Fatal Orbit

by Tom Grace

  LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA

  The dot soaring over the graphic depiction of the Earth’s surface on Skye’s display split in two. The original dot—Liberty—continued on its previous trajectory, while the second slowly fell back as it reached for higher orbit. Skye checked her watch.

  “They on schedule?” Moug asked.

  Skye nodded. “NASA prides itself on punctuality, which makes it all the easier.”

  “By this time next week, you’ll have added ZetaComm to our list of valued customers. Lucky for them there’s bandwidth available on our constellation at only a modest premium.”

  “Luck,” Skye said, fixing her gaze on him, “is just the ability to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA

  Colonel Benjamin Kowalkowski, director of Space Operations for the National Reconnaissance Office, stood on the balcony outside his glass-enclosed office, an expectant look in his lined and weathered face as he gazed down on the space operations center. In the large room spread out before him, dozens of people sat behind rows of multi-screen workstations. They were the eyes and ears of the United States of America; the shepherds of the nation’s spy satellites.

  The air in the cavernous room felt dry and cool and it carried a slightly metallic taste—an artifact of intense filtration. The room was finished in metal, plastic, and glass—all in grays or black, sterile and artificial. Concealed luminaires provided a dim, indirect glow over the room in an ergonomic effort to minimize glare on the large flat-screen monitors. As befitted the shadowy purpose of Kowalkowski’s command, the place was hidden far from the light of day, deep beneath the NRO’s sprawling Virginia campus.

  Kowalkowski studied the large wall monitor. It displayed a flattened map of the Earth and the orbital tracks of all the reconnaissance satellites managed from this room. Spacecraft bearing the names Keyhole, Vortex, Jumpseat, Magnum, Triplet, and Lacrosse soared high over the Earth, watching and listening to the world below. The silver-haired director of Space Operations searched the map, looking at the new track that signaled the arrival of the first in a new generation of radar imaging satellites: Oculus.

  Deployed by Liberty less than an hour ago over the west coast of Africa, Oculus was currently 180 miles above the Coral Sea, its track heading diagonally across the Pacific Ocean toward Hawaii. Kowalkowski descended from his aerie and headed directly to the workstation occupied by Nicola Rooney.

  “Talk to me,” Kowalkowski demanded as he peered over Rooney’s shoulder at the LCD displays.

  Rooney didn’t flinch. She’d worked for Kowalkowski for six years and knew exactly how he behaved during the initial deployment of a strategic technical asset—bureaucratese for the launch of a spy satellite. Her normally even-keeled boss became a nervous father awaiting the birth of a child.

  “We are at plus forty-three minutes from separation with Liberty,” Rooney said precisely, her eyes never leaving the monitors. “All onboard systems are operational. So far, so good.”

  “Then we’re two minutes from boost phase,” Kowalkowski said.

  Rooney nodded. “Liberty will soon be far enough away to safely fire the engine.”

  IN ORBIT

  As it neared the six-hundred-mile apogee of its polar orbit, Zeus-1 watched and waited. Liberty had already passed beneath the sleek black craft, racing toward the terminator between day and night on Earth, and the distance between the orbiter and the satellite that had spiraled out of its payload bay had quickly grown into miles.

  Zeus-1 ignored Liberty, its lethal intent focused solely on the satellite hurtling into higher orbit.

  CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA

  “Initiating boost sequence,” Rooney said calmly.

  Rooney’s command traveled from her workstation through the NRO network to a collection of dishes mounted atop the agency’s huge office buildings. A millisecond later, the short string of binary code reached Oculus.

  IN ORBIT

  A blue-white tongue of flame erupted from the bell-shaped nozzle on Oculus’s tail, the icy liquefied fuels blending there in an explosive reaction. The short burst of thrust coupled with a minor adjustment in orientation aligned the spy satellite for an elliptical orbit that would allow it to pass over any point on Earth once every two days.

  A two-inch-diameter spot of red light appeared on the crinkled layer of foil covering the satellite’s propulsion unit. The metallic skin flashed incandescent, then disappeared altogether in a puff of silver-gray vapor.

  The spherical aluminum tank containing Oculus’s supply of liquefied hydrogen offered equally poor resistance to the focused power of Zeus-1’s laser. The cryogenic fuel inside reacted violently when the icy, sluggish molecules were suddenly excited far past the boiling point by five megawatts of energy. Rippling shock waves of concussive power burst through the weakest points on the tank’s surface, the laser’s silver-dollar-sized entry and exit wounds.

  Dozens of tiny aluminum shards tore through the foil shielding, flying into space. A few pieces of the shrapnel tore into the bus segment, damaging portions of the craft’s electronics. Others punctured the other fuel tank containing liquid oxygen. In gaseous form the two fuels mixed and ignited. Oculus reeled with the explosion, tumbling into an uncontrolled spin from an attack that had lasted barely a second.

  CHANTILLY, VIRGINIA

  “Signal lost?” Rooney asked, questioning the message on her screen.

  “Problem?” Kowalkowski asked.

  “I don’t know. Boost phase initiated perfectly.” Rooney typed furiously as she spoke, trying to reestablish contact with Oculus. “Telemetry was good, then nothing.”

  Kowalkowski studied the large wall monitor, a sick feeling tightening in his gut, and he picked up the phone.

  DAHLGREN, VIRGINIA

  Tim Heshel had just stepped into his office with a fresh cup of coffee when the multiline phone on his desk began to purr. “Naval Space Command, NAVSPASUR Office, Commander Heshel speaking.”

  “Hey, Tim, it’s Ben Kowalkowski at NRO.”

  “Kow, what can I do for you?”

  “I need you to quietly take a look at something.”

  Heshel closed his office door and sat behind his desk. “Shoot.”

  “The shuttle launched a new satellite today, but it went silent during the boost phase.”

  “Why are you guys interested in a commercial bird?” Heshel asked.

  “It’s one of ours,” Kowalkowski replied, “and that bit of information is not for public consumption.”

  “Got it.”

  “Last track should put our satellite about five minutes west of Hawaii. She’s about half the size of Hubble.”

  Heshel cradled the phone against his shoulder and turned to his dual-screen workstation. “How high?”

  “Just under two hundred nautical.”

  “Hang on, I’m checking the Fence.”

  The Fence was an invisible wall of energy traversing the United States from Southern California to the Georgia coast. Produced by a string of six 217-megahertz continuous-wave, multistate radar installations, it reached fifteen thousand nautical miles into space and could track an object as far east as Africa and as far west as Hawaii. Computers at the navy’s facility in Dahlgren used signals generated by the Fence to calculate the position of every object in orbit larger than two inches.

  “I have a projection of your bird’s orbit,” Heshel reported. “It should be approximately twenty degrees north latitude, one-seventy west longitude, right on the western edge of the Fence.”

  “That sounds about right,” Kowalkowski said.

  “Whoa.”

  As the dot at the end of the projected object hit the Fence, it fragmented and was quickly covered by a clutter of overlapping identification numbers.

  “What?” Kowalkowski asked.

  “Looks like your bird is fragged.”

  Heshel zeroed in on the cluttered image. The Fence had resolved twenty
distinct objects in immediate proximity to the new satellite.

  “There’s one big piece and a lot of little stuff up there,” Heshel said. He switched to the second monitor and quickly brought up a flat map view of the world with the new satellite’s orbit superimposed. “I’m going to run a quick collision check and see if I can’t model your bird.”

  “Collision?” Kowalkowski questioned angrily. “I thought you guys cleared the launch window.”

  “We did,” Heshel replied, his eyes carefully studying the information on his displays. “All right. Tatnall Station in Georgia caught Liberty releasing your bird about an hour ago. Then there’s a forty-minute gap before we reacquired your satellite over Hawaii. I interpolated the orbit in between and cross-referenced it against everything that’s up there and came up empty. The window was clear, so if it was a collision that took out your bird, either it was with something too small for us to track or you caught a chunk of something incoming from further out. Both are trillion-to-one shots.”

  The display of real-time data from the Fence on the screen to Heshel’s right was replaced with a crude three-dimensional animation of a long, indistinct mass spinning end over end. Also visible were several smaller objects speeding away from the larger one. Heshel ran the animation in reverse and watched the cloud of fragments shrink back into the damaged satellite.

  “That’s interesting.”

  “What?” Kowalkowski asked.

  Heshel stepped the animation forward slowly. And then he saw it—a pair of distinct conical eruptions from the base of the satellite.

  “Kow, from here it looks like the back end of your satellite exploded.”

  In the Tracking Center outside Heshel’s office, Lieutenant Alana Taggert glanced up from her workstation at Heshel’s office. The door was closed. She selected the most recent additions to Space Command’s catalog of orbiting objects—Liberty and the ZetaComm satellite.

  Since deploying the satellite, Liberty had moved on and was now making adjustments in its orbit in preparation for a rendezvous with the ISS. Taggert always enjoyed tracking the shuttle in orbit; it was one of the few dynamic objects in a halo of satellites and space junk that was otherwise as predictable as the phases of the moon.

  Switching to the ZetaComm satellite, she was surprised to find it below two hundred miles in altitude. After safely separating from the shuttle, the satellite’s booster should have pushed into a much higher orbit by now. Zooming in, she saw the same field of debris Heshel was studying.

  * * * * *

  On her way home from work, Taggert stopped in at a convenience store/gas station and topped off the tank of her VW Beetle. Even though she had a cell phone in her purse, she followed the rules that had been laid out for her and slipped a few coins into the slot and dialed a long string of digits.

  “Yeah?” Owen Moug answered.

  Taggert recognized the flat tenor voice immediately. She knew little about the man who possessed it other than his name and his interest in communications satellites. That was the entirety of their relationship—she told him things and he paid her for the information. Strictly business. What he did with the information mattered little to her, but she suspected it involved the stock market. When a company lost a half-billion dollar satellite, its share price was bound to take a hit.

  “I have some news you might be interested in. ZetaComm’s new satellite failed to make orbit.”

  “Thank you,” Moug said, then he hung up.

  Taggert cradled the handset and walked back to her car, trying to decide what she would do with the five-thousand-dollar check that her part-time computer-consulting firm would receive for services rendered.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  USS VIRGINIA

  AUGUST 4

  Lieutenant Commander Jeff Paulson went aft of the control room and peered through the open door of the captain’s quarters. “Captain?”

  Commander Scott Johnston held a finger up at his executive officer and quickly finished rereading the paragraph he’d been struggling with for the past few minutes.

  A career submariner, Johnston had spent much of the past seventeen years cruising beneath the waves. It was in recognition of his skills and the excellence with which he performed his duties that the navy offered him the honor of taking command of the Virginia. A variant of the Seawolf, she was the first in a new class of submarines, one that extended the stealth and lethality of a fast-attack boat from deep water into the shallows close to shore.

  “It’s goddamn science fiction,” Johnston muttered, shaking his head as he looked up at the man standing in the doorway of his cabin. “Yeah, Jeff.”

  “We’re nearing the center of the box,” Paulson reported. “How do you want to proceed?”

  “Maintain present depth and slow her down to five knots. Run a broad, circular sweep. I want to loiter here for a while, nice and quiet, see if there’s anybody in the neighborhood. How’s the sonar?”

  “Still giving us fits. I don’t know what our two guests are doing, but the system’s so degraded right now that cavitation’s about the only hope we have of catching another sub out here.”

  Johnston snorted a laugh. “No way Nevada’s CO is going to drop his drawers like that. I was Mike Granskog’s XO before I got my first command—tricky sonofabitch knows how to hide a boomer.”

  “Maybe that new gear’ll help us find him.”

  “On that, I’m a Missouri man—show me.” Johnston rapped a knuckle on his briefing booklet. “You’ve read this. What’s your take on acoustic daylighting?”

  “Looks like some new kind of passive sonar.”

  “Echolocation and holographic imaging? Next thing you know, somebody’ll talk the navy into trying to communicate with the goddamn dolphins.”

  “I just wonder why they offered up Virginia as a guinea pig. I mean, this boat’s so new the paint’s still wet.”

  “Officially, we got tagged for this experiment because of our integrated electronics systems. We’re the most advanced boat in the fleet, ergo the easiest to graft a new technology onto.”

  “Unofficially?”

  “One of our two guests down below is a former SEAL.”

  “Got to be the redhead,” Paulson surmised. “The guy with the ponytail is definitely a career civilian.”

  Johnston nodded. “The ex-SEAL’s former CO now has flag rank and a hard-on for this project.”

  “And since Virginia was built for spec ops—I get the picture. Got to love that Beltway back scratching. Any chance this thing might actually work?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Johnston answered with a shrug. “I’m just a dumb sub driver.”

  Paulson cracked a faint smile at the self-deprecating remark. He’d read the commander’s official one-page navy bio when he was first assigned to serve under him and knew Johnston had graduated with the highest honors from both the Academy and the University of Florida. As further testament to the commander’s acumen and ability, the navy rumor mill had Johnston up for promotion to captain before his next posting and pegged him as an odds-on favorite to achieve flag rank.

  “Captain in Control,” the duty officer announced.

  Johnston went directly to the large console centered in the aft end of the control room to check the latest plot. The quartermaster of the watch, seated behind the navigator’s console, calmly went about his duties as the captain looked over his shoulder at the high-definition flat screen display.

  An icon representing the submarine appeared in the center of a dark-blue image, its position constantly updated by a continuous stream of data from the helm, sensory, and propulsion systems. A dashed line trailed behind the icon, defining the path that the submarine had taken since beginning its sweep of the area.

  “Zoom out, Nav,” Johnston ordered. “I want to see the whole box.”

  “Aye, sir,” the navigator answered as he manipulated the display.

  The submarine icon shrank down into a white dot as the image panned back to revea
l the gray, dotted outline—a hundred-square-mile expanse of ocean southwest of Hawaii. The navy had designated the area surrounding Virginia for a submarine training exercise. The fact that none of the participants in this exercise had been forewarned of Virginia’s presence in the area was, in Johnston’s thinking, immaterial.

  Johnston studied the display. Hidden somewhere in the deep waters surrounding his boat were three submarines of the Pacific Fleet—the boomer Nevada and the attack boats Cheyenne and Pasadena. The 560-foot-long Nevada, with her arsenal of twenty-four nuclear missiles, would attempt to avoid detection during the exercise, while the smaller and faster attack boats tried to sniff her out. Soviet submariners had played hide-and-seek with their American counterparts for decades, but the USSR’s cash-strapped successor didn’t have the rubles required to maintain the once-formidable fleet at sea. Other nations—China in particular—were forging ahead with plans to launch blue-water submarine fleets, and it was with them in mind that the U.S. Navy strove to keep its forces sharp.

  “Sonar,” Johnston called out. “Anything?”

  “Nada, Captain. Of course, they’d have to be banging pots and pans against the hull for me to hear ’em.”

  “That bad?”

  “It comes and goes,” the sonar man admitted. “It just seems like every time I think I have something, my screens go blank.”

  “Keep at it,” Johnston replied. “XO, I’m heading down to have a chat with our guests. Continue the search pattern.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Paulson replied.

  “C’mon, baby, you can do it. I know you can,” Grin said in a low soft voice.

  Seated behind a makeshift console in the center of Virginia’s torpedo room, Bill “Grin” Grinelli urged his computer to sync-up the submarine’s acoustic sensor array. The center row of the weapons room had been reconfigured at Pearl Harbor to provide workspace and quarters for him and Nolan Kilkenny during their time onboard. Racks of Mk-48 ADCAP torpedoes stood on either side of the open area, a fact the computer systems expert and avowed pacifist found somewhat unnerving.