Strike Force

by Dale Brown

  “And we’d have it on the line sooner rather than later and have the manpower, education, and infrastructure to support it all,” Sparks added. “I do believe that’s a better choice than putting the bulk of the budget into unproven technology.”

  “And it would avoid a lot of political wrangling in Congress,” chief of staff Minden interjected, “which because of McLanahan we cannot afford to indulge in now.”

  “That’s called ‘appeasement,’ Carl—attempting to stop complaints or reduce difficulties by making concessions or abandoning desires or goals,” Maureen said. “There’s no reason to avoid confrontation, in Congress or anywhere else. The President knows what he wants. It’s up to us to support him.”

  “Hold on, hold on,” the President said. “This is not about forcing agreement or browbeating one another to get our own way. We all want the same thing: security for the United States of America. Even in her most outspoken partisan political scheming, I believe even firebrand operatives like Stacy Anne Barbeau want the exact same thing.”

  Kevin Martindale affixed each of them with a direct, stern expression, then said, “This is the way it’s going to work, folks: you will give me all your input, pro or con, whichever way you see it, without hesitation or personal attacks; I will take it all into consideration and come up with a decision. My expectation is that you will support whatever plan I come up with. If you can’t support me, tender your resignation and it’ll be reluctantly but quickly accepted.”

  He scanned the faces of his national security staff once again, then added, “There’s no reason why this decision has to be a test of political will, but somehow it’s become that. I’m sure it’s because of the money—two hundred, three hundred billion dollars over the next ten years is hard to ignore. I don’t want to fight, and I don’t think we need to fight over this. But I’ve been in the White House for sixteen years and in Washington for twice that—I know political turf wars start over much less. If it’s a battle they want, they’ll get a good one.

  “But I don’t want any battles in the White House or in public between the people in this room or anyone else that reports to me—McLanahan included,” the President went on. “My door is open to all of you any time. Tell me what you think; tell me what you fear. I’ll listen. Otherwise, you keep your traps shut unless it’s something you’ve been briefed you can say. If you can’t abide by that simple rule, I’ll show you the door. Got it?” There was a murmur of “Yes, Mr. President” all around the Oval Office. “Good. Now get the hell out so I can do something about this headache.”

  CHAPTER 4

  OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR OF THE

  SUPREME NATIONAL SECURITY DEPUTATE,

  TEHRAN, ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN

  THE NEXT MORNING

  “This is an absolute abomination!” screamed the Ayatollah Hassan Mohtaz, director of the Supreme National Security Directorate, a conglomeration of military, civilian, and religious leaders who advised Iran’s Supreme Leader on military matters. “That this should happen in the holiest of places in the Islamic Republic is nothing short of criminal bestiality!”

  “General Yassini should be arrested and charged with treason for his unauthorized meeting with Buzhazi and for criminal conspiracy in the attack on Qom,” Colonel Zolqadr said. “I shall prosecute him personally. He and all his outgoing communications from the Defense Ministry will be monitored carefully in case he attempts to contact Buzhazi. He should be removed from office and placed in solitary confinement to prevent him from using his staff or privileges of office to act against us.”

  “I think that is a wise precaution, but we will need permission from the Supreme Leadership Council or the Faqih himself to authorize such a move against the chief of staff,” Mohtaz said. “Although I do not believe Yassini would betray the government and the people like Buzhazi has done, their friendship muddles the equation greatly. If Yassini was in Qom actually meeting with Buzhazi when the library was destroyed, and he had the slightest hint of what was about to happen, it is most certainly a case of conspiracy to commit high treason, and he must be dealt with accordingly.”

  “Yes, Excellency,” Zolqadr responded.

  “What is your plan for dealing with Buzhazi and his murderous criminals, Colonel?”

  “Certainly not the ‘wait and then give amnesty’ tactic, Excellency, as Yassini advocates,” the Pasdaran commander said. “Buzhazi has many more men to feed, equip, and move, and so he will be desperate for resupply—contrary to what Yassini believes, Buzhazi can’t equip a battalion-sized force off the land or begging from civilians. He will certainly be targeting supply bases—he has no choice. That is how I propose to destroy him.”

  He spread a map out on the conference table for the ayatollah to examine. “The Pasdaran supply warehouses at Arān were evacuated and abandoned because of the chemical gas attack Buzhazi staged,” Zolqadr went on, “but the gas has since dissipated. If it appears that we do not know this, and Buzhazi returns to loot the rest of the warehouses, we can surround him.”

  Ayatollah Mohtaz looked at the map, but he wasn’t thinking about the plan—he was thinking about whom to support in this conflict—it was a much more pressing issue for his own safety and future well-being than whatever Buzhazi had in mind.

  It was generally believed that the regular armed forces were more secular than the Pasdaran, and so were less likely to support the clerical regime. But so far the Pasdaran hadn’t captured Buzhazi—in fact, the insurgency had steadily grown into a serious fighting force now despite the Pasdaran’s pursuit. Yassini’s plan was to deal with Buzhazi logically and rationally, appealing to his soldier’s sense of honor and duty to his country and his men. Zolqadr simply wanted to lure him into a trap, and Buzhazi appeared to be well prepared to wiggle out of any trap, especially one set by Zolqadr. Which was most likely to succeed?

  Well, he thought, there really wasn’t any choice to make. If Mohtaz even hinted at supporting the regular army over the Pasdaran, he would be immediately arrested, imprisoned, and probably executed. Buzhazi represented the regular army, and he had killed a great many politicians and leaders already—anyone even remotely appearing as if they supported him was doomed…

  …like Yassini, if it was shown that he actually was in Qom meeting with Buzhazi before the library was destroyed.

  “I will present your proposal to the entire acting Security Council, Colonel,” Mohtaz said, “but you should expect approval in very short order, so you should be prepared to act.”

  “Yes, Excellency. All will be ready.”

  “Very good.” Mohtaz thought for a moment; then: “One more thing.”

  “Yes, Excellency?”

  The cleric turned away from Zolqadr, as if distancing himself from his own words, then said, “You are sure that Yassini was in Qom meeting with Buzhazi, without a shadow of doubt…”

  “I have many witnesses who will testify to it, Excellency, as well as testify about the intercepted radio transmissions picked up between them just before the library was destroyed.” Zolqadr hoped all that was true—his actual information had come from gossip and rumors about Yassini possibly going to Qom to check out the situation at the Khomeini Library and personally take charge of a rescue mission.

  Mohtaz nodded, still turned away from Zolqadr, then said, “Then his guilt is beyond doubt. Deal with it as you see fit…General Zolqadr.”

  HIGH TECHNOLOGY AEROSPACE WEAPONS

  CENTER, ELLIOTT AFB, NEVADA

  A SHORT TIME LATER

  “You told them we weren’t in orbit yet when we flew over Russia, sir?” Captain Hunter Noble asked incredulously. He was meeting with Patrick McLanahan, Dave Luger, Ann Page, Hal Briggs, and Chris Wohl in the Battle Staff briefing area at Elliott Air Force Base.

  “What did you expect the general to say, Boomer?” Dave asked.

  “Lie, of course,” Hunter replied matter-of-factly. “The only guys that could have tracked us were the Russians, and nobody believes what they say an
y more.”

  “You need a little more experience talking with the President of the United States before you go around giving tips on lying to the national security staff, Boomer,” Patrick suggested. “If I recall correctly, you had a tough time saying anything when we visited the Oval Office.”

  “Touché. I’ll be quiet now, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  “So we’re grounded now?” Ann Page asked. “I just got here! I love those little Studs! Can’t we do something? You’re the special adviser to the President and a three-star general, General—pull some strings, throw some weight around.”

  Patrick was silent for a few moments, adopting his infamous “thousand-yard stare” as his mind turned over possibilities. “Look out, everyone—the ‘Rubik’s Cube’ is in motion,” Dave Luger commented.

  Patrick winked at Dave. “The spaceplanes are grounded, we can’t launch any more NIRTSats, and the ones we have monitoring Iran will fall out of the sky in less than six days,” he summarized. “What else do we have?”

  “Squat,” Boomer said. “We’re shut down.”

  “Maybe not,” Patrick said. “We still have one asset we can bring online to help us—we just need someone who can fly the thing over to where we need it.”

  Ann Page noticed Patrick and Dave Luger looking…at her. “What?” she asked. “I’m grounded, same as you guys. Get me permission to fly the Stud again and I’ll take her anywhere you want.”

  “I’m not thinking about the Stud,” Patrick said. “I’m thinking about bringing Armstrong Space Station online again.”

  “Silver Tower!” Ann exclaimed. “You serious?”

  “It’s the greatest surveillance platform in existence,” Patrick said. “It can scan every square foot of the entire Middle East or Siberia in one pass, including underwater and underground. If we want to find out what’s happening in Iran—or Kavaznya, if we have to go up against that thing again—that’s what we need.”

  “Sounds fine with me, Patrick—I love going up to that thing and turning it on,” Ann said happily, so excited she could hardly keep her seat. “But the only way we have to get up there is with the Shuttle, and it takes at least two months—more like six—to get it ready for a mission.”

  “We have access to Ares,” Dave Luger said. “We’ve been involved in testing from the beginning, and we can put together a launch in no time.”

  “The new Crew Launch Vehicle?” Ann remarked. Ares was the next generation of low-cost, highly reliable, reusable heavy rocket launchers. Its first stage was a five-segment solid-rocket booster similar to the Shuttle’s Solid Rocket Boosters; its second stage was a liquid-fueled booster uprated and improved from the Saturn-V’s J-2 engine. “Cool. But what about Orion?”

  Dave shook his head. “We never got to play with the Crew Exploration Vehicle, only the booster,” he said. Orion was the name of the new series of manned space vehicles destined to replace the Shuttle Transportation System. Resembling the Apollo spacecraft, Orion could carry as many as six astronauts and was designed to be configurable for any space mission from low Earth orbit to a trip to Mars. “But we do have a cargo stage that we used to test the Meteor weapon dispenser.”

  Ann shook her head. “Ares won’t help if the cargo stage can’t carry passengers,” Ann said. “We need at least two persons aboard Silver Tower to bring it online again and operate the surveillance systems.” She paused, smiled, and said, “And me to command it, of course. We need a Shuttle mission. We hitch a ride on the next Shuttle flight, get on board, restart the environmental systems, and reactivate the station’s sensors and datalinks,” Ann Page said. “When’s the next flight?”

  Dave queried the “Duty Officer,” the electronic virtual assistant at Dreamland, and got the answer moments later. “Four months,” Dave Luger replied. “Too long. Whatever’s going to happen in Iran will happen in four days.”

  “Well, let’s put together an earlier one.”

  “Are we talking about the same National Aeronautical and Space Administration as I am?” Patrick asked. “NASA is so ultracautious that if we make a simple five-pound payload change they will either cancel the flight or slip it six months to study all the possible ramifications. If it was an Air Force program, like the Black Stallion, we might have a chance.”

  “What about the America spaceplane?”

  “Canceled years ago.”

  “The Stud can make it,” Boomer said.

  “No way,” Ann said. “Last I knew, the Silver Tower was in a two-hundred-mile-plus orbit. How high can you take the Stud? I didn’t think it could go higher than one hundred miles or so.”

  “It can do two hundred easily—if it was a one-way mission,” Boomer said matter-of-factly.

  “A one-way mission?” Patrick asked.

  “I haven’t computed the exact fuel requirement, sir, but I’d guess the Stud would use just about all of its fuel to get up to two hundred miles,” Boomer said. “Since I assume we’d be using the cargo bay for passengers, some supplies, and the docking system, there’s no room for extra fuel for the return, even for a ballistic Shuttle-like re-entry. It would have to be refueled on the station to return.”

  “Which means if you can’t reach the station or fail to dock…”

  “We’d be stranded in orbit until we were rescued,” Boomer said. “But we’d just have to make sure we got it right the first time.”

  “The passenger module is ready to go?”

  “Sure. We can fit a docking adapter and airlock onto the passenger module. We can carry two passengers plus the Stud’s crew and still transfer everyone to the station. We’d have to bring jet fuel and ‘boom’ up on a Shuttle or on the Ares booster with the cargo stage. Can that be done?”

  “The station has a Soyuz- and Agena-compatible cargo dock and a universal crew docking adapter, so we can dock and resupply at the same time,” Ann said. The unmanned Russian Soyuz modules resupplied the Russian and International Space Stations, while the Agena modules resupplied the American Skylab station. “We refueled America on the station several times.”

  “We can use the cargo stage of Ares to bring jet fuel and BOHM to the station to refuel the XR-A9,” Dave said. “It has plenty of room to carry that, and the stuff is stable enough to handle a launch. We would just need to be sure that Silver Tower has the gear necessary to service the Stud.”

  “You’ve got the exact same gear the America spaceplane used for servicing,” Ann said. “It’ll work. You get the Stud and the Ares cargo stage to Silver Tower, and we can fill ’er up.”

  “I’ve never docked the Black Stallion before,” Boomer said. “I mean, I know I can do it—I can fly that thing anywhere you want—but…”

  “If he can’t do it, the crew is stranded,” Dave said.

  “Can’t you just park the spaceplane near the station and then just spacewalk from the spaceplane to the station?” Patrick asked.

  “You can, but a spacewalk is by far the most dangerous activity in all of space flight,” Ann said. “It takes training and practice to get the movements just right. Push when you’re not supposed to, miss a leap or a grasp, activate the wrong switch, and you could go flying off into Neverland in the blink of an eye—or fall to Earth and burn up like a meteorite. Get a tether or umbilical tangled and you could be like Captain Ahab lassoed to Moby Dick for all eternity. The longer the distance between spacecraft, the greater the danger. Twenty feet will seem like twenty miles up there.” She looked at Hunter. “I don’t even think we can fit a Shuttle-style EVA getup in the Black Stallion. We’ll have to use Gemini- or Skylab-style spacesuit setups—pressure suits and emergency oxygen bottles only, with simple tethers. I don’t even think the Black Stallion is set up for umbilicals, is it?”

  “We never intended to do spacewalks from the Stud,” Boomer said. “Heck, we’ll have to modify the safety squat switches to allow us to open the canopies with the landing gear retracted.”

  “But it can be done?” Patrick asked. “We c
an fly the Black Stallion to Armstrong Space Station, dock or climb out, and space-walk over to the station?”

  “Sure,” Ann said. “There are a million things that can go wrong, but that’s typical for any space mission. I don’t see why we can’t do it.”

  “Shuttle astronauts did tethered spacewalks quite a bit,” Dave said. “Even Gemini and Apollo astronauts did little spacewalks all the time. Every Skylab mission had several spacewalks to service the experiments they were running.”

  “But each spacewalk was preceded by months of training and years of design study and testing,” Ann said. “We’re trying to put all this together in hours. We need some experienced crewmen to send up there. I volunteer. Got any ideas for another?”

  Patrick smiled and nodded. “Dave, get Kai Raydon on the phone for me,” he said. Dave smiled, nodded, then picked up the telephone.

  “Raydon, the Shuttle pilot?” Ann asked. “Haven’t seen him at the bar in quite awhile—I’m sure he owes me a few rounds. Is he still with NASA?”

  “Was,” Patrick said. “He was reassigned to Los Angeles Air Force Base and put in charge of a program that just got canceled, and he came to me recently looking for a flying job. You may have heard of the program, Ann: Hermes.”

  “The European Space Agency spaceplane project? It was canceled years ago. Raydon’s not that old.”

  “The name was deliberately used to throw people off the track,” Patrick said. “Kai’s been involved in another project using that name. You knew it as ‘Skybolt.’”

  “Skybolt!” Ann Page exclaimed. “That’s my project! What in hell’s going on, sir?”

  “Skybolt, the space-based laser?” Boomer asked. “It’s still up there?”

  “Did you really believe the U.S. would spend two billion dollars and five years to launch a massive space station into orbit and then just leave it up there, Ann?” Dave Luger asked. “When Raydon was getting his Ph.D. in the Air Force Institute of Technology program his dissertation was on the reactivation of Skybolt.”