Stephen Coonts - Combat

“I’ve heard of them,” she answered, nodding, “and of Douglas. Your friend knows him ?” She sounded impressed.

Naguchi replied, “Ray’s got contacts all over.”

Jennifer nodded again, trying to pick up the conversation at the same time.

“ … verified Horace’s report about an hour ago. It was number seventeen, a relatively new bird, but anything mechanical can fail. I normally wouldn’t think it worth more than a note, but then Horace called back and said another one’s gone down as well, and quite soon after the first one.”

“Why was Horace looking at the GPS satellite signals?” McConnell asked.

“Horace collects electronic signals. He’s writing a piece on the GPS signal structure for the next issue of our magazine.”

Ray looked uncertain, even a little worried. “Two failures is a little unusual, isn’t it?” It was a rhetorical question.

Douglas sniffed. “GPS satellites don’t fail, Raymond. You’ve only had two go down since the system was established twenty-five years ago. By the way, both satellites are due over southern China in less than an hour.”

Ray could only manage a “What?” but Douglas seemed to understand his query. “I’m sending you a file with the orbital data for the constellation in it. I’ve marked numbers seventeen and twenty-two. They’re the one’s who’ve failed.” He paused for a moment, typing. “There … you have it now.”

“Thank you, Dave. I’ll get back to you if we can add anything to what you’ve found.” Ray broke the connection, then grabbed his data tablet.

While McConnell worked with the system, speculation filled the conversation. “ … so we turned off two of the birds ourselves. Deny them to the Chinese,” Reeves suggested.

“If so, why only two?” countered Jenny.

“And the most accurate signal’s encrypted anyway,” added Garber.

“The Chinese can only use civilian GPS.”

“Which still gives them an asset they wouldn’t otherwise have,” reminded Reeves.

“Unless the Chinese have broken the encryption,” countered Duvall.

“But we need GPS even more,” said Garber. “It’s not just navigation, it’s weapons guidance and command and control.”

Jennifer added, “All of our aircraft mission planning uses GPS now. If we had to go back, it would be a lot harder to run a coordinated attack. We could never get the split-second timing we can now.”

“Here’s the orbital data,” McConnell announced.

The smaller windows on the Wall all vanished, leaving the map showing southern China and Vietnam. A small bundle of curved lines appeared in the center, then expanded out to fill the map, covering the area with orbital tracks. As Ray moved the cursor on his data pad, the cursor moved on the map. When it rested on a track, a tag appeared, naming the satellite and providing orbital and other data. Two of the tracks were red, not white, and were marked with small boxes with a time in them.

“Where are the satellites right now?” someone asked.

Ray tapped the tablet and small diamonds appeared on all the tracks, showing their current positions.

“Can you move them to where they’d be at local dawn for Hanoi?” suggested Garber.

“And what’s the horizon for those satellites at Mengzi?” Jennifer prompted, pointing to a town just north of the Chinese-Vietnamese border. “That’s one of the places the Chinese are supposed to be massing.”

“Stand by,” answered Ray. “That’s not built in. I’ll have to do the math and draw it.” He worked quickly, and in absolute silence. After about two minutes, an oval drawn in red appeared on the map, centered on the location. Everyone counted, but Ray spoke first. “I count three.”

“ … and you need four for a fix,” finished Naguchi.

“ … and without the GPS, General Hyde had to issue a recall.” The assistant J-3 looked uncomfortable, as only a colonel can look when giving bad news to a room full of four-star generals.

The meeting had originally been scheduled to review results of the first day’s strikes in Operation CERTAIN FORCE. A total of eightythree targets in China had been programmed to be hit by 150 combat aircraft and almost two hundred cruise missiles. It hadn’t happened.

“The gap in coverage was only twenty minutes,” Admiral Kramer complained. “Are we so inflexible that we couldn’t delay the operation until we had full coverage?”

“It would have meant issuing orders to hundreds of units through two levels of command,” answered General Michael Warner. Chief of Staff of the Air Force, it was one of his men, General Tim Hyde, who was Joint Task Force Commander for CERTAIN FORCE. Warner, a slim, handsome man whose hair was still jet-black at sixty, looked more than a little defensive.

“Sounds like ‘set-piece-itis’ to me,” muttered the Army Chief of Staff.

The Chairman, also an Army general, shot his subordinate a “this isn’t helping” look and turned back to Warner. The Air Force, through the Fiftieth Space Operations Wing, operated the GPS satellites.

“Mike, have your people found out anything else since this morning?”

“Only that both birds were functioning within norms. Number seventeen was the older bird. They’d recently fired up the third of her four clocks, but she was in good shape. Number twenty-two was still on her first atomic clock. All attempts to restart them, or even communicate with them, have failed. Imaging from our telescopes shows that they’re still there, but they’re in a slow tumble, which they shouldn’t be doing …”

“And the chance of both of them suffering catastrophic failure is nil,” concluded the Chairman.

“Yes sir. The final straw is that we started warm-up procedures on the two reserve birds twenty-eight and twenty-nine. Or rather, we tried to warm them up. They don’t answer either.”

General Sam Kastner, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was a thinker, more a listener than a speaker, but he knew he had to take firm charge of the meeting. He sighed, knowing the answer before he started, “What about Intelligence?”

The J-2, or Joint Intelligence officer, was a boyish-looking rear admiral. His normal staff was two or three assistants, but this time he had a small mob of officers and civilians behind him. The admiral moved to the podium.

“Sir, the short answer is that we don’t know who did this or how. If we knew who, we could start to guess how they did it. Similarly, knowing how would immediately narrow the list of suspects.

“We know that the DSP infrared satellites detected no launches, and we believe that they also would have detected a laser powerful enough to knock out a GPS bird — although that’s not a certainty,” he added quickly, nodding to an Army officer with a stern expression on his face.

“The Chinese are the most likely actors, of course, but others can’t be ruled out. CIA believes the attack was made by agents on the ground or in cyberspace, but we’ve detected no signs of this at any of the monitoring stations. The Navy believes they’ve adapted their space-launch vehicles for the purpose. Although it’s a logical proposition, we’ve seen no sign of the launch, or the considerable effort it would require. And we track their space program quite closely.”

The frustration in his voice underlined every word. “It’s possible that the Russians or someone else is doing it to assist the Chinese, but there aren’t that many candidates, and we’ve simply seen no sign of activity by any nation, friendly or hostile.” He almost threw up his hands.

“Thank you, Admiral,” replied Kastner. “Set up a Joint Intelligence Task Force immediately. Until we can at least find out what’s being done, we can do nothing, and that includes reliably carry out military operations. Spread your net wide.”