Sandecker spoke the same way he walked: briskly. “The Air Force lost a couple of planes over the Arctic. One of them is a billion-dollar prototype that shouldn’t be allowed to fall into enemy hands.”
“If it crashed into the sea, there won’t be much left of it,” Kurt said.
“If,” Sandecker agreed. “From the sound of it, hitting the ocean would be the best-case scenario at this point.”
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 termhijackingused 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 andimmediately 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.
