Combat

by Stephen Coonts

  He didn’t have to say that the media were also spreading their net. Television and the Internet were already full of rumors—the attack had been scheduled but called off for political reasons, that the entire exercise was just a bluff, that the U.S. had backed down because of the risk of excessive casualties, and others more fanciful. U.S. “resolve” had been shattered.

  Gongga Shan Mountain Launch Complex, Xichuan Province, Southern China September 23

  General Shen Xuesen stood quietly, calmly, watching the bank of monitors, but wishing to be on the surface. He had a better view of the operation from here, but it did not seem as real.

  It was their fifth time, and he could see the staff settling down, nowhere as nervous as the first launch, but China was committed now, and her future hung on their success.

  Everyone saw the short, solidly built general standing quietly in the gallery. In his early fifties, he’d spent a lot of time in the weather, and it showed. An engineer, he looked capable of reshaping a mountain, and he had Gongga Shan as proof. It was a commander’s role to appear calm, even when he knew exactly how many things could go wrong, and how much was at stake, both for him and for China.

  Shen had already given his permission to fire. The staff was counting down, waiting until they were in the exact center of the intercept window. The ‘Dragon’s egg’ sat in the breech, inert but vital, waiting for just a few more seconds.

  The moment came as the master clock stepped down to zero. The launch controller turned a key, and for a moment, the only sign of activity was on the computer displays. Shen’s eyes glanced to the breech seals, but the indicators all showed green. He watched the video screen that showed the muzzle, a black oval three meters across.

  Even with a muzzle velocity of four thousand meters per second, it took time for the egg to build up to full speed. Almost a full second elapsed between ignition and …

  A puff of smoke and flame appeared on the display, followed by a black streak, briefly visible. Only its size, almost three meters in diameter, allowed it to be seen at all. Shen relaxed, his inward calm now matching his outward demeanor. His gun had worked again.

  “Hatching,” reported the launch controller. Everyone had so loved the egg metaphor that they used the term to report when the sabots separated from the meter-sized projectile. Designed to hold the small vehicle inside the larger bore, they split and fell away almost instantly. Effectively, the projectile got the boost of three-meter barrel but the drag of a one-meter body.

  Speed, always more speed, mused Shen as he watched the monitors. The crews were already boarding buses for their ride up the mountain to inspect the gun. Other screens showed helicopters lifting off to search for the sabots. Although they could not be used again, they were marvels of engineering in their own right and would reveal much about the gun’s design.

  The goal was eight kilometers a second, orbital velocity. First, take a barrel a kilometer long and three meters across. To make it laser-straight, gouge out the slope of a mountain and anchor it on the bedrock. Cover it up, armor and camouflage it, too. Put the muzzle near the top, seventy-nine hundred meters above sea level. That reduces air resistance and buys you some speed. Then use sabots to get more speed. You’re halfway there. Then …

  “Ignition,” announced one of the controllers. Put a solid rocket booster on the projectile to give it the final push it needed. “She’s flying! Guidance is on-line, sir. It’s in the center of the basket. Intercept in twenty minutes.”

  General Shen had seen the concept described in a summary the Iraqis had provided of Supergun technology after the American Persian Gulf War. American technological superiority had been more than a shock to the People’s Liberation Army. It had triggered an upheaval.

  The Chinese military had always chosen numbers over quality, because numbers were cheap, and the Politburo was trying to feed one and a half billion people. They’d always believed that numbers could overwhelm a smaller high-tech force, making them reluctant even to try. Everyone knew how sensitive the Americans were to casualties, and to risk.

  But if the difference in quality is big enough, numbers don’t matter anymore. Imagine using machine guns in the Civil War, or a nuclear sub in WW II. Shen and his colleagues had watched the Americans run rings around the Iraqis, suffering trivial casualties while they hammered the opposition.

  So the Chinese army had started the long, expensive process of becoming a modern military. They’d bought high-tech weapons from the Russians, fortunately willing to sell at bargain-basement prices. They’d stolen what they couldn’t buy from Western nations. They’d gotten all kinds of exotic technologies: rocket-driven torpedoes for their subs, exotic aircraft designs.

  It wasn’t enough. Running and working as hard as they could, they’d cut the technology lag from twenty to fifteen years. They were following the same path as the West, and it would just take time to catch up.

  General Shen had seen the answer. He’d seen a vulnerability, then planned, convinced, plotted, and argued until the Politburo had listened and backed his plan. If your opponent strikes at you from above, take away his perch. Take away that technological edge.

  Build a prison camp deep in the mountains, in a remote spot in southern China. Send the hard cases and malcontents there. The State has useful work for them. Watch the prisoners dig away the side of a mountain. You need a rail line to the nearest city, Kangding, 250 kilometers southwest. That had been a job in itself. Then add army barracks, the launch-control center, and SAM and AAA defenses. It had taken years before it looked like anything more than a mistake.

  Meanwhile, design the “T’ien Lung,” or Celestial Dragon, to fly in space. And design a gun, the biggest gun in the history of the world, the Dragon’s Mother, to fire it. Such designs were well within the grasp of the West, but they were barely possible for China’s limited means. Her civilian space program had provided a lot of the talent, as well as a convenient excuse for foreign study and purchases.

  “Control has been passed to Xichuan,” the senior controller announced. “Intercept in ten minutes.” A look of relief passed over his face. If a screwup occurred after this, it was their fault, not his.

  Shen longed to be in two places at once, but the gun was his, and Dong Zhi, the scientist who had actually designed the Dragons, was at the space complex. Xichuan handled China’s civilian space program, and they had the antennas to watch the intercept.

  Everyone in the room watched the central display, even though it was only a computer representation. Two small dots sat on curved lines, slowly moving to an intersection point. Then the screen changed, becoming completely black, with the characters for “Terminal Phase,” displayed in one corner.

  General Shen Xuesen smiled. He had insisted on the television camera for terminal-phase guidance. Not only was it hard to jam, it made the result understandable. Seeing the target grow from a speck to a shape to a recognizable satellite had made it real, not only for the leadership who had watched the tests, but for the people who had to do the work, who fought the war from so far away.

  The image was a little grainy, because of the lens size, but it also had the clarity of space. He could see the boxy, cluttered body of the American GPS satellite, and the outspread solar panels, each divided into four sections.

  The controller started counting down as the image slowly expanded. “Five seconds, four, three, two, one, now.” He uttered the last word softly, but triumphantly, as the image suddenly vanished. A few people clapped, but they’d all seen this before, and most didn’t feel the need now.

  All that work, all that money, to put a ten-pound warhead in orbit. More like a shotgun shell, the explosive fired a cone of fragments at the unarmored satellite. Filled with atomic clocks and delicate electronics, it didn’t have a hope of surviving the explosion. The carcass would remain in its orbit, intact, but pocked with dozens of small holes.

  In fact, the kill was almost an anticlimax. After all the work of getting the vehicle up there
, it was over far too quickly.

  Skyhook One Seven, Over the South China Sea September 23

  “We just lost GPS,” reported the navigator. “Switching to inertial tracker.” The navigator, an Air Force major, sounded concerned but not alarmed.

  “Is it the receiver?” asked the mission commander. A full colonel, it was his job to manage the information gathered by the ELINT, or Electronic Intelligence, aircraft. Running racetracks off the China coast, it listened for radar and radio signals, analyzing their contents and fixing their location. The digested information was datalinked directly back to Joint Task Force Headquarters.

  “Self-test is good, sir, and the receiver is still picking up satellites, but we just lost one of the signals, and now we’re outside our error budget.” Each satellite over the minimum required narrowed the area of uncertainty around a transmitter’s location. GPS was accurate enough to target some missiles directly, or give pilots a good idea of where to search for their objective.

  “So we’ve lost another one,” muttered the colonel.

  USS Nebraska (SSBN—739), On Patrol September 24

  The sub’s Operations Officer knocked on the captain’s open door. “Sir, they’ve lost another one.” He handed the priority message to the skipper. It detailed the loss and showed how coverage was affected for their patrol area.

  The captain looked over the printout. “Have you compared this with our navigation plan?”

  “Yes, sir. We have to change one of our planned fix times. It falls in one of the new ‘dark windows.’ We can move it ahead two hours or back six.”

  The captain scowled, more than one might think appropriate for a minor inconvenience. But ballistic missile subs had to come up to periscope depth periodically to check their navigation systems’ accuracy. A few meters of error at the launch point could be hundreds of times that at the target.

  When the full GPS constellation had been operational, the captain could take a fix anytime he chose. Now there were times he couldn’t. That made him less flexible, more predictable, and thus easier to find. He really didn’t like that.

  “Move it up,” ordered the captain. “Let’s take a fix before they lose any more birds. And draw up a new schedule reducing the interval between fixes.”

  INN News September 24

  “With the loss of another satellite, emotions at the Fiftieth Space Operations Wing have changed from grim or angry to fatalistic.” Mark Markin, INN’s defense correspondent, stood in front of the gate to Cheyenne Mountain. The Fiftieth’s operations center was actually located at Schriver Air Force Base nearby, but the drama of the mountain’s tunnel entrance was preferable to Schriver’s nondescript government buildings.

  Markin wore a weather-beaten parka, zipped up against the chill Colorado wind. His carefully shaped hair was beginning to show the effects of the wind as well, and he seemed to rush through his report in an effort to get out of the weather.

  “Although it is widely acknowledged that loss of the GPS satellites is no fault of the people here at the Fiftieth, they are still suffering a deep sense of helplessness.

  “Since the GPS network became active in 1989, it has become almost a public utility. The men and women here took pride in providing a service that not only gave the U.S. armed forces a tremendous military advantage, but benefited the civilian community in countless ways.

  “Now, someone, possibly the Chinese, but certainly an enemy of the United States, has destroyed at least three and possibly as many as five satellites. Yesterday’s loss shows that last week’s attack was not an isolated act.

  “And the United States can do nothing to stop it.”

  San Diego, California September 24

  Jim Avrell had gone to only a few of Ray’s gatherings. His “discussion groups” were famous throughout SPAWAR, and were always worthwhile. Although Arvell would have liked to go, two preschoolers and another on the way limited his free time.

  Tonight, though, he’d made the time. In fact, his wife Carol had urged him to go. After he’d described Ray’s sudden leave of absence and the rumors from the other coworkers, she’d urged him to go and get the straight story.

  Avrell was an antenna design specialist in Ray’s working group. He knew and liked the outgoing engineer, even if McConnell could be a little fierce in technical “discussions.” He was worried about their project, which was suffering in Ray’s absence, and about Ray himself. With the brass so upset about GPS, it was no time for Ray to play “missing person.”

  The car’s nav console prompted, “Turn left here,” and he signaled for the turn onto Panorama Drive. It had been over a year since he had visited Ray’s place, that time with Carol at a reception for a visiting astronaut. That had been an occasion.

  But nothing like this. As he made the turn, Avrell saw the street almost completely lined with cars. This was definitely not typical for a quiet residential community. Avrell ended up parking a block away.

  As he hurried up the path, he heard the expected hubbub, but Ray didn’t meet him at the door, and everyone wasn’t in the living room. A group of four men huddled around a coffee table there, and he could see another clustered in the kitchen. McConnell appeared out of the one of the bedroom doors, hurrying. He looked tired.

  “Jim Avrell! It’s great to see you.” Genuine pleasure lit up Ray’s face, but there was a distracted air to it. And surprise.

  Avrell saw no point in dissembling. “Ray, what’s going on over here? You haven’t been at work …”

  “I’ve got bigger fish to fry, Jim. Promise you won’t tell anyone what’s going on here? Unless I OK it?”

  “Well, of course.”

  Ray looked at him intently. “No, Jim, I mean it. You can’t tell anyone. Treat this as classified.”

  Avrell studied McConnell carefully, then agreed. “I promise not to tell anyone what I see here.” He fought the urge to raise his right hand.

  McConnell seemed to relax a little, and smiled again. “You’ll understand in a minute, Jim.” He called over to the group at the coffee table. “I’ll be right there.”

  One of them, whom Avrell recognized as Avrim Takir, a mathematician from the work group, answered. “Fine, Ray. We need another ten minutes, anyway.” Takir spotted Avrell and waved, but quickly returned his attention to the laptop in front of him.

  McConnell led his coworker down the hall into his home office. Ray’s desk was piled high with books and disk cases and printouts. The center display, another Image Wall mounted above the desk, showed an isometric design for an aircraft—no, a spacecraft, Avrell realized.

  Used to polished CAD-CAM designs where they worked, he was surprised. This one was crude. Some of it was fully rendered in 3-D space, but parts of it were just wireframes. At least one section was a two-dimensional image altered to appear three-dimensional.

  “Defender isn’t pretty, but we’re a little pressed for time,” McConnell declared. He had the air of a proud parent.

  Avrell, surprised and puzzled, studied the diagram, which filled the four-by-eight display. Data tables hovered in parts of the screen not covered by the vehicle. He started tracing out systems: propulsion; communications; weapons? He shot a questioning look at McConnell.

  Ray met his look with one of his own. “Question, Jim. What’s the best way to protect a satellite? If someone’s shooting them down, how can you stop them?”

  “They haven’t even confirmed it’s the Chinese …”

  “Doesn’t matter who’s doing it!” McConnell countered. “Someone is.” He paused and rephrased the question. “Can you effectively protect a satellite from the ground?”

  Avrell answered quickly. “Of course not. You’re on the wrong end of the gravity well, even if you’re near the launcher site, and you might be on the wrong side of the planet.”

  “Which we probably are,” McConnell agreed. “Here on the surface, even with perfect information, we can’t defend a satellite until something is launched to attack it, so we’re always i
n a tail chase. If we’re above the launcher, with the satellite we’re trying to defend, Isaac Newton joins our team.”

  “And this is going to do the job?” Avrell asked, motioning toward the diagram. He tried to sound objective, but skepticism crept into his voice in spite of his efforts.

  McConnell seemed used to it. “It can, Jim. There’s nothing startling in here. The technology is all there: an orbital vehicle, sensors, and weapons.”

  “And you’ve been tasked by …”

  “It’s my own hook, Jim. This is all on my own,” Ray admitted. Then he saw his friend’s question and answered it without waiting.

  “Because I can’t wait for the government to think of it, that’s why. The answer is obvious, but by the time they hold all the meetings and write all the Requirements we won’t have any satellites left.”

  McConnell sat down heavily, fatigue and strain showing on his face. “This isn’t about just GPS or the Chinese, Jim. Someone’s developed the capability to attack satellites in space. That means they could attack manned spacecraft. They can probably launch orbital nuclear weapons at us, or anyone else they don’t like. And we certainly know they don’t like us.”

  Avrell leaned back against the edge of a table and looked carefully at Ray. “So you’re going to design the answer to our problems.” He phrased it as a statement, but it was still a question.

  “Me and all the other people here,” Ray corrected. “Why not, Jim? I’ve got a good idea, and I’m running with it. I might not be in the right bureau in the right branch, but I believe in this. Ideas are too precious to waste.”

  Inside, Avrell agreed with his friend, but practicality pushed that aside. “You can’t build it,” he stated quietly.

  “Well, that’s the rub,” McConnell said, actually rubbing the back of his neck in emphasis. “I’ve made a lot of friends over the years. I’m going to shotgun it out—only within the system,” he hurriedly added, referring to the procedures for handling classified material. “I won’t go public with this. It’s a serious design proposal.”