Thursday 7:30 A.M.

Andrei Petrovich Androv, director of propulsion systems, gazed out across the windy strait, feeling the chill of the sea air cut through his fur-lined trench coat.

Physically, he was almost mythic, a giant from Grimms' fairy tales. He had a heavy face nature should wish on no man, tousled gray hair, bushy eyebrows eternally cocked in skepticism, and a powerful taste for Beethoven's string quartets, which he played incessantly in the instrument room. He bore, in fact, more than a passing resemblance to that aging, half-mad genius. Now seventy-one, he, too, possessed a monumental mind and was acknowledged worldwide as the founding intellect behind the Soviet space program.

Yes, he was thinking, this location had been ideal. Here in remote Hokkaido they had constructed a high-security facility surrounded by wind-swept wilderness--virgin forests and snow-covered volcanoes. Even for him, a man long used to the harsh winters of Baikonur, the almost Siberian weather along this coast was intimidating. This was the most isolated, austere, and yes, lonely spot he'd ever known.

But it was the perfect site. Mino Industries had insisted, rightly, on this northernmost point of Japan for the facility, here in a national park on Cape Soya, fifty kilometers west of Wakkanai. The facility itself had been constructed entirely underground, excavated beneath this rocky northern coast in order to be secure and invisible to satellite reconnaisance, both Soviet and American. Such excessive precautions, hardly a problem in the New Mexico desert when the first atomic bomb was tested, were the order of the day in this new era of space photography. Nowadays you even had to find ways to mask telltale waste heat

expulsion, which always betrayed an unmistakable infrared signature.

In that respect, too, their choice of this spot was strategic, with the freezing currents of the La Perouse Strait between northern Hokkaido and Sakhalin providing a continuous and thermally stable 12 degrees Celsius feed for the heat exchangers. Only the ten-thousand-meter test runway could not be concealed full-time, but it had been carefully camouflaged and was used only at night.

A massive breaker crashed against the rocks at the north end of the shore, sending ice-flecked spray upward into the morning mist. As he watched the freezing cloud and felt its ice collecting on his cheeks, he glanced at his watch. It was seven-forty. He took one last survey of the choppy gray sea and turned back. His daily morning walk down to the shore had achieved its purpose: His mind was as sharp as the icy wind whistling through the rocks. He needed to be at Number One by 0800 hours, when the final test run was scheduled to begin.

As he did every morning, he retraced the concrete steps that led down to the stainless steel entry door leading into the West Quadrant. When he reached it, he inserted a coded plastic card into the slot, pronounced his name into the black microphone flush with the metal doorframe, and signaled the TV eye. Two seconds later a simulated voice from the computer granted him access, the door sliding aside.

He nodded to the guards, then moved on down the long neon-lit, gray hallway. When he reached the unmarked door of Number One, he paused to listen. The whine of the fans was still a high growl as the engineers ran through the warm-up preparatory to bringing its six 25,000-horse- power motors to full power. Contenting himself that vibration in the fan housings remained at acceptable levels, he flashed his ID to the guard, inserted his magnetic card, and shoved open the door.

Without a word, he marched to his desk by the main video panel and slipped a scratched old Melodiya disk onto his ancient turntable.

Moments later, the first movement of Beethoven's Quartet in A Minor boomed from the speakers.

"We are ready to switch on the laser field, Doktor Androv." A young Soviet technician approached gingerly. "If you wish, we can direct the holograms here to the master terminal."

"More of your pretty pictures?" He was examining the data on the video screens. Then he nodded. "_Da. Ya gotov_. When you will."

As he stared at the screens, he again found himself growing pensive.

The project was all but finished now. His lifelong dream.

He silently counted their breakthroughs. The new material being used for the leading edges and scramjet struts, a proprietary titanium alloy coated with a ceramic skin, had turned out to be much lighter than aluminum and eight times as strong. Full-scale sections of the leading edges of the wings and the engine struts had been subjected to ten- minute blasts of 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit air at Mach 7 in the high- temperature tunnel with no deformation or structural failure.

Then the turboramjet-scramjets, four meters in diameter and nine meters long, had all been given full-scale static tests at the aeropropulsion facility in the south, where they were operated to Mach 8 at temperatures ranging from minus 100 to over 1900 degrees Fahrenheit.

Massive refrigeration units and gas heaters had been used to achieve the temperature range, while liquefied air was pumped into the intakes to duplicate a complete hypersonic duty cycle.

Maybe, he thought, they were ready for a full-scale test flight. Only one problem remained: a hint of supersonic wave drag the low- temperature helium wind tunnel had shown could develop behind the leading edges. He had ordered the project director to run a computer simulation examining the performance of two new ceramic spoilers, modified canard foreplanes, and the preliminary results indicated the drag would be effectively damped. Still, he was determined to test that design modification with a full run-up here in Number One, the massive hypersonic tunnel that contained a ten-meter scale model of the vehicle.

As he sat thinking, he neglected to acknowledge the arrival of the project director, now advancing down the concrete steps that led from the steel entry door.

"_Dobriy utro_, Doktor Androv." Taro Ikeda's good-morning greeting was heavily accented. "_Kak pashaviatye_?"

"_Khoroshau_." Andrei Petrovich Androv nodded absently, still engaged in his thoughts. "_Dobriy utro_."

"Today I have more good news," Ikeda continued as he headed for the coffee urn. "My 0730 briefing included a report that during the night our Tsukuba team completed a simulation of the aerodynamic performance of your suggested modification all the way to Mach 25. Just as you envisioned, leading-edge deformation and vortex bursts were reduced to values well within the acceptable envelope." He looked back. "Which makes me question whether we really need to proceed with this morning's run."

"Your SX-10 only tells us how a fuselage performs if airflows are ideal," Androv replied. "At hypersonic temperatures and velocities air doesn't behave predictably, like a perfect gas. Fluid dynamics models can only give us approximations of actual characteristics." He glanced up from the video control panel, his face determined. "It is my son, Yuri, who will be in the cockpit of these vehicles, and my experience is you never put your faith in simulations. In the hypersonic regime, computer simulations are just guesswork, a shortcut not worth a _drozhky _driver's fart."

"As you wish," Ikeda replied evenly, taking his first sip of coffee.

In truth, Andrei Androv did not dismiss simulations out of hand. He knew their Fujitsu supercomputer was truly a marvel, capable of replicating the aerodynamic characteristics of a given fuselage component, modifying it, testing it, over and over millions of times, iterating to the optimum design in almost the twinkling of an eye.

In every respect the high technology available here was astonishing.

Take their hypersonic wind tunnel. Its laser probes shone thin slices of coherent light through the swirling air currents, revealing complexities otherwise hidden amid whorls of turbulence. These data were then enhanced through holography, which used the laser light to create colored 3-D representations of the flow around the model.

Finally those holograms were fed into the supercomputer and analyzed from all angles.

This project would have been impossible anywhere else on earth. But here, the foreign team had created a feather-light hypersonic airframe that used turbo-ramjets for horizontal takeoff and then changed their geometry into fuel-injected supersonic combustion ramjets, or scramjets, which combusted fuel and atmospheric oxygen using an internal shock wave instead of conventional compressors to achieve orbital velocity, Mach 25. It was his dream come true.

"Brief me again on the simulation." Androv turned back to Ikeda. "You say you went all the way to our maximum design objective?"

"We ran through the entire flight profile in real time," the other man replied. "There were no stability problems whatsoever. Either during the power-up or during the switch-over to scramjet engine geometry at Mach 4.8."

"Encouraging, encouraging." Androv turned back to his video panel as the fans continued to accelerate. The violins of the A Minor quartet, his favorite of all Beethoven's late works, washed over the room. "All the same, we must run a complete sequence here for any design alterations."

He then fell silent, studying the screens. Mach 25. That was--yes--almost seventeen thousand miles per hour. A velocity greater than any existing missile. And it was air-breathing!

Their supercomputer's revolutionary aerodynamic design had made it possible. Problem: at velocities higher than Mach 5 unprecedented airflows were required, due to heat buildup in the fuel-injection struts and the shortage of oxygen at rarified altitudes. Solution: the entire underside of the vehicle had been shaped to serve as an exten- sion of the intakes for the twelve massive scramjets. The fuselage of the plane itself was going to act as a giant funnel, scooping in air.

And it had appeared to work, at least in the computer. Then finally the Japanese engineers had perfected the liquid-air-cycle process, permitting the cryogenic hydrogen fuel to be used to liquefy a portion of the incoming air and inject it under high pressure into the engine.

The final, essential breakthrough.

Andrei Androv was both an idealist and a pragmatist. In Russia you had to be. That education began almost half a century earlier when, as a student, he had been on hand to assist in the first free flight of a Russian-made liquid fuel rocket, at an army base just outside Moscow.

He had experienced the exhilaration of a new frontier, and plunging himself into the new science of rocketry, he had become a self-taught expert who published theoretical works read and praised by men three times his age.

Ironically, therefore, Andrei Petrovich Androv had not enjoyed the luxury of being ignored, as the American rocket pioneer Goddard had been. Joseph Stalin, always paranoid, decided that the rocket researchers' "fireworks" were "dangerous to the country." Consequently, Andrei Petrovich Androv was arrested, interrogated at Butyrskaya Prison in Moscow, and dispatched on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to a convict coal mine on the Pacific coast.

Eventually the political winds shifted. As a recognized rocket expert, he was part of the 1946 Soviet team that shipped German scientists and V-2 launchers back to Russia. Finally, under Khrushchev, he rose to genuine prominence, since that general secretary believed that only rockets, not manned aircraft, had the range to drop bombs on the U.S.

Nikita S. Khrushchev put Andrei Androv in charge of all Soviet rocketry, and Andrei Androv put Russia in space.

He'd been in charge of constructing the sprawling Baikonur Cosmodrome, near Tyuratram in Kazakhstan, central Asia, still the world's largest space center. From it he orbited the world's first satellite, Sputnik, and the world's first astronaut, Yuri Gagarin. He knew the byways of that top-secret facility almost better than he knew his own living room--the gantry systems, the fueling apparatus, the clean rooms, the rocket assembly areas, the sectors where satellites were readied. Most recently, in 1987, he had been in charge of the successful first test launch of the most powerful vehicle the world had ever seen--the Energia, propelled by liquid hydrogen engines capable of lifting a hundred-ton space platform into orbit.

Also during that time his only son, Yuri Andreevich, had become the Soviet Union's leading test pilot. Yuri was rarely home, and then, nine years ago, Andrei Androv's wife had died of pneumonia. Isolated in the long, snowy nights at Baikonur, he'd consoled himself with string quar- tets, his studies of classical Greek, and his designs, his dreams of the ultimate space vehicle.

But he knew Russia would never be able to build it alone. Soviet computer and materials technology already was slipping behind those of the West.

He grimaced to think how his country had been brought to today's humiliating state of affairs, reduced to bargaining with foreigners like Arabs in a medina. Eventually, though, pragmatism had overruled all. Underlying this bizarre new alliance was one simple reality: the USSR needed Japanese high technology desperately. And it needed that technology now.

It had begun two years earlier, when the president himself had paid a surprise secret visit to the space complex at Baikonur, supposedly to review the Energia launch schedule. That, however, was merely the official excuse. He actually had an entirely different agenda.

Without saying why, he had invited his old friend Andrei Petrovich Androv to join him at the secluded hunting lodge where he was staying-- to talk, one-on-one, about the future of Soviet science. As that long snowy evening wore on, wind whistling through the log walls and pine smoke clouding the air, their conversation had turned to hard truths and blunt language.

In vino, Veritas. By midnight, the uniformed bodyguards outside were stamping their heavy boots to keep warm, and Andrei Petrovich and Mikhail Sergeevich were both drinking vodka directly from the bottle, had flung its tinfoil cap onto the rough-hewn boards of the cabin's floor. By then, too, the revered Andrei Petrovich Androv was boldly speaking his mind.

"Mikhail Sergeevich, time has run out for Russia. There is nothing to buy, almost nothing to eat, and prices are soaring. There is so much corruption you will not leave a Russian hospital alive unless you've bribed everyone, right down to the drunken orderlies. And those bribes can't be money. Who wants rubles? They are worthless. These days you have to bribe with vodka." He'd laughed sadly, then picked up an old copy of Pravda there by the fireplace, waved it in the air, and tossed it into the crackling flames. "When we start cooperatives, they are immediately taken over by our new mafia, Russia's ruble millionaires.

Everything--"

"_Perestroika_ will succeed in time, Andrei Petrovich," the president had insisted perfunctorily, still not having explained why they were meeting. "We are moving as rapidly as circumstances will permit. The bureaucracy--"

"_Perestroika_!" Androv had roared back. "Have you heard the latest joke from Moscow? _Perestroika_ is like a country where everyone is switching from driving on the left side to the right side--gradually.

Our half-measure concessions to a market economy have produced the worst of both systems. We now have a land with socialist initiative and capitalist conscience." He paused to laugh again, then sobered. "And soon, very soon, we're going to find ourselves in the technological Third World. We need a vision. Even more, we need hard currency, and Western technology now. And we need massive amounts. Nothing less can save us."