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Page 38.
 Moriarty sounded as if he felt he’d won. “Fair enough. We can send the appropriate specifications and any other information that you wish, providing you agree that this will remain the best kept secret in the world since the United States in World War II developed the first operational atomic bombs."
Burning replied: "Dr. Moriarty, you have set a dragon upon the table. Publication of your scheme would cause panic on world financial markets. It would most assuredly disrupt world energy and other commodity spot markets within minutes. We will all do our best to keep this totally under wraps."
Neptune said: "Thank you for giving this your most urgent and secret consideration. The next Saddam or Hitler is probably a child somewhere, at this moment. We must be ready for him or her when the time comes. And I assure you, the time will be here sooner rather than later."
Burning said: “We can agree on this. The world is full of Colonel Ruliks. It is the Human Condition.”
"Dr. Moriarty, I have a technical question," one of Senator Bloviant's assistants said. She was a frumpy looking young woman with a mousy, tight little hairdo and a brown dress-suit. "If I imagine this correctly, it would be like shooting a rifle into a deep pond to kill a fish at the bottom. Would the bullet not be slowed down by the hydraulic principle, since water cannot be compressed? Would the air mass of the atmosphere not slow your bullet? Would the bullet not burn up from atmospheric friction? Would the winds not carry it off course?"
Moriarty chuckled. "Wise questions. Easily answered. The concept of an Orbital Sniper bullet is quite literally true on the one hand, and a bit of a metaphor on the other hand. At the end point, your target does take a bullet directly to the torso, with catastrophic and terminal results, as happened with Colonel Osman Rulik of the CAE. The bullet itself is fired from a sniper rifle. The trick is how to get the sniper rifle into firing position, without using a human agent or sniper. That is where the fake Rulik assassination, and our proposed Orbital Sniper Technology, differ. Our technology is the ultimate in stealth."
Another Congressional aide, this time a studious looking young man in the requisite rumpled dark suit, asked: "So why not just send a sniper? Why not shoot him from a jet aircraft miles away?"
"Good questions, all," said Moriarty. "When you assassinate a foreign head of state or corporation, you want it to occur anonymously. The West, certainly, has long been lulled by its own legal niceties and legalistic suicide in the face of implacable hatred from forces of unreason. The OST side-steps the obvious issues. As I said, begin by declaring war. You can do this covertly, for the record, to cover yourself in the endless political and legal hearings that may follow, reported to death in the press. But it’s the kind of thing that can also get lost in secret committees and closed door hearings. Preferably, you would make it seem like the work of some local psychopath. You do not want your fingerprints on it. You do not want to run the possibility of a propaganda disaster or media blowback. You do not want to create a strategic advantage for your enemies. A declaration of war is a serious matter. Just as dangerous is use of the OST, which must be done as surgically and precisely as a robotic mission to Mars.
"So here is how it works. You do not use cruise missiles, drones, or other air technology. Today's radars are sophisticated enough to rule out any such crude tactics—shall we say mano-a-mano or hand to hand combat. Radars, my friends, do not typically look upward, with one or two exceptions. They are primarily deployed to detect incoming waves of bombers, as was their design since World War II. They will look for incoming missiles, but our OST has an entirely different signature.
"For one thing, it is very small. What leaves the orbiting mother ship is a miniature ceramic shuttle, resembling a scale version of the old U.S. space shuttle, or its miniature clone, the smaller Soviet Buran design. Our model is approximately the size of a motorcycle. As it moves across the sky, it resembles a meteor, but moves slowly enough that the fire ball looks like that of an even smaller reentry mass. Every day and night, hundreds of these, maybe thousands, streak through the atmosphere, and no military or civilian observatory pays much attention to them.
"In Stage One, the primary reentry vehicle descends at a steep angle, leveling out at one mile altitude, and shatters into fragments that will land harmlessly and resemble ordinary rocks. The fragments will land far apart, and nobody will connect them with each other.
“For Stage Two, inside is a smaller vehicle, the size of an artillery shell with wings. It is a small cruise missile. It is light-weight, of ceramic like the shuttle, and designed to fly head-on toward the target. As it approaches, it aims its interior rifle. It descends to about one hundred feet in clear air space, and its tiny nose cone shears off—the size of a man's thumb, fixed on the oblique for flawless, instantaneous separation.
“Now for Stage Three, the final step. The cruise missile fires a bullet from the aperture in its nose. The gas exhausted by the round also shatters the cruise missile or sniper rifle, leaving no trace. "The bullet is essentially a .50 caliber round of fully jacketed steel, which travels a quarter mile laterally before entering its target with catastrophic and terminal results. Saddam is dead, and the world is safe from all-out war."
"And the target?" asked another Camelback Consortium aide. "How long does this all take? Won't a Saddam or a Milosevic move around in the meantime? How do you target someone like that?"
If voices could smile, Moriarty's surely did. "Now you ask my favorite question. Think, young man. What do Fidel Castro, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Moammar Ghaddafi, and others of their ilk have in common?"
Suspenseful silence. An observer would have been convinced by that moment, correctly, that Moriarty had his listeners eating from his hand.
"They talk too much," Moriarty's voice boomed through the Camelback conference room. "The Fidels and the Saddams are all notorious for speaking at a podium, sometimes for eight hours without interruption or pause for breath. It is a primary symptom of their psychosis and their megalomania. It is the easiest element in the entire OST program, Project David, that I can offer you today. Rest assured, psychopaths like this will stand quite still while you shoot them.”
“Brilliant,” Lane Burning could be heard murmuring.
The hall rumbled with excitement.
"It’s a technological feat of genius from Global Anaconda engineers and scientists," Moriarty said. "OST works from Low Earth Orbit, on the basis of research dating back to the U.S. CIA's Keyhole satellites and the U.S. Air Force's Corona satellites. These were not sniper vehicles, but photo reconnaissance technologies. They could be moved upward or downward in orbit, to as low as 165 miles altitude, and back up over 200 miles. From an orbital position 180 miles high, let's say, a vehicle like OST can shoot a bullet that, traveling a mile a minute over an arc of about 240 miles, will perform through its ballistic stages from shuttle to rifle to bullet…"
Heads leaned together in excited conversation as Moriarty closed his presentation.
"…and impact the target in just four minutes. It travels, in fact, at a relatively slow speed compared to meteors and similar natural phenomena. A man-made rocket travels much faster, to achieve escape velocity greater than 17,500 mph. Our vehicle travels without undue engineering stresses, and certainly without being observed," Moriarty concluded. "The net effect is to catastrophically and definitively terminate the target, while causing observers to frantically search the grounds for a discarded sniper rifle. We thought about adding that for special effect, but canceled the idea after considering what a rifle still moving—say, a mile a minute—might do when dropping from 100 feet. We simply decided it would be best if it looked as if the sniper got away with his rifle. So the cruise missile phase is the rifle itself, which self-destructs while shooting the actual sniper bullet. We get in, and kill our enemy, without leaving a trace. For all anyone knows, the action was done by a madman with a sniper rifle, as in the Rulik scenario."
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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