Authors: David DeBatto
“Got your message, David,” LeDoux said. “I hope you weren’t too hard on the colonel here. I had to get permission to read
you on to this mission separately, because that’s how sensitive this is. I also have to warn you—I had to put the PowerPoint
together myself because nobody in tech support has the clearance to do it for me. It should be glitch-free, but you never
know. Apologies in advance.”
He lowered the lights, as a cue on the flat screen monitor mounted on the wall asked for a password.
“Why don’t you tell us your concerns first?” LeDoux said as he typed in his ID code. “What exactly brings you back to Washington?”
“It just doesn’t take that much intuition to know when I’m being bullshitted,” DeLuca said. “When people start contradicting
each other or offering me answers to questions I haven’t asked yet, to lead me in a certain direction, or they know I’m coming
before I get there—I start to get a sense I’m being given a cover story. They give me this elaborate explanation for why they
don’t know what information Cheryl Escavedo took, which sounds plausible, I suppose, but they don’t offer me a thing about
what she was working on the day or the week it happened, when I know they’ve got that in the duty logs. My gut tells me this
is a whistleblower event and not espionage. Whistleblowers who are conscientious—and I have every indication that Escavedo
was a conscientious soldier—usually go through channels first before they take things into their own hands. I get nothing
on that. Everyone is acting like this happened out of the blue for no reason. That’s not how things happen. There’s a lid
on. And then, in a matter of a few days, I find out two other people are missing, and I can’t even start to tell you why—maybe
it’s nothing, but how often do three people, connected to the same event, go missing in the same week?”
“What other two?” LeDoux asked.
“Escavedo’s roommate,” DeLuca said, “and apparently a girl, in a cult that Escavedo was trying to contact.”
“A cult?”
“Don’t ask,” DeLuca said. “It’s probably unrelated, but it’s something I have to look at to make sure. Apparently Escavedo
tried to contact them. The bottom line is, I’m going to need more people.”
“You’re calling in your team?” LeDoux asked.
“We’re meeting tonight in Albuquerque,” DeLuca said. “I’m trying not to be a pain in the ass, Phil, but when I took the mission
with Team Red, I had the impression I was going to be given what I need. I can’t do my work with my hands tied and a blindfold
over my eyes. That’s good enough for magician’s assistants, but it doesn’t work for CI.”
“Okay then,” LeDoux said. “Fair enough. Colonel Oswald, why don’t you give us a little background.”
“I’m going to walk you through some basic history,” Oswald said. “I want this to be understood in context. I’m sure you know
a lot of this already, but bear with me.”
Words came up on the screen:
1981 SDI
1982 Russian test ASAT
1985 Congressional test ban/COIL
1988 MHV canceled
1989 KE-ASAT
1997 MIRACL/LPCL
1998 KE-ASAT minus $37mil/SBLRD
2000 $7mil
2001 $3mil
WTC
2002 SBL-IFX
2004 THEL/BRILLIANT PEBBLES
“I’ll try to be brief,” Oswald said. “I’m not going to talk about strictly surveillance birds, because that’s National Reconnaissance
Office and not STRATCOM. You know about President Reagan’s Space Defense Initiative, SDI, the so-called ‘Star Wars’ program.
In 1982, in response, the Russians tested a high explosive shrapnel-based antisatellite weapon, an SS-9 booster that detonated
at fourteen hundred miles. Sort of a warning shot, I guess. Most of our milsats were higher than that, and only nine out of
twenty Russian tests were successful, but that said, it was an operational system.”
He clicked his mouse, and a new screen appeared.
“In 1985, a Democratic Congress bans testing antisatellite weapons for fear of sparking a new arms race. That doesn’t mean
we can’t test antiballistic missile weapons, and that includes the Chemical Oxygen-Iodine Laser, from TRW and Lockheed-Martin,
with a wavelength that can penetrate atmosphere, but it needs a 6.6-second dwell at ten kilojoules to produce enough energy
to pierce a missile casing, and of course there are other problems with target acquisition and tracking—basically missile
tails and nose cones are already hardened against heat, so the only way to take out a missile with a laser, to this point,
is to hit the fuel tanks. The point is, antisatellite research continues, disguised as antimissile work.”
He clicked again.
“Nineteen eighty-eight. MHV stands for Miniature Homing Vehicle, which is a two-stage missile fired from an F-15, a $1.6-billion
Air Force program that gets killed, at which time the Army pushes forward with a KE-ASAT program, a rocket-launched kinetic
energy satellite, which is basically an orbiting bomb that we could fly up next to a Russian satellite and blow it up. Funding
for KE-ASAT peaks in 1991 at $91 million and declines under Clinton. Secretary of Defense Cohen says he wants capabilities
that are temporary and reversible, meaning he wants to blind or jam instead of destroy, pursuant to the argument that a fully
blinded nuclear foe is more dangerous than a sighted one.”
He clicked. DeLuca saw the image of a large white building, in a desert setting, with the word
MIRACL
beneath it.
“October 1997, the Army tests a Mid-Infra-Red Advanced Chemical Laser from a test bed in White Sands, challenging the vulnerability
of our own satellites, supposedly, but the offensive capabilities of a ground-based laser are obvious, as are the limitations.
The technology is hydrogen-fluoride, which is an improvement over oxygen-iodine, but the thing is huge and requires tons of
fuel. There’s talk of mounting them on river barges. We also test an LPCL, a Low-Powered Chemical Laser, thirty watts, but
it’s enough to blind. Meanwhile the kinetic stuff is getting hammered in Congress. Clinton uses a line-item veto to wipe $37.5
million from the KE-ASAT budget in 1998. At the same time, Boeing/TRW wins a contract to build a Space-Based Laser Readiness
Demonstrator, the SBLRD, to use laser technology to destroy missiles in booster phase from space. The schedule is for a 2008
launch or 2005 accelerated, depending on funding. Kinetics continues to be defunded, with only seven and a half mil in 2000
and three million in 2001. Then comes 9/11.”
The colonel clicked again. On the screen, the image of a large satellite.
“SBL-IFX is what SBLRD turns into, Space-Based Laser Integrated Flight Experiment. Funding isn’t a problem after 9/11. Also
hydrogen-fluoride, which is nice in space because it reabsorbs waste heat, but the bird is still something of a battleship,
42,000 pounds with a 2.8-meter beam that kills down to 40,000 feet, with a 5,000-kilometer range. But cruise missiles fly
considerably lower than 40,000 feet, and there are 7,500 of them already deployed with nuclear warheads, and we have no confidence
that we’re going to keep these out of the hands of terrorists and rogue governments forever.”
Colonel Oswald took a drink of water, then clicked again. DeLuca saw a picture of what appeared to be a truck-mounted antiaircraft
cannon, except that the cannon didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen before.
“Some think, at this point, that THEL is the answer. Tactical High-Energy Laser, developed as part of the Nautilus program
with the Israelis, who didn’t much care for defending themselves with plastic sheeting and duct tape while SCUDS were falling
on their heads during Gulf One. The original THEL is megawatt class continuous wave deuterium-fluoride, like MIRACL, but it
has to be made compact and mobile enough to be deployed in theater. Hughes Aircraft builds the tracking system and the rest
is Lockheed-Martin/Boeing/TRW. We get a beam out of a five-inch gun turret with 350 degrees of motion, capable of acquiring
targets as close as 450 meters. We’re getting $170 million U.S. annually, mostly going to Northrop-Grumman and Ball Aerospace
for miniaturization, and $80 million from the Israelis, paid to Rehovot Air and Yehud Industrial. In the year 2000, the MTHEL,
a mobile THEL, tests and takes down twenty-three out of twenty-four Katyusha rockets—this is again at White Sands. Last summer
the thing was knocking mortar rounds out of the sky with a 97 percent batting average. Artillery shells, SAM-7s—it’s unbelievable,
really. Fantastic fire control. We’re not far at all from having a fully effective tactical defensive shield. I can’t tell
you how happy that makes the Israelis. We have three Humvee-mounted THELs in Iraq at present, hunting IEDs.We’re probably
looking at V-22 tilt-rotor and CH-47 Chinook and Bradley-mounted battlefield THELs by 2006, deployed out of C-130s, and possibly
shoulder-fired by 2008. At which point the limitations become more human than technological.”
“Meaning?” DeLuca asked, though he knew the answer.
“Meaning, how much discretionary power do you really want to give to any one individual?” Phil LeDoux said. “It’s not just
a defensive weapon. If you think we were worried about Stingers getting into the wrong hands, THEL makes the Stinger look
like a popgun. There wouldn’t be a commercial flight in the world that would be safe. We’re not even sure we want our own
soldiers in the field to have that much power, because all it would take would be to have one guy have a very bad day and
you’d probably kill the whole program.”
“And Cheryl Escavedo was working with the THEL program?”
LeDoux shook his head.
“This is just the background,” LeDoux said. “What’s sensitive here is what was black-budgeted. Nobody really stopped researching
antisatellite weapons in 1985—some pretended to be ABM programs and the rest went from white to black. Without getting into
specifics, what you need to keep in focus is the degree to which technology has increased its capacity while reducing its
size. I had a Kaypro 10 portable computer in 1985 that weighed almost one hundred pounds and had enough memory to store thirty
pages of text, and I think I paid three thousand dollars for it. Today there’s more technology in the little pieces of plastic
crap they give away in McDonald’s Happy Meals. So, smaller and smaller, and more and more powerful.”
“Nuclear-powered satellites?”
“Oh, yeah,” LeDoux said. “But the problem with satellites is how vulnerable they are—they get wiped out by solar flares, let
alone by ASAT systems. Thermal management is critical to their design—internal temperatures have to be maintained within a
very narrow range, and they’re not designed to redistribute heat. Most have a lethal radiance of ten watts per square centimeter,
plus they don’t maneuver, so ASAT-SBLs could take their time knocking them out. We’ve been armoring our own birds in a variety
of ways ever since DOD directive TS.3100a, but we’re still vulnerable. So, what’s the best way to hide a satellite?”
“Make it invisible?” DeLuca guessed.
“You got it,” LeDoux said, clicking on his mouse. The word at the top of the screen read “DARKSTAR,” and beneath it, a photograph
of a man standing next to what looked like a large black flashlight, a canister about five feet long and two feet in diameter.
LeDoux allowed DeLuca a few moments to absorb the image.
“The nickname is ‘Deathstar,’” Oswald said. “It’s a good thing George Lucas doesn’t sue us for copyright infringement. This
is an early prototype, by the way, about ten years old. The new ones are smaller. Darkstar is a fully cloaked satellite, using
the same Stealth technology we use to hide our Stealth fighters and our Stealth bombers, more effectively, actually, since
in space you don’t have to allow for aerodynamics. NRO was working with the CIA on Stealth birds at a clip of about $9 billion
a year, classified as ‘Misty,’ mostly Lockheed-Martin, and Darkstar was piggybacked on a black program. It’s a tunable microwave
infrared laser with a two-thousand-megawatt capacity. Minneapolis-St. Paul draws about two thousand megawatts. The problem
with atmospherics has been something Space Command has been working on for years. The longer the wavelength, the more atmosphere
you can penetrate but the more power you need to push it through. Darkstar was designed as both an ASAT and an ABM weapon,
and finally, to perform all the same functions as THEL. It puts it all together. Fully maneuverable, and small enough that
you can launch it to geosynchronous with as little as a Delta II platform, though that far out, you start to lose range even
at two thousand megawatts. At geotransfer orbit, the dwell is in microseconds for even hardened targets like cruise missiles
flying at twenty or thirty meters above the ground. Radar exposure increases only .07 percent when it reconfigures and essentially
decloaks to fire, and it’s coated in heat-and light-absorbent materials. In other words, no one is going to see this thing
unless we want them to see it. The only way would be to be looking in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, but
without being able to track it, it can’t really be done.”
“Wait a minute,” DeLuca said. “This thing can shoot down cruise missiles?”
“That’s right,” Colonel Oswald said.
“Thirty meters above the ground?” DeLuca said. “What’s to stop it from taking out ground targets? They don’t even move.”
Colonel Oswald and Phil LeDoux exchanged glances.
“Where space defense is concerned,” Oswald said, “there’s what we can do, and there’s what the enemy thinks we can do. And
it’s always been a delicate balance. It’s game theory, but it’s played for real. We don’t want our enemies knowing what we
can do, any more than we want them knowing what we can’t. We want them to think we’re stronger than we really are, because
that creates deterrence, but we don’t want them to think we’re so strong that they have to act to defend themselves, because
that generates aggression. That’s why this is sensitive—if word of Darkstar were to get out, the first thing the media would
start talking about is death rays. Is it a death ray? Yes, actually, it is. It’s a tunable beam, so it can do anything from
start a campfire to obliterate a building or an underground bunker to, perhaps, destroy a city.”