by FX Holden
Colonel-General Oleg Popovkin was commander of the 15th Aerospace Forces Army, which comprised both Maqsud’s Groza program, the Titov research center, the Center for Missile Attack Warning, the Space Intelligence Center, and finally but most importantly, the Baikonur and Plesetsk Cosmodromes, where Russia’s heavy launch capability was centered and from where its Groza satellites had been boosted into space atop Supertyazh rockets.
“So, what the hell is up?” Maqsud asked.
The man shrugged. “Damned if I know. I got nothing to tell you that you don’t already know. We had a quiet shift. Groza 14 is still having comms issues, intermittent dropouts. Selnik is working on it, thinks he might have a workaround, but probably not for implementation during your shift. No new tasking: standing orders, standing targets are still in effect. But whatever it is, it’s going down on your shift or all those suits and medals wouldn’t be standing around up there drinking coffee and brandy.” The man gripped his fist, shook it and wished him luck.
His men had already made their handover and had taken up station inside the CIC. They were only a part of the full Groza complement, the target acquisition team. There were two other teams making up about 20 personnel in total and including the Weapons and Systems teams. His team used the Groza’s onboard targeting system to identify and isolate ground targets, pulling on data from other satellites or airborne platforms like surveillance drones or Airborne Warning and Control aircraft if available. The process was largely automated, but Maqsud had to make the call about which assets to draw on and confirm his team had a solid target lock before firing authority was handed to the Weapons team. Weapons determined what type of bombardment was needed to achieve the mission objective – from a single warhead holding 64 missiles for a target like a small building or compound, up to the full complement of 20 warheads – 1,280 ‘missiles’ – for an area bombardment. The Systems Team kept comms clean and clear, managed fuel and propulsion systems, dealt with malfunctions, and was responsible for maneuvering the various satellites into new orbits as needed.
Which Maqsud could immediately see they were doing as he took his seat behind his computer console and looked up at the large wall screen at the front of the room, which showed the current and projected orbit of every one of the 16 Groza satellites. A glance at the familiar screen showed him that Groza 5 was being pulled out of its normal orbit – which took it over Australia, India, Turkey and then Europe – and moved closer to Groza 12 over the Persian Gulf. He pulled on his headset, got his men to call in and confirm they were all logged in, and checked in with the shift leader, Sergeant Kerim Karas.
“Corporal Khan reporting. Targeting Team Echo online. All targets from standing order 19.11.2033 locked and available. Grozas 1 through 13, 15 to 16 available for retasking. Groza 14 locked on standing targets but unavailable for retasking. Awaiting daily orders,” he intoned.
Karas sat two rows ahead of Maqsud and three stations to the right on what were essentially just three long benches that were lined with computer terminals and under which hung cables the thickness of Maqsud’s fingers. Up front was the tactical display showing the status of every satellite, and at the rear was the observation platform. He snuck a look over his shoulder. He hadn’t seen it so full since the full salvo test shot nearly a year ago when they had fully expended the magazine on Groza 17 and flattened those navy ships moored five miles off Sevastopol.
“Very good, Comrade Corporal,” he heard Karas’ voice say in his ears. “Listen up. As you can see, we’ve got an audience today. I want you on top of your men, checking every coordinate to the third decimal point twice before you confirm. Got that?” Karas was squat, square-headed, jug-eared and had a squint like the light of the surrounding world annoyed him.
“Yes, Sergeant,” he said.
“Tasking for today in your daily orders … sending, now. Get back to me in five with questions,” the man said and rang off.
Maqsud reached for his mouse and clicked through his log-on screens to his daily orders desktop. Then his breath caught in his chest. Now he understood why the high-octane audience was in attendance. He re-read the orders and then sat back in his chair for a moment. The target was clearly described. His team would certainly have no trouble identifying it and locking it down. Unlike the missile in his silo in Svobodnyy, Groza represented the latest in advanced weaponry and computer systems that Russia could deploy, so Maqsud had no doubts that if the order was given for the system to be used, the target would be completely and utterly obliterated.
As would the 1,489 civilian and security personnel that his mission briefing file had told him were expected to be working there today.
Rain from a clear sky
Abqaiq oil production facility, Buqayq, Saudi Arabia, January 2034
Sourav Thakur looked up at the sky and cursed. Another cloudless, baking hot bloody day. True, he did not have to work in the cloying, choking fumes of polluted Delhi driving taxi bikes like his brothers, but today looked like it was shaping to be one of those deadly 110-degree days. Days like this, he always lost one or two men in his crew to heatstroke, exhaustion, dehydration, or worse. It had only been a year ago he’d had to pack up the stuff of one of his workers and write his family back home a letter after he’d died of heat stress. What was the guy’s name again? Rohit? No … Virat, that was the one. Not much stuff to pack up, really. Some papers, a tobacco pouch, telephone, a cheap ring and necklace bought at a souk. The sum total of a human life in a shoebox.
Five years of university to become a chemical engineer to end up here? He stood in the illusory shade of a distillation tower and watched liquid sulfur squeeze through a crack in the tower and run down the side, sizzling and bubbling on the hot metal and evaporating into the desert air. That crack was today’s job. He had to confirm the distillate was sulfur – though any idiot could see that from the color and the position on the tower – and do the paperwork to get the tower shut down. Then some other poor fools had to climb up there in the baking heat and pull the tower apart, get at the plates inside and pull those out, then weld the crack to close it up, reinstall the plates and seal up the tower so that he could run it up and recertify it. Another day in paradise, Sourav, keep your mind on your bank balance and just get through it.
Sourav had a target of 300,000 riyals or about 100,000 US dollars he wanted to save up so he could set up his own consultancy in the Indian oil capital of Mumbai and he was two-thirds of the way there. Another year, maybe 18 months, and he’d be back home scouting office space and Buqayq would just be a bad memory. Get himself a wife – his mother was working on that – and a mistress too. A dancer maybe.
“Hey,” he called out to the foreman of the crew he’d been assigned. The men were lounging under a platform, hiding from the sun while he made up his mind what to do. “Get off your bloody arses and go get me a cherry picker so I can get up there and take a sample and we can all get back inside again.”
Anastasia Grahkovsky stood on the observation platform at the back of the Combat Information Center in Baikonur, listening to the murmurings of the personnel below, who included the now very troubled Maqsud Khan.
“And now we shall see what 2,560 125 lb. meteorites hitting the earth at ten times the speed of sound will do to a modern industrial facility,” said a voice behind her, and she turned toward the voice of the commander of the Titov test facility, General Bondarev. She had hoped to be able to just stand unseen at the back of the platform, or if not unseen, then at least ignored – a state her physical appearance usually encouraged. But Bondarev appeared, as usual, to be completely unfazed by her scars and patchwork skin, and treated her as he would any of his other personnel.
“Yes, Comrade General,” she said. “I have asked to receive…”
“You will get access to every last megabyte of data from our post-strike damage assessment, Chief Scientist,” he said. “After it has been collated and analyzed by my intelligence staff. Don’t worry.”
“Thank you,
General.” She was trying to keep the excitement out of her voice but knew it would be palpable to anyone who had spent any time with her, Bondarev being one of those. “General, this target, can I ask why?”
“Why the oil-producing nation of Russia is about to destroy Saudi Arabia’s, no, the world’s most important oil processing plant, accounting for more than seven percent of global capacity?” he asked rhetorically. “You are an intelligent woman, Grahkovsky. The implications must be obvious.”
“Not entirely, General,” she admitted. “I assume the purpose of the planned strike is to reduce Saudi refined fuel production capacity. But don’t they have reserves they could bring online to fill the gap? And couldn’t the other OPEC nations simply step up their own production?”
He nodded. “A fair question. In 2019 Iranian-backed Yemeni terrorists attacked Abqaiq with drones and missiles. They knocked the facility out for several months, and world oil prices barely fluttered because the Saudis opened up their sweet crude oil reserves and maintained a relatively constant supply. On the surface, things stayed calm, but below the surface, the Saudis and OPEC were sweating because the Saudis were sitting on only 200 days of sweet crude production, and the repairs to the facility took 180 days to complete. If the drone strike had been more effective, the Saudi crude reserve would have run dry and sent global prices through the roof.” He saw her eyes glitter in the darkness of the CIC as he spoke. “If Groza works as you have designed it to, it will not cause the sort of damage the Saudis can repair within a few months. It should ensure the Abqaiq facility can never be brought back online, ever again.”
There was a cough and Grahkovsky heard a new voice join the conversation; that of Bondarev’s superior, Popovkin. It seemed everyone wanted to have a part of this day. Success has many fathers, she thought to herself wryly. Failure will no doubt be a bitch called Grahkovsky. “Indeed, Bondarev,” Popovkin said. “And the Kingdom’s days of trying to dictate Russian oil prices will be numbered.”
Up in the cradle of the cherry picker, Sourav unbuckled his safety harness from the rail at the back of the cradle and attached it to the rail at the front, so that he could climb up on the lip of the cradle and reach over to take a sample of the sulfur bubbling from the cracked tower. If it was 110 degrees down on the ground, it was at least 120 degrees up here, twenty feet off the ground in the baking hot air – not to mention the radiant heat blasting at him from the polished metal of the tower itself. Any doubts he had about whether it was sulfur bubbling out of the crack had disappeared as he maneuvered the cherry picker cradle closer to the tower and got a whiff of the stinging odor of the gas given off as the liquid evaporated. Phew!
He had three sample jars to fill and, using a set of long-handled tongs, held the rubber lip of the first up against the tower under the crack and let the yellow liquid drip into it. There was always a chance that the crack would be admitting oxygen as well as releasing sulfur, and a buildup of combustible gas inside the tower could suddenly ignite, sending the tower up like a Roman candle, and Sourav with it. But his contract stated that any such risks were his problem, not his employer’s, and he was responsible for his decision to climb into a cherry picker and get up close and personal with a leaking distillation tower, so if he died doing so, it was his bad. He could always refuse, but then he’d be on the first plane back to India with his dreams of starting his own business in shreds in his carryon, so he tried not to think about little things like getting blown up. He’d just get his sample, get back down to the ground and get back inside to his nice cool lab.
As he looked up at the tower to make sure the sample jar was catching the distillate, he stared past it at the clear blue sky. A cloud would be nice, he thought briefly. Just one, to give a little shade.
“Target acquired,” Maqsud said into his headset. “Groza 5 in position, orbit is stable and weapons are tracking. Groza 12 in position, orbit is stable and weapons are tracking. Groza system locked and ready to fire.”
Please, no, Maqsud said inside his own head. He shot a glance over his shoulder. Someone back there, tell us this was all just a drill after all, and stand us down.
But his hope was snuffed out as Karas repeated in his headset, “Groza 5 and 12, targets acquired, prepared to engage. Fire order is full salvo. Weapons report…”
“Full salvo programmed,” the corporal in charge of the weapons team seated directly in front of Maqsud reported. “Groza 5 armed, spinning up. Groza 12 armed, spinning up.”
“Systems check…” Karas called out to the corporal of his third team.
“Five and twelve, hub green. Re-entry vehicle green. Tether lock green. No optical or electronic jamming detected. Systems go for release.”
Karas turned in his seat as he switched his microphone to the CIC loudspeakers and looked up at General Popovkin, who was standing beside Bondarev and Grahkovsky on the viewing platform with a telephone to his ear. “Targets acquired and all systems green. Requesting go for release, General Popovkin.” Karas looked nervous. Normally he’d be asking for permission to fire from his Lieutenant, not from the Commander of the 15th Aerospace Forces Army. It was a break from routine that caused Maqsud’s spirits to sink lower still.
Popovkin muttered into the telephone, then listened attentively before pulling the phone from his ear and holding it down by his side. “You are cleared to fire, Sergeant Karas.”
It was as though the Gods had heard him pray for shade, Sourav thought, adjusting his grip on the tongs. There! Straight up in the sky above the distillation tower, a small white cloud began to form in the air. Sourav frowned. He’d seen some weird atmospheric phenomena in the skies over the Gulf, from red sandstorms to the pale milky fog that appeared from nowhere and, in a matter of minutes, brought traffic to a standstill. But he’d never seen a cloud form in a clear blue sky.
As he watched, the cloud expanded and divided into two clouds, one beside the other. Sourav pulled his sample beaker away from the leaking sulfur and put a gloved hand against the tower to steady himself as he watched. From where Sourav stood, it looked as though the cloud was expanding slowly, and then began to spread tendrils of white smoke, like jet plane contrails, out over his head like an umbrella made of a thousand spokes. He smiled. It was probably one of those daytime fireworks displays marking some Royal birth, death or marriage. They were certainly quite spectacular. But they usually took place out to sea, not right over the top of the Abqaiq processing plant. Perhaps the shells had misfired?
Unlike the smoke from fireworks, which slowed down and then drifted away the closer they got to the ground, these contrails appeared to be accelerating, like missiles! He looked down and saw the workmen below scattering in panic, hands over their heads as they ran. But where were they running to? The distillation tower he was standing against was in the middle of the processing plant and the white contrails were rushing toward the ground from above and all around him. Whatever this was, there was nowhere to hide from it. In a panic himself, he dropped the tongs and sample jar and fell into the cradle of the cherry picker.
The forty tungsten-core warheads that dropped off the two Groza satellites weighed four tons each. As they got to about 80 miles above their target, the ablative shell of the Sarmat RS-28 re-entry vehicle began to burn away, and the engine and navigational systems inside were destroyed, their job done. By now, the warhead was already in the upper atmosphere, moving at a speed of Mach 10, its tungsten core held together only by the carbon belt around its segments. Then about 20 miles above the target this too burned away, releasing the tungsten segments in a pattern roughly equivalent to a two-mile by two-mile grid.
Abqaiq processing plant was concentrated in a one and a half mile by two-mile compound. Two thousand five hundred and sixty white-hot tungsten ‘pebbles’ slammed into the sandy earth, bitumen and steel of the processing plant and adjacent town over a two square mile area, shattering on impact and releasing millions of bullet-sized shards of tungsten and superheated iron plasma. Cowering in
the cradle of his cherry picker, fifty feet above the ground, Sourav heard a sound like thousands of hand grenades exploding, gas and oil burst from ruptured pipes and tanks and ignited, and moments later a ripple of sonic booms split the air. Sourav felt the cherry picker rock and sway. It tilted and felt like it was going over, so he grabbed frantically for a handhold, forgetting that he was still tied to the railing around the cradle with his safety belt. His scrabbling hand grabbed one of the control levers that angled the cradle to allow the workers inside a better view to lower equipment down to the ground. It wasn’t meant to rotate through more than ten degrees, but one of the flying tungsten shards had cut the control wire and the cab began to tilt, tipping Sourav toward an inferno of flaming gas and oil fifty feet below.
Still attached by his safety harness, he dropped and came to a jerking stop forty feet above the flames. Luckily for the screaming, roasting Sourav Thakur, the distillation tower beside him chose that moment to explode and end his agony.
Groza was not Russia’s first attempt at a space-based weapons system. Nearly a century earlier, at the height of the Cold War, the USSR deployed a missile called the R-36O, which was designed to orbit the earth from pole to pole and had the ability to fire a nuclear missile at any target on the planet at any time during its orbit. It was called the ‘Fractional Orbit Bombardment System,’ and because it wasn’t technically either a ballistic missile or a permanently deployed space-based weapon, it was deemed not to have violated any treaties and western powers tolerated it despite its terrifying potential. The program was eventually canceled by the USSR because normal intercontinental ballistic weapons were simpler and submarine-based weapons were easier to deploy in secret.
In the 1980s, the USSR also tested a system known as Polyus – a spacecraft designed to hunt and kill enemy satellites using a megawatt carbon dioxide laser. Due to technical failures, it was never deployed.