The Krone Experiment (5 page)

Isaacs returned to his seat in gloom. This
was bad all around. They still did not know what had happened to
the Novorossiisk. There would be strong quarters in the Pentagon
plotting retaliation to the Soviet attack. And in his own nest,
McMasters would be sending up smoke screens all over the Agency to
hide his tremendous error. If the crunch came, Isaacs knew,
McMasters would even sacrifice Deloach, his unwitting ally. That
would be a tragedy. For all his faults, Deloach was too good at
what he did best.

Two days later Isaacs sat at his desk,
forehead cradled in his hands, intently reading the report before
him. Every few minutes he would lower his right hand to turn a
loose— leaf page and then replace it on his head, thumb to temple,
fingers shading his eyes. Across from his desk, Vincent Martinelli
sat, legs crossed, reading the same report. Boswank had done his
job. The report, fresh from the translator, was taken directly from
the file of the Soviet Admiralty. Isaacs finished first and leaned
back gazing at the ceiling, mulling what he had read, waiting for
Martinelli.

After a few minutes, Martinelli looked up.
“What do you make of that? Sure as hell something more going on
than a match in a gas tank. There’s nothing in here about a
space-based weapon, though.”

“Someone higher up must have reached that
conclusion after reading this,” Isaacs said. “Let’s see how the
thinking may have gone. There is widespread agreement from the
hands on the flight deck that there was some kind of noise, a
hissing, growing in intensity, and coming apparently from
overhead.”

“That’s no reason to think whatever it was
came from something in orbit.”

“Granted, but it is a peculiar precursor. I
can’t think of anything offhand to account for it.”

“You’ve got me there.”

“Then the fire breaks out,” Isaacs continued,
“apparently a punctured fuel tank and a spark.”

Martinelli squinted in concentration. “I’d
say the fire was incidental, granted one of them may have sparked
the fire, but the punctures themselves are the odd bit.”

“I agree and so, it seems, do our Soviet
counterparts. Drilled is the word the translators came up with. A
hole, a half a centimeter to a centimeter in diameter,” right
through the ship. No evidence in the first couple of decks because
of fire damage, but from there on down, a clean little hole, right
through every deck and out the bottom of the hull.”

“That’s the son-of-a-bitch, all right. Did
you catch the reference to the sonar?”

“Ah, right, it’s here on page -” Isaacs
leafed through the report, “page fifty-seven. Sonar operator picked
up a sudden strange signal just as the fire klaxon sounded and all
hell broke loose.

“So,” Isaacs continued thoughtfully, “you are
Yuri Blodnik reading this report. What do you conclude?”

“Noise above,” summarized Martinelli, “a hole
drilled vertically through the decks, and a sonar trace below. I’d
say I’d been shot.” Martinelli dramatically clasped his hands to
his heart and then thrust a pointed finger at the ceiling. “And the
varmint what did it was up there!”

“All right, Tex ,” Isaacs smiled, “and just
what were you shot with?”

Martinelli grew serious. “Not a conventional
projectile. You’d need a hell of an explosive punch to penetrate
all that steel, and then you’d rip things up, not drill any dainty
little hole. If it’s not an explosive, then it’d have to be a slug
with tremendous velocity.”

Martinelli could see the idea flare in
Isaacs’s eyes and spread across his face as his brow unfurrowed and
his chin came up. Isaacs pointed a finger at him.

“A meteorite.”

Martinelli stared at him and then slowly
nodded in comprehension.

“The damned carrier was hit by a meteorite!”
Isaacs exclaimed. “We’ve worried about them mistaking a large
meteor for a nuclear explosion and launching a retaliatory strike.
Now they get hit by a small one, a chance in a million, and they
think it’s a beam weapon.”

“Damn, that smells right.”

“We’ve got to convince the Soviets of that,
particularly whoever decided a beam weapon was involved.”

Isaacs reached for a pad and began to make
notes. “We need to know who that person was, or what group, and how
they think. Bureaucratic types? Someone in intelligence?
Scientists? And, if so, government flakes or independent thinkers?
We need evidence. What would a meteorite do? Can it do this? I’ll
set my team on that. We’ll need a projectile specialist. Maybe
there’s some work in the labs, Los Alamos or Livermore. Too bad
there’s not more specific information here,” he tapped the report,
“on the nature of the punctures, stress on the surrounding metal,
flaring at the rim. There should be contamination by meteoritic
material, but that would require a specific metallurgical
examination of a sample from around the holes. We’ve got to get
them to do that.

“You get with Boswank and find out about the
decision structure here. We’ll do a report outlining the effects of
meteorite impact, feed that to them through channels, and see if we
can get them to look at those punctures in detail. If they can
convince themselves, that’ll be best. Great! We can move on
this.”

“Won’t hurt to be quick,” advised Martinelli.
“I just got word about Drefke’s meeting with the National Security
Council yesterday. It went just the way you called it.”

“The space shuttle?”

“Yep, the Joint Chiefs came out pushing hard
for sending the shuttle after Cosmos 2112. Their arguments were
almost a parody of what you predicted for Drefke day before
yesterday. Can’t let the Russkis get away with this, or they’ll
start picking off all our birds like sitting ducks. Got to hang
tough. And, of course, they’re drooling to get their hands on the
laser itself, do a little satellite vivisection.”

“Damnation!” exclaimed Isaacs, pounding his
fist on the desk. “Can’t they see the danger of escalating this
thing? The last thing the human race needs is a whole new way to
make war! Good Lord! We have no idea where it will lead.”

“Hey!” protested Martinelli. “You’re talking
to the wrong guy.”

“Sorry,” Isaacs slumped back in his chair,
“but what a tragedy, especially if it’s all an overreaction to a
freak of nature. Oh, damn!”

He thought quietly for a moment. “Just what
do they suggest? All we need is for the Cosmos to blast the shuttle
as it approaches. No way we could keep that from the public. The
President couldn’t resist the war cries.”

“Well, of course, they’ve been planning for
just such a contingency all along. Apparently, as well as working
on laser systems, the Livermore people have been working on
defenses as well. They’ve designed a highly reflective, collapsible
mirror specifically for the shuttle. It’s been tucked in a
warehouse for some time. The shuttle swings this thing overboard
with the manipulating boom and positions it to reflect any laser
blast as they close in. Just how they immobilize the satellite to
get it in the cargo bay and bring it home isn’t clear to me.”

“Isn’t it too big?” Isaacs wanted to
know.

“In a sense, but the Soviets know how big the
shuttle bay is. The satellite is basically the upper end of one of
their big booster rockets.”

Isaacs nodded.

“Apparently, they added some external
gew-gaws specifically designed to make the whole thing too large to
fit in the cargo bay. The idea is that the crew should take a torch
to it with a space walk, cut it up into manageable-size pieces. In
principle it’ll fit.”

“Great,” exclaimed Isaacs with irony. “And
when do they advise trying to attempt this insanity?”

“The next shuttle launch is in the middle of
April, two weeks from now. That’s what they’re pushing for. The
idea being, of course, to strike while the iron is lukewarm. They’d
like to launch yesterday, but the shuttle isn’t so flexible.”

“Madness! And they think the Soviets won’t
then blow away one of our communication link satellites, Comsat or
some such thing?”

“The argument is that Cosmos 2112 is the only
laser they have flying.”

“But we didn’t know that until two days
ago!”

“Tell that to mah buddy, the President.”

“How’s he leaning?”

“I didn’t get any feeling for that, third
hand, but the brass is pushing hard. They’ve pumped a lot of
dollars sideways into NASA for the shuttle. They want to play with
their toy.”

“But they must have war-gamed this kind of
thing.”

“I suppose it can be contained in some
scenarios.”

“Yeah, in one per cent of them. Voice, we’ve
got to convince our side about this meteorite, too. That seems to
be the only sure way to show that the Soviets had some
justification and that we don’t need to retaliate.”

“You’ll have to start in-house. Drefke will
relay any report you write, but you know how his antennae are tuned
to the White House. He’s apt to take his cues from the President.
And McMasters clearly won’t be much help.”

“That’s a fact,” Isaacs agreed. That was
quite a show he put on the other day.”

“It was clearly his only tack. He had to
really push the Russians as bad guys to keep Drefke from thinking
too deeply about why FireEye was shifted in the first place. Now
he’s painted himself into a corner. He’ll have trouble turning
around and saying, well, maybe they’re not so nasty after all, a
little hasty with their death ray, but really not bad chaps.

“The other factor is,” Martinelli continued,
“that this meteorite idea and follow-up has to come from your group
and his negative instincts won’t allow him to embrace it with a lot
of enthusiasm.” The two men sat in silence for a moment, then
Martinelli rose.

“I’ll go see Art; we’ll try to get some dope
on the channels this report went through.” Martinelli waved the
document as a farewell gesture and paused.

“There’s a bright side to all this, you know.
If this trick with the shuttle backfires badly enough, we won’t
have to worry about getting our taxes done on time.”

“Thanks a lot, Vince.” Isaacs grinned at the
black humor. “Silver linings like that I can do without.”

Isaacs watched his friend shut the door. He
began an outline of the questions to be addressed concerning the
possible impact of a meteorite on the Novorossiisk. He would turn
it over to his technical staff to flesh it out.

The preliminary report was ready by late the
next day, a rush job to which some thirty people had contributed in
an intense surge of effort. It looked pretty good, plausible enough
for a first pass. There were some troubling points. A meteorite
would progressively disintegrate as it passed through metal walls.
To go all the way through the carrier, a meteorite would have to
drill larger holes than had been reported in the upper decks, and
the holes should get smaller in the lower decks. It was not clear
from the stolen Soviet report that that pattern was reproduced.

Isaacs downplayed such doubts in working over
the final draft. He wanted to make as much impact as possible to
forestall a decision to go after Cosmos 2112 with the shuttle. He
relied on the state of emergency to go out of channels and took the
report directly to Drefke. The Director was clearly impressed with
the idea. Isaacs knew he would then show it to McMasters, but by
then the original impact would have had its maximum effect. He
would get the most positive response possible when Drefke in turn
reported to the National Security Council and the President.

Korolev stirred at his desk, reached up and
punched off the button on the neck of the gooseneck lamp, leaving
the room to share the deepening light of dusk. He rose and moved to
the window. From this upper floor of the Academy of Sciences
building he could see a stretch of lights now winking on over
Moscow. For years, no, decades now, he had stood at this window
watching those lights at odd hours of the night as he contemplated
some problem. How many there had been. Practical Earth-shattering
problems imposed by the voracious military: explosions, implosions,
shock waves, the bomb. Later, intense radiation, hyper velocities,
directed energy weapons. What did the Americans call them? Buck
Rogers stuff. Lovely, basic problems. Microscopic, the innards of
particles, and the innards of those in turn, and then of those.
Cosmological problems, the wondrous workings of Einstein’s mind on
vast scales.

Tonight, a small but troubling problem. Some
American was quick and thoughtful. He could see the mental play
behind the words. Yes, the suggestion of a meteorite was bold, for
all its obviousness. It was one of the first that had occurred to
him as well. The author of this report had pushed it for all its
worth, but he also knew the limitations. Korolev could read between
the lines and see where the American had suppressed his
reservations. What the American did not know were the results of
the follow-up report that had come directly to him. The punctures
were all wrong for a meteorite with enough impact to penetrate the
carrier decks. There was no downward flaring, the holes looked
drilled, not punched. They had done a metallurgical test: there was
no meteorite material. The Americans had not yet stolen that
report. It was no meteorite.

Although there were features that did not
fit, a lack of heat searing, for instance, Korolev had been
compelled to state that a beam weapon seemed the most plausible
explanation. His superiors had demanded some hypothesis and he
could think of no other. He had not anticipated that they would
mistrust their intelligence so badly as to suspect that the
Americans had leap-frogged them and orbited such a weapon.

What troubled him, beyond the still
unexplained nature of the Novorossiisk event, was the sincerity in
this report. He was convinced that the author would eventually come
to the conclusion that a meteorite could not be involved, but this
report was not a sham. The author pushed the meteor idea too
strongly because he wanted it to be true. The whole tone told
Korolev that the report was based on the secure knowledge of the
author that the Americans were not involved with the Novorossiisk.
That was the trouble. His government knew he had already considered
and rejected the meteor hypothesis. They would reject the
suggestion by the Americans. Could he convince them of the
Americans’ uninvolvement with the Novorossiisk based not on the
contents, but on his sense of the motivation of the report on his
desk? There would be much resistance. They were convinced the
Americans were involved, somehow, and now there was the irrevocable
act of the destruction of the American spy satellite. Korolev
continued to stare out over the streets until the dusk faded to
deepest black.