The Cardinal of the Kremlin (Jack Ryan, #4; Jack Ryan Universe, #5)

by Tom Clancy

The converted Boeing 767 had two names. Originally known as the Airborne Optical Adjunct, it was now called Cobra Belle, which at least sounded better. The aircraft was little more than a platform for as large an infrared telescope as could be made to fit in the wide-bodied airliner.

But it was now part of an Air Force program whose cover-all name was Cobra. It worked in coordination with the Cobra Dane radar at Shemya, and often flew in conjunction with an aircraft called Cobra Ball—a converted 707—because Cobra was the code name for a family of systems aimed at tracking Soviet missiles.

The flight crew went through its checklist casually, since they had plenty of time. They were from Boeing.

Shemya, one of the western Aleutians, is a small island, roughly four miles long by two wide, whose highest point is a mere two hundred thirty-eight feet above the slate-gray sea. What passed for average weather in the Aleutians would close most reputable airports, and what they called bad weather here made the Boeing crew wish for Amtrak.

There were instruments to activate, computers to recycle, data links to set up, and voice links to check out. The aircraft was equipped with every communications system known to man, and would have had a psychic aboard if that Defense Department program—there was one—had progressed as well as originally hoped.

The mission book in the Colonel’s hands was a facsimile print-out from the Washington headquarters of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) telling him that in four hours and sixteen minutes the Soviets would conduct a test firing of the SS-25 ICBM. The book didn’t say how DIA had obtained that information, though the Colonel knew that it wasn’t from reading an ad in Izvestia.

“’Morning, people.” It was now 0004-Lima, or 12:04 A.M., local time.

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,

Its data was downlinked via Alice Springs, Australia, to various installations in the United States.

“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.

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.

There were over a hundred engineers—sixty doctorates in physics—and even those called technicians could have taught the sciences at any university in the Soviet Union. They sat or hovered at their consoles. Most smoked, and the air-conditioning system needed to cool the computers struggled mightily to keep the air clear. Everywhere were digital counters. Most showed the time: Greenwich Mean Time, by which the satellites were tracked; local time; and, of course, Moscow Standard Time. Other counters showed the precise coordinates of the target satellite, Cosmos-1810, which bore the international satellite designator 1986-102A. It

“All laser systems are fully powered and on line.”

In addition to aiming the whole system, it made a high-resolution image on the command console. The identity of the target was now confirmed. The chief engineer turned the key that “enabled” the entire system. Bright Star was now fully out of human hands, controlled wholly by the site’s main computer complex. “There’s target lock,” Morozov observed to his senior.

“Crystal Palace, this is Cobra Belle. Stand by to copy a Superflash message.” “Standing by.” “We have a high-energy event. I say again, we are tracking a high-energy event. Cobra Belle declares a Dropshot. Acknowledge.” He turned to the Captain, and his face was pale. . . . At NORAD headquarters, the senior watch officer had to quickly check his memory to remember what a Dropshot was.

Jack Ryan was just about to take the cloverleaf exit off I-495 when his car phone rang. “Yes?” “We need you back here.”

“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.”

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.

CHAPTER SIX One if by Land

Here Gregory took out his other pass. He showed it to the four people at the security desk, then held it against the wall panel that interrogated its electromagnetic coding and decided that the Major could enter.

Moral courage was more rare a commodity than the physical kind, a fact as true of the military profession as any other.

“And aiming difficulty, sir. At least, it looks like that, too. I need some time to work, and a good calculator. I left mine at work,” he admitted sheepishly. There was an empty pouch on his belt, next to his beeper. Graham tossed one over, an expensive Hewlett-Packard programmable.

“As I told you,” the engineer told Morozov, “the problem isn’t getting the lasers to put the power out—that’s the easy part. The hard part is delivering the energy to the target.”

If they’d been able to put out a slightly different frequency the day before—one that penetrated the atmosphere more efficiently—the thermal blooming might have been reduced by fifty percent or so. But that meant controlling the superconducting magnets better. They were called wigglers because they induced an oscillating magnetic field through the charged electrons in the lasing cavity. Unfortunately, the breakthrough that made the lasing cavity larger had also had an unexpected effect on their ability to control magnetic-field flux.

The principal breakthrough, he wrote, was in the lasing-cavity design. It allowed the enormous increase in power output, and had been made over a table in the canteen when an engineer and a physicist had jointly stumbled across a piece of Truth. The Colonel smiled to himself. Pravda was actually the word they used. “Truth” was the exact translation, and the two young academicians had spoken it so artlessly. Indeed, that was a word that had gained currency at Bright Star, and Bondarenko wondered how much of that was an inside joke of some sort or another. “But is it pravilno,” they would ask of a fact. “Is it truthful?”

Project ADAMANT: Accelerated Development of Advanced Materials and New Technologies Group. We’re hoping the next mirror will be made out of diamond.” “What?” “Artificial diamond made from pure Carbon-12—that’s an isotopic form of regular carbon, and it’s perfect for us. The problem is energy absorption,” Gregory went on. “If the surface retains much of the light, the heat energy can blast the coating right off the glass, then the mirror blows apart. I watched a half-meter mirror let go once. Sounded like God snapping His fingers. With C-12 diamond you have a material that’s almost a superconductor of heat. It permits increased power density, and a smaller mirror. General Electric just learned how to make gemstone-quality diamond out of Carbon-12. Candi’s already working to see how we can make a mirror out of it.”

a sizable stock of exclusive women’s fashions without an overly expensive insurance package. The shop had started shakily enough—the fashions of Paris, Rome, and New York do not translate well west of the Mississippi River, except perhaps along the Pacific Coast—but much of the academic community came from both coasts, and clung to their ways. It didn’t take much exposure at the country clubs for Anne Klein II to become a hot item even in the Rocky Mountains.

In this sense, America was an easy target. If you had the right lifestyle, nobody questioned where it came from. Getting across the border had been almost a comic exercise. All the time she’d spent getting her documents and background “legend” exactly right, and all the Border Patrol had done was to have a dog sniff the car for drugs—she’d come in over the Mexican border at EI Paso—and wave her through with a smile. And for that—she smiled to herself eight months later now—I actually got excited.

The next morning she made her drop, and the photographs traveled across the border into Mexico on a tractor-trailer rig belonging to a long-haul concern based in Austin. It was delivering oil-drilling machinery. By the end of the day the photos would be in the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. The day after that, in Cuba, where they would be placed on an Aeroflot flight direct to Moscow.

Allah’s ways were surely mysterious, the Archer thought. As much as he’d wanted to kill a Soviet transport aircraft, all he had to do was return to his home, the river town of Ghazni. It

A local storm had grounded Russian aircraft for the past several days, allowing him to make good time. He arrived with his fresh supplies of missiles and found his chieftain planning an attack on the town’s outlying airport. The winter weather was hard on everyone, and the infidels left the outer security posts to Afghan soldiers in the service of the traitorous government in Kabul.

What they did not know, however, was that the Major commanding the battalion on perimeter duty worked for the local mudjaheddin. The perimeter would be open when the time came, allowing three hundr...

It was a risk, but he and his men had been running risks since 1980.

The Major reported that two of his company commanders were ready to act as planned, but the commander of Three Company remained loyal to the Soviets.

A trusted sergeant would kill this officer in a few minutes, allowing that sector to be used for the withdrawal.

It helped that the Soviet officer had made a real effort to be respectful of the ways of the local people, and that his Afghan counterpart believed Marxism-Leninism was the way of the future.

The chieftain ordered his men forward anyway, supported by nearly two hundred Afghan Army troops for whom the change of side had come as a relief. The additional men did not make as much of a difference as one might expect. These new mudjaheddin had no heavy weapons other than a few crew-served machine guns, and the chieftain’s single mortar was slow setting up.

“Get a smoke rocket,” the Archer said. Abdul had only one of those. It was a small, finned plastic device, little more than a toy. It had been developed for the training of U.S. Air Force pilots, to simulate the feel—the terror—of having missiles shot at them. At a cost of six dollars, all it could do was fly in a fairly straight line for a few seconds while leaving a trail of smoke. They’d

the Archer had found a real use for them. Abdul ran a hundred meters and set it up on the simple steel-wire launcher. He came back to his master’s side, trailing the launching wire behind him.

But despite countless tactical successes, the fundamental problem remained: Time and again the Soviet government had gravely misread Western actions and intentions; and in a nuclear age unpredictability could mean that an unbalanced American leader—and, to a lesser extent, English or French—could

could even spell the end of the Soviet Union and the postponement of World Socialism for generations.

(To a Russian, the former was more grave, since no ethnic Russian wanted to see the world brought to Socia...

Since the Soviets viewed the West as politically unpredictable, they felt that they could not depend on deterring it. They needed to be able to eliminate, or at least degrade, the Western nuclear arsenal if a crisis threatened to go beyond the point of mere words.

To kill the American missiles had meant developing several generations of highly accurate—and hugely expensive—rockets like the SS-18, whose sole mission was to reduce America’s Minuteman missile

squadrons to glowing dust, along with the submarine and bomber bases. All but the last were to be found

well distant from population centers; consequently, a strike aimed at disarming the West might be carried off without necess...

The twisted logic of the nuclear balance was again turning on itself—as it had to do at least once per generation.

If you kill our helpless civilians, we will kill yours. Defense was no longer protection of one’s own society, but the threat of senseless violence against another. Misha grimaced. No tribe of savages had ever formulated such an idea—even the most uncivilized barbarians were too advanced for such a thing, but that was precisely what the world’s most advanced peoples had decided—or stumbled—upon. Although deterrence could be said to work, it meant that the Soviet Union—and the West—lived under a threat with more than one trigger.

Laser weapons and other high-energy-projection systems, mated to the power of computers, were a quantum jump into a new strategic realm. A workable defense, Bondarenko’s report told Colonel Filitov, was now a real possibility. And what did that mean?

If the Americans could prevent the SS-18s from taking out their land-based missiles, then the disarming first strike that the Soviets depended upon to limit damage to the Rodina was no longer possible.