Combat

by Stephen Coonts

  “Multiple contacts. Radar shows debris as well,” Tillman confirmed. Defender’s millimeter-wave radar would have no trouble distinguishing individual pieces of wreckage.

  “It’s a kill,” she said with satisfaction. Sue Tillman also handled voice comms with Miramar, and said “They’re cheering in the Battle Center!”

  Ray noted the time. They’d been up half an hour.

  Gongga Shan 0635

  “It’s gone, sir!” The communications tech handed him the headset. Shen listened to Dong’s report quietly. The Americans had destroyed the special T’ien Lung. They’d made the kill at long range, on an opening target. Defender was more than capable.

  Shen worked to control his surprise and disappointment, making his face a mask. Defender had proved itself. Now more than before, it was vital that the second vehicle destroy the American spacecraft. Unfortunately, there was nothing more he could do to ensure its success. Like countless commanders before him, Shen could only wait for the dice to stop rolling.

  Battle Center 0635

  “It’s a brute force attack, Jenny.” Chris Brown sat surrounded by display screens. Some showed packets of invading data. Others listed tables of statistical data—numbers of packets sent from each site, numbers rejected by the filter, amount of processor time lost, and many other values.

  “They don’t have our encryption completely broken, but they’ve learned enough to get through occasionally. See,” he said, pointing to two invading data packets. “The body of the message is the same. And most of the header data is valid. All they have to do is vary the part they don’t know.

  “And they’re getting better at it. Look at this curve.” It showed the percentage of successful penetrations since the attack began, and the number steadily increased.

  Jenny forced herself to think clearly, to ignore the rest of the center and the craft in space above her. This was a battle of minds.

  “The encryption key is time-based,” Jenny said. “To mimic it at all, they’d have to be monitoring our communications in real time.”

  “Then that’s what they’re doing,” replied the computer analyst. “All of the communications are hardened land lines.” Jenny had insisted on that, for obvious reasons.

  “Except the signal to Defender,” countered Brown.

  “Which we have to leave up,” finished Jenny. That link was the reason for the Battle Center’s existence. She visualized the flow, out from the Center, picked up by intercept antenna somewhere, then fed back into the system though pirated computers. The Chinese were using their own codes against them.

  “Chris, we have to change the encryption schemes.”

  “That won’t help, they’ll only …”

  “Only for the link to Defender,” she continued. “Right now we all use the same coding scheme. Change the time-based key for Defender’s link, and the filters will reject it automatically.”

  Brown’s face lit up. “Yeah, I can even optimize the coding to make it easier for the filters to spot. I can use a modifier …”

  The analyst trailed off into thought, but quickly resurfaced. “I’ll have to upload a patch to Defender, but the Chinese haven’t interfered with the link. I can have us up in five minutes.”

  Jenny hurried back to her own console, keying her handset as she went. “Good news, Admiral.”

  Defender 0645

  Brown’s patch had an immediate effect. Cut off from the ground, the computer had been displaying the estimated position of the second T’ien Lung. It had been close, but the uncertainty of the estimate had prevented them from taking any action.

  Now, within moments, the display flashed with the real position of TL2. A red arc showed its track history, a red dot its present location, and a red cone its possible future position. Defender’s orbit lay square in the center of that cone, and another flashing symbol showed the intercept point.

  Intercept was only five minutes away. They couldn’t hope to set up and kill it before it reached them. Barnes ordered “Countermeasures!” and then told the pilots, “Take this vector. Pull in the turret, close the doors.”

  Ray saw the stars swing again, then felt pressure against his back as Defender’s engines came to life. They quickly increased to full power. The rest of the crew quickly carried out Barnes’s orders, bringing the laser turret inside.

  The doors might protect the turret against small fragments from the T’ien Lung if it did detonate. Of course, with the doors closed, they were blind as well as defenseless. More than ever, Ray felt grateful for the data link.

  Scarelli had oriented the craft so that its top side faced the T’ien Lung. They’d argued about it during one of the many strategy sessions, and decided they’d rather have fragments in the doors and upper fuselage than in the heat shield. They could live without weapons and sensors, but they couldn’t reenter without the heat shield.

  The acceleration wasn’t as bad as takeoff, but it was still intense, and mixed with uncertainly.

  His board showed the same tracks as Barnes’s, as well as other ship’s systems. He watched the radar decoys leave the ship, a cluster of simple radar corners, based on their best guesses about the design of the kill vehicle’s sensors.

  McConnell also watched as the line of Defender’s orbit slowly curved. The engines stopped, and Ray saw that they were just outside the Chinese intercept cone.

  The arc carrying the T’ien Lung did not change for two long minutes. It finally started to shift, back toward an intercept on their new course. “Look at that,” Barnes said, pointing to the display. “Their reaction times are very slow.”

  He waited for a moment, then announced, “They’re not buying the decoys. All right, pilot, now take this vector. Stand by for a long burn, people.”

  This time Ray was ready for the acceleration, and better still, welcomed it. The Chinese lag in controlling the T’ien Lung would be their undoing.

  Barnes’s new course zigged Defender away from the T‘ien Lung, exactly opposite to the course correction the Chinese vehicle was making. Defender’s engines were more powerful than the T’ien Lung’s thrusters. The Chinese vehicle had been designed to engage satellites, not maneuverable spacecraft.

  “Past closest point of approach!” the copilot reported. Skeldon didn’t sound relieved. The Chinese could always command-detonate the warhead if they felt there was a chance of damaging them.

  They did, after another thirty extra seconds of distance. There was no sound of explosion, but two sharp bangs, like rifle shots, sounded over their heads, and part of Ray’s board went from green to red and yellow. One corner of his eye noted that the symbol for the second T’ien Lung was now gone from the screen.

  Ray reported, “We’re losing hydrogen pressure. One of the tanks has been holed!”

  “Continue the burn,” Barnes ordered. “Move as much hydrogen out of the tank as you can before it escapes.”

  “Doing it,” Ray responded. “It’ll screw up our center of gravity,” he warned.

  “Compensating,” responded Scarelli. “What about that other strike?” the pilot asked.

  “That’ll take a little sorting out,” Ray replied.

  Part of the electrical system flashed red, but what was the problem? Was it a component, or the wiring? They’d installed redundant lines on the critical systems. It was time to see if it was working. He started isolating components. His mind focused on the technical problem, he hardly noticed the acceleration.

  There. “Primary actuators for the ailerons are off-line. Backups seem all right.” But something else aft still glowed red. He closed a few more systems, but the news wasn’t good. “We’ve lost number three hydrogen pump.”

  “Which means no number three engine,” Scarelli continued.

  “We can cope,” Barnes reassured him. “We don’t have another burn until we reenter.”

  The burn finished, and Ray was surprised by the sudden weightlessness. His stomach complained a little, but he mastered it.

  B
arnes asked. “Jim, how long until we’re over Xichuan?”

  Scarelli checked his plot, then answered, “Twenty-three minutes. That last burn brought our orbit right over them!” He looked at Barnes with a “How’d you do that?” expression.

  The major grinned. “I picked the first burn vector directly away from where I wanted us to end up. That way I could make the long burn in the right direction. Set up for ground attack. Here are the targets.”

  Ray watched as he designated two points on the map display. Scarelli had to make one small burn to refine the course, then he and Skeldon turned Defender so her bay faced the globe of earth below.

  After that, they waited. Baker and Tillman checked out their equipment, and pilots monitored their course. For the first time since they had taken off, Ray had a moment to realize he was in space.

  His stomach was still under control, and they were all strapped in anyway. No floating during General Quarters, he mused. He looked at the monitors, one of which showed the earth “above” them. They were over the North Pole, coming down on the other side of the world from California. It seemed different, somehow. Smaller, and more vulnerable.

  “Five minutes,” Scarelli warned, and Baker and Tillman both acknowledged. Ray and Barnes both watched silently as the specialists worked.

  Tillman reported “Imaging first target,” and activated her radar. The millimeter-wave signal easily found the Xichuan space center, a cluster of large buildings. Ray selected the radar display, and studied the buildings. They’d seen it before in satellite photographs, and he quickly picked out the administration buildings, the control center, the powerhouse, and the other structures. The image was clear enough to show the chain-link fence that surrounded the compound.

  Baker designated his rods, and Ray saw three small symbols appear over the control center, and two more on the antennas. “Ready for drop,” he reported.

  “Drop on the mark,” Barnes ordered calmly.

  “Roger, in ten,” the weapons officer replied, and then counted the seconds down. “Dropping now.”

  Ray saw his board change but felt nothing.

  The rods were not as noisy or complex as the laser. Each simply consisted of a long, pointed tungsten cylinder weighing fifty kilograms, with a small motor and finned guidance unit on the back. Springs ejected them in quick sequence from their rack in Defender’s bay, and McConnell watched the stream drift clear of the ship.

  As fast as the rods had been ejected, their individual motors fired, driving them down toward the earth and reentry. The tungsten projectile would easily withstand the heat, and was aerodynamically shaped. The guidance unit would burn up, but by then they’d be aligned on their target, and with so much speed that nothing would deflect them.

  Xichuan was still several hundred miles ahead of them, but of course the rods needed that time to cover the distance to the ground. It also made it difficult for the Chinese to predict where the attack would strike. If they could even see Defender. The ship was approaching from the north, where Chinese radar coverage was limited.

  “Five minutes to next target,” Baker announced.

  Gongga Shan 0120

  The call came over a standard phone line, not the command net. General Shen Xuesen took the receiver from the communications chief.

  “General, this is Wu Lixin.” Shen knew the man. He was one of Dong’s assistants at the control center. He sounded absolutely shattered.

  “Wu, what’s happened?”

  “They bombed us, sir. Dong is dead, and so are most of the staff. The center’s gone, ripped apart.”

  “Bombs. Was it an air attack?”

  “No, no airplane, nothing was seen. No planes, no missiles.”

  The general felt his heart turn to ice. It had to be Defender. So the detonation hadn’t hurt them at all. They were still capable.

  Shen looked at their predicted orbit. She was moving from north to south, and …

  “Out! Everybody outside right now! Head for the shelters!” he turned to the comm chief. “Get the gun crews out as well.” Theoretically, the gun and the control bunkers were hardened, but Xichuan’s control center had been hardened as well.

  There was no way to tell when, or even if, an attack would happen, but Shen wasn’t risking his people’s lives. The instant he saw everyone in the center moving, he headed for the door himself.

  He sprinted outside, intending to head for one of the slit trenches that had been dug nearby, but he had made it no more than a dozen steps before the explosions started.

  It wasn’t from behind him, but from the mountain, to his right. He turned just a little and saw a series of bright yellow explosions ripple over the gun’s location. Earth spouted into the air hundreds of feet, and he could feel the concussions from over a kilometer away.

  At least three deadly flowers blossomed at the base of the gun, right over the breech. Another four or five landed in a neat line on top of the barrel, and another three clustered closely around the muzzle. In the darkness, the mountain was outlined for several seconds by the flash from the explosions.

  One of the first group must have found the liquid-propellant piping, because the entire building suddenly disintegrated in a ball of orange flame. Pieces of debris arced high into the air, and Shen suddenly found himself running again, diving headfirst into the trench as pieces of cement, steel, and rock began raining down on him.

  The deadly rain stopped, and Shen untangled himself from the others who had sought shelter with him in the trench. Reluctantly, he knelt, and then stood, a little unsteadily. Knowing and hating what he would see, he nonetheless had to find out what they’d done to his gun.

  The breech building was gone, replaced by a crater filled with flaming debris. Most of the installation had been below ground, and the crater had carved a massive gouge out of the mountain’s roots.

  The slope of the mountain looked almost untouched, but a line of craters neatly followed the path of the gun barrel, and the mouth was hidden in a mound of loose rock.

  Five years of work. Ten years of convincing. Twenty years of dreaming, all lost. His friend Dong was dead, with many of China’s brightest dead with him. How many bodies would they find just in the ruins below?

  Shen realized others were trying to help him out of the trench. Passively, he let them lift him out and steady him on the grass. He turned automatically to head for the center, and saw it was in ruins, flames outlining the ruined walls. He hadn’t even heard the explosions.

  It was finished. Shen was suddenly very sorry he’d lived.

  Defender

  With most of their fuel used up, they’d made one small burn to line up for reentry after two more orbits. With nothing to do but wait, Ray felt his sensation of unreality return. His mind and emotions sought to understand this new experience.

  They’d fought and won a battle in space. He’d played a role, a major one, in making it happen, but he knew he wasn’t the only one. More importantly, others would follow after him. Not all would be Americans, maybe not all of them would be friends, but warfare had changed, as it always does.

  Biff Barnes checked the displays over and over again, looking for the smallest fault, but the ship was performing well. Reentry was now only a few minutes away. Scarelli and Skeldon were handling the preparations perfectly.

  For some reason Barnes was having problems trying to determine how he would fill out his personal flight log. Would the T’ien Lungs count as “kills”? Three more to become an “orbital ace”? He suspected there would be more missions after this one.

  That thought led to another, and he started to make a mental list of improvements Defender would need before she flew again.

  Battle Center

  Jenny Oh fought hard to keep her emotions under control. Her first cheer, when Defender had destroyed the first T’ien Lung, had been followed by another when they’d escaped the second kill vehicle. Her heart had leapt to her throat when she saw the symbols for Defender and the kill vehicle merge,
and then soared when they’d said all were safe.

  And that had been followed by the destruction of the Dragon Gun at Gongga Shan. They’d watched it all on Defender’s imaging radar, datalinked down to the Center. The sudden transformation of the neat structural shapes to rubble had been unmistakable, and she’d yelled as loud as any of them. It was the success of everything they’d worked so hard for. Defender had proven herself.

  Jenny had looked over at Admiral Schultz, who sat quietly, his head in his hands. He stayed that way, aware but silent, for some time. After the celebration stopped, he’d left, then come back later, in time to watch the reentry. He slowly walked over to Jenny’s station, checking his watch as he approached.

  “Check INN,” the admiral suggested, smiling. It was just 1600.

  Jenny selected to broadcast, and saw Markin’s now-familiar face. Behind him was a commercial satellite image of the destroyed gun. Markin was excited, almost frantic.

  “Flash! Only a short time ago sources revealed the destruction of the Gongga Shan Dragon Gun by Defender, and also the destruction of two orbital kill vehicles. The Chinese attempted to use these to shoot down the American spacecraft and a GPS satellite, but according to my source, both weapons were destroyed after an extended battle.”

  “Extended battle?” Jenny wondered aloud.

  “Well, it was extended in orbital terms.” The Admiral’s smile widened.

  “You’re his source?” Jenny asked, almost shouting, and then controlling her voice.

  “This time, yes. I felt bad about bamboozling him earlier this morning. There’s no more need for secrecy, and I figured the best way for the media to get it straight was to get it straight from me.”

  They watched Markin’s piece together for a few more minutes, as he detailed the engagements in space and the damage to the Chinese. Finally, he started to repeat himself, and Jenny checked the status board. Defender was now blacked out, and would be until she finished reentry.

  The admiral watched her for a moment, then said, “Congratulations, Jenny. You made it happen.”

  “Congratulations to all of us, Admiral. We all did it.”