Now it was time to fly for himself and not the mission, the pilot reminded himself. He brought back the throttles slowly, carefully, and at the same time started a slight left bank. The bank helped decrease lift and bleed off excessive speed, and would also help bring the nose down without subjecting the crew to negative G-forces. The pressure began to subside, making it a bit easier to breathe — or was it just because their part of the mission was…?
The pilot lost concentration just for a split second, but that was enough. At the moment he let a single degree of sideslip creep in, the fighter flew through the disrupted supersonic air created by the big missile’s exhaust tail, and airflow through the left engine was nearly cut off. One engine coughed, sputtered, and then began to scream as fuel continued to pour into the burner cans but the hot exhaust gases were no longer being pushed out.
With one engine running and the other on fire, with not enough air to restart the stalled engine, the MiG-31 launch aircraft was doomed. But the missile it fired performed flawlessly.
Fifteen seconds after the first-stage motor ignited, it separated from the missile and the second-stage motor fired. Speed and altitude climbed quickly. Soon the missile was at five hundred miles above Earth, flying at over three thousand miles per hour, and the second-stage motor separated. Now the third stage remained. High above the atmosphere, it needed no control surfaces to maneuver, instead relying on tiny nitrogen-gas thrusters for maneuvering. A radar in the nose of the third stage activated and began looking at a precise spot in space, and a second later it locked onto its quarry.
The missile didn’t have enough speed to begin orbiting the Earth, so as soon as the second stage separated it began its long fall, but it didn’t need to orbit: like an atmospheric anti-tank missile, it was falling in a ballistic path toward a computed point in space where its quarry would be in mere seconds. The predicted path, programmed well before launch by ground controllers, was soon verified by on-board targeting computers: the target’s orbit had not changed. The intercept was just as planned.
Twenty seconds before impact, the third stage deployed a fifty-yard-wide circular composite net — well above the atmosphere, the net was unaffected by air pressure and stayed round and solid even though traveling several thousand miles an hour. The net was an insurance policy against a near-miss…but this time, it didn’t need it. With the third stage solidly locked onto the target, and with very little need for hard jarring maneuvering because of the precision of the launch and flight path, the third stage made a direct hit on its intended target.
“Impact, sir,” the technician reported. “No telemetry received from the test article.”
The commanding general in charge, Russian Air Forces chief of staff Andrei Darzov, nodded. “But what about the flight path? Was it affected by the improper launch parameters?”
The technician looked confused. “Uh…no, sir, I do not believe so,” he said. “The launch seemed to go perfectly.”
“I disagree, Sergeant,” Darzov said. He turned to the technician and affixed him with an angry glare. An angry look was bad enough, but Darzov kept his head shaved to best reveal his extensive combat injuries and burns across his head and body, and he looked even more fearsome. “That missile went far off-course, and it may have locked onto an errant satellite by mistake and attacked it.”
“Sir?” the technician asked, confused. “The target…uh, the American Pathfinder space-based surveillance satellite? That was—”
“Was that what we hit, Sergeant?” Darzov asked. “Why, that was not in the flight test plan at all. There has been a horrible mistake, and I will be sure it is investigated fully.” His features softened, he smiled, then clasped the technician’s shoulder. “Be sure to write in your report that the missile went off-course because of a sideslip in the launch aircraft — I will take care of the rest. And the target was not the American SBSS, but our Soyuz target spacecraft inserted into orbit last month. Is that clear, Sergeant?”
CHAPTER ONE
It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.
“Okay, suckers, c’mon and poke your head out — just a little bit,” Captain Hunter “Boomer” Noble muttered. “Don’t be afraid — this won’t hurt a bit.” This was day two of their new patrol, and so far they had squat to show for it except for a persistent headache from watching the sensor monitors for hours at a stretch.
“Hang in there, sir,” Air Force Master Sergeant Valerie “Seeker” Lukas said gaily. “You’re anticipating, and that negative energy only keeps their heads down.”
“It’s not negative energy, Seeker, whatever that is,” Boomer said, rubbing his eyes. “It’s that TV picture — it’s killing me.” Hunter rubbed his eyes. They were staring at a wide-screen high-definition image of a suburban section of the southeast side of Tehran, in what used to be called the Islamic Republic of Iran but was now referred to by many in the world as the Democratic Republic of Persia. The image, shot from a telescopic electro-optical camera mounted aboard a U.S. Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned reconnaissance aircraft orbiting at sixty thousand feet above the city, was fairly steady, but every shake, no matter how occasional, felt like another pinch of sand thrown into Boomer’s eyes.
The two were not sitting at a console in a normal terrestrial combat control center, but in the main battle management module of Armstrong Space Station, positioned two hundred and seventy-five miles above Earth in a forty-seven-degree inclination easterly orbit. Noble and Lukas were among four additional personnel brought aboard to run the U.S. Air Force’s Air Battle Force monitoring and command mission over the Democratic Republic of Persia. Although Boomer was a space veteran with several dozen orbital flights and even a spacewalk to his credit, floating in zero-G staring at a monitor was not what he joined the Air Force for. “How much longer are we on station?”
“Just five more hours, sir,” Lukas said, smiling and shaking her head in mock disbelief when Noble groaned at her reply. Seeker was an eighteen-year U.S. Air Force veteran, but she still looked barely older than she did the day she enlisted in January 1991 when Operation Desert Storm kicked off, and she loved her profession just as much now as she did back then. The images of laser- and TV-guided bombs flying through windows and down ventilator shafts fascinated and excited her, and she started basic training two days after graduating from high school. She joined every high-tech optronic sensor school and course she could find, quickly becoming an all-around expert at remote sensing and targeting systems. “Besides the power plant, environmental, and electronic systems, the most important systems in strategic reconnaissance are patience and an iron butt.”
“I’d rather be out there flying myself,” Boomer said petulantly, readjusting himself yet again on his attachment spot on the bulkhead in front of the large monitor. He was a little taller than the average American astronaut that most of the instruments on the space station were obviously designed for, so he found almost everything on the station just enough of the wrong size, height, or orientation to irk him. Although the twenty-five-year-old test pilot, engineer, and astronaut was a space veteran, most of his time in space had been spent strapped into a nice secure spaceplane seat at the controls, not floating around in zero-G. “All this remote-control stuff is for the birds.”