Able One

by Ben Bova

  A downside to the longer intercept window is that the attacker has an opportunity to deploy countermeasures against a defensive system. The warhead and decoys are detached from the spent rocket stages during the midcourse phase. However, the interceptor and other sensors have more time to observe and discriminate countermeasures from the warhead. The midcourse defense segment has ground-and sea-based elements, including the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) and the sea-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (Aegis BMD).

  Unlike the Airborne Laser, which fires a beam of light energy to destroy the missile, the midcourse and terminal phase systems employ smaller, high-velocity missiles to strike the incoming warhead; this is known as the “kinetic kill” method.

  Terminal Phase Defense

  A missile enters the terminal phase when the warhead falls back into the atmosphere. This phase generally lasts from 30 seconds to one minute.

  The primary elements in the terminal defense segment are:

  Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), which will destroy a ballistic missile’s warhead as it transitions from the midcourse to the terminal phase of its trajectory. THAAD consists of four principle components: truck-mounted launchers; interceptor missiles; radars; and command, control, and battle management (C2BM). The system has rapid mobility so that it can be airlifted to almost anywhere in the world within hours.

  Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC-3), the most mature element of the ballistic missile defense system. Built on previous Patriot air and missile defense infrastructure, PAC-3 missiles were deployed to Southwest Asia as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.

  Arrow, a joint effort between the United States and Israel, provides Israel with a capability to defend its borders and U.S. troops deployed in the region against short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. The system became operational in 2000.

  Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS), a co-developmental program with Germany and Italy to develop an air and missile defense system that is mobile and transportable. Using the combat-proven PAC-3 as a platform, MEADS’ role in ballistic missile defense is to bridge the gap between man-portable systems like the Stinger shoulder-fired missile and the higher levels of the ballistic missile defense system, such as the THAAD system.

  Missile Defense Agency

  Overview and BMD Basics

  Elmendorf Air Force Base

  The mess hall was big and crowded, but not as noisy as Harry expected from the size of the place. The rest of his laser team was finishing up their breakfast by the time Harry worked his way down the counter and carried his tray to their table. He could spot them from across the cafeteria by their white Anson Aerospace coveralls, like a cluster of ice floes in a sea of Air Force blue.

  “She’s hot, I tell you,” Wally Rosenberg was saying as Harry dragged a chair from the next table and sat down between him and Taki Nakamura.

  “What do you think, boss?” Angie Reyes asked. He was a chemical technician, in charge of the volatile mix of iodine and oxygen that powered the big laser. Reyes was a wiry bantam cock of a guy, short, slim, dark-haired. He had replaced Pete Quintana; Rosenberg kidded that the company’s management wanted to keep its quota of Hispanics on the project.

  “Think about what?” Harry asked, taking his English muffin and mug of coffee off the tray.

  “Our new pilot,” Rosenberg answered. A chemical engineer, Rosenberg always had a sly grin on his long, horsey face. “I say she’s hot.”

  Taki Nakamura, the only woman in the team, made a mock scowl at Rosenberg. “You say every woman you see is hot.”

  “Not you, Tiki-Taki,” Rosenberg shot back.

  “You’d better not. Unless you want your nose stuffed up your butt.”

  “Kung fu engineer,” Monk Delany cracked. Everybody laughed, even Rosenberg.

  “Colonel Christopher?” Harry replied to Rosenberg’s question. “I just met her last night, same as you guys. I guess she’s good-looking, all right.”

  “Well, you’re an eligible bachelor, aintcha?” Rosenberg said, his grin turning into a smirk.

  “I’m still a married man,” Harry said. “We’re separated; we’re not divorced yet.”

  Delany shook his head. “When are you gonna bite the bullet, Harry? Go through with the divorce, pal. Get on with your life.”

  Harry said nothing.

  Nakamura asked, “Is the colonel married?”

  “Nope,” Rosenberg answered. “I Googled her. She’s in hot water with the Air Force, as a matter of fact. They caught her sleeping with a married guy—some general, no less.”

  “Your kind of woman,” Delany said.

  “Yeah. A slut,” added Reyes.

  Harry decided the banter had gone far enough. “We’ve got work to do. Let’s get moving.”

  As they carried their trays to the disposal area, Taki asked, “Did any of you see the northern lights out there? They’re spectacular!”

  Delany said, “So that’s what it was! I caught a glimpse just before the sun came up. Then they faded out. I was wondering what those lights were.”

  “Well, shit, we are in Alaska,” Rosenberg said.

  Nakamura shook her head. “They were awful bright. Must be some big flare on the sun to work them up like that. Or something.”

  Standing in front of the desk in the cubbyhole of an office that the base commander had given her, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Christopher was not in a happy mood. Bad enough to be exiled to this godforsaken dump in Alaska. Even worse to push the regular pilot of this oversized bus out of his job and into the right-hand seat. He’s already pissed off at me. Now they’ve stuck me with a navigator who’s so inexperienced he looks like a skinny high school kid who’s snuck into Air Force blues.

  Her navigator, Lieutenant Eustis Sharmon, was tall, quite lean, with skin the color of dark chocolate. He was standing at attention before Colonel Christopher, who stood a full head shorter than him. Sharmon looked uncomfortable; Christopher felt grouchy.

  But as she looked up at Sharmon’s young face and troubled, red-rimmed eyes, Colonel Christopher said to herself, It’s not his fault. The brass assigned him to me and he’s stuck with the job. Just like I’m stuck with driving this clunker of an airplane.

  “Take it easy, Lieutenant,” she said, trying to put some warmth into it. She extended her hand. “Welcome on board.”

  Sharmon loosened up a little. “Thanks, Colonel,” he mumbled.

  Christopher perched on the edge of the desk and gestured to the chair against the wall. “Have a seat. Relax.”

  The lieutenant settled into the chair like a carpenter’s ruler folding up, big hands on his knees.

  “I bet you played basketball,” Colonel Christopher said, trying to smile.

  “No, ma’am. Track. Ran the distance events.”

  Her brows rose. “Marathon?”

  Shannon smiled for the first time. It was a good, bright smile. “Did the marathon once. Once was enough.”

  She laughed. “Well, what we’re doing here is easier than a marathon.” “Racetrack, they told me.”

  Nodding. “That’s right. We take the bird out to a designated test area over the ocean, then fly a figure eight while the tech geniuses downstairs get their laser working. Piece of cake.”

  But in her mind she was thinking of the missions she had flown over Afghanistan: twelve-thousand-kilometer distances, midair refuelings, full stealth mode, pinpoint delivery of smart bombs. Going from flying a B-2 to jockeying a dumbass 747 was more than a demotion, it was a humiliation.

  “So there’s not much for me to do, then,” Lieutenant Sharmon said.

  Christopher nodded. “Not as long as the GPS is working.”

  Fargo, North Dakota: KXND-TV

  “Whattaya mean there’s no satellite pictures?” Heydon Kalheimer demanded indignantly. He was standing in front of the studio’s blue wall, due to be on the air with the weather report in forty seconds. As usual, he had shown up at the last possible moment. The monitor
screen that usually showed the National Weather Service satellite imagery was as blank as the wall. Kalheimer felt very put out.

  His producer shrugged her heavy shoulders. They made quite a pair: Kalheimer was long and lanky, all arms and legs, even his head was narrow and long-jawed. He always had a slap-happy grin on his face, even when he was furious. The producer was built like a squat teddy bear, short, heavy, given to sighs of long suffering.

  She sighed in her long-suffering way, then repeated, “No satellite pictures. Something’s screwed up. News reports say that all the satellites are down, malfunctioning.”

  “How in hell am I supposed to do the weather without satellite graphics? What’m I supposed to do, just stand in front of the camera and look stupid?”

  “That wouldn’t take much,” the producer muttered.

  “What?”

  Louder, she said, “You’ll have the local radar imagery and the National Weather Service’s forecast. Just read it off the monitor, like you always do.”

  “That’ll take ten seconds. What do I do with the rest of my two minutes?”

  “You’ll just have to wing it.” She knew that Kalheimer did not like winging it. Behind his facade of overweening self-confidence he was still as insecure as he’d been his first day in front of the cameras.

  “Heads are gonna roll over this,” Kalheimer growled. “And your head’s gonna be the first one!”

  “In five!” the floor manager shouted. “Four… three…”

  The overhead lights turned on and Kalheimer turned to camera one, his toothy professional grin spread across his long, bony face.

  “Hi there! It’s time for your up-to-the-minute weather report.”

  The Pentagon: Situation Room

  The first meeting of this emergency action team is convened”—General Franklin P. Higgins glanced at his Breitling wristwatch— “at 11:46 a.m., 23 October.”

  The situation room was in the basement of the Pentagon, in the wing that had been rebuilt after being blasted and burned by the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. It was a small room; it felt crowded, tense, even with fewer than a dozen men and women sitting around the oblong table. Almost every one of them had opened a laptop or notebook computer on the table before them.

  Three of the room’s walls were floor-to-ceiling smart screens, showing various images from hardened Defense Department satellites. The ceiling was paneled with glareless lights. The seats around the highly polished table were dark leather, plush, comfortable. Each place at the table had a built-in phone jack and power plug.

  General Higgins was a big, morose-looking man with a flabby-jowled face and a bulbous nose that had earned him the nickname Possum when he’d been a cadet at the Air Force Academy. Although he was presently on detached duty with the Defense Intelligence Agency, he still wore his blue uniform.

  Zuri Coggins sat at the general’s right hand. She was from the White House, a member of the National Security Advisor’s staff, sent to this emergency action team as the West Wing’s representative. She was a tiny African-American woman, almost elfin, but very intense. Wearing a stylish short-skirted red jacket dress, she was the only woman in the conference room.

  The rear door opened and Michael Jamil stepped in, looking apologetic. All eyes around the oblong conference table turned to him.

  “Sorry to be late,” he said, his voice soft, contrite. “They held me up at the security checkpoint outside.”

  Jamil, a civilian analyst from the National Intelligence Council, was in a suede sports jacket and baggy, creaseless chinos. No tie, but a sleeveless V-neck yellow sweater beneath the jacket. He slid into an empty seat at the foot of the conference table, glancing at the displays on the smart screens that lined three of the room’s four walls. The images showed a satellite view of the missile launching site in the rugged mountains of North Korea, an electronic map of the North Pacific Ocean with each U.S. Navy surface vessel and submarine highlighted by a pinpoint light, and other satellite pictures of Air Force bases in Alaska, Okinawa, and Japan.

  Jamil was of medium height, spare of build, his face fringed with a neatly trimmed light brown beard. His skin was the color of tobacco leaf, although he had never smoked in his life. He brushed at a lock of sandy hair that stubbornly fell across his high forehead and nervously adjusted his tinted eyeglasses. His eyes were caramel brown. He felt very junior to this assemblage of uniformed brass and high-powered civilians, even though he was convinced that he knew more about the situation than most of them did.

  “Are we all here now?” General Higgins asked, his tone biting, his fleshy face clearly displeased.

  His aide, an Air Force major sitting on his left, replied, “The representative from the Chief of Naval Operations is on his way, sir. And the chief of the Homeland Security office at Honolulu was going to attend via a satellite link, but the link isn’t operative this morning.”

  Higgins grumbled, “Which is why we’re here, isn’t it?”

  Zuri Coggins said, “The President and the National Security Advisor have both instructed me to assure you that any and all resources you may need will be made available.” She peered down the table toward Major General Bradley Scheib.

  Brad Scheib gave the impression of being a dashing sky warrior in his crisp blue uniform with its chest full of ribbons, and his handsome, chiseled features. In reality he was more of a tech geek than a jet jock. A graduate of Caltech, Scheib had spent more of his career in laboratories than cockpits.

  “What about it, Brad?” General Higgins asked. “Is your missile defense system up and running?”

  With a curt nod, Scheib answered, “We’ve activated all our ABM units in Fort Greely, in Alaska, and at Vandenberg Air Force Base. The Navy has alerted all four of its Aegis battle groups in the western Pacific. Two of them are steaming at full speed for the Sea of Japan; the other two are deploying between Japan and Hawaii.”

  “There’s only two missiles to worry about,” one of the civilians on the other side of the table said, pointing to the satellite image of the North Korean launch site.

  “Two that we know about,” Scheib replied.

  “How many do the Chinese have?” an Army officer asked.

  “And the Russians?”

  “They both have missile-launching submarines, too.”

  Zuri Coggins said, “The President has decided that our moves will be strictly defensive.” Poking at the air with one finger to emphasize her words, she added, “We will not do anything that could provoke a Chinese response. Or a Russian one.”

  “But they’ve both gone on alert, haven’t they?” asked the admiral sitting across the table from her.

  “Not yet,” Coggins replied, “although the State Department was tasked with informing them that our own nuclear retaliatory forces are being placed on full alert.”

  “State Department,” the admiral muttered distastefully.

  General Higgins looked toward one of the civilians sitting down the table from Coggins. “Are our snooper satellites still working?”

  “They are,” said the civilian. “ELINT birds have picked up coded messages sent along landlines in China and Russia.” Glancing at Coggins, he continued. “They are in the process of putting their missile forces on full alert.”

  Higgins nodded morosely, as if he had expected nothing less.

  “Pakistan and India, too,” the civilian added.

  “Sweet Jesus,” said the admiral. “That’s all we need, those two pulling the trigger.”

  “What about the Iranians?” Higgins asked.

  “They’ve only got a half dozen missiles.”

  “Guess where they’ll fire them?” asked Higgins’ aide, who was Jewish.

  “What if the Chinese or the Russians take advantage of this situation to attack us?” Higgins snapped.

  Coggins replied firmly, “That will trigger a fullscale retaliation by our missile forces and both the Chinese and Russians know it. What’s more, they know that our systems are on full a
lert. We could respond with a devastating nuclear counterstrike at a moment’s notice.”

  “Even if the President is dead?” Jamil asked. His voice was soft, tentative, as if he’d surprised himself by speaking up.

  Everyone turned to him. Her dark eyes narrowing, Coggins demanded, “What do you mean by that?”

  Suddenly the focus of everyone around the table, Jamil blinked his brown eyes nervously and pawed at his unruly hair. At last he said, “Well, the President is scheduled to give a speech in San Francisco tonight.”

  General Scheib pointed to the wall screen with one hand as he pecked with a single finger at his laptop’s keyboard. A schematic drawing of a ballistic missile appeared on the screen, with a list of performance specifications alongside it.

  “Those two missiles are Taepodong-2s,” Scheib said. “They don’t have the range to reach San Francisco. Or the reliability. The last time they fired one it splashed into the Pacific several hundred miles short of Hawaii.”

  Jamil had to turn in his chair to see the drawing. “According to our information,” he said, “the Taepodong-2 has a range of ten thousand kilometers.”

  “That’s Pyongyang propaganda. In the real world, the Taepodong-2 doesn’t have the range to reach San Francisco.”

  “I admit that San Francisco is at the extreme fringe of the missile’s capability.” Jamil’s tone was conciliatory, yet he was clearly contradicting the general.

  Scheib glared at the civilian analyst. “Even so, the missile doesn’t have the accuracy to hit San Francisco, not at that range.”

  Jamil nodded slightly but countered, “Yet they launched a bird into geosynchronous orbit. General, I submit that their guidance system has demonstrated a sophisticated degree of accuracy.”

  “You can submit whatever you want,” Scheib retorted with a humorless grin. “They can’t reach San Francisco.”