best bet is to identify the control signals, and either interfere with them or take control of the weapon ourselves, and neutralize it in that way. If we can locate it, it may be possible to destroy it with a missile.

“In the meantime, we need to negotiate, to buy some time. If we knew who we are dealing with, it would help. It could be a terrorist organization in the Middle East . . . maybe even an old-guard Soviet or Red Chinese splinter faction that hasn’t yet given up the idea of destroying us in a decisive global engagement. Whoever they are, they have access to state-of-the-art military technology, and the funds to acquire it. They also have the technical know-how to use it. If we knew who they are, we would at least know something about their motivations.

“If I were to make a guess, based strictly on the demands on the tape, I would suspect some domestic militia group. The technological sophistication makes that impossible. This weapon took advanced scientific knowledge, high-tech manufacturing facilities and cutting-edge engineering, not to mention expensive, exotic materials and other uncommon resources. It wasn’t cobbled together in a barn, with off-the-shelf parts from a hardware store.

“As things stand, we are unable to plan a military solution. Diplomacy is the only card we have.”

Stickle sat down.

“That is our assessment of the situation, Senator.”

Harford blustered with indignation, “This government is not going to negotiate with a bunch of ignorant terrorists.” He held up the cassette tape and shook it. “This asshole wants to dictate the Constitution to us—wants to dictate tax laws. Hell, he even wants to dictate education policy, for God’s sake. You people had better get on the ball and resolve this situation, Stickle, and stop your cover-your-ass tactics. We didn’t give you billions of dollars for research and fancy gadgets just to hear you cop out with a ‘We can’t plan a military solution,’ the first time some yahoo blows up one of your ammo dumps. You’re the Defense Department, so defend. Find the bastards and shoot them down like dogs.

“For your information, I’m not buying this ‘space weapon’ business, either. You always try to bullshit your way out of any responsibility before this body, Stickle, usually by trying to do a scientific-sounding snow job on the committee. I am here to clue you in, Dr. Stickle, that I am not easily snowed. I also head the Defense Appropriations Committee, and if you and your people want to exist next year, you had better lay off your techno-speak jargon and come up with something better than ‘buying time.’ I hope I’m getting through to you.”

Stickle glared at Harford for a moment, struggled for self-control, and finally said quietly, “Senator Harford, you still don’t seem to understand what has happened here. The Eidermann Depot was literally vaporized in the blink of an eye. Thousands of tons of equipment and structural material vanished as if they had never existed. Any explosives expert will tell you that nothing short of a thermonuclear bomb could produce that effect and, even then, it would only completely vaporize those objects within a few hundred yards of ground-zero, not five miles away. Furthermore, no bomb ever made burns a sharply defined rectangular pattern on the ground. You saw the aerial photographs of the site at the beginning of the hearing.”

Stickle sighed. “If there is a way to neutralize the weapon, we will find it, given time; but I’m telling you as plainly as I know how, that at this moment, from what we know, acceptance or rejection of their terms is not an option that you have. They can potentially snuff out the entire population of this city in a heartbeat.

“I may not be here next year, Senator Harford, but I’m advising you to treat this business with caution. You know nothing about the mentality of these people. Whoever they are, they are not ‘ignorant terrorists.’ They have a superior technology; that much is apparent. We cannot do what they have done, not if we had years to do it in. They also have consummate planning ability, which should also be apparent, even to someone as dense as you. They put up a sophisticated weapon, at some time within the past two or three years, without anyone knowing about it. That took a heavy-lift launch vehicle with high-orbit capability. We have nothing on record during that period that is not currently accounted for.

“What we don’t know about them is critical to mounting any kind of defense. How far are they willing to go, or how long are they willing to negotiate, or what does it take to piss them off to the point that they are willing to annihilate several million people.”

Stickle’s volume increased as he warmed to his inner feelings of contempt for Harford. He rose from his chair and leaned forward, knuckles on the table, staring into Harford’s flushed face a few feet away, his face and body language emphasizing his loathing for the other man.

“You don’t get into a chest-shoving contest with an insane person who has a gun, Senator. You swallow your pride and do as he says. You play up to him and kiss his ass, and you buy time until you have a chance to escape from him, or until you can gain the advantage and subdue him.

“What these people are demanding is not that impossible to do. The demands are not even unreasonable . . . at least not yet. What they want changed are policies that the majority of the nation have been complaining about for years. They want less government control over people. Only your bureaucratic pride and your personal power is at stake here, and as a technical expert, I’m telling you that they have the ability, as of this moment, to make you eat your pride. I hope I’m getting through to you,” this last with a jab of his finger toward the senator.

With that, Dr. Stickle grabbed up his briefcase and stalked out of the hearing room amid winking flash cameras and a rising babble of voices.

VII

On July 15, Joseph Miller, Harold Tanner, Casper Franklin, Jack Mota and White House Chief of Security, Lloyd Dahner, sat with President Robert Vanderbilt in the ready room just off his day office. Vanderbilt sat at a large, ornate desk, legs crossed, absently running his finger around the rim of a drinking glass that sat on his blotter.

Vanderbilt was a big-boned man in his late fifties, with archaic, mutton-chop sideburns and thinning, curly, brown hair that was graving at the temples. With the exception of a slight belly, he was in generally good physical shape. He had a callous sense of humor, and often used it at the expense of those around him.

“So, you don’t think they can fire again, Harold?” he was asking Tanner.

“Of course, we don’t know for sure, Mr. President,” replied Tanner, his face a worried frown, “but we’ve been unable to detect any sign of a thermal-energy signature in space. If the generator that powers the thing is chemically fueled, there should be one. Even if it uses a fission pile, it must have a heat radiator of some sort in order to get rid of the waste heat from the energy conversion system. No machine is one hundred percent efficient, so all heat engines must radiate some excess heat.

“According to Stickle and his experts, an orbital laser weapon would have to either generate power as it needs it, feeding it directly to the laser cavity during the firing sequence, or else generate the power prior to firing, in order to charge up an energy storage system, which would then supply the energy to the laser when called for. In either case, we should be able to detect waste heat being emitted as radiant energy, and so far, there is none.

“This leads us to believe that it was sent up with a one-shot charge already stored in some sort of energy storage capacitor. Since there was no fuel to be burned, there was no detectable heat signature when the thing fired.

“But, if it has no fuel, it can’t recharge itself, either. A solar energy array could supply energy to such a weapon, but it would be slow to recharge, and due to the power requirements, the array would be very large, and certainly visible to our radar.

“Based on the lack of a heat signature, and the absence of a solar generator, we think it was a one-shot device, designed to get our attention.”

“I’d say they accomplished that, all right,” said Vanderbilt, absently studying the whiskey glass. “But what about fuel cells, that kind of thing?”

“Same argument. They generate heat.”

“What about the energy beam itself? Can’t your satellites detect it, and trace it back to the weapon?”

“We’re working on it, Mr. President,” said Tanner. “The scientists all agree that if the beam frequency is in the high-energy part of the spectrum, it must ionize gas particles as it passes through the atmosphere, leaving an electrically charged path that exists just for an instant, something like a lightning stroke. The problem is, the area of space that it can be within is enormous. It is literally like looking for a needle of light in hundreds of thousands of cubic miles of atmosphere, a needle which may only exist for a few thousandths of a second, at best.

“As for our satellites, they’re in the same orbital plane as the weapon, twenty-two thousand three hundred miles up, and either looking down at the surface of the planet, or out into space at other stellar objects, not across the orbital plane. Our defensive ground stations are generally tuned to detect radio-frequency and infrared wavelength energy, not stuff in the ultraviolet or X-ray spectrum.

“The few terrestrial-based, scientific sampling instruments that operate within those frequencies are not set up to image a point-source of energy in a wide-field area of outer space. Even if they were, the odds against someone looking at a particular area of the sky during the fraction of a second when the weapon is firing are enormous.”

Tanner rose and walked across the room, obviously nervous in Vanderbilt’s presence. Vanderbilt was aware of Tanner’s unease, but he did not outwardly show it. The twitch at the corner of his mouth may have been an amused smile trying to form, but if it was, he controlled it well.

“We are taking steps now to correct that, though,” Tanner continued. “We’re setting up long-range Doppler-radar ground stations here at Langley Air Force Base; at Patrick Air Force Base at the Cape; and at several airports and other sites that have the necessary equipment. Falcon Air Force Base in Colorado is working with NOAA to enhance weather satellite imagery of lightning strokes, in the interest of detecting and logging all ionizing radiation emissions in the atmosphere over the U.S.

“The CIA is running the Langley site,” he acknowledged Franklin with a nod, “but the Patrick operation is a joint NASA/military operation. The Air Force’s 45th Space Wing is stationed there. The physics department at the University of Miami will do the actual monitoring.

“Caltech is contracted to do the monitoring at the Space Warfare Center at Falcon Air Force Base, and for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. We hope to be ready if they fire it again. We won’t have any satellite surveillance across the orbital plane—the beam wouldn’t be visible in space, anyway—but the ground stations should be able to see the beam path through the atmosphere and triangulate the orbital position of the weapon platform.”

“Do you think we should evacuate senior government staff from Washington, just on the off chance that these freaks make good on their promise?” Vanderbilt asked, studying Tanner.

Tanner resumed his chair, and looked Vanderbilt in the eye, a neutral expression on his face. “None of your political advisors think so, sir,” he responded, deftly avoiding giving his own opinion. “They feel that it would only lend credence to the terrorists, and would really piss off the people who were evacuated, especially if nothing happened. It could do a lot of damage to your public image, too.”

Tanner studied his fingernails a moment before continuing. “Tactically, the consensus is that chances are next to none that they have the stored energy to fire again. Of course, the Secret Service insists that you, and the senior White House staff and their families, be evacuated for a few days in early August, just to be on the safe side.”

“Speaking of image, won’t that look a bit strange to the public, not to say cowardly, if we just happen to vacate the White House around that date?” Vanderbilt asked.

“You can minimize it, Mr. President. Your security chief and press secretary can arrange for the Travel Office to schedule some sort of routine business engagements for you and the Vice President, and the rest of the cabinet can find excuses to be elsewhere. If you stagger the dates so that it isn’t obvious, and insist that you are just going about business as usual—attending prearranged events, and making it appear that you give no significance whatever to the terrorist threat—it should be believable to the mainstream public.”

“Have our intelligence people had any success in getting a lead on who these people are?” Vanderbilt asked Franklin, as he resumed toying with his glass.

“Not yet, sir, but they’re working on it,” Franklin responded. “We’re scanning all foreign and domestic launch records as far back as ten years, trying to determine the most probable launch sites. It’s probably a waste of effort. It could be almost anywhere. Could be in the Russian Ukraine, India, Southeast Asia, China, the Middle East, damned near anywhere. There’s no telling when it was put up. It could have been anytime in the last couple of years, maybe longer. Other nations do a lot of experimental stuff, just as we do. We can correlate and verify those launches and payloads where the payload is still functional and we know what it is— a communications satellite, for example—but science experiments are generally term packages, and we have no way of verifying that they all burned up.

“It’s also possible that a missile carried two separate satellites into orbit, while claiming only one—a MIRVed payload. Unless someone admits to it, I doubt we can find them by detective work alone. So far, no one is taking credit.”

“You seriously think it might be a Russian or Chinese operation?” Vanderbilt studied Franklin’s face.

“I know it sounds ridiculous, Mr. President.” Franklin rose and paced the room. “Everything does. It’s just that we can’t rule it out, based on any concrete information. In my opinion, though, it’s unlikely they would pull something like this. Certainly not the official Russian or Chinese military. Those nations have nothing to gain anymore. We are all partners in business, now. Anyway, why would they make demands concerning our tax system or our education policies?”

“What do you think, Jack?” Vanderbilt asked Mota.

Mota’s brow furrowed, and his dark eyes looked toward some distant image in his own mind. “The sophistication of their science notwithstanding,” he said, “I think it has to be some civilian faction, headquartered here in the States. Nothing else makes sense. Even that doesn’t make sense. Assuming some militia could come up with enough money to buy a launch vehicle and the personnel to put it up, where did they get the scientific know-how and manufacturing technology to build the payload—that’s the real mystery—and where is the paper trail? We’re talking real money, a billion or two at the very least, for a launch vehicle, and the technical personnel to carry out launch and mission operations. You don’t spend that kind of money without leaving a trail a mile wide, especially if it’s a domestic operation. It has to come out of bank accounts and go into bank accounts. It has to buy lots of electronics and other exotic parts. So far, there isn’t a trace.

“A very large institution might be able to hide such a sum in its routine expenditures over a period of several years, or several large institutions might manage it in one year, but it would require an extensive conspiracy in either case. I would rather believe that a foreign power is behind it than to believe that something of that magnitude could take place under our noses, without our knowing about it.”

“That brings us back, full circle,” said Franklin. “Why would any foreign government care about those specific domestic policy reforms? What government anywhere wants to increase democratic civil control of government? It’s an absolute mystery. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Vanderbilt stood. “All right. It sounds like you’ve got all the questions in hand. See if you can find me some answers. Keep me up to speed on it. I want a daily progress report through regular channels.”

He swallowed the contents of the glass, and replaced it on the blotter. “If something significant breaks, you can get me or Joe through the national priority net at any time. I want field commanders informed—they are to call me if anything important happens and they can’t reach their superiors. I want the Chiefs of NORAD and Space Command to issue orders that nobody is to be punished for circumventing their chain of command in an emergency.”

“Do you think that’s wise, sir?” Tanner frowned. “It will piss off a lot of command people.”

“I don’t give a damn who it pisses off,” said Vanderbilt, bluntly. “If those people sneeze, I want to know about it the instant after it happens, and I don’t want it filtered through a bunch of prima donnas who have to weigh the personal benefits of every bit of information that they pass up the chain. Make it plain to them, Harold. They had better play ball with me on this. I can’t afford to fumble, especially not if those bastards actually do knock out a city. A few hundred thousand dead voters won’t get me any roses, and if it looks like a bunch of inept bunglers in my administration let it happen, I’m going to come looking for some sacrificial goats. I’ll let you guess where I’m going to look. Do you read me?”

“Loud and clear, Mr. President,” Tanner said, frowning at the floor.

“Thank you for coming, gentlemen,” Vanderbilt said dismissively, walking away. “I’ll expect your first progress reports by ten o’clock tomorrow morning.” He smiled over his shoulder at the troubled countenances of his bureau chiefs. He enjoyed making them worry.