Stephen Coonts - Combat

All that work, all that money, to put a ten-pound warhead in orbit. More like a shotgun shell, the explosive fired a cone of fragments at the unarmored satellite. Filled with atomic clocks and delicate electronics, it didn’t have a hope of surviving the explosion. The carcass would remain in its orbit, intact, but pocked with dozens of small holes.

In fact, the kill was almost an anticlimax. After all the work of getting the vehicle up there, it was over far too quickly.

“We just lost GPS,” reported the navigator. “Switching to inertial tracker.” The navigator, an Air Force major, sounded concerned but not alarmed.

“Is it the receiver?” asked the mission commander. A full colonel, it was his job to manage the information gathered by the ELINT, or Electronic Intelligence, aircraft. Running racetracks off the China coast, it listened for radar and radio signals, analyzing their contents and fixing their location. The digested information was datalinked directly back to Joint Task Force Headquarters.

“Self-test is good, sir, and the receiver is still picking up satellites, but we just lost one of the signals, and now we’re outside our error budget.” Each satellite over the minimum required narrowed the area of uncertainty around a transmitter’s location. GPS was accurate enough to target some missiles directly, or give pilots a good idea of where to search for their objective.

“So we’ve lost another one,” muttered the colonel.

The sub’s Operations Officer knocked on the captain’s open door. “Sir, they’ve lost another one.” He handed the priority message to the skipper. It detailed the loss and showed how coverage was affected for their patrol area.

The captain looked over the printout. “Have you compared this with our navigation plan?”

“Yes, sir. We have to change one of our planned fix times. It falls in one of the new ‘dark windows.’ We can move it ahead two hours or back six.”

The captain scowled, more than one might think appropriate for a minor inconvenience. But ballistic missile subs had to come up to periscope depth periodically to check their navigation systems’ accuracy. A few meters of error at the launch point could be hundreds of times that at the target.

When the full GPS constellation had been operational, the captain could take a fix anytime he chose. Now there were times he couldn’t. That made him less flexible, more predictable, and thus easier to find. He really didn’t like that.

“Move it up,” ordered the captain. “Let’s take a fix before they lose any more birds. And draw up a new schedule reducing the interval between fixes.”

“With the loss of another satellite, emotions at the Fiftieth Space Operations Wing have changed from grim or angry to fatalistic.” Mark Markin, INN’s defense correspondent, stood in front of the gate to Cheyenne Mountain. The Fiftieth’s operations center was actually located at Schriver Air Force Base nearby, but the drama of the mountain’s tunnel entrance was preferable to Schriver’s nondescript government buildings.

Markin wore a weather-beaten parka, zipped up against the chill Colorado wind. His carefully shaped hair was beginning to show the effects of the wind as well, and he seemed to rush through his report in an effort to get out of the weather.

“Although it is widely acknowledged that loss of the GPS satellites is no fault of the people here at the Fiftieth, they are still suffering a deep sense of helplessness.

“Since the GPS network became active in 1989, it has become almost a public utility. The men and women here took pride in providing a service that not only gave the U.S. armed forces a tremendous military advantage, but benefited the civilian community in countless ways.

“Now, someone, possibly the Chinese, but certainly an enemy of the United States, has destroyed at least three and possibly as many as five satellites. Yesterday’s loss shows that last week’s attack was not an isolated act.

“And the United States can do nothing to stop it.”

Jim Avrell had gone to only a few of Ray’s gatherings. His “discussion groups” were famous throughout SPAWAR, and were always worthwhile. Although Arvell would have liked to go, two preschoolers and another on the way limited his free time.

Tonight, though, he’d made the time. In fact, his wife Carol had urged him to go. After he’d described Ray’s sudden leave of absence and the rumors from the other coworkers, she’d urged him to go and get the straight story.

Avrell was an antenna design specialist in Ray’s working group. He knew and liked the outgoing engineer, even if McConnell could be a little fierce in technical “discussions.” He was worried about their project, which was suffering in Ray’s absence, and about Ray himself. With the brass so upset about GPS, it was no time for Ray to play “missing person.”

The car’s nav console prompted, “Turn left here,” and he signaled for the turn onto Panorama Drive. It had been over a year since he had visited Ray’s place, that time with Carol at a reception for a visiting astronaut. That had been an occasion.

But nothing like this. As he made the turn, Avrell saw the street almost completely lined with cars. This was definitely not typical for a quiet residential community. Avrell ended up parking a block away.

As he hurried up the path, he heard the expected hubbub, but Ray didn’t meet him at the door, and everyone wasn’t in the living room. A group of four men huddled around a coffee table there, and he could see another clustered in the kitchen. McConnell appeared out of the one of the bedroom doors, hurrying. He looked tired.

“Jim Avrell! It’s great to see you.” Genuine pleasure lit up Ray’s face, but there was a distracted air to it. And surprise.

Avrell saw no point in dissembling. “Ray, what’s going on over here? You haven’t been at work …”

“I’ve got bigger fish to fry, Jim. Promise you won’t tell anyone what’s going on here? Unless I OK it?”

“Well, of course.”

Ray looked at him intently. “No, Jim, I mean it. You can’t tell anyone. Treat this as classified.”

Avrell studied McConnell carefully, then agreed. “I promise not to tell anyone what I see here.” He fought the urge to raise his right hand.

McConnell seemed to relax a little, and smiled again. “You’ll understand in a minute, Jim.” He called over to the group at the coffee table. “I’ll be right there.”

One of them, whom Avrell recognized as Avrim Takir, a mathematician from the work group, answered. “Fine, Ray. We need another ten minutes, anyway.” Takir spotted Avrell and waved, but quickly returned his attention to the laptop in front of him.

McConnell led his coworker down the hall into his home office. Ray’s desk was piled high with books and disk cases and printouts. The center display, another Image Wall mounted above the desk, showed an isometric design for an aircraft — no, a spacecraft, Avrell realized.

Used to polished CAD-CAM designs where they worked, he was surprised. This one was crude. Some of it was fully rendered in 3-D space, but parts of it were just wireframes. At least one section was a two-dimensional image altered to appear three-dimensional.

“ Defender isn’t pretty, but we’re a little pressed for time,” McConnell declared. He had the air of a proud parent.

Avrell, surprised and puzzled, studied the diagram, which filled the four-by-eight display. Data tables hovered in parts of the screen not covered by the vehicle. He started tracing out systems: propulsion; communications; weapons? He shot a questioning look at McConnell.