Able One Read online

  Able One

  Ben Bova

  Can an experimental defense system stop North Korean missile strikes?

  Able One

  by Ben Bova

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Although this is a work of fiction, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s Airborne Laser program actually exists. It consists of a megawatt-plus laser mounted in a specially modified Boeing 747-400F four-engined jet aircraft, much as described in this novel. The purpose of the system is to shoot down ballistic missiles soon after they are launched, while their rocket engines are still burning and they are quite vulnerable.

  The program’s principal contractors include three major aerospace corporations:

  Boeing: 747-400F aircraft; active ranging system; battle management system

  Northrop Grumman: high-energy chemical oxygen iodine laser (COIL); advanced resonator alignment system; laser fuel supply

  Lockheed Martin: laser beam control system; illuminator optical bench; nose-mounted turret

  This novel could not have been written without the generous assistance of Colonel M. V. “Coyote” Smith, USAF, Scott Herman, Judy Reemtsma, and many others who provided invaluable information and insights. The accuracy of this work is in large part due to them; any errors of fact are my fault, not theirs. However, this is a work of fiction, so I have felt free to extrapolate from what is known today, where necessary to the story.

  Ben Bova

  Naples, Florida July 2009

  To the memory of Arthur R. Kantrowitz, who guided the invention of the first high-power laser

  It is the policy of the United States to deploy as soon as is technologically possible an effective National Missile Defense system capable of defending the territory of the United States against limited ballistic missile attack (whether accidental, unauthorized, or deliberate).

  NATIONAL MISSILE DEFENSE ACT OF 1999 (PUBLIC LAW 106-38)

  First strike

  Chattanooga, Tennessee

  Hank Barstow frowned at the blank screen of his GPS box. Rolling down Interstate 75 at nearly eighty miles per hour, he was looking forward to making a breakfast stop at the Sticky Fingers restaurant a couple of his trucker pals had told him about. Food’s not all that much, they’d said, but there’s this really stacked blonde waitress…

  But he needed the doggone GPS to find his way through the streets of Chattanooga and get to the restaurant. Hank had been through Chattanooga plenty of times on his runs down I-75 to Tampa. But this time he had to get off the highway and find that blonde.

  And the GPS was dead. Hank pounded a big fist on the gray box mounted on his cab’s dashboard. Didn’t do any good. The doggone screen stayed blank.

  A sign whizzed by: TRUCK STOP FIVE MILES AHEAD. I’ll pull in there and dig the road atlas out of the pile in back, he decided.

  To Hank’s surprise, the truck stop was filled with tractor-trailer rigs. Unusual for this time of the morning. Drivers were standing around their rigs, a lot of them talking into cell phones. He found a spot out on the grass, parked his rig, and killed the engine.

  As he climbed down from the cab he heard a familiar voice yell, “You too, Hank?”

  Turning as he stepped onto the grass, he saw one of his old buddies, Phil Camerata, heavy with belly fat, face stubbled, plodding up toward him.

  “Me too what, Phil?” Hank asked.

  “GPS dead?”

  “Yeah? How’d you know?”

  Waving at the jam-packed parking area, Camerata said, “Everybody’s GPS is down. Whole GPS system is out.”

  “Everybody’s?” Automatically, Hank fished in the pocket of his jeans for his cell phone.

  Shaking his grizzled head, Camerata said, “Lotsa luck, buddy. Looks like most of the cell phones are out, too.”

  In Manhattan the air was filled with the bleating horns of thousands of taxicabs, trucks, cars, and buses, like a rising chorus of wailing lost souls. .

  The automated tollbooths in all the city’s bridges and tunnels had abruptly shut down, piling cars in long lines behind their unmoving barrier arms. Even in the subway tunnels automated MetroCard dispensers had gone dead.

  Drivers leaned on their horns in maddened frustration. The streets and avenues were choked with honking, steaming vehicles whose sweating, puzzled, cursing drivers stared at the traffic lights, which had all gone blank.

  Gridlock, all across Manhattan and rapidly spreading through the other boroughs. The helpless bleat of thousands of taxi, automobile, truck, and bus horns filled the air all across New York’s crowded, choked streets.

  Gordon Hathaway swiped his Visa card through the slot in the taxicab’s bulletproof window, scribbled his signature on the strip of paper that came stuttering out of the chugging machine, then ducked out of the cab while the driver sat in sullen silence. Some sort of Asian, Hathaway thought: the driver was swathed in a white turban and had a deeply black curly beard.

  Lower Broadway was a total bedlam of gridlock, cabs and trucks and city buses sitting unmoving, horns blaring insanely, drivers and radiators fuming. Do better on foot, Hathaway told himself as he headed down toward Wall Street.

  Fifteen minutes later he was panting from the unusual exertion, his three-piece suit rumpled, his brand-new shirt soaked with perspiration. When he finally got to the lobby of the building where his brokerage firm was quartered, he saw a crowd of his fellow brokers milling about in dazed confusion.

  “You hoofed it out here for nothing,” one of his buddies told him as Hathaway tried to push through the throng to the elevators. “The office’s closed.”

  “Closed?”

  “Whole damned market’s closed. All the computers are down. Nothing’s going to happen today, Gordo.”

  Hathaway’s jaw dropped open.

  “The New York Stock Exchange is closed? I can’t believe it!”

  “Believe it,” said his buddy sourly.

  In Boston’s Children’s Hospital the head of the surgical team gaped at the suddenly blank display screen, his blue eyes above his surgical mask going so wide you could see white all around the irises. “What happened?” he whispered harshly.

  His chief nurse shook her head. “The screen’s gone out.”

  “I can see that!” Louder, snarling.

  One of the assistant surgeons said needlessly, “The patient’s open.”

  The baby on the surgical table was only three weeks old. She was undergoing surgery to correct an aneurysm in her aorta that threatened to kill her before she’d seen one month of life.

  “Get the screen back up!” the head of surgery demanded of no one in particular, of everyone in the surgical theater.

  The actual surgery was being performed remotely, over an electronic link, by a surgeon in Minneapolis who was recognized around the world as the best and most experienced man for this particular procedure. But the link had abruptly shut down in the middle of the operation.

  “Get it back up!” the head of surgery shouted again.

  “We’re trying,” said the computer technician from her console off in a corner of the surgery theater. She was almost in tears.

  “The patient. . .” said one of the nurses.

  With a growl that was almost feral, the head of surgery said, “I’ll have to finish this myself, goddammit to hell.”

  He was a very good surgeon, but not good enough. The infant died on the table, four days short of her first month of life.

  In the headquarters of Travis Broadcasting Systems, in Atlanta, Herman Scott blinked unbelievingly at the wall full of monitor screens. Seven—no, eight—of the thirty had crapped out. Make it ten. In stunned amazement he watched as, one after another, the remaining twenty screens broke into hissing snowy static and then went dead gray.

  The big electronic map that covered one
entire wall of the monitoring center froze. Every last one of the pinpoint lights that showed where the satellites were in their orbits winked out.

  We can’t have all thirty satellites going down at once, Scott said to himself, trying to remain calm. Must be a power failure here in the building.

  But the big map was still lit, and a glance at the lights and gauges of his console told him that electrical power was normal, and the backup power system was in the green too.

  A couple of the other engineers were getting up from their consoles, confusion and outright fear on their faces.

  “What’s going on?” one of them asked.

  As if I know, Scott said to himself.

  “How can all thirty birds go down at once?”

  Something very bad is happening here, Scott realized. Something terrible.

  His console phone buzzed. Picking it up automatically, his eyes still on the dead screens, Scott heard the angry voice of the news bureau’s chief:

  “We’re off the air! How the fuck can we be off the air in the middle of the sports report?”

  In London, Sir Mallory Hyde-Grosvener was pacing up and down his office, desperately trying to get a phone connection to Singapore. He had pulled off his tweed jacket ten minutes earlier, crumpled it into a ball, and thrown it with main force against the wall where the portrait of his grandfather hung watching him with hard unblinking eyes. Through his office window he could see chaos on the floor of the market, absolute chaos. All the boards were down; where up-to-the-second market numbers should be flashing there was nothing but dead darkness. Every bloody man on the floor had a telephone jammed to his ear, red-faced and screaming.

  Sweating, his impeccable gray tie pulled loose from his collar, he bellowed into his own dead phone while his grandfather’s image frowned sternly at him.

  Colonel Brady Desilva was also sweating heavily as he sat in the command center at NORAD headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.

  “They’re all out?” he asked, his voice already hoarse from yelling at his staff officers.

  Captain Nomura nodded. “Almost, sir. Four commsats are still on the air, but they’re in and out. Sputtering, kind of.”

  “Sputtering,” DeSilva echoed darkly.

  Nomura was normally unflappable. But even his usually deadpan face was sheened with perspiration, his dark eyes blinking nervously.

  “The milsats are okay, mostly, sir,” the captain said. “But the commercial birds have gone dead, just about all of them.”

  “Half our communications traffic goes through those commercial satellites,” DeSilva muttered.

  “The early-warning system is functional,” said the captain, trying to sound cheerful. “If anybody tries to attack us while the commercial birds are down, we’ll spot them right off.”

  DeSilva growled at his aide. “And how the hell will we get the warning out? Carrier pigeons?”

  General “Bernie” Bernard had been holding the phone to his ear for so long he felt as if it had taken root in his skull. He was pacing behind his desk, too edgy to sit.

  To his credit, he and his staff at Space Command headquarters had not panicked when the satellite communications system started to break down. But he was scared; for the first time in his life, this former B-52 pilot who had flown combat missions over Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan was scared.

  At last a voice crackled, “The President is coming on the line now.”

  A click. Oh shit, Bernard thought. It’s gone dead again.

  But then a crisp voice said, “General Bernard.” Bernard automatically stiffened to attention. “Mr. President.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “All the commercial satellites over this hemisphere have gone dark, sir.”

  “I know that. What about—”

  “The birds orbiting over the other side of the planet are degrading rapidly. They’re dying, one by one.”

  “Jesus.”

  “As you know, sir, yesterday we tracked an unannounced rocket launch from North Korea. We went on alert, but the bird went into a geosynchronous orbit, twenty-two thousand miles up. It was a satellite, not a missile.”

  “So?” the President demanded.

  “Three hours ago there was a nuclear detonation at geosynch altitude. The electromagnetic pulse from the explosion knocked out almost all the unhardened satellites over our half of the globe.”

  “The communications satellites?”

  “Commsats, yessir. Weather satellites too. Landsats, ocean surveillance—they’re all down, sir.”

  “But your military satellites are protected, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, sir. Most of them. A few of the older ones have gone dark, but the others seem to be holding up. So far.”

  “Our military communications, the early-warning satellites, they’re all okay, aren’t they?” “For the most part, sir.”

  A heartbeat’s pause. Then, “What do you mean, ‘for the most part’?”

  General Bernard replied, “Sir, our communications needs have grown a lot faster than our milsats can support. The Department of Defense has been using commercial commsats for almost half its day-to-day traffic.”

  “And now those commsats are down.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Again a pause. Then the President asked, “What about satellites on the other side of the world? Over Russia, China?”

  “They’re degrading, sir. It’s not just the EMP that kills ‘em. The nuke puts out a big cloud of energetic particles, too: high-energy electrons, protons. They bounce around along Earth’s magnetic field lines like Ping-Pong balls. Those particles can kill unhardened satellites, too.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that we’re back to 1950, as far as telephone communications are concerned.”

  “Television, too, sir. Computer networks. Anything that uses satellites to relay information or data. All kaput.”

  For several long moments the President said nothing. Then he asked, “Is this the first strike in a war, General?”

  General Bernard hesitated, then answered, “It’s a good way to start a war, sir. Pearl Harbor, in orbit.”

  Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska

  Harry Hartunian was having the same nightmare again.

  He was at the test center out in the desert, standing in the control room as the team powered up the big laser. Through the thick safety glass of the observation window he could see the jumble of tubes and wires, the stainless steel vat that held the iodine, the frosted tank that contained the liquid oxygen, the complex of mirrors and lenses at the output point where more than a million watts of invisible energy would lance across the desert floor to the target, half a mile away.

  Five technicians were at their posts, but Pete Quintana was out beside the optical bench on the other side of the observation window, right in the middle of the laser assembly. Pete was worried about the effect of the rig’s vibration on the sensitive optical setup. Quintana.

  “Iodine pressure on the button,” one of the technicians in the control room called out.

  Don’t pressurize the oxy line, Harry warned. In his nightmare he tried to say the words out loud, but not a sound came out of his mouth. The tech was sitting five feet away from him, but he couldn’t make him hear his warning.

  “Electrical power ramping up,” another technician said.

  “Optical bench ready.”

  “Atmospheric instability nominal.”

  “Adaptive optics on.”

  “Iodine flow in ten seconds.”

  “Oxygen flow in eight seconds.”

  Don’t pressurize the oxy line, Harry tried to scream. But he couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but watch them go through the same disaster again.

  “Pressurizing iodine.”

  “Pressurizing oxy.”

  “No!” Harry screeched.

  The explosion knocked him against the back wall of the control room, shattering his ribs against the gauges mounted on the concre
te. Pain roared through Harry as the laser blew up in a spectacular blast that knocked the roof off the test shed. The heat from the oxygen-fed fire poured through the safety glass of the observation window, hot enough to melt the gauges on the back wall.

  Pete Quintana was enveloped in the flames, screaming, gibbering, flailing in agony. Harry tried to reach out to him but his own pain was so intense that he blacked out.

  “Rise and shine, Harry!”

  Hartunian blinked awake. The room was dark, but somebody was flicking a flashlight beam in his eyes.

  Harry was drenched with sweat, gasping for breath.

  “You were yelling in your sleep, pal.” Monk Delany. Harry recognized his voice and dimly made out the outline of his heavy, bearlike body in the darkness of the strange bedroom. Elmendorf Air Force Base, Harry remembered. We’re in Alaska.

  “C’mon, buddy, we’re gonna miss breakfast if you don’t get going.”

  Harry didn’t mind the flashlight glaring in his eyes. It was Monk’s chipper, cheerful tone that irked him. Can’t be more than four o’clock in the friggin’ morning, Harry thought, and Monk’s as jolly as a goddamned Santa Claus.

  “Come on, Harry,” Delany coaxed, flicking the flashlight beam back and forth across Harry’s face again. “Rise and shine.”

  “Go ‘way!”

  Delany laughed. “You gotta get up, Harry. Time’s a-wasting.”

  With a groan, Harry sat up, blinking, rubbing his stubbled jaw. Reluctantly he switched on the bedside lamp.

  “What time is it?”

  “Nearly six.”

  Squinting at the room’s only window, Hartunian said, “Christ, it’s still dark.”

  “Alaska, buddy. We’re not in sunny California anymore.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Hartunian swung his legs out of the bed and stood up, shivering slightly in his boxers and undershirt. His back ached dully. He was a short, round-shouldered man with baby-fine thin dark hair that flew into disarray at the slightest puff of breeze. His midsection showed a distinct middle-aged bulge. He hadn’t come to Alaska willingly.