Oath of Office

63

Midshipman Hardy went to Idaho State for two years before he followed through on a dream and gained acceptance to Annapolis. He was considerably older than most midshipmen in his class, but still, being driven up to the side entrance of the White House and ushered past security was enough to make him feel like an excited schoolkid on a field trip to the Smithsonian. Special Agent Marsh waited for the barricades at the northeast gate to the White House to come down. An officer with the Uniformed Division of the Secret Service was expecting them, and waved the Crown Victoria through when Marsh held up the credential card hanging from the lanyard around his neck. Marsh handed both Van Orden and Marsh lanyards of their own, each bearing a badge with a red A, signifying they had an appointment but had to be escorted.

Marsh kept going past the main entrance, parking the sedan at the east end of the circular drive, and led the way down a long walk along what Hardy guessed was the press briefing room. There were no guards on the outside, but they were met by two more officers from the Secret Service Uniformed Division, one standing, another seated at a desk. A sign-in book lay open in front of this one, but Marsh pointed down the hall and the African American officer nodded her head and waved him through. “Hey, Cody,” she said. “Busy day.”

“You’re tellin’ me,” Marsh said.

Hardy had seen photographs of the White House, and plenty of movies and television shows like National Treasure and The West Wing—but he was most surprised at how low the ceilings were. Everyone from staffers to the Secret Service U.D. officers spoke in solemn tones. Rich carpeting and antique furniture gave it a reverent, museum quality, what seemed like a palace on film was much smaller, almost to the point of feeling cramped. Historic paintings by Terpning, Bierstadt, and Remington graced the walls. There were even some sketches by Norman Rockwell depicting a visit to the White House, but other than the official portraits of the President and the Vice President like the ones hanging in The Yard, there were none of the Commander in Chief himself.

Marsh turned left at the end of the hall, into a suite of offices crammed full of one too many desks where the President’s secretaries and body man sat. A severe-looking woman peered over the top of her glasses and then nodded at the Secret Service agent.

“Go on in, Cody,” she said. “He’s expecting you.”

“Thanks, Ms. Martin,” Marsh said. He stopped at the door and straightened his tie before leading the way into the Oval Office.

The President of the United States stood from his chair by the fireplace when Hardy and Van Orden stepped into the room. It too was smaller than Hardy imagined, but still big enough to bring more than a little awe. There were others in the room, the secretaries of defense and state, the director of the CIA, the chairman of the joint chiefs, and a couple of others Hardy did not recognize, including a woman who looked to be in her late fifties and sat nearest the President.

“Professor Van Orden,” Ryan said, stepping forward to extend his hand.

That is something, Hardy thought. The most powerful man on the planet and he crosses the room to shake our hands.

“And Midshipman Hardy,” Ryan said. “I’m sure you’re wondering what all this fuss is about.”

“So you two are my resident experts,” President Ryan said after Mary Pat brought the newcomers up to speed with a quick brief. “On the science at least. I want you both to speak freely. Give me your opinions as well as scientific facts — just make sure you make it clear which is which.” He heaved something between a groan and a sigh. “So tell me, how real is this threat proposed by Sahar Tabrizi? What are the odds?”

“If Iran is able to hit the correct satellite,” Van Orden said, “what Dr. Tabrizi calls ‘Crux,’ then the odds of a cascading effect are high. She is a gifted physicist. Her theories as well as Kessler’s are sound.”

“If I may, Mr. President,” the secretary of defense asked.

Ryan nodded.

“How quickly would this debris from Tabrizi’s Crux affect the remainder of our satellites in low earth orbit?”

Van Orden turned to Hardy.

“My father is a police officer,” the midshipman said, making Ryan like the kid even more. “His ballistic vest is made of Kevlar, but the steel shock plate over his heart and lungs is covered in material to prevent spalling. If a bullet were to hit a metal shock plate that was not coated and angled correctly, then spalling occurs. Metal fragments are sent flying off the plate and become just as deadly to my dad as the original projectile. Even a glancing missile strike on a satellite would create a great deal of debris. I’m sure you’ve all seen what a particle the size of a grain of sand can do to the window of the Space Station.”

Everyone in the room gave a solemn nod.

Van Orden took up the conversation. “There are almost eight hundred satellites in low earth orbit, including some for communications such as satellite telephones, ISR, and the International Space Station, and others. Some of them small cubes just a few inches across. Others weigh several tons and are the size of a bus.” He turned to Hardy, giving him the floor to continue.

“We track over eighty-five hundred bits of debris — space junk if you will — that are larger than ten centimeters. China used a kinetic kill vehicle to take out one of their own weather satellites in 2007, creating over two thousand pieces larger than a golf ball. Some estimates put the pieces of junk over two millimeters but too small to track at more than a million. To put that in perspective, a .22-caliber bullet is 5.56 millimeters. Space, even low earth orbit, is a very large place, but the odds of catastrophic damage rise exponentially.” Hardy paused, then said, “With each successive satellite creating more and more bits of debris, each traveling at seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour, it wouldn’t take too many days to create a ring that would make low earth orbit a very unfriendly environment.”

Van Orden nodded in assent. “And that does not address what would occur when the orbit of that debris starts to decay. Much of it would burn up on reentry, but a significant portion would fall back to earth — right on top of us.”

Foley raised her fountain pen. “Since reentry would burn up many of the pieces, would not a nuclear detonation do the same thing?”

“A kinetic kill would be better if their aim is to create more debris,” the midshipman said.

Burgess said, “Then we have to assume they were just after the guidance system on the missiles. It wouldn’t be difficult to leave the warhead unarmed. PALs should render it incapable of detonation even during a direct, head-on engagement.”

A PAL, or permissive action link, was a security system designed to keep a nuclear device from blowing up except when positive actions were taken. As one nuclear weapons expert put it, “bypassing a PAL should be about as complex as performing a tonsillectomy while entering the patient from the wrong end.”

“So what do we do about a kinetic kill vehicle?” Arnie van Damm asked.

Hardy gave a solemn nod. “My friends and I worked through this,” he said. “You can move a satellite a couple of different ways. Some of them have solar antennas. We could deploy those and move the bird with solar radiation pressure — sort of like wind on a kite.”

“Too slow,” Van Orden said. “A missile with any guidance system at all would merely reacquire.”

“True,” Hardy said.

“Can’t you just move it?” Foley asked.

“You could,” Hardy said. “A lot of satellites require periodic boosts to maintain their orbit. We could boost its orbit to take it higher temporarily.”

“Just temporarily?” van Damm asked.

Hardy nodded. “That’s correct, sir.” Hardy and Van Orden began to talk between themselves, running numbers and scenarios.

Ryan interrupted. “But we can move it?”

“We can, Mr. President,” Van Orden said. He muttered what to Ryan sounded like strange incantations about pi and vis viva, and orbital decay, while preforming calculations in his head. He looked at his protégé. “A point-five-degree flight path change…”

Midshipman Hardy, who’d been working through the same mental calculations, finished the professor’s thought: “…would mean movement in tens of meters from the original location.”

“So,” Ryan said, “what you’re saying is, we put on the brakes and the missile flies right by?”

“What?” Van Orden said, missing the Top Gun reference.

Hardy nodded. “Essentially, yes, Mr. President. As long as the missile didn’t reacquire, then it would continue past, eventually falling back to earth.”

“Okay,” Ryan said. “Nuclear or kinetic, we still have a major problem. So let’s have it.”

“Pardon?” Van Orden said.

“Crux,” Ryan said. “The satellite Dr. Tabrizi talks about in her theory. We can’t move it until we know which one it is?”

Van Orden and Hardy looked at each other, then at the President.

The professor spoke first. “We believe there are five that would work,” he said.

Hardy added, “Maybe as many as nine. And that’s just talking about ours.”