by FX Holden
Minhao muted and appeared to confer with someone off-camera and then looked back at Fenner. “I can assure you, the data you provided is being acted upon, Mr. President.”
“I am pleased to hear that. But our situation since the attack on the Cape requires not only that we act, but that I am seen to be acting.”
Minhao leaned in to the camera. “Mister President, I am aware some members of your Congress are calling for nuclear retaliation against Russia. We have also seen that Russia denies any and all responsibility for the act and maintains that it was an unfortunate natural event. For obvious reasons, we do not believe them, but we would caution in the strongest terms against resort to the use of nuclear arms.”
Fenner noted Minhao’s carefully emphasized use of the word ‘we,’ and took it to mean that he was also speaking for Xi Ping in this matter. It was good to know.
“Premier, as you know, we have called an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council for later today. At that session, we will be laying out the compelling evidence we have assembled, which proves Russia has placed a kinetic bombardment weapons system in space and that it was behind the attacks on both Abqaiq and Cape Canaveral.”
“I see.”
“Premier, would you be comfortable with us disclosing that Korla was similarly attacked?” Fenner asked, getting down to business.
Minhao did not hesitate or confer with his aides this time. “That would not be … desirable … at this time, Mr. President. We have no plan for public confirmation of the event you refer to.”
“Very well. Can I ask you, if we call for punitive international economic sanctions against Russia in the Security Council, will you support us? I should point out the leaders of the UK and France have indicated their support already.”
Now Minhao hesitated before replying. “We would consider supporting such a resolution,” he said.
“Thank you, Premier,” Fenner said, knowing he could not expect a more definitive answer in the circumstances. “And finally, if the USA takes military action against Russia, limited to eliminating its ability to carry out offensive operations in and from space, can I have your commitment that you will neither condemn these actions publicly nor will you oppose them militarily?”
Minhao’s face was impassive, but his next words were delivered with passion. “We would be concerned, Mr. President, that any military conflict between the USA and Russia had the potential to escalate undesirably,” Minhao said. “Publicly, we would counsel both sides to find a peaceful resolution to the current situation.” He leaned forward. “Privately, as you know, we are willing to continue our cooperation in regard to the already agreed joint operations, and would not attempt to interfere in a proportionate non-nuclear response to the attack in Florida, limited to the domain of space and, naturally, not prejudicial to Chinese interests in any way.”
Fenner read the written translation of Minhao’s words on the screen in front of him to be sure he had heard correctly. There were a lot of very deliberate clauses in the Chinese Premier’s words – ‘already agreed,’ ‘proportionate,’ ‘non-nuclear,’ ‘limited to space’ – but they were all conditions he could live with considering the state of relations between China and the USA. “I think your position is clear, Premier. I hope you will support our Security Council resolution later today and please, let us keep this line open in coming weeks. You may call me at any time on any issue, not just this one.”
“Thank you, Mr. President, the offer is mutual,” Minhao said. “Goodbye.”
Fenner watched the screen go black and sighed. He needed a minute to think before walking back out of the telepresence room into the maelstrom of activity that was the White House. He did not realistically expect China to support their resolution in the Security Council, but if they would at least abstain, the US would proceed with sanctions. And none of the conditions suggested by the Chinese Premier would prevent him from taking the actions currently proposed by his Defense Secretary and National Security Advisor.
He took a sip of cold coffee from the mug in front of him and stood. He had an address to the nation to review. One that could set them on a course to all-out war with Russia.
As he turned, the door to the telepresence room opened and his Chief of Staff, Dave Moore, stepped in, closing it behind him. “Mr. President, I suggest you sit down again. The Russian President, Avramenko, is waiting to talk with you.”
Fenner flushed. “Unless he plans to take full responsibility for the attack on the Cape yesterday, he and I have nothing to say to each other.”
Moore was a former US Air Force Major-General and not given to political doubletalk. “Our information is that he will admit privately to you that Russia has put a kinetic weapons system in space, but that he will claim the attack on the Cape was an act of cyberterrorism, and not officially sanctioned by his government or its military.”
“Cyberterrorism? Someone hijacked their satellite?”
“That’s their story, sir.”
Fenner put his coffee mug back on the table with care. A very deliberate act since what he felt like doing was throwing it against the wall. “Firstly, Dave, it’s nice of him to admit privately what we already know to be true. Secondly, I neither believe, nor care, whether the attack on the Cape was sanctioned or unsanctioned. That claim, even if true, would change nothing.” Fenner nodded at the door. “You can tell President Avramenko to go…”
“How about I just tell him you’re not inclined to take his call, Mr. President,” Moore interrupted.
The Groza attack on the Cape two days earlier had been brutally effective and, Rodriguez had to admit, had exposed how vulnerable US Space Force’s infrastructure was to asymmetrical enemy action, due to its reliance on US continental launch facilities side by side in Florida. If Kennedy had been hit as hard as the Cape, the US would have lost most of its East Coast heavy-lift launch capacity for a considerable period of time, leaving it only with the limited facilities available at Vandenberg. Not to mention the additional thousands of personnel years and expertise it would have lost too.
Her staff had, of course, wargamed a similar threat (assuming a terrorist incident, though) and had a solution of sorts. Right now, the X-37C that was being prepped for loading aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy out of Florida (and that luckily had not been moved to the Cape yet) was on its way to Vandenberg where Rodriguez had been assigned a priority Delta IV Heavy launch slot.
The RAF’s Skylon had been left critically low on fuel after its race to catch the Groza over Florida, with no chance of making it back to Lossiemouth. Despite looking at an option for refueling in space – an operation not previously attempted – RAF engineers instead chose the least bad option, deorbiting the Skylon and landing it successfully on the three-mile-long runway at Hamad International Airport in Qatar. A company of Royal Marines was there to meet it, just in case any nearby Sheikh got it in their head it might make a nice addition to their fleet of executive jets.
That said, Rodriguez had been impressed by what she had seen of the Skylon in action, she had to admit. Which was why she had written a memo to 45th Wing’s Brigadier General Parsons requesting urgent consideration of a proposal to purchase a Skylon Spacecraft military variant from the UK, for testing purposes. There were precedents for the US purchasing UK military equipment, the best known being the UK-made Harrier jump jets used by the US Marine Corps for decades. But she knew it would be an uphill fight.
That was a battle for another day.
Today, the war in space was about to go from cold to hot, and she was deeply chagrined that her 615th Combat Operations Squadron was to have no part in it.
Well, almost no part.
In addition to the Royal Marines there had been another reception committee waiting for the Skylon in Qatar. They were from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and in their Lockheed C5 Galaxy they carried all the fuel and equipment needed to get the Skylon airborne again.
Plus a very special, and very
secret, cargo for its payload bay.
“Captain, your role in this mission is as weapons officer, is that clear?” ‘Paddington’ Bear was explaining, slowly and carefully, to a rather indifferent Bunny O’Hare.
“It was explained to me more as a multirole kind of thing, Colonel,” O’Hare argued. “Which is why I was advising Flight Lieutenant Meany here to…”
Payload deployed, systems check complete, ready to hand over control, Angus intoned, interrupting the heated debate inside the Skylon’s virtual cockpit. Bear wasn’t present in person – the only two officers in the cabin were Meany and O’Hare – but he had joined via intercom when the altercation between the Space Force and RAF officers had become rather … vigorous.
“We are two hundred miles laterally and fifty miles vertically from the threat you are describing, Captain,” Meany said, with patently false patience. “Also, we are in geostationary orbit, therefore unlikely to accidentally fly into a cloud of space debris of any sort, until we move from this position.”
“OK, it’s your spacecraft,” O’Hare said ominously. “But as soon as I drop the boom, all hell is going to break loose up there and you might wish you had a little more room to maneuver, is all I’m saying.” She was not in a great mood, having spent seven of the last 24 hours on a cramped and uncomfortable flight from Orlando to Lossiemouth in Scotland, and having slept only two of those.
The ‘boom,’ as O’Hare called it, was a Kinetic Energy Projectile (KEP) and it did not exist. At least, not on any public list of DARPA balance sheets. It was the offspring of a project that had been running in the early 2020s, in which DARPA had trial-fired a ‘tungsten-rich’ core inside a carbon-epoxy aeroshell to ensure it could withstand the Mach 5 plus velocities that it would need to sustain if fired either by a rail gun or dropped from orbit. It had proven that it could.
The program had been revived by DARPA five years earlier when the US got its first inkling that Russia was serious about deploying a kinetic bombardment weapon in space. Unlike the Russian ‘area effect’ weapon, Groza, DARPA had been directed to develop a precision-guided weapon, which it had done by fitting the KEP with the guidance system from a Trident D5 sub-launched ballistic missile re-entry vehicle. As the US had no orbital platform big enough from which to launch the KEP, it had only been test-fired from Virgin Galactic’s White Knight 2 carrier aircraft, from an altitude of 71,000 feet. That test had, however, been successful, with the guidance system functioning flawlessly.
O’Hare’s demeanor could be put down to two things. The first was that while she was one hundred percent certain the DARPA warhead would hit the ground somewhere (gravity would see to that), she was not at all certain the guidance system would survive the shock of atmospheric re-entry, even if it did use the same well-proven technology as an ICBM re-entry vehicle. So she wasn’t one hundred percent sure it would hit its target.
The second thing impacting her mood was the knowledge that her strike was to be the signal for both a Presidential address and a major ground to space anti-satellite operation launched by multiple US Air Force and Navy units across the globe. As she sat and bickered with Meany, no fewer than six US Aegis guided missile cruisers on patrol in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans were preparing to fire SM-3 Block III anti-ballistic missiles at identified Groza satellites. In coordination with China, another six Grozas had been targeted for destruction by the Chinese Parasite anti-satellite system, though of course they still would not reveal details of the Parasite system. O’Hare knew from the intel she had seen that the Chinese could have been left to take out all eight orbiting Groza satellites, but a US assault on Russia’s satellite network by sea-launched anti-satellite missiles of a scale almost unimaginable to O’Hare was about to begin, and the US President clearly wanted it to be seen and heeded by all.
“Thank you, Angus,” O’Hare said, dropping her beef. She checked the instrument readouts on the KEP. “Shell integrity confirmed, propulsion system online, target locked and inertial navigation system online…” She hit a key combination on her keyboard. “Launch in T minus three minutes and … counting.”
She looked over at Meany, crouched in his exoskeleton in front of the Skylon control systems, hand on stick and throttle. “You’ve got this, Flight Lieutenant,” she said, by way of apology. “Anyone who can outfly a Shakti kill vehicle and take down two Grozas in orbit can handle whatever happens next, no worries.”
“Thanks, ma’am,” the RAF pilot said. “Permission to assume you’re being sincere?”
“Granted,” O’Hare said. “Angus, give me an external view on the KEP, will you, and get ready to count us down?” Even though it wasn’t necessary, she wanted to watch the launch of the US weapon, especially as it may be the first and only time the weapon was ever deployed.
View from Skylon to KEP re-entry vehicle onscreen, Captain, Angus said, bringing it up on the main panoramic visual display in front of both her and Meany.
It was not a very impressive sight, O’Hare reflected as she looked at the weapon. The 20 cubic feet of tungsten encased in an ablation-shielded ceramic tile sheath weighed only 24,000 lbs., and in the wide-angle camera view the deltoid-shaped missile looked impossibly small against the vast expanse of the earth below.
Did she spare a thought for the men and women who lay under the crosshairs of the target she had just designated? Yeah, she did. But they had seen what had happened in Abqaiq, and Korla, and Florida; they had put on the uniform of the Russian armed forces that morning, and they had known what that could mean.
O’Hare looked at Meany one last time, got his nod, and checked her targeting data. “Angus, you are go for launch.”
Launch in five, four, three, two … KEP away, Angus said.
The warhead had been lifted out of the Skylon’s payload bay and pushed out into orbit by the same robot arm Meany used to ‘drag and bag’ errant satellites. It was as low-tech a delivery system as any that had been discussed, but the operations window hadn’t allowed for anything more sophisticated. And in the end, it wasn’t needed.
Without any fanfare, the vectoring thrusters on the re-entry vehicle fired, putting it on a trajectory that would end with it slamming into its ground target in about fifteen minutes from now, with the power of a tactical nuclear penetrating bomb.
That target? Russia’s principal spaceport, Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Yevgeny Bondarev had already decided that Baikonur Cosmodrome was likely to be the last duty post he would ever see. As he had expected, his call to General Popovkin had been followed a short time later by the arrival of two armed GRU officers, who escorted him back to his quarters. There he had remained under arrest for nearly 18 hours, incommunicado. He had no idea what was happening in the world outside his accommodations, but he could imagine. Both within and outside Russia, the world would be losing its mind. And it was his fault. He could blame no one else.
It had been his recommendation, some years before, for Groza to be deployed.
The Groza strikes on Abqaiq and Korla? Under his command. He could have refused to carry out the attacks, and challenged the sanity of such orders. But he had not.
The appointment of the brilliant but ultimately unstable Chief Scientist Grahkovsky? Him again.
The loss of no fewer than four Groza satellites to enemy action? Under his leadership.
The final signature on the orders transferring Maqsud Khan and approving Grahkovsky to conduct a series of ‘simulations’ of attacks on US launch infrastructure? His.
The security of the control system which Grahkovsky had subverted to allow her AI to take control of the errant Groza? His responsibility.
When he had been told to shower, shave and don his dress uniform, he had assumed he would be carted away to face a military tribunal. Instead, he had been bundled into a car in handcuffs, and then into an aircraft, and flown east. He was not told his destination and had no window out of which to orient himself, but as he was walked from the aircraft onto t
he tarmac, he recognized the facility. Baikonur Cosmodrome.
“Where am I being taken?” he asked the GRU Lieutenant in charge of his escort.
“To meet with Colonel-General Popovkin,” the man replied, giving Bondarev some information for the first time in more than 24 hours. “But we have been told your aircraft will be returning to Moscow in four hours, with you on it, Major-General.”
“Alive, or dead?” Bondarev wondered out loud. The GRU Lieutenant didn’t respond.
After winding through two long corridors, they walked into what Bondarev quickly recognized as a situation room, on full alert. Had full-scale war already erupted? Row upon row of technicians, enlisted men and women, intelligence and other officers, were hunkered over terminals or talking in low, urgent tones. Wall screens on all sides were showing friendly and enemy dispositions, on the ground, in the air, on the sea, and in space. There was too much information for him to take in before he was pushed roughly along the back wall to a side office, in which General Popovkin and his staff were gathered around a table.
Popovkin looked up as he came in. “Ah, the man of the hour,” he said with not a little irony. “Sit him down.” His escort led him to a chair along one wall, where he was left for several minutes in cuffs, trying to catch up with the conversation. They were apparently preparing for a US retaliatory strike of some sort, but what kind, he couldn’t tell.
“Why do you think you are here, Bondarev?” Popovkin asked, at last, the four other officers in the room staring at him with blank faces.
“I do not know, Comrade General,” Bondarev replied honestly.
“I sent for you because, despite your recent lapses in judgment, you remain the officer on my staff with the best understanding of American strategic intent and capabilities,” he said. “I sent for you because I wanted you here where my people could pick your brain about what the Americans might be planning in response to your attack on Cape Canaveral, without the risk of using video links vulnerable to interception or cyberattack.”