Operation Damocles (14 page)

They stayed in Houston for four days while Reed found another private plane ride, this time with the president of a construction firm who took them to Tucson. From Tucson, they did the same thing again, this time with a preacher flying to San Diego. Reed concocted a different story and different names each time. Finally, on October 5, they arrived at their destination of Santa Cruz, California.

XIX

It was a quiet evening on December 20. Senator Isley was sitting in the large, comfortably appointed living room of his new combination home and office. It was an antebellum-style house, with a pillared front entry, located in an older residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Atlanta. A fire crackled in the fireplace, while snow fell gently to earth outside. He occupied one of two overstuffed chairs that flanked a similarly proportioned sofa.

The chairs and sofa formed a cozy arrangement in front of a large, brick fireplace with an overhung mantle. A throw-rug with a pale-green oriental design graced the hardwood floor, and a huge painting of some nineteenth-century Victorian mansion, complete with giant, old Cypress or Willow trees and two girls in hoopskirts and bonnets, hung above the mantle.

In the south wall of the spacious room, large floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on a snow-covered clearing. Bordering the clearing, a forest of fir trees looked like painted silhouettes against the muted light of the gray winter sky. Dark-red velvet drapes with gold brocade framed the windows.

Four grim-faced men sat with Isley, all but one holding brandy glasses in their hands. Dr. Stickle occupied the opposite chair and he was drinking coffee. Along with General Pat Hargety and Dr. Gene Stickle of the Air Force Space Command, sat Dr. Clarence Patterson of NASA and Joseph Miller, Vice President of the United States. Miller paced slowly before the fireplace, sipping his brandy and listening to the other men talk.

Senator Isley had become, among other things, chairman of the Armed Services Budget Committee, taking the post of the late Congressman Harford. He was also the sole senator from his state, now that each state had only one senator and one member in the House of Representatives. Of his original staff of forty-odd, only three remained.

In many respects, Isley liked it much better this way. His office was quiet these days, and simplicity had brought about order. The flocks of lobbyists had finally faced reality, and most of them had faded away. Under the new rules, special treatment was not possible, and only a fool would risk it. Toward the end, military police had been required to eject the milling crowds of hangers-on from the public buildings, just so the government employees could begin to reorganize the shambles that remained. Influence peddling had diminished from a torrent to a trickle. To Isley, it felt almost log-cabinish—early Americana. He liked it a lot.

The purpose of this gathering was to discuss the weapon that had brought about such radical change. The military and civilian space authorities had continuously searched for it for the past eight months. Until now, without success. The present conversation was quiet and earnest, a welcome departure from the fencing bouts and blame-laying that Isley had enjoyed with Vanderbilt’s appointed military incompetents during the past few weeks. Isley and some others had finally challenged Vanderbilt, threatening no further cooperation unless he replaced his yes-men idiots with people they could work with. It took a few weeks, but the military command structure had been reconfigured, with experienced officers in charge once again. Stickle had been recalled from a university post, and reinstated in his old position as Chief Scientist in AFSPACECOM. He had immediately been put to work trying to find the orbital weapon system.

“How can you be sure that what you have found is the weapon, Gene?” asked Miller. “The consequences are enormous if you’re wrong.”

Stickle stared into his cup as he spoke. “Ground-based optics have discovered a kind of shadow in geosynchronous orbit. It’s only six milliseconds of arc across—about a meter. It doesn’t reflect radar, but it eclipses stars and appears as a kind of dark spot to optical telescopes. We’ve plotted the likely angles of fire, backward from the two impact zones, and it’s in the correct position to target them. It has to be the weapon.”

“If it is . . . if we assume that we know where it is,” said Miller, “what can we do about it?”

“We’ve had a lucky break in that respect, or at least we may have. During the mid-80s, the Strategic Defense Command put up a killer satellite, called Diana after the Roman or Greek goddess of the hunt. It is a kinetic weapon. Specifically, it shoots metal arrows—or projectiles made from spent uranium. They are hard, heavy material, and they have a lot of energy. They can puncture gas cylinders, smash electronics, in general wipe out a satellite’s attitude control system and other systems—assuming they hit a critical element, of course.

“Diana’s weapons complement includes eighteen uranium arrows, plus six explosive projectiles, four of them tipped with high-explosive fragmentation grenades, and two burst-shells filled with radioactive iodide. The burst-shells were designed to produce a large ionizing cloud around an enemy weapons platform, and blind its electronic targeting, navigation and communications systems. There are twenty-four projectiles in all.

“Diana is in a slightly lower orbit, and about ten degrees, roughly three thousand kilometers, behind the nationalist weapon. We are trying to find out now if she will respond to controls, and if she has the propellant gas to maneuver. She’s been inoperative, simply powered down, for almost fifteen years. Our people are digging out the old command protocols and the computer operating instruction set. We should know something in the next two or three days.”

“What are the odds?” asked Isley.

“Your guess is as good as mine, Senator. The big questions are batteries, controls and thrusters. The photovoltaics, or solar panels, are probably okay, but the batteries may be beyond redemption. Of course, if there is even the smallest pinhole anywhere in the thruster lines or connections, the maneuvering propellant has long since leaked away. Otherwise, the weapon system itself should be okay. All of Diana’s projectiles are driven by compressed gas, but each projectile has its own individual carbon dioxide propellant charge. The odds are that several, maybe all of them, are okay. The electronics are shielded, but twelve years in space means a lot of hard radiation and micrometeorite dust. Who knows?

“We have one other option as well. I may as well go into it while we’re on the subject. We’re acquiring a mobile launcher with a Soyuz intercontinental missile from a site near Minsk, in Russia. It has a five-megaton warhead. If Diana is inoperative, we will launch the warhead into the orbital track of the nationalist weapon at an accretion velocity. It’s called a Trojan Horse, for obvious reasons, in space warfare vernacular.

“We’ll scrap the Soviet missile, and use a staged Ariane booster to lift the warhead into geosynchronous orbit. We’ll launch from a site in Europe that’s beyond the limb of the earth, and out of sight of the weapon. We think the element of risk is relatively low.

“Normal antisatellite surveillance systems aren’t likely to detect the approaching weapon until it’s too late, once insertion is accomplished. We don’t know what kind of surveillance they have, and that’s a chance we’ll have to take. They may only have an aiming system, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it—not with what’s at stake. If they have a security envelope with a Doppler radar or laser auto-ranging system, we’re sunk. If they have any kind of ground support like a global, or even a hemispherical radar net, they’ll see the launch vehicle during the boost phase, and it will arouse their suspicions.

“Assuming we can get it up without their noticing, the bomb will take a few days to slowly catch up to the weapon. Once in close proximity, it can be detonated. It will be disguised as something innocuous, like an old, mangled comm satellite.

“A satellite?” asked Miller. “You think that will fool them?”

“We must assume that they will detect the approach of anything in the orbital track, once it gets close enough; but in that orbit, it would be more peculiar if they didn’t see things like that. It may fool their instruments, or at least not elicit the immediate response that an approaching missile would. We’ll also give it a high-radar albedo—just the opposite of what anyone would expect of a sneak attack weapon.

“As a precaution, we will load the warhead envelope with radioactive iodide. Even if we miss it with the direct blast, the ionizing radiation and radioactive cloud of charged particles should hamper its target acquisition system’s capability to fix on a target, at least for several hours. In case we only cripple it, we’ll have an armed Titan ready to launch from the Cape, to follow through and finish the job—kill it while it’s blind.

“In any case, the beauty of this approach is that if they don’t recognize the bomb as a threat, we can get it close enough to destroy the weapon system. If they decide not to take any chances, and destroy our Trojan Horse just to be on the safe side, they still won’t know for sure that it was an intentional threat. They would have no reason to retaliate.”

“Why can’t you just launch an atomic bomb right at it?” asked Isley. “Wouldn’t a nuclear blast destroy it even from a long distance away?”

“Afraid it won’t work. If we launch in a minimal elapsed-time trajectory, they can see the booster and kill it before it leaves the atmosphere, thousands of miles short of its target. The retaliation could be severe. If we use an accretion orbit, they may not be able to identify it as a threat until it is too late.”

“Very well, gentlemen,” said Miller, finishing his drink and rising. “Keep me posted on this Diana thing, and we’ll go from there. The President wants a detailed briefing before any course of action is taken. I am your only point of contact. Understood?’ Miller deposited his glass on the table, gathered his overcoat and umbrella at the door, and left. The others followed suit.

After they had gone, Isley sat looking out at the white-clad, forested beauty of the Georgia countryside. It was such a peaceful scene—the gently falling snowflakes among the tall, gray fir trees, the overcast sky, the dim, white outline of the distant hills. He wondered, and not for the first time, if what they contemplated was really necessary.

Contrary to expectations, there had been no further demands from the people commanding the weapon—no self-serving dictates, no demands for riches or power—nothing. The world had held its collective breath for months after that terrible beam of energy had excised political arrogance from the federal government. They had waited for the other shoe to drop. Nothing had happened. After a time, the world had exhaled that collective breath, as a victim of fear will finally do, and breathed a tentative sigh of relief.

As more time had passed, people had begun to regain some of their confidence and laughter. Haunted looks in the faces of worried adults had eased; the glum countenances of the children, who of course sensed the strain that the adults felt, began to return to the roller coaster of gleeful, petulant, questioning, pouting, angelic assumption and naïveté that is their nature. Things were, in many ways, returning to normal.

It was true that to do nothing was to leave the country at the mercy of the weapon and its makers, but what would this country look like in a few weeks or months if the military failed in their attempt to destroy the weapon? Would those people controlling the weapon simply laugh at the failed attempt? Would they punish the United States and make an example to the rest of the world by destroying it utterly?

Dr. Stickle and his war college experts had no doubts at all, that given sufficient fuel, the weapon could raze the entire surface of the planet. That thing was up there, in its cold and lonely orbit, looking down on humanity without compassion, or even interest. Its electronic brain cared nothing for humanity—had no biases, good or bad. It simply reacted to the conditions programmed into it. It waited, and watched with electronic eyes, a shadow against the starscape of heaven.

In a way, it could be romanticized as a sort of intelligent entity, since its instructions and nature were devised by intelligent creatures, but if such “inference by association” was granted, then its makers must take on the character it reflected. Cold, heartless intellect. But were they? What were these people like, who would kill millions as if chastising a child? No anger. No extortion. “This is for your own good, children. Do as I say, or I’ll punish you. It hurts me to do this, but you must learn to obey.” They were still a mystery. So was their weapon.

Some religious groups were calling it the Sword of God. Maybe it was. God could use people and technology as His instruments, Isley supposed. The military had code-named it “Damocles,” after the Greek hero who had been forced to sit beneath a razor-sharp sword, suspended from the ceiling by a single, fragile hair. Damocles’ sword now hung above the whole earth, and no one knew whither it would fall.

Isley’s doubts were not born of cowardice; he could fight and die for a just cause, and he was no longer much impressed with the merits of humanity. His doubts sprang from the motives behind the proposed overthrow of the weapon. It was not for the people or the good of the country. Not one of those involved in the scheme even considered that a reasonable question. It was solely to win back control for the old power structure. The people would be dictated to in any case, but it was who did the dictating that mattered to them.

Isley had once had ideals. He had been a college preppie, and later a college activist, and still later an involved family man, active in the affairs of his community. He liked people, liked seeing them happy and embracing all the good aspects of life.

He thought about the men who had just left. Miller was a question mark. He seemed to have no opinions of his own. He just seemed to run errands for the President, and officiate at forgettable events. Isley smiled. Those were the merits of a perfect politician. The public couldn’t pin anything on you if you were invisible. Miller was a “stealth” politician.

Patterson he knew and liked. He was direct and stuck to his guns over issues. He didn’t think Patterson was really cut out for the Washington crowd, but then he didn’t suppose that he, himself, was all that good a fit, either. Patterson wasn’t happy about the military’s scheme, but Isley knew that he would go along with the crowd. Patterson would defend his convictions, up to a point, but he wouldn’t fall on his sword over anything that he couldn’t hope to change. He was not one to buck the entire power structure in a public stand against the White House, simply as an act of principle.