Orbit

Chapter 20

The President pauses before unlocking the bathroom door and walking back into the world. He shakes his head to think that the only privacy the most powerful leader on the planet can have is in his private water closet, but too often it’s true.

He rummages through his pants pocket for a breath strip, aware of his growing case of coffee breath, and does a quick reassessment of his image in the mirror before drying his hands and opening the door. As usual, several people are hovering right outside and waiting for him, this time the number includes the White House Air Force liaison officer.

“Ready, Mr. President?” she asks.

“Yes, Kim. Lead the way.”

They quickly move into the inner chamber of the Situation Room, a small conference room festooned with communications equipment and liquid crystal screens.

Colonel Kim Wallenda lights up one of the screens, a real-time image of an Air Force hangar complex in Nevada undulating in the morning heat. One of the hangar doors is open, with nothing but black visible inside.

“Good show and tell, Kim, but why?”

She looks taken aback, but she knows this President and knows it’s not a challenge.

“Just an establishing shot, sir. To be honest, I just put it up there to show off our real-time video capabilities.”

“Let’s get to the details.”

Charts and tables alternately fill the screen with the top secret deployment details of a standby force ordered quietly into existence by President Reagan in the early eighties.

“As you know, sir, Longbow has been on pad alert since its inception as an antisatellite killer, and our planes have been scrambled only twice, but never used for an actual kill. We have a total of fifteen of these specially modified F-106s ready in six different locations, all shown on the screen. The original tests used F-15s, but the 106 has a bigger weapons’ bay. The one for this mission has to come from Holloman in New Mexico, because of the target’s orbital path. The only real challenge is computing and flying the precise path to lob the missile into the right window. We can reach as high as a six-hundred-fifty-mile orbit.”

“And the thing we’re trying to hit is at three hundred ten miles, right?”

“Yes, sir. Now, what you’ve essentially asked us to do is change the course of this rogue object by a kinetic kill. There will be an explosive charge on the missile’s second stage, but we’re relying on the energy transfer of the kinetic impact to blow the shroud off course just enough to miss ASA’s spacecraft. But just fragmenting it isn’t enough, so we’re using an oblique trajectory, almost forty-five degrees to its course. Hopefully, not even fragments will remain on the same collision course.”

“Are we absolutely sure… is NORAD sure… that the collision course is valid and that we really need to do this?”

Another woman at the far end of the table in civilian clothes nods.

“Yes, sir. I just spoke with General Risen at NORAD. Their continuous orbital path reassessment still shows a high probability of a dead-on collision if there’s no change.”

“Very well. Jim? Objections on this decision from the Pentagon’s perspective?”

“Nothing new, Mr. President. As far as our overseas friends and adversaries, we’re going to show ’em our… ah…” The President can see the Deputy Secretary of Defense suddenly realizing there are women present, tough and professional as they may be, and it’s momentarily amusing to watch him founder as he looks for an expression less earthy than what was on his lips.

“Showing them our what?”

“Muscle, sir.”

“Uh-huh.” Even the two women are chuckling under their breath as he tries to continue with some dignity. “It’s… a worry, revealing what we’ve got, but we’ve long since made it clear we were not going to comply with archaic treaty restrictions that are questionable, anyway. And this is not hostile use.”

“As soon as we’re done, I’ll phone Moscow and explain what’s happening. Him first, then NATO. So, how about State? Kevin?”

“No objections, sir. The only countries able to perceive what we’re doing by direct observation probably need to be warned we have this capability.”

“It’s thirty-year-old technology, Kevin. I doubt even popular science would be too impressed.”

“Yes, sir, but we pretended to abandon it. So, whether we’re using Star Wars-pulsed beam plasma systems or throwing large rocks with a guidance package, it all comes down to the same thing. If it’s up there, we can bring it down.”

The President closes his notebook and looks at each of them. “All of us understand that this will solve only one of the problems. What I’ve ordered NASA to try to do is far more problematic and risky, but if there’s anyone breathing up there… and we all think there is… we’ve got to do our best to bring him back. Kim, let me know the moment you launch.”

Her “Yes, sir” is spoken to his back as the President swings out the door, trying to imagine for a second how it would feel to be trapped in a spacecraft with no communications. The news that most likely the civilian passenger is the only survivor continues to chill him.

Owen Larrabe feels the excitement building as he sits in his pressure suit on a box beside the F-106 and studies the top-secret flight plan he figured he’d never get the chance to fly. Two crewmen are hovering at the ready, one holding his helmet.

“I’d better get in,” he says, getting awkwardly to his feet. The two crewmen are instantly at his side, walking him to the ladder for what will be a brief but arduous job of sliding into the seat and attaching himself with straps that he won’t have enough mobility to reach. F-106 cockpits were not designed for pressure suits.

Owen pauses to survey the interior of the secret hangar, built to look like a dusty warehouse on the far side of the well-worn Air Force base. When they’re ready and the security police have chased off everyone who might otherwise be looking, the entire false front of the allegedly old brick building will open, allowing him to taxi quickly to the adjacent end of the runway for a quick takeoff to the west. By the time he plugs in the afterburner, the building should have returned to normal, protected by the anonymity of its uninteresting appearance and a host of sophisticated sensors and monitoring devices.

Like an astronaut who never thought he’d fly a mission to space, Captain Owen Larrabe has always thought of his weird, secret assignment as a pain. Three years stationed at Holloman supposedly flying a revived continental defense mission in one of the few remaining F-106 squadrons, while secretly maintaining proficiency for this mission and spending too many weekends and evenings practicing getting into and out of the pressure suit. Two other pilots here have the same mission and the same problem, with wives and families who just don’t understand where they go all those extra evenings when the rest of their squadron is at home or having barbecues.

The last strap is being snapped in place and the young crew chief runs over his checklist, showing the removed ejection seat pins and getting the requisite nod from his pilot.

At least, Owen thinks, the air conditioned temperature maintained in the hangar is a blessing. He’ll taxi into the desert heat in comfort.

The side of the hangar is in motion now, large hydraulic arms moving the counterbalanced facade up and over as he runs the checklist and starts the engine, timing the start of his quick exit for the moment the marshaler signals the door is clear. His takeoff and flight clearance have already been granted on a special UHF frequency and the airfield is silent, awaiting his departure. He finishes the last checklist item and smoothly swings the Delta Dart onto the runway, bringing the power to maximum and then plugging in the afterburner as he accelerates, the unusually long missile held snugly inside the weapons bay. He passes eighty knots with a glance to his left. The building is a building again, the door closed, the crew invisible, and he pulls the bird into the air, cleaning up gear and flaps and burner as he turns for the intercept point somewhere to the southeast.

The missile has been designed to launch itself, just like the original test back in 1985, but at nearly ninety thousand feet. And the trajectory is not what they’ve practiced. Instead of a head-on shot, it will go for an intercept from a forty-five-degree angle from the back.

He’s already had the classified briefing on what they’re trying to do, and there’ll be only one chance. If they miss, on the very next orbit ninety minutes later the old Russian missile shroud will impact the spacecraft, obliterating both.

But his equipment is improved from the old days. The first and only successful test had none of the sophisticated onboard guidance computers he has now, and the missile was more or less a dumb infrared tracker. The pilot of that test plane, Doug Pearson, had become the first and only “space ace,” the first to shoot down a spacecraft.

And now, Owen thinks, I’ve got the chance to be the second. Sweet.

Yet, the seriousness of the mission is not lost on him. The stakes couldn’t be higher. He’s trained to take out an enemy’s orbiting eyes or an orbiting nuke if anyone is ever stupid enough to put one up. But this is a different type of shooting.

Owen engages the trajectory computer and locks his global positioning satellite system into the data stream, pleased to see the green light flash on his screen. The flight director pops into view and he places the dot representing the F-106 in the middle, following the computer commands to the start point. The mission is to be flown in radio silence, except for his transponder and an open satcom channel to the mission commander back in the Pentagon. He’s closing on the hold point where he’ll fly a racetrack pattern for thirty minutes waiting for the precise moment to start the run, and he looks over to check the fuel remaining, momentarily disbelieving the figures.

What the hell?

He should be reading a full tank but it’s coming up short. Disastrously short, and he wonders if the fuel totalizer could be wrong.

A quick mental calculation deflates that possibility, and he toggles the UHF radio back to the ground crew’s frequency at Holloman, triggering a series of messages that end with the realization that someone screwed up big-time.

I don’t frigging believe this! he thinks, his heart pounding. Twenty years to practice and the one time we get a mission we blow it for insufficient fuel?

There’s no time to scare up a tanker. He runs the numbers again, the planned fuel burn during the antisatellite launch run and the fuel between now and then, plus the fuel back to the base.

They don’t match. If he uses the most fuel-efficient speed to hold, he’ll still flame-out on the way back down from launch altitude.

Okay, but can I dead-stick her back to the base?

The thought is chilling, shoving an engineless F-106 back through the stratosphere and stretching the energy enough to make the home runway.

But that, too, won’t work. He’d end up crashing in the desert fifty miles short or worse.

The call to the command post in the Pentagon is tough but crucial, and there’s a momentary flurry of confusion until a general comes on the line.

“Bluebird Two-Three, Stargazer. You do realize we have no other options on this mission?”

“Roger, Stargazer. I can’t believe we’re short. I don’t suppose there are any tankers airborne nearby?”

“Negative. We just looked at that, and there’s no time to go back. Can you make the launch work?”

“Yes, sir. That I can do, but I’ll flame out on the way down.”

“We’re considering a punch-out scenario here.”

Owen’s finger freezes on the transmit button for a few seconds. Punch out of a perfectly good F-106? Worse, a specially modified F-106? A hundred million dollars or more reduced to junk because one of his team failed to read the tanks?

Not acceptable, he tells himself.

“Stargazer, there’s an alternate airport below my flight path. Civilian and short, but I can probably make it in dead stick.”

“Which one?”

“Carlsbad Muni, sir.”

Silence for a few seconds before a cautious reply reaches his ears.

“Your choice, Bluebird Two-Three. You are authorized to leave the ship or take it in without power to Carlsbad. We’ll scramble a team there right now just in case.”

“Roger.”

“Hey, Bluebird… a personal note from an old fighter pilot, okay? Don’t wait too long if you have to leave her. Eject inside the envelope. Got it?”

“Roger, sir.”