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

by FX Holden

  “I asked, did I not?”

  “It will be lower if you only target the northern bridge. That way, you will avoid the high rises and…”

  “Tomas.”

  “Between two and five thousand.”

  “My God,” Bondarev breathed. He ran his hand over his face. “It’s mass murder, Tomas. Is that who we have become?”

  Arsharvin stiffened. “And how many will die if our economy implodes, Yevgeny? If our health system falls apart, crime runs rampant, our infrastructure collapses, and our people freeze to death in their unheated apartments? Ten thousand, a hundred thousand? A million?” He fixed Bondarev with a fierce glare. “How many Russians?”

  Bondarev wasn’t buying it that easily. “What is the long game here, Tomas? We bump up the price of oil, save the treasury from going under this year, maybe next. And then what? Another ‘meteor’ strike? A new war? Do we encourage Iran to nuke Saudi Arabia perhaps? Or perhaps we should nuke Texas? That would do wonders for the price of oil.”

  “If you are drowning in quicksand, Yevgeny, your first and only concern is getting out of the mud. Once you are out, you can worry about where you can clean your clothes.”

  Bondarev looked across at the map again. “You have a way of always viewing questions of morality through a Russian lens, my friend.”

  “Is there any other?” Arshavin asked.

  “Not today,” Bondarev allowed. “Prepare the tasking. We will hit the compressor plant and the northern bridge. Be sure the footprint includes that dam.”

  Arsharvin stood. “It’s a good compromise, General. The local authorities will have so much on their hands dealing with the bridge collapse and the flooding, the destruction of the compressor plant will be an asterisk in their reports.”

  “Until those reports hit Beijing,” Bondarev said grimly. “And they realize the gas and oil from the Tarim Basin has stopped flowing.”

  “I will get onto it, General,” Arsharvin said. “Was there anything else?”

  “Yes, actually,” Bondarev told him. “It seems the Americans have taken exception to my advanced near-earth object detection system.”

  “I heard,” Arsharvin said. “I also heard your people gave them a resounding 30mm welcome when they tried to interfere.”

  “They’ll be back,” Bondarev said grimly. “And soon. I need to know what Minister Kelnikov and his cronies are planning to do next. I have been told by Popovkin to lift personnel levels and maintain real-time monitoring of all Groza platforms to ensure no further attacks get through, but I can’t believe Kelnikov will be satisfied with that. He’ll be planning something else to get the Americans off our backs, and I’d rather hear about it sooner than later.”

  Arsharvin winked. “I’ll ask discreet questions in indiscreet ears, General.”

  After fire, flood

  Korla, Xinjiang Province, China

  The Korla Gas Pipeline Compressor Station was built at the height of China’s 2020s infrastructure boom and was another example of why you should not tell Chinese engineers that something can’t be done. The specifications for the project called for four gas generators aerodynamically coupled with high-speed high-power gas turbines supplied by General Electric’s oil and gas business arm in Florence, Italy. The contract called for the station and downstream relay compressors – which would have to transport 17 billion cubic meters of gas a year across four provinces – to be started in 2016 and finished by 2019, which the Swedish engineering firm contracted to build the compressor stations advised was impossible. It took the contract anyway, but after one year was so far behind the build target that China terminated its contract and gave the job to the People’s Liberation Army Engineer Corps, which finished it over budget but ahead of schedule in 2018.

  Included in the contract with GE were 15 years of spare parts, which had seemed like a long time in 2018, but in 2033 the US imposed stringent sanctions against China following an ill-advised attempt to force the US out of its last naval base on Okinawa. By 2034, the precious stockpile of spare parts was running low, and though it had not been widely communicated, one of the four Korla turbines was already inoperative due to an inability to source or locally manufacture the needed turbine parts.

  Supervising Engineer Kezzhou Zhang had no idea how he was going to ensure Korla delivered on its carbon capture target, with a quarter of its energy generation capacity offline. China had banked on Korla for a not insignificant contribution to its commitments under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The gas-powered turbines that compressed the natural gas and pumped it eastwards generated massive volumes of superhot exhaust gases. These were captured and fed into heat recovery steam generators, which each put 25 MW of power into the Xinjiang grid and every year accounted for more than 200,000 tons of captured CO2, which went straight into China’s CO2 credit bank.

  Kezzhou knew it was just a matter of time before an angry official in the Ministry of Ecology and the Environment was on the line, asking him why Korla looked like it was going to come up 50,000 tons short this year.

  Kezzhou looked at his two-year-old son, out on the balcony of their small first-floor apartment, kicking a football back and forth inside three square yards of walled-in concrete lined with wilting plastic daisies. Ah hell, maybe getting fired from the Tarim Oilfield Company wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to him. His Han father had come to Korla sixty years ago as one of the jianshezhe, or ‘builders,’ fresh from engineering school with the mission to help civilize the wild deserts of Xinjiang. Kezzhou had been sent to Xinjiang University for his undergrad degree and then completed his master’s in mechanical engineering at the University of Glasgow, including a semester of applied engineering pulling Upper Jurassic oil from under the North Sea on the Beryl 5 oil rig.

  His Glasgow years were enshrined in legend, both in the master’s degree hanging in his office and in the photographs of Glasgow cityscapes hanging in his loungeroom. His wife told him he was crazy every time he talked about wanting to go back there to live and work, but maybe it was time to bring it up again. Jump, before he was pushed.

  He walked out on the balcony, absent-mindedly stealing the football from his son’s feet and teasing him by rolling it back and forth between his legs. The walled compound of the five-story managers’ accommodations held a pre-school and small playground, and he toyed with the idea of taking his son down there so he could boot the ball in earnest and burn some of his seemingly unlimited energy. Now, if he could just tap into that, maybe he could make up for the shortfall at Korla.

  It was the middle of the afternoon; his wife wouldn’t be home from his sister’s place until five. There was time. He looked up, checking the sky for rain.

  Something flashed. No, sparkled.

  He turned his head and stared into the empty gray sky.

  Not empty. Somewhere up there inside the high layer of clouds, he saw more sparkles, like small fireflies. It was impossible to say how high – either they were large and very high, or tiny and quite low. But then the sparkles started dropping down toward the ground, trailing white smoky contrails behind them.

  And they were moving fast.

  Instinct took hold of Kezzhou and he swept his son up in his arms and, without hesitating, ran for the door.

  By the time he hit the stairs down to the ground floor, the world outside his apartment was exploding!

  Maqsud Khan was sick to his stomach. Literally. Fifteen minutes earlier, he had been looking at Korla through the high-powered zoom lens of the targeting system on Groza 11.

  He’d dutifully picked up the target coordinates he’d been given, fed them into the quantum brain of the targeting AI, and then watched with pale dread as the globe on his tactical monitor had zoomed from a simulated orbital view of Groza 11 moving serenely through space 900 miles above the deserts of western China, to a zoomed real-time view of the city of Korla in Xinjiang province.

  As ordered, he had centered the crosshairs of the Groza sights on the
Kongque River dam that sat almost perfectly framed by the two four-lane bridges that crossed the river north and south of the dam. It was about 3 p.m. in Korla, 12 noon in Baikonur. Maqsud saw cars, trucks and motorcycles moving in a steady flow across the bridges.

  The mission planners for the Korla strike had determined that bringing the bridges and the dam down with any certainty would require a full payload release – 1,440 125 lb. missiles in total. But the two bridges were only a mile apart, with the dam squeezed nicely into the center of the strike zone, so a two-mile by two-mile footprint should ensure complete destruction of both the bridges and the dam, they had said confidently.

  Maqsud knew they had no reason for such confidence since the Groza had only been tested against steel and iron bridges, not braced concrete like the ones he was looking at on his screen. And yes, if they fell into the river, the surge of water and debris combined with the explosive pelting of the dam’s retaining wall should be enough to breach it, but that was not certain either.

  Later, Maqsud would claim that he had deviated from the assigned mission parameters in order to maximize the impact of the strike in a smaller strike zone, and increase the destructive power of the attack. In reality, he pulled the strike zone in from two by two miles to one mile by two miles because it sickened him that under the planned footprint of the attack lay a densely populated conurbation, where he could see people walking, shopping, and cycling as though it was any other Sunday.

  Pulling his eyes away from the screen, he pulled up the primary target – the Korla Compressor Station. This one gave him fewer moral qualms. It was in the southwest of Korla, situated in the middle of what looked like artificially irrigated rice fields and beside an empty football stadium. Confident that it would add its own explosive energy to the attack, only four of the eight warheads on Groza 7 had been allocated to the strike on the compressor plant, a mere 700 or so missiles. The plant was festooned with high-pressure gas pipelines, and the turbines which were the key targets were housed in two large airplane hangar-style buildings with concrete foundations but only steel upper structures which the missiles would pierce like flaming javelins through tissue paper.

  As he laid Groza 7’s crosshairs between the two turbine halls, he marveled at how destroying an industrial facility with a few hundred workers now suddenly seemed the lesser evil.

  “Groza 7 locked on primary and tracking,” Maqsud said into his headset. “Groza 11 locked on secondary and tracking. All targeting systems nominal. Weapons, you are clear to fire.”

  A verse from the holy Koran came to him and he started repeating it under his breath. Oh my Lord, forgive me, for I have wronged my soul.

  Maqsud’s decision to compress the strike zone for Groza 11 meant fewer than twenty missiles struck Kezzhou Zhang’s housing complex.

  But each struck at Mach 10, with the power of 11.5 tons of TNT, releasing superheated plasma which instantly vaporized the atmosphere around it and set fire to everything it touched.

  The sound of the missile that struck Kezzhou’s building was like a bomb going off, but the noise of the blast was nothing compared to the sonic boom and pressure wave that followed. As he staggered out the front doors of the building, the missile slammed through the fifth-floor roof, barely slowing as it speared through four stories of steel, wood, concrete and tile until it buried itself in the building’s foundations and shattered.

  The ground shook like a small earthquake had hit and Kezzhou stumbled, falling to one knee, his son clutched against his chest as he pulled himself in against the wall of the building. Other missiles were striking the ground further away, toward the highway, so Kezzhou lurched in the opposite direction, away from his now burning apartment block and toward the safety of the open ground by the riverbank.

  Maqsud wasn’t interested in the strike on the compressor plant. Comprising industrial-sized liquified natural gas tanks, high-pressure pipelines and steam generators, its doom was assured. No, Maqsud was watching the feed from Groza 11’s high-powered zoom camera as fire rained down on the bridges over the Kongque River.

  His instruments showed a two-knot westerly breeze over the target area, which the Sarmat re-entry vehicle would have compensated for during its descent, but it wasn’t enough to blow away the smoke from the meteor contrails until several agonizing minutes after the strike. Maqsud leaned forward to squint at his screen, even though the same image was being broadcast onto the huge wall screen at the Groza Baikonur control center. It was as though the smaller image made the scale of the destruction he saw somehow less horrifying.

  The northernmost bridge was down. The entire span across the river had dropped, and concrete, bitumen, smashed cars and flattened trucks lay strewn across the river from bank to bank. White foam surged around them. The reason for that was clear as Maqsud’s eye tracked further down the image to see … nothing. The dam was completely gone. Raging water flowed over the kink in the river where it had been built as the river slammed unchecked into the southernmost bridge, which was still defiantly standing. Traffic on the bridge had pulled up, several cars or trucks were burning, and Maqsud could see people milling around them.

  South of that bridge, water was welling up onto manicured parks and walkways in a brown, foaming morass and Maqsud saw with despair that he might have saved most of the high-rise district from meteoric fire, but he had done nothing to save it from the flooding water.

  “Papa, look!” Kezzhou’s son called.

  Kezzhou had been standing with his back to the river, his son clutched to his chest, looking back up the riverbank at their burning apartment. All he could think of was his wife. Thank heavens she was at Biyu’s house in the western outskirts of Korla. He had no idea what the hell had happened, but buildings were burning all over their compound, and he heard sirens and car horns blaring all through the city to the north.

  People from the compound either stood around, shocked like him, or lay on the ground. A woman in front of him was crying, holding her hand out toward the burning building in supplication as if her tears could will those trapped inside it back to life.

  He’d been reaching for the cell phone in his pocket with one hand while holding the other under his son’s legs as he gripped his father tight around the neck.

  “Papa!” the boy called, panic in his voice.

  Kezzhou spun around to see a wall of rising water carrying a fifty-yard-long section of boardwalk come rushing toward him. He pulled his son’s head into his shoulder and closed his eyes as the water hit and carried them away.

  Perhaps curiously, at that moment, Yevgeny Bondarev was not following the progress of the Korla strike in a command and communication center at Titov Space Center. He had seen the Groza system perform both in trials and against Abqaiq. He had handpicked the officers serving on the program, including the hapless Captain Kozytsin, whose only real flaw was that he was a little too quick to blame subordinates for his own failings. Luckily for him, these were rare. So Bondarev had little doubt the strike would go to plan and the Korla compressor plant would be leveled.

  No, Bondarev had his mind on a much more interesting problem. Roberta D’Antonia.

  Ah, signora, signora. Bondarev shook his head at the report that had just ticked into the inbox on his tablet. You do disappoint me.

  Without telling him why, Bondarev had asked Arsharvin to alert him if the GRU picked up any intelligence regarding a civilian or military emergency in Nebraska. A civil alert, evacuation, police or National Guard activations – anything of the sort. News service alerts he would pick up eventually, but he was particularly interested to see if he had been right to suspect the intriguing Roberta D’Antonia. He had started from a position of distrust, he had to admit. An Italian? As principal advisor to the Energy Minister? He’d had his own people review the State Security Service vetting file, and had to admit, she looked clean. Not too clean – she had money put away in a complex network of offshore accounts – but that could just be prudence, given the high six-figure
US dollar salary she was pulling in. But having met her, she had seemed just a little too interested in Groza, just a little too eager for a level of detail that she really shouldn’t have needed if she was just interested in avoiding her Minister being blindsided.

  So yes, he had set up a little test.

  And looking at the report on his screen, she had failed it.

  Arsharvin had sent through a report from a GRU source in the Nebraska National Guard, indicating they had been called out to the Cooper Nuclear Power Plant to provide added security while it was evacuated. It was being called a routine security training exercise. All but a skeleton operating staff had been ordered out of the facility and a large contingent of fire and emergency first responder units had been moved in. There had been no release of information to local media. The GRU source said there was little information being released regarding the reason behind the mobilization, but everyone was talking about a potential terrorist threat.

  A simple enough cover story, Bondarev mused. But it was confirmation to him that Signora Roberta D’Antonia served more than one master. He had no idea whether it was the Americans, the Italians, or even the Saudis. That didn’t really matter. What it had shown him was that she could get information to the highest levels of the US intelligence apparatus and that they took it seriously enough to act on it, with alacrity. As an agent, she must be rated very highly by whoever was running her.

  Bondarev closed his tablet, leaned back in his chair, and looked up at the ceiling.

  He would have to handle this very carefully. Yes, she was a foreigner, but she was Denis Lapikov’s new pet foreigner. It would not help already strained relations between the Defense Minister, Kelnikov, and Energy Minister Lapikov if one of Kelnikov’s generals was seen to have blown the whistle on her and had her arrested by the Federal Security Service.