They saw it at the same time.
Meter readings jumped, remaining ion engine indicators flashed green, and Roger’s helmet slammed back into the seat’s headrest.
“Pull up! Pull up!” Justin bellowed. The scramjet and ion drive screamed online.
Roger pulled back hard on a joystick that provided tactile feedback movement of only three inches. But the tug on his gut, the difficulty breathing, light-headedness, and tunnel vision verified that Guardian was straining to pull out of the dive.
The ion drive…how can you describe sitting in front of a gas plasma torch? It sounded like the otherworldly scream of a tormented soul, rising above the deep-throated roar of a B-1B Lancer bomber with all four engines in full afterburner.
The graphic user interface—GUI—of the altimeter slowed its downward count. What Roger did not see, trying to focus ahead and maintain consciousness in the high-G pullout, was the devastation the ion blast was having on the Texas landscape. Fortunately, his flight path was not over homes, a busy highway, or a dry forest. For years to come, many a Texan would scratch their head as they looked at the two-foot-deep, ten-foot-wide hard-glazed-earth trench. The trench led up to a major electric trunk off the Pampa Energy Center, one of the few coal-fired generating plants still operating in the United States. Speculation would range from classified airborne military laser testing to something from a UFO.
Intense flashes of man-made lightning lit up the sky behind Roger as the conductive ionized gas hit those power lines. It resembled a massive afternoon thunderstorm off the Florida Gulf Coast, truncated into just four seconds. Then the improved electric grid protection kicked in and isolated what had become a direct three-phase, 165 megawatt short to ground.
Roger missed all of that as his eyelids drooped, his breathing became shallower, and his body began to relax.
“You with us? Stay with us!” While Justin could read the aircraft’s telemetry, he had no biometrics on Roger. “Are you okay?”
Everything grew dark. Roger’s grip weakened on the stick. He was going home.
The aircraft nose was only a degree or two above the horizon; he was just barely above the few trees along his path. Suddenly Roger shuddered, jerked his head to clear his mind and to refocus. The few seconds of relief brought just enough blood flow to prevent a complete blackout. He forced a deep breath, gripped the stick and pulled hard. The horizon quickly dropped below him. Through a sheer act of will, he forced himself to take more deep breaths and to focus on his rate of ascent. Twenty degrees, thirty, then forty; he let up on the stick to maintain forty degrees nose-up. Although the gorilla continued sitting on his chest, it seemed to have lost a few hundred pounds. Blood flow returned to his head. His sight and senses slowly returned.
“Roger!”
“Wow…something else I never want to do again.” He sucked in another deep breath. “Any data for me?”
He heard Justin exhale a sigh of relief as he checked the data channels. “From NORAD. You should see the datalink request in a moment. They want you to squawk a secure transponder code so they can track.”
Roger scanned the DLS, his Data Link Screen. He saw and then accepted the incoming link request and accepted the transponder “squawk” code. With Guardian’s radar image roughly the size of a bluebird, no radar on earth could track him; he had to “tell” them his location in the three-dimensional airspace. The stealth technology was in case Guardian might also serve as an interceptor against the advanced manned bombers and supersonic drones that potential adversaries were developing. The aircraft even included optical stealth.
Vectors came up and displayed on his target screen. Within moments, he could see a miniature, ultra-high-resolution image of what Colonel Draper and his team viewed on their large overhead screen. Roger manipulated the touch screen to zoom in on the East Coast, between Florida and New York, and studied the colored overlay. Even as he watched, the overlay reduced in size and cleared South Florida and Baltimore, Maryland. Those areas were no longer at risk; at least, not for the direct hit. Other effects of EMP, radioactive fallout, and the breakdown of civil government could devastate much of the country for decades regardless of where the nuke hit.
The possible impact zone further tightened to exclude central Florida and Washington, D.C. The width of the band also narrowed closer to the coast.
Draper brooded over the attacker’s intent. Would the warhead detonate at a high altitude to maximize EMP effects? Would it be an air burst to maximize the area of destruction from the blast overpressure? Maybe a devastating ground burst, low enough so the fireball would vaporize earth, buildings, trees, people—which would precipitate back out and scatter as flakes of lethal radioactive fallout? Or, since part of the uncertain path extended into the Atlantic Ocean, would it be a sea burst to maximize damage along the coast by a massive tsunami?
Roger noticed a voice call request on his Data Link Screen. NORAD. He answered, patching Justin in for a three-way.
“This is Guardian.”
Three-way calls. Susan used to three-way her calls. Painful memories flooded over Roger of the destruction many of those calls brought to Susan, and the crushing hurt to the rest of the family.
He swallowed hard, his fast and irregular AFib heartbeat pounding in his ears.
17. HYPERSONIC
“Guardian, this is NORAD; Colonel Don Draper. Don’t know what’s lit there behind you, but you’d better crank it up or the mushroom cloud will be gone before you get there!”
Roger looked at his Mach indicator and altimeter. The former was climbing toward two point five; the upper range for most military jets. The latter was climbing through 60,000 feet. High, yes, but again within the range of many military fighters. But the G-forces trying to push his backbone through the tail of the aircraft continued at an uncomfortable three point five Gs. He heard the whine and felt the vibration of the wingtips dipping downward to maximize compression lift for the higher altitudes, like the XB-70 Valkyrie test aircraft from decades before.
Justin wanted to be inside the SKIF at DPI, surrounded by virtual reality displays and his multiple 3-D input pads and wearing his personal Bose noise cancelling headset. But even listening to his Multiphone from his bedroom, he clearly heard the Colonel. Nobody was going to trash-talk his baby.
“Colonel, as soon as he clears 80,000 and cranks it past Mach Eight, you better hope your played-out machines can keep up!”
Roger, always the peacemaker, intervened. “Colonel, stand by. Justin, I need to get the ion shield up and stabilized, or it's going to get very hot in here, fast.”
Guardian didn’t have the nickel alloy of the X-15, the titanium skin of the SR-71 Blackbird and XB-70 Valkyrie, or the thick ceramic tiles of the Space Shuttle. Instead, the aircraft used lightweight ceramic matrix composites. They were critical inside the scramjet and MHD core where temperatures exceeded 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit; and outside along leading edges. An SR-71 flying at Mach Three was blistering hot and had to be extensively cooled before the crew could safely exit after landing. With Guardian’s skin, an SR-71 would have been cool to the touch by the time it taxied into its hangar. But even that advanced coating alone wouldn’t protect Guardian from extended hypersonic cruise. Roger’s team of engineers went beyond materials. They routed part of the ion drive itself to provide shielding.
Roger actuated the second mandatory manual control.
Generators sprayed a stream of ionized particles along the aircraft leading edges, creating a laminar flow at a much-reduced temperature. Farther back, microscopic ridges created wind-tunnel-perfected turbulence that reduced aerodynamic drag, like a shark’s skin through the water. The high-velocity razor-sharp stream of ions cutting into the headwind, followed by the microturbulence, caused the high altitude air to sweep over the aircraft in a smooth flow. Guardian experienced less aerodynamic drag than the ancient and much slower needle-like F-104 Starfighter. An additional benefit: Instead of creating the typical dual thud-thud explosive sound
of a supersonic shockwave, Guardian produced a gentler sound like distant thunder. No broken windows.
The Mach indicator and the altimeter readings climbed faster.
“Looks good, Roger; all indicators are green. You’re free to kick it!” Justin smiled with satisfaction as nano-sensors all along the leading edge showed a clean, cool—relatively speaking, at over 572 degrees Fahrenheit—laminar flow over the aircraft’s blended wing surfaces. “You should also have full I-A-C.”
Weeks earlier than planned, Guardian was flying under full Ion Aerodynamic Control. The final beauty of the ion shield design was to morph the airflow by electronically adjusting the ion stream, hundreds of times per second, to control pitch, yaw, and roll. Larger control surfaces, necessary at takeoff and landing speeds all the way up to low supersonic speeds, remained locked once the IAC became fully active above Mach 5. The only remaining external physical movement was for the wingtips as they adjusted to maintain the optimal lifting body effect, allowing the craft to ride on its own shockwave. And, of course, the all-important tiny door that would slide open for a split-second to expel the rail gun’s “slug.”
“Looking good for Flight Level Nine Zero.”
Roger was soaked in sweat, his heart beating wildly, and his hands shaking. There was just a momentary twitch of a smile as he imagined NORAD’s reaction to Justin’s comment. Guardian was approaching 90,000 feet. No one had ever maintained sustained, level flight at that altitude. About the time he finished that thought, Roger was there.
Although the sun was just setting on the Pacific Coast, it was dark around him. At his altitude, it would have been dark even in the middle of the day.
I’ve earned my Astronaut wings. Too bad I’ll never have a chance to wear them.
He leveled the nose and finally got the gorilla off his chest. Roger and Justin watched as the Mach indicator immediately increased its climb past Six Point Zero.
Massive power flowed through classified state-of-the-art graphene conductors.
“Colonel, I need vectors for the earliest intercept points at a beginning range of 300 nautical miles. I have three rail gun projectiles. I’ll need to fire at ranges of 300, 150, and at eighty nautical miles. We’re hoping for Mach Ten, but I’ll push her as hard as she’ll go, so I need figures between Mach Nine and Eleven.”
Justin spoke up. “Roger, I’ve bypassed the test protocols. You’re fully operational, including the rail gun. Shouldn’t I be helping with vectors?” His question wasn’t cocky. He was that good.
Roger’s voice quivered so slightly that only Justin caught it. “We only bore sighted the gun to the ninth decimal place. I need a fallback option at fifty miles. I need you to set up Battle Short protocols for a fly-under and implosion.”
Only Roger and Justin knew what all that meant. And even for them, it was hypothetical, something they’d kicked around with one of DPI’s physicists during a coffee break on one of their many late nights during the early days of the program.
As for the best-of-the-best team at the Peterson Control Center, up to that point they had only understood some of the conversation between the two engineers. But that last exchange sounded ominous. They each returned their focus to telemetry, vectors, probability analyses, and everything else they could synthesize into the flight data that Guardian would need to make the intercept.
“Sir!” Colonel Draper looked over at the same Technical Sergeant who’d contacted Justin. The younger man was staring at his instrumentation in unbelief. “He’s holding steady at Mach Ten! He’s goin’ like a bat outta hades!”
A new vector was tracking on their screen. It showed a green icon, sweeping from west to east, toward the red icon coming up from the south. Minutes earlier, no one in that room would have believed that a manned aircraft could travel as fast as they saw the green icon move, sweeping across entire states in minutes. Then again, no one would have believed an ICBM warhead would have come up from over the South Pole.
Roger desperately prayed that the intercept would succeed. So much could go wrong...
+ + +
“Come on, come on, come on…”
Anton Filipov was not a patient man. Patience is not what had earned him his position as the flight engineer of the highly specialized Ilyushin Il-96-400PU aircraft.
It had been a long day. Russia was such a huge country, any time President Viktor Savin needed to go anywhere, it normally had to be by aircraft. And each of his many trips meant a twenty to thirty-hour ordeal for the crew. Today was much closer to the thirty-hour mark, with at least six more to go.
They’ll panic for a few moments and be dead within minutes.
The plan was simple. Diabolically so. As soon as he received the message on his secure maintenance net radio, he’d signal the co-pilot, who would take one of his breaks out of the cockpit. Only short breaks were allowed for the flight crew. Once both of them had donned portable oxygen bottles, Anton would rapidly depressurize the president’s aircraft. Alarms would awaken anyone currently asleep at four a.m. Two seconds. Oxygen masks would automatically drop and cabin lights would illuminate to full brightness. Another second. Everyone would grab and put on his own mask—two more seconds; then help everyone else get theirs on— two more seconds. Total of seven seconds. Three more seconds to realize that the life-giving oxygen wasn’t flowing, because Anton had set the valve to OFF during his pre-flight inspection. Ten seconds. They would panic, but in another five seconds, not a single person would have time to grab a stand-alone bottle. Not even the pilot. Fifteen seconds and they would all be unconscious.
The autopilot would react to the alarm by putting the plane into a controlled rapid descent. The co-pilot would simply walk back in the cockpit, take over manual control, and keep the plane near its current altitude of 40,000 feet. Within minutes, only two people in the aircraft would still be alive. By then Anton would have disabled all tracking beacons, they would drop below radar coverage, and then divert to their secret destination.
Anton impatiently awaited the call that would change Mother Russia. He knew it would come as soon as the very large explosion changed the United States of America forever. He expected it within the next fifteen minutes.
18. TARGET LOCK
The datalink streamed at maximum capacity. NORAD supercomputers crunched numbers with redundant teraflop precision. This was difficult because of the unexpected southern trajectory. The incoming arc was too high for the Robins Air Force Base backscatter radar, designed for closer-in and lower altitude SLBMs, to track accurately. So sketchy data from satellites and “best guess” probabilities continued to show wide paths instead of precise arcs. No one suspected the warhead to have terminal guidance. Fortunately, they were correct.
Gigabytes of data streamed to Guardian’s Targeting and Flight Control Computer each second, but the aircraft system hardly broke a sweat. American ingenuity led the world in developing quantum computer technology, but even with the $1.2 billion allocated to Guardian’s computer mainframe, quantum systems were still too risky. Instead, they chose a tristate “ternary” computer developed by Directed Paradigms, Inc. as a rugged, lower-risk solution with added benefits. Instead of simple binary ones and zeroes, the DPI-01Ternary Computer allowed states of positive, zero, and negative. The circuit board substrate materials, including graphene traces, allowed unheard-of packing of “Trisistors,” which reduced electron travel times and enhanced clock speed. Shifting from bits and bytes to “trites” allowed for shorter words at the machine language level, faster bus speeds, and more efficient programming language. The suitcase-size TCS DPI-01 on Guardian easily kept up with the supercomputers at NORAD.
Roger turned on the interceptor’s own Terminal Targeting System, its TTS. In a split second, its multi-frequency LIDAR—Light Detection and Ranging system—swept forward into space. The laser light wouldn’t be distorted by the ion shield, nor would clouds be a concern at the planned intercept altitude. The design used multiple frequencies to mitigate intentiona
l stealth coatings; a coating that could absorb visible light would reflect ultraviolet. Coatings that could absorb visible and UV would reflect infrared. Early self-driving cars used LIDARs with sixty-four lasers on turrets spinning at six hundred rpm. They generated over one and a half million voxels per second, mapping three dimensional space outward as far as a mile. In comparison, Guardian’s LIDAR ranged outward to hundreds of nautical miles. The LIDAR Targeting System—LTS—was generating half a Gigavoxel per second.
“TTS on, LTS active,” Roger reported. Guardian was now flying itself, following data feeds from NORAD. But it was also scanning thousands of cubic miles of space for the Doppler signature of a downward arcing object in a non-stable orbit: An incoming warhead.
“Copy. See that?” Justin directed Roger’s attention back to NORAD’s “best guess” arcs, which just tightened as the CEP could be better predicted.
“So, Florida and Georgia are clear. Looks like the earliest detonation would be a high altitude burst over North Carolina, and the furthest would fall short of Washington. Speculation, Colonel?”
Colonel Draper’s team had been zooming in maps for both counter-force and counter-value targets. A high altitude burst over Fayetteville, North Carolina would be catastrophic to Fort Bragg, an Army base with a large Special Operations Command contingent. And there was Norfolk, Virginia with a very strong Navy presence. Like NAS Jacksonville, Naval Station Norfolk had recently taken on even more responsibilities, assuring its continuation as the world’s largest naval station for decades to come.
“This is Draper. An air burst over Norfolk would destroy the base and cause collateral damage hundreds of miles out. A ground burst would have a smaller kill zone, but the fallout would be much greater and might spread up to Washington. Or it could go over to Roanoke, Virginia; or down to Fort Bragg in North Carolina depending on winds, which are right now...” A Navy ensign brought up a plot based on current weather, “…Southerly; twenty-five knots at 20,000 feet. And there’s a huge storm over the entire region which could drop the fallout to the ground quickly in a high concentration.”
The Guardian Collection (End of the Sixth Age Book 2) Page 8