Brown, Dale - Independent 01 (47 page)

           
Thank God,
Ann said to herself.

           
“General,”
Hampton
said again, “it’s now or never....”

           
“We’re
ready,” Marty called out.

 
         
“Ann, Marty, secure yourselves to the
keel. Ken, grab hold of something in there. Jon, you’ll have to maneuver clear
of the station before we set off the boosters.”

           
“Moving away now.”
Ann watched with fascination as the huge,
dark form of the spaceplane seemed to fall away from her, the tiny maneuvering
jets on the broad tail flashing on and off like spotlights. In a few moments
America
was a hundred feet away from its original position, looking like a large,
finely detailed toy hovering against the revolving backdrops of stars and the
hazy upper atmosphere of earth.

           
“Commit both
PAM boosters,” Saint-Michael ordered.

           
“PAM
boosters armed,”
Hampton
replied
“Ku-band earth station data link good. Data transfer... here it comes....”

           
Ann felt
her body strain against the clips holding her to a mounting bracket on
Silver
Tower
’s keel as the PAM booster
fired. She could feel an intense vibration ripple through the keel; then the
booster abruptly cut off, but the spinning went on.

           
“Why did it
stop?” she asked. “Is there—”

           
She didn’t
have a chance to finish the question as Saint-Michael’s PAM booster fired in
sequence. It was followed by another longer burst of thrust from her PAM
booster, followed again by a shorter pulse from the opposite booster. The
effect was to move the station and its tethered crewmembers upward toward outer
space at a rate of ten miles per hour. For Ann and the others it was like being
dragged along by a slow-moving car.
America
seemed to slide forward and sideways, then tip on edge. Even the scattering of
debris seemed to swirl and drop away like a cloud bank being pushed back out to
sea by a fresh breeze.

           
Following
guidance commands from the ground tracking stations, the two PAM boosters
alternated each of their pulses of thrust until, after several minutes, the
station’s wild multiaxis spinning slowed nearly to a stop. As the rotation
decreased, the booster thrusts became longer as the station fought for
altitude. A couple of minutes later the roar of the engines was constant. Earth
was now firmly beneath them, slowly but surely dropping away. Ann was no longer
pinned to the keel, but found instead that she could move freely.

           
Saint-Michael
spoke first. “Jon, how do you copy?”

           
“Loud and
clear,
General
,”
Hampton
said. “Ken’s got the station emitting a tracking beacon now.
America
is back on digital autopilot. I’ll bring her back beside the cargo bay so we
can start refueling the energy cells.”

 
         
“Horvath here.
I’ve got auxiliary power on in the command module. It’s depressurized. I don’t
think we can fix it: it’s got two or three monster holes in it—”

           
“How about
environmental and SBR controls?”

           
“I think I
can reset the environmental controls, sir. I have no idea if that SBR stuff is
operational, but there’s backup power going to every console.”

           
More than
they’d hoped for, Ann thought.
Silver
Tower
was alive. Now if the
Russians would just give them the time they needed....

 
          
TYURATAM
,
USSR

 
          
Marshal Govorov came into the Space
Defense Command control center, joined up with Colonel Gulaev, then kept stride
with his subordinate as both hurried to the main tracking computer monitor to
scan the information that was scrolling across the screen.

           
“We didn’t
notice the change until the station was at two hundred fifteen kilometers....”
Gulaev said. “We thought it was an error, an anomaly—”

           
“It’s
impossible,” Govorov said, realizing as he said it how much that sounded like
the Kremlin bureaucrats he’d gone up against all these years. He’d deceived
himself. Well, let’s go from there.... But wasn’t more time needed to boost the
station into higher orbit?

           
“Sir, shall
I alert the—”

           
“Alert
no one.
I want this tracking
confirmed”

           
Gulaev took
off for the communication center to call Sary Shagan for a confirmation. The
answer did not take long. The young officer returned to the control console
only sixty seconds later to find the Space Defense commander alone at the
console—no one else wanted any part of him—including himself.

           
“Sir, the
Shirov-25 space surveillance site at Sary Shagan has just issued an advisory to
Space Defense Command headquarters. The tracking is... confirmed. Armstrong
appears to be under power and being directed to a standard circular orbit,
inclined less than five degrees from the equator.... Is it possible that the
Americans could reestablish surveillance over the
Persian Gulf
or
Arabian Sea
...?” Govorov came close to giving him a
murder-the-messenger look,
then
shook his head, trying
his best to control himself. “The station’s pressurized modules are
uninhabitable. Our Scimitar missile had to penetrate the radar array and solar
cells. It would take
a full work- crew months
to bring
Armstrong back on line.” Or at least it should. ... He clapped his hands
together, as though to jog himself out of his unaccustomed funk. “All right, I
want a secure videophone connection established among Rhomerdunov, Khromeyev
and myself, the conference to be set up in tactical situation briefing room
three. And I want General Kulovsky of intelligence on hand. Get him here.”

           
Gulaev
hurried off to give the orders, relieved that Govorov seemed his old self, back
in control, in command, at least a step ahead of the Americans....

           
But why did
it feel like they were one step behind?

           
The
videophone terminal had been set up on a pedestal at the front of the large
conference room near Govorov’s office at the Glowing Star Manned Launch
Facility. Govorov and General Kulovsky, the Space Defense Command’s chief of
intelligence, stood in front of the terminal waiting for the two senior Stavka
members to make contact.

           
They did
not have to wait long. The videophone buzzed once, long and insisting, and the
screen suddenly flared to life, revealing Deputy Minister of Defense Khromeyev
and Commander in Chief of Aerospace Forces Rhomerdunov seated at the main
battle staff conference table at Supreme Headquarters in
Moscow
.

           
Khromeyev
spoke first. “We already know about the American space station, Govorov. I
assume you have an explanation....”

           
Govorov did
not feel better, hearing he’d apparently been scooped by the space warning and
tracking facility at Sary Shagan. Make the best of it, he told himself, and try
to tell it as you see it.... “Comrade Deputy Minister, it’s not as we hoped,
and believed. True. But I believe it likely that the station has been destroyed
beyond the point of
near-term
usefulness—”

           
“Then how
is it being moved at all?” Rhomerdunov interrupted.

           
“I believe
the Americans may have brought aloft the rocket boosters needed to send the
station to higher orbit—”

           
“Isn’t it
more likely,” Khromeyev put it, “that you overestimated the damage done to the
station?”

           
“Yes, sir,
that’s possible, but I point out that
America's
cargo bay, from what we’ve learned of it, is more than large enough to carry a
fuel tank and several small rocket boosters to attach to the station’s central
keel.”

           
Govorov hit
a button on a small wireless control unit, and the pedestal that the videophone
monitor was mounted on swiveled up so that the camera faced a large plastic and
balsa wood model of Armstrong hanging from the ceiling. The model, carefully
constructed and precise in every detail, had been just as precisely broken in
several places.

           
“The model
you’re looking at,
sir,
represents the last full image
of the station as seen through my Elektron spaceplane’s Scimitar missile laser
designator.” With a long pointer he then motioned to each of the station’s
damaged systems.

           
“Yes, yes,
General. And your opinion, Colonel Kulovsky?”

           
“That the
station does not have the capacity to counter earth’s gravity,” Kulovsky said.
“Even with full-thruster capacity, the station can’t change altitude more than
a hundred kilometers without a refueling. So, as Govorov says, the spaceplane
must have brought rocket thrusters to move the station.”

           
“The most
important target for
myself
and Colonel Voloshin,”
Govorov said, “was the station’s space-based radar array attach points. As you
can see”—he used the pointer for emphasis—“three of the four attach-points have
been hit and two destroyed.”

           
“So that
leaves two SBR arrays,” Khromeyev said.

           
“Yes,
though not enough to let the Americans duplicate the extent of earlier
surveillance, sir,” Kulovsky said.

           
“The other
strikes against the station,” Govorov said, “took out or damaged the solar
arrays, which are necessary to recharge the station batteries and convert water
to fuel... the fuel-storage vessels on the keel... and the pressurized modules
themselves. It’s possible these punctures in the modules are repairable in
orbit, but they will leak so badly that the modules can’t be safely inhabited
unless the crew wear space suits the whole time.
However
, sir, I grant that the seemingly impossible may be
possible. We are not infallible, and I do not underestimate the Americans. I
have warned against that myself over the years, and I don’t intend to change
now. And so....”

           
“And so
... ?”
Rhomerdunov said. “Finish the thought, General.”

           
Govorov
took the leap, the one he’d been moving toward, if in a roundabout fashion,
since this little lecture had begun. “And so, sir, I believe we should not take
the chance, however remote, that Armstrong will not regain its surveillance
capabilities and be a substantial threat. I recommend that I attempt another
attack against the space station.”

           
Khromeyev
clearly wasn’t so sure. “The first attack on the space station was easily
justified,” he said. “The Americans moved their station directly over the
Soviet
Union
and used it to direct an attack against our defensive
forces. But if we mount another offensive against a crippled station, one that
is not, at least at the moment, orbiting over Soviet territory, world opinion
may very well turn against us. We have already received much criticism for the
deaths aboard the American rescue craft; if we attack America’s only hypersonic
spaceplane, one ostensibly launched to retrieve the bodies of the other
crewmembers that died in Govorov’s first attack, we could be subject to the
kind of international condemnation that could expand the conflict beyond the
present boundaries—something we must avoid.”

           
“I agree,
sir.”

           
Khromeyev
and Rhomerdunov conferred briefly; then Khromeyev turned to the camera:

           
“Marshal
Govorov, continue to monitor the space station Armstrong’s orbit and advise us
immediately if there are any significant changes, or if any other spacecraft
dock with the station. The responsibility for determining whether or not the
station becomes a threat to Operation Feather is, of course, yours.”

           
It was not
what Govorov wanted to hear, though he wasn’t surprised. It seemed he’d done
too good a job of making a “balanced” presentation. But if he knew the
Americans, and he was beginning to know them too well, they would soon give him
a good reason to resume the attack he believed necessary....

 
          
October 1992

 
          
ARMSTRONG SPACE STATION, TWO DAYS
LATER

 
          
It certainly wasn’t pretty.

           
The command
module, connecting tunnel, engineering and Skybolt control module all leaked
like wet paper bags. Environmental alarms went off constantly, sending the
already exhausted and nervous crew scrambling for POS masks. But to Jason
Saint-Michael it marked a major step in the reactivation of Armstrong Space
Station, and as such he had to admit that, all things considered, it looked
beautiful. Not pretty, but beautiful.

           
Saint-Michael
had volunteered to be the first to take watch while the rest of the crew stayed
aboard the spaceplane and got their first sleep in forty-eight hours. He didn’t
completely trust the “bubble-gum and baling wire” repair jobs they’d made on
the modules, so he’d ordered everyone except one person to sleep in
America
.
The space- plane was now docked with
the station, using yet another jury-rigged device made from the undamaged parts
of the docking module so the crew could transfer between
America
and the station without prebreathing or wearing a spacesuit.

           
The general
was keeping himself awake with shots of pure oxygen from his POS mask and by
checking and rechecking the systems, all in various states of repair, in the
command module. He took pride in the patch job they’d done. Luckily they had
the supplies on board to fix pressurized module penetrations. Those supplies
and a generous amount of elbow grease had gotten the job done so far.

           
Fixing the
modules to allow for working without spacesuits was minor compared to
repowering and repositioning the station itself. It had taken Marty Schultz
three hours of exhausting hard work to refuel the two undamaged fuel cells from
the large fuel tank they had brought from earth. But it had paid off: direct
system power had been applied an hour later, and enough systems were restored
to allow the station’s built-in self-test equipment to analyze and point out
other malfunctions and damage. Once the equipment began looking after itself
and telling its human keepers what was wrong, things began to ease up a little.

           
Now they
had to try to position the station in a usable orbit. One main attitude
thruster and both main station thruster fuel tanks had been destroyed in the
Soviet spaceplane attack. After refueling the fuel cells to provide electrical
power Marty had attached the fuel tank, still with three-quarters of the fuel
left, into the station’s attitude and positioning thruster system. By the end
of the first twenty-four hours they had restored enough inertial navigation
systems and satellite tracking and positioning data links to activate the
station thrusters, and with far more human intervention than normal they
managed to kick
Silver
Tower
into a low equatorial orbit. Now at two hundred miles altitude, orbiting almost
directly over the equator,
Silver
Tower
passed appproximately six hundred miles south of the
Nimitz
carrier group in the
Arabian Sea
. At
seventeen thousand miles per hour they could theoretically scan the fleet for
twenty minutes on every orbit, or twenty minutes out of every ninety—almost
one-fourth of the time.
Providing
they could
get the space-based radar system
working.
They hadn’t brought along an SBR engineer on the flight, but as long as the
master system processor was working it could direct the SBR operator to system
faults—the system would fix itself.

           
They had
been following the SBR computer’s direction for nearly twenty hours when Saint-Michael
called a halt. Now he was there alone, monitoring the systems and watching in
case the Russians staged another attack—although if they did there was no way
he could detect it beforehand and not a damn thing he could do even if he
did
know they were coming.
Silver
Tower
wasn’t yet ready to fight.
Not yet.

           
He looked
over to the master SBR console. The huge master SBR monitor wasn’t broken, as
far as anyone could tell, but for some reason it wasn’t coming on. After taking
it down off its mounting spot on the bulkhead to try to fix it someone had used
a couple strips of tape to secure the huge screen back to the wall. He went
over to the console and checked the two screens, one of them cannibalized from
a TV set found in the recreation area in the Skylab module. If the SBR screen
had been working properly a political map of the earth would be scrolling
across the screen with the SBR’s scan pattern superimposed on it. Without the
mapping display the only readout of where they were was a series of complicated
digits zipping across the TV set, representing azimuth, declination, latitude,
longitude, inertial velocity and planetary motion corrections of the station
relative to earth. It might as well have been written in ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphics.

           
He went
back to what was left of his seat (one of the Russian missiles had blown off
the backrest), strapped himself in, thinking that in the days before the attack
he would have automatically picked up his earset and electret microphone and
set it in place. Not so now. There wasn’t any point—even though the station’s
tracking beacon had been activated, the tracking and data relay satellite
system was smashed to hell. They could only talk with someone on the ground
using the ultrahigh frequency radios that were limited to line-of-sight. With
TDRS you could talk or exchange data with someone on the other side of the
planet—with UHF,
if
you could cut
through the static,
if
you talked at
night, you
might
be able to talk to an
earth station you could see out the window. Maybe.

           
He wished
he could have the same problem seeing or thinking about
Enterprise
..
..

           
The thought
of the wrecked shuttle and her dead crew back in the docking module suddenly
deflated him, left him with a deep sense of frustration and anger. Nothing he
or anyone else did would make a difference as far as they were concerned. And
by forcing this mission to reactivate the station he’d exposed other crewmen...
including Ann ... to the same risk.... But
no,
he had to remember this mission was about much more than revenge. It was about
saving
lives. American lives out there
in the
Persian Gulf
..
..

           
That was
what he’d told the Joint Chiefs and the president when he’d met with them to
argue the case. He’d had a tough time at first.. . . Stuart had done a good job
convincing people that Armstrong’s station commander was a casualty who, for
his own good and the country’s, ought to be put out to pasture. What he was
after would needlessly provoke the Russians. Saint-Michael had countered with
the very likely scenario if they
didn't
reactivate the station, and when he’d finished even Secretary of Defense Linus
Edwards seemed to comprehend the seriousness of the situation. Saint-Michael
had gotten authorization only just in time, though, to put a hold on the launch
so he could arrange a cargo switch....

           
Alone now
in the command module, he was not so all-fired sure he was right. And with that
thought came another: that he’d better be, or the folks back home just might
invent a Yankee Siberia for him if his plan backfired.

 
          
THE USS
NIMITZ
, IN THE
ARABIAN SEA

 
          
“The most sophisticated radar ships
in the world,” Admiral Clancy grumbled, “and I still feel naked as a jaybird
out here.”

           
The
commander of
Nimitz
carrier fleet was
talking to Captain Edge- water, captain of the
Nimitz
, in the carrier’s combat information center. He was talking
about the USS
Ticonderoga, Shiloh
,
Valley Forge
and
Hue City
, the Aegis battle management cruisers operating alongside
Nimitz
as the battle group steamed
slowly eastward in the Arabian Sea.

           
Ticonderoga
and her
sisters, although over a decade old, were indeed some of the most sophisticated
vessels in the world. Their four large phased-array radar antennas could scan
the skies for hundreds of miles in all directions, electronically link dozens
of ships together and direct gun, aircraft or missile attacks against hundreds
of targets all at once. They carried nearly a half-billion dollars worth of
nuclear-hardened twenty-first-century equipment. Yet here in the middle of the
Arabian
Sea
they were made virtually impotent by the sophistication of
weaponry and the preponderance of enemy forces surrounding them.

           
Clancy
pointed to a five-foot-by-five-foot liquid-crystal display in the center of
Nimitz’s
CIC. “I need more eyes up
there, Captain,” Clancy was saying, jabbing his finger toward the center of the
Arabian Sea
.
“Ticonderoga’
s
detection range for high-flying aircraft is only about three hundred miles; for
surface vessels and low-flying aircraft it’s about two hundred miles, and for
fast-moving, sea-skimming missiles or aircraft the detection range could be as
little as eighty miles.” Edge water agreed with the commander of the
Persian
Gulf
flotilla. Clancy continued: “It’s just not enough. With
Soviet cruise missiles having Mach five speed and supersonic bombers that could
carry fifty-thousand-pound payloads at Mach two and fifty feet above the water,
Ticonderoga
can barely keep up. An
AS-6 cruise missile diving down on us at nearly Mach speed would only give our
escorts five minutes to destroy the missile. A Soviet Blackjack or Backfire
bomber at extreme low altitude, detected at maximum range, would be right on
top of us in seconds, giving us barely enough time to react.”

           
“They have
to get past the fleet defenses first, Admiral,” Edge- water said. “We’ve got
nearly a hundred missile launchers on-line, plus fifty fighters aboard
Nimitz
ready to fly—”

           
“But we’re
already stretched to the limit,” Clancy said, pointing around the periphery of
his fleet’s escorts. “We’ve got Soviet ships from the
Red Sea
and
Yemen
,
Soviet aircraft and cruise missiles from
Iran
,
and the
Arkhangel
carrier group from
the south and east.” He shook his head, trying but failing to manage a rueful
smile. “Some old sea dog I turned out to be.... A carrier’s main defensive
weapon is not getting itself into indefensible tactical situations in the first
place. Here’s a perfect example of what
not
to do: getting
yourself
surrounded on all sides by the
bad guys.... We need a good five hundred miles of reliable surveillance before
we can safely secure this group. Right now we don’t have it. We need some
important help if we’re going to pull this off.”

           
“The best
we can get out here,” Edge water said, “are our own carrier-based EF-18s and
Hawkeye AWACS radar planes.”

           
“
Which will be prime targets when the shooting starts.
And we
just don’t have the assets to assign one fighter to one Hawkeye for
protection.”

           
“We can try
another HIMLORD recon drone sortie....”

           
Clancy
shook his head. “Those drones are worth their weight in gold, but they’re
sitting ducks against shipbome surface-to-air concentrations. We sent four of
them up two days ago and the Soviets used them for target practice.” He paused
for a minute, staring at the screen; then: “What about Diego Garcia? Any help
from the Air Force available?”

           
“Same deal
with Air Force E-3C AWACs,” Edgewater said. “The Russian Su-27s will pick them
off right away. Command won’t risk them so far out without fighter escort.”

           
“
They're
trying to tell
me
about risk?” Clancy had no trouble
getting up a sarcastic smile. “I’m up to my eyeballs in risk." He studied
the huge SPY-2 Aegis repeater display in front of him. “Y’know what we need,
Joe?”

           
Joe knew:
they needed their space-based eyes back.

 
          
THE KREMLIN,
USSR

 
          
For the last ten minutes the general
secretary had listened with scarcely disguised impatience as Khromeyev and
Rhomerdunov briefed him on their conversation with Govorov about the recent
movement of the space station.

           
“Stop right
there,” the Soviet commander in chief said, holding up his hand. “I’ve heard
enough to worry me. Thank you very much. But in spite of your emphasis on
Marshal Govorov’s assessment of the damage done to the station, you cannot
dismiss that he did recommend a second attack.”