thought of his date for the futbol game that evening. One of the teams from Buenos Aires was coming to play Rosario. Rosario was good this year; they had a chance. Jorge was excited by the prospect of a victory. He was also excited by his own chances with Constanza. Particularly if they won, everyone’s passions would be running high.
He pulled another piece off the press and tackled it with his file. He put it on the conveyor, then did a double take, and yanked it off again. He held it before him and stared in amazement. There was a hole in it, about the size of his little finger. He had not noticed that when he picked up the sheet. He looked at the stack on the palette. No holes there. How could he have missed such a thing? He set the damaged part aside, picked up a fresh sheet, and maneuvered it into place. He pulled the lever. The press dropped a little, but then jammed, groaning.
Jorge slapped the lever off. He threw the switch that shut the machine down completely, raised his safety goggles up onto his forehead and stared. The upper jaw of the press was skew in its framework. Jorge stepped forward and craned his neck to look up at the underside. His eyes widened. There was a hole in the massive piece of steel. It was drilled through, just like the damaged part he had just removed. From somewhere higher up in the works of the machine, a steady stream of fluid seeped down. Jorge removed a glove, ran a finger through a drip and sniffed. Hydraulic fluid. This machine is in bad trouble, he thought to himself as he wiped his finger on his overalls. He pulled the sheet of metal from the press and was not completely surprised to find another hole in the bed of the machine. He ran a finger around its clean edge and bent to peer down. He couldn’t see but a fraction of a centimeter in, but he bet it was deep, maybe all the way to the floor. He stuck his little finger into the hole up past the first knuckle. He couldn’t imagine what could have caused such a thing.
Jorge pulled off his other glove, threw it next to the first, and went in search of his supervisor.
It was 7:30 a.m. Sunday morning, July 4. Isaacs had not slept on the flight back from San Diego and then had spent an hour on the phone catching up on the Russian deployment of hunter-killer satellites and making arrangements for this morning’s meeting. He’d gotten three hours of troubled sleep and nursed a splitting headache.
Isaacs scanned the packed conference room. Twenty-three people were more than it held comfortably, but he had called for everyone in his crisis team to bring their aides. This would speed dissemination, give the young people exposure, and encourage them to participate directly. He did not want any bright ideas languishing in the face of an unprecedented confrontation with the Russians. He began as the last chair was filled.
“I’m sorry to have to call you in on a holiday. This may be the Soviets heavy-handed idea of irony, but they’re threatening us with some real fireworks.
“You know that the Soviets launched an operating laser and used it to destroy the FireEye satellite, which had recently been placed into orbit last April.” You don’t know why, though, he thought. He caught Pat Danielson’s eyes on him from where she sat in a rear corner looking remarkably alert despite their late flight. She returned his gaze steadily until he looked on around the room and continued. “The US appropriated that laser satellite with the shuttle, but the Soviets launched another. The US response was to put a small atomic device in orbit near the laser. The device is specially shielded with a reflective coating, difficult for the laser to penetrate. There are also heat sensing circuits that will trigger the device if the laser is used on it. The Soviets have been informed of this. We have promised to detonate the device if the laser is used.
“They have now made their countermove. They’ve surrounded the two satellites with a pack of six hunter- killer satellites. These contain only conventional explosives, but they’re powerful enough to neutralize our nuclear device. The concern is that the protective circuits will not respond to a blast wave. The Soviets are betting, or bluffing, that we are vulnerable to the hunter-killers.
“Our task is to anticipate the intelligence gathering operations that will be necessary to map out their tactical possibilities, and our appropriate responses. As of forty-five minutes ago, the Soviets had not tried to aim the laser, but they could force the issue at any moment.”
Isaacs signaled, the lights were dimmed, and a slide projected at the end of the room. The people sitting too near the screen shuffled their chairs around and craned their necks.
“This was taken from one of our KH-11 satellites from about 5,000 miles,” Isaacs continued. “The laser satellite is the cylinder at the tip of the yellow arrow. You can make out some details on it if you look closely, and, of course, the image can be reprocessed to bring them out. The small spot at the tip of the white arrow is our device.”
“What’s the actual spatial separation there?” a voice asked.
“About two hundred meters,” Isaacs replied. “The effective range of the device is much greater, the proximity was chosen mainly for psychological effect. You’ll notice that our device is located along the long axis of the laser satellite; the laser fires out the side. The small dots at the tips of the six shorter yellow arrows are the hunter- killers.”
“That’s an odd configuration they’re in,” said Bill Baris from somewhere down the table. “Unless there is a funny projection effect, they seem to be in two groups of three and closer to the big laser satellite than to ours. Why would they do that? Won’t they do themselves as much or more damage as they do us?”
There was a silence for thirty seconds, then a sudden voice.
“Shaped charges! I’ll bet they’re shaped and specifically aimed away from the laser and toward our device.”
There were murmurs of agreement, then Baris again.
“We’ll need some close-up photos to see if the hunter- killers have distinguishing features and if there is a pattern in their orientation that suggests they are aimed. I bet we find they’re positioned so that any recoil will miss the laser. We’ll need ground intelligence concerning their manufacture.”
Another voice. “If we assume they’re shaped, we can work out the spread angle of the explosion from the positions they’ve been deployed in, assuming they’re all designed to hit us and none to damage the laser.”
Isaacs listened to this interchange with the satisfaction he always took when the ideas began to flow in one of these sessions. He had worked hard to assemble this crew and rarely failed to admire their performance. It was a good thing someone could think this morning. His mind was numb.
“How did we get in this fix?” someone inquired. “Surely we saw the hunter-killers converging?”
“The Soviets play good chess,” Isaacs responded. “They know how to use their pawns. They correctly anticipated our dilemma as they moved the first one up. We had promised to fire the nuke if the laser were used. But it’s a very different story to fire the first nuclear device in space in a generation when neither the laser nor even the hunter-killer is actually used, just repositioned. I think there was also a failure to realize that the heat sensitive circuits might not be triggered by an explosion until extensive physical damage was already done. In any case, once they had bluffed the first one into position, adding others wasn’t much different.”
“We could up the ante,” someone suggested. “Put up another nuke at a greater distance, but still in kill range. If the hunter-killers take out the first, we take out everything left with the second nuke. And we lay down an ultimatum. Use one or both nukes if any hunter-killers approach the second.”
Isaacs made a couple of personal notes to augment the record of the session, which would be transcribed and stored in computer memory. “The President may not want to escalate in that direction,” he replied. “Let’s see what else we can come up with.”
“What’s to keep the Russians from putting up their own nuke?”
“They may be trying to keep some lid on this in their own way,” answered Isaacs. “But that’s clearly one of their options.
Let’s come back to that and see if we can map out what would drive them to it.”
“How fast are those hunter-killers?” a new voice asked. “Can the nuke be scooted somewhere else before they can respond? For instance out of their range, but still within nuclear range?”
Another voice answered. “Tough to outrun an explosion.”
“Yeah, true,” the first voice answered thoughtfully, “but at least you would be putting the pressure on them to make the first overt move.”
“Maybe,” came the second voice, “but if you force them to blast the nuke, they may figure they’re already committed and start using the laser on everything else in orbit.”
Isaacs had the projector turned off and the lights back on. Around the room, people sat erect from the postures they had assumed to peer at the slide.
“Let’s talk some more about the options of the Soviets,” Isaacs requested. “What are they apt to do?”
