Orbital

by F X Holden

  She had already decided to play along. To do what was necessary to preserve her freedom, for as long as she could. He asked who she was working for and she told him. She dumped her whole CV on him. He asked what information she had been tasked to obtain, and she told him that too. He asked her to name all of the AISE officers or agents she had knowledge of, and she told him truthfully she could not. He was not happy, but she had no information to offer the GRU about AISE agents or officers in Russia or elsewhere because, after all, she was an asset herself, not an intelligence officer, and she had not met face to face with her handler for several years. She did not know his name, and she did not even know if the disembodied digital individual she dealt with was even the same man who had recruited her so many years ago. Payment from AISE appeared in her parents’ bank account each month so that the additional income could not be traced to her. Her parents thought it was her, sending them money from overseas. She did not tell him how small the payment was.

  He asked her how she communicated with AISE, and she showed him her telephone. He handed it to a second officer, who cloned it on the spot. On it was an app, a multiplayer game, in which the participants could chat with each other. The conversations were not saved in the phone, she said, but perhaps they still existed on the app developer’s server? She helpfully suggested the GRU could hack the developer and perhaps recover her conversations. She showed the officer her ‘friends’ list and pointed out which ‘friend’ was her AISE contact. It was true she played the game, and chatted with other players. But the rest was a plausible fabrication created by AISE exactly for this purpose.

  When he was done with the list of questions from his initial debriefing, he confirmed what Grahkovsky had implied; the GRU expected her to work for them as a double agent. She would continue supplying intel to AISE, feeding them intelligence, both real and false. But she would have to give the GRU whatever intelligence she could about AISE methods, codes, technologies and such and share with them the tasking they gave her. They would provide her with tasking of their own. They also wanted her to provide them with intelligence on Lapikov – both his political and personal dealings – which she found to be a request typical of the Russian psyche. The one thing better than information about a foreign power was getting dirt on each other.

  She agreed to it all, trying to appear frightened, helpless, hopeless. It was not a difficult act. She repeatedly requested to be given the antidote and was repeatedly refused.

  The GRU officer asked what had motivated her to work for AISE and she told him it was the money. She had demanded the GRU match her AISE payments and named an exorbitant monthly sum. He had laughed. He told her that if she did not cooperate, it was not her bank balance, not her own life or liberty she would need to worry about, but that of her family in Italy. Had she not seen what happened to Russian exiles abroad? Poisoned, irradiated, gassed? He showed her a picture of her father, taken the day before. Buying groceries.

  If we wanted to hurt you, he would be dead already, the man said. And your mother next.

  Please, no. I will cooperate, she told him. Her plea was real enough.

  When he was finished, he had her sign what he said was a ‘full confession,’ in Russian, then handed her a small bottle of fluid that could easily have been more poison for all she knew, but she drank it down greedily. She was screwed anyway.

  But in D’Antonia’s mind, there was cooperation, and there was cooperation. The first thing she did when she got home was throw up. A stomach full of accumulated adrenaline, bad coffee and raw fear. The next thing she did was compose a coded message to AISE on her networked refrigerator. She’d told the GRU a lot about how AISE worked, but she’d kept that communication channel to herself. Her message to her handler was short and simple:

  I have been arrested; my life threatened. I agreed to work with the GRU as a double agent in return for my release. I do not repeat NOT request extraction. I understand you may choose to disavow me, but I propose to remain in place to provide AISE with intelligence on GRU methods and tasking. Respond, please.

  The message would have read like a shopping list to anyone else and was as concise as she could make it. She made herself a cup of coffee and sat staring into space. She would have loved a Hollywood-style extraction; perhaps some sort of quadrotor drone landing on her roof, whisking her away to a boat in the Baltic Sea. She no longer had the poison in her blood, so while her career as an AISE spy might be over, she would be alive and free.

  And in fear of what the GRU would do to her parents, for the rest of their remaining days.

  It was not like AISE had such resources in any case. She knew they would doubt whether she was even the sender of the message. If she had been arrested, they would assume she had been broken and the message sent by the GRU. But they might respond.

  The reply that came back would determine her next move. ‘Error 404’ would mean her message had been received, and she had been disavowed by AISE. No response at all, she would take that the same way. ‘Order confirmed’ would mean her message had been received and they wanted her to continue as a double agent, or wanted her to stay in place until they could extract her. A nerve-wracking half-hour passed. If she was disavowed, she had nothing to offer the GRU. She might string them along for a while with old intel, but the lack of currency in tasking from AISE would soon make them suspicious. They would give her a task that could only be fulfilled if she was still in contact with AISE and when she couldn’t deliver on it, she would no longer be an asset, she would be a liability.

  If she was extracted by AISE, what future would she have? She might be safe, temporarily, but her career would be over, and so would her usefulness to AISE. And then there was the continuing threat to her family.

  Her coffee went cold.

  Another hour went by with no response. Va bene. She would not be extracted, but it did not mean she would stay and play the GRU game either.

  She walked around, checking in cupboards and bookcases to see if there was anything here she could not just walk out and leave behind. Her laptop and telephone contained nothing compromising; she would leave them both. The GRU had probably already searched her apartment while she was meeting with them, but it felt important to reassure herself. She satisfied herself that the apartment was clean. She had screwed up everything else, but not that. Then she drew the blinds and put spare clothes, makeup, toiletries and jewelry in a small backpack.

  So this was how it ended. Not with a bang, or even a whimper, but in silence.

  So be it. The GRU would be watching. It was evening. There was no way to leave now without risking detection. She would have to wait for the ‘witching hour.’ Four fifteen. The worst period on the worst watch in any surveillance duty. There would be movement sensors set up to record any movement of the building’s front or back doors, but that worked two ways. It gave surveillance officers a false sense of security. It made it permissible to sneak a few moments of sleep because an alarm would wake you if anyone came out the door. She wouldn’t be using the front or back doors, but she didn’t want attentive eyes on her building, she wanted them half shut.

  She had chosen this apartment building because the roof adjoined the neighboring building and she had a key to that building’s roof access door. She would go up, over to the next building, in and down. Then she would come out, hit the alley out the side of that building, a hundred yards from her own, where she had a perfectly silent Vespa electric scooter parked, and evaporate.

  She went around the apartment turning out lights, and pulled out her hairband, shaking out her hair, heading for the bathroom one last time. She should be feeling broken, rudderless, but surprised herself as she realized she…

  The refrigerator chimed, the loud ping interrupting her thoughts.

  She walked up to it, keyed up, almost unable to focus on the small LCD screen.

  Error 404. Disavowed.

  It was clarity, at least. AISE did not trust her enough to leave her in place, nor valu
e her highly enough to try to rescue her. She doubted now that they had even passed on her report about the possible strike on Nebraska to CIA. At the time, she’d been almost relieved. Now, she felt betrayed. Ignored. Abandoned.

  She didn’t feel sad, or scared. What she felt was a rising anger. If her own service did not value her intelligence, she would send it directly to those who might. She had not revealed everything to her GRU captors. Though it was true she did not know the names of any of AISE’s own officers or those of their allied services, shortly after arriving in Moscow she had been tasked to provide the local CIA station with the names and biographical details of every member of Lapikov’s office and her assessment of his political alliances within the Kremlin – who did he regard as his friends, and who as his enemies. To facilitate this, she had been given the download code for a modified dating app and the profile of a man on the app to whom she could deliver the data. She had pulled all the information together and forwarded it to him as a message, which the app encrypted. She had never met him, and knew that ‘he’ was probably just a postbox. But she still had the app, and it still showed the man’s profile as ‘active.’

  If AISE would not listen to her, perhaps the CIA would. She spent the next sixty minutes documenting everything she knew about Groza, about Bondarev and Grahkovsky, about Russia’s cover story for the system, and Lapikov’s conviction that Russia was planning to use it again in support of Iran in the Gulf conflict. She left out the detail that she had been poisoned and arrested, but added a note to explain that she was forwarding the intel directly to CIA because she had reason to believe AISE was not doing so. It was a long shot, she recognized that, but she had already proven to them she was a reliable source by providing them with valuable intel on the inner workings of Lapikov’s office and his place in the politics of the Kremlin. After checking her message a couple of times and adding some small details, she hit ‘send’ and then deleted the app from her phone.

  It was a small salve on her wounded self-esteem to think that everything she had done since arriving in Moscow might not have been in vain. That someone might receive her report and take her seriously.

  But she was still angry, and she turned her thoughts to the GRU. Threaten her family? That was not something you did to a girl from Sicily. She had money, contacts, resources and a Sicilian temperament.

  Her next move was simple enough. After that, not so much.

  Major Fan Bo’s Mao Bei attack on the two Grozas whose orbit took them over China daily was nearly flawless. His men performed acceptably, and he commended them accordingly. But there was room for improvement.

  He had not used his BX-1.4 swarms. Those he wanted to keep up his sleeve. With the first Groza he decided that, given what he had seen of the Russian satellite’s capabilities, he should assume it had layered defensive systems: the Shakti for engaging larger threats at great range and close-in weapons for dealing with lesser threats. He told his people to assume the Russian machine would be capable of infrared and radar countermeasures, laser, ballistic or kinetic self-defense weapons.

  The small size of the BX-1.3 would be its one advantage, at least in this first engagement. The attack would be timed to take place simultaneously on both Grozas at once. One as it entered orbit over China, the other as it departed Chinese territory. The Mao Bei satellites would be positioned non-threateningly, far enough away to pose no collision danger to the Grozas. They were set to mimic the frequencies of a 5G comms satellite, but Bo doubted they would be detected at all, amongst all the clutter and radio energy the Grozas flew through daily.

  As the Groza drew near, the Mao Bei would power up. As the target drew parallel it would accelerate to match orbit and close the gap to the Groza. If it survived the approach, when it closed to within twenty feet of the Groza it would complete the attachment maneuver, using powerful magnets to clamp itself to the Groza’s main dome. China recognized this strategy would have a limited ‘shelf life’ as enemy satellites could be fitted with degaussing fields to shake off a magnetic limpet. So the next-gen BX-1.4 included a small harpoon which could be fired at a passing satellite to attach itself, and then reel itself in to sit tight against the body of the target.

  Once in position, the Mao Bei triggered a high-powered pulsed microwave energy release lasting up to ten minutes. And fried the silicon brain of whatever it was riding on.

  But the attack was only ‘nearly flawless.’ The first Mao Bei completed its approach apparently undetected and triggered itself. Bo could not be 100 percent sure, but it had reported performing exactly as expected, and that Groza had gone off the air immediately and irreversibly.

  The second Mao Bei also completed a successful approach, but its powerful magnetic field was triggered too close to the Groza’s tungsten-filled warheads. Being ferromagnetic, the huge tungsten warheads had proven an almost irresistible target to the small brain of the micro-sat guidance system. It had clamped itself onto one of the warheads out on the cylinder and triggered itself. They had definitely knocked out its comms system – it had stopped broadcasting – but Bo’s engineers seriously doubted that this Groza would have been fully disabled. If Russia found a way to restore comms, or repaired it in orbit, it might still be a threat.

  Bo castigated the officer in charge of the second attack. But he also held himself to account. The code on a Mao Bei mini-sat already in orbit could not be rewritten ‘on the fly.’ There would be a risk in any Groza attack that the same would happen. He could increase the likelihood of a successful attack by allocating extra units to an attack, but this tactic brought with it a larger chance of detection. A swarm attack would almost certainly be detected, either during the engagement or in analysis after the attack, but it offered the best chance of assured target destruction.

  Still, he had learned the Mao Bei could approach and engage without triggering the Groza’s defenses. He had achieved one certain, and one possible kill. And the operation had cost him only two 90 lb. mini-satellites.

  It was a far superior result to that achieved by the Main Enemy, USA. Bo knew his country had also started a massive cyberwarfare campaign against Russia in retaliation for the Korla attack. It would take a few days for the impact to become evident, but Bo had been told 61398 Cyberwarfare Unit had been ordered to fatally compromise the computer systems of Russia’s top 100 industrial and resource conglomerates. If they weren’t making panicked phone calls to the Russian President already, within days or hours the oligarchs who owned the crippled companies would be.

  The People’s Republic was not one to run crying to the United Nations or the world press when it came under attack. Nor did it silently stand and lick its wounds. On the wall of his office, Bo had a vintage poster, printed at the time of the Cultural Revolution. Under the images of peasant soldiers and factory workers it said: ‘In battle, there are only two types of attack: direct and indirect. However, out of these two, in various combinations, it is possible to create endless options.’ Russia was about to learn that in the art of indirect attack, China was a grand master.

  So it was with no surprise he received the news that the Pentagon had accepted the Chinese offer of assistance. He had been given the name of the US Commander with whom he was to coordinate operations.

  Colonel Alicia Rodriguez.

  The first thing he had done was to call for her file from PLA Central Security and he was flipping through it now.

  Woman

  Mid-40s

  Latino

  Former US Navy. Pilot. Catapult officer.

  Assistant Air Boss on the Gerald R Ford-class supercarrier, the USS GW Bush.

  Three years’ service unaccounted for after that, before she reappeared as commanding officer of the Amphibious Landing Ship USS Bougainville. Interesting.

  Then appointed Commander Space Force’s 615th Combat Operations Squadron.

  On the surface, impressive. But she had already lost one spacecraft in an ill-conceived, poorly executed attack on a Groza.

  H
e enlarged the photo of the woman on his tablet and held it up for closer inspection. Hello Colonel Rodriguez. Are you worthy to go to war with a real Space Force?

  Yevgeny Bondarev was relying on a very risky game of bluff to protect the Grozas overflying the US East Coast.

  He had persuaded General Popovkin to intercede with his Navy counterpart to reposition the Cuban-based Lider destroyer. It was now patrolling a grid fifteen miles directly offshore from Kennedy-Cape Canaveral, in the company of a Russian Sovremenny-class air warfare destroyer and one Cuban Navy Rio Damuji-class frigate. The US had howled in protest at the flotilla operating so close to its spaceports, but Russia had responded that it was operating in international waters, conducting lawful military exercises with its Cuban ally.

  The message Bondarev had hoped to send was this – if you launch another X-37, you will do so at risk. The Lider was armed with the satellite-killing Nudol missile. The US would know it was more than capable of destroying a heavy-lift launch rocket in its boost phase. But more importantly, it was also armed with a 200-kilowatt Peresvet high energy laser, both to attack enemy aircraft and to protect the Lider from hypersonic missile attacks. Named after Alexander Peresvet, a medieval Russian warrior monk, the Peresvet system was Bondarev’s ‘ace in the hole.’ From the position the Lider was patrolling, the laser could easily engage an American rocket and either explode it outright or destabilize it enough to cause the launch to fail. And most importantly, it would do so invisibly and thus deniably.

  The Americans would know this too.

  Bondarev hoped the unmistakable threat would be enough to cause a pause in X-37 launches and the US attacks on his Groza system. Personally, he believed it was time for Defense Ministers and Generals to stop waging economic warfare from space. But he was just a simple soldier, and therefore took the precautions a simple soldier should take.