"But what about—"
"Ann, you can believe me or not, but I'm telling you I will not cancel Skybolt."
Okay, okay, she thought. Better not press him any further. In fact, better try to cool it. She had to live with these guys. And, when you thought about it, her future was in Saint-Michael's hands…
CHAPTER 10
"Dammit, Cogley," Captain Matthew Page said, "I don't want copies of Nimitz's transcript of the satellite messages. Takes an extra half-hour for them to relay the messages to you and for Comm to type them out nice and pretty. Half of Asia could get blown up in a half-hour. We've got our own FLEETSAT terminal; I want copies of the transmissions from that." Cogley nodded and turned but Page grabbed his arm. "Cogley, give me those messages you have. It's better than nothing. Tell Comm I want updates every half-hour."
Cogley scurried away and returned a few moments later to fill Page's coffee cup. "Thanks. Now tell Comm to start earning their salaries or I'll keel-haul them." Cogley disappeared.
Page took a sip of coffee, looked skyward. "See that, Ann?" he said, half-aloud. "I call him other things besides 'Dammit Cogley'."
It was the first time he had thought of his daughter since leaving Oakland, and the realization hurt him. My daughter, the astronaut. She had been on the evening news half a dozen times and in the newspapers constantly. A laser expert. Smarter, more famous, better paid and certainly better looking than her old man.
He felt a lurch from an errant wave and his eyes quickly scanned the digital inertial sea-motion gauges and the computerized compensating equipment on the master bridge-console. All functioning normally. The Arabian Sea could be a wild place sometimes — even without the interference of other people's navies.
At least Ann didn't have to deal with twelve-foot waves, he thought. They didn't have waves in space. He remembered reading about a "solar wind" powerful enough to move huge space stations, and micrometeorites that could slice through steel. It sounded much more dangerous than the sea.
He had always wanted to ask his daughter about things like the solar wind and micrometeorites but just never did. Funny — whenever he saw his daughter, he never thought of asking her about lasers, or space, or physics. She was a world-class scientist, one of the nation's best. She could probably write a book about the solar wind. But whenever he saw her, she was his daughter-nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.
You're an old idiot, Page told himself. You've never let her know how proud you are of her, how happy you are about her success. You see her maybe twice a year and then it's always "get me a beer" or "help your mother" or "when are you going to come down to earth — joke — and crank out some grandkids?"
He went out onto the catwalk and took in the clean, crisp salt breeze and the sounds of waves crashing against the bow of his eleven-thousand-ton guided-missile cruiser. Off in the distance he could just make out the massive outline of the Nimitz as it launched another pair of F/A-18D fighters on a night patrol. The California was positioned as the "goalkeeper," the largest and most powerful ship cruising except for the main carrier in the battle group. The California's eight antiaircraft guided-missile launchers, two 127-millimeter guns, eight Harpoon antiship missile launchers, four 324-millimeter nuclear torpedo tubes and eight ASROC antisubmarine missile launchers were the last layer of protection for the ninety-one-thousand-ton carrier and her thirty-six-hundred crewmembers.
Dammit, he thought, why feel guilty about speaking your mind? Deep down he couldn't help feeling that Ann had no business being on a space station or flying in a contraption like the Space Shuttle. Both were dangerous enough without the Russians screaming about them being a threat, And what was wrong with asking for a few grandchildren? Ann was an only child.
It would be nice to have a few rug rats around after the navy dry-docked him in a few years.
Chief Petty Officer Cogley ran up to him now and held out a computer printout. "Message traffic from the Persian Gulf, sir."
"I'm not asking too much, right, Cogley? But no. She's gotta go off and play spaceman. Big deal."
"Your daughter, sir?"
"What? What about my daughter?" Page snapped himself back to the deck of the California and Cogley wisely decided not to pursue whatever the captain had been muttering about.
"Three point ships from the Brezhnev battle group heading south for the Strait of Hormuz," Cogley read. "Space Command thinks they're exiting the Gulf for an early force rotation. The carrier Brezhnev herself is hanging back for now. We'll be able to wave bye-bye to them as they exit the Gulf of Oman."
For a brief instant Captain Page's mind registered the words "Space Command," but he didn't make the connection and assumed Cogley was referring to the air force. They're all the same, aren't they? he liked to say. "Thanks, Cogley. Keep the reports coming,"
Dark clouds raced across the skies, but Captain Page looked up and stared at the sky as if his daughter Ann could look back down at him. "Well, daughter, for once I'm damn glad you're tucked away up there…"
CHAPTER 11
For the third time that hour General-Lieutenant Alesander Govorov rested a hand near a clear plastic-covered control panel on the master control board. He was careful to double check that the plastic cover was still in place, but he could not prevent his hand from moving toward the three switches recessed beneath the cover. Slowly, almost reverently, he tapped the plastic above the switches and imagined the results.
Switch one: Activation of an electromechanical interlock that absolutely committed a launch and attack on the target selected by the tracking computer. Even if an explosion or massive power failure cut power to the entire launch complex, the Gorgon missile's internal circuitry could still successfully process an attack on the target. Activation of the switch also set off several warning alarms through the antisatellite missile-launch complex and would automatically transmit warning messages to the Space Center headquarters at Baikenour, to the Kremlin, and to several alternate command and control centers throughout the Soviet Union.
Switch two: Fully automatic launch preparation. Final inertial guidance corrections, final target processing, opening of the missile silo's twin steel muzzle shutters, retraction of all service ports, arms, and umbilicals, and preparation of the twin one thousand decaliter chemical reagent vessels for the turbo-powered cold-launch mixing process.
Switch three: Launch commit. The four underground turbopumps would force-mix a sodium carbonate slurry with nitric acid in a large steel vessel under the silo, yielding huge volumes of nitrogen gas in seconds. The reaction vessel would store and compress the gas until the pressure reached one million kilopascals, then force the neutral gas into the silo. The gas would spit the twenty-thousand-kilogram Gorgon missile nearly twenty meters above the silo, where the missile's exhaust gases would not scorch or damage the silo on first-stage motor ignition. In less than fifteen minutes another missile would be hauled in place and made ready for launch.
Govorov could almost see the numbers on the computer monitor displaying the results. A long first-stage burn as the SAS-10 missile plowed through the thick atmosphere. A high-impulse second stage to accelerate the missile to orbital speed. A third-stage orbit-correcting burn, followed by steering burns and thruster course corrections.