54
“Jeremy,Miranda called from Brunei. We’ve made the observations, but we need some math run. We don’t want to distract her with the calculations. Besides, she’ll appreciate your confirmation on it.” Holly spilled it out fast.
“I’m in the Situation Room.” Jeremy had been here before. No, he hadn’t. But he’d talked to Miranda on conference calls when she was here. And Mike. But he’d never been here himself. Had he? This must be how Miranda felt when the world whipsawed her back and forth. He wanted to ask her, but it didn’t seem like the appropriate time.
He’d never been in the Pentagon before today either. Yet Taz had entered as if it was the most normal thing ever.
He wished there’d been time to test the rumor that it was possible to walk from any office to any other office in under seven minutes across the seven floors of the world’s largest office building. Instead, Taz had breezed them from the underground parking to Jon’s office in under two minutes, like the twenty-eight kilometers of corridors were simply in her blood.
“You can’t do calculations in the Situation Room? Snap to, mate.”
“Right. Go ahead!” He opened the laptop he’d been allowed to bring into the room.
“Okay, we have an F-35C that was burned by an orbital laser during landing on an aircraft carrier. It’s—”
“Youwhat?”But then he noticed the President’s unhappy scowl. Well, that explained where Miranda had been. “Okay.”
“I’m sending you a large number of images and a landing camera video. Miranda estimated that the laser was focused on the plane beginning six-and-a-half seconds before the landing went seriously wrong. I’m sending you thre sets of images. One is closeups of the laser etchings on the carrier’s flight deck. The second is the reconstructed wreckage and the last is shadowing angles where one part of the aircraft shielded another due to the angle of the attack. We need you to compare the flight path and landing angles with the damage on the deck. Then back it up with the burn versus shadow angles on the plane. Miranda wants us to locate the angular area of Earth orbit from which the laser fired.”
“Like James BondMoonraker,Diamonds Are Forever,andGoldenEyeall combined. I’m sooo all over this.”
“Go get ’em, Q.”
And the breath caught in his throat. He’d thought that coming East would cut him off from Miranda and Holly, but they were all still in it together. He glanced at Taz…they all were.
But there was no magic moment about it, because Taz was explaining Holly’s request to Rose and the President.
Didn’t matter. Theywerein it together.
He opened a window to the secure server he’d set up exclusively for Miranda’s government work and there it all was.
He plugged the aircraft carrier’s heading and GPS data into his mapping software, then watched the landing video as the President was called out of the room. By the time he returned, Jeremy had layered the observed Flight Deck etching on the carrier, recognizing Miranda’s characteristic measurements. It felt as if he was looking over her shoulder as he positioned it properly.
Jeremy hummed the theme forGoldenEye.It wasn’t one of the greats likeGoldfingeror the overratedLive or Let Die,but itwasTina Turner and she was awesome.
Rather than shifting the object side-to-side—the plane over the decking—to discover the most accurate shadowing, he kept the plane looping over the deck from seven seconds out until it snagged the Number Four wire.
Then he shifted the light source trying to match the results to the observed markings on the deck.
Variations in altitude of firing the laser and the angle of attack offered several solutions.
He stored the most likely result but it wasn’t accurate enough. Nine degrees of possible east-west shift wasn’ttooawful for a first approximation. But the north-south axis was far less indicative and covered thirty degrees of sky.
“And it’s a big-ass sky.”
“What was that?”
Jeremy was suddenly sitting in his seat again rather than floating at varying angles over the South China Sea. “What is what?”
“What you said,” the President was squinting at him. Rose appeared to have been in the middle of saying something.
“What did I say? Oh,And it’s a big-ass sky.That’s from the movieArmageddon.The head of NASA is telling the President that the reason they didn’t spot the planet-killing comet was because…”
Taz rolled her eyes at him. Jeremy finally clued into what he was saying and stopped. Presidents probably didn’t like hearing about Armageddons.
“Sorry, sir. I have a first estimate, but it covers too broad an area of sky. My first look narrows the attack area to less than two-tenths of a percent of the sky. However, if the firing range is from an orbit of two hundred and fifty kilometers, that’s MSL (above Mean Sea Level), there is still three-quarters of a million square kilometers of orbital area that was occupied by the satellite for the crucial six to eight seconds. But we don’t know the height of the orbit and I don’t have a sufficiently accurate analysis of the data yet to estimate the orbital altitude. If it’s a thousand-kilometer-high orbit, that would be, uh, twelve-point-six, that’s rounded off a bit, million square kilometers.”
The President’s expression was absolutely deadpan.