The Cardinal of the Kremlin - Tom Clancy [53]
"His master's voice," Al Gregory grumbled. He tossed the chalk to the nearest man and walked out of the room. He was on the phone in a minute.
"There's a helicopter on its way to pick you up," the General said without any pleasantries. "Sir, we're trying to nail down-"
"There'll be a Lear waiting for you at Kirtland. Not enough time to get you here on a commercial bird. You won't need to pack. Get moving, Major!"
"Yessir."
"What went wrong?" Morozov asked. The engineer stared at his console, an angry frown on his face.
"Thermal blooming. Damn! I thought we'd put that one behind us."
Across the room, the low-powered laser system was making another image of the target. The monocolor image was like a close-up black-and-white photograph, though what would have been black was maroon instead. The television technicians made up a split-screen image to compare before and after.
"No holes," Pokryshkin noted sourly. "So what?" Bondarenko said in surprise. "My God, man, you melted the thing! That looks like it was dipped in a ladle of molten steel." And indeed it did. What had been flat surfaces were now rippled from the intense heat that was still radiating away. The solar cells arrayed on the body of the satellite-which were designed to absorb light energy-appeared to be burned off entirely. On closer inspection, the entire satellite body was distorted from the energy that had blasted it.
Pokryshkin nodded, but his expression hadn't changed. "We were supposed to have chopped a hole right through it. If we can do that, it would look as though a piece of orbiting space junk had impacted the satellite. That's the kind of energy concentration we were looking for."
"But you can now destroy any American satellite you wish!"
"Bright Star wasn't built to destroy satellites, Colonel. We can already do that easily enough."
And Bondarenko got the message. Bright Star had, in fact, been built for that specific purpose, but the power breakthrough that had justified the funding for the installation exceeded expectations by a factor of four, and Pokryshkin wanted to make two leaps at once, to demonstrate an antisatellite capability and a system that could be adapted to ballistic-missile defense. This was an ambitious man, though not in the usual sense.
Bondarenko set that aside and thought about what he'd seen. What had gone wrong? It must have been thermal blooming. As the laser beams chopped through the air, they'd transferred a fractional amount of their power as heat in the atmosphere. This had roiled the air, disturbing the optical path, moving the beam on and off the target and also spreading the beam wider than its intended diameter.
But despite that, it had still been powerful enough to melt metal one hundred eighty kilometers away! the Colonel told himself. This was no failure. It was a giant leap toward a wholly new technology.
"Any damage to the system?" the General asked the project director.
"None, otherwise we'd not have gotten the follow-up image. It would appear that our atmospheric-compensation measures are sufficient for the imaging beam but not for the high-power transmission. Half a success, Comrade General."
"Yes." Pokryshkin rubbed his eyes for a moment and spoke more firmly. "Comrades, we have demonstrated great progress tonight, but there is still more work to be done."
"And that's my.job," Morozov's neighbor said. "We'll solve this son of a bitch!"
"Do you need another man for your team?"
"It's part mirrors and part computers. How much do you know about those?"
"That is for you to decide. When do we begin?"
"Tomorrow. It'll take twelve hours for the telemetry people to organize their data. I'm going to catch the next bus back to my flat and have a drink. My family is away for another week. Care to join me?"
"What do you think that was?" Abdul asked.
They had just gotten to the top of a ridge when the meteor had appeared. At least, it had looked like a meteor's fiery track across the sky at first. But the thin golden line had hung there, and actually marched upward-very quickly, but it had been