The Bear and the Dragon - By Tom Clancy Page 0,256

hit them, not unlike dropping a pigeon with a shotgun. The trick remained hitting the damned things.

Even if you got close with your interceptor, close won you no cigars. The warhead on a SAM is little different from a shotgun shell. The explosive charge destroys the metal case, converting it into jagged fragments with an initial velocity of about five thousand feet per second. These are ordinarily quite sufficient to rip into the aluminum skin that constitutes the lift and control surfaces of the strength-members of an airplane’s internal framing, turning an aircraft into a ballistic object with no more ability to fly than a bird stripped of its wings.

But hitting one necessitates exploding the warhead far enough from the target that the cone formed of the flying fragments intersects the space occupied by the target. For an aircraft, this is not difficult, but for a missile warhead traveling faster than the explosive-produced fragments, it is—which explained the controversy over the Patriot missiles and the Scuds in 1991.

The gadget telling the SAM warhead where and when to explode is generically called the “fuse.” For most modern missiles, the fusing system is a small, low-powered laser, which “nutates,” or turns in a circle to project its beam in a cone forward of its flight path, until the beam hits and reflects off the target. The reflected beam is received by a receptor in the laser assembly, and that generates the signal telling the warhead to explode. But quick as it is, it takes a finite amount of time, and the inbound RV is coming in very fast. So fast, in fact, that if the laser beam lacks the power for more than, say, a hundred meters of range, there isn’t enough time for the beam to reflect off the RV in time to tell the warhead to explode soon enough to form the cone of destruction to engulf the RV target. Even if the RV is immediately next to the SAM warhead when the warhead explodes, the RV is going faster than the fragments, which cannot hurt it because they can’t catch up.

And there’s the problem, Gregory saw. The laser chip in the Standard Missile’s nose wasn’t very powerful, and the nutation speed was relatively slow, and that combination could allow the RV to slip right past the SAM, maybe as much as half the time, even if the SAM came within three meters of the target, and that was no good at all. They might actually have been better off with the old VT proximity fuse of World War II, which had used a non-directional RF emitter, instead of the new high-tech gallium-arsenide laser chip. But there was room for him to play. The nutation of the laser beam was controlled by computer software, as was the fusing signal. That was something he could fiddle with. To that end, he had to talk to the guys who made it, “it” being the current limited-production test missile, the SM-2-ER-Block-IV, and they were the Standard Missile Company, a joint venture of Raytheon and Hughes, right up the street in McLean, Virginia. To accomplish that, he’d have Tony Bretano call ahead. Why not let them know that their visitor was anointed by God, after all?

My God, Jack,” Mary Pat said. The sun was under the yardarm. Cathy was on her way home from Hopkins, and Jack was in his private study off the Oval Office, sipping a glass of whiskey and ice with the DCI and his wife, the DDO. ”When I saw this, I had to go off to the bathroom.”

“I hear you, MP.” Jack handed her a glass of sherry—Mary Pat’s favorite relaxing drink. Ed Foley picked a Samuel Adams beer in keeping with his working-class origins. “Ed?”

“Jack, this is totally fucking crazy,” the Director of Central Intelligence blurted. “Fucking” was not a word you usually used around the President, even this one. “I mean, sure, it’s from a good source and all that, but, Jesus, you just don’t do shit like this.”

“Pat Martin was in here, right?” the Deputy Director (Operations) asked. She got a nod. “Well, then he told you this is damned near an act of war.”

“Damned near,” Ryan agreed, with a small sip of his Irish whiskey. Then he pulled out his last cigarette of the day, stolen from Mrs. Sumter, and lit it. “But it’s a hard one to deny, and we have to fit this into government policy somehow or other.”

“We have to get George