The Warhead

CAUTION: This email originated from outside of Penguin Random House. Please be extra cautious when opening file attachments or clicking on links.

1.

Twenty-three years later

Somewhere over North Vietnam

Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hilton rockets through the sky at close to the speed of sound, five miles above enemy territory. His plane bobs in its formation. A small ship at sea, vortices of wind across the skin nudging the airframe up a little, down a little, a little over. He's at .88 Mach, a good speed, a good, smart speed, he thinks, not cooking through fuel but fast enough to fight if the enemy jets engage.

Which they almost certainly will.

Rick Hilton is a savant in the cockpit. Fused to the machine and sealed off from emotion, capable of rapid calculation at speed. He processes extraordinary amounts of information almost instantaneously. Pull up, bank, engage afterburners, he turns data to decisions and decisions to action in the time it takes for a ripple of electricity to flash across his brain.

He's at home up here. All he ever wanted to do was be in the sky, ever since he was a mouthy kid in Oklahoma on a Sunday drive and caught the sun glinting off a dinky old crop duster flying alongside the family sedan. A four-year-old Rick Hilton blurting out to scandalized parents, look at that sum' bitch go! Then, after his parents' marriage blew up, a stint being passed from home to home and idle time spent at the local airstrip waxing single-engine props for the chance to ride in them, then teenage years getting into the air however he could, even when it just meant finding a ramp to ride a heavy old Harley off of and get away from terra firma for a breath or two.

Now he's up in the thin air, in a real live war. Up above the matted clouds because a supply line snakes through the countryside right below and the enemy's protecting it with everything they have. Destroy that supply line and save Americans. Leave it intact and the enemy keeps feeding a beast chewing through the kids not lucky enough to do Vietnam the way he's doing it-the kids without 20/15 eyesight and the sealed-off kind of mind for math at altitude Hilton has.

The supply line is the problem, but as far as Hilton's concerned, the whole war might as well be about one especially brutal section of it, a 540-foot span of steel and rebar known as the Dragon's Jaw. The only railroad in the panhandle crosses that bridge. It's the only way the enemy can get supplies across the Sông Mã River, so the enemy has it defended better than any target in the country, which right now means it's defended better than just about any target in the world. Hilton's seen just about every kind of mission launched against that bridge, and they've barely dented it.

If Hilton survives this mission, it'll be the Dragon's Jaw that all the officers and pilots and even the Thai laborers back at base who wander across the tarmac to find work will talk about. They've lost friends over it. Enough failed missions, enough planes shot through and lost in the area around the Dragon's Jaw, that whole mythologies have risen up around it: that the bridge is the stitch that holds the universe together; that it's a link between two dimensions; that it doesn't exist on the terrestrial plane at all. A trick of the light-some kind of hologram drawing pilots in like mosquitoes to porch lamps.

For Hilton, it's only by dumb luck that, for all the deadly flying he's done over the supply line, he hasn't yet been tapped for a mission against the Dragon. But he knows. That luck won't last forever. If he survives today, tomorrow it'll be the Dragon, and without an effective weapon against small targets in dangerous airspace he's no more likely than all the pilots who've gone before to make it out alive.

2.

Okaloosa County, Florida

Air Proving Ground Center

Eglin Air Force Base

"Detachment 5"

To Weldon Word, a blue-eyed thirty-four-year-old engineer, the problem was obvious. And almost instantly, he began to see how he might solve it.

Just called up by his employer, Texas Instruments, from a dead-end post off the coast of Rhode Island-a year and a half sitting on ships scraping up miles of sensor data for a sonar program theoretically useful to someone but so monotonous and incremental it was hard to feel any kind of impact-Weldon had been waiting for an escape, primed to dive into a problem with real stakes, when he got the call from TI dispatching him down to Florida for an important new project just now coming into focus.

Across from him an overenergized colonel paused a monologue about the dangers facing American pilots, pulled a file from a desk drawer, and slid it across the table to Weldon: an aerial reconnaissance shot in black-and-white. An important bridge, the colonel explained, over in Vietnam.

To Weldon, it looked like a bridge on the moon. From bombs, the colonel said-all bombs that missed the target, and this didn't even account for all the bombs that missed into the water. Weldon counted: ten, twenty, one hundred, two hundred . . . there had to be eight hundred craters near the bridge and, from the looks of it, almost no damage at all to the bridge itself.

Weldon looked up from the photo and trained his blue eyes on the colonel, already back at top speed, holding forth on his desire to provide the boys flying in Vietnam with a new kind of weapon, one that would at least give them a chance to land a few blows against this damned bridge before they got themselves shot out of the sky.

The colonel shifted to his wish list and began rattling off specifications.

The new weapon would have to be effective enough that pilots wouldn't need to linger in dangerous airspace for long or return to it again and again-a weapon that could help do away with massive "alpha" strikes and "dual axis" attacks that put hundreds of pilots in the line of fire.

He wanted something that might allow just a few pilots to do the job that right now required dozens to even attempt.

He wanted a weapon that could be deployed from farther away. From, say, 10,000 feet or so, high enough to keep the boys up there a little safer a little longer. And as Weldon listened-looking from the moonscape recon photo to the colonel and back, imagining how such a weapon might work-three disparate threads started to converge in his head.

First, he was thinking about a new technology in the works, something Albert Einstein had dreamed up and the comic books seized on. Einstein had an idea that, at least theoretically, you could use radiation to amplify a beam of light to perhaps as much as a million times the intensity of the sun. To the United States Army, that idea-light amplification by stimulated emissions of radiation, or LASER-had at least one obvious application: a death ray. Over time the idea evolved into a beam that maybe didn't kill but would still maim an enemy soldier, who would then need rescuing and medical care, removing not one but several fighters from the battlefield. The Army contracted with a company called Martin Marietta to work on LASER, but it turned out generating a beam that could harm an enemy took more energy than could feasibly be packed into any kind of remotely mobile package. Martin Marietta managed to build prototypes, and the laser beams could reach long distances, but not with enough power to do much to an enemy. All they could really do was, essentially, point at things. Even then, not all that usefully, since the versions that actually worked operated on a light frequency too high for the human eye to see. The Army had considered using LASER to try to guide one of its ground-launched missiles, but Army medical officers got in the way. LASER wasn't powerful enough to disable a vehicle or injure an enemy soldier on the other side of a battlefield, but it was plenty powerful to blind an Army missile crewman standing beside it.

By the time Weldon landed in Florida, the sci-fi promise of LASER had given way to the more sober reality of what was essentially just a long-range flashlight with an invisible beam, more dangerous to the user than the enemy, and lacking any practical use. But, sitting there in the colonel's office, it occurred to Weldon that he might have found one.

If the Army's interest in finding some way to guide a ground-launched weapon with a laser didn't make sense because the person operating it might accidentally look into the invisible beam, that, theoretically, wouldn't be a problem with an air-launched weapon, since there was little risk of a pilot in the sky accidentally looking into a laser beam pointed at the ground.

When the colonel paused for a breath, Weldon tested the water. "Well," he said. "How about laser-guided stuff?"


If the laser was the first of the threads coming together in Weldon’s head, it had to do with a story beginning fifteen years earlier with the Nazis and a man Weldon had come to know well: Tom Weaver, who returned from World War II having made friends of his enemies.

No one knew the whole Tom Weaver story, and he seemed to like it that way. He'd lost a leg; no one knew exactly how, and he gave a different explanation every time someone asked. The one thing Weldon knew about Tom Weaver was that he'd been involved in Operation Paperclip, the top secret mission to bring scientists from the defeated Nazi regime to America. Whatever Tom's job during the war had been, his job after it had been working with a team of Germans relocated from the Reich to Alabama, where they were given U.S. government housing at the Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville and a generous budget courtesy of the American taxpayer and put to work repurposing Hitler's rockets for the United States. Tom worked with the men who designed the "vengeance" weapons Hitler used to terrorize Europe-the very weapons that inspired Project Anvil and drove the Allies to dream up the remote-control B-17, the ill-fated early entry in the quest for a steerable bomb Weldon now found himself in the middle of.

But from early on, the relocated Germans showed a key weakness. They'd proven to be perhaps the best in the world at launching things but were still not very good at controlling where those things came down. Steering hadn't been a high priority when they worked in Germany: Hitler had wanted to terrorize cities full of civilians, and it hadn't much mattered which particular building was destroyed or even what neighborhood a rocket landed in. Hitler's V-2 could travel a hundred miles or more, but it was barely aimable.

To turn Hitler's V-2 rocket into something the United States could use, it needed to follow a path. To follow a path, it needed to know when it was falling off course. The Germans had access to instruments that could do that-to sensors that could generate electronic currents-but for an electronic current to actually do anything-to move a fin, for example-that current would need to be more powerful. It would need to be amplified. At the time, the only available "signal amplifiers" were heavy glass contraptions, cylinders that needed to be vacuumed free of air and sealed off so oxygen molecules didn't get in the way of electrons, and which could then turn a small electronic signal into a more powerful one and pass it on. The signal-amplifying "vacuum tube" was so key to so many early electronic devices that those devices were often given nicknames derived from it: "tube" for television; "amp" for the box that turned the nearly silent vibrating strings on an electric guitar into sound coming out of a speaker. And on a flying rocket, "vacuum tubes" were how you turned the signal from a sensor saying "time to turn" into a current strong enough to move a fin.

Which meant that every time the German scientists launched a test rocket, a few dozen heavy glass tubes went up with it. To turn an unaimable weapon for a revenge-blinded Führer into an actually useful rocket, the scientists were going to need a lot of practice, and for that they'd need a generous supply of those vacuum tubes.

So Tom Weaver hobbled out of Alabama and went hunting for a way to supply the underperforming German scientists with more vacuum tubes-or, perhaps, with some kind of substitute.


That was the second of the three threads beginning to come together in Weldon’s head as he sat across from an angry colonel with a picture of the bridge between them: strange old Tom Weaver and his one-legged quest to help aim Nazi ingenuity at America’s enemies. The last one had to do with Weldon’s employer; with the very founding of the company, and a corporate origin story that had led to this very meeting with an impatient officer of the United States military.

The company that would become Texas Instruments was incorporated on December 6th, 1941, to sell a promising new product for the oil prospecting industry. The very next day, the Imperial Japanese Army attacked Pearl Harbor, prompting the United States to join the war and take control of oil exploration, which meant the first strategic decision they ever made was a giant bet on an industry that looked like it might be disappearing overnight.

What the small team of brainy oilmen lacked in timing, though, they tried to make up for in creativity. The invention they'd intended to sell was a "magnetic anomaly detector," a device designed to pick up inconsistencies in the earth's magnetic field that suggested the presence of hydrocarbons. But if looking for subsurface magnetic anomalies to find oil had become a profitless endeavor, they figured there might now be a different subsurface magnetic anomaly worth looking for: enemy submarines. They hooked up with the U.S. Navy to work on a better method for detecting German U-boats, eventually changed their name from the generic "Geophysical Service Incorporated" to the even more generic "Texas Instruments," and secured enough work with the Navy to survive their early misfire, though the embarrassing first step served a complex the company never quite shook: a preoccupation with trying to avoid obsolescence. If you couldn't count on today's customer, try to anticipate tomorrow's.

Some of the naval officers TI had worked with during the war became the company's more influential executives afterward, chief among them a young reservist and budding prophet of technology named Pat Haggerty, who said that the war had given him a glimpse into the future.