Chapter 3
The world-famous Situation Room at the White House was actually a collection of several conference rooms, all connected to the world through high-tech communication nodes and guarded by security stations that were manned twenty-four hours a day.
Kurt had been in the room before, but never during a rushed gathering like this one.
He was cleared into the main room at Sandecker’s insistence and given a place against the wall to stand.
The seats were already taken by important members of the administration and enough military brass to form a marching band.
As Kurt leaned against the wall, Sandecker made his way over to the President, who was speaking with a three-star Air Force general and the Secretary of Defense. All three men looked positively ill.
Turning his attention to the late arrivals streaming in, Kurt noticed a distinct difference in clothing.
Unlike the first group, who had come from the party in tuxedos and thousand-dollar suits, this crew was showing up in casual clothing.
Khakis and polos. Jeans and sweaters. Whatever they’d been wearing at home or could throw on quickly.
The President’s chief of staff—who was no friend of Sandecker’s, as Kurt recalled—rushed in wearing a tracksuit. He’d been jogging on a treadmill at the White House gym when the call came in.
All things considered, Kurt figured it was time to get rid of the bow tie. He pulled it off and unbuttoned his collar. A feeling of relief swept over him.
The doors closed and the lights went down. Everyone fell silent as the three-star general from the Air Force stepped to the front.
“This is the Eagle,” he said, pointing to the image of the modified C-17 that had appeared on screens around the room.
“E-A-G-L,” he continued, breaking the acronym down.
“The Enhanced Aerial Gunnery Laser. It’s the most powerful directed-energy system in the world by a factor of ten.
Each pulse it generates carries enough energy to burn through a panel of aircraft-grade aluminum in less than a hundredth of a second.
Linked with the AQX-9 radar, which is mounted below the C-17’s airframe, it can hit a target the size of a refrigerator at a range of five hundred miles.
It was in the process of being tested over the Arctic when something went wrong. ”
“A failure?” someone asked.
“Unfortunately not,” the general explained. “The aircraft has been hijacked.”
Very few statements elicited shock in this room.
The people in it were no storm-shy greenhorns, and they understood that a rushed meeting in the Situation Room would only happen if something had gone terribly wrong, but the audience was startled to hear the term hijacking used in conjunction with a top secret project.
“How?” someone asked. “By whom?”
“We’re looking into that now,” the general admitted. “The more pressing issue is figuring out where the plane went and where it might be now.”
“Weren’t you tracking it?” someone else asked.
“Of course,” the general said. “But the hijackers knew this and immediately disabled the onboard tracking systems. They then used the active laser to shoot down both F-35 chase planes and an E-6 AWACS radar plane that was monitoring the test from approximately a hundred miles away. When the E-6 went down our primary coverage was lost. Shortly thereafter they descended to the deck, dropping below our land-based radar coverage. We managed to follow it for a short time by monitoring emissions from the AN/APN 241, which stood out like a man carrying a flashlight in a dark and empty field. But when the hijackers turned the radar off, they disappeared.”
“Where were they at that moment?”
“Out over the Arctic Sea, on a heading that would take it directly to Murmansk, Russia.”
“Russia?” the President’s chief of staff exclaimed. “Good gravy, man. Why the hell didn’t you intercept it?”
“With all due respect,” the general insisted, “the attempt would have been futile or worse.”
The chief of staff didn’t back down. “We have hundreds of frontline aircraft based in northern Europe, do we not?”
“And we could have launched them all,” the general insisted, “only to see them shot out of the sky long before a single plane got within miles of firing a missile.”
“You can’t be serious,” a member of the National Security Council suggested.
“I’m deadly serious,” the general grunted.
“Taking out large numbers of fast-moving targets at long range is exactly what this aircraft was designed for. The laser can destroy any mechanical object in a line of sight. It can hit low-flying aircraft down across the horizon at incredible range. It can hit high-flying aircraft at even greater distances. It can hit ballistic missiles traveling twenty-five thousand miles an hour from half a continent away.”
Kurt noticed a newfound silence in the crowd. A showing of respect. He himself was surprised to hear about such a weapon.
“At the time of the hijacking,” the general continued, “we had approximately three hundred fighter aircraft available for launch in the theater. The best of which can reach a top speed of fifteen hundred miles per hour. That means with afterburners full open and traveling in a straight line, the nearest squadron would have been exposed to laser fire for a full thirty minutes before they brought the EAGL in range of their longest-legged missiles. Thirty minutes of exposure to a weapon that can obliterate an aircraft in a fraction of a second is an absolute eternity. It would be nothing but suicide for the pilots.”
“What about encircling it, coming at it from all sides at the same time?” someone asked.
“The laser is aimed using mirrors,” the general explained.
“There are no moving turrets, no shells to load, no delays in triggering the next burst. It can be trained on one target, fired, and then refocused on another target in a fraction of a second. It can discharge ninety pulses per minute without overheating or overdrawing its onboard power source. And unlike physical weapons, which are limited by the number of rounds carried in their magazines, the laser on board the EAGL never runs out of ammunition. Once powered up, it can destroy an almost unlimited number of targets during a single mission.”
The general turned back to the chief of staff.
“A mad scramble to intercept the aircraft might have cost us our entire fighter capacity in northern Europe, while almost certainly proving futile and quite possibly provoking a war. I ask you to imagine the Russian response when we scramble all our frontline aircraft and send them toward Russian airspace at maximum speed with no explanation.”
The news was sobering. No one liked what they were hearing, but it was hard to argue with the logic. Silence descended over the room.
Finally, the President spoke. The EAGL had been his pet project for three solid years. For it to end like this was almost too much to take. “Is there anything to suggest the EAGL isn’t in Russia at this point?”
The question was addressed to the general and more broadly to the room. The general deferred and the rest of the room became a sea of murmurs, filled with eyes and faces looking anywhere but at the President.
The head of the National Security Council sighed and shook his head, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency looked down at the computer in front of him as if he’d find the truth somewhere on the screen. But no one met the President’s gaze to offer an answer.
Kurt found that surprising. He thought the answer was obvious. And he felt the President deserved a reply.
He stepped forward. “Based on what’s been presented here,” he began, “I’d say there’s less than a five percent chance the aircraft is in Russia. And then only if the pilot got lost and wound up there by mistake.”
A smattering of laughter and surprise emerged in the wake of Kurt’s statement. A few derisive comments came from dark corners of the room, but the President silenced everyone by raising his hand.
The President was a tall man who loomed over others, even sitting down. As he looked up over the crowd trying to find the voice crying in the wilderness, the defeated aura around him seemed to vanish.
“And you are?” the President asked.
“Kurt Austin. NUMA special projects.”
Hearing this, the chief of staff turned to Sandecker.
There was an undeclared war between them regarding who was the President’s most important advisor.
It usually presented itself in a cordial manner but occasionally flared into snide comments from the chief and gruff bluster from Sandecker.
“One of your people,” the chief said. “Care to tell us what he’s doing here and what he’s talking about? ”
Sandecker offered an unflinching poker face; he looked composed, even though he’d never expected Kurt to jump into the fray, certainly not with a comment like the one he’d just offered.
“Considering the possibility that the EAGL or the wrecked F-35s would need to be recovered from frigid Arctic waters, I thought it would behoove us to have a salvage expert here. One who has actually pulled things off the bottom of the ocean. As for what he’s talking about”—Sandecker paused and looked Kurt’s way—“I’ve always believed in letting my people elaborate on their own thoughts.
Kurt,” he said, using a tone that suggested This better be good, “Why don’t you enlighten us? ”