Stephen Coonts - Combat

“Five minutes,” Scarelli warned, and Baker and Tillman both acknowledged. Ray and Barnes both watched silently as the specialists worked.

Tillman reported “Imaging first target,” and activated her radar. The millimeter-wave signal easily found the Xichuan space center, a cluster of large buildings. Ray selected the radar display, and studied the buildings. They’d seen it before in satellite photographs, and he quickly picked out the administration buildings, the control center, the powerhouse, and the other structures. The image was clear enough to show the chain-link fence that surrounded the compound.

Baker designated his rods, and Ray saw three small symbols appear over the control center, and two more on the antennas. “Ready for drop,” he reported.

“Drop on the mark,” Barnes ordered calmly.

“Roger, in ten,” the weapons officer replied, and then counted the seconds down. “Dropping now.”

Ray saw his board change but felt nothing.

The rods were not as noisy or complex as the laser. Each simply consisted of a long, pointed tungsten cylinder weighing fifty kilograms, with a small motor and finned guidance unit on the back. Springs ejected them in quick sequence from their rack in Defender ’s bay, and McConnell watched the stream drift clear of the ship.

As fast as the rods had been ejected, their individual motors fired, driving them down toward the earth and reentry. The tungsten projectile would easily withstand the heat, and was aerodynamically shaped. The guidance unit would burn up, but by then they’d be aligned on their target, and with so much speed that nothing would deflect them.

Xichuan was still several hundred miles ahead of them, but of course the rods needed that time to cover the distance to the ground. It also made it difficult for the Chinese to predict where the attack would strike. If they could even see Defender . The ship was approaching from the north, where Chinese radar coverage was limited.

“Five minutes to next target,” Baker announced.

The call came over a standard phone line, not the command net. General Shen Xuesen took the receiver from the communications chief.

“General, this is Wu Lixin.” Shen knew the man. He was one of Dong’s assistants at the control center. He sounded absolutely shattered.

“Wu, what’s happened?”

“They bombed us, sir. Dong is dead, and so are most of the staff. The center’s gone, ripped apart.”

“Bombs. Was it an air attack?”

“No, no airplane, nothing was seen. No planes, no missiles.”

The general felt his heart turn to ice. It had to be Defender . So the detonation hadn’t hurt them at all. They were still capable.

Shen looked at their predicted orbit. She was moving from north to south, and …

“Out! Everybody outside right now! Head for the shelters!” he turned to the comm chief. “Get the gun crews out as well.” Theoretically, the gun and the control bunkers were hardened, but Xichuan’s control center had been hardened as well.

There was no way to tell when, or even if, an attack would happen, but Shen wasn’t risking his people’s lives. The instant he saw everyone in the center moving, he headed for the door himself.

He sprinted outside, intending to head for one of the slit trenches that had been dug nearby, but he had made it no more than a dozen steps before the explosions started.

It wasn’t from behind him, but from the mountain, to his right. He turned just a little and saw a series of bright yellow explosions ripple over the gun’s location. Earth spouted into the air hundreds of feet, and he could feel the concussions from over a kilometer away.

At least three deadly flowers blossomed at the base of the gun, right over the breech. Another four or five landed in a neat line on top of the barrel, and another three clustered closely around the muzzle. In the darkness, the mountain was outlined for several seconds by the flash from the explosions.

One of the first group must have found the liquid-propellant piping, because the entire building suddenly disintegrated in a ball of orange flame. Pieces of debris arced high into the air, and Shen suddenly found himself running again, diving headfirst into the trench as pieces of cement, steel, and rock began raining down on him.

The deadly rain stopped, and Shen untangled himself from the others who had sought shelter with him in the trench. Reluctantly, he knelt, and then stood, a little unsteadily. Knowing and hating what he would see, he nonetheless had to find out what they’d done to his gun.

The breech building was gone, replaced by a crater filled with flaming debris. Most of the installation had been below ground, and the crater had carved a massive gouge out of the mountain’s roots.

The slope of the mountain looked almost untouched, but a line of craters neatly followed the path of the gun barrel, and the mouth was hidden in a mound of loose rock.

Five years of work. Ten years of convincing. Twenty years of dreaming, all lost. His friend Dong was dead, with many of China’s brightest dead with him. How many bodies would they find just in the ruins below?

Shen realized others were trying to help him out of the trench. Passively, he let them lift him out and steady him on the grass. He turned automatically to head for the center, and saw it was in ruins, flames outlining the ruined walls. He hadn’t even heard the explosions.

It was finished. Shen was suddenly very sorry he’d lived.

With most of their fuel used up, they’d made one small burn to line up for reentry after two more orbits. With nothing to do but wait, Ray felt his sensation of unreality return. His mind and emotions sought to understand this new experience.

They’d fought and won a battle in space. He’d played a role, a major one, in making it happen, but he knew he wasn’t the only one. More importantly, others would follow after him. Not all would be Americans, maybe not all of them would be friends, but warfare had changed, as it always does.

Biff Barnes checked the displays over and over again, looking for the smallest fault, but the ship was performing well. Reentry was now only a few minutes away. Scarelli and Skeldon were handling the preparations perfectly.

For some reason Barnes was having problems trying to determine how he would fill out his personal flight log. Would the T’ien Lungs count as “kills”? Three more to become an “orbital ace”? He suspected there would be more missions after this one.

That thought led to another, and he started to make a mental list of improvements Defender would need before she flew again.

Jenny Oh fought hard to keep her emotions under control. Her first cheer, when Defender had destroyed the first T’ien Lung, had been followed by another when they’d escaped the second kill vehicle. Her heart had leapt to her throat when she saw the symbols for Defender and the kill vehicle merge, and then soared when they’d said all were safe.

And that had been followed by the destruction of the Dragon Gun at Gongga Shan. They’d watched it all on Defender ’s imaging radar, data-linked down to the Center. The sudden transformation of the neat structural shapes to rubble had been unmistakable, and she’d yelled as loud as any of them. It was the success of everything they’d worked so hard for. Defender had proven herself.

Jenny had looked over at Admiral Schultz, who sat quietly, his head in his hands. He stayed that way, aware but silent, for some time. After the celebration stopped, he’d left, then come back later, in time to watch the reentry. He slowly walked over to Jenny’s station, checking his watch as he approached.