Siege of Lightning

PROLOGUE

Bathed in the soft ruddy glow of an autumn sunset, the Russian cargo spacecraft Progress VI trembled as the engines of its four strap-on boosters and central core ignited with the thundering roar of thousands of gallons of highly pressurized kerosene reacting with liquid oxygen, unleashing a combined thrust of 400,000 pounds against the flame-deflector pit.

Engulfed in a pillar of blaze and smoke, the rocket hesitated for a few seconds as the monumental upward drive fought the gravitational force pulling down on its 300,000-pound mass, until slowly the unmanned ferry gained the momentum necessary to achieve lift-off. The four “tulip” stabilizer arms, cradling the three-stage rocket over the concrete stand, fell back to their retracted position through the action of counterweights as the deafening RD-107 engines thrust the craft clear of the launchpad.

On-board computers issued hundreds of commands per second to the attitude-control boosters to keep the ferry from drifting off course as the launch vehicle broke through the sound barrier in forty-five seconds.

Leaving a long billowing trail of smoke, the boosters fired for another eighty seconds before separating from the central core, which continued to fire as the second stage for an additional two hundred seconds.

Forty seconds into second-stage firing, the abort rockets on the shroud tower ignited and the protective third-stage shroud separated into two halves along its longitudinal axis, exposing the spacecraft inside.

At an altitude of ninety miles, the second stage separated, and the RD-461 third-stage booster kicked into life with a final thrust of sixty thousand pounds for 240 seconds, injecting Progress VI into an east-to-west elliptical orbit 150 miles in perigee and 310 in apogee. The flight plan called for the spacecraft to remain in the orbit for seven hours and fifteen minutes, after which Progress VI’s main engine would start the first of three orbital burns to approach Space Station Mir.

The Olympus 6-F8 oceanography studies satellite continued its low-Earth orbit of 150 miles with an inclination of eighty-two degrees while performing a surface-imaging survey of the water off the Venezuelan coast. Its central processing unit temporarily switched tasks in response to a priority-one signal sent from a tracking station in French Guiana.

The signal ordered the processor to run a one-time algorithm, which would erase itself from memory after execution, programmed to jettison a cylindrical-shaped white object that had remained concealed since the satellite’s launch several months back.

The five-hundred-pound cylinder did not house any of the infrared and microwave imaging gear that filled most of the parent satellite. Aside from six tubular solid-propellant rockets around its one-foot diameter, a homing sensor, and a transponder radio, the five-foot-long object contained three hundred pounds of HEP, High Explosive Plastic, connected to a fuse with a brief time delay. The radar-absorbing fluorocarbon resins coating the entire cylinder made it nearly invisible to its creators as well as to the Russian tracking stations controlling Progress VI.

The rockets fired, propelling the cylinder into a highly elliptical two-hundred-by-three-thousand-mile orbit, but the cylinder never reached its apogee. It never even came close. As the accelerating object reached its maximum velocity, its homing unit detected Progress VI in its own orbit one thousand miles away.

The high-speed chase did not last long. Traveling at nearly thirty thousand miles per hour, the cylinder closed the gap in minutes and struck the rear section of the Russian craft with a relative velocity of five thousand miles per hour. On hitting the target, the cylinder fractured and its explosive filling spread like a pancake around the Russian craft, detonating a split second later. Stress waves propagated along the length of the craft, sending hundreds of metal fragments traveling around the interior of Progress VI at lightning speed, and puncturing the liquid oxygen and kerosene fuel cells housed in the rear.

On-board impact sensors registered the attack but were unable to transmit the data to Earth. The blast that followed dwarfed the initial explosion. Thousands of gallons of propellant and liquid oxygen ignited creating an inferno that lasted only a few seconds, but long enough to destroy Progress VI.

The operator sitting behind the green CRT display read the Orbital Termination message flashing on the top left-hand corner of the screen. The message marked the end of the drone satellite’s transponder radio signal, indicating that the drone had been successful in reaching its target and detonating.

The operator shifted his gaze to the circular radar screen to his left and verified that the Russian craft had disappeared from the display. Satisfied, he continued processing the surface images collected by the Olympus satellite.