With the new job came a third star. He rose in seniority over forty or fifty general officers in the air force, not the best way to make friends among the senior-officer corp. Friends told him it was a guaranteed stepping stone to four stars and a major air force or unified command. The old luck had returned in spades.
Thomas found the job exhilarating. He felt renewed after years in the bureaucratic trenches, fighting narrowly focused air force budget battles. He was a big-picture man. The world he and Secretary Alexander now faced was startlingly different from the unparalleled drama, breathtaking euphoria, and plain giddiness that gripped the planet early in the decade. Ice-cold reality had hammered home with a vengeance. The epochal upheavals in the world’s supposedly rigid power structure left everyone breathless and cultivated a breeding ground for international mischief.
In retrospect, that wonderful period in American history had been an aberration. It started with the brilliant Desert Storm victory romp through Kuwait and Iraq. The Soviet Union had been relegated to a bit player, a helpless onlooker, struggling to stay in one piece. The United States had emerged as the undisputed master of the universe. After years of procrastination, the START I treaty was successfully negotiated and later amended by START II for even deeper reductions. The treaties promised massive cuts in the superpower nuclear arsenals, the first ever. Conventional forces were dissolving on both sides of the quickly forgotten Iron Curtain. Fledgling democratically elected governments in Eastern Europe struggled for life, but the atmosphere was electric. Anything seemed possible. Even the bankrupt and beaten Soviets — now Russians — appeared on the tortuous road to real economic reform and the beginnings of some sort of democracy. The once frightening prospect for a major East/West confrontation was proscribed from acceptable Washington cocktail party chitchat, and the threat of a nuclear showdown ranked up there with the probability of a comet striking the earth. Even the antinuclear movement gave up the ghost, convinced that mankind was on the golden road to reason and universal nuclear disarmament. The Cold War was clearly over; the ranting of a few surviving anticommunist curmudgeons in the Capitol was no matter. Their days were numbered.
Then the clumsy Soviet coup attempt by Stalinist dreamers momentarily turned the world on its head. At first it seemed as if the clock had been instantly rolled back ten years. Faceless Soviet hard-liners made ridiculous pronouncements that presaged an instant return to the Cold War. Battered Marxist/Leninist holdout regimes around the world cheered, but just as quickly the hapless conspirators were behind bars. The party was disgraced, and the military ran for cover, wearing their apparent indifference to the plotters as a sign of fidelity. The abortive coup unleashed decades of pent-up resentment and hatred, accelerating the Soviet state dismemberment to breakneck speed.
The triumphant reformers turned to dismantling the Kremlin-centered power structure overnight. The stated goal was a loose confederation of sovereign states with all the trappings, but the result was a ridiculous hodgepodge of squabbling ethic groups that could never get their collective act together. The experiment was doomed from the start, despite the forced shows of mutual support by all the key players and bold pronouncements giving birth to the new Commonwealth.
Over time, the miraculous transformation had collapsed, despite the heroic efforts of the popularly elected Russian president. The sick, socialist economy, originally in a tailspin, crashed and burned and never recovered. That’s when Nikolai Laptev came on the scene. The disgraced reformers had been discredited by empty shelves and a bone-weary population that craved stability at any price. With Laptev, they got it.
Like following a bad script, the State Department launched repeated fresh diplomatic initiatives to calm the turbulent seas. The military fell back on the tried and true — aggressively pushing exotic weapons systems and exploiting the United States’ technological edge to the hilt. In reality, no one had the foggiest notion how to approach this mysterious, ultranationalist beast led by Nikolai Laptev.
Laptev rode a wave of recrimination, hate, and nationalist fervor. His Liberal Democratic Party controlled the State Duma, and Laptev controlled the coveted presidency, much to the horror of the West. At first, they had tried to ignore the man, as they had when he blustered and raved as leader of the opposition in the Duma, passing off his more egregious and outrageous ranting as political food for local consumption. But eventually the clearer heads realized they would have to deal with the man. Doing so had proven nearly impossible. The vitriolic native of Saint Petersburg held sway over a disillusioned and desperate Russian people. The irony was not lost on Thomas — a democratically elected neo-fascist armed with thousands of nuclear weapons. Time would tell what Nikolai Laptev had in mind. Until then, the West, led by the United States, stumbled, loath to fully engage the despicable Russian president, but terrified of the alternative. The constant, gut-wrenching tension didn’t make for sound foreign policy.
Thomas rubbed the back of his neck. He thought again of Project Shooting Star. When it came to operational security, he was a born cynic. He’d seen more than one plan screwed up by overconfidence and both hardware and lives lost. Not to mention careers. Lingering doubts played on Thomas’s mind. He prayed they had played this one right.
CHAPTER 5
Mission Control was at full throttle when Thomas arrived a few minutes after nine. If Morgan and his boys pulled this off, it would rank as one of the most remarkable technological achievements of the century.
The first hurdle was positioning Discovery precisely in space. The mission director, an air force lieutenant colonel, was hunched over a console near the center of the room, looking over a young female captain’s shoulder. He was responsible for the whole show, and it had already been a long day. The bright computer graphics depicted the orbital track of the shuttle, shown in magenta, against a beautifully animated earth imprisoned within a black latitudinal and longitudinal grid.
Thomas walked over. The director had been forewarned that the secretary’s aide would be present on the floor.
“Good morning, General Thomas. Looks good so far. Take a peek here, sir,” he said, tapping the screen. “They should be in position in about fifty minutes.”
The boyish-looking colonel tapped a spot on the CRT where the distinct orbital trace crossed the Pacific Ocean a few hundred miles west of the North American continent. Thomas studied the screen but wondered if he had looked that young as a light colonel.
Over the Pacific Ocean, 170 nautical miles above the earth, the space shuttle Discovery prepared for her final approach for the last orbital burn. Absolute precision was the watchword.
Like bleachers filling before a basketball game, VIPs began to gather in a glass-enclosed spectator gallery above the CSOC Mission Control. From their comfortable chairs the brass had a perfect view of oversized high-definition video screens, which covered the entire front wall thirty yards away. The off-white panels were driven by customized graphics processors assisted by the CSOC’s stable of powerful computers. Live video was also pumped in for everyone’s enjoyment. The system was state of the art, providing a dazzling showcase for computer technologies just beginning to filter into the DoD world. The CSOC had been fortunate to piggyback on the National Test Bed’s proclivity to procure only the finest hardware for their extensive war-gaming simulations.