Tom Clancy, Larry Bond, Steven Coontz, Dale Brown - I have read most of their stuff. Did not necessary retain the copy. I will give a brief discretion of a passage of action - and can anyone help with name the book or author.I'd guess book was written between 1988 (last year Reagan was President) to 2006 (into Clinton years)

Toward the end of the book. A ballistic missile has been launched toward Washington DC. An Aegis Cruiser is positioned in the Anacostia or Potomac River. And they start firing a the missile - with a Sm (standard Missile)- First missile has a proximity fuze and fragmentation warhead. he describe fact closure rate is Too fast - proximity fuse works per specifications, but too far away to affect inbound missile with the fragmentation warhead - timing stuff ..Get Lucky and destroys the imbound with maybe 3rd or 4th shot.

 

My research efforts has me thinking it was a Steven Coontz book.

 

Thanks in advance

 

I did read it but don't remember the book neither author, I remember the detail of they came from a short stock of preseries SM-2ER Block IVa, cancelled in December 2001, as per this detail the thriller should be post December 2001.

Clancy's "The Bear and the Dragon", just searching in Google the expression "sm-2er block iva clancy".

(I'm casually working these days in a Little academic paper about techno-thrillers):

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bear_and_the_Dragon

 

Beijing's increasingly desperate leaders decide to ready their ICBMs for a potential launch. A joint NATO-Russian special operations team led by Rainbow operative John Clark is dispatched to destroy them. The team destroys all but two of the Chinese missiles. Of the two that launch, one is shot down by an AH-64 Apache while the second heads toward Washington, D.C.. Ryan's family is evacuated, but Ryan himself decides at the last minute to stay behind on board a docked naval ship, the USS Gettysburg, which has an experimental anti-missile system. Ryan watches as the ship destroys the ICBM at the last possible moment.

 

http://www.litmir.me/br/?b=125462&p=138(beware, Russian Site! enter at your own risk!)

 

Gregory had spent most of the morning with a couple of serious commander-rank officers who seemed smart enough, though both were praying aloud to get the hell back on a ship and out to sea, just as Army officers always wanted to get back out in the field where there was mud to put on your boots and you had to dig a hole to piss in-but that's where the soldiers were, and any officer worth his salt wanted to be where the soldiers were. For sailors, Gregory imagined, it was salt water and fish, and probably better food than the MREs inflicted on the guys in BDUs.

 

But from his conversations with the squids, he'd learned much of what he'd already known. The Aegis radar/missile system had been developed to deal with the Russian airplane and cruise-missile threat to the Navy's aircraft carriers. It entailed a superb phased-array radar called the SPY and a fair-to-middlin' surface-to-air missile originally called the Standard Missile, because, Gregory imagined, it was the only one the Navy had. The Standard had evolved from the SM-1 to the SM-2, actually called the SM-2-MR because it was a "medium-range" missile instead of an ER, or extended-range, one, which had a booster stage to kick it out of the ships' launch cells a little faster and farther. There were about two hundred of the ER versions sitting in various storage sheds for the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, because full production had never been approved-because, somebody thought, the SM-2-ER might violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had, however, been signed with a country called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which country, of course, no longer existed. But after the 1991 war in the Persian Gulf, the Navy had looked at using the Standard Missile and Aegis system that shot it off against theater-missile threats like the Iraqi Scud. During that war, Aegis ships had actually been deployed into Saudi and other Gulf ports to protect them against the ballistic inbounds, but no missiles had actually been aimed that way, and so the system had never been combat-tested. Instead, Aegis ships periodically sailed out to Kwajalein Atoll, where their theater-missile capabilities were tested against ballistic target drones, and where, most of the time, they worked. But that wasn't quite the same, Gregory saw. An ICBM reentry vehicle had a maximum speed of about seventeen thousand miles per hour, or twenty-five thousand feet per second, which was almost ten times the speed of a rifle bullet.

 

The problem here was, oddly enough, one of both hardware and software. The SM-2-ER-Block-IV missile had indeed been designed with a ballistic target in mind, to the point that its terminal guidance system was infrared. You could, theoretically, stealth an RV against radar, but anything plunging through the atmosphere at Mach 15-plus would heat up to the temperature of molten steel. He'd seen Minuteman warheads coming into Kwajalein from California's Vandenberg Air Force

 

Base; they came in like man-made meteors, visible even in daylight, screaming in at an angle of thirty degrees or so, slowing down, but not visibly so, as they encountered thicker air. The trick was hitting them, or rather, hitting them hard enough to destroy them. In this, the new ones were actually easier to kill than the old ones. The original RVs had been metallic, some actually made of beryllium copper, which had been fairly sturdy. The new ones were lighter-therefore able to carry a heavier and more powerful nuclear warhead-and made from material like the tiles on the space shuttle. This was little different in feel from Styrofoam and not much stronger, since it was designed only to insulate against heat, and then only for a brief span of seconds. The space shuttles had suffered damage when their 747 ferry had flown through rainstorms, and some in the ICBM business referred to large raindrops as "hydro meteors" for the damage they could do to a descending RV. On rare occasions when an RV had come down through a THUNDERstorm, relatively small hailstones had damaged them to the point that the nuclear warhead might not have functioned properly.

 

Such a target was almost as easy a kill as an aircraft-shooting airplanes down is easy if you hit them, not unlike dropping a pigeon with a shotgun. The trick remained hitting the damned things.

 

Even if you got close with your interceptor, close won you no cigars. The warhead on a SAM is little different from a shotgun shell. The explosive charge destroys the metal case, converting it into jagged fragments with an initial velocity of about five thousand feet per second. These are ordinarily quite sufficient to rip into the aluminum skin that constitutes the lift and control surfaces of the strength-members of an airplane's internal framing, turning an aircraft into a ballistic object with no more ability to fly than a bird stripped of its wings.

 

But hitting one necessitates exploding the warhead far enough from the target that the cone formed of the flying fragments intersects the space occupied by the target. For an aircraft, this is not difficult, but for a missile warhead traveling faster than the explosive-produced fragments, it is-which explained the controversy over the Patriot missiles and the Scuds in 1991.

 

The gadget telling the SAM warhead where and when to explode is generically called the "fuse." For most modern missiles, the fusing system is a small, low-powered laser, which "nutates," or turns in a circle to project its beam in a cone forward of its flight path, until the beam hits and reflects off the target. The reflected beam is received by a receptor in the laser assembly, and that generates the signal telling the warhead to explode. But quick as it is, it takes a finite amount of time, and the inbound RV is coming in very fast. So fast, in fact, that if the laser beam lacks the power for more than, say, a hundred meters of range, there isn't enough time for the beam to reflect off the RV in time to tell the warhead to explode soon enough to form the cone of destruction to engulf the RV target. Even if the RV is immediately next to the SAM warhead when the warhead explodes, the RV is going faster than the fragments, which cannot hurt it because they can't catch up.

 

And there's the problem, Gregory saw. The laser chip in the Standard Missile's nose wasn't very powerful, and the nutation speed was relatively slow, and that combination could allow the RV to slip right past the SAM, maybe as much as half the time, even if the SAM came within three meters of the target, and that was no good at all. They might actually have been better off with the old VT proximity fuse of World War II, which had used a non-directional RF emitter, instead of the new high-tech gallium-arsenide laser chip. But there was room for him to play. The nutation of the laser beam was controlled by computer software, as was the fusing signal. That was something he could fiddle with. To that end, he had to talk to the guys who made it, "it" being the current limited-production test missile, the SM-2-ER-Block-IV, and they were the Standard Missile Company, a joint venture of Raytheon and Hughes, right up the street in McLean, Virginia. To accomplish that, he'd have Tony Bretano call ahead. Why not let them know that their visitor was anointed by God, after all?

 

My God, Jack," Mary Pat said. The sun was under the yardarm. Cathy was on her way home from Hopkins, and Jack was in his private study off the Oval Office, sipping a glass of whiskey and ice with the DCI and his wife, the DDO. "When I saw this, I had to go off to the bathroom."

 

"I hear you, MP." Jack handed her a glass of sherry-Mary Pat's favorite relaxing drink. Ed Foley picked a Samuel Adams beer in keeping with his working-class origins. "Ed?"

 

"Jack, this is totally ***ing crazy," the Director of Central Intelligence blurted. "***ing" was not a word you usually used around the President, even this one. "I mean, sure, it's from a good source and all that, but, Jesus, you just don't do shit like this."

Thank you very much for your assistance.