“Good morning, sir,” Hall said as Tombstone strode into the waiting room. “Your uncle is already here.”
“And Jeremy?” Tombstone asked.
Hall shook her head. “Traffic, probably.”
“Probably. Again,” Tombstone said. None of them punched a clock at Advanced Analysis, but certain standards of behavior were expected when an operation was in the offing. Even during downtimes, they were expected to stay in contact with the office, ready for immediate recall. Since the last mission, Greene had been increasingly restless and sometimes difficult to locate when needed.
Tombstone knew what was at the heart of the younger aviator’s attitude. Jeremy was a pilot and he wanted to fly. When he accepted the offer to join Advanced Analysis, he had been assured that he would be flying, and in more dangerous situations than he would in the fleet. It hadn’t worked out that way, and too much of it had been Tombstone’s fault.
I should have taken a RIO, not another pilot. And I should get him more stick time.
Damn it all, it was so hard to turn over the controls. But how was Jeremy going to get the experience that Tombstone had without — well, experience?
I’ll talk to Uncle about it. Get a couple of RIOs and start planning on two aircraft missions. Otherwise, we’re going to lose him. I can feel it.
The security door opened as Hall let him in. Tombstone strode down the short passageway to his office, checked for messages, and then headed for the conference room. A few hours catching up on paperwork, and he would be done.
His uncle was already there, perusing a thin brown folder. “Morning,” Tombstone said. “Anything up?”
“Maybe.” His uncle sighed heavily, shut the folder, and shoved it across the table to Tombstone. “Although I’m not sure what we can do about it. We might not even be involved.”
Before he took the folder, Tombstone paused to study his uncle. In the last three months, his uncle’s boundless enthusiasm for Advanced Analysis and its mission seemed to have waned. Instead of presenting the ruddy, cheerful face he normally did to the world, his uncle had lost a good deal of color. His face tended to look gray and drawn now, and he appeared older than he had in years.
“Is anything wrong?” Tombstone asked, his hand still on the closed folder. “You don’t look so hot.”
“I’m fine,” his uncle said.
“You sure?”
His uncle glared at him, his eyes piercing under his heavy eyebrows. There was a grim set to his face, a determination that Tombstone knew very well. It was an expression he’d seen often during his uncle’s days as chief of naval operations, but less often since he had retired from active duty. Now, seeing the same expression again, Tombstone felt uneasy. “What is it?”
“Nothing.”
Tombstone recognized that tone in his uncle’s voice. Questioning him further would just result in an argument. Whatever was going on — and Tombstone was convinced something was — he would have to wait for his uncle to reveal it in his own time.
Tombstone opened the folder. A satellite photo was on top, and Tombstone spent a few minutes trying to puzzle it out before referring to the attached analysis sheet. Photo-intelligence interpretation was a highly specialized skill, more art than science, and it took trained eyes to extract the most information from a picture.
He glanced at the technical data before getting to the analyst’s comments. The picture was taken at nighttime by an older geosynchronous satellite and showed a large portion of the Atlantic Ocean. There was a sharp line running across the center on it, linking the top right and bottom left corners. Tombstone had assumed it was a scratch of some sort, or a processing anomaly or gap in the data.
After reading the analyst’s comments, he flipped back to the photo with renewed interest. “A laser shot,” he said, impressed. “And from a Russian ship. Just why did they let us see this? They know when the satellites are going to be overhead, and what areas are covered by geosynchronous assets. Why test it on a clear day when you know a satellite is watching?”
“Exactly. But keep reading — there’s more.”
Tombstone skipped the rest of the report and leafed through the later materials. Just after the analyst’s report was a top secret message from the National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Observatory. It announced the termination of the satellite that had taken the first photo. The cause was listed as unknown, possibly a mechanical failure. The message was classified top secret.
The message after it went one step further, both in classification and in explanation. It was specially compartmented information, eyes only. Readers had to have a cosmic purple clearance even to know that those messages existed.
And the contents were stunning. Tombstone whistled softly as he read. “Laser… intentional termination… possible experiment and response to theater ballistic missile testing…” When he finished reading, Tombstone looked up with concern in his eyes. “They think the Russians nailed the satellite? But why? How does that tie in with the theater ballistic missile defense system?”
“Pretty tightly, if you ask me. You saw the storm of worldwide protest when President Bush first announced that the United States would be pursuing an anti-missile defense system. Well, the rest of the world has had a few years to think about that while we worked on developing an operationally reliable system. It relies on early detection of launches and laser targeting and weaponry for soft kill operations. It makes perfect sense as a tactical system. The first thing anyone would want to do would be eliminate the detection and targeting systems, and that means taking out the space-based lasers. What better weapon to use against a laser than another laser?”
“Fight fire with fire?” Tombstone mused.
His uncle nodded. “Exactly. It’s very much like the development of the mutually assured destruction, or MAD, program. If you recall, the think tanks were tasked with coming up with a solution to the possibility of nuclear attack from Russia. They spent years considering defense systems just like this, but the technology didn’t exist then. Finally, some smart kid ran the numbers and came up with the answer — within the budget restraints, the only way to fight the Russian ballistic missiles system was to develop our own. Fire with fire, as you say. That resulted in the insanity of the Cold War. We made it so costly for the Russians to attack that they never did — although they did test our resolve on numerous occasions, not believing that an American would have the guts to push the button.
“But while the system worked, the downside was that it insured there would be an arms race. And that, as you know, eventually led to nuclear weapons in the hands of rogue states.” His uncle shook his head sadly. “Sometimes I think it would have been better if we’d never uncorked that particular genie.”
“Maybe if we hadn’t relied on MAD, more research would have been poured into defense systems like the laser,” Tombstone added. “So why are the Russians so dead set against a missile defense system?”
“Because, to their mind, it means we can attack and not suffer the consequences of MAD. There’s a huge cultural gap between Russia and the United States, don’t ever forget that.”
“Right. So we’re testing a missile laser system at sea—”
His uncle interrupted him. “They’re shadowing Jefferson, which is testing our own sea-based ballistic missile defense system. That’s the official story. In response to every query, Russia says it is simply in the same area testing its own systems.”