The Apocalypse Troll

"Yup." Morris pushed back his own chair and watched her slip the tape into the VCR. "We're damned lucky to have it, too. That fighter jock was a long way from the big blast, so he didn't lose all his avionics, but a lot of his systems were fried, and he couldn't trust Roosevelt's electronics, either. It took a hell of a driver to put that bird onto a carrier by hand and eye. Matter of fact, I didn't know it could be done-and neither did Northrop-Grumman." He gave a brief snort of humor. "I understand the other aircrew were more than content to use their water wings, but not this guy. He and his RIO are the ones that nailed those first two missiles, too; they must have great, big brass ones. Anyway-" he shrugged "-here it finally is. I've got expert analyses out the ying-yang, and I've watched the damned thing a dozen times myself. Now it's your turn."

"What was all the delay about?" she demanded.

"CIA got their hands on it first, somehow," Morris snorted. "You know how compartmented they are over there. It's taken this long for them to find it and break it loose. The boss," he added dryly, "was not amused."

"Why am I not surprised?" Hastings murmured, and they gri

"I think we can safely count on him to collect a few scalps," Morris agreed, then pointed at the TV. "Switch it on and take a look."

Hastings nodded and punched the play button on the remote. The unit clicked and whirred to itself for a moment, then a night sky replaced the quietly hissing snow on the TV screen. A small digital readout in the lower right corner gave the date and time at which the tape had been made and another in the left corner gave a distance-to-target reading; at the moment, it was whirring downward with disconcerting speed. The picture was black and white but almost painfully sharp.

"This from the new TCS?" Hastings asked absently.

"Yup," Morris said again. "Does a nice job, doesn't it?"

"I'll say. The old TISEO system and the first-generation TCS both looked good, but this is even better."

Morris simply nodded. The latest tactical camera system fitted under the nose of late marks of the F-14D used a whole new optics system, not to mention a long overdue infrared sensor. The Tomcat had never been designed to be a stealthy platform, but at least it finally had a reasonably effective passive search system which didn't require its massive radar to broadcast its presence to all and sundry. It was a useful retrofit to the aging fighter, and the Tomcat crews claimed their new imagery was so sharp they could count an OpFor pilot's warts at fifty miles, which was an exaggeration ... he thought.

He leaned back and fought the weight of his eyelids, watching Hastings bend towards the television and wondering how she would react.

There! He saw her flinch at the speed with which the brilliant streaks of light came sweeping towards her, but she mastered her reaction instantly and leaned still closer, eyes intent. Six light sources swelled with freight-train speed, bobbing and weaving as they came. It was impossible to make out much detail, but the lights kept getting bigger and bigger. After a moment, it became clear they were well above the camera-and that the Tomcat pilot was maneuvering hard to keep them in view. They swept over the aircraft, and the pilot put the big fighter into a climbing loop. Stars swooped wildly in their field of view, and then the lights reappeared, moving away. The image trembled and rotated dizzyingly for just a moment as the pilot rolled his aircraft, then smoothed back out.

The lights continued to move away, but more slowly, and now the imagery showed at least some details of the craft which produced them. There were six of them, and four-all of which appeared identical-held a tight formation around a fifth, much larger shape while the sixth pursued them all. It was apparent now that the intense brilliance came not from the craft themselves but from a bowl-shaped curve of fire just ahead of each of them.

The shapes were in sight for no more than three or four minutes when an intolerable glare from ahead and below burned out the images entirely. Crazy patterns of interference flashed and danced for a moment, and then the screen went blank.

Lieutenant Commander Hastings was silent as she rewound the tape and played it again. Then she played it a third time, using the remote to freeze the picture repeatedly as she studied it. Finally she sighed and rewound the tape a final time, turning to Morris with a frown.

"Those things were big," she said softly.

"You might say that," he agreed. "The photo analysis people say most of the lead group were bigger than Spruance-class destroyers-and the biggie was the size of a CGN. The one in back was smaller, but not by a heck of a lot. They make it about-" he consulted a scratch pad "-three hundred to three hundred thirty feet, give or take."

"Oh, how I wish we'd had a camera bird up there to watch all this!"

"I understand the pulse from that big boom didn't do the Russkies' RORSAT a bit of good," Morris chuckled.

"Not too surprising. But at least they had one, so they knew it wasn't us shooting at them, thank God!"

"Amen," Morris said seriously. "I just wish we knew whether or not the PRC had satellite imagery of its own."

"You and me both," Hastings agreed with a humorless grin. "We know they've got at least some recon birds hidden up there amongst all those 'commercial communications' birds of theirs. I have to agree with CIA and NSA that their main interest these days is Taiwan and that they're probably concentrating on the Pacific, not the Atlantic, but it would be nice to know. And the French-!"

She tossed both hands upwards with a grimace, and Morris nodded. As was not, unfortunately, uncommon in American diplomatic history, the US had overplayed the "Chinese Card" badly. Unlike the defunct Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party was showing no particular signs of vanishing into the ash heap of history. Not that it showed any particular sign of remaining unswervingly attached to the principles of Marxism-Leninism, either. But any country with that many people and resources and an authoritarian government-whatever that government's ideology might be-was almost bound to attempt to expand its hegemony, and the Chinese had made it increasingly plain that Asia belonged to them. And that they were willing to threaten and even (probably) use military means to enforce that claim. As one consequence of that attitude, things were heating up over the Republic of Taiwan once more. That was why a two-carrier American task group had been deployed to the area, and it had become painfully clear that the US aerospace industry's efforts to improve the PRC's satellite launch capability had transferred rather more technology to the mainland Chinese in the last several years than anyone had realized at the time.

As for the French, their fundamental anti-Americanism had only grown more pronounced as the much anticipated European Union continued to stagger along as a concept rather than a reality. The EU's persistent failure to solve the smouldering issues of the Balkans or defuse the growing nationalist tensions between Russia and certain other of the old soviet empire's fragments hadn't helped much, either. France, in particular, had been savage in the derision it heaped upon America's bumbling efforts in the Balkans, and the French government had become even more anti-US as its own failure to solve the same problems drove it into an ever more defensive attitude. Mordecai knew Paris had had at least one recon satellite in position to watch what had happened, but it had also been much closer to the largest of the nuclear explosions. What it had seen-or transmitted back home, at least-before the blast reduced it to so much expensive junk was anyone's guess ... and the French weren't telling.