“Ah, I see.”
“What do you think they’re up to?” asked the navigation officer.
“Oh, we’ll find out. Trust me.”
In the back of Andreas’s mind sat an important fact: they were long overdue for a position check to update the SINS (ship’s inertial navigation system) and a GPS check. Above the Arctic Circle, SINS was often unreliable. Fortunately, GPS solved the problem of getting a reliable corroborating fix.
Once back in the Coronation Gulf, Andreas brought the sub to periscope depth and raised one of the photonic masts, which was followed immediately by the BRA-34 antenna mast. He forced himself to wait a full sixty seconds, allowing the BRA-34 antenna to dry, hoping to improve the reception of any “burst” broadcast traffic from the satellite.
An ELF message would precede specific operational orders. While anxious to engage the Russians, Andreas knew his initial SITREP to the Commander of the Pacific Fleet (COMPACFLT) had to move up to the National Command Center and then back down to CENTCOM, SOCOM, and finally the JSF. He just needed to be patient.
“That’s strange,” he said to the XO.
“I know. No broadcast traffic. Absolutely nothing.”
“Check the antenna.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
The broadcast provided routine administrative notices such as promotions, personnel transfers, and, more important, personal e-mails for the crewmembers. Andreas knew Petty Officer Second-Class Ramirez was waiting to hear from his wife about the birth of their first child. As the ship’s morale officer, Andreas was acutely aware of how much these broadcasts contributed to the smooth functioning of his submarine. He regretted that the upgrade to the new OE-538 multifunction mast got pushed back during the Florida’s last overhaul.
“The antenna looks fine,” reported the XO. “And the GPS signal came through five by five, but I’ll have them check all the gear again. What do you think?”
Andreas was about to venture a few guesses when the ECM operator called out, “Sir? I have encrypted UHF chatter and shipboard air-search radar emissions originating from the Russian task force.”
With a nod, Andreas answered, “Well, well, well. They’ve finally broken radio silence. As soon as we get a match between the SINS and GPS we’ll swing back down there and take a look.”
“It’s a Top Plate, Captain,” added the operator.
“Are you kidding me?”
“No, sir.”
Top Plate was the old NATO designation for a Russian MR-710 Fregat-M, 3D air search radar, a model normally found onboard Slava class cruisers.
“Well, then either the Russian Army’s hogging all those petrodollars or somebody in the Navy’s skimming big-time. They’re cannibalizing their ships.”
By now, a steady stream of Kamov Ka-29 helicopters with one to three crew members and hold capacities of up to sixteen troops were beginning to leave the Ulyanovsk, landing on the Ivan Rogov’s flight deck, on-loading troops, then taking off, heading south into the Canadian interior.
“Gentlemen, I’m stumped,” Andreas said with a snort. “If this is a Russian invasion, it’s analogous to a flea crawling up an elephant’s leg with intentions of rape.”
“Well, this can’t be some kind of exercise,” the XO said. “This must be part of—”
“Sir,” the officer of the deck interrupted. “Flashing light between the Varyag and the oiler, and it’s plain language: FROM VARYAG TO KALOVSK: MAKE MY PORT SIDE 0500 HOURS TOMORROW FOR REFUELING.”
“We can take out two ships with one missile,” Andreas said. “XO, set up another slot buoy. Admiral Stanton needs to see this . . .”
ELEVEN
President Becerra listened intently to Chief of Staff Hellenberg, who was briefing him regarding the recent Motorola-Iridium deal.
Iridium Satellite of Bethesda, Maryland, had established a LEO (low earth orbit) communication satellite network consisting of sixty birds, some in polar orbit, at an altitude of five hundred miles.
The system provided cell phone—voice and data—communication anywhere in the world. It did this by building in satellite-to-satellite transfer capability among all of its birds.
General Rudolph McDaniel, United States Air Force and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had recommended that Becerra contact the CEOs of Motorola and Iridium and ask them for total control of the network in the name of national security. McDaniel had confirmed with the Navy that the USS Florida did have at least six Iridium 9505A satellite phones onboard.
“Well, the network is ours,” said Hellenberg.
“Have they made contact with the sub yet?”
“Not yet.”
“What’s the holdup now?”
“Sir, when the Navy tried to reactivate the Michigan ELF transmitter, the only site capable of communicating under the polar cap, they found that two of the underground diesel fuel tanks had rusted out and ruptured. The fuel in a third tank was contaminated and unusable. Remember, that equipment has been sitting there for more than ten years, unused.”
“What now?”
“The Navy says they need all six diesel generators online to produce enough power to push an ELF signal down through the underlying bedrock. Right now they have four eighteen-wheeler fuel tankers heading to that transmitter site in the middle of the wilderness. They’ll implement a direct hookup between the trucks and the diesel generators.”
“Let me know when we’ve reestablished.”
“Yes, sir. And right now it looks like General Kennedy is on three.”
“Route it to my screen.”
After a second, the monitor before Becerra flickered into the image of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Laura Kennedy, United States Army, her blond hair pulled into a tight bun, her expression grave. “Hello, again, Mr. President.” She immediately glanced down at her notes.
Here it comes, Becerra thought. He’d never asked for a war during his presidency. But this . . . he could have never imagined this . . .
“The Joint Chiefs have reviewed the data we’ve gathered from the ISS and from the satellite debris fields, as collected by NASA and the ESA, along with real-time, long-range imagery. It’s our conclusion that the ISS is, in fact, under Russian control, that they’ve violated the 2019 treaty regarding use of the station, and that a portable, tactical high energy laser-based weapon was fired from that platform. The station is now maneuvering again.”
“I understand.”
“We recommend that this threat to national security be eliminated immediately. General McDaniel informs us that he can shift one of our live-fire prototype ANGELS satellites to within striking distance.”
Autonomous Nanosatellite Guardian Evaluating Local Space (ANGELS) were cylindrical devices no larger than a wastepaper basket used primarily to monitor other satellites. However, during the last four years the JSF had piggybacked at least a dozen new ones aboard other communication satellites with the future mission of converting those ANGELS into low-power laser weapons and orbiting bombs.
“General, I’m wondering if there’s a way we can neutralize the threat without destroying the station.”
“Sir, we’ve considered every possibility. We could cut off their life support, force them to go to the suits. But they might reach their next target before exhausting their oxygen. We can’t send up astronauts in time. And if you open this up to debate with the other nations involved, the Russians will achieve their goals before the representatives even sit down.”
“Oh, I’m well aware of that, General.”
“Mr. President, I will say this. If the weapon is clearly identifiable on the station, perhaps attached to one of the Russian modules, we’ll make every attempt to destroy it first, then see how they react. They might decide to take the ISS on a suicide run to destroy other orbital platforms, maybe even Freedom Star—in which case we’ll have the ANGEL attach itself to the station and self-destruct.”
“General, stand by for one moment please.” Becerra pu
t her on hold, then tapped another screen, bringing up Roberta Santiago, his national security advisor. “Roberta, you’ve been listening in.”
“Yes, sir. And my God, sir. They want you to authorize the destruction of the ISS.”
“Do we have a choice? They will attempt to take out the weapon first.”
“I do have another thought.” Santiago’s tone darkened. “Why do we need to take full responsibility? Why can’t we turn this situation around? We’re the victims here and we should remain victims. Striking back, killing those two innocent researchers . . . that’s—”
“Roberta, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that within an hour I can have video released to the media. The Green Brigade Transnational will take full responsibility for the ISS’s destruction. And the ironic part is, Green Vox won’t dispute the lie. It’ll surprise him, but he’ll be happy to take full credit. He’d blow up the ISS himself if he could. That’s a fact.”
An icy feeling crept into Becerra’s spine as he considered how cunning and clever such a ploy might be—
And how it might backfire. This could be his Water-gate, his Monica Lewinsky, his war in Iraq.
He leaned forward and steeled his gaze. “Roberta, I won’t do that. I’m going to authorize the destruction attempt and I’m going to stand behind it. The ISS is an ongoing threat to national security. There is collateral damage in every war, and that’s terrible and unfortunate. But as president, my first responsibility is the defense of the United Sates of America. This will be an unpopular decision—but we have to make it. And we have to be willing to take the international heat. Roberta, are we absolutely clear on this?”
She pursed her lips. “Yes, Mr. President. I understand.”
He switched back to the chairman’s line. “General Kennedy, you have my authorization to take whatever steps are necessary to neutralize the threat.”
“Yes, Mr. President. We’ll act immediately. And I’ll update you as soon as we know anything.”
Becerra tapped off the call, closed his eyes, and imagined the news stories to follow, pretty graphics beside the words BECERRA ORDERS DESTRUCTION OF ISS.
TWELVE
The Commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Donald Stanton, called Admiral Charles “Chuck” Harrison, Commander Submarine Forces Pacific, regarding a most intriguing loss of communication up in the Arctic.
Stanton was in his office at COMPACFLT Headquarters in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, staring at a computer screen showing him the bio and military service record of the USS Florida’s current commander.
The communications screen indicated they had a link, and Chuck appeared, his silver hair expertly razored into a crew cut, his face barely wrinkled for a man pushing sixty. Stanton had already broken that barrier, and he wanted to believe he looked as good as Chuck. Aw, hell, who was he kidding?
“Hey, Donny.”
“Hey, Chuck. Listen, I just got an e-mail from American Eagle telling me we’ve got total control of the Iridium cell phone system. He wants us to reach out to your boy up north. I was just reading his record.”
“Andreas is a pretty clever lad. Once he figures out the satellite is bent, he just might poke up his sail long enough to check for a text message. But how can I help?”
“My techies tell me they need the phone numbers for every Iridium 9505A onboard Florida, plus we need something—something personal—that will convince Andreas that our text message is legit. I know how serious you guys are about the silent in silent service.”
“I’ll get the squadron commander on the horn. Smitty keeps a roster of all the allocated 9505As, and next I’ll give Andreas’s wife a buzz. I’ll bet she can come up with something personal to authenticate with.”
“Sounds like a plan, Chuck. My best to Jamie. Fifteen minutes?”
“Back in fifteen, Admiral.”
“Captain, we’ve covered—”
“Hold on,” Commander Jonathan Andreas said, cutting off his communications officer. “Right now I want to hear Senior Chief Radioman Sheldon’s assessment of the situation.”
“Captain, I’ve been over every inch of that gear. I even got Chief Electronics Technician Burgess to look over my shoulder. I swear that the ELF and satellite receivers are good to go.” His tone grew ominous. “There’s just no signal.”
Andreas couldn’t estimate how much pride calling in another chief for help had cost his senior chief radioman.
Andreas nodded, “Sheldon, that’s good enough for me.”
Andreas returned to his quarters and sat on his bunk for almost ten minutes, allowing himself to work through the mystery, taking in each piece of evidence, examining it, probing it, trying to reach conclusions. Then he started down a new path, one in which they took action to get answers.
He came up with two plans.
Finally, he stood and purposefully stepped through the doorway into the head separating his stateroom from the XO’s. He knocked twice on the door in the opposite bulkhead, then stepped through to where the XO was reading something at his desk. He glanced up. “Sir?”
Without preamble, Andreas said, “XO, I’m about to break a cardinal rule, and I want you to hear it.”
“Skipper, are you sure?”
“Yes, I am.” The first plan sounded even more logical to him as he voiced it rapid-fire. “I’m going to go deep, sprint thirty miles northwest, stick up the antenna, and ping the transponder on the satellite. The problem could still be ours, but right now it’s the next-to-last action we can take. What do you think?”
“Skipper, with the shrouded propulsor, and at a depth of, say, eight hundred feet, we can do that.”
“I just can’t wait around any longer.”
“No doubt. We sprint at nearly thirty knots and find us a nice lonely spot out in the middle of the gulf.”
“So it’s worth a try?”
“It is, but I have to play devil’s advocate—what happens if we don’t trigger an answering ping from the transponder?”
“I said this was my next-to-last plan, XO. If this doesn’t work, you won’t believe what I’ll do next.”
THIRTEEN
“Ghost Hawk, this is Siren. Contact is now three minutes out, over.”
Major Stephanie Halverson, dressed like a praying mantis in her pressure suit and alien-like helmet with attached O2 line, took a deep breath and adjusted her grip on the stick.
The F-35B Joint Strike Fighter’s electro-optical targeting system (EOTS) continued to feed her up-to-the-nanosecond images and data on the approaching targets, and her helmet-mounted display system had some of the best head-tracking hardware and software she had ever fielded, along with all the usual requirements like a binocular-wide field of view, day/night capability with sensor fusion, and a digital image source for helmet-displayed symbology—all of which was engineer-speak for some wicked cool battlefield capability.
After an unusually long delay, her wingman, Captain Jake Boyd, finally replied with a curt “Roger that,” his own F-35B streaking over the frozen tundra just off Halverson’s right wing, its tail glowing faintly in the night.
“Ghost Hawk, do you have a problem, over?”
“Negative, Siren. Just shaking my head.”
They had nearly forty Russian Ka-29s on the AN/ APG-81 AESA radar, the helos on a bearing due south across the Northwest Territories, maintaining an altitude of just one thousand feet.
To say that Halverson and Boyd were surprised was an understatement.
Operating out of a small JSF training base located approximately two hundred miles north of Yellowknife, the capital of the NWT, she and Boyd were on their third scheduled night flight of the F-35B Short Take-Off and Vertical Landing (STOVL) fighter used primarily by the United States Marine Corps and the Royal Navy.
As JSF pilots and members of the Air Force, they were being cross-trained in the fighter so that its features could be exploited in non-carrier based operations located far inland and in more rugged terrain. The JSF had
struck a deal with the commissioner of the NWT to use the largely unpopulated areas for tests.
Halverson and Boyd had both hoped that after the fourteen-day training mission, they’d get a chance to take their state-of-the-art killing machines into Russia and show those vodka-soaked wolves what they could do.
That the Russians would help by dropping in themselves was as exciting as it was troubling.
Halverson maintained a video blog, Femme Fatale Fighter Pilot, and she couldn’t wait to share this with her readers, though she’d carefully dance around the classified details, and her face was always hidden behind her helmet.
“All right, Ghost Hawk, two minutes now,” she reported. “Let’s hit the gas and ascend before they spot us.”
“Roger that.”
“Igloo Base, this is Siren, we’re climbing to fourteen thousand to hover and observe contact, over.”
“Roger that, Siren. Igloo Base standing by.”
She and Boyd climbed to fourteen thousand, then, with the targets about to pass below in thirty seconds, they prepared to hover.
All right, baby, show me what you got.
Instead of utilizing lift engines or rotating nozzles on the engine fan and exhaust like the old Harriers, Halverson’s F-35B employed a shift-driven lift fan, patented by Lockheed Martin and developed by Rolls-Royce.
The contra-rotating fan was like a turboprop set into the fuselage, just behind the cockpit. Engine shaft power could be sent forward to it while bypass air from the cruise engine was sent to nozzles in the wings as the cruise nozzle at the tail vectored downward.
Thus, under her command, panels opened over the lift fan behind her, and a column of cool air providing 20,000 pounds of lifting power vented from the bottom of the aircraft, holding her steady, a fighter plane seemingly locked in the air by an invisible tractor beam.
Boyd was at Halverson’s wing, hovering as well.
“Siren, this is Igloo Base.”
“Go ahead, Igloo.”