by Dale Brown
It appeared as if Patrick hadn’t heard him, but a few moments later he nodded excitedly. “I agree, Seeker,” he said. “A Hezbollah weapon, based on a Russian battalion-level battlefield attack missile. Two-hundred-pound warhead, simple but usually effective barometric fuse, airburst with a backup impact detonation, killing radius a hundred yards or more, usually loaded up with glass, ball bearings, and pieces of metal along with high explosives to increase the injury toll. A real terror weapon.” He shook his head. “But there are too many civilians around. Our ROE says no noncombatant casualties and minimal collateral damage. Pick a different target, Boomer, one with fewer bystanders. There will be plenty of opportunities…”
“We don’t see many Ra’ad rockets, sir,” Seeker said. “That’s not a homemade rocket—that’s a military-grade short-range ballistic attack missile.”
“I know, Master Sergeant, but our orders are specific and—” At that moment the insurgents shooed the children away again, more forcefully this time, as another insurgent fitted ignition wires to the tail end of the rocket in final preparation for launch. “Now,” Patrick snapped. “Take it down.”
“Yes, sir,” Boomer said enthusiastically. He issued commands on his computer, checked the computer’s responses, then nodded. “Here we go…missile counting down…doors coming open…ready…ready…now, missile away.” He checked a countdown timer. “Don’t anyone blink, ’cuz this won’t take long.”
Over the Caspian Sea two hundred and twenty miles north of Tehran, an unmanned EB-1D Vampire bomber opened its combined forward and center bomb bay doors and released a single large missile. The D-model Vampire was a modified U.S. Air Force B-1B strategic bomber, converted by the High-Technology Aerospace Weapons Center to a long-range unmanned flying battleship. It was capable of autonomously flying itself from takeoff to final parking with an inflight-reprogrammable flight plan, or could be flown by satellite remote control like a large multimillion-dollar video game from a laptop computer located almost anywhere.
The missile the Vampire had just released was an even more sophisticated weapon developed by the engineers at HAWC. Its unclassified designator was the XAGM-279A SkySTREAK, but anyone who knew anything about this missile—and there were only a handful of persons on the entire planet who did—called it the “Streaker.” It resembled a cross between a bullet and a manta ray, with a pointed carbon-carbon nosecap and bullet-shaped forebody splaying out into a thin, flat fuselage and pointed tail section. After stabilizing itself in the atmosphere, four solid-fuel rocket motors ignited, pushing the weapon to well past Mach 3 and one hundred thousand feet of altitude in just a few seconds.
Within eight seconds the motors had burned out, and a wide, flat oval air intake popped open underneath the missile. Supersonic air was ingested and compressed by the shape of the now-empty rocket motor casings, mixed with jet fuel, and ignited by high-energy pulses of laser energy. The resultant energy propelled the missile to over ten times the speed of sound in just a few more seconds, and the missile ate up the distance between its launch point and its target in no time, climbing to two hundred thousand feet as it raced downrange. The missile burned all of its jet fuel in just a few seconds, and it quickly decelerated and began descending back through the atmosphere. Once the outside skin temperature was within safe limits, the bullet-shaped forebody detached from the spent propulsion section, which automatically blew itself to bits moments later.
Small stabilizer fins popped out of the forebody, and it became a supersonic re-entry vehicle, guiding itself to its target with its on-board navigation computer refined by Global Positioning System signals. Fifteen seconds to impact, the protective nosecap detached, revealing a combination millimeter-wave radar and imaging infrared scanner, and the warhead began uploading video signals via satellite to Boomer and Seeker back in Dreamland. The steering cue in the video image was several yards off, but Seeker used a trackball and rolled the steering rectangle back on the pickup truck, which sent steering correction signals to the warhead.
The video image from the warhead was sharp and clear all the way to impact. Patrick had a brief glimpse of a young man, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, wearing a mask and carrying an AK-47 assault rifle that looked almost as big as he was, who looked right up at the incoming weapon milliseconds before the image vanished. Patrick knew that the warhead was programmed to explode a tenth of a second before impact, splitting the warhead apart into thousands of small hypervelocity fragments, increasing the killing radius of the weapon out to about forty to fifty yards.
“Direct hit!” Boomer shouted happily. He looked at the control monitor and slapped his hands together. “Total time from detection to impact: forty-eight point nine seconds. Less than a friggin’ minute!”
“It’s more like a Maverick missile—or a sniper’s bullet—only fired from two hundred miles away!” Seeker exclaimed. She had switched back to the Global Hawk’s image of the target area and zoomed in to take a close look at the Streaker warhead’s impact spot. “Pretty good urban weapon effects, sir, exactly what you were hoping for. A really good-sized hole, about fifteen to twenty feet in diameter—looks like the center punched through the concrete parking garage roof into the floor below—but no damage to the nearby buildings that I can see except for a few broken windows. Even a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Small-Diameter Bomb might have caved in the sides of the building facing the blast.”
“With no explosive warhead on the Streaker, there’s nothing there to create any collateral damage,” Boomer said. “We put just enough shaped explosive charges in the warhead to break it apart milliseconds before impact, and that was both to increase the weapon effect slightly as well as to destroy as much of the evidence as we could. All they should find are tiny pieces of—”
“Oh…my…God,” Seeker breathed. She had zoomed out to survey a little more of the surrounding area. There were clusters of people, perhaps two dozen or so, just outside the apartment complex area lying on the sidewalk and street, with others attending to them, waving frantically for help. “What in hell happened here? Where did those people come from, and why are they lying on the ground like that? Are they from inside the apartment complex…?”
“The Streaker must’ve set off the Ra’ad rocket’s warhead,” Boomer said. They all carefully studied the image as Seeker took manual control of the camera and zoomed in. “But what’s going on? Those people over there weren’t anywhere near the blast, but they’re staggering around like they were hit. Was it shrapnel from the Ra’ad warhead? The Streaker doesn’t have an explosive payload—it’s all kinetic energy. Is the Persian army moving in? What’s going…?”
“A chemical weapon cloud,” Patrick said.
“What…?”
“It looks like some sort of chemical weapon cloud, spreading out from the target area,” Patrick said. He pointed to the monitor. “Not more than thirty feet away. Here’s a little bit of the cloud…see, it’s not rising like a cloud from an explosion or from heat, but traveling horizontally, blown around by air currents.” He looked closer. “Not twitching…it’s hard to tell, but it looks like he’s rubbing his eyes and face and is having trouble breathing. I’ll bet it’s a blister agent…lewisite or phosgene. Mustard agents would take longer to incapacitate someone, even in high concentrations…look, now someone collapsing across the street. Jesus, the warhead must’ve had several liters of CW in it.”
“My God,” Seeker gasped. “I’ve been operating remote sensors for almost twenty years, and I’ve never seen anyone die from a chemical weapon attack.”
“I have a feeling the powers that be aren’t going to like this,” Patrick said.
“Should we recall the Vampire, sir?”
“Hell no,” Patrick said. “We still have three more Streakers on board, and another Vampire loaded and waiting to go at Mosul. Keep on scanning for more insurgents. Congratulations, Boomer. The SkySTREAK worked perfectly. Nail a few more insurgents for us.”
“You got it,
sir,” Boomer said happily.
ARMSTRONG SPACE STATION
A SHORT TIME LATER
Unfortunately, Patrick turned out to be exactly correct. The Global Hawk images were being beamed to several terrestrial locations as well as to Silver Tower, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff Operations Center in Washington, and it was there that he received his first call just moments later: “Genesis, this is Rook.” That was from the duty officer at the JCS Operations Center. “Stand by, please.” A moment later, the chief of staff of the Air Force, General Charles A. Huffman, appeared on the video teleconference channel, looking a little pale himself but still very angry as well.
Huffman, a tall, dark-haired, and very young man with husky, athletic features—more like a linebacker than a running back, Boomer thought—was typical of the new breed of leaders in the American military. In the five years since the Russian nuclear cruise missile air strike on the continental United States, known as the “American Holocaust,” which left several thousand dead, hundreds of thousands injured, several Air Force bases destroyed, and almost all of America’s long-range bombers wiped out, the military ranks had filled with eager young men and women wishing to protect their country, and many officers were promoted well below their primary zones and placed into important command positions years before it was ever thought possible. Also, since senior leaders with extensive combat experience were kept in charge of tactical units or major commands, often officers with less direct combat experience were placed in more administrative and training billets—and since the office of the chief of staff was mostly concerned with equipping and training their forces, not leading them into combat, it seemed a good match.
That was true of Huffman as well: Patrick knew he came from the logistics field, a command pilot, wing, and numbered Air Force commander, and former Air Force Materiel Command commander with over fifteen thousand hours flying time in a variety of cargo, transport, and liaison aircraft in two conflicts, and extensive experience in supply, resource management, and test and evaluation. As former head of Materiel Command, Huffman had been notional commander of activities at the top-secret High-Technology Aerospace Weapons Center at Elliott Air Force Base, although that link was mostly administrative and logistical—operationally, the commanders at HAWC reported to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon, the President’s National Security Adviser at the White House, or—at least under former President Kevin Martindale—directly to the President himself.
Patrick had never spent any time in logistics, but he knew that logistics officers liked their world as neat, orderly, and organized as possible. Although they learned to expect the unexpected, they very much preferred to anticipate, predict, and manage the unexpected, and therefore anything unexpected was not welcome. He knew Huffman, however, and he knew that’s precisely the way Huffman liked it: no surprises. “McLanahan, what in hell happened out there?”
“Calling Genesis, say again, please,” Patrick said, trying to remind the general that although the connection was encrypted and as secure as they could make it, it was still a wide-open satellite-based network and prone to eavesdropping.
“We’re secure here, McLanahan,” Huffman thundered. “What in hell is going on? What happened?”
“We hit an insurgent rocket launcher, and apparently detonated its explosive chemical-weapon warhead, sir.”
“What did you hit it with?”
“A XAGM-279 with a kinetic warhead, sir,” Patrick responded, using the SkySTREAK’s experimental model number instead of its name to confuse any eavesdroppers. “Almost no explosives in it—just enough to fragment the warhead.”
“What is a XAGM-279? An experimental precision-guided missile?”
So much for communications security, Patrick thought, shaking his head. It was five years after the American Holocaust and seven years since 9/11, and many folks had forgotten or abandoned the tight security measures that had been put in place after those two devastating attacks. “Yes, sir” was all Patrick said.
“Launched from that unmanned B-1?”
“Yes, sir.” Anyone listening to this conversation—and Patrick didn’t delude himself that any number of agencies or units around the world could’ve done so easily—could piece together their entire operation by now. “I briefed the staff two days ago on the operation.”
“Dammit, McLanahan, you briefed minimal collateral damage, not dozens of dead women and children lying in the street!” Huffman cried. “That was the only way we could sell your idea to the President.”
“The weapon produced virtually no collateral damage, sir. It was the chemical warhead on the insurgents’ rocket that caused all those civilian casualties.”
“Do you believe anyone is gong to care about that one bit?” Huffman said. “This is a major fuckup, McLanahan. The press is going to have a field day with this.” Patrick remained silent. “Well?”
“I don’t feel it’s my task force’s or my responsibility to worry about what the enemy’s weapons do to the civilian population, sir,” Patrick said. “Our job is to hunt for insurgents firing rockets into population centers in Tehran and destroy them.”
“The Qagev members inside the Turkmeni insurgent network and Buzhazi’s spies inside Mohtaz’s security staff briefed us that the insurgents could use weapons of mass destruction at any time, McLanahan,” Huffman said. Patrick suppressed another irritated breath: Huffman had just revealed two highly classified intelligence sources—if anyone was eavesdropping, those sources were dead meat in just a matter of days, perhaps hours. “You should have adjusted tactics accordingly.”
“Tactics were adjusted, sir—I was ordered to reduce the number of bombers on station from three to one,” Patrick responded—by you, he added to himself. “But we don’t have enough coverage of the city to effectively deal with the number of launchers being reported. I recommend we launch two more bombers so we can hunt down more launchers before the insurgents actually start firing live chemical warhead munitions into the city.”
“Are you crazy, McLanahan?” Huffman retorted. “The President will probably order the entire program shut down because of this! The last thing he will do is put more bombers up there. As it is, we’ll spend a week defending ourselves from being accused of releasing those chemical warheads. You will recall your aircraft immediately, then prepare to debrief the JCS and likely the entire national security staff. I want a full report on the incident on my desk in one hour. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And after the briefing is complete, get your ass off that damned space station,” Huffman said. “I don’t know why my predecessor allowed you to go up there, but you’ve got no business traipsing up to that floating pile of tubes every time you feel like it. I need you down here—if for no other reason than to have you personally answer to the national command authority regarding another lapse in judgment.”
“Yes, sir,” Patrick replied, but the transmission had already been ended by the time he spoke. He terminated the videoconference link, thought for a moment, then spoke, “McLanahan to Mace.”
Another window popped open on the opposite lower corner of Boomer’s large multifunction screen, and he saw the image of Brigadier General Daren Mace, the operations officer and second-in-command of the Air Battle Force attack wing at Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base in northern Nevada. The air wing at Battle Mountain was the home base and central control facility for the unmanned long-range bombers, although commanders at HAWC could also issue instructions to the bombers as well.
“Yes, General?” Mace responded. Older than Patrick by just a few years, Daren Mace was a veteran B-1B Lancer strategic bomber OSO, or offensive systems officer, and bomb wing commander. His expertise on the B-1’s attack systems and capabilities led him to be chosen to head the Air Battle Force’s long-range supersonic attack fleet.
“Recall the damned Vampires,” Patrick ordered tonelessly.
“But sir, we’ve still
got three more Streakers on board the Vampire, and it’s got at least two more hours’ endurance before it has to head back to Batman Air Base in Turkey,” Boomer interjected. “Intel briefed us that—”
“The operational test was successful, Boomer—that’s what we needed to find out,” Patrick said, rubbing his temples. He shook his head resignedly. “Recall the Vampire now, General Mace,” he said quietly, his head lowered, his voice sounding utterly exhausted.
“Yes, sir,” the veteran bomber navigator responded. He entered keyboard instructions on his computer console. “The Vampire’s on the way back to Batman Air Base in Turkey, sir, ETE forty-five minutes. What about the follow-on sorties?”
“Hold them in their hangars until I give the word,” Patrick replied.
“And what about our shadow, sir?” Daren asked.
Patrick looked at another monitor. Yep, it was still there: a Russian MiG-29 Fulcrum jet fighter, one of several that had been hanging near the bomber since it started its patrol, always within one or two miles of the Vampire, not making any threatening moves but certainly able to attack at any second. It certainly had a front-row seat for the SkySTREAK launch. The Vampire bomber had taken several photographs of the fighter with its high-resolution digital camera so detailed that they could practically read the pilot’s name stenciled on the front of his flight suit.
“If it locks onto the Vampire, shoot it down immediately,” Patrick said. “Otherwise we’ll let it—”
And at that moment they heard a computer-synthesized voice announce, “Warning, warning, missile launch! SPEAR system activated!”
Patrick shook his head and sighed audibly. “The game’s afoot, crew,” he said. “The battle begins today, and it has little to do with Persia.” He turned to the computer screen of the command center at Battle Mountain. “Shut that bastard down, Daren,” Patrick radioed.