by Dale Brown
“You’ve just seen the future, ladies and gentlemen,” Ann went on, driving her point home now that it appeared the spectators were regaining their senses. “We have already established a military base and a global communications and reconnaissance network in space; we have several families of spacecraft that provide America with anytime-anywhere access to space; and now we are developing effective weapons to not only defeat America ’s enemies but defend our new space-based infrastructure. It’s ready-all we need to do is put it all together and set it in motion.
“It’s time to make the commitment to secure the high ground for the United States of America. That’s why I’m spearheading this effort in Congress and the Pentagon to formally stand up the U.S. Space Defense Command and build this true twenty-first-century force. I’m asking for your help and support. Thank you very much. I’ll be pleased to answer any questions you might have.”
The congressional staffer meekly raised his hand. Ann smiled and pointed to him. “Uh, Miss Secretary…?” he began.
“Yes, sir, what’s your question?”
The staffer put his hand down, smiled…then his skin turned green, his eyes rolled up inside his head, and he whirled around and vomited over the side of the barge.
ONE
One must wager on the future.
– ELIE WIESEL
ARMSTRONG SPACE STATION
A FEW HOURS LATER
U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Kai Raydon expertly sailed across the command module and precisely attached himself to the commander’s console with perfectly placed touches of Velcro sneakers. He still remembered what it was like to float around in zero-g-what most Earth-bound folks called “weightlessness”-for the first time. It simply took practice to get used to the fact that there was no gravity to help you orient your body-every action has to be counteracted with an opposite action. It took a lot of banging around, but Raydon, a longtime veteran of space flight and working in space, was more accustomed to moving around in zero-g than he was in terrestrial one-g.
The main screen at the commander’s station showed an eight-place split videoconference view, with his image in the lower right corner, and he studied his image for a few moments to make sure he looked presentable. He knew that hair had a tendency to look tangly and get rather dirty during long tours of duty in space, so he always kept his hair buzz-cut short, even when he returned to Earth. Raydon was trim and fit, thanks to a daily resistance workout regimen, especially on Armstrong Space Station, and he was careful to regulate his diet while in space to avoid loss of muscle tone and fluid imbalances. The schedule was demanding up here, but there was always time for exercise; that was one of the most important lessons he taught the young astronauts assigned to Armstrong.
The other videoconference windows were still vacant; Raydon was the first to arrive in the virtual conference room. The windows were labeled with the names of where the feed was originating: PNSA, SECDEF, CJCS, SECNAV, SECSTATE, DCI, and CNO, all the national security bigwigs, and little old Kai Raydon, the only Air Force guy. He wouldn’t be surprised if this meeting started late, given the shitstorm that was brewing down on planet Earth.
He checked the secondary commander’s monitor, which showed the latest satellite video feed of the aircraft carrier USS George H. W. Bush, now motionless in the South China Sea. Smoke still covered the aft half of the carrier, although he couldn’t see flames anymore. “Seeker, what’s the latest on the Bush?” he asked on intercom.
“Fires are under control and the casualties have all been evacuated, sir,” Air Force Senior Master Sergeant Valerie “Seeker” Lukas, the senior noncommissioned officer and chief sensor operator aboard Armstrong Space Station, replied.
“Casualty count?”
“Same as last report, sir: fifteen dead, thirty-seven wounded, nine critically. Five jets and three choppers lost.”
“Damn,” Raydon muttered. “Freakin’ Chinese squids. They want to play in Carnegie Hall-now they’re center stage.”
Twenty minutes past the scheduled start time, the videoconference got under way, presided over by the president’s national security adviser, Conrad Carlyle. The chief of naval operations, Admiral Richard Cowan, read the latest report on casualties and condition of the George H. W. Bush. “I think we were very fortunate the Sea Whiz got that missile,” Cowan concluded, using the common nickname for the Close-In Weapon System, or CIWS. “If it hit at the speed it was traveling, even with no warhead, it could have possibly sunk the Bush.”
“Sink it?” Carlyle exclaimed. “A single missile? Doesn’t an aircraft carrier weigh over ninety thousand tons?”
“But traveling at eight times the speed of sound, the momentum of that missile would be enormous,” Cowan explained. “Our engineers calculated it could’ve exceeded a tenth of the total weight of the carrier.”
“And remember, the Russian hypersonic missiles used in the Holocaust had one-kiloton nuclear warheads on them,” Secretary of Defense Miller Turner added. Turner, like Carlyle and Chief of Staff Walter Kordus, was a longtime friend and confidant of President Joseph Gardner, and everyone else in the room knew that the “clubhouse cabinet’s” thoughts and opinions would certainly be transmitted directly to the White House in no time. “Any evidence at all that those missiles had nuclear warheads on them?”
“None at all, sir,” Cowan said. “No warhead of any kind, except perhaps a flight-data transmitter, as the Chinese claim.”
“That doesn’t make me feel one bit better about this,” Carlyle said, shaking his head. “Why in the hell were the Chinese flying a jet with hypersonic antiship missiles near our carrier?”
“Freedom of the seas, Conrad,” Secretary of State Stacy Anne Barbeau said. Barbeau, the former senior senator from Louisiana and former Senate majority leader, was a glamorous and ebullient personality who took great pride in politically destroying anyone who tried to dismiss her as a brainless bimbo, even when she played the bimbo card to the max. Everyone knew she had strong White House ambitions, and no one wanted to get in her way when she eventually made her move. “We’re free to sail near their shores; they’re free to fly toward our ships; we’re free to intercept them, try to turn them away, and shoot their butts down if they look like they’re going to attack.” She turned to the chief of naval operations. “What I want to know, Admiral Cowan, is what were the American fighters doing out there that made those missiles fire off?”
“Standard operating procedures for any surface combatant, especially a carrier, is to keep unidentified combat aircraft at least two hundred miles away, ma’am,” Cowan said. “In my opinion, that’s too close-I’d like to make it five hundred miles. In any case, our intercept pilots have a gradually escalating cascade of maneuvers they are authorized to do to turn a suspect aircraft away: They fly close to the aircraft, fire guns, do high-speed passes, and do other maneuvers to show the bad guys we’re serious. The last option is to attack.”
“So your Hornets do this maneuver, this ‘handstand’ as you call it, to try to…what? Scare the other guys away?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And does it usually work?”
“Very few bad guys stick around after we fire a cannon burst a few feet away from their cockpits,” Cowan said. “The Chinese plane just kept on coming. They even fired their cannon in return.”
“So what was this handstand maneuver that caused the missiles to dislodge from the Chinese fighter?” Barbeau asked. “Was this a deliberate contact between two planes?”
“A handstand is just a scare tactic, ma’am,” Cowan explained. “It directs a jet blast down on the other guys’ plane from a few yards away. It’s surprising and maybe momentarily disruptive, but it’s not dangerous to similar-size aircraft-and the Chinese fighter is…was…much bigger than the Hornet. It’s certainly not enough to dislodge a missile from a jet-especially an armed missile.”
“So you’re saying the Chinese fighter crew deliberately fired those missiles at the carrier?”
“Wouldn’t they need to know where the carrier was before launch?” Carlyle asked.
“Not necessarily, sir,” Cowan replied. “Some antiship cruise missiles can be self-guided by radar to attack any large target; shorter-range missiles use electro-optical sensors and datalink the images back to a controller to pinpoint a particular target. Russian-made cruise missiles can do both. Such missiles can then be fired in the general direction of their targets, or programmed to patrol an area where the targets might sail into, and then lock on and attack.”
Secretary of State Barbeau shook her hands and closed her eyes. “Hold on, everyone, hold on,” she said irritably. “We’re getting off track here. My bottom-line question: Does anybody here honestly believe the Chinese would deliberately fire a hypersonic missile at a U.S. warship in peacetime?” No one replied. “Good. I happen to agree, so we can move on from here. However it happened, I believe it was an accident. I’m going to ask the Chinese foreign minister to demand a formal inquiry and full analysis of the incident, and to have U.S. experts involved every step of the way to the maximum extent possible. China is a pretty closed society, and their government and military even more so, but I expect full cooperation. Case closed.”
Admiral Cowan’s eyes had narrowed into angry slits. “Excuse me, ma’am, but the case is not closed. What about the casualties, the damage to the carrier-”
“What about the loss of that Chinese fighter and its crew, Admiral?” Barbeau retorted. “We lost more, so they should pay? They fired the missiles, so they’re the bad guys? Excuse me, Admiral, but this ‘handstand’ maneuver sounds to me like showing off, not defending the carrier. It’s like Tom Cruise flying upside down over the MiG in Top Gun-he did it just because the MiG pilot was starting to piss him off. If we’re all agreed it was not deliberate, then the Chinese pilot flew toward our carrier just to piss us off. Is that a reason to blast him with engine exhaust and cause him to almost flip upside down and possibly dislodge those missiles?”
“Our SOP is to do everything necessary to divert a possible hostile target away with nonlethal means before resorting to lethal force-”
“Your men have their SOPs when they’re out there in harm’s way, Admiral-it’s for you and the national command authority to decide what they are and if they’re being properly performed, not me,” Barbeau said. “I know your men don’t have the luxury of sitting in a nice comfy chair and calmly debating things when they’re looking down the barrel of a gun thousands of miles from home, when the only dry landing strip and hot meal is a four-acre hunk of floating steel that might end up at the bottom of the South China Sea at any moment.
“But now we’re in my battlefield, Admiral, not yours. If we’re all agreed this was a tragic accident and not deliberate”-Barbeau paused, then pointed at each window in her videoconference monitor, querying each participant-“and we are all still agreed, are we not…?”-she waited a few breaths: still more silence-“that it was an accident, then we investigate fully to prevent such accidents from happening again; we issue the sincerest of apologies; and we move on. You start asking for reparations, or justice, or payback, and it tells me you don’t really believe it was an accident. If that’s the case, Admiral Cowan, you’d better tell me right now.”
The chief of naval operations looked as if he was going to continue the argument; then, like a balloon slowly losing air, his shoulders slumped, he folded his hands, and made an almost imperceptible shake of his head.
“Thank you, Admiral,” Barbeau said. “Now I have something to work with. One more question: Where did that Chinese fighter come from? Was it on a patrol mission, some kind of test, or is there any possibility that it could have been launched on a strike mission?”
“I can give you the answer to that, Madam Secretary,” Kai Raydon said.
“Who is this?”
“General Kai Raydon, commander of Armstrong Space Station, Air Force Space Defense Command,” Kai responded. He typed in commands on his console’s keyboard, and the image on a new videoconference monitor changed to another trio of naval vessels. “You’re looking at live pictures of the People’s Liberation Army Navy Project 190 aircraft carrier, named the Zhenyuan, accompanied by two underway replenishment vessels on either side of the carrier. We’ve been monitoring the Chinese carrier since it sailed within five hundred miles of the Bush and observed the fighter launch.”
“Who are you again, General?” Barbeau asked. “Where are you?” She turned to Secretary of Defense Turner. “Is he one of yours, Miller?”
“General Raydon commands Armstrong Space Station, the Air Force’s orbiting space reconnaissance and communications platform,” Turner replied. “Where are you exactly right now, General?”
“Two hundred and twelve miles over Argentina, sir, falling eastward at seventeen thousand six hundred miles per hour.”
“‘Falling’? You’re falling?” Barbeau exclaimed.
“Spacecraft in Earth orbit aren’t floating, Madam Secretary, and they aren’t being propelled-they are pulled to Earth by gravity like any other object,” Kai explained. “At our altitude and speed, however, we never hit the Earth as we fall because we speed past Earth as we continue to fall toward it.”
“I’m sure I don’t understand any of that, General Raydon,” Barbeau said, “so I’ll defer to your expertise. You saw the fighters launch from that carrier?”
“Armstrong is the hub of an extensive network of communications-and-surveillance satellites that cover the entire planet twenty-four/seven. If any American military unit goes into possible danger, the Air Force watches it from space. We’ve monitored the Chinese carrier almost continuously in real time since it left port.”
Barbeau nodded. “It sounds impressive,” she said. “Any unit, anytime, anywhere?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Raydon responded. “If we don’t have a satellite constellation ready to observe, we can set one up PDQ. If a satellite breaks, we can fix it. We can tie into a network of satellites and unmanned surveillance aircraft that fills in a pretty complete picture of every carrier battle group, surface-action group, and Marine Expeditionary Force deployed around the world, plus major exercises and other deployments. And if something needs blowing up, we’re developing the capability of blowing it up from here faster than you can imagine.”
“Naval support is a top priority for the Air Force these days, isn’t it?” Barbeau remarked with a slight smile. She knew that the increased emphasis on naval operations, especially carriers and multipurpose submarines, was a sore point with many services, especially the Air Force, whose budget was the hardest hit.
“Yes, ma’am, it is,” Raydon said. “They badly need the help, after all, and we’re happy to assist.”
“Go on without the editorial comments, General,” Turner said.
“Yes, sir,” Raydon said, suppressing a smile.
The space thing was back, Stacy Barbeau thought as the space general blathered on about all the stuff his station could do. President Joseph Gardner had vowed to kill the space station and spend the money on more carriers. The carriers were indeed on order-she had procured at least two to be built in her home state of Louisiana, thanks to her intimate relationship with the president-but the Air Force’s push for space was apparently still going strong. That was a very interesting development indeed…“Tell me about this Chinese aircraft carrier, General Raydon,” she interrupted without knowing or caring what he had been talking about. “You said that’s a live picture?”
“Yes, ma’am, that’s a nighttime shot of the carrier performing a night underway replenishment-a very tricky maneuver for any carrier navy, and a very impressive feat for China ’s very young carrier navy,” Raydon said. “The Project 190 carrier was laid down three years ago in Novosibirsk, Russia. It was meant to be Russia’s sec
ond carrier and first true angled-deck catapult-equipped supercarrier-they had been using ‘ski-jump’-equipped carriers before this-but China made Russia an offer it couldn’t refuse.”
“ Russia actually sold its aircraft carrier to China?”
“Military cooperation between the two has been increasing over the past ten years at least,” National Security Adviser Carlyle said. “I wouldn’t say it’s as close as it was in the sixties, but it’s an easy way for China to quickly and easily build a world-class military.”
“What else has Russia been selling to China?”
“You name it, Madam Secretary,” Carlyle said. “Naval weapon systems, long-range precision-guided weapons, spacecraft, maritime attack, air-launched missiles-big-ticket, relatively low-tech, high-volume items.”
“Is this carrier a threat to us?” Barbeau asked. “Is it like our carriers?”
“It is a monster, on a par with any of the world’s carriers with the exception of America ’s,” Raydon went on. “It is over nine hundred feet long, two hundred and fifty feet wide, and has a seventy-five-thousand-pound displacement fully loaded. It features two aircraft elevators, four steam catapults, almost thirty-knot top speed, and forty fixed-and rotary-wing aircraft aboard, including thirty-two former Russian Sukhoi-34 advanced fighter-bombers ruggedized for catapult and tailhook operations. Total crew complement is four thousand sailors, and it usually embarks a company of special operations forces. Because it was designed for ‘greenwater’ operations, within easy reach of supply ports, it does not have a nuclear power plant, although the 190 has been deployed as far as East Africa in support of Somali antipiracy missions, which means the Chinese have gotten very good at long-range naval operations with extended supply lines.”