Patrick McLanahan Collection #1

by Dale Brown

  STRATFOR INTELLIGENCE SUMMARY, 25 OCTOBER 2007, © STRATFOR INC.—During Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Oct. 16 visit to Tehran, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei asked him to order Russian experts to help Iran figure out how Israel jammed Syrian radars prior to the Sept. 6 air raid, a Stratfor source in Hezbollah said. Iran wants to rectify the problem associated with the failure of Syrian radars because Iran uses similar equipment, the source added.

  RUSSIA, IRAN: THE NEXT STEP IN THE DIPLOMATIC TANGO—STRATFOR Global Intelligence Brief, 30 October 2007, © 2007 Stratfor, Inc.—…Russia has a fine-tuned strategy of exploiting its Middle Eastern allies’ interests for its own political purposes. Iran is the perfect candidate. It is a powerful Islamic state that is locked into a showdown with the United States over its nuclear program and Iraq. Though Washington and Tehran are constantly battling in the public sphere with war rhetoric, they need to deal with each other for the sake of their strategic interests.

  Russia, meanwhile, has its own turf war with the United States that involves a range of hot issues, including National Missile Defense, renegotiating Cold War–era treaties, and Western interference in Russia’s periphery. By demonstrating that Moscow has some real sway over the Iranians, Russia gains a useful bargaining chip to use in its dealings with the United States…

  ALTAY OPTICAL-LASER SOURCEBOOK, 28 December 2007—The Scientific Research Institute of Precision Instrument Engineering [of the Russian Federation] has established a branch satellite tracking facility called the Altay Optical-Laser Center (AOLS) near the small Siberian town of Savvushka. The center consists of two sites, one of which is now operational and the other of which is intended to go into operation in or after 2010.

  The present site has a laser rangefinder for precision orbit determination, and, for the first time in Russia, a telescope (60 cm aperture) there has been equipped with an adaptive optics system for high-resolution imaging of satellites. The second site will be equipped with a 3.12-meter satellite-imaging telescope generally similar to the one the United States operates in Hawaii.

  …Successful implementation of the AOLS 3.12-meter system would allow satellites to be imaged with a resolution of 25 cm [9.8 inches] or better out to a range of 1,000 km [621 miles].

  PROLOGUE

  Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  OVER EASTERN SIBERIA

  FEBRUARY 2009

  “Stand by…ready…ready…begin climb, now,” the ground controller radioed.

  “Acknowledged,” the pilot of the Russian Federation’s Mikoyan-Gurevich-31BM long-range interceptor responded. He gently eased back on his control stick and began feeding in power. The twin Tumanski R15-BD-300 engines, the most powerful engines ever put on a jet fighter, barked once as the afterburners ignited, then quickly roared to life as the engines’ fuel turbopumps caught up with the massive streams of air flooding inside, turning air and fuel into raw power and acceleration.

  The pilot’s eyes darted back and forth from the power gauges to the heads-up display, which showed two crossed needles with a circle in the middle, similar to an Instrument Landing System. He made gentle, almost imperceptible control inputs to keep the crossed needles centered in the circle. His inputs had to be tiny because the tiniest slip or skid now, with his nose almost forty degrees above the horizon and climbing, could result in a disruption of the smooth airflow into the engine intakes, causing a blowout or compressor stall. The MiG-31, known as “Foxhound” in the West, was not a forgiving machine—it regularly killed sloppy or inattentive crewmembers. Built for speed, it required precise handling at the outer edges of its impressive flight envelope.

  “Passing ten thousand meters…Mach two point five…fifteen thousand…forty degrees nose-high…airspeed dropping off slightly,” the pilot intoned. The MiG-31 was one of the few planes that could accelerate while in a steep climb, but for this test flight they were going to take it higher than its service ceiling of twenty thousand meters, and its performance dropped off significantly then. “Passing twenty K, airspeed below Mach two…passing twenty-two K…stand by…approaching release speed and altitude…”

  “Keep it centered, Yuri,” the MiG’s backseater said over intercom. The needles had drifted slightly to the edge of the circle. The circle represented their target tonight, transmitted to them not by the MiG-31’s powerful phased-array radar but by a network of space tracking radars around the Russian Federation and fed to them by a nearby data relay aircraft. They would never see their target and would probably never know if their mission was a success or failure.

  “It’s getting less responsive…harder to correct,” the pilot breathed. Both crewmembers were wearing space suits and full-face sealed helmets, like astronauts, and as the cabin altitude climbed, the pressure in the suit climbed to compensate, making it harder to move and breathe. “How…much…longer?”

  “Ten seconds…nine…eight…”

  “Come on, you old pig, climb,” the pilot grunted.

  “Five seconds…missile ready…tree, dva, adeen…pazhar! Launch!”

  The MiG-31 was at twenty-five thousand meters above Earth, one thousand kilometers per hour airspeed, with the nose fifty degrees above the horizon, when the ship’s computer issued the launch command, and a single large missile was ejected clear of the fighter. Seconds after ejection, the missile’s first-stage rocket motor ignited, a tremendous plume of fire erupted from the nozzles, and the missile disappeared from view in the blink of an eye.

  Now it was time to fly for himself and not the mission, the pilot reminded himself. He brought back the throttles slowly, carefully, and at the same time started a slight left bank. The bank helped decrease lift and bleed off excessive speed, and would also help bring the nose down without subjecting the crew to negative G-forces. The pressure began to subside, making it a bit easier to breathe—or was it just because their part of the mission was…?

  The pilot lost concentration just for a split second, but that was enough. At the moment he let a single degree of sideslip creep in, the fighter flew through the disrupted supersonic air created by the big missile’s exhaust tail, and airflow through the left engine was nearly cut off. One engine coughed, sputtered, and then began to scream as fuel continued to pour into the burner cans but the hot exhaust gases were no longer being pushed out.

  With one engine running and the other on fire, with not enough air to restart the stalled engine, the MiG-31 launch aircraft was doomed. But the missile it fired performed flawlessly.

  Fifteen seconds after the first-stage motor ignited, it separated from the missile and the second-stage motor fired. Speed and altitude climbed quickly. Soon the missile was at five hundred miles above Earth, flying at over three thousand miles per hour, and the second-stage motor separated. Now the third stage remained. High above the atmosphere, it needed no control surfaces to maneuver, instead relying on tiny nitrogen-gas thrusters for maneuvering. A radar in the nose of the third stage activated and began looking at a precise spot in space, and a second later it locked onto its quarry.

  The missile didn’t have enough speed to begin orbiting the Earth, so as soon as the second stage separated it began its long fall, but it didn’t need to orbit: like an atmospheric anti-tank missile, it was falling in a ballistic path toward a computed point in space where its quarry would be in mere seconds. The predicted path, programmed well before launch by ground controllers, was soon verified by on-board targeting computers: the target’s orbit had not changed. The intercept was just as planned.

  Twenty seconds before impact, the third stage deployed a fifty-yard-wide circular composite net—well above the atmosphere, the net was unaffected by air pressure and stayed round and solid even though traveling several thousand miles an hour. The net was an insurance policy against a near-miss…but this time, it didn’t need it. With the third stage solidly locked onto the targe
t, and with very little need for hard jarring maneuvering because of the precision of the launch and flight path, the third stage made a direct hit on its intended target.

  “Impact, sir,” the technician reported. “No telemetry received from the test article.”

  The commanding general in charge, Russian Air Forces chief of staff Andrei Darzov, nodded. “But what about the flight path? Was it affected by the improper launch parameters?”

  The technician looked confused. “Uh…no, sir, I do not believe so,” he said. “The launch seemed to go perfectly.”

  “I disagree, Sergeant,” Darzov said. He turned to the technician and affixed him with an angry glare. An angry look was bad enough, but Darzov kept his head shaved to best reveal his extensive combat injuries and burns across his head and body, and he looked even more fearsome. “That missile went far off-course, and it may have locked onto an errant satellite by mistake and attacked it.”

  “Sir?” the technician asked, confused. “The target…uh, the American Pathfinder space-based surveillance satellite? That was—”

  “Was that what we hit, Sergeant?” Darzov asked. “Why, that was not in the flight test plan at all. There has been a horrible mistake, and I will be sure it is investigated fully.” His features softened, he smiled, then clasped the technician’s shoulder. “Be sure to write in your report that the missile went off-course because of a sideslip in the launch aircraft—I will take care of the rest. And the target was not the American SBSS, but our Soyuz target spacecraft inserted into orbit last month. Is that clear, Sergeant?”

  CHAPTER ONE

  It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

  —MAHATMA GANDHI

  ARMSTRONG SPACE STATION

  THAT SAME TIME

  “Okay, suckers, c’mon and poke your head out—just a little bit,” Captain Hunter “Boomer” Noble muttered. “Don’t be afraid—this won’t hurt a bit.” This was day two of their new patrol, and so far they had squat to show for it except for a persistent headache from watching the sensor monitors for hours at a stretch.

  “Hang in there, sir,” Air Force Master Sergeant Valerie “Seeker” Lukas said gaily. “You’re anticipating, and that negative energy only keeps their heads down.”

  “It’s not negative energy, Seeker, whatever that is,” Boomer said, rubbing his eyes. “It’s that TV picture—it’s killing me.” Hunter rubbed his eyes. They were staring at a wide-screen high-definition image of a suburban section of the southeast side of Tehran, in what used to be called the Islamic Republic of Iran but was now referred to by many in the world as the Democratic Republic of Persia. The image, shot from a telescopic electro-optical camera mounted aboard a U.S. Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned reconnaissance aircraft orbiting at sixty thousand feet above the city, was fairly steady, but every shake, no matter how occasional, felt like another pinch of sand thrown into Boomer’s eyes.

  The two were not sitting at a console in a normal terrestrial combat control center, but in the main battle management module of Armstrong Space Station, positioned two hundred and seventy-five miles above Earth in a forty-seven-degree inclination easterly orbit. Noble and Lukas were among four additional personnel brought aboard to run the U.S. Air Force’s Air Battle Force monitoring and command mission over the Democratic Republic of Persia. Although Boomer was a space veteran with several dozen orbital flights and even a spacewalk to his credit, floating in zero-G staring at a monitor was not what he joined the Air Force for. “How much longer are we on station?”

  “Just five more hours, sir,” Lukas said, smiling and shaking her head in mock disbelief when Noble groaned at her reply. Seeker was an eighteen-year U.S. Air Force veteran, but she still looked barely older than she did the day she enlisted in January 1991 when Operation Desert Storm kicked off, and she loved her profession just as much now as she did back then. The images of laser- and TV-guided bombs flying through windows and down ventilator shafts fascinated and excited her, and she started basic training two days after graduating from high school. She joined every high-tech optronic sensor school and course she could find, quickly becoming an all-around expert at remote sensing and targeting systems. “Besides the power plant, environmental, and electronic systems, the most important systems in strategic reconnaissance are patience and an iron butt.”

  “I’d rather be out there flying myself,” Boomer said petulantly, readjusting himself yet again on his attachment spot on the bulkhead in front of the large monitor. He was a little taller than the average American astronaut that most of the instruments on the space station were obviously designed for, so he found almost everything on the station just enough of the wrong size, height, or orientation to irk him. Although the twenty-five-year-old test pilot, engineer, and astronaut was a space veteran, most of his time in space had been spent strapped into a nice secure spaceplane seat at the controls, not floating around in zero-G. “All this remote-control stuff is for the birds.”

  “You calling me a ‘bird,’ sir?” she asked with mock disapproval.

  “I’m not calling anyone anything, Master Sergeant—I’m giving this particular procedure my own personal opinion,” Boomer said. He motioned to the screen. “The picture is really good, but it’s the radar aiming thingy that’s driving me nuts.”

  “That’s the SAR aiming reticle, sir,” Seeker said. “It’s slaved to the synthetic aperture radar and highlights any large vehicle or device that appears in the sensor field of view that matches our search parameters. If we didn’t have it, we’d have to manually scan every vehicle in the city—that would really drive you nuts.”

  “I know what it is, Master Sergeant,” Boomer said, “but can’t you make it stop darting and flitting and shaking around the screen so much?” The monitor showed a rectangular box that appeared and disappeared frequently in the scene. When it appeared, the box surrounded a vehicle, adjusted its size to match the vehicle, and then if it matched the preprogrammed size parameters, a tone would sound and the camera would zoom in so the humans could see what the computers had found. But it would only stay focused on one vehicle for five seconds before starting the wide-area scan again, so Boomer and Seeker had to almost constantly watch the screen and be prepared to hit the HOLD button to study the image before the computer jumped out again. “It’s giving me a damned headache.”

  “I think it’s incredible it’s doing what it’s doing, sir,” Seeker said, “and I’m more than willing to put up with a few jiggles if it helps us spot a—” And at that moment the computer locked onto another vehicle, which had just appeared atop a parking structure beside a cluster of apartment buildings. Seeker slapped the HOLD button a second later. “Hey, we got one!” she shouted. “It’s a Katyusha…no, I think it’s a Ra’ad rocket! We got them setting up a Ra’ad!”

  “You’re mine, suckers,” Boomer said, instantly forgetting all about his purported headache. He glanced at the monitor, but he was already busy making sure the target coordinates obtained by the Global Hawk were being uploaded properly. The live image was incredibly detailed. They watched as four men carried a large rocket, resembling a large artillery shell with fins, out of the parking garage to the back of a Toyota pickup truck—it must’ve been very heavy, because it appeared they were having difficulty carrying it. The pickup had a large steel skeletal pedestal mounted in the pickup frame, with a circular cradle atop it. The men rested the rocket on the back of the truck, then two of them hopped up and they began struggling to lift the rocket up to the launcher.

  “Don’t drop it, boys,” Seeker said. “You wouldn’t want to spoil our fun, would you?” She turned to Boomer. “How much longer, sir?”

  “Target coordinates uploaded,” Boomer said. “Counting down now. How long do we have?”

  “Once they get it up into the launcher, it could be fired in less than a minute.”

  Boomer glanced up and watched the monitor. Several children ran up to
the truck to watch the terrorists at work—at first they were shooed away, but after a few moments they were allowed to get a closer look. “Looks like ‘Career Day’ is on in Tehran,” he said gloomily.

  “Get out of there, kids,” Seeker murmured. “It’s not safe for you there.”

  “Not because of us,” Boomer said coldly. He hit a transmitter button on his console. “Ripper to Genesis.”

  “I’m right here, Boomer,” responded Lieutenant General Patrick McLanahan, “standing” on the bulkhead behind Boomer and looking over his shoulder. The twenty-one-year Air Force veteran and three-star general was the commanding officer at Elliott Air Force Base, Groom Lake, Nevada, the home of the High-Technology Aerospace Weapons Center, or HAWC. HAWC developed the XR-A9 Black Stallion spaceplane, along with countless other air weapons and aircraft, but it was leaders like Patrick McLanahan who saw the capabilities and possibilities of those experimental devices and brought them to bear in crisis situations where America or her allies would otherwise suffer tremendous losses or even defeat. Short, husky but not large, with disarming blue eyes and a quick smile, Patrick McLanahan did not at all resemble the hard-charging, determined, audacious globe-crossing aerial bombardment expert and master tactician portrayed by his reputation. Like Boomer and Seeker, McLanahan was becoming a veteran astronaut—this was his third trip to Armstrong Space Station in as many months.

  “We’ve got a good one, sir,” Boomer said, nodding at his monitor. “Not a little homemade Qassam or Katyusha this time, either.” Boomer studied the young three-star Air Force general’s face carefully, noticing his eyes flicking back and forth across his monitor—not just looking at the rocket, Boomer thought, but at the kids clustered around the makeshift terror weapon launcher. “The master sergeant thinks it’s a Ra’ad rocket.”