by F X Holden
Nor was Groza the first conceptual design for a kinetic energy weapon fired from altitude. In the Vietnam war, the US dropped 1-foot-long iron spikes fitted with fins from their bombers, which sliced through enemy troops like spears. In 2003 the US Air Force published a paper on the potential value of fitting bundles of 20-foot-long, one-foot-wide tungsten rods to a firing and guidance system on a satellite. The paper concluded that with six to eight such satellites in orbit, the weapon would allow the US to strike any target on the planet within 15 minutes versus 30 minutes for a typical intercontinental ballistic missile. And the rods would hit their targets at ten times the speed of sound, with the power of bunker-busting bombs. At such a high speed and with such a small radar cross-section, they would be almost impossible to detect and even harder to intercept.
But the paper also concluded that failure of guidance systems under the heat of re-entry was also highly likely, the ability of the system to hit moving targets would be very limited, and the destructive effect would be no more than could be achieved with conventional explosives anyway. Not to mention that the cost of lifting such weapons into space compared to just mounting conventional weapons on a warplane or cruise missile could not be justified.
Two breakthroughs made Groza possible. The first was the boom in lower-cost heavy-lift rocket capacity that started with the launch of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy semi-reusable rocket, which could lift a payload of 70 tons into full earth orbit. This was followed by the launch in 2030 of Russia’s own new heavy launch rocket, Supertyazh, which could lift payloads of up to 90 tons into space at a lower cost per ton than any other platform. Russia made good use of both heavy-lift platforms as they came online.
The second breakthrough came from Anastasia Grahkovsky. She had started in the Groza program as a simple physicist, running calculations on the impact force of projectiles of different compositions and mass if dropped from space. The Groza team had of course looked at the older ideas, such as tungsten or depleted uranium rods dropped alone or in bundles, with and without guidance modules, as the simplest solution. But the team had been blinded by the modern obsession with precision weaponry and wasted a huge part of its energy and resources on trying to develop kinetic missiles that could be guided to strike both stationary and moving targets. But guidance systems took away from the mass that could be deployed, and they were vulnerable to the heat and violence of atmospheric re-entry. Not to mention that to Anastasia, the destructive power of the weapons remained unremarkable and certainly didn’t justify the effort of lifting them into space.
Then one Easter holiday, she had taken leave and traveled by train to Saint Petersburg to see the city for the first time. She took in all the usual tourist locations, but being Anastasia Grahkovsky, she also visited the Military Historical Museum of Artillery, Engineers and Signal Corps with the aid of a young university student to guide her. She was particularly fascinated by the exhibit of cannons and catapults from the ‘entertainment regiments’ of Peter the Great. Among these was a trebuchet, used to fling flaming projectiles over castle walls to set alight the houses within.
She listened to the student’s detailed description of the projectiles with professional fascination and quizzed him closely.
They resembled traditional Russian wedding-bread loaves. A large disk or dome encircled with twisted rope. The disk of stone was held together around its circumference by the rope and then dipped in tar and set alight. The rope was fixed to the trebuchet bucket and as the disk was flung through the air, the rope pulled away and the flaming segments of the disk separated into eight triangular pieces, each weighing about 40 lbs., which smashed through straw and slate roofs to set fire to the buildings beneath.
Anastasia ran out of the museum and took the first train back to Moscow, typing equations into a braille recorder the whole way. She had found a way to increase the destructive power of Groza, through a crude but simple warhead design.
The prototype weapon that Russia boosted into space atop its Supertyazh rocket was an eighty-ton payload of tungsten comprising twenty-four-ton tungsten cores arranged around a very simple ten-ton satellite hub containing computer and telemetry equipment and an electrical engine. Visually, it looked very much like the loaded cylinder of a twenty-round revolver. Each four-ton tungsten core was fitted into a modified RS-28 Sarmat ICBM re-entry vehicle. Inside the warhead, around each tungsten core was wound a thick, flat carbon fiber cable.
After mechanically dropping the warheads from the central hub they were fired toward their target. The Sarmat re-entry vehicle guided the warhead toward the target until it burned away, the carbon fiber cable burned away next, and by then, the tungsten warhead was in the lower atmosphere. The slight variability in when the carbon fiber cable release occurred meant Groza’s operators were only able to predict the impact zone for the artificial meteorites to within a two-mile by two-mile strike zone.
Like the disk fired from the medieval trebuchet, each core split into eight segments when the cable broke, and the segments fractured into eight again, pounding the target area with up to 1,280 125 lb. glowing hot tungsten meteorites, striking the earth at ten times the speed of sound.
Remembering the stone under her shoe, Anastasia called them ‘pebbles.’ To anyone else, they were missiles.
Over the next five years, Russia experimented with the composition of the missiles to achieve the most destructive combination of pure tungsten and superheated plasma on impact. They refined their targeting algorithms, developing the ability to focus the entire strike on a two-mile by two-mile zone, or spread it out over a five by five-mile area to enable it to flatten entire villages, suburbs, stationary fleets or military bases.
Unlike the dumb concrete practice bombs used by modern air forces on test ranges, which left little more than a small crater a foot in diameter, Anastasia’s missiles created carnage at multiple levels. They struck with a force many times greater than a gravity bomb and, hardened by the heat of re-entry, the brittle tungsten shattered on impact, sending hot metal shards spraying outward to a radius of two hundred yards. Inside their superheated core was a plasma of iron particles that supercharged the air around it with an effect similar to a small fuel-air explosive and electromagnetic pulse weapon (EMP) combined. What they didn’t blast, bake or fry on impact was then rocked by the sonic shock wave that followed close on their heels, similar to the blast that had brought the roof down on Anastasia’s mother and blown her off her window ledge at Chelyabinsk.
Once they had composition, size, form and weight locked in, the Groza team tested the weapon first on Siberian tundra, then on an abandoned mining town which comprised both standing villas and concrete and glass apartment blocks, and progressively against harder and harder targets. Five-story apartment blocks crumbled if they took a direct hit from several missiles, windows were shattered for miles around by the sonic shock wave, fires broke out all over the target area, which quickly built to firestorm levels if there was fuel enough. Reactive armor-equipped main battle tanks were either flattened or upended, their electronic control and communication systems fried. Troops in deep trenches or bunkers were safe unless they took a direct hit, but their communication and electronic equipment was fried as it would be by a nuclear EMP burst. Troops out in the open would be flayed alive by tungsten shrapnel or burned by plasma, vehicles flattened. Against moored ships, a direct hit would penetrate half-inch steel plate and Groza’s operators learned that the best result was achieved with a focused two-mile by two-mile, two-satellite strike that sent 2,560 of the 125 lb. missiles into the target area and almost guaranteed any ship bigger than a fishing boat would be struck. The weapon was useless against even slow-moving targets, but against a fleet moored in port, it would devastate both enemy warships and the port itself.
The falling missiles left frightening white contrails in the sky as they fell, but once launched, a Groza strike was silent until it hit, visible to radar but completely impossible to prevent.
On the eigh
th floor of Le Bristol hotel in Paris, TV images of towering flames and roiling smoke kept playing in Roberta D’Antonia’s head as she hurried from her room to the suite where Prince Al-Malki was quartered. News channels were calling it a meteor strike and playing jerky amateur footage taken from outside the impact area, which appeared to show two flaming meteors dropping through the sky before they exploded high in the atmosphere and showered meteorites over the stricken town and processing plant of Abqaiq.
Meteor my Sicilian culo, D’Antonia thought as she pushed past the Prince’s bodyguards and into the entrée area of the suite. The luxury hotel was the venue for the latest meeting of the fast disintegrating coalition of countries that was OPEC Plus. On the table this week had been a motion sponsored by Saudi Arabia to expel Russia from the extended grouping. D’Antonia knew as soon as her phone had started ringing that her agenda for the day was about to be seriously derailed. Al-Malki had rented the entire eighth floor for his personal retinue and D’Antonia had been only five doors down. She banged urgently on his door.
Al-Malki was many things, but idle was not one of them. He was less interested in the affairs of the OPEC Plus portfolio than he was in his own investment portfolio, that much was true, but D’Antonia knew he’d been woken at 6 a.m. with news of the disaster, and had been on a call with Riyadh for nearly twenty minutes. As she let herself in, he was pacing up and down out on a balcony, holding his phone at arm’s length so he could see the person on the screen. Sahed, his personal assistant, was busy packing his things.
“What are you doing?” D’Antonia asked him.
“What does it look like?” Sahed responded. “I ordered the jet for ten a.m. We’ll be back in Riyadh by supper time.”
“He’s not going anywhere,” D’Antonia told him. “He has to call an emergency session of the heads of delegation and pin Russia to the mat for this.”
Sahed looked at her scornfully and pointed at the huge TV screen on a wall of the living room. “You think Russia can magically call meteors from outer space?”
D’Antonia looked back at him disbelievingly. “Even you can’t be stupid enough to think this was a coincidence.”
The man’s bearded face flushed and he was about to snap back when Al-Malki pulled the door to the balcony open and stood there, looking stunned. “The King has ordered me to call an emergency session with the heads of delegation to accuse Russia of attacking Abqaiq.”
“With a meteor?” Sahed asked.
D’Antonia ignored him. “It has to be a closed session. Not minuted. The Russians will have Iran behind them, Syria, Venezuela, Nigeria, Algeria…”
Al-Malki looked distracted. “I need to get home … my family.”
“Are in Istanbul, Highness,” D’Antonia told him. “At the winter residence, remember?”
“Oh, yes.” He was flipping his phone from front to back in his hand. “Closed session, you say. You will be there? You have to be there.”
Sahed coughed. “I have ordered the jet, Highness,” he said. “Shall I push it back?”
“Push … yes,” the Prince said. He pointed his phone at Sahed. “And call my wife. Tell her you will arrange for her to go to the apartment in London. Istanbul is not safe.”
“Yes, Highness.” Sahed bowed and rushed outside.
Al-Malki watched him go, then dropped his voice to a whisper. “The King received a call from the American Secretary of State. He said the Americans have proof the Russians attacked us with some new type of space weapon. Our military is trying to corroborate their claims.” He put down his telephone and picked up the TV remote, flicking the TV to a business channel. Across the bottom of the screen, the stock tickers were all turning red. “I have to call my broker,” the Prince said, distractedly. “I need to move some … where is Sahed?”
D’Antonia sighed inwardly and tried to keep the scatterbrained Prince focused. “Highness, I will contact the Secretariat and demand an emergency closed session of the full OPEC Plus group for tomorrow at 1 p.m., with the heads of delegation. I will advise that you are to make an announcement about the destruction of our plant at Abqaiq.”
“Attack!” Al-Malki sputtered. “It was a damned Russian attack. Say that.”
“Destruction of our plant at Abqaiq is enough for now, Highness,” D’Antonia said. “The other delegations will prioritize the meeting just to hear what you are going to say. We should save the accusations for when we get behind closed doors.”
“Say… and what am I going to say?” Al-Malki asked, pacing now. “The King said…”
“I will call Riyadh for instructions, Highness.” D’Antonia calmed him. “I started drafting a public statement as soon as I saw the news reports. I will adjust it according to the messages that Riyadh wants to convey.”
“By the time we have gathered evidence of this attack, the meeting will be upon us,” the man said. Al-Malki preferred at least three run-throughs for any public appearance. “This could be a disaster for me.”
“We will keep it short. A statement of the facts as we know them, an expression of sympathy for any lives lost, and then the apportionment of blame, if Riyadh wishes. I expect the King will also want to reassure our allies that we have ample reserves to cover any shortfall in production until the facility is repaired…”
“Do we?” Al-Malki asked.
D’Antonia glanced at the TV screen, which showed a row of fire trucks, parked in the sand outside the processing plant perimeter, unable to even approach due to the heat of the towering flames.
“No, Highness,” D’Antonia said. “And I seriously doubt there will be anything left to repair.”
“It’s beyond repair, ma’am,” the manufacturer’s engineer was telling Alicia Rodriguez.
As Anastasia Grahkovsky’s missiles were raining down on Abqaiq, Rodriguez was taking a tour of the X-37 maintenance facility at Vandenberg Air Force Base. The X-37 was lifted into space from the East Coast, at Kennedy or the Cape, but if necessary could land at Vandenberg. On paper, the 615th Squadron also included one of the older and smaller X-37B reconnaissance spacecraft, which was listed on her inventory as ‘stored’ at Vandenberg. But when she’d dropped in to inspect it she found it parked up with ports open, and gaping holes where removable components should have been slotted in. She’d asked hopefully if it could be made flyable.
The engineer was called Ross Hardy and had been on the program for over ten years. He was a tall, lean, weather-beaten Californian who had explained to her when she asked if he’d considered a move to Cape Canaveral that he liked Florida well enough, except for the humidity. And the mosquitoes. And the gators. He climbed up the scaffolding to the starboard wing root and gestured to her to follow him up. When she got up there, he pointed. “Hasn’t flown since 2029. Hard to see with the naked eye, but two of those heat tiles are cracked. You see the ones a little more yellow? A couple more on the underside have micro-cracks, could expand on re-entry. Can’t get those tiles anymore.” He shrugged. “We haven’t written her off because theoretically you could fix her and send her up. But the only thing you’d get back down would be glowing embers.”
She had sighed. Another asset that only existed in a database somewhere, not in reality. In her first couple of months in command of 615th Squadron’s X-37Cs, Rodriguez had learned that what on paper looked like a serious military aerospace capability with four reusable unmanned spacecraft able to be deployed, and one in production which was near completion, was in fact seriously incapable of mounting anything like combat operations. One X-37C was currently in space, conducting synthetic aperture infrared mapping of newly exposed polar sea floors. She had one X-37C that had just returned from a 100-day mission cycle, having landed here at Vandenberg Air Force Base two thousand miles away from its launch base in California. It was not expected to be deployable for another six to eight months, at least. And she had one X-37C on readiness, but with no available launch vehicle as all suitable heavy-lift rocket capacity, both government and private, was booke
d up well into the next year.
And those were just the issues with her so-called ‘fleet.’ Her main concern was the organization she had inherited, which was supposed to be supporting it. She had been given six months to get her unit ready for operations in a covert environment, which required a combat mentality and sense of urgency. What she had found instead was a peacetime, even corporate mentality among her personnel that was a legacy of a time when NASA and different government bodies contracted with the manufacturer and Air Force to conduct tests and experiments in space using the X-37B platform. If they missed a launch window by a few weeks or months, if they landed their spacecraft in California and lost weeks transporting it back to Florida across the damn country, well, that was just the nature of the business.
Not to Rodriguez it wasn’t. She had to get her people to realize that if protocols weren’t in place for her to commandeer a launch slot, then there was no 615th Squadron. That if they missed a launch window, if they didn’t have a recovery and turnaround time of days, rather than months, people could die. In short, she had to get them ready to go to war.
For that she had turned to two people she had taken with her on her last two postings and had arranged to transfer from Navy to Space Force service like herself. The first was Major (as he was now) KC ‘Kansas’ Severin, who had been a Lieutenant and the catapult Shooter aboard the aircraft carrier the USS GW Bush, when Rodriguez had served in primary flight control as mini-Boss. He was a small man, but he was all muscle and she brought him in as second in command. One terse conversation with Kansas was usually all a subordinate needed to achieve a lasting ‘attitude adjustment.’ Her other ‘go-to’ was Chief Petty Officer, now Master Sergeant, Xiaoxia ‘Zeezee’ Halloran, a completely humorless fourth-generation Chinese American who Rodriguez had talent-spotted when she had been called in to help with Navy’s support of Operation Windlass, the relief operation in the aftermath of the 2028 Hurricane Geraldine that decimated Cuba. Zeezee had alerted Rodriguez to the fact that local Communist party officials were diverting nearly a third of the relief supplies that Rodriguez and her America-class assault ship the USS Bougainville were landing, and before Rodriguez could decide what to do about it, Zeezee had appropriated a Marine platoon, gone ashore and located the warehouse where the pilfered supplies were being stored. After a short conversation with a local Cuban Army detachment during which she explained exactly how much pain a heavily armed US Marine platoon could and would bring down on them, she had not only secured the release of the supplies but ten Cuban Army trucks with which to transport them to where they were needed. Zeezee was Rodriguez’s primary logistical fixer, and Rodriguez had yet to come across a SNAFU that Zeezee couldn’t un-FU.
