“My detailed proposals …” said the radio before the words disintegrated into a hiss like frying bacon – louder than the voice levels had been, so it couldn’t be the French dry cells giving out. . . .
“Fuckin’ A!” snarled Chief Warrant Officer Platt as he ducked out the rear hatch of the command vehicle. He, the intercept team’s commander, was a corpulent man who wore two fighting knives on his barracks belt and carried the ear of a Druse guerrilla tissue-wrapped in a watch case. “We’re getting jammed across all bands! What the fuck is this?”
Something with a fluctuating glow deep in the violet and presumably ultraviolet was crossing the sky very high up and very swiftly. A word or two, ” – dominance — ” crept through a momentary pause in the static before the howitzers, linked by wire to the Tactical Operations Center, fired again.
“Commie recon satellite,” Platt muttered, his eyes following Kelly’s to the bead shimmering so far above the surface of dust, buffeted by hot, gray strokes of howitzer propellant. “You know those bastards’re targeting us down to the last square meter!”
Tom Kelly reached for the tuning dial of the radio with the hand which was not sweating on the grip of his rifle. Anybody who could come within a hundred yards of a point target, using a bombardment rocket aimed by adjusting a homemade bipod under the front of the launching tube, ought to be running the US space program instead of a Druse artillery company. The hell with the satellite – assuming that’s what it was. If the rag-heads could jam the whole electromagnetic spectrum like that, there were worse problems than Radio Research teams becoming as useless as tits on a boar. . . .
” – domestic front,” said the radio just as Kelly’s fingers touched it, “the curse of racial injustice calls for – ”
Tom Kelly never did hear the rest of that speech because just as normal reception resumed, a one-twenty-two howled over the berm and exploded near a tank-recovery vehicle. It was the first of the thirty-seven rockets preceding the attack of a reinforced Druse battalion.
The only physical scar Kelly took home from that one was on his hand, burned by the red-hot receiver of his rifle as he worked to clear a jam.
Another 1985
The three helicopters were orbiting slowly, as if tethered to the monocle ferry on the launchpad five hundred meters below. When the other birds rotated so that the West Texas sun caught the cameras aimed from their bays, the long lenses blazed as if they were lasers themselves rather than merely tools with which to record a test of laser propulsion.
The sheathing which would normally have roofed the passenger compartments of the helicopters had been removed, leaving the multi-triangulated frame tubing and a view straight upward for the cameras and the men waiting for what was about to happen on the launchpad.
Sharing the bay of the bird carrying Tom Kelly were a cameraman, a project scientist named Desmond, and a pair of colonels in Class A uniforms, Army green and Air Force blue, rather than the flight suits that Kelly thought would have been more reasonable. The military officers seemed to be a good deal more nervous than the scientist was; and unless Kelly was misreading them, their concern was less about the test itself than about him – the staff investigator for Representative Carlo Bianci, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Space Defense. Sometimes it seemed to Kelly that he’d spent all his life surrounded by people who were worried as hell about what he was going to do next. Occasionally, of course, people would have been smart to worry more than they did. . . .
The communications helmet Kelly had been issued for the test had a three-position switch beneath the left earpiece, but only one channel on it was live. He could not hear either the chatter of the Army pilots in the cockpit or the muttered discussions of the two officers in the passenger bay with him, though the latter could speak to him when they chose to throw their own helmet switches forward. The clop of the blades overhead was more a fact than an impediment to normal speech, but the intake rush of the twin-turbine power plant created an ambiance through which Kelly could hear nothing but what the officers chose to direct to him through the intercom circuitry.