by Dale Brown
“Most American air, ground, and naval forces remain at their normal peacetime stations,” Sokolov replied slowly. He hesitated for a moment—plainly reluctant to go on. “With one possible exception.”
Gryzlov frowned. “Which is?”
“Approximately twenty-four hours ago, the U.S. Navy’s Ronald Reagan carrier strike group, which had been conducting previously scheduled training exercises in the Western Pacific, off the Taiwanese coast, suddenly altered its course. It is now steaming north, toward Japan.”
“Japan? Why head there?” Gryzlov demanded.
Leonov leaned forward, suddenly looking pensive. “Washington may be positioning military assets for a possible strike against the Vostochny Cosmodrome,” he said. “If the Americans are planning a retaliatory attack against our space launch assets, it is the logical target.”
Gryzlov stared at him. “Vostochny must be well over a thousand kilometers from Japan. That’s beyond the range of a carrier strike force, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” Leonov agreed. “Even using long-range cruise missiles, carrier-based aircraft would be hard-pressed to attack the complex.”
“Then where is the threat?”
“The Reagan’s aircraft could be used to breach our outer defenses in the far east region,” Leonov speculated. “That would open a path for a deep penetration raid by America’s remaining heavy bombers.”
“Six B-2 Spirit stealth bombers and a handful of refurbished B-1 Lancers?” Gryzlov scoffed. “What could they accomplish against Vostochny’s defenses?”
“It would probably be a suicide mission,” Leonov agreed carefully. “We have a full regiment of S-500 SAMs guarding the space center itself.” His jaw tightened. “But I remind you that even a single bomb or missile hit scored against a spacecraft ready for launch would be catastrophic.”
Gryzlov saw what he was driving at. The Energia-5VR heavy-lift rocket being assembled at Vostochny was the one slated to ferry Mars One’s replacement reactor into orbit in just a few short days. If American bombers hit the launch complex and destroyed the Energia and its priceless payload on the pad, Russia’s space station would remain dangerously vulnerable for months.
“Listen to me closely, Mikhail,” he said coldly. “You will prevent such a disaster.”
Leonov nodded. “I will put my forces on the highest possible alert. If the Americans do attack, their aircraft and missiles will be shot out of the sky.”
“For your sake, I hope this show of confidence is justified,” Gryzlov said bluntly. “Do not forget that others have failed to keep similar promises to me . . . and regretted it for the rest of their short and pain-filled lives.”
Khabarovsk Region, Russia
A Short Time Later
With his boots held above his head in his left hand to keep them dry, Brad McLanahan waded cautiously across a shallow, muddy creek choked with reeds. Huge mosquitoes rose in swarms on all sides—buzzing noisily past his face. He grimaced. With his right arm in its improvised sling, he couldn’t even swat at the ones that came swooping in, hungry for his blood.
“Wonderful, just wonderful. Join Sky Masters and see the festering armpits of the world,” he spat out through clenched teeth. The air was thick with the stench of rotting vegetation.
On the other side of the creek, Brad grabbed at an overhanging branch and hauled himself back up onto drier land, his left arm shaking with fatigue and his right leg threatening to give out at any second. Despite the discomfort involved in walking barefoot through the tall grass and rocky soil, he resisted the temptation to put his boots back on right away. The last thing he needed right now was a case of trench foot, with its attendant blisters and painful skin infections.
Slowly, he toiled up a low rise and worked his way into the cover of a copse of trees. Time for a short breather, he decided. Once his feet dried off, he should be able to make better time.
When he drew near the top of the little ridge, Brad stopped and slumped down. He propped his back up against a tree trunk for support. Bone-weary as he was, lying down was a surefire recipe for falling asleep. Then, noticing that his mouth felt dry, he took out his canteen and swigged a quick drink.
He recapped the canteen and put it away. At least the purification tablets included in his SERE kit ensured he wasn’t short of potable water. Food was another matter. His stomach growled softly. The need to ration his limited stock of protein bars meant he was already running a serious calorie deficit. Ideally, he would have been able to hunt, fish, and forage to supplement his emergency supplies. But that wasn’t possible—not when he still had so much ground to cover before it grew too dark to travel safely.
Exhausted, Brad bent his head and focused on controlling his breathing. With every passing hour, he was growing more footsore and hungry. To avoid being spotted, he’d been forced to fight his way through the worst and most rugged sections of this seemingly empty countryside. The need to detour around clearings and patches of more open woodland added miles to his journey.
In some ways, the worst part was knowing that he was being deliberately kept in the dark about the details of any plans to rescue him. Intellectually, he understood the need for tight security. After all, what he didn’t know he couldn’t spill if the Russians caught him. Still, it was frustrating. And, as tired as he was, frustration felt dangerously close to despair.
The instructions Brad had been given were both clear as crystal and as murky as the bottom of that stream he’d just crossed. On first hearing, they’d seemed simple enough: Head southeast toward a set of map coordinates. And at all costs, reach those coordinates within seventy-two hours. But what he didn’t know, and the Scion agents on the other end of his satellite phone connection would not tell him, was why this was so important. Did that X on the phone’s digital map mark the end of this long trek, the place where someone would be waiting to help him out of this godforsaken country? Or was it only a waypoint on an even longer journey?
Well, Brad told himself grimly, there was only one sure way to find out. He would just have to get off his lazy ass and soldier on. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he tugged the paratrooper boots over his swollen feet, pushed himself back upright, and started walking again.
Thirty
Sky Masters Aerospace, Inc., Battle Mountain, Nevada
Some Hours Later
Patrick McLanahan knew he’d given in to sentiment by returning to Sky Masters to carry out his analysis of Russia’s armed space station. The wireless links and limited neural interface built into his LEAF exoskeleton and its associated computer would have allowed him to carry out the work of combing through the accumulated intelligence from almost anywhere in the world. But Battle Mountain had been his adopted hometown—a home he’d shared with his son through much of Brad’s childhood and teenage years. Coming back here now to search out ways to destroy the enemy orbital fortress that had knocked Brad and Boomer’s S-19 out of the sky just felt right somehow.
It was a sentiment Jason Richter certainly understood. The Sky Masters CEO had set him up in an office just down the hall, with complete access to all of the company’s secure computer systems . . . and to the accumulated knowledge and intuition of its top scientists and engineers.
Right now his eyes were closed. This shut out all outside distractions while he sorted through thousands of pieces of data collected about Mars One, both during Brad and Boomer’s aborted reconnaissance and in the hours and days since then. While his LEAF’s neural link was less capable than those used by the Iron Wolf Squadron’s Cybernetic Infantry Devices, it still gave him the ability to assimilate and analyze information much faster than was possible for an unassisted human brain.
He was drawing on much more than just the material gathered by Sky Masters itself. Years before, while he was still president of the United States, Kevin Martindale had made sure carefully concealed back doors were secretly installed in the operating systems of most of the federal government’s computer networks. Martindale had
wanted to be able to bypass the sluggish federal bureaucracy during a national crisis. Now those same hidden back doors enabled Patrick to roam freely through the immense amounts of information collected by a vast array of different government agencies—ranging from the Pentagon to the National Reconnaissance Office to NASA.
Mentally, he dove headlong into this flow of raw intelligence, determined to tease out the significance of even the smallest scrap of data. Visual, radar, and infrared imagery, together with detailed reports prepared by various experts, scrolled through his mind at a rapid clip. Time in the sense used by the outside world ceased to have any real meaning for him.
Sorting through the pictures and other sensor readings amassed by Brad’s nanosatellites during their close approach to the Russian station made several things clear. First, Mars One’s three large modules had both inner and outer hulls. It was a construction technique similar to that used in Russian nuclear submarine designs, though never before for spacecraft. While this double-hulled design added mass and reduced the amount of usable interior space in each module, it also gave the station significant structural strength against damage from micrometeorites, shrapnel, and even weapons-grade lasers. And it provided the Russian station with good protection against radiation, something that was especially important since its relatively high orbit brushed against the lower fringes of the innermost Van Allen belt. Second, the spaces between its inner and outer hulls were occupied by retractable weapons and sensor mounts and stores of consumables—water, food, and oxygen. As another benefit, those stores added even more shielding against cosmic radiation.
Next, Patrick turned his efforts to analyzing Mars One’s armament. Even what little was known left no doubt that the station had been designed and built for one purpose and one purpose only: to conduct sustained combat operations in space.
The two lasers Brad and Boomer had observed in action were plainly upgraded models of the Hobnail carbon-dioxide, electric-discharge weapons carried aboard Russia’s rocket-launched Elektron spaceplanes. Their lethality at relatively short ranges had been demonstrated by the speed with which they engaged and destroyed the Sky Masters recon nanosats. By correlating the known thermal resistance of the materials used to build the nanosats and the time it took the lasers to kill them, he was able to develop a reasonable estimate of their energy output. And that, in turn, enabled him to pin down the Russian lasers’ probable maximum effective range—which was somewhere between eighty-five and one hundred and twenty kilometers.
Patrick nodded to himself. The station’s lasers were primarily defensive weapons. Against targets moving at orbital speeds, battles fought at one hundred kilometers or less were practically knife fights.
Mars One’s offensive punch came from the plasma rail gun that had wrecked Brad and Boomer’s spaceplane. Close study of images showing the starfish-shaped array of supercapacitors around the weapon’s central tube confirmed Lawrence Dawson’s speculation that it was a MARAUDER-type plasma gun. Somehow, Patrick doubted that was simply a coincidence. Over the years, the West’s intelligence agencies had penetrated several of Russia’s most closely held weapons research and development programs. But espionage was a door that opened both ways. He strongly suspected a thorough probe of the long-sealed MARAUDER research files would find Russian digital fingerprints all over them.
Still immersed in the data stream, he resisted the temptation to slide off target and waste time scanning through the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s computers to confirm his hunch. How the Russians originally got their hands on this technology was a question for another day and time. What mattered right now was that they’d turned it into a powerful and incredibly long-range weapon—one that had already destroyed most of America’s reconnaissance satellites. Current observations suggested it could hit and kill targets at well over four thousand miles.
Patrick shook his head in astonishment. The Russian scientists and engineers who’d built that damned rail gun had evidently figured out how to create plasma toroids that remained stable for close to a second in a vacuum, far beyond anything yet achieved in any Western lab. Their success was a damning indictment of the shortsighted politicians and defense officials who’d abandoned similar U.S. efforts decades ago.
With an inward sigh at the folly and carelessness his countrymen had exhibited, he moved on.
During the nanosat flyby of Mars One, Brad had identified several other camouflaged hatches and ports. Knowing how the Russians, especially Gryzlov, thought, Patrick had little doubt those masked more weapons systems—probably a mix of missiles and conventional autocannons, like the 23mm gun the Soviets had test-fired aboard their old Salyut-3 space station back in the 1970s. But conventional missiles and cannons, powerful though they might be individually, could not begin to match the firepower produced by the station’s plasma rail gun and its two shorter-range Hobnail lasers.
No, Patrick thought coldly, those directed-energy weapons were the chief threat posed by Mars One. Without them, the Russian station would be nothing more than an orbiting target—vulnerable to any number of missiles and lasers already in the U.S. and Sky Masters arsenals. With them, it circled the earth as a lethal, effectively impregnable fortress. Whatever Mars One’s sensors could see, its plasma rail gun could kill . . . and at unprecedented distances.
He shifted slightly in his chair. The energy required to power those weapons must be significant, around a hundred kilowatts for each of the lasers and considerably more for the plasma gun. Where was it coming from? Certainly not from the space station’s solar panels.
Images captured by ground-based telescopes and by the Sky Masters nanosatellites made it possible to calculate the size of those arrays. Even assuming the Russians had figured out how to increase their panel efficiency beyond the 30 to 40 percent range achieved by those aboard the old International Space Station, Mars One could not possibly generate more than one hundred kilowatts from solar power.
Patrick frowned. He’d read the reports from the Scion team in Russia. Alexei Rykov, the former cosmonaut candidate they’d tricked into spilling details about Gryzlov’s top secret program, had claimed Mars Project personnel were being trained to operate and maintain small, high-efficiency fusion power plants. Most analysts had dismissed this otherwise unconfirmed claim as dubious. They were skeptical that the Russians could have developed compact fusion technology ahead of the United States or other Western nations. And frankly, he’d shared that assessment . . .
But now?
Mars One had a working and deadly plasma rail gun—a weapon that was beyond the current technological reach of the United States and its allies. That much was undeniable. Was it safe to assume that was the only scientific and engineering breakthrough Moscow had achieved?
Hell no, Muck, Patrick told himself, using the nickname his friends had given him long ago. Fusion reactor or not, it was obvious that the Russian space station must have some kind of advanced power generator aboard. How else could its crew hope to fire their rail gun and lasers repeatedly in combat? No amount of battery storage could keep those weapons charged during a prolonged fight.
For a moment, he sat motionless, gripped by a sudden fear that the Russians had gained an insurmountable lead over the United States. In seeking a way to defeat Mars One, he might only be hunting a chimera, something that was impossible. How in Christ’s name could they hope to win a battle against this monstrosity? That space station’s plasma gun could kill any spacecraft or missile long before it closed within striking range. And with the power generated by a working fusion reactor, the Russians had the ability to fire the damned thing as rapidly as they could recharge its supercapacitors.
Or could they?
Patrick suddenly opened his eyes, thinking hard. Bring up all data collected during every observed attack on an American satellite and spacecraft, he ordered his computer through the neural link. He closed his eyes again in intense concentration. Reams of information spooled through his mind. The intelligence
gathered from more than thirty separate engagements was intriguing. Mars One’s rail gun had killed targets over a wide variety of distances. Brad and Boomer’s S-19 had been nailed at point-blank range, at least in astronautical terms. But the station’s last kill, another Trumpeter ELINT satellite, had been fried at more than four thousand miles while on its way back up to apogee in an elliptical Molniya orbit. The intervals between Mars One’s attacks were equally varied—varying from as short as several minutes to as long as an hour or more.
Images of the Russian space station cascaded past his closed eyes. In every case, there was the same dazzling pulse as the plasma gun fired—a flare of white light so intense that it obscured even the bright glare of the sun reflected off Mars One’s solar arrays.
The sun . . .
Like a hunting dog suddenly catching a scent, Patrick leaned forward in his chair. The sun. That was the one constant amid all the variation. So far, Mars One had never fired its directed-energy weapons while the station itself was deep in Earth’s shadow. Which could mean—
“General McLanahan?”
Startled by the sudden interruption, Patrick swam back up to full awareness of his surroundings. He disengaged his neural link. His racing thoughts abruptly decelerated, returning to the plodding, second-by-second routine of the nondigital world. Clumsily, he swiveled around in his chair. “Yes?”
Nadia Rozek stood framed in the open door. She wore a flight suit and cradled a helmet under one arm. Her expression was somber. “I have come to say good-bye,” she told him. “And to give you my word that we will do our best.”
He glanced at his watch and was shocked to see that several hours had passed while he’d been linked to his computer. Nadia and her team must be ready to depart for the distant airfield she’d chosen as a base for their planned rescue operation.
