“Beside Commander Wiegand is Dr. Jaime Swisher from Lawrence Livermore Labs, Nevada. To Jaime’s left is Dr. Kathleen Burtscher from Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and liaison to the White Sands, New Mexico, High-Energy Laser Systems Test Facility.”
The thin woman smiled and stroked dark wisps of hair from her healthy, tanned face.
“And at the end of the table is Dr. Joseph Vazzo from the Department of State, Soviet Technical Studies Group. Nice to see you, Joe.”
The graying diplomat nodded.
“Well, to get down to business.” Admiral Hauch, Annapolis 1954, shifted a pile of papers as he glanced up at the clocks along the walclass="underline" Two o’clock in the morning, Washington time. “It’s LACE. And we have a problem.”
The Admiral paused as his words cleaved the quiet air within the glass chamber. One dozen tired faces looked up from steaming coffee cups. Half a dozen cigarettes were smashed into pewter ashtrays engraved THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF. The Admiral continued.
“It’s TRIAD.”
“But TRIAD doesn’t fly, even boilerplate-experimental for five years at best, Admiral,” the woman said with assurance.
“How familiar are you with TRIAD, Dr. Burtscher?” the Admiral inquired in a cordial tone.
“Same as everyone here. It’s our spaceborne, laser weapons system with three elements: Alpha Project — a chemical laser, five megawatts, 2.7 microns in wave length. And LODE — Large Optics Demonstration Experiment by Hughes Aircraft — a four meter firing mirror. And Talon Gold — Lockheed’s laser aiming-radar for tracking missile targets from space. I read the same technical reports as everyone else here. The laser satellite should fly in five years at the earliest.”
“Very good, Kathy. Very thorough. One more detail, however: DARPA’s laser, killer satellite is flying… in space… right now. General Burns?”
The youthful, sandy haired officer looked uncomfortable as he addressed the company.
“The orbiting laser platform was launched February 14, 1990, on a Delta-2 missile from Cape Canaveral. It was contained in the announced mission of the LACE/RME spacecraft flying in a 130 nautical mile circular orbit with orbital inclination of 38 degrees. We announced the mission as simply a benign test of the LACE and RME satellites publicized as laser target drones.” General Burns shuffled through his stack of confidential documents. “LACE was to be only the Low-power Atmospheric Compensation Experiment: a flying target for ground-based lasers. The bird’s 210 optical sensors were to monitor low-powered laser beams fired from the Air Force Maui Optical Station, Mount Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii. The Naval Research Lab built LACE for the public purpose of testing the distortion caused by the atmosphere to ground-based lasers firing into space.
“RME was announced as part of the McDomnell Douglas Delta-2’s double payload. RME was billed in the press as the Relay Mirror Experiment: another drone with adjustable mirrors for testing whether or not a ground-based laser could bounce off of steerable, space-based mirrors for targeting on other satellites. RME was to carry twelve mirrors adjustable four thousand times every second.”
General Burns looked uncomfortable and pained.
“The Alpha laser was carried live. It had been successfully test fired for the first time on April 7, 1989, at TRW’s plant at San Juan Capistrano, California. And it did not carry the older Talon Gold aiming device. Talon Gold on LACE carried the working optics of Teal Ruby: the spacecraft AFP-888, infrared tracker by Rockwell. We announced in January of 1990 that the five-hundred-million-dollar Teal Ruby was being put into mothball storage at Norton Air Force Base, California. In actuality, Teal Ruby went to Canaveral’s 6555th Aerospace Test Group for integration with Talon Gold and mating to the LACE/RME spacecraft. Teal Ruby was further enhanced by combining it with certain parts of the CIRRIS infrared missile tracker which had been removed from the AFP-675, Lockheed satellite. You may remember that CIRRIS flew manned on the fourth space shuttle flight.”
“Thanks, Tom. General Gordon, if you will fill in the blanks, please?”
“Admiraclass="underline" The LACE test article was designed only for evaluation of the tracking optics. The Talon Gold sight was to be targeted on one of our three modified recon satellites, the Block 647 spacecraft built by TRW.”
“And?” interrupted General Cochran from Defense. “I followed that mission. It did not carry a live killer laser, as far as I know. Only the ranging and aiming device with modified Teal Ruby electronics.” The General looked hard at General Gordon. “Did it, John?”
General Gordon studied the grim face of the Admiral who nodded him on.
“It did… Alpha Project was carried hot: One hydrogen-fluoride, infrared, chemical laser at five megawatts.”
“Mother of God,” Joseph Vazzo of the State Department breathed as he rocked back in his tall chair.
“And it worked beyond our expectations — quite unplanned, I would hasten to add.” The Admiral squirmed with discomfort.
“How unplanned?” demanded the gray-haired man from State.
The Admiral exhaled a long and tired breath as he looked his interrogator in the eye.
“Two days ago, the LACE spacecraft severely damaged and perhaps destroyed by a stray laser blast the Russian, Kvant-3 vehicle.” Admiral Hauch spoke gravely. “The Kvant-3 module was on a five-day automatic rendezvous and docking mission to link up with the Soviet’s Mir space station. Thank God Kvant-3 was unmanned! Kvant-3 is part of their Module-D program of sending up so-called building block units for attachment to Mir.
“LACE’s Alpha laser literally got off one lucky shot. Mir flies in a much steeper, nearly polar orbital path, and higher than LACE. But Kvant-3 on its automatic way to Mir had a one-in-a-million nodal crossing where the orbits of LACE and Kvant-3 crossed. LACE simply looked sideways and let Kvant-3 have it broadside.”
“John,” General Cochran inquired, “do the Russians know that we have hit them?”
“We’re not sure yet. They haven’t said a word in two days. We’re hoping they think it was internal damage, some kind of stray voltage spike. We are hoping… I can tell you this: Through the usual channels, the Russians have asked for a closed technical conference between our people and theirs in Vienna.”
“When?” inquired Deputy Secretary of State Vazzo, more restrained.
“Later today, mid-morning our time, Joe.”
Secretary Vazzo said nothing.
“Dr. Swisher?”
“How could it have happened, Admiral?”
“Don’t know, Jaime. The LODE optics and Alpha Project laser are both designed fail-safe with triple redundancy in range safety. We know from the data over the last few weeks that we’re not even close to the anti-missile, laser-aiming goal of accuracy to within two-tenths of one millionth of a degree on Talon Gold. And we still have quite a bit of jitter in the beam-focusing mechanism. Our best guess is that if LACE had actually aimed at Kvant-3… she would have missed by a country mile. It just let one slip — at the wrong time, in the wrong corner of the sky.” The Admiral looked very tired as he shook his head. “We’re here at two o’clock in the morning to figure out how to disable LACE from the ground.”
“Turn it off”demanded the man from State.
“Can’t, Joe,” responded General Gordon, who lived in a hole in the Denver mountains. “Can’t. It’s burned out her own encryptor. She will acknowledge an uplink telemetry signal from the ground, but she cannot seem to use her onboard encryptor to decode the signal.
“We expect a transient SGEMP. Let me explain: LACE is at the front, the very tip, of our avionics technology. Her innards are mostly what we call VHSIC — or very-high-speed integrated circuitry. These are tightly packed electronic modules, very sensitive to stray electrical fields. The laser energy of Alpha generates a low-level field of radiation within the spacecraft. This field can engulf a satellite in an SGEMP — system-generated electromagnetic pulse.