Orbital: This is the Future of War (Future War Book 3)

by FX Holden

  With Russian fighter aircraft protecting the skies overhead, a nuclear shield to deter any invasion, and with Saudi Arabia facing crippling economic challenges, Iran had decided it was an opportune time to turn the screws.

  It was about to learn an age-old lesson in cause and effect.

  Alakeel’s flight of six F-35 Lightning IIs had been ordered to take off from Medina in the west of Saudi Arabia after taking on fuel and ordnance, and proceed to a point in international airspace over the Red Sea southwest of Yanbu, where they would engage the Iranian frigate Sahand. The Sahand was a long way from home, but patrolling in the company of two new Khalije Fars guided-missile destroyers and the light replenishment ship Bushehr. Russian air cover, of unknown strength, was expected.

  He had made many ‘observations’ about his orders. The first, that a mission such as this would ideally utilize at least a full squadron strength attack, with a six to eight fighter element covering two to four ground attack configured Lightnings. The second, that with the frigate sailing under the protection of two guided-missile destroyers, a conventional air-sea missile strike with standoff cruise missiles was unlikely to penetrate the destroyer and fighter screen. The third, that a stealth attack would be difficult, even in the F-35, if Russian 5th-gen aircraft were providing cover, as they were no doubt networked with low-frequency ground-based radar in Egypt designed specifically to detect the F-35. The fourth, as a result of all this, was that the destruction of the Sahand in a traditional engagement was highly unlikely if that was the objective.

  He had been told to plan his mission around the resources allocated. Which told him his mission was a roll of the dice, intended more to send a signal to Iran than to actually inconvenience them. Or perhaps, if he or his pilots were killed or injured, to provide a pretext for escalation. But Alakeel never approached a mission planning for it to fail. In planning the attack on the Sahand, he had done his utmost to ensure it would succeed.

  Amir Alakeel had a two-year-old daughter he wanted to watch grow into a fine young woman. With the changes he had seen in his own lifetime, he even imagined that one day, she might be a pilot too. He planned to be around to see that happen.

  He had eschewed the proposed loadout of twin AGM-154C standoff weapons for his two ground attack configured aircraft. These were essentially glide-bombs, which would have to be dropped from altitude, at medium range. Alakeel knew that with the amount of warning the Iranians might have regarding the approach of the attacking Lightnings, the likelihood of these weapons getting through was minimal. He seriously considered, but finally also rejected the option to go with four smaller Norwegian Naval Strike Missiles. They were sea-skimming weapons, newly adapted for air to ground operations, able to make random maneuvers in the terminal phase to throw off enemy close-in weapons systems. But they flew at only 600 mph and again, Alakeel was worried they were too few to overwhelm the Iranian defenses.

  Instead, he had loaded his two ground attack Lightnings with Indian-made ‘ALFA-S’ attack drones. Each F-35 could carry 15 of the small electrically powered hundred mile an hour dart-shaped drones.

  The ALFA-S drone swarm had made an impression on Alakeel. He’d seen it deployed in an attack against a dummy tank formation with devastating effect. The swarm had surrounded the tank formation and then attacked it from every side, detonating overhead and sending depleted uranium ‘slugs’ through the weak top armor of the vehicles, shredding them from above. But would a slow-moving swarm work against modern warships fitted with radar-guided Russian AK-630M Kamand 30mm rotary cannons? Both the Sahand and its destroyer escorts featured one of the Kamand close-in weapons mounted on each beam, for six in total. They could track multiple targets, destroying each sequentially, which was why Alakeel was convinced an attack with just two to four missiles would fail.

  But an attack by thirty drones? And what if that attack was timed to coincide with the launch of a wave of Homing Anti Radar (HARM) missiles, which the Iranian defenses could not ignore?

  It was a gamble, but he had persuaded his Colonel to take it, and now it was up to him to prove it could work.

  He checked his instruments one last time. They were a hundred and fifty miles out and closing on the Iranian frigate. The skies were full of military and civilian radar energy, but there was no indication his flight had been detected. He craned his neck and checked the skies around him with his mark one eyeballs. He had already learned once that a lack of radar warnings did not mean he was safe.

  He satisfied himself the skies were clear. “Haya flight, Haya One,” he said. “Section one, begin ingress, sections two and three on me line abreast. Arm your HARM missiles.”

  Each of his four escort aircraft was armed with a mixed payload of two Homing Anti-Radar Missiles and four medium-range Sidewinder air to air missiles. He would love to have been able to field the newer CUDA all-aspect missiles the US F-35s were equipped with, but they had not yet been released for export.

  Saudi Arabia had been preparing for this war for decades. Year on year since the early 2010s, it had been the largest arms importer in the world. It had purchased hundreds of helicopters, nearly 200 main battle tanks, a thousand armored personnel carriers, and over 20,000 guided missiles. Its navy had purchased five missile frigates from Spain, and its army, short-range ballistic missiles from the Ukraine. With the purchase of 70 UK Typhoon attack aircraft, 20 Advanced F-15SA Strike Fighters, five SAAB 2000 Early Warning and Control aircraft and 35 F-35 Lightning IIs, it now had an air force to rival Israel, the formerly dominant airpower in the region. Though it had only the fifth largest standing army, technologically it had the second most powerful ground force behind Israel, though it had yet to convert that superiority to battlefield victories in the many proxy wars it had been fighting in the last 20 years, not least in Yemen.

  His aircraft, and those of his wingmen, were armed with the extended range AGM-88G Block 4 anti-radar missile. They were already tracking their targets, pulling data from a Saudi SAAB 2000 Early Warning and Control aircraft circling inside Saudi airspace behind the port of Yanbu.

  “Haya Two beginning ingress,” his drone attack flight leader confirmed. The two-plane element dropped away, headed for the sea. They still had a hundred miles to run before they released their payload.

  The HARM missiles’ targets were the radar systems on the two destroyers escorting the Sahand, plus that on the Sahand itself. Mission planners had given the ‘wild weasel’ radar suppression attack a 13 percent chance of successfully knocking out the radar systems on even one of the Iranian ships. Alakeel’s strategy for dealing with the Sahand did not rely on them succeeding.

  He looked at his helmet-mounted display to confirm that all four aircraft in his flight had locked up the targets they’d been assigned by the SAAB 2000 operations controller.

  As his machines closed to within a hundred miles of the Iranian ships, he paged the SAAB. “Haya Control, Haya One. We are approaching attack point alpha.”

  “Haya Control, Haya One. You are cleared to engage,” the controller replied.

  Without needing an order, his four aircraft increased their separation and spread out into a line abreast formation. At ten thousand feet, 650 miles an hour, they approached the attack point – an invisible line in the sky marked on Alakeel’s tac display with a dotted line. As he crossed the line, he checked his weapon was armed, reached for the missile trigger and opened his mike. “Haya flight, HARMs away.”

  His weapons bay doors swung open and two of the 700 lb. missiles dropped into his slipstream and ignited their solid fuel ramjet engines before streaking away toward the horizon at nearly 1,500 miles per hour. They had about five minutes to run.

  “Haya Two, Haya Three missiles away and tracking, Haya flights two and three returning to base. Happy hunting, Haya One,” he said. He would like to have taken his aircraft all the way to the target, both to see the results of his attack and to mix it up with the Russian fighters he knew had to be there. But that was not the nature of
modern war in the air. Hit, and run – that was the name of the game.

  If you did it right, you would never even set eyes on the enemy you had killed.

  Uncomfortable encounters

  RAF Lossiemouth, Scotland

  “And what in the bleedin’ heck are you?” Meany asked himself, his eyes glued to the multifunctional display on the panel in front of his flight controls.

  Target on optical lock, eleven point five miles, closing at two knots relative, Angus said.

  “Twenty times zoom, Angus,” Meany said. The tasking sent from UK GCHQ for the RAF Skylon unit had been routine, and at the same time, frightening. What was routine was that it was a photo reconnaissance mission where the target was another country’s military satellite. Meany and the other Skylon pilots had conducted about fifty such missions, and they were usually dead boring unless you were the kind of signals intelligence nerd who completely geeked out at closeup images of antennae and solar panels. Meany understood the value of the photographs – the type of antennae could tell GCHQ what frequency and wavelength the satellite used, serial numbers could identify the exact model of the transmission equipment, and knowing that, algorithms could be developed to intercept or jam it. The size and type of the solar and thermal panels told the boffins exactly how much juice the satellite was pulling, which could also give them vital clues to its inner workings and purpose.

  But it wasn’t exactly fighter combat. So Meany had welcomed the single line in the briefing from GCHQ about ‘operational safety.’ The one thing that had made this mission just a little interesting. “The target is believed to be a space to ground weapon and may have space to space defensive capabilities.” He’d asked the intel officer, a warrant officer called Aston who had served in the Middle East like him – and knew what his pilots needed to know, and what they didn’t – what the hell space to space weapon capabilities the Russians might have.

  “Blinding lasers,” Aston had said. “Radar and infrared jamming. Physical decoys. Ballistic weapons. Mini-railguns … basically, anything you can put on a ship or an aircraft, they can mount on a satellite of this size. But to our knowledge, they haven’t. Automated systems are too dangerous to other space objects, including their own, and remotely directed weapons systems are too resource-intensive to crew around the clock when there is no threat.”

  “To our knowledge…” Meany repeated drily. “You could be sending us up against some new Russian Death Star.”

  “The intel on this comes from the Yanks,” the warrant officer told him. He was a roly-poly man, with a habit he’d picked up during a posting to the US of chewing tobacco plugs, and spitting into a handkerchief when annoyed. “And they’ve said nothing about defensive weapons.”

  “Then why…” Meany asked him, “… don’t the bloody Yanks go on a Russian Death Star photo safari with their own bloody spacecraft?”

  “They probably will,” he said. “But do they share every little thing with us in a timely fashion? Do they tell us what they’re going to do before they’ve gone and done it? No, they do not,” he said, and spat. “Hence, we shall take our own photographs of this beasty.”

  Paddington had contrived to be inside his trailer as Meany and Angus closed on the Russian satellite. It was one of several, his commanding officer had told him. This one was on an orbit that took it south to north over the west coast of Africa and Europe, over the UK to the north pole, down over the Pacific Ocean and back up again. He wasn’t surprised, therefore, that the UK signals intelligence agency had taken a sudden and rather particular interest in the satellite if their US counterparts had told them it was weaponized.

  Loaded with a recon pod in the payload bay, it had taken the Skylon flight crews nearly 18 hours from takeoff at Lossiemouth to get in position for the intercept. As their lead pilot, Meany was supposed to be resting for most of that time so that he was fresh when he jumped into the cockpit with Angus. But Meany trusted Angus to be fresh and had spent as much time as he could in the simulator, programming evasive maneuvers. His sensor suite should be able to pick up everything from a laser flare to the flash of small cannon firing, but he knew his own reaction time would be too slow in almost any engagement scenario. It would be Angus who picked up the attack and reacted to it, and he wanted to be sure the AI was ready to respond to every damn possibility.

  The odds were stacked against them, though. If the Russian satellite was armed with a laser weapon, the bolt would be traveling at light speed and Angus would have no time between the flare of the laser burst and it hitting the spacecraft in which to react. It would take a megawatt laser to cut through his heat tiles, though. If the weapon was a railgun shooting a kinetic projectile, there would be no telltale flash, no warning at all unless the projectile was big enough to be picked up on the Skylon’s own radar. Luckily both of these weapons required significant power to trigger, so a thermal signature might be detected before they were used. A 20 or 30mm cannon would give off no thermal warning before its first shot but might give off a warning flash. The tiny slugs from a 20mm cannon would almost certainly be undetectable until they started chewing at the skin of his Skylon, but that skin was hardened, and photosensitive, and might pick up the heat of a targeting laser if the Russian system was using one.

  The permutations and probabilities made his head spin, but that’s why he had Angus. He could program the threats and responses at leisure, and leave Angus to choose between them in the heat of combat.

  As he looked at the zoomed image of the approaching Russian satellite, he had a horrible feeling the time he had spent that afternoon on programming and reprogramming the AI’s defensive routines might just have been needed.

  “Hold position,” Meany called.

  Holding. Distance ten point eight miles. Relative velocity zero.

  Meany panned around the image of the satellite. “Do you see that, sir?” he asked Paddington. “Earthside, four o’clock low.” Meany double-clicked on his screen with his mousepad and brought the lower quarter of the Russian satellite into focus.

  It was like no satellite Meany had ever seen. It looked like the cylinder of a loaded revolver. Sitting on top of the cylinder was a dome about thirty feet in diameter that looked like it housed thrust vectors, probably electronics too. Standard latticed solar panels extended from the dome and, judging by their design, the latticed wings doubled as thermal radiators. Around the hub were objects that had to be missiles. He counted twenty. It must have been similar in size to a module on a space station. Though it floated weightlessly in space, the thing looked like it must weigh a hundred tons.

  Even just looking at it, it scared the living daylights out of him.

  What had caught his attention, though, was a tube-like protrusion from one side of the dome on top of the cylinder that appeared to be … pointed right bloody at them.

  “Angus,” he said, as calmly as he could. “Analyze the current image. Match with known Russian weapon types. Report.”

  A fraught second passed before the calm Scottish brogue of the AI responded. Image analyzed. Possible match: Gryazev-Shipunov GSh-30-1 30mm autocannon.

  “I can’t use ‘possible,’ Angus. How certain are you?”

  The full body of the possible weapon is obscured by the housing. Only the barrel is observable. I am 100 percent certain, however, the barrel is that of a Gryazev-Shipunov GSh-30-1 autocannon.

  “Any indication of a targeting laser or radar, Angus?”

  No, sir. I am detecting no photovoltaic energy or radio emissions from the target.

  “Then how, Angus, does it happen to be pointing that bloody blunderbuss straight at us?”

  Please repeat your request, sir.

  “Move your ship a few dozen yards laterally, Flight Lieutenant,” Paddington said quietly. “See if it really is tracking you.”

  “Yes, sir. Angus, two seventy degrees thrust, five knots, hold fifty yards from current position.”

  Confirming. Two seventy degrees thrust, five knots, hold a
t fifty yards from current position.

  “Correct, execute.”

  The image on the screen shuddered as the small vectoring jets on the Skylon fired and shoved it slowly sideways, its nose and sensors still pointing at the Russian satellite.

  As it did so, the barrel of the satellite autocannon swiveled to follow it.

  “Oh, shit,” Meany said. “Excuse the French, sir. No radar radiation. It’s using infrared or optical targeting.”

  “It’s probably automated,” Paddington said, though he didn’t sound confident to Meany. “A close-in weapons system like ours, in case of space debris. That cannon has a range of about one mile. If we don’t approach any closer than that, we’ll be safe enough.”

  At that moment, the RAF Skylon was anything but ‘safe.’ Russia had not put its hundred million dollar killer satellites into orbit without the means to protect themselves. The defensive system on the Groza was automated, but it was based on the same Atoll electro-optical infrared search and track targeting system deployed in its latest stealth fighter aircraft. The infrared sensors in the turrets mounted beside the Groza’s 30mm cannons could detect moving objects at close range, or pick up the reflected heat of sunlight on metal surfaces at long range. They had detected the approaching Skylon at about thirty miles distant, and locked onto it as Meany had maneuvered, his vectoring thrusters lighting up the Skylon like a Christmas tree. The system was designed to photograph and identify any approaching space objects, and to engage them at a range of ten miles if they appeared to be on a collision course. The designers had not anticipated being attacked by enemy spacecraft, but the system would at least offer some low-level protection against hostiles of that nature as well.