The Kremlin Strike

Ten

Brad McLanahan rapped on the open door of Hunter Noble’s office and then poked his head around the doorjamb. “You called, O mighty wizard of aerospace engineering?”

With a tired nod, Boomer waved him inside. He was on the phone, listening to someone talking fast while he scrawled notes on a crumpled piece of scrap paper. “Yeah, I got it,” he said briskly. Sighing, he hung up and rubbed hard at his eyes. “Man, I feel like a dog that actually caught the car it was chasing.”

“Busy?” Brad asked in sympathy.

“With a capital B,” Boomer said. “We’re landing new contracts with the Pentagon, Poland, and other U.S. allies so fast that it seems like the ink isn’t even dry on the paperwork before the next one hits my damned desk.”

Brad nodded. Barbeau’s administration, always eager to funnel federal defense dollars to favored campaign contributors and equally determined to punish companies it distrusted, had virtually blacklisted Sky Masters for four long years. Now free to compete fairly, without a hostile White House tipping the scales against it, Sky Masters was on a roll — beating out defense industry competitors with new aircraft, weapons, and sensor designs that were astonishingly innovative, cost-effective, and close to operational readiness.

“Anyway, I’d better stop bitching about all our good luck,” Boomer said, ostentatiously crossing his fingers. “Dame Fortune is a fickle lady, after all. No sense in making her mad. The table will go cold soon enough.”

Brad nodded seriously, hiding a smile. In his off-hours, the other man was an avid and successful amateur gambler, with a reputation for winning more than he lost at the big-name casinos in Reno, Lake Tahoe, and Las Vegas. But even the professionals knew there were moments when you caught a winning streak… and times when no amount of skill, intuition, and mathematical genius could affect the outcome. “I sort of figured you called me over here to work through that little flight-planning problem my dad and Martindale dumped in our laps.”

“You figured right.” Boomer shook his head. “But increasing the orbital maneuvering capability of our S-19s and S-29s at four hundred miles above the surface? ‘Little’ isn’t exactly the word I’d choose to describe that kind of challenge.”

“How about… difficult?” Brad suggested.

Boomer snorted. “More like totally freaking impossible.” He leaned over and tapped a few keys on his computer. On the far wall of his office, the large LED screen he used for conferences with his widely scattered engineering teams lit up. “Unfortunately, figuring out how to match the orbital reach of that new Russian heavy-lift launcher is only part of the problem we face if Moscow starts screwing around in space again. Check this out, young Jedi.”

Obediently, Brad swiveled in his chair to study the digital map of the earth the big screen now showed. A series of bright yellow lines across the face of the planet in a sine wave pattern showed the ground track of an orbit inclined at 51.6 degrees. They rose as high as southern Canada and Russia and as low as the southernmost tip of South America.

Boomer pressed another key. Red circles lit up across the territory of both the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, intersecting the projected orbital tracks at several points. Brad narrowed his eyes. “Those are the estimated engagement zones for deployed Russian and Chinese antisatellite weapons, right?”

“You got it in one, Brad,” Boomer said with approval. “Of course, that’s pretty much what I’d expect from General McLanahan’s fair-haired boy.” He nodded at the circles. “Thanks to our friends in Scion, you’re looking at the best available intelligence on where Moscow and Beijing have stationed their S-500 surface-to-air missile regiments. Martindale’s spooks didn’t tell me where this information came from. And since I’m allergic to federal maximum-security prisons, I sure as hell didn’t ask.”

Brad nodded. Over the years, Kevin Martindale’s private military company had regularly obtained highly classified data from U.S. intelligence databases without being detected. Even with an ally in the White House these days, he had a sneaking hunch that Scion analysts still didn’t waste much time making formal requests to their counterparts in the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the CIA, or others. He looked at the map again. “What about Russia’s MiG-31Ds? Do we have any intel on their current status?”

“Ask and you shall receive,” Boomer said graciously. More red circles appeared across southern Russia. These were centered on a network of air bases ranging eastward from Vornezh in the west to Yelizovo Airport on Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in the east. The MiG-31D was a high-altitude, Mach 3–capable fighter. Used in an antisatellite role, MiG-31s could fire Wasp missiles, an air-launched variant of Russia’s Iskander theater ballistic weapons. “See the problem?”

“Yeah, I do. All too damned clearly,” Brad said slowly, staring at the map. Thanks to their S-500 SAMs and MiG-31-launched Wasp missiles, Moscow and Beijing were poised to interdict a huge portion of low Earth orbit, all the way up to two hundred and sixty miles. Any spacecraft or satellite flying through those missile engagement zones was in danger of being shot down — including the S-19 and S-29 spaceplanes their Sky Masters team was working so hard to restore to flight status.

Sure, Sky Masters could launch into equatorial and low-inclination orbits instead, avoiding the risk of interception. But accepting those restrictions would mean conceding a huge swath of the most militarily, scientifically, and economically useful space above the earth to Gennadiy Gryzlov or to China’s almost equally dictatorial leader, President Zhou. That would be one hell of a big and bitter pill to swallow, he thought grimly. And if Moscow’s heavy-lift rocket program was part of a space-based military move against America or its allies, as his father and Martindale suspected, that gauntlet of ground-based missiles and MiG-31s would stop any possible Sky Masters counterattack cold.

Brad looked back at Boomer. “There has to be a way a spaceplane can dodge those potential kill zones,” he said stubbornly.

“Oh, there is,” the other man agreed. “Say we light the candle and head for space out over the Pacific, right? Out where no missile can touch us?” Brad nodded. “Okay, so once the spaceplane is safely in orbit around the equator, we execute another series of burns using the LPDRS engines in rocket mode,” Boomer went on. “Essentially, we combine a plane change maneuver to shift our orbital inclination with a couple of fast-transfer burns to increase altitude.” He shrugged. “And hocus-pocus, abracadabra, all of a sudden we’re coasting along in orbit over Russia well beyond the reach of Comrade Gryzlov’s menacing missiles—”

“With nearly empty fuel tanks,” Brad realized abruptly.

“Pretty much,” Boomer said. “The delta-v requirement for that kind of stunt is huge. Yeah, we can do it, but only by spending most of the fuel needed for other significant on-orbit maneuvers or to make a powered reentry.”

Brad winced. Carrying out the maneuvers Boomer described would foreclose a lot of options. Reaching its final orbit with dry main-engine fuel tanks would leave a spaceplane entirely dependent on its much smaller, much less powerful hydrazine thrusters. It would also mean reentering the earth’s atmosphere like the old space shuttle — using atmospheric drag to slow down until the spaceplane could glide safely to a landing. And that kind of high-drag reentry always inflicted damage to thermal protection tiles on the fuselage and wings, adding to mission costs and turnaround time.

“Well, that sucks,” he grumbled.

“Tell me about it,” Boomer said, sounding discouraged. “But however much I hate running up against problems I can’t solve, I just don’t see a workable way forward here. In the short run, we can’t squeeze any more efficiency out of the S-19 and S-29 engines and thrusters.”

Brad frowned, thinking out loud. “Maybe we could add auxiliary fuel tanks—”

Boomer shrugged. “We could, but only at the cost of passengers or cargo or crew. Or defensive and offensive weapons, if the Russians are planning new military operations in orbit against us. Mass is mass.”

Brad pointed at the shelves lining the wall behind Boomer’s desk. They were crowded with detailed scale models of every aircraft and spacecraft the other man had ever flown or worked on. “There’s the XS-39 you’re designing,” he pointed out. “It’ll have spare payload capacity according to the specs I’ve seen.”

With a weary smile, Boomer shook his head. “The XS-39 is a beaut,” he agreed. “The trouble is, right now it’s just a collection of design drawings and models. We’re at least a couple of years away from getting a prototype into space, even with a crash R&D, flight-test, and manufacturing effort.”

Feeling more frustrated than ever, Brad bounced to his feet and started pacing around Boomer’s cluttered office. All his life, he’d had a hard time sitting still — especially when he was thinking hard. As far as he was concerned, Rodin’s famous sculpture The Thinker just showed a guy who looked constipated. Maybe, he mused, anyone who honestly tried to capture the process of real thought in solid stone should finish up with the blurred, impressionistic shape of a man in motion.

The high-pitched sound of two powerful jet engines spooling up broke in on his distracted thoughts. Drawn to the sound like a moth to the flame, Brad turned around to stare out a window that overlooked McLanahan Industrial Airport’s main runway. He froze for one brief instant, pinned in place by a sudden burst of inspiration as it flashed through his restless mind.

Then he swung back again, unable to control a wild, shit-eating grin. “What if I told you the solution to our problem is out there right now, just staring us in the face?”

Curious now, Boomer got up from behind his desk and came over. “Yeah? So what have I missed?”

Brad nodded toward the runway, where a twin-engine Boeing 767 airliner was preparing for takeoff. It was one of the modified aircraft Sky Masters used as aerial refueling tankers for the S-series spaceplanes after they took off and climbed to thirty-five thousand feet. To make sure the spaceplanes had enough fuel for the rest of the mission, it was standard practice to top off their tanks before they lit their scramjets and rocketed into orbit.

Impatiently, Boomer shook his head. “Nice try, Brad. But there’s no way we can pump in more fuel from those 767s. Not without completely rejiggering the cargo hold and fuel system to cram in additional tankage. And even then, we’d still be sacrificing payload capacity we need.”

Brad’s grin grew even wider. “You are being way too literal here, Dr. Noble.” He tapped the window. “I’m not talking about that 767 in particular. I’m talking about the whole concept of in-flight refueling. Transferring fuel from one aircraft to another is an old game. So why not try the same thing in space?”

For a long moment, Boomer just stared at him. Then he looked again at the big tanker aircraft taxiing past on the runway… and back to one of the cutaway scale models behind his desk, this one an S-29 Shadow. His eyes narrowed in concentration while he worked through rapid-fire mental estimates of payload mass and necessary equipment modifications. Slowly at first and then faster, an answering smile spread across his face. “You know, Brad,” he said with growing excitement. “That could actually work!”