The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [70]
Van hated Pepsis, but he sat down gratefully. He focused his aching eyes on Wessler’s stack of brand-new books. The titles were War at the Top of the World, Tournament of Shadows, and The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. Their pages were thick with fresh yellow Post-it notes.
Wessler barked orders into a bright red desk phone.
“I brought you something good here, sir,” offered Hickok. “It sure wasn’t easy finding it. I had to kiss me a whole lot of frogs. But, sir, I believe this approach might work out!”
Wessler lowered his brows in a scowl. He had about a mile and a half of shining bald forehead. “Why’d you leave the Air Force, Mr. Hickok?”
Hickok was startled. “Well, it just seemed like the right time for me to move on, sir.”
“Don’t hand me that crap! Why’d we lose an airman like you? And now you’re here telling me you think you know how to manage a satellite, Master Sergeant? What on earth is that all about?”
“Well, sir,” said Hickok, standing straighter, “if you want the truth about why I left the Force, it just got too obvious who was calling the shots there in Kosovo. It was the damn United Nations!”
Wessler didn’t take that remark at all well. Van was very alarmed. They’d agreed earlier that Hickok would do the talking, because Space Force was a branch of the Air Force, while Hickok was Special Ops, also Air Force. Two wings of the Air Force trying to fly together, how hard could that be?
“Mr. Hickok may be a civilian now, sir,” Van spoke up. “But I’m NSC.”
“That’s not what your card says, Dr. Vandeveer! This card says you are DoD!” Wessler read it carefully. “‘Transformational Communications Architecture Office, Department of Defense.’” Wessler’s glasses gleamed fiercely. “That outfit doesn’t even exist! It’s nothing but a press release!”
“Well, we’re way ahead of the curve,” Van mumbled.
Van was saved by the arrival of a young airman with a Pepsi. The drink came in a sixteen-ounce plastic Los Angeles Lakers cup.
“Sir,” Hickok told the general, “that big space re-org at the Pentagon is not the lookout of me and the computer doc here. So there’s no need to bring up the subject of ‘space transformation.’ If you’ll just hear us out a minute . . . We came a long way, and well, we’ve got some good ideas.”
Wessler hitched up the elastic belt of his blue jumpsuit and sat by his computer. “I’m listening.”
Hickok shot Van an urgent look. Startled, Van put his Pepsi on the floor.
“Well,” Van blurted, “uh, sir, when I first saw those SEU reports, I had it figured for thermal failure. Some kind of heat load. But of course, this bird is the most advanced infrared spotter we have. So if there’s anything it would spot, it would certainly be heat.”
“They tell me you’re a programmer.”
“That’s right.”
“Cut to the chase! What’s gone wrong with the bird’s software?”
“Nothing,” Van said, lunging for his cold-sweating Pepsi. “It’s the hardware. First, I had to correlate those reported anomalies with its orbital position.”
Wessler stared at him. “You tracked the bird’s zenith angles?”
“Well, yes.”
“That is the one thing no one is supposed to know! The orbital periodicity, that is the most jealously guarded secret we have! If the adversary learns that, then he can do denial and deception!”
“It wasn’t that hard to figure out,” Van said. Other national governments already knew about the KH-13. It was the business of their intelligence services to figure such things out. So Van had used French commercial SPOT satellite photos, easily purchased through the Internet. Using these photos, Van had watched Indian scientists at various Indian nuclear weapons centers busily moving their cars and trucks to baffle the KH-13. The Indians were doing their usual denial and deception efforts against the new American spy satellite, trying to disguise the feverish activity in and out of their nuclear weapons centers. Given the Indians’ keen awareness of the KH-13’s orbit, it was easy for Van to download a PC simulator program from Dottie’s astrophysics lab, and deduce the satellite’s orbit by himself. Dottie