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it.”
His flat-screen monitor switched to a different scene, an aerial view of a stretch of dusty-looking and arid terrain.
“This was taken by 202 about two hours ago, sir,” Marie’s voice said. The date and time stamp at the bottom left told him the same thing, along with a set of coordinates.
On the monitor, a blue car appeared frozen in time as it sped along a dirt and gravel road etched out of a hillside. A helicopter, an Mi-8 Hip, appeared to be in pursuit. Three seconds later, the image shifted, showing the same chase. Two more freeze-frame images, and then the helicopter rose suddenly, raced ahead of the speeding car, and descended once again across the road. A moment later, the automobile rounded a curve, then swerved to avoid hitting the aircraft. The car went down the hill and rolled, raising a towering plume of ocher dust. Rubens wasn’t sure, but he thought he might have seen debris kicked up by bullets striking the car and the ground around it. The image series froze then and returned to the beginning of the series.
“Is that all there was?” he asked.
“The complete clip was about seventy seconds long. That was the end of it. The satellite moved out of range after that.”
That was the problem with satellite imagery. Unless the spacecraft was in a geosynchronous orbit, which kept it positioned above the same spot on the Earth all the time, the satellite would be moving with respect to the Earth, and quite swiftly. The lower the orbit, the faster it was moving, and the shorter the useful hang time above a given target. Geosynch gave satellites a good long look at the target—but was over twenty-two thousand miles up, so far out that it was difficult to get useful resolution.
USA-202 was the first Intruder-class spy satellite launched by the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO. Originally scheduled for a 2005 launch from Space Launch Complex 37B at Cape Canaveral, a series of technical and political issues, including a new round of budget battles with Congress, had delayed the launch until January 18, 2009.
The Intruder program was designed to offer higher resolution in Earth imagery. It was in a Molniya orbit—a high apogee of 25,000 miles, a low perigee of 300 miles, which gave it extended hang time above the target. Its three-meter mirror, larger than the primary mirror used by the Hubble Space Telescope, had a resolution of just less than four centimeters—not quite enough to read the proverbial license plate from orbit, but damned good nonetheless.
USA-202 could deliver clear, crisp images from space, but the satellites of the 8X program were better. Popularly known within the intelligence community as Crystal Fire, the 8X was a class of black follow-on spysats intended to replace the venerable Keyhole program. During the First Gulf War, military commanders in the field had insisted that they needed two things in orbital reconnaissance: realtime imagery and the ability to see a large area—say, all of Iraq—at once. The Intruder program drastically reduced the amount of time necessary for converting raw imagery to useful intelligence available in the AO, yet it was still limited to a relatively narrow field within which to work; Crystal Fire, it was hoped, would provide detailed imagery over a much larger area than had previously been possible. CF-1 had been carried aloft during a shuttle mission late last year; a number of subsequent planned launches had been put on indefinite hold, however, again because of budget debates—which meant it was very difficult to get reconnaissance time off of that one bird.
Rubens studied the series of images again, then had Marie halt the series at a frame that showed the Hip hovering above the road in front of the blue automobile. The satellite had shot the image from an oblique angle, perhaps thirty degrees above the horizon, which meant that Rubens could see the side of the Mi-8.
Intruder’s imaging system couldn’t read license plates, but it easily