by FX Holden
Twice he felt the ghostly fingers of enemy radar play across the skin of his aircraft. So lightly that they could not possibly have picked up a return, but enough to make him realize the Beriev wasn’t the only enemy up there. But they hadn’t seen him. He’d made it.
And there was no time for relief, because he was on the last five-mile, slowly curving easterly section of the highway, and up ahead, he saw the lights of Shiraz. Above it, the Beriev was a ghostly green blob of radar energy. He had no lock on it, yet, but from the strength of the signal estimated it was anywhere from 20 to 30,000 feet above him.
As the green blob moved toward and then directly above his aircraft, he firewalled his throttle and put the F-35 into a screaming supersonic Mach 1.2, 900 mile an hour vertical climb. Twenty seconds. That was how long it would take him to reach 30,000 feet. That was how long he had to lock up the 150-foot-long, 180-ton Beriev. That was how long the Beriev and its escort had to see him and shoot him down. It was an eternity, and it went by in slow motion.
He armed his one Sidewinder missile and set it to ‘fire on lock’ mode.
He engaged his APG-81 phased array radar’s air-air mode and set the software to scan the sky directly overhead for the profile of a Beriev A-100.
He ignored the sudden radar warning screaming in his ears and the alerts flashing in his helmet-mounted display.
He kept his Lightning pointed at the sky, at the green phosphorescent blob on his helmet display that could only be the Beriev, until the blob turned to an icon, and the icon flashed red and his last Sidewinder dropped from his weapons bay and speared into space ahead of him!
Without waiting to see if it hit home, he hauled his machine over onto its back and pointed it southwest to the line in the sky that was Saudi airspace.
Missile warning! The Beriev’s escort had a lock on him. How could they not? His weapons bay doors were still closing and his tail streaming fire as he pulled away from Shiraz at Mach 1.3 … 1.4 … 1.5.
Come on, you beautiful girl, Alakeel urged his Lightning. It pumped flares into his wake, trying to decoy the missiles behind it, and he saw the coast of Iran flash by underneath him. The Russian air to air missiles would be traveling at Mach 2.5, so it wasn’t a question of whether they would haul him in, but when.
Mach 1.6.
In his situational display, he saw the icon for his Sidewinder missile wink out, but the Beriev was still flying.
Or … was it? The icon for the Russian AWACS began rotating – left, right, left – like it did when an aircraft was … spiraling to the ground.
Kill!
He was over the Gulf now, seconds from the Saudi coast.
An explosion behind him. His machine shook. Then another, closer.
He was shoved back in his seat as his machine was jolted forward as though by the slap of an angry God, and then began tumbling nose over non-existent tail through the sky. Groaning against the violence and speed of his descent as his machine disintegrated around him, he reached for the handle between his legs and heaved.
At ten thousand feet above the ground and one thousand two hundred and twenty seven miles an hour, his canopy blew away and the rocket booster under his seat ignited, flinging him into the sky with a force that rendered him instantly unconscious.
“The joint operation with China is on,” Rodriguez told O’Hare the following day. “I got launch priority on that Atlas at Vandenberg, and CIA just passed on intel from a deep cover source that Russia is planning to use its orbital bombardment system again.”
“Use it on who?” Bunny asked. She was sharing a beer with Rodriguez in the Colonel’s off-base apartment at Cocoa Beach near the Cape. It was something they hadn’t done often enough, if you asked O’Hare, but she appreciated her friend was also weighed down with some pretty heavy responsibilities, so she just grabbed the opportunities when they arose. Plus, she’d lied about the mockhitos and sorely needed a ‘hair of the dog’.
“Probably targets in the Middle East, the report says, but we don’t plan to wait to find out. Together with China we are going to take the Groza system down, starting with the bird orbiting over East Coast USA. We hit it earlier, as it flies over Greenland this time, so that if anything goes wrong, it splashes down in the Labrador Sea or Greenland landmass.”
“We hit it, or China does?” O’Hare asked.
“Chinese PLA Strategic Support Force will conduct its attack before the Groza hits the Greenland ice shelf. They have not chosen to inform us exactly what form this attack will take but they did share with us that they recently conducted two successful interceptions of the Groza units in orbit over China.”
“They what?”
“NORAD has been monitoring comms from those units. They stopped simultaneously yesterday. However China did it, they knocked those Grozas off the air and the assumption is if they can’t send, they can’t receive. They’re non-mission-capable.” She tipped the neck of her beer at O’Hare. “Anyway, enjoy your drink, it might be your last for a while.”
“You know this is not something to celebrate, right?” O’Hare said. “If the PLA can take down something like those Grozas that easily, then nothing we currently have in space is safe, including our X-37s, the RAF’s Skylon … nothing.”
“That thought had occurred to me,” Rodriguez said. “And I suspect they are using this opportunity as a not so subtle way to show us what they are capable of.”
“Parasite?” O’Hare asked.
“Could be, or could be another attack vector we haven’t considered,” Rodriguez said.
“When do we go up?” O’Hare asked.
“The Chinese say they’ll have their assets in place inside a day.”
O’Hare nearly coughed beer out her nose. “One day!?”
Rodriguez handed her a paper towel. “And there’s something else. Ivan has parked a damned Lider missile cruiser off the coast of Florida. It fields Nudol missiles and a high energy laser, either of which could swat a heavy-lift vehicle launched from the Cape or Kennedy out of the sky the minute it clears the launch pad.”
“They wouldn’t bloody dare,” O’Hare said.
“Space Command begs to differ. All heavy-lift launches out of Kennedy-Canaveral are now on hold. Anyway that was the last detail Brigadier General Parsons needed to get that Atlas launch allocated to us, so this is where you tell me I didn’t use up every last favor I was owed on one of your drunken brainwaves.”
“With respect, my idea for a puppy-kitten hybrid is both genetically possible and commercially attractive, but relax, this idea is solid.”
“How solid?” Rodriguez asked. “You mentioned a laser. What kind of firepower can DARPA squeeze into the payload bay of an unmanned spacecraft the size of a Humvee?”
“How about exactly the kind of weapon the Army has just mounted on its Humvees?” Bunny said with a grin. “What would you say to a G-BAD 30-kilowatt laser?”
Rodriguez hesitated. The small Ground-Based Air Defense Directed Energy On-the-Move (G-BAD) laser that the Army had just begun mounting on vehicles like the Humvee and Stryker was a defensive weapon. It was powerful enough to hit and destroy air to ground missiles, subsonic cruise missiles and drones, but several orders of magnitude less powerful than the 250-kilowatt high energy laser that could be carried by the X-37C. And that had already proven ineffective against the Groza. Unless…
“You want to fly escort for the Skylon,” Rodriguez guessed. “China’s attack fails, we have the Skylon as a backup. Russia launches a Shakti against the Skylon again, you protect it with your G-BAD armed X-37B?”
Bunny winked at her. “Long-range strike capability protected by an anti-missile laser weapon. Great plan, Ally, wish I’d thought of it.” She finished her beer and walked to the icebox for another two. “When is the Atlas launch slot?”
“My people in Vandenberg say they can have that X-37B prepped within another ….” She looked at her watch. “…eleven hours. Then DARPA can go to work. The launch slot is fifteen-thirty
Pacific, two days’ time. That’s how long DARPA has to get the G-BAD mounted in our X-37 and the X-37 inside an Atlas nose cone.”
“A half day more than they told me they need,” Bunny said. “But let’s not tell them that. I’ll call them now.” She handed a beer to Rodriguez and tapped the neck of the two bottles together. “Thunderbirds Are Go, ma’am.”
“Your new friend Meany will be happy to know you’re riding shotgun again,” Rodriguez observed.
O’Hare handed a new beer to Rodriguez. “You know what happened to him? Meany?”
“No, what?”
“Broke his back, punching out over Syria,” she said. “I think he and I might even have been at Incirlik air base around the same time.” She sounded uncharacteristically thoughtful. “Could just as easily have been me.”
“Glad it wasn’t,” Rodriguez said. “He looks totally hard-core in that exoskeleton. You would look like a tattooed midget on stilts.”
“Ouch. That hurt.”
“I take it back. Make that an angry tattooed midget on stilts.”
Manure, meet fan
45th Space Wing, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida
Being a data scientist in Cape Canaveral Security Center wasn’t as glamorous a job as it had sounded. “Damn, I need a cup of coffee,” Ambre Duchamp said, stretching. She was serious too. Her morning routine was a cup of coffee when she woke up, then one when she got through the Cape Canaveral Security Force patrol headquarters doors and settled at her workstation. Then another one by about 11. Each one a double shot skinny cappuccino. She knew it was too much, but she never used to need that much caffeine. It was boredom setting in, she knew it. The visitor vetting system she had designed was more or less running itself now, so all she found herself doing the last few weeks was running reports. The Risk Factor tags were generated automatically as soon as visitor data was entered and crossmatched, and sent immediately to the duty Patrol Supervisor. She’d set up another report that she ran once a week which checked the RF hits against the incident reports to see how accurate the system had been at tagging troublemakers. She was in the mid 80 percent range now but would like to see something closer to 90, so she was still tweaking the AI algorithms to see if she could break the 85 percent ceiling she seemed to have hit. Once she did that, she’d probably start looking for a new job. Running reports wasn’t a job for a restless data scientist.
But that wasn’t why she desperately needed a coffee.
“I’m bored…” came a small voice from the desk beside her. “When can we go and see the rocket?”
Ambre turned to Soshane, who she had sat down with some pens and paper and a coffee table book of photos from Kennedy through the years, and told her to ‘draw something while momma got some stuff done.’ “We’ll head out soon with one of the Defenders,” Ambre told her. “I got to get this done; then I need to organize a ride. OK?”
Her girl looked at her with pantomime impatience, but turned back to her drawing. “Ooookaaaaay.”
Soshane’s nagging had finally got to her. She knew there was a SpaceX Falcon heavy-lift launch vehicle being prepped for transport out to Launch Complex 40 and there would never be a better chance for Soshane to get a selfie of herself in front of a real rocket. Depending on how soon Ambre found herself another job, it may well be the little girl’s only chance.
She swiveled away from Soshane and turned on the coffee machine that sat on her desk. Yeah, she was serious about her damn coffee. She didn’t drink that swill they had in big urns out in the duty room. Tasted like tar mixed with paint thinner. Nah, she had her own New Guinea mild roast she bought online from that place that made the compressed coffee balls however you wanted them. Had her own little machine on her desk, brewed that coffee at a perfect 201 degrees with a quarter-inch of crema that just made you say ‘mmmmmmm’ every time.
While she was waiting for the machine to warm up, she turned back to her screen and ran her eye over the morning’s RF reports. Fifteen so far, but it was only 9.30 a.m. OK, couple guys with felony assault, all going way back; low risk. Two domestic violence, coming in from Kennedy visitor center with their families on a tour, so they were flagged in the mid-risk range, especially since it was going to be a hot day out there; not good for fools with a short fuse. A couple foreign commercial visitors who ticked boxes because they were on a watch list. One diplomat, doing a tour with officers from 45th Wing Command, harmless enough…
But this one.
Ambre leaned forward, running her finger along the screen. Huh. The hit on him came from FBI. Tourist, booked on the 11 a.m. Space History tour of Kennedy-Canaveral. Russian, but then they got a lot of Russian tourists at Kennedy because of the whole International Space Station connection. Except … she double-clicked on the FBI source report that had triggered the tag.
OK. FBI had the guy on a watch list as a ‘person of interest.’ He wasn’t under active investigation. Ambre leaned over and took her cup, sipped her coffee. “Mmm,” she said aloud, thinking, Let’s have a little look at you, Sergei. She pulled up his visitor record and nodded to herself. He’d checked in at the visitor center, as normal. No prior visits and nothing in the Homeland Security databases she had access to, though she could see he’d done two years at Penn U in Philly about ten years ago, without so much as a parking ticket. Probably nothing, right? And then…
She looked at her watch. The 11 a.m. tour should have reached the Cape by now. They usually took the tourists out to Launch Complex 34 at the Cape, the scene of the Apollo 1 disaster. “Hmm,” she said, sitting back and looking up at the ceiling. This wasn’t her job. The RF report would have gone in to the Staff Sergeant duty commander. He’d decide whether to hand it to one of his Defenders to keep tabs on Sergei The Russian, or just let it ride. Russian or not, a routine low-risk visitor like that would probably not get any special attention unless he did something to put himself on the Security Forces radar.
Ah, what the hell. She pulled up the GPS map that showed where every visitor on the site was currently located. It matched the chip in their visitor tags with facial recognition data from the CCTV cameras that festooned the center inside and outside buildings and infrastructure, and it showed not just where they were, but could paint a phosphorescent trail on the screen of where they’d been since checking in.
Where you at right now, Sergei? she asked herself, clicking on his portrait photo to show his location.
Well, she knew where he should have been. He should have been on the tour bus, heading either to, or away from, Launch Complex 34.
Except he wasn’t.
Sergei The Russian, person of interest to the FBI, was two hundred yards from the SpaceX engineering complex, apparently on foot, and very close to the 45th Space Wing’s new Central Computer Complex. The CCC is not on your official tour program, Sergei, she thought. She ran the back trace on his movement history.
He checked in at visitor reception.
Got on the bus outside the Pass and ID office.
Got off the bus at Building AS, the new SpaceX engineering complex at the Cape. Then walked back down Industrial Road to the Computing Center.
Went inside the Computing Center. His tour ID shouldn’t have let him get any further than the reception area, but his trace showed him in there for ten minutes. She’d have to pull the internal CCTV feed to see what he was doing, and she didn’t have access to that.
The motion tracker showed he’d left the CCC, and was now walking down the Phillips Parkway, presumably back to the SpaceX complex. Which was a total no no. Visitors were required to either stay on the tour bus or be escorted to their next appointment – they were not supposed to go wandering around the station.
Ambre drained her coffee and reached over to rub Soshane on the back. “You stay here, honey. Momma has to talk to some people.” She didn’t run. It wasn’t unusual, among thousands of daily tourists, for them to get the occasional stray or ‘leave behind.’
She went out of her small offic
e, up a corridor and into the duty room. A couple of guys were sitting there getting ready to go on shift, and she got a brief ‘Hey’ from one, a young Senior Airman called Russell something, before going into the small office out back where Staff Sergeant Danilo Verge was just putting down his phone after what had sounded like a call to his wife.
He looked over at her. “Hey, Ambre. You got something for me?”
“Maybe.”
He rotated his chair a little left, a little right. “Must be good, to get you out of your little cave.”
“Depends. A Russian spy sound good to you?”
He picked up a tablet and opened an app. “Juicy. Whodat?”
“I sent you the profile, and his current location.”
Verge looked the data over. “What’s he doing wandering around the Industrial Area?”
“What I asked myself.”
Verge tapped his tablet, calling up more information on the guy. “OK, FBI tagged him as he flew in, but nothing serious. Probably just a stray.”
“That’s what I thought. But, you know, FBI don’t tag every Russian coming in…”
Verge picked up a handset, looked up a number and dialed it. “I’ll call guest services, ask them to patch me through to … Oh, hey. Hi Raylene.” He rolled his eyes. “I know, that must hurt some. Hey look, can you put me through to the, uh, the guide on the 11 a.m. Early Space Tour? Lyle, that’s his name?” He wrote it down. “OK, yeah, put me through to Lyle.” He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Lyle, Lyle … the guide who had a bolter last month, the one who managed to hide himself inside the Space Shuttle Atlantis. Wasn’t that Lyle?”
