"Clancy, Tom - Jack Ryan 03 - The Cardinal of the Kremlin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clancy Tom)

"AOS!" someone announced behind them. "We have signal."
' "Goggles!" The call came over the metal speakers. "Everyone put on their eye-protection."
Jack blew on his hands before taking the plastic goggles from his pocket. He'd been told to stash them there to keep them warm. They were still cold enough on his face that he noticed the difference. Once in place, however, Ryan was effectively blinded. The stars and moon were gone.
"Tracking! We have lock. Discovery has established the downlink. All systems are nominal."
"Target acquisition!" another voice announced. "Initiate interrogation sequencing . . . first target is locked . . . auto firing circuits enabled."
There was no sound to indicate what had happened. Ryan didn't see anythingЧor did I? he asked himself. There had been the fleeting impression of ... what? Did I imagine it? Next to him he felt the Major's breath come out slowly.
"Exercise concluded," the speaker said. Jack tore off his goggles.
"That's all?" What had he just seen? What had they just done? Was he so far out of date that even after being briefed he didn't understand what was happening before his eyes? I- "The laser light is almost impossible to see," Major Greg-I ory explained. "This high up, there isn't much dust or hu-1 midity in the air to reflect it."
"Then why the goggles?"
The young officer smiled as he took his off. "Well, if a bird flies over at the wrong time, the impact might be, well, kind of spectacular. That could hurt your eyes some."
Two hundred miles over their heads, Discovery continued toward the horizon. The shuttle would stay in orbit another three days, conducting its "routine scientific mission," mainly oceanographical studies this time, the press was told, something secret for the Navy. The papers had been speculating on the mission for weeks. It had something to do, they said, with tracking missile submarines from orbit. There was no better way to keep a secret than to use another "secret" to
rceal it. Every time someone asked about the mission, a 'y public-affairs officer would do the "no comments." Did it work?" Jack asked. He looked up, but he couldn't
-I*. .Д..-
pick out the dot of light that denoted the billion-dollar space
plane.
"We have to see." The Major turned and walked to the I camouflage-painted truck van parked a few yards away. The j three-star General followed him, with Ryan trailing behind.
Inside the van, where the temperature might have been merely at freezing, a chief warrant officer was rewinding a] videotape. 1
"Where were the targets?" Jack asked. "That wasn't in the!
briefing papers." I "About forty-five south, thirty west," the General replied. Major Gregory was perched in front of the TV screen. 1 "That's around the Falklands, isn't it? Why there?" I "Closer to South Georgia, actually," the General replied.! "It's a nice, quiet, out-of-the-way sort of place, and the dis-1 tance is about right." 1 And the Soviets had no known intelligence-gathering assets! within three thousand miles, Ryan knew. The Tea Clipper! test had been timed precisely for a moment when all Soviet! spy satellites were under the visible horizon. Finally, the!
(shooting distance was exactly the same as the distance to the! Soviet ballistic missile fields arrayed along the country's maul east-west railway. I "Ready!" the warrant officer said. r The video picture wasn't all that great, taken from sea level! specifically the deck of the Observation Island, a rangej instrumentation ship returning from Trident missile tests ii the Indian Ocean. Next to the first TV screen was another! This one showed the picture from the ship's "Cobra Judyj missile-tracking radar. Both screens showed four objects spaced in a slightly uneven line. A timer box in the Iowa right-hand corner was changing numbers as though in an A pine ski race, with three digits to the right of the decim
point. "Hit!" One of the dots disappeared in a puff of green ligtt
"Miss!" Another one didn't.
"Miss!" Jack frowned. He'd half-expected to see the bean of light streaking through the sky, but that happened onl] movies. There wasn't enough dust in space to denote
energy's path.
"Hit!" A second dot vanished. "Hit!" Only one was left.
"Miss."
"Miss." The last one didn't want to die, Ryan thought.
"Hit!" But it did. "Total elapsed time, one point eight-zero-six seconds."
"Fifty percent," Major Gregory said quietly. "And it corrected itself." The young officer nodded slowly. He managed to keep from smiling, except around the eyes. "It works."
"How big were the targets?" Ryan asked.
"Three meters. Spherical balloons, of course." Gregory was rapidly losing control. He looked like a kid whom Christmas had taken by surprise.
"Same diameter as an SS-18."
"Something like that." The General answered that one.
"Where's the other mirror?"
"Ten thousand kilometers up, currently over Ascension Island. Officially it's a weather satellite that never made its proper orbit." The General smiled.
"I didn't know you could send it that far."
Major Gregory actually giggled. "Neither did we."
"So you sent the beam from over there to the shuttle's mirror, from Discovery to this other one over the equator, and from there to the targets?" i "Correct," the General said.
"Your targeting system is on the other satellite, then?"
"Yes," the General answered more grudgingly.
Jack did some numbers in his head. "Okay, that means you can discriminate a three-meter target at ... ten thousand kilometers. I didn't know we could do that. How do we?"
"You don't need to know," the General replied coldly.
"You had four hits and four missesЧeight shots in under two seconds, and the Major said the targeting system corrected for misses. Okay, if those had been SS-18s launched roff of South Georgia, would the shots have killed them?"
"Probably not," Gregory admitted. "The laser assembly only puts out five megajoules. Do you know what a joule is?"
"I checked my college phyzzies book before I flew down.
A joule is one newton-meter per second, or zero-point-seven
foot-pounds of energy, plus change, right? Okay, a megajoule
-.t is a million of them . . . seven hundred thousand foot-pounds.
In terms I can understandЧ"
"A megajoule is the rough equivalent of a stick of dyna-