Stephen Coonts - Combat

A medium-built, muscular man with fair skin and short brown hair, Myers looked and acted the role of the typical Air Force squadron commander. He was cocky and sometimes borderline-arrogant, but he knew how to carry out orders and get his men motivated to follow them as well. On the ground he was a bastard, who pushed everyone to do and act their best, but once airborne, he was the ideal flight leader, wise and courageous, fully capable of making lifesaving, split-second decisions.

Myers definitely knew how to follow orders, even when those orders meant the destruction of one of the world’s greatest technological achievements: the International Space Station.

“Leader to Ghosts, Leader to Ghosts,” Myers said over the squadron frequency. “Prepare to release.”

“Roger,” came the response from his other four jets, each carrying a single ANSAT missile attached to the underfuselage pallet.

Myers activated the ordnance-release system. Firing the ANSAT was quite simple because of the nature of the missile, which was already preprogrammed to home in on the station flying 105 miles overhead. There was no radar control from the parent craft or from an overhead satellite to guide it to its target. The ANSATs were shoot-and-forget. According to the briefing, Myers would fire his missile first. Each of his men would follow serially until all five missiles had been fired.

Shoving the sidestick back while pushing full throttle, Myers pointed the nose to the upper layers of the stratosphere before pressing a button on the sidestick.

A silver missile glided upward in a parabolic flight as he rolled the jet and pulled away. The missile continued skyward solely on the momentum it had gained from the F-22, until right before reaching its apex, when the single solid-propellant booster kicked in and projected it up at great speed.

“Leader’s out,” commented Myers as he watched his wingman get into position for his release.

“Ghost Leader, Ghost Leader, Eagle’s Nest, over.”

“Nest, Leader, over.”

“Abort, Leader. Repeat, abort mission. Authorization code Three-Niner-Alpha-Zulu-Seven-Six-Lima-Charlie. ”

Myers glanced at the small notepad strapped right below the Heads-Up Display. Abort Code 39AZ76LC. That’s a match.

“Leader to Ghosts, Leader to Ghosts. Abort, abort. RTB, RTB.”

“ Roger ,” responded the other four jets, acknowledging not just the abort, but also the Return-To-Base order.

Colonel Myers watched his wingman rolling his jet out of the climb and returning to formation with the ANSAT still strapped to his F-22’s belly.

Myers said, “Nest, Ghost Leader. One demon got away. Repeat. One demon got away. Other four demons secured. RTB.”

“Roger, Lead. Will pass it on.”

The runaway ANSAT’s thruster still burning in the distance, Myers cut back throttles and dropped his F-22’s nose. His squadron followed him.

As she floated inside the Habitation Module, Diane Williams only had two more minutes before the ANSAT missile reached her orbit. She inserted the keys she had removed from the GPATS’ launching station into the key slots on the top of the keyboard of the Multipurpose Application Console, connected to the central electronic brain of the station.

The screen came up with a list of menus, each containing its own list of submenus and commands. She chose a menu that controlled the station’s rotational verniers. A three-dimensional drawing on the screen showed the ISS’s current attitude with respect to Earth, and also indicated that the station was operating under automatic computer control. She switched to manual, transferring control of the verniers to a joystick controller next to the station.

She then programmed the station to split the large screen in two. The bottom section still displayed the station’s attitude, but the top section now showed a color radar map of the ISS and its surroundings. The resolution was set to 250 miles out, and it showed no sign of the ANSAT yet.

“Houston, ISS. I’m all set, over.”

“All right, ISS,” Jake Cohen responded from Mission Control. “ANSAT is three hundred miles high two hundred ninety miles downrange with a closing velocity of seven hundred miles per hour. It should show on your screen any moment now.”

Diane’s eyes never left the display as she said, “I see you.” The blue dot entered Diane’s range from the east and approached the station at great speed. She estimated another minute to impact.

The fingers of her right hand caressed the plastic surface of the joystick. Her eyes followed the blue dot, blinking its way across the screen.

She waited, knowing she would only have one chance at this. Her military background told her that the radar-controlled ANSAT would home in on the area with the largest mass, namely the core of the station. A direct hit there would certainly destroy the ISS.

The ANSAT got within fifty miles. That was the mark. She moved the joystick to the right, and the station’s rotational verniers responded by firing counterclockwise. She watched the screen as the station’s 3-D drawing began to rotate. Twenty seconds to impact.

The ANSAT was too close to make any large corrections as its electronic brain detected a shift in the relative location of its target’s center of mass. The microprocessor stored inside the missile’s cone ordered the firing of the small attitude control verniers to make a slight adjustment in the flight path, and in another few seconds the missile struck the south section of the boom, near the only functional set of solar panels, over two hundred feet away from any module. The ensuing explosion severed the solar panels in a brief display of orange flames.

Diane was thrown against the food galley, bounced and landed feetfirst against the large panoramic window next to the crew’s recreational station. Her shoulders and back burned. Through the largest and thickest piece of tempered glass ever put in orbit Diane Williams saw the damage as the station rotated clockwise, out of control, but at least in one piece. She had spared the core of the station from a direct hit. However, the blast had sent a powerful electromagnetic pulse through the cables connecting the solar panels to the station’s batteries, shorting them out.

Alarms blared inside the Habitation Module. Red lights, indicating a major power malfunction, flashed at each entrance to the module. Just as suddenly, sparks and smoke spewed from underneath the floor tiles near the Multipurpose Application Console. The bright overheads suddenly went off, replaced by green emergency lights. The computers, sensing that they had lost power from the main batteries, automatically switched to the emergency shutdown program, which began to power down all systems according to a priority sequence.

Stunned but fully conscious, the forty-five-year-old ex-Marine aviator thrust herself through the smoke and sparks and back to the Multipurpose Applications Console, where she snagged the joystick and tried unsuccessfully to stabilize the station. She tried to switch to automatic control, but the system did not respond.

Another alarm began to blare inside the station. Diane recognized its high pulsating pitch: The station was losing pressurization and oxygen. The air pressurization and revitalization system had shut down. At least the station had survived, but it would take a couple of shuttle flights to get it back in shape to support life.

Time to go.

Finding it harder to breathe, her ears beginning to ring from the air-pressure drop, Diane kicked her legs against the MPAC and floated out of the Habitation Module and into Unity. The Soyuz capsule was coupled to the node through a four-foot-long narrow tunnel.