The zenith angle (18 page)

“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 was happy to help him find the right program, and she had never suspected a thing.

“The KH-13 is in a standard American spy-sat LEO/POLAR orbit,” Van said. “Apogee 256, perigee 530 . . .”

“Never mind that.”

Van nodded hastily. “So, once I had the orbital periodicity, then I could see these damage episodes are far from random. They only occur when the bird is transiting from the highly charged polar regions into the mid-latitudes.”

This news put General Wessler right off his feed. Wessler started fiddling nervously with the track-wheel in his mouse. “So, what do you mean to say? That it’s surface-charging? That there’s an arc discharge?”

“Well, that’s part of it,” Van said. “I had to look at SD-SURF.”

“Space Debris-Surfaces, yes, we ran that diagnostic almost a year ago.”

“Yeah, you always run that program,” Van told him. “But SD-SURF was written in FORTRAN way back in 1983. So SD-SURF treats the spacecraft’s surface contours as a faceted geometry. That simulation’s not entirely accurate, because you get these peaks and waves of flux and probability surfaces that are artifacts produced by granularity in the model. That’s due to the way the subroutine interrogates the ballistic limit surface . . .” Van’s voice trailed off. Hickok and Wessler were both staring at him blankly. He had completely lost them.

Van cleared his dry throat. “So, anyway, I rewrote SD-SURF and sent it to some friends of mine over at NCAR.”

“Do you mean NCAR up in Boulder? Those Atmospheric Research guys?”

“Yeah. Yes, sir.”

“But NCAR is a civilian agency! They’re not cleared for any of this at all!”

“SD-SURF is not a secret. SD-SURF is public domain. It’s free for download off a NASA Web site.”

Wessler made a quick note on a Post-it. “We’ll have to see about that right away.”

“So, uhm, I had NCAR run my improved version of SD-SURF on their weather-simulation supercomputers. And while I was at it, I also had them search their files for space weather. Solar discharges, photoelectron flux, the works. Everything.”

Wessler narrowed his eyes. “Oh, ho.”

“There was no correlation,” Van said. “Not at first. To maintain my confidentiality, I told my friend at NCAR to search
everything.
So he also ran through all of NOAA’s
conventional
weather records. And there, a strong correlation turned up. There is a direct relationship between these, uh, damage episodes and storm fronts moving across the western USA.”

“You mean the weather on the ground.”

Van nodded. He hated talking this much. It was making his head ache.

“Dr. Vandeveer, can I remind you of something? That bird is two hundred fifty miles up!”

“I know that, General. But there’s a lot we don’t know about the upper thermosphere. My friend at NCAR put me in touch with a friend of his at NOAA who’s a world expert on sprites and elves.”

Wessler tugged at his ear. “ ‘Elves’?”

“Sprites and elves. Sprites and elves are huge discharges from the tops of thunderclouds,” Van said.

“Nothing like lightning. They go
up.
They are very big. Colossal. The Shuttle has photographed them from orbit.” Van paused. “Show him those elf and sprite pics, Mike.”

As Hickok busied himself unlatching the case from his wrist, Van forced a swallow of Pepsi. It tasted even worse than he remembered.

Wessler examined the set of glossy NASA printouts. “So, Dr. Vandeveer, you’re telling me my satellite was attacked by elves.”

“That’s just one hypothesis,” Van said. “But I can tell you, as a fact, that there has never been a damage episode that wasn’t correlated with a storm front. When I searched those storm records, that’s when I realized that there haven’t been just four episodes, as your reports say. There were seven episodes, including three weaker storms with three much weaker attacks. The very worst came with the most violent storm last winter. December 17. Those onboard power anomalies.”

“That was really bad,” Wessler said gloomily. “We really thought we’d lost her that time.” The elf pictures had shaken Wessler. Van had felt the very same way when he had seen them. It was truly bizarre to realize that the Earth’s upper atmosphere had some gigantic blistering explosions that no one but pilots and astronauts ever saw. Sprites and elves, “Transient Discharge Phenomena.” Sprites and elves sounded almost crazier than UFOs, but they were very real. Every bit as real as the northern lights.

“That December event,” Van said. “Some very similar power surges happened to the Hubble, before the Shuttle crew fixed its Kapton sleeves. The power surges mean that the solar panels were vibrating on their bistems.” Van bucked his hands back and forth. “It means that something almost tore the wings off your spacecraft.”

Van put his Pepsi down. He felt drained. But Wessler had a face like a cross-examining attorney. “We used to have those ‘episodes,’ as you say. But now we have ongoing operational anomalies. What do you make of that?”

Van could handle that question. “That’s BUMPER, your space-junk debris collision program. I looked at BUMPER, too. BUMPER has an unexamined assumption in its design specs. BUMPER assumes that debris cannot intercept a spacecraft from more than ten degrees above or below a plane tangent to the Earth normal.”

Wessler scratched the back of his neck. “Of course. Otherwise that debris would fall right into the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up immediately.”

“No,” said Van. “Not if the debris were coming
off of the spacecraft itself.
Not big chunks of space junk, not yet. But a fine haze of debris. Ionized. Ablated. Particles and ejecta from violent surface shocks. You would get a dielectric constant on the spacecraft that would reattract those contaminants and precipitate them onto specific areas of the hull.”

“You see, it’s just like a microwave oven, sir,” Hickok broke in helpfully. “You can’t ever get smoke in outer space because there’s no air up there, but if it got blasted by an elf or sprite or like that, then there would be gas and dust. Kinda like a hot cloud of grease.”

“I know what the man’s talking about,” Wessler said tautly.

Hickok shrugged. “Well then, you sure got me beat.”

“I understand it, but there’s no reason for me to believe it,” Wessler said. “Why do I have to believe in elves, all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know,” Van said. “There wasn’t time to fully examine that question. But I do have a working fix for your satellite’s problem.”

“This is where Dr. Vandeveer and I part company, sir,” Hickok said eagerly. “Because I
do
know! And it’s no damn little elves, either. We are
under attack,
sir! This is
spacewar
!”

“What?” said Wessler. “How? Who? The Russians?”

“Well, why not the Russians?” said Hickok. “I’ve met some Russians, sir. I know they’re up for anything.”

“The Russians can’t launch anything at us! I have personally seen their space centers. The Russian space centers are totally broke! They can’t pay their own power bills.”

Hickok bored in. “The Red Chinese are building rockets, sir! They can lift big payloads! I reckon they’re sandbagging us.”

Wessler raised his brows. “What do you make of that concept, Dr. Vandeveer?”

“I don’t believe in sandbagging attacks,” Van said. “Sand is not an effective space weapon. Fine debris like sand would ionize quickly, then it would fall out of orbit. Besides, a cloud of sand from a Chinese rocket would injure other spacecraft, and we haven’t seen any signs of that.” Van pulled at his beard.

“Have we seen other signs of that, General?”

Wessler closed his lips tightly. He had nothing to offer on that topic. Van tried to smile at him. “Let’s all be reasonable here. We don’t have to bring any elves, UFOs, or Communists into this.” He cleared his throat. “Let’s just say . . . cause or causes unknown. Then we can focus on patching this problem you have.”

Wessler’s face set like stone. Van knew that it was time to move right along in a hurry. “Can you help me with my case here, Mike?”

Hickok opened the cork-lined instrument box. Van removed the extra foam-rubber padding. He was very relieved to see that his breadboarding had survived the rough trip from Washington. Van had had to leave his grandfather’s big solder gun back inside Hickok’s Humvee. Van had gotten so used to using the ray gun for work that he didn’t think he could manage any more with a normal soldering tool. Van sensed that this demonstration was his last chance. “Like I said, about that space dust,” he said.

“I’ve got a friend in Los Alamos National Lab who models particle action in dielectric fields.”

“You seem to have a whole lot of unnamed friends, Dr. Vandeveer.”

Van’s temper sharpened. “General, in the President’s National Security Council, we don’t exactly lack for helpful contacts.”

Wessler heaved aside a stack of folders on his desk to make extra room for Van’s box. “Please. Do help yourself.”

Van took a deep breath. “Ionized dust seeks equilibrium, to balance that electric charge. So the dust will settle wherever the fields on the spacecraft guide it.” Van removed an extremely secret printout from the case. He ran his finger across the schematics. “That means you’re getting a cloud of filth on the KH-13’s sensor booms, the edges of the chassis, and especially right about here. This highly charged area, just at the rim of the Mylar insulation. There’s a big component there, under the skin of the hull. It’s an MIL-STD-1541, Taiwanese capacitor. Just like this component in this case.”

Wessler gazed into the box. “Where did you get that thing?”

“They’re pretty standard. My secretary bought it off eBay.” Van sighed. “Ideally, I would have liked three milspec control-CDUs in this experiment as well, but that is way beyond my salary.” Van touched a switch. “Okay, General, I think we’re ready to roll now. I want you to watch this voltmeter here. Mike, fire the model up.”

Hickok put his hand to a gray plastic crank. There was a faint crackle.

“See that needle bouncing?” Van said. “Now look at these SEU records. Bang, bang, beat, beat, blip. Same series, same surges, same rates of decline. That’s it, General. This is your bug, that’s your ongoing operational anomaly. It’s a hardware glitch, and it’s in this capacitor. It’s got so much dirt on top of it that it is overheating.”

“You’re telling me there’s too much dirt on it,” Wessler said. “But you can’t tell me
why
there is any dust in the first place.”

“No, sir, I can’t tell you that. But I can tell you how to fix it. You need to spin the spacecraft.”

“Spin it,” said Wessler.

“Spin it on the longitudinal axis. That’ll fling the loose dust off, and whenever these, uh, episodes happen again . . . well, spinning will spread the stresses evenly across the whole spacecraft. So you won’t get that pitting, that, uhm, that sputtering . . .” Van was losing it. Those words he’d just said, “ongoing operational anomaly.” That was a regular tongue twister. “You tell him, Mike.”

“The bird spins like a chicken on a spit, sir. Won’t blacken all on one side, turns golden brown, like.”