Lahr shook his head. “No, not yet. This stuff is being held pretty close.”
“Might want to tell Washington that they have a better feel for Beijing’s internal politics than we do,” the senior Marine observed. “They ought to. They speak the same language. Same thought processes and stuff. Taiwan ought to be a prime asset to us.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Lahr countered. “If a shooting war starts, they won’t jump in for the fun of it. Sure, they’re our friends, but they don’t really have a dog in this fight yet, and the smart play for them is to play it cautious. They’ll go to a high alert status, but they will not commence offensive operations on their own hook.”
“Will we really back the Russians if it comes to that? More to the point, will the Chinese regard that as a credible option on our part?” CoMAiRPAC asked. He administratively “owned” the carriers and naval air wings. Getting them trained was his job.
“Reading their minds is CIA’s job, not ours,” Lahr answered. “As far as I know, DIA has no high-quality sources in Beijing, except what we get from intercepts out of Fort Meade. If you’re asking me for a personal opinion, well, we have to remember that their political assessments are made by Maoist politicians who tend to see things their own way rather than with what we would term an objective outlook. Short version, I don’t know, and I don’t know anyone who does, but the asset that got us this information tells us that they’re serious about this possible move. Serious enough to bring Russia into NATO. You could call that rather a desperate move towards deterring the PRC, Admiral.”
“So, we regard war as a highly possible eventuality?” Mancuso summarized.
“Yes, sir,” Lahr agreed.
“Okay, gentlemen. Then we treat it that way. I want plans and options for giving our Chinese brethren a bellyache. Rough outlines after lunch tomorrow, and firm options in forty-eight hours. Questions?” There were none. “Okay, let’s get to work on this.”
Al Gregory was working late. A computer-software expert, he was accustomed to working odd hours, and this was no exception. At the moment he was aboard USS Gettysburg, an Aegis-class cruiser. The ship was not in the water, but rather in dry dock, sitting on a collection of wooden blocks while undergoing propeller replacement. Gettysburg had tangled with a buoy that had parted its mooring chain and drifted into the fairway, rather to the detriment of the cruiser’s port screw. The yard was taking its time to do the replacement because the ship’s engines were about due for programmed maintenance anyway. This was good for the crew. Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, part of the Norfolk Naval Base complex, wasn’t exactly a garden spot, but it was where most of the crew’s families lived, and that made it attractive enough.
Gregory was in the ship’s CIC, or Combat Information Center, the compartment from which the captain “fought” the ship. All the weapons systems were controlled from this large space. The SPY radar display was found on three side-by-side displays about the size of a good big-screen TV. The problem was the computers that drove the systems.
“You know,” Gregory observed to the senior chief who maintained the systems, “an old iMac has a ton more power than this.”
“Doc, this system is the flower of 1975 technology,” the senior chief protested. “And it ain’t all that hard to track a missile, is it?”
“Besides, Dr. Gregory,” another chief put it, “that radar of mine is still the best fucking system ever put to sea.”
“That’s a fact,” Gregory had to agree. The solid-state components could combine to blast six megawatts of RF power down a one-degree line of bearing, enough to make a helicopter pilot, for example, produce what cruel physicians called FLKs: funny-looking kids. And more than enough to track a ballistic reentry vehicle at a thousand miles or more. The limitation there also was computer software, which was the new gold standard in just about every weapons system in the world.
“So, when you want to track an RV, what do you do?”
“We call it ‘inserting the chip,’ ” the senior chief answered.
“What? It’s hardware?” Al asked. He had trouble believing that. This wasn’t a computer that you slid a board into.
“No, sir, it’s software. We upload a different control program.”
“Why do you need a second program for that? Can’t your regular one track airplanes and missiles?” the TRW vice president demanded.
“Sir, I just maintain and operate the bitch. I don’t design the things. RCA and IBM do that.”
“Shit,” Gregory observed.
“You could talk to Lieutenant Olson,” the other chief thought aloud. “He’s a Dartmouth boy. Pretty smart for a j.g.”
“Yeah,” the first chief agreed. “He writes software as sort of a hobby.”
“Dennis the Menace. Weps and the XO get annoyed with him sometimes.”
“Why?” Gregory asked.
“Because he talks like you, sir,” Senior Chief Leek answered. “But he ain’t in your pay grade.”
“He’s a good kid, though,” Senior Chief Matson observed. “Takes good care of his troops, and he knows his stuff, doesn’t he, Tim?”
“Yeah, George, good kid, going places if he stays in.”
“He won’t. Computer companies are already trying to recruit him. Shit, Compaq offered him three hundred big ones last week.”
“That’s a living wage,” Chief Leek commented. “What did Dennis say?”
“He said no. I told him to hold out for half a mil.” Matson laughed as he reached for some coffee.
“What d’ya think, Dr. Gregory? The kid worth that kinda money in the ‘puter business?”
“If he can do really good code, maybe,” Al replied, making a mental note to check out this Lieutenant Olson himself. TRW always had room for talent. Dartmouth was known for its computer science department. Add field experience to that, and you had a real candidate for the ongoing SAM project. “Okay, if you insert the chip, what happens?”
“Then you change the range of the radar. You know how it works, the RF energy goes out forever on its own, but we only accept signals that bounce back within a specific time gate. This”—Senior Chief Leek held up a floppy disk with a hand-printed label on it—”changes the gate. It extends the effective rage of the SPY out to, oh, two thousand kilometers. Damned sight farther than the missiles’ll go. I was on Port Royal out at Kwajalein five years ago doing a theater-missile test, and we were tracking the inbound from the time it popped over the horizon all the way in.”
“You hit it?” Gregory asked with immediate interest.
Leek shook his head. “Guidance-fin failure on the bird, it was an early Block-IV. We got within fifty meters, but that was a cunt hair outside the warhead’s kill perimeter, and they only allowed us one shot, for some reason or other nobody ever told me about. Shiloh got a kill the next year. Splattered it with a skin-skin kill. The video of that one is a son of a bitch,” the senior chief assured his guest.
Gregory believed it. When an object going one way at fourteen thousand miles per hour got hit by something going the other way at two thousand miles per hour, the result could be quite impressive. “First-round hit?” he asked.
“You bet. The sucker was coming straight at us, and this baby doesn’t miss much.”
“We always clean up with Vandal tests off Wallops Island,” Chief Matson confirmed.
“What are those exactly?”
“Old Talos SAMs,” Matson explained. “Big stovepipes, ramjet engines, they can come in on a ballistic track at about twenty-two hundred miles per hour. Pretty hot on the deck, too. That’s what we worry about. The Russians came out with a sea-skimmer we call Sunburn—”
“Aegis-killer, some folks call it,” Chief Leek added. “Low and fast.”
“But we ain’t missed one yet,” Matson announced. “The Aegis system’s pretty good. So, Dr. Gregory, what exactly are you checking out?”
“I want to see if your system can be used to stop a ballistic inbound.”
“How fast?” Matson asked.
“A for-real ICBM. When you detect it on radar, it’ll be doing about seventeen thousand miles per hour, call it seventy-six hundred meters per second.”
“That’s real fast,” Leek observed. “Seven, eight times the speed of a rifle bullet.”
“Faster’n a theater ballistic weapon like a Scud. Not sure we can do it,” Matson worried.
“This radar system’ll track it just fine. It’s very similar to the Cobra Dane system in the Aleutians. Question is, can your SAMs react fast enough to get a hit?”
“How hard’s the target?” Matson asked.
“Softer than an aircraft. The RV’s designed to withstand heat, not an impact. Like the space shuttle. When you fly it through a rainstorm, it plays hell with the tiles.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yep.” Gregory nodded. “Like Styrofoam coffee cups.”
“Okay, so then the problems getting the SM2 close enough to have the warhead pop off when the target’s in the fragmentation cone.”