Free Jack Ryan 5 - The Cardinal of the Kremlin by Tom Clancy

General almost smiled in spite of himself. Gregory could not have known anything about Sally Rand.
    “That's all?” Ryan said again when the youngster finished, and he knew that every computer expert in Project Tea Clipper must have asked himself the same thing: Why didn't I think of that! No wonder they all say that Gregory is a genius. He'd made a crucial breakthrough in laser technology at Stony Brook, then one in software design. “But that's simple!”
    “Yes, sir, but it took over two years to make it work, and a Cray-2 computer to make it work fast enough to matter. We still need a little more work, but after we analyze what went wrong tonight, another four or five months, maybe, and we got it knocked.”
    “Next step, then?”
    “Building a five-megajoule laser. Another team is close to that already. Then we gang up twenty of them, and we can send out a hundred-megajoule pulse, twenty times per second, and hit any target we want. The impact energy then will be on the order of, say, twenty to thirty kilograms of explosives.”
    “And that'll kill any missile anybody can make . . .”
    “Yes, sir.” Major Gregory smiled.
    "What you're telling me is, the thing—Tea Clipper works.
    “We've validated the system architecture,” the General corrected Ryan. “It's been a long haul since we started looking at this system. Five years ago there were eleven hurdles. There are three technical hurdles left. Five years from now there won't be any. Then we can start building it.”
    “The strategic implications . . .” Ryan said, and stopped. “Jesus.”
    “It's going to change the world,” the General agreed.
    “You know that they're playing with the same thing at
    
    
     Dushanbe
    
    
    .”
    “Yes, sir,” Major Gregory answered. “And they might know something that we don't.”
    Ryan nodded. Gregory was even smart enough to know that someone else might be smarter. This was some kid.
    “Gentlemen, out in my helicopter is a briefcase. Could you have somebody bring it in? There are some satellite photos that you might find interesting.”
     
    “How old are these shots?” the General asked five minutes later as he leafed through the photos.
    “A couple of days,” Jack replied.
    Major Gregory peered at them for a minute or so. “Okay, we have two slightly different installations here. It's called a 'sparse array.' The hexagonal array—the six-pillar one—is a transmitter. The building in the middle here is probably designed to house six lasers. These pillars are optically stable mounts for mirrors. The laser beams come out of the building, reflect off the mirrors, and the mirrors are computer-controlled to concentrate the beam on a target.”
    “What do you mean by optically stable?”
    “The mirrors have to be controlled with a high degree of accuracy, sir,” Gregory told Ryan. “By isolating them from the surrounding ground you eliminate vibration that might come from having a man walk nearby, or driving a car around. If you jiggle the mirrors by a small multiple of the laser-light frequency, you mess up the effect you're trying to get. Here we use shock mountings to enhance the isolation factor. It's technique originally developed for submarines. Okay? This other diamond-shaped array is . . . oh, of course. That's the receiver.”
    ''What?" Jack's brain had just met another stone wall.
    "Let's say you want to make a really good picture of something. I mean, really good. You use a laser as your strobe light.”
    “But why four mirrors?"
    “It's easier and cheaper to make four small mirrors than one big one,” Gregory explained. “Hmph. I wonder if they're trying to do a holographic image. If they can really lock they illuminating beams in phase . . . theoretically it's possible. There are a couple of things that make it tricky, but the Russians like the brute-force approach . . . Damn!” His eyes lit up. “That's one hell of an interesting idea! I'll have to think about that one.”
    “You're