Starfire

by Dale Brown

  Gennadiy Gryzlov turned into a different man after that day. He resigned his commission and left the military. He’d always had a high level of energy, but now his personality became more akin to that of a whirling dervish. He took control of his family’s oil, gas, and petrochemical companies and had them positioned perfectly when oil prices began to skyrocket in the later part of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and he became one of the wealthiest men in the western hemisphere. He remained a bachelor and became one of the most popular and recognizable playboys in the world, pursued by wealthy women and men everywhere. He translated his wealth, popularity, and good looks into political capital and was appointed minister of energy and industry and deputy premier of Russia in rapid succession, then elected prime minister by the Duma even though he had never served in the legislature, aligning himself for higher office. He ran for president thereafter and was elected to the office by more than 80 percent of the voters in the 2014 elections.

  But now the face of the tall, handsome young man, easily the most photographed male face on planet Earth, was contorted in a mixture of disbelief, rage, and resolve. Sergei Tarzarov, the president’s chief of staff, trotted into Gryzlov’s office when he heard the president shouting. “Get Sokolov and Khristenko in here on the double,” Gryzlov shouted to his chief of staff, his longish dark hair whirling around his head as he stomped around his office. “I want some answers, and I want them now!”

  “Yes, sir,” Tarzarov said, and he picked up a phone in the president’s office. Tarzarov was almost a generation older than Gryzlov, a thin and unimposing-looking man in a simple brown suit, but everyone in the Kremlin knew the former intelligence officer and minister of the interior was the power behind the presidency and had been so since Gennadiy’s father was in office. “They saw the broadcast and are already on the way, sir,” he reported a few moments later.

  “Why, that smug, preening, clueless bastard—I will show him how to make a statement to the world,” Gryzlov snapped. “It was nothing but an election-year stunt. I hope it blows up in his face! I hope he dies in a fireball during reentry. Then the American government will be in a state of complete chaos!”

  “Receiving data from the ministry of defense,” Tarzarov reported after checking his tablet computer. “Minister Sokolov ordered an update of our space offensive and defensive forces and ground, air, and naval forces that support space operations. He and General Khristenko will brief you as soon as they arrive.”

  “Why the hell did we not know that Phoenix was going to fly to that space station?” Gryzlov shouted. “We know what that bastard does almost before he knows it, and we have plants, eavesdroppers, listening devices, cameras, and informants all over Washington. Get Kazyanov in here too. No, get the entire security council in here.” Tarzarov made another phone call and reported that Viktor Kazyanov, the minister of state security, Russia’s top espionage and counterintelligence service, was also already on the way to the president’s office.

  “Mr. President, Phoenix has got to be totally crazy to pull off a stunt like that,” the minister of defense, Gregor Sokolov, said as he quickly strode into the president’s office a few minutes later. “If he was not damaged goods before he blasted off, the cosmic radiation and lack of oxygen will surely get to him—if he really did all the things he claimed to do, and all of this is not an elaborate election-year fake—and then the American space program will be deader than it was after the space shuttle Challenger blew up.”

  “Shut up, Sokolov,” Gryzlov said. “The fact is, he did it, and I want to know how, I want to know why I didn’t know about it, and I want to know what we can do if he starts doing all the shit he says he is going to do—and I want to know it right now!”

  Tarzarov stepped over to Gryzlov, turned his back to the others in the room, and said in a soft voice, “It is perfectly all right to have a rant when I or no one else is in the room, Gennadiy, but when the national security staff arrives you should contain yourself.” Gryzlov’s head snapped over to his chief of staff and his eyes flared, but when his angry visage met Tarzarov’s steady, warning gaze, he relaxed and nodded. “And do not make your comments personal. You need the support of your cabinet, not their resentment.”

  “I want answers, Sergei,” Gryzlov said, lowering his voice but only slightly. “I want answers I should have had days ago!” But he turned away from Tarzarov, gave Sokolov a slight bow of his head in apology, then returned to his desk and pretended to look over some dispatches on his tablet computer.

  The meeting of Gryzlov’s national security advisers began several minutes later, with Foreign Minister Daria Titeneva joining Gryzlov and the others in the conference room adjoining the president’s office. Chief of the general staff General Mikhail Khristenko was the first to speak, using a tablet computer to wirelessly present photographs and data slides on a large flat-screen computer monitor: “If you will allow me, sir: I double-checked the records, and in fact the American Strategic Command, who oversees all military space operations, did inform our embassy in Washington through the air attaché’s office that they would be launching an S-19 Midnight spaceplane to Armstrong Space Station.”

  Gryzlov looked as if he was going to explode again, but Tarzarov spoke first: “Minister Titeneva?”

  “I was not informed,” Titeneva, a veteran foreign-affairs officer with dark hair and eyes and a full but attractive body, responded. “Urgent and emergency messages are routed to my office immediately, but routine messages are sent to my staff office in charge of such matters, and they are included in the two summary reports I receive each day. A spaceplane goes to the space stations or into orbit many times a month—such flights are considered routine.”

  “Perhaps your office should be notified every time such a flight occurs,” Tarzarov suggested.

  “That may be a good idea for the military, Mr. Tarzarov, but I see no reason for the Foreign Ministry to be so advised unless the military or state security thinks the flight might be a threat to the homeland or our allies,” Titeneva said, obviously piqued about being challenged by the chief of staff in a meeting of the full security council. “The main reason we demanded that the United States notify us of the flights at all is because its boost into orbit could resemble an intercontinental-ballistic-missile launch. They are certainly not obligated to give us the passenger list.”

  “You will instruct your office to notify you whenever one of those spaceplanes is set to launch, Minister,” Gryzlov said angrily. “Then you will notify me immediately, with details about its departure and return dates and times, destination, and purpose. I will not allow those damned things to just flit about overhead and not know anything about it!” He turned to the minister of state security. “Kazyanov, do you not keep track of the whereabouts of the president of the United States?” he asked. “How in hell can the president of the United States make a television broadcast from space and apparently no one in this entire damned city know anything about it?”

  “We do our best to track the president of the United States, major officials, and senior military officers, sir,” Viktor Kazyanov, a tall, bald, and powerful-looking former army colonel, replied. Like the director of national intelligence in the United States, the recently created Ministry of State Security was meant to combine domestic, international, and military intelligence, presidential and embassy protection, and border security activities under one cabinet-level officer who reported directly to the security council.

  However, the intelligence services were reluctant in the extreme to share information and lose access to the office of the president. It was well known that the directors of the Federal Security Service (once known as Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnoti, or KGB), the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Presidential Security Service, and the Chief Directorate for Intelligence of the General Staff (Glavnoe Razvedivatel’noe Upravlenie, or GRU) reported directly to the president through the chief of staff: very often Kazyanov was the last to know anything. “But we
cannot know precisely where the American president is every minute of every day,” Kazyanov said. “The American press all believed he was on his way to Guam for this press conference, and that was where we were waiting for him. If he is going to leave the capital for any length of time, we know about it.”

  “Well, I would say he has left the capital, would you not?” Gryzlov retorted derisively. “Are you not watching the White House and Capitol all the time?”

  “Any movement of the president, vice president, cabinet officials and their deputies, and senior-level military officers and defense officials triggers a warning to us, sir,” Kazyanov said. “The president and any official that travels with a large contingent, or any information we receive on movement plans, triggers an alert. If they do not, we may not know about their movement. Obviously, this trip was kept under very tight secrecy, with minimal security protocols to avoid attracting attention.”

  “It is imperative that you come up with the means for discovering when one of those spaceplanes is going to make a flight and who and what is aboard it, Kazyanov,” Gryzlov said. “If they fly so routinely, maybe their security procedures are starting to break down. You must also think of ways to be alerted to movement of major American officials other than by the size of their retinue. Be prepared to brief the council on your suggestions at next week’s regular meeting.” It was obvious by his expression that Kazyanov didn’t like being barked at, even by the president, but he nodded assent. Gryzlov turned back to General Khristenko. “Continue, General.”

  “Yes, sir,” the chief of the general staff said. He called up a silent replay of President Phoenix’s press conference. “My staff studied the video of Phoenix’s press conference and some video that was shot after the press conference of Phoenix having a meal with some cosmonauts, and based on these preliminary images my staff feels that it is indeed President Phoenix and he is aboard a spacecraft in Earth orbit, experiencing real weightlessness, and looks very healthy and not suffering from any ill effects of space flight or weightlessness. The other persons in the video were identified as retired brigadier general Kai Raydon, engineer and astronaut Trevor Shale, and retired U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and astronaut Jessica Faulkner, a spaceplane pilot.

  “Most likely he did travel to Earth orbit on the spacecraft reported to our embassy by U.S. Strategic Command, an S-19 spaceplane, nicknamed ‘Midnight,’ ” Khristenko went on, switching slides to a photograph of the spaceplane. “It carries a crew of two and up to five thousand kilos of cargo. It apparently has a pressurized module in its cargo bay that has seats for as many as four passengers.”

  “I do not care about its seating capacity, General,” Gryzlov said acidly. “What kind of threat is this spacecraft to Russia?”

  “It represents a technology that we are still several years away from developing: the ability to take off from almost any commercial runway in the world, fly into low Earth orbit, dock with the space stations or perform various activities in space, reenter Earth’s atmosphere, and land again on any runway—and do it all again just a few hours later,” Khristenko said. “It has a sophisticated propulsion system that uses readily available jet fuel and hydrogen-peroxide oxidizer. It can dock with the space station and deliver supplies or personnel almost on demand. If it stayed in the atmosphere, it could fly from its base in the western United States to Moscow in less than three hours.”

  “Three hours!” Gryzlov exclaimed. “And then deliver a nuclear weapon right on top of our heads!”

  “To our knowledge, sir, the spaceplanes have only deployed nonnuclear weapons in space,” Kazyanov said, “but one such weapon, the so-called Thor’s Hammer, did successfully reenter Earth’s atmosphere and destroyed a target on the ground.”

  “That is when we argued to put the Space Preservation Treaty in place, sir,” Foreign Minister Titeneva said. “The treaty bans any weapons based in space that can attack targets on Earth. Russia, China, and all of the other space-capable countries have ratified the treaty except the United States, although they appear to be abiding by it.”

  “Damn it, Daria, I want weapons such as that banned . . . only as long as it takes us to build them ourselves!” Gryzlov said. He ran a hand through his thick hair. “And we have no technology similar to this spaceplane?”

  “We had built a reusable spacecraft years before the Americans built their space shuttle,” Minister of Defense Sokolov said. “The Elektron spaceplane was boosted into orbit atop an SL-16 booster and could land on a runway—it was even armed with guided missiles. We built several of the spacecraft, but their operational status is unknown. The Buran spaceplane was very similar to the American space shuttle. We built five of them and performed one successful flight before the empire dissolved. Three more Burans are in various states of completion; the other completed spacecraft was destroyed in a ground accident.”

  “And look what has happened: we let the Americans gain the advantage over us in space,” Gryzlov said. “So put them back into operation and get them flying right away, and if we have built them once before, we can build them again. I want as many as possible put into immediate production.”

  “Phoenix is a fool if he really plans to degrade his army and navy in favor of space weapons,” Sokolov said. “And he can build all the cyberweapons he wants—while our troops overrun his cities.”

  “It looks to me like Phoenix will not abide by any space treaty for long,” Gryzlov said. “If he wants to industrialize space, he will want to defend it. If we cannot get him to agree not to militarize space, and he wins reelection and goes ahead with this plan, what do we have to counter such moves? What can we use to attack his spacecraft?”

  “Our most potent antisatellite weapon currently deployed is the S-500 ‘Autocrat’ surface-to-air missile system, sir,” Khristenko said. “Its maximum target altitude of five hundred kilometers and a maximum range of seven hundred kilometers put it well within range of the American’s military space station. The system is mobile and easily moved and set up, so it can be fired and then moved to evade counterstrike or quickly be placed under the orbital path of a target. The S-500 is also very capable against hypersonic attack missiles, stealthy aircraft, low-flying aircraft or cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. It is by far the most capable surface-to-air missile system in the world.”

  “Finally, some good news,” Gryzlov said.

  “The one problem with the S-500 is we have built very few of them so far, sir,” Sokolov said. “There are only twelve batteries in service, stationed around Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Vladivostok for defense against stealth aircraft and cruise missiles.”

  “Twelve?” Gryzlov retorted loudly. “We should have twelve thousand of them! You will get the funding to build ten a month, and I want several to be deployed to every Russian military base in the world! I want that space station and every Western spacecraft in Russia’s crosshairs around the clock! Go on.”

  “The next viable antisatellite system, and the most flexible, is the MiG-31D antisatellite missile carrier,” Khristenko said, changing the slide again. The slide showed a picture of a large twin-tailed muscular-looking jet fighter. “It has a top speed of almost three times the speed of sound and a maximum altitude of over thirty thousand meters. It employs the 9K720 Osa missile, which is the same missile as on the Iskander theater ballistic missile. The MiG-31 is directed toward its target by ground radar stations and deploys the missile as it climbs through twenty thousand meters. The Osa missile optionally carries a micronuclear warhead, so one missile would probably be sufficient to knock the American space station out of the sky. The Osa missile steered by the MiG-31’s radar is capable against other aerial targets as well.”

  “That is good,” Gryzlov said. “How many do we have active right now, General?”

  “There are only thirty of the antisatellite missile carriers in service right now, sir,” Khristenko replied. “Two squadrons in the west and one in the far east.”

  “When in hell di
d we stop building military equipment?” Gryzlov moaned. “What else?”

  “The MiG-31 first flew over forty years ago,” Khristenko said. “Its radar has been updated, but not for several years in favor of newer fifth-generation fighters. In its antisatellite role the MiG-31’s range is limited to only about eight hundred kilometers. But the 9K720 missile has a range of four hundred kilometers, sufficient to reach any American spacecraft in low Earth orbit.”

  “Can we build more?”

  “We currently have about two hundred and fifty MiG-31s in the inventory, sir,” Khristenko said. “About one hundred are active.”

  “More than half the inventory is inactive?” Gryzlov complained again. “If our country is awash in oil money, why have we been allowing half our aircraft to be inactive?” Khristenko did not answer. “Then turn all of the active MiG-31s into antisatellite missile carriers,” Gryzlov said. “I assume you have other fighters that can take over the interceptor role from the MiG-31s?”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “I want a full report on the conversion, and I want an estimate of how long it will take to build more of the S-500s,” Gryzlov ordered. “What about space assets?”

  “We have the Soyuz man-rated cargo spacecraft and the Progress unmanned cargo spacecraft, sir, along with the Proton medium-lift and Angara heavy-lift launch rockets,” Khristenko replied. “We have extensive experience with resupply missions to the International Space Station.”

  “That is all? Supply missions?”

  “Sir, Russia has been heavily supporting the International Space Station, especially since the Americans stopped flying their shuttle,” Sokolov said. “We needed no other outpost in Earth orbit since we have unlimited access to the Russian Orbital Section of the ISS for scientific experiments.”

  “But it is not a Russian space station,” Gryzlov said. “Do we have any plans whatsoever to build our own military space station? Whatever happened to our own space station projects? We had several, and now we have none?”