As mission commander, the Colonel didn’t have a great deal to do. His control board was a panel of colored lights that showed the status of various onboard systems. Since the AOA was a fairly new item in the inventory, everything aboard worked reasonably well. Today the only thing currently “down” was a backup data link, and a technician was working to put that back on line while the Colonel sipped his coffee. It was something of an effort for him to look interested while he had nothing in particular to do, but if he started looking bored, it would set a bad example for his people. He reached in the zippered sleeve pocket of his flight suit for a butterscotch candy. These were healthier than the cigarettes he’d smoked as a lieutenant, though not so good for his teeth, the base dentist liked to point out. The Colonel sucked on the candy for five minutes before he decided that he had to do something. He unstrapped from his command chair and went to the flight deck forward.
” ‘Morning, people.” It was now 0004-Lima, or 12:04 A.M., local time.
“Good morning, Colonel,” the pilot replied for his crew. “Everything working in back, sir?”
“So far. How’s the weather in the patrol area?”
“Solid undercast at twelve-to-fifteen thousand,” the navigator answered, holding up a satellite photograph. “Winds three-two-five at thirty knots. Our nav systems check out with the track from Shemya,” she added. Ordinarily the 767 operates with a crew of two flight officers. Not this one. Since the Korean Air 007 flight had been shot down by the Soviets, every flight over the Western Pacific was especially careful with its navigation. This was doubly true of Cobra Belle; the Soviets hated all intelligence-gathering platforms. They never went within fifty miles of Soviet territory, nor into the Russian Air Defense Identification Zone, but twice the Soviets had sent fighters to let the AOA know they cared.
“Well, we aren’t supposed to get very close,” the Colonel observed. He leaned between the pilot and copilot to look out the windows. Both turbofans were performing well. He would have preferred a four-engined aircraft for extended over-water flight, but that hadn’t been his decision. The navigator raised an eyebrow at the Colonel’s interest and got a pat on the shoulder by way of apology. It was time to leave.
“Time to observation area?”
“Three hours, seventeen minutes, sir; three hours thirty-nine minutes to orbit point.”
“Guess I have time for a nap,” the Colonel said on his way to the door. He closed it and walked aft, past the telescope assembly to the main cabin. Why was it that the crews doing the flying now were so damned young? They probably think I need a nap instead of being bored to death.
Forward, the pilot and copilot shared a look. Old fart doesn’t trust us to fly the goddamned airplane, does he? They adjusted themselves in their seats, letting their eyes scan for the blinking lights of other aircraft while the autopilot controlled the aircraft.
Morozov was dressed like the other scientists in the control room, in a white laboratory coat adorned with a security pass. He was still going through orientation, and his assignment to the mirror-control team was probably temporary, though he was beginning to appreciate just how important this part of the program was. In Moscow, he’d learned how lasers work, and done some impressive lab work with experimental models, but he’d never truly appreciated the fact that when the energy came out the front of the instruments the task had only begun. Besides, Bright Star had already made its breakthrough in laser power.
“Recycle,” the senior engineer said into his headset.
They were testing the system calibration by tracking their mirrors on a distant star. It didn’t even matter which star. They picked one at random for each test.
“Makes one hell of a telescope, doesn’t it?” the engineer noted, looking at his TV screen.
“You were concerned about the stability of the system. Why?”
“We require a very high degree of accuracy, as you might imagine. We’ve never actually tested the complete system. We can track stars easily enough, but . . .” He shrugged. “This is still a young program, my friend. Just like you.”
“Why don’t you use radar to select a satellite and track on that?”
“That’s a fine question!” The older man chuckled. “I’ve asked that myself. It has to do with arms-control agreements or some such nonsense. For the moment, they tell us, it is enough that they feed us coordinates of our targets via land-line. We do not have to acquire them ourselves. Rubbish!” he concluded.
Morozov leaned back in his chair to look around. On the other side of the room, the laser-control team were shuffling about busily, with a flock of uniformed soldiers behind them whispering to themselves. Next he checked the clock—sixty-three minutes until the test began. One by one, the technicians were drifting off to the rest room. He didn’t feel the need, nor did the section chief, who finally pronounced himself satisfied with his systems, and placed everything on standby.
At 22,300 miles over the Indian Ocean, an American Defense Support Program satellite hung in geosynchronous orbit
over a fixed point on the Indian Ocean. Its huge cassegrain-focus Schmidt telescope was permanently aimed at the Soviet Union, and its mission was to provide first warning that Russian missiles had been launched at the United States. Its data was downlinked via Alice Springs, Australia, to various installations in the United States. Viewing conditions were excellent at the moment. Almost the entire visible hemisphere of the earth was in darkness, and the cold, wintry ground easily showed the smallest heat source in precise definition.
The technicians who monitored the DSPS in Sunnyvale, California, routinely amused themselves by counting industrial facilities. There was the Lenin Steel Plant at Kazan, and there was the big refinery outside Moscow, and there—
“Heads up,” a sergeant announced. “We have an energy bloom at Plesetsk. Looks like one bird lifting off from the ICBM test facility.”
The Major who had the duty this night immediately got on the phone to “Crystal Palace,” the headquarters of the North American Aerospace Defense Command—NORAD—under Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, to make sure that they were copying the satellite data. They were, of course.
“That’s the missile launch they told us about,” he said to himself.
As they watched, the bright image of the missile rocket exhaust started turning to an easterly heading as the ICBM arced over into the ballistic flight path that gave the missile its name. The Major had the characteristics of all Soviet missiles memorized. If this were an SS-25, the first stage would separate right about . . . now.
The screen bloomed bright before their eyes as a fireball six hundred yards in diameter appeared. The orbiting camera did the mechanical equivalent of a blink, altering its sensitivity after its sensors were dazzled by the sudden burst of heat energy. Three seconds later it was able to track on a cloud of heated fragments, curving down to earth.
“Looks like that one blew,” the sergeant observed unnecessarily. “Back to the drawing board, Ivan . . .”
“Still haven’t licked the second-stage problem,” the Major added. He wondered briefly what the problem was, but didn’t care all that much. The Soviets had rushed the -25 into production and had already begun deploying them on railcars for mobility, but they were still having problems with the solid-fuel bird. The Major was glad for it. It didn’t take a great degree of unreliability in missiles to make their use a very chancy thing. And that uncertainty was still the best guarantee of peace.
“Crystal Palace, we call that test a failure at fifty-seven seconds after launch. Is Cobra Belle up to monitor the test?”
“That’s affirmative,” the officer on the other end replied. “We’ll call them off.”
“Right. ‘Night, Jeff.”
Aboard Cobra Belle, ten minutes later, the mission commander acknowledged the message and cut off the radio channel. He checked his watch and sighed. He didn’t feel like heading back to Shemya yet. The Captain in charge of the mission hardware suggested that they could always use the time to calibrate their instruments. The Colonel thought about that one and nodded approval. The aircraft and crew were new enough that everyone needed the practice. The camera system was put in the MTI-mode. A computer that registered all the energy sources the telescope found began to search only for targets that were moving. The technicians on the screens watched as the Moving-Target Indicator rapidly eliminated the stars and began to find a few low-altitude satellites and fragments of orbiting space junk. The camera system was sensitive enough to detect the heat of a human body at a range of one thousand miles, and soon they had their choice of targets. The camera locked on them one by one and made its photographic images in digital code on computer tape. Though mainly a practice drill, this data would automatically be forwarded to NORAD, where it would update the register of information of orbiting objects.