Bondarenko set that aside and thought about what he'd seen. What had gone wrong? It must have been thermal blooming. As the laser beams chopped through the air, they'd transferred a fractional amount of their power as heat in the atmosphere. This had roiled the air, disturbing the optical path, moving the beam on and off the target and also spreading the beam wider than its intended diameter.
But despite that, it had still been powerful enough to melt metal one hundred eighty kilometers away! the Colonel told himself. This was no failure. It was a giant leap toward a wholly new technology.
'Any damage to the system?' the General asked the project director.
'None, otherwise we'd not have gotten the follow-up image. It would appear that our atmospheric- compensation measures are sufficient for the imaging beam but not for the high-power transmission. Half a success, Comrade General.'
'Yes.' Pokryshkin rubbed his eyes for a moment and spoke more firmly. 'Comrades, we have demonstrated great progress tonight, but there is still more work to be done.'
'And that's my.job,' Morozov's neighbor said. 'We'll solve this son of a bitch!'
'Do you need another man for your team?'
'It's part mirrors and part computers. How much do you know about those?'
'That is for you to decide. When do we begin?'
'Tomorrow. It'll take twelve hours for the telemetry people to organize their data. I'm going to catch the next bus back to my flat and have a drink. My family is away for another week. Care to join me?'
'What do you think that was?' Abdul asked.
They had just gotten to the top of a ridge when the meteor had appeared. At least, it had looked like a meteor's fiery track across the sky at first. But the thin golden line had hung there, and actually marched upward- very quickly, but it had been discernible.
A thin golden line, the Archer thought. The air itself had glowed. What made the air do that? He forgot where and who he now was for a moment, thinking back to his university days. Heat made air do that. Only heat. When a meteor came down, the friction of its passage? but this line could not have been a meteor. Even if the upward stroke had been an illusion-and he wasn't sure of that; eyes could play tricks-the golden line had lasted for nearly five seconds. Perhaps longer, the Archer reflected. Your mind couldn't measure time either. Hmph. He sat down abruptly and pulled out his note pad. The CIA man had given him that and told him to keep a diary of events. A useful thing to do; it hadn't ever occurred to him. He wrote down the time, date, place, and approximate direction. In a few more days he'd be heading back to Pakistan, and perhaps the CIA man would find this interesting.
6
IT was dark when he arrived. Gregory's driver came off the George Washington Parkway toward the Pentagon's Mall entrance. The guard raised the gate, allowing the nondescript government Ford-the Pentagon was buying Fords this year-to proceed up the ramp, loop around the handful of parked cars, and drop him off at the steps right behind a shuttle bus. Gregory knew the routine well enough: show the guard the pass, walk through the metal detector, then down the corridor filled with state flags, past the cafeteria, and down the ramp to the shopping arcade lit and decorated in the style of a 12th-century dungeon. In fact, Gregory had played Dungeons and Dragons in high school, and his first trip to the dreary polygon of a building had convinced him that the authors' inspiration had come from this very place.
The Strategic Defense Initiative Office was beneath the Pentagon's shopping concourse (its entrance, in fact, directly under the pastry shop), a space about a thousand feet long that had previously been the bus and taxi stand-before the advent of car bombs had persuaded the nation's defense community that automobiles were not all that fine a thing to have under the E-ring. This portion of the building, therefore, was the newest and most secure office-for the nation's newest and least secure military program. Here Gregory took out his other pass. He showed it to the four people at the security desk, then held it against the wall panel that interrogated its electromagnetic coding and decided that the Major could enter. This took him through a waiting room to double glass doors. He smiled at the receptionist as he went through, then at General Parks's secretary. She nodded back, but was annoyed to be staying so late and was not in a smiling mood.
Neither was Lieutenant General Bill Parks. His spacious office included a desk, a low table for coffee and intimate talks, and a larger conference table. The walls were covered with framed photographs of various space activities, along with numerous models of real and imagined space vehicles? and weapons. Parks was usually a genial man. A former test pilot, he'd marched through a career so accomplished that one would expect a bluff- hearty handshaker to have done it. Instead, Parks was an almost monkish person, with a smile that was at once engagingly shy and quietly intense. His many ribbons did not adorn his short-sleeved shirt, only a miniature of his command-pilot's wings. He didn't have to impress people with what he'd done. He could do so with what he was. Parks was one of the brightest people in government, certainly in the top ten, perhaps in the top one. Gregory saw that the General had company tonight.
'We meet again, Major,' Ryan said, turning. In his hands was a ring binder of perhaps two hundred pages that he was halfway through.
Gregory came to attention-for Parks-and reported-as-ordered, sir.
'How was the flight?'
'Super. Sir, is the soda machine in the same place? I'm a little dried out.'
Parks grinned for half a second. 'Go ahead, we're not in that much of a hurry.
'You have to love the kid,' the General said after the door closed behind him.
'I wonder if his mom knows what he's doing after school.' Ryan chuckled, then turned serious. 'He hasn't seen any of this yet, right?'
'No, we didn't have time, and the Colonel from the Cobra Belle won't be here for another five hours.'
Jack nodded. That was why the only CIA people here were himself and Art Graham from the satellite unit. Everyone else would get a decent night's sleep while they prepared the full briefing for tomorrow morning. Parks could have skipped it himself and left the work to his senior scientists, but he wasn't that sort of man. The more Ryan saw of Parks, the more he liked him. Parks fulfilled the first definition of a leader. He was a man with a vision-and it was a vision with which Ryan agreed. Here was a senior man in uniform who hated nuclear weapons. That wasn't terribly unusual-people in uniform tend to be rather tidy, and nuclear weapons make for a very untidy world. Quite a few soldiers, sailors, and airmen had swallowed their opinions and built careers around weapons that they hoped would never be used. Parks had spent the last ten years of his career trying to find a way to eliminate them. Jack liked people who tried to swim against the tide. Moral courage was more rare a commodity than the physical kind, a fact as true of the military profession as any other.
Gregory reappeared with a can of Coca-Cola from a machine near the door. Gregory didn't like coffee. It was time for work.
'What gives, sir?'
'We have a videotape from Cobra Belle. They were up to monitor a Soviet ICBM test. Their bird-it was an SS-25-blew, but the mission commander decided to stay up and play with his toys. This is what he saw.' The General lifted the remote-control for the VCR and thumbed the Play button.
'That's Cosmos-1810,' Art Graham said, handing over a photograph. 'It's a recon bird that went bad on them.'
'Infrared picture on the TV, right?' Gregory asked, sipping at his Coke. 'God!'
What had been a single dot of light blossomed like an exploding star in a science-fiction movie. But this wasn't science fiction. The picture changed as the computerized imaging system fought to keep up with the energy burst. At the bottom of the screen a digital display appeared, showing the apparent temperature of the glowing satellite. In a few seconds the image faded, and again the computer had had to adjust to keep track on the Cosmos.
There was a second or two of static on the screen, then a new image began to form.
'This is ninety minutes old. The satellite went over Hawaii a few orbits later,' Graham said. 'We have cameras
