“It’s in a low polar orbit. Period about ninety minutes.” Mills flipped pages in a red-covered pub titled Draft Tactics for Engaging Ballistic and Orbital Targets, then riffed on his keyboard. “NORAD catalog number 20404, for what it’s worth. And ephemeris data. But that doesn’t tell us what it is.”
Dan reread the order. Acquire, track, and prepare to engage. A polar-orbiting body, or technically speaking, a ninety-degree inclination orbit, moved north to south, or south to north, while the earth rotated beneath it. The item they were directed to look for circled the globe every hour and a half. So that over twenty-four hours, it crossed over, or at least within reasonable slant range of, every point on the planet.
The ideal orbit for a reconnaissance satellite, whether its sensors be cameras, radars, or something more sophisticated, like the far-infrared detectors of the Obsidian Glint early-launch warning satellites. “It’s a recon bird?” he asked anyone who cared to answer.
“That’d be my guess.” Noblos settled into a seat on the far side of the CIC officer. He wore civilian slacks, a Savo Island light blue nylon running jacket, and a soft wool cap. “In a low polar orbit? Probably synthetic aperture radars, for ocean recon. Like our Lacrosse series.”
Mills added, “But all we actually have is object number and orbital parameters.”
“Could be some kind of comm relay,” Wenck put in.
“Doubtful,” said Noblos. “They put those in a synchronous orbit, so they’re always over the same spot.”
Dan lifted his eyebrows. Was it really possible they were being asked to acquire a satellite? “Uh, how long to acquisition? Until it’s overhead?”
Wenck said patiently, “By then it’s too late to do anything about it. We gotta hop on it the second it pops over the horizon, clears atmospheric lensing effects.”
“All right, and how long is that?”
“That’s gonna be”—Wenck peered past Terranova—“two minutes, fifteen seconds.”
Dan sat back, reviewing the order. It was to acquire and, yes, “prepare to engage.” The SPY-1 output was focused into a narrow, coherent beam by the phased arrays. The octagonal antenna faces were made up of dozens of radiating elements. Since waves from nearby sources interfered with each other, shifting the phase of the signals pointed the beams left, right, up, and down, within certain stops imposed by the physics of interference phenomena. To detect something as small, as fast, and as far away as their target, the beam had to be both extremely narrow and aimed exacty where it would appear. Like trying to track a fastball with a laser pointer… you had to start with the laser on the ball the moment it left the pitcher’s hand.
He twisted in his seat, fighting the urge to go over and kibitz. “Donnie, Terror, we set to acquire?”
“Not yet, Captain.” Wenck was busy on the Dell laptop that connected to the Aegis console by a cable, an arrangement that had always struck Dan as absurdly ad hoc. But, hey, off the shelf was popular… regardless of whether it was milspec, shock-hardened, or EMP-protected. The chief frowned at his screen. “Getting an error message. Fuck.”
“What kind of error message?” Dan asked him.
“Delta AM on the array face. Hot weather like this, you get thermal distortion on the edges of the array faces.”
“You can tune for that,” Noblos observed. “Apply a bias correction factor. Haven’t you been doing that?” He dragged his stool noisily to the console, where he was soon deep in the weeds with Wenck, Terranova, and the assistant SPY-1 petty officer.
Dan knitted his fingers, getting apprehensive. At the tremendous speed this thing was moving, much faster than the suborbital projectiles they’d engaged to date, they had to take it head-on. Otherwise the Block 4 just wasn’t fast enough; its target would zip past unharmed as the seeker fell back into the thermosphere, ablated, and burned.
But he couldn’t, not with two minutes to set up. They might acquire, but they couldn’t fire on this first pass. Ninety minutes from now was the soonest they’d be set, when it came around again.
“And… there it is,” Noblos announced drily. “Be sure to log that correction. That’s the tweak you need when the array gets unevenly heated. We saw a lot of that at the test site in Kwaj.”
“Target acquired. Designate…” The petty officer’s voice trailed off. There was no proword for “satellite.” “Uh, Satellite Alfa.”
Wenck muttered, “Man, this thing is struttin’. Look at that range gate. Five miles a second. That’s… eighteen thousand miles an hour. And the cross section fluctuates, fuck’s with that?”
“Maybe rotating,” Terranova suggested.
“A recon bird, rotating? Probably just the antennas changing their angle to us.”
No one said anything for several seconds, as Wenck or maybe Terranova turned up the audio on the signal going out. For some reason the unsteady, low-frequency rattle sounded eerie today. “Okay,” Wenck muttered. “Noodge the range gate a little more… got it. No, wait, lost it… lock on. Intermittent. This thing’s really fucking small. And it’s way out there, slant range four hundred miles… out of engagement range on this pass, anyway.”
“Put it on the screen,” Mills said.
It came up, not video but the range gate brackets, vibrating as usual, clamped around the contact, and the data readouts flickering, and at the bottom of the display a blank black area that Dan guessed was the sea horizon. He leaned back again.
Object 02-4064 was a recon bird. Most likely Chinese. It made sense to take it out, if a war was starting. But no one had ever shot down another country’s satellite. Only their own, falling out of orbit, or in tests of the few antisatellite interceptors that had ever existed. Reaching out to this one was going to be at the very outside envelope of Block 4’s and Aegis’s capabilities. In a sense, it was astonishing he could even consider trying.
He remembered how impressed he’d been, back at the start of his career, at how far out the old Reynolds Ryan’s dual-purpose five-inch 38s could reach. Now their eighteen-thousand-yard range seemed laughable, primeval…
…No, goddamn it. He pinched his cheek painfully, catching a doubtful glance from the CIC officer. He’d gotten maybe four hours a night, going through the Singapore Strait, alert for air strikes or the lurking submarine, maybe a sub-laid mine. What had he been thinking about… oh yeah. That no one had ever shot down another country’s satellite. Would it be an act of war? Did anyone even bother to declare war anymore? Maybe the whole idea was passé, like dueling.
Okay, time to let everybody know what was going on. He picked up the red phone and waited for the sync. The comm problem, whatever it had been, had gone away, or been fixed; anyway, the circuit didn’t squeal, just synced smoothly. The tasking message had come from Pacific Command, but Strike One and Fleet would be monitoring too, and logging the conversation for history. Alert for any more Dan Lenson screwups… He said slowly and clearly, “PaCom, this is Savo Island, over.” On covered nets, there was usually no need to use call signs, though sometimes you did, depending on what the SOP directed.
A hiss, a crackle. “Savo, this is PaCom. Over.”
“Savo Island Actual. In respect of your order to track and prep to engage NORAD catalog 20404, low polar orbital object 02-4064. Over.”