by Dale Brown
“No sweat, Lieutenant,” the rescue swimmer, Petty Officer Paul Malkin, said. He wore a twelve-millimeter one-piece cold-water wet suit, which would keep him safe in water down to forty degrees. He sat on the open door’s sill, removed his headset, put his mask and snorkel in place, and gave the copilot a thumbs-up.
“Stand by on the rescue container,” the pilot said. He maneuvered over to the raft. “Now!” The sensor operator threw the orange-and-white fiberglass container overboard out the starboard door. When it hit the water, it automatically opened and deployed a four-person covered life raft with water, survival, and medical equipment secured inside. The pilot translated slightly, getting as close as possible to the survivors without flipping their raft or the rescue raft over with his rotor wash. When he was sure he was clear of both rafts, the rescue swimmer jumped out the door, holding his mask firmly in place.
“Swimmer in the water,” the sensor operator reported on intercom. A moment later: “Swimmer signaling okay, heading for the survivors.”
“Emergency fuel,” the copilot reported.
“We are outta here,” the pilot said. “Radio the Rourke, have them make a ready deck, we’re going to be on fumes.”
The rescue swimmer Australian-crawled over to the buoy attached to the lanyard of the four-man rescue raft, attached the ring to his waist, then swam over to the survivors, towing the bigger raft behind him. One crewman was atop the other, and the one on top looked pretty messed up-maybe a broken neck. He felt for a pulse and didn’t feel anything, but survivors’ bodies immersed in seawater for long periods of time were known to shut down so much that a pulse was undetectable, only to be revived later. He rolled the crewman on top off the other one, letting him float by himself faceup using his own still-inflated personal flotation vest.
The one on bottom definitely had a pulse. He still wore his flight helmet, gloves, and survival vest, but he was sitting in seawater that had mostly filled the little raft. “Sir, this is Petty Officer Malkin, USS Rourke, United States Navy,” the rescue swimmer shouted. “Can you hear me?” The crewman’s head moved, he coughed, and his eyes fluttered. “If you can hear me, sir, listen up, I’m here to rescue you,” Malkin said. “You’re going to be okay, buddy. I’m going to get you and the other guy in my raft. My chopper will be back in no time. Hang tough and do what I tell you, okay? Are you hurt? Any broken bones? Do you feel any pain?”
The survivor coughed, spitting up a mouthful of water, then actually tried to sit up. He looked at Malkin…and it wasn’t until then that he could see that the he was really a she! Not only that, but she was an Air Force colonel, the equivalent of a captain in the Navy! She was by far the highest-ranking person he had ever rescued! The name on her badge below her command pilot’s wings read CAZZOTTA. “Can you hear me, Colonel Cazzotta?” he shouted.
Cazzotta coughed again, rolled to one side, then looked at him. “Thank you for rescuing us, Petty Officer Malkin,” she said, “but can you please stop yelling now?” Malkin couldn’t help but chuckle-here they were, bobbing in the Gulf of Aden hundreds of miles from help, and this zoomie colonel was cracking wise. She looked around. “Where’s Frodo?”
“Frodo?”
“The other crewmember-Major Alan Friel.”
Malkin looked at the other crewmember’s flight suit and verified the name. “He’s right here,” he said, “but he looks like he’s hurt bad. Let’s get you into the big raft first. Can you move? Are you hurt anywhere?”
“My neck and back are killing me,” Boxer said, “but I think I can move.” As Malkin pulled the big raft over, she tried to sit up and was rewarded with a shot of pain that sped through her neck and zapped her all the way down to her legs. But she was still able to get up far enough to grab the other raft, and with Malkin’s help she rolled herself off her raft and into the other, suppressing a cry of pain but thankful not to be lying in a raft full of water.
“Those cases on the side of the raft have bottles of water and survival blankets, ma’am,” Malkin shouted. “Can you reach them?”
“Get Frodo,” Boxer said. “I’m okay.”
Malkin returned to the second crewmember to do a more thorough examination. “I’m afraid he’s dead, Colonel,” he said a few minutes later. He brought the body over to the raft, climbed aboard, pulled him inside, then pointed out his injuries to Boxer. “I’m very sorry, ma’am,” he said. Boxer was too exhausted and dehydrated to cry anymore. Malkin had her drink a tiny bit of water, checked her over carefully for any injuries, wrapped her in a survival blanket, then covered the body with another survival blanket.
About twenty minutes later he heard on his radio: “Sierra, Trident Seven-One, standing by to authenticate.”
“This is Sierra,” Malkin responded. He looked at the code card secured to the radio and mentally computed the proper challenge based on the current time and the daily authentication code. This was a standard challenge-and-response security procedure for communications on an unsecure channel. “Authenticate tango-mike.”
“Seven-One authenticates ‘charlie.’”
Malkin computed the response on his card and came up with a matching answer. “Good copy, Seven-One.”
“Roger,” the helicopter copilot replied. “Sierra, authenticate yankee-hotel.”
Malkin did the reverse on his card and responded, “Sierra authenticates ‘bravo.’”
“Good copy, Paul,” the copilot of the second Seahawk radioed. “We’ve got a good DF steer and it checks with the GPS coordinates, about two minutes…”
Suddenly Malkin saw two streaks of white flash across the sky overhead…and a second later he saw a bright burst of fire in the sky to the east. “What the hell…?”
“That was a missile!” Boxer croaked through salt water-coarse lips. “Someone fired a missile!”
“I think the helicopter got hit!” Malkin shouted. “For God’s sake, who would shoot down a rescue helicopter?” Seconds later he saw a jet fighter fly high overhead, but he couldn’t identify it. With shaking fingers he keyed the microphone button on his radio: “Seven-One, Seven-One, this is Sierra, how copy?” No response, even after several more tries. His face was a frozen stunned mask of confusion. “Holy crap…!” He keyed the mike again: “Mayday, mayday, mayday, any radio, any radio, any radio, rescue helicopter down, possible hostile antiaircraft fire, any radio, please respond.” He then reached over and activated the raft’s satellite EPIRB, or Emergency Position-Indicating Rescue Beacon, which would broadcast location information via satellite to rescue coordination centers around the world.
“I think we’re going to have company, Petty Officer,” Boxer said. “Keep trying to raise someone on the radio.” Boxer found her personal satellite locator in her harness and saw that it had not automatically activated upon ejection-because she’d been flying near possibly hostile forces, she did not want it to automatically activate-so she activated it now, and activated the beacon on Friel’s vest as well. She then started to drink as much of the water as she could without throwing up, and she stuffed nutrient bars from the survival rations into her flight suit.
The thing she feared showed up about fifteen minutes later: a Russian-made Ka-27 naval helicopter. This one was fitted with pylons carrying antiship missiles, a machine gun in a turret in the nose, and machine gunners in the side doors. Neither Malkin nor Boxer could see any other flags or markings. With guns trained on the Americans in the raft, two black-suited divers dropped into the water, swam over to the raft, and climbed inside. They wore black balaclavas; neither could tell if the men were black or wore black camo paint on their faces. They motioned for Malkin to raise his hands.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Malkin shouted. He raised his hands but kept the mike button on the portable radio keyed. “Who are you?”
“Don’t resist, Petty Officer,” Boxer said. “They’ll gun you down just to save weight.” Again, neither American could see any insignia on the uniforms, and they said nothing so it wa
s impossible to identify them by their voices or accents. While the first commando pushed Malkin over on his front and secured his arms behind his back with plastic handcuffs, the second removed Boxer’s survival harness, ignoring her cries of pain, wrapped Malkin’s radio and the EPIRB in the harness, and dropped it into the ocean; the weight of the radio pulled everything underwater. A rescue basket was lowered, and in just a few minutes both Americans were aboard the Ka-27.
Before being hoisted back aboard the helicopter, the last commando punctured all of the air chambers of both rafts and Friel’s life vest with a knife, and in seconds Frodo had disappeared beneath the waves of the Gulf of Aden.
RUSSIAN MILITARY HEADQUARTERS, MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
THAT SAME TIME, EARLY MORNING
“General Darzov here.” The chief of staff of Russian defense forces spoke.
“General, the site is ready to radiate,” the commander of the special intelligence unit on Socotra Island, Yemen, said. “Overflight will be in five minutes.”
“I received a message from the GRU, reporting a possible security breach of the facility,” Darzov said. “But I found nothing in your daily reports about it. Explain.”
“Sir, the military intelligence branch from Sana’a detached to Socotra Island arrested an American engineer here, claiming he was a spy,” the commander said. “They advised us to shut down all special intelligence operations and do a complete search of the facility.”
“And did you?”
“Yes, sir. We found nothing.”
“Did you interview the suspect?”
“We could not, sir-the GRU beat the man senseless. He is probably a vegetable.”
“Where is he?”
“They said he was to be transferred to GRU headquarters in Sana’a or to the Putin for further medical tests.”
Darzov knew full well that meant chemical-induced torture-the guy was certainly going to disappear after the GRU was through with him. “Did you look at the files on the suspect?”
“I did, sir. He checked out. He builds robots. He was scheduled to demonstrate some sort of robotic fishing device to the local fish company here. We looked at the device-it’s a robot that walks in the ocean and checks fish traps. All his other papers were in order. He flew in the day before on Felix Air from Sana’a. We checked his entire itinerary and background. Clean.”
“So what was the GRU suspicious about?”
“I do not know, sir,” the commander said. “They said his dive suit was unusual. I looked at it: It was fancy, very high-tech, made for long and deep underwater missions, but it was a dive suit. I think the GRU mouth-breathers got a little too overexcited on this guy and beat the hell out of him, and now they want to deflect attention from themselves.”
“And your facility checked out?”
“Completely, sir. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Darzov thought for a moment. Something was not right. The GRU regularly used a heavy hand in their operations, but they did not target foreign civilians without plenty of reason. But there was no time to waste on this matter now. “Very well, Commander,” he said. “Proceed with the operation.”
“Yes, sir,” the commander said, and the connection was broken. He turned to his operations officer. “We are cleared to radiate, Major.”
Minutes later, 260 miles above Earth, the Kingfisher-3 orbiting interceptor spacecraft rose above Socotra Island ’s horizon. The space tracking facility immediately locked onto it, and steering signals were transmitted to the adjacent parabolic antenna, which also began to track it. When the spacecraft was thirty seconds from its highest point above Socotra Island, sensors detected digital radar emissions from the satellite, and the special intelligence unit’s computers synchronized on the digital data stream and began transmitting corrupt digital data instructions that would be received and processed simultaneously with the radar returns.
The corrupt data stream lasted only tenths of a second, but in that span of time Kingfisher-3’s targeting and identification computers received millions of lines of computer code from the Russian computers on Socotra Island. Ninety percent of the code was rejected as corrupt or irrelevant data, but 10 percent was accepted and processed as valid commands. The commands ran the gamut: Some were orders to shut down, power up, reboot, or do all three at the same time; others were for repositioning and realignment with unrecognizable or illogical references such as the moon or some other celestial body instead of with Earth; others were for immediate engagement of nonexistent targets.
Within minutes of trying to sort out all of the contrary or unexpected commands, the spacecraft simply rejected all commands, safed and locked all of its weapons, reported itself as out of service, and shut itself down.
THE WHITE HOUSE OVAL OFFICE
A SHORT TIME LATER, EARLY EVENING WASHINGTON TIME
“What the hell is it now?” the president asked as he strode into the Oval Office. He drank a full glass of water-he had been in a dinner meeting with his reelection campaign staff, celebrating another primary win, and had a couple glasses of wine, and he hoped the water would dilute some of the alcohol.
“The Reagan carrier group went on battle stations in the Gulf of Aden, sir,” National Security Adviser Conrad Carlyle said. “One of its escort ships, the destroyer Rourke, was participating in a search and rescue for the bomber that was shot down a couple days ago. They found a survivor, but couldn’t pick him up because of low fuel, so they put a rescue swimmer in the water and dispatched another helicopter. The destroyer lost contact with the second helicopter shortly after detecting an unidentified high-speed aircraft heading east toward it.”
The president shook his head in confusion. “So the carrier came under attack?” he asked.
“No, sir,” Turner said. “They lost contact with the second rescue helicopter. The captain of the Reagan must have assumed the helicopter was shot down or collided with the unidentified aircraft and went to battle stations.”
“Did they see this plane attack the helicopter?”
“No, sir. They were out of range. The carrier’s Hawkeye AWACS radar plane detected both the aircraft and the helicopter but did not pick up any distress or warning calls and can’t say for certain what happened. The Hawkeye did pick up some radio traffic between the second chopper and the rescue swimmer, and also detected another helicopter from the west of where the survivor was located.”
“One of ours?”
“No, sir, but by the time a patrol plane from the carrier Reagan got on station, it was gone. The patrol plane searched for it until it got within a hundred miles of the Russian carrier battle group, then turned around.”
“Thank God for that,” the president said. “The last thing we need is for the Russians to shoot down another of our planes. But I still don’t see what the emergency is about. A rescue helicopter went down, and the carrier’s captain suspects something with this unidentified aircraft and goes to battle stations? Does he think the chopper was shot down? Why would anybody shoot down a rescue helicopter?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Carlyle said. “It’s preliminary word, a lot of guesstimates. But I asked that the Navy notify the White House anytime one of their battle groups in the vicinity of the Russian or Chinese carrier groups goes to battle stations for real, so they did. I thought you’d like to know.”
The president nodded, then burped uncomfortably-the sudden flurry of excitement was dumping stomach acid atop the fine dinner and wine he had partially finished, and now it was all turning into sour junk in his guts. “That’s okay,” he said. “Keep me advised.” At that moment the phone rang, and he picked it up, listened, then grunted something in reply. “ Phoenix wants a quick word.”
“What about?”
“Wouldn’t say.” He picked up the phone again. “Ask Mr. Kordus to join us in the Oval Office. He’s upstairs in the residence with the reelection team. Thanks.” Just as he hung up, there was a knock on the Oval Office door, and Vice President Ken Phoenix w
alked in. “What’s going on, Ken?” the president asked.
The vice president held up a folder. “I have information that proves that the Russians have been sabotaging our Space Defense Force satellites, sir,” he said.
The president’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “You have information? How did you get it, and I didn’t?” He turned to the national security adviser. “You hear about this, Conrad?”
“No, sir, I haven’t.”
Phoenix ignored the question. “Just a few minutes ago, the Russians sent netrusion signals into a Kingfisher weapon garage, causing it to shut itself down a short time later. The signals were detected originating from a Russian space tracking and intelligence site in the Gulf of Aden, off the coast of Somalia.”
“Answer my question, Ken-how did you get this information? Who is it from?”
“Apparently a nongovernmental group investigating Russian activity in the Gulf of Aden.”
“A ‘nongovernmental group’? Care to elaborate?”
“That’s all I was told, sir.”
“Does this have to do with the commando insertion plan you concocted on that island in the Gulf of Aden…what was it, Socotra Island?”
“You canceled that operation, sir.”
“I canceled all operations in that area, Mr. Phoenix,” the president said. “How did this one come about?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Phoenix replied. “But the results are conclusive: The Russians are definitely targeting Kingfisher weapon garages, causing them to shut down.”
Chief of Staff Walter Kordus entered the Oval Office, and he motioned to National Security Adviser Carlyle that he had a phone call waiting for him. While Carlyle took the call, the president motioned for the papers Phoenix had and quickly flipped through them. “It’s all unsubstantiated stuff, Ken,” the president said, giving the file back to him. “It’s hearsay. No specifics. I think someone is feeding you information you wanted to hear. Besides, it’s moot: I’m shutting down those Kingfisher satellites anyway.” Carlyle hung up the phone loudly enough to get the president’s attention. “What, Conrad?”
