Ryan turned to his Chief of Staff. "Okay, Arnie, I'm listening."
"No, I'm the one listening, Jack," van Damm replied. "What are you thinking?"
"I'm thinking I have to talk to the public about this. Press conference, maybe. As far as action goes, I'll start by saying that we have a huge violation of human rights, all the more so that they had the fucking arrogance to do it in front of world opinion. I'll say that America has trouble doing business with people who act in this way, that commercial ties do not justify or cancel out gross violations of the principles on which our country is founded, that we have to reconsider all of our relations with the PRC."
"Not bad," the Chief of Staff observed, with a teacher's smile to a bright pupil. "Check with Scott for other options and ideas."
"Yeah." Jack nodded. "Okay, broader question, how will the country react to this?"
"The initial response will be outrage," Arnie replied. "It looks bad on TV, and that's how most people will respond, from the gut. If the Chinese have the good sense to make some kind of amends, then it'll settle down. If not"-Arnie frowned importantly-"I have a bad feeling. The church groups are going to raise hell. They've offended the Italian and German governments-so our NATO allies are also pissed off at this-and smashing that poor woman's face isn't going to win them any friends in the women's rights movement. This whole business is a colossal loser for them, but I'm not sure they understand the implications of their actions."
"Then they're going to learn, the easy way or the hard way," Goodley suggested to the group.
Dr. Alan Gregory always seemed to stay at the same Marriott overlooking the Potomac, under the air approach to Reagan National Airport. He'd again taken the red-eye in from Los Angeles, a flight which hadn't exactly improved with practice over the years. Arriving, he took a cab to the hotel for a shower and a change of clothes, which would enable him to feel and look vaguely human for his 10:15 with the SecDef. For this at least, he would not need a taxi. Dr. Bretano was sending a car for him. The car duly arrived with an Army staff sergeant driving, and Gregory hopped in the back, to find a newspaper. It took only ten minutes to pull up to the River Entrance, where an Army major waited to escort him through the metal detector and onto the E-ring.
"You know the Secretary?" the officer asked on the way in.
"Oh, yeah, from a short distance, anyway."
He had to wait half a minute in an anteroom, but only half a minute.
"Al, grab a seat. Coffee?"
"Yes, thank you, Dr. Bretano."
"Tony," the SecDef corrected. He wasn't a forma! man most of the time, and he knew the sort of work Gregory was capable of. A Navy steward got coffee for both men, along with croissants and jam, then withdrew. "How was the flight?"
"The red-eye never changes, sir-Tony. If you get off alive, they haven't done it right."
"Yeah, well, one nice thing about this job, I have a G waiting for me all the time. I don't have to walk or drive very much, and you saw the security detail outside."
"The guys with the knuckles dragging on the floor?" Gregory asked.
"Be nice. One of them went to Princeton before he became a SEAL."
That must be the one who reads the comic books to the others, Al didn't observe out loud. "So, Tony, what did you want me here for?"
"You used to work downstairs in SDIO, as I recall."
"Seven years down there, working in the dark with the rest of the mushrooms, and it never really worked out. I was in the free-electron-laser project. It went pretty well, except the damned lasers never scaled up the way we expected, even after we stole what the Russians were doing. They had the best laser guy in the world, by the way. Poor bastard got killed in a rock-climbing accident back in 1990, or that's what we heard in SDIO. He was bashing his head against the same wall our guys were. The 'wiggle chamber,' we called it, where you lase the hot gasses to extract the energy for your beam. We could never get a stable magnetic containment. They tried everything. I helped for nineteen months. There were some really smart guys working that problem, but we all struck out. I think the guys at Princeton will solve the fusion-containment problem before this one. We looked at that, too, but the problems were too different to copy the theoretical solutions. We ended up giving them a lot of our ideas, and they've been putting it to good use. Anyway, the Army made me a lieutenant colonel, and three weeks later, they offered me an early out because they didn't have any more use for me, and so I took the job at TRW that Dr. Flynn offered, and I've been working for you ever since." And so Gregory was getting eighty percent of his twenty-year Army pension, plus half a million a year from TRW as a section leader, with stock options, and one hell of a retirement package.
"Well, Gerry Flynn sings your praises about once a week."
"He's a good man to work for," Gregory replied, with a smile and a nod.
"He says you can do software better than anyone in Sunnyvale."
"For some things. I didn't do the code for 'Doom,' unfortunately, but I'm still your man for adaptive optics."
"How about SAMs?"
Gregory nodded. "I did some of that when I was new in the Army. Then later they had me in to play with Patriot Block-4, you know, intercepting Scuds. I helped out on the warhead software." It had been three days too late to be used in the Persian Gulf War, he didn't add, but his software was now standard on all Patriot missiles in the field.
"Excellent. I want you to look over something for me. It'll be a direct contract for the Office of the Secretary of Defense-me-and Gerry Flynn won't gripe about it."
"What's that, Tony?"
"Find out if the Navy's Aegis system can intercept a ballistic inbound."
"It can. It'll stop a Scud, but that's only Mach three or so. You mean a real ballistic inbound?"
The SecDef nodded. "Yeah, an ICBM."
"There's been talk about that for years…" Gregory sipped his coffee. "The radar system is up to it. May be a slight software issue there, but it would not be a hard one, because you'll be getting raid-warning from other assets, and the SPY radar can see a good five hundred miles, and you can do all sorts of things with it electronically, like blast out seven million watts of RF down half a degree of bearing. That'll fry electronic components out to, oh, seven or eight thousand meters. You'll end up having two-headed kids, and have to buy a new watch.
"Okay," he went on, a slightly spacey look in his eyes. "The way Aegis works, the big SPY radar gives you a rough location for your target-interception, so you can loft your SAMs into a box. That's why Aegis missiles get such great range. They go out on autopilot and only do actual maneuvering for the last few seconds. For that, you have the
SPG radars on the ships, and the seeker-head on the missile tracks in on the reflected RF energy off the target. It’s a killer system against airplanes, because you don't know you're being illuminated until the last couple of seconds, and it's hard to eyeball the missile and evade in so short a time.
"Okay, but for an ICBM, the terminal velocity is way the hell up there, like twenty-five thousand feet per second, like Mach eleven. That means your targeting window is very small… in all dimensions, but especially depth. Also you're talking a fairly hard, robust target. The RV off an ICBM is fairly sturdy, not tissue paper like the boosters are. I'll have to see if the warhead off a SAM will really hurt one of those." The eyes cleared and he looked directly into Bretano's eyes. "Okay, when do I start?"
"Commander Matthews," THUNDER said into his intercom phone. "Dr. Gregory is ready to talk to the Aegis people. Keep me posted, Al" was Bretano's final order.
"You bet."
The Reverend Doctor Hosiah Jackson donned his best robe of black silk, a gift handmade by the ladies of his congregation, the three stripes on the upper arms designating his academic rank. He was in Gerry Patterson's study, and a nice one it was. Outside the white wooden door was his congregation, all of them well-dressed and fairly prosperous white folks, some of whom would be slightly uncomfortable with having a black minister talk to them-Jesus was white, after all (or Jewish, which was almost the same thing). This was a little different, though, because this day they were remembering the life of someone only Gerry Patterson had ever met, a Chinese Baptist named Yu Fa An, whom their minister had called Skip, and whose congregation they had supported and supported generously for years. And so to commemorate the life of a yellow minister, they would sit through the sermon of a black one while their own pastor preached the gospel in a black church. It was a fine gesture on Gerry's part, Hosiah Jackson thought, hoping it wouldn't get him into any trouble with this congregation. There'd be a few out there, their bigoted thoughts invisible behind their self-righteous faces, but, the Reverend Jackson admitted to himself, they'd be tortured souls because of it. Those times had passed. He remembered them better than white Mississippians did because he'd been the one walking in the streets-he'd been arrested seven times during his work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference-and getting his parishioners registered to vote. That had been the real problem with the rednecks. Riding in a municipal bus was no big deal, but voting meant power, real civic power, the ability to elect the people who made the laws which would be enforced on black and white citizens alike, and the rednecks hadn't liked that at all. But times had changed, and now they accepted the inevitable-after it had come to pass-and they'd learned to deal with it, and they'd also learned to vote Republican instead of Democrat, and the amusing part of that to Hosiah Jackson was that his own son Robert was more conservative than these well-dressed rednecks were, and he'd gone pretty far for the son of a colored preacherman in central Mississippi. But it was time. Patterson, like Jackson, had a large mirror on the back of the door so that he could check his appearance on the way out. Yes, he was ready. He looked solemn and authoritative, as the Voice of God was supposed to look.