So much was gone. What he had once been, the hopes for the future he’d once held, all of his former life slipped further away with the passage of every day. It seemed that he only thought of them when asleep now—and when he awoke, the dreams of a peaceful, contented life wafted away from his grasp like the morning mist. But even those dreams were fading away. He could still see his wife’s face, and his daughter’s, and his son’s, but they were like photographs now, flat, lifeless, cruel reminders of times that would not return. But at least they gave his life purpose. When he felt pity for his victims, when he wondered if Allah really approved of what he did—of the things that had sickened him at first—he could close his eyes for a moment and remind himself why the screams of dying Russians were as sweet to his ears as the passionate cries of his wife.
“Going away,” Abdul noted.
The Archer turned to look. The sun glinted off the plane’s vertical rudder as it passed beyond the far ridges. Even if he’d been atop that rocky edge, the An-26 would have been too high. The Russians weren’t fools. They flew no lower than they had to. If he really wanted to get one of those, he’d have to get close to an airfield . . . or perhaps come up with a new tactic. That was a thought. The Archer started ordering the problem in his mind as he walked along the endless rocky path.
“Will it work?” Morozov asked.
“That is the purpose of the test, to see if it works,” the senior engineer explained patiently. He remembered when he’d been young and impatient. Morozov had real potential. His documents from the university had shown that clearly enough. The son of a factory worker in Kiev, his intelligence and hard work had won him an appointment at the Soviet Union’s most prestigious school, where he had won the highest honors—enough to be excused from military service, which was unusual enough for someone without political connections.
“And this is new optical coating . . .” Morozov looked at the mirror from a distance of only a few centimeters. Both men wore overalls, masks, and gloves so that they would not damage the reflecting surface of the number-four mirror.
“As you have guessed, that is one element of the test.” The engineer turned. “Ready!”
“Get clear,” a technician called.
They climbed down a ladder fixed to the side of the pillar, then across the gap to the concrete ring that surrounded the hole.
“Pretty deep,” he observed.
“Yes, we have to determine how effective our vibration-isolation measures are.” The senior man was worried about that. He heard a jeep motor and turned to see the base commander lead another man into the laser building. Another visitor from Moscow, he judged. How do we ever get work done with all those Party hacks hanging over our shoulders?
“Have you met General Pokryshkin?” he asked Morozov.
“No. What sort of man is he?”
“I’ve met worse. Like most people, he thinks the lasers are the important part. Lesson number one, Boris Filipovich: it’s the mirrors that are the important part—that and the computers. The lasers are useless unless we can focus their energy on a specific point in space.” This lesson told Morozov which part of the project came under this man’s authority, but the newly certified engineer already knew the real lesson—the entire system had to work perfectly. One faulty segment would convert the most expensive piece of hardware in the Soviet Union into a collection of curious toys.
5.
Eye of the Snake/
Face of the Dragon
THE converted Boeing 767 had two names. Originally known as the Airborne Optical Adjunct, it was now called Cobra Belle, which at least sounded better. The aircraft was little more than a platform for as large an infrared telescope as could be made to fit in the wide-bodied airliner. The engineers had cheated somewhat, of course, giving the fuselage an ungainly humpback immediately aft of the flight deck that extended half its length, and the 767 did look rather like a snake that had just swallowed something large enough to choke on.
What was even more remarkable about the aircraft, however, was the lettering on its vertical tail: U.S. ARMY. This fact, which infuriated the Air Force, resulted from unusual prescience or obstinacy on the part of the Army, which even in the 1970s had never shut down its research into ballistic-missile defense, and whose “hobby shop” (as such places were known) had invented the infrared sensors on the AOA.
But it was now part of an Air Force program whose cover-all name was Cobra. It worked in coordination with the Cobra Dane radar at Shemya, and often flew in conjunction with an aircraft called Cobra Ball—a converted 707—because Cobra was the code name for a family of systems aimed at tracking Soviet missiles. The Army was smugly satisfied that the Air Force needed its help, though wary of ongoing attempts to steal its program.
The flight crew went through its checklist casually, since they had plenty of time. They were from Boeing. So far the Army had successfully resisted attempts by the Air Force to get its own people on the flight deck. The copilot, who was ex-Air Force, ran his finger down the paper list of things to do, calling them off in a voice neither excited nor bored while the pilot and flight engineer/navigator pushed the buttons, checked the gauges, and otherwise made their aircraft ready for a safe flight.
The worst part of the mission was the weather on the ground. Shemya, one of the western Aleutians, is a small island, roughly four miles long by two wide, whose highest point is a mere two hundred thirty-eight feet above the slate-gray sea. What passed for average weather in the Aleutians would close most reputable airports, and what they called bad weather here made the Boeing crew wish for Amtrak. It was widely believed on the base that the only reason the Russians sent their ICBM tests to the Sea of Okhotsk was to make life as miserable as possible for the Americans who monitored them. Today the weather was fairly decent. You could see almost to the far end of the runway, where the blue lights were surrounded by little globes of mist. Like most flyers, the pilot preferred daylight, but in winter that was the exception here. He counted his blessings: there was supposed to be a ceiling at about fifteen hundred feet, and it wasn’t raining yet. The crosswinds were a problem, too, but the wind never blew where you wanted up here—or more correctly, the people who laid out the runway hadn’t known or cared that wind was a factor in flying airplanes.
“Shemya Tower, this is Charlie Bravo, ready to taxi.”
“Charlie Bravo, you are cleared to taxi. Winds are two-five-zero at fifteen.” The tower didn’t have to say that Cobra Belle was number one in line. At the moment, the 767 was the only aircraft on the base. Supposedly in California for equipment tests, it had been rushed here only twenty hours earlier.
“Roger. Charlie Bravo is rolling.” Ten minutes later the Boeing started down the runway, to begin what was expected to be yet another routine mission.
Twenty minutes later the AOA reached its cruising altitude of 45,000 feet. The ride was the same smooth glide known by airline passengers, but instead of downing their first drinks and making their dinner selections, the people aboard this aircraft had already unbuckled and gone to work.
There were instruments to activate, computers to recycle, data links to set up, and voice links to check out. The aircraft was equipped with every communications system known to man, and would have had a psychic aboard if that Defense Department program—there was one—had progressed as well as originally hoped. The man commanding it was an artilleryman with a masters in astronomy, of all things, from the University of Texas. His last command had been of a Patriot missile battery in Germany. While most men looked at airplanes and wished to fly them, his interest had always been in shooting them out of the sky. He felt the same way about ballistic missiles, and had helped develop the modification that enabled the Patriot missile to kill other missiles in addition to Soviet aircraft. It also gave him an intimate familiarity with the instruments used to track missiles in flight.
The mission book in the Colonel’s hands was a facsimile print-out from the Washington headquarters of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) telling him that in four hours and sixteen minutes the Soviets would conduct a test firing of the SS-25 ICBM. The book didn’t say how DIA had obtained that information, though the Colonel knew that it wasn’t from reading an ad in Izvestia. Cobra Belle’s mission was to monitor the firing, intercept all telemetry transmissions from the missile’s test instruments, and, most important, to take pictures of the warheads in flight. The data collected would later be analyzed to determine the performance of the missile, and most particularly the accuracy of its warhead delivery, a matter of the greatest interest to Washington.