“Yes, sir,” the Defense secretary said. “I recommend making this an unacknowledged Special Access Program and call it Burnt Haunt. The less people that know about this SAP the better, and you can bring it out into the open as soon as the deorbit hits the press, show that we’re aggressively working to stop the ISS from injuring or contaminating anyone.”
“Good point,” the President agreed. He turned to the Secretary of State. “Inform our allies through SAP channels as soon as the cruisers reach their launch points. And before the launch is executed, work through classified channels to request that both Russia and China deploy their own ASAT capabilities as a backup, just in case our Burnt Haunt option fails. Any questions?”
Scott felt a sick queasiness growing in the pit of his stomach. This had really spiraled out of control. The Russian and Chinese ASAT weapons were going to be part of the mix. He suspected that their fail-safe systems for calling off a strike to bring down the ISS were nowhere near as reliable as the U.S.’s.
Which meant that the ISS was going to be destroyed one way or the other—either by the terrorists or by the U.S., Russia, or China.
Which left zero hope that if Kimberly had somehow managed to survive, she might get out of this alive.
Because the President of the United States had just signed her death warrant.
SOUTH CHINA SEA: 745 MILES SSE OF HAINAN, CHINA
The Chinese launch facility for unmanned rockets was located on the southernmost part of the Spratly Islands, one of the most remote spots in the South China Sea. Most of the world was unaware of its existence. And although thousands of miles from any major land area, the bare bones spaceport was located in bitterly disputed territory claimed by both the Philippines and China.
A hundred and fifty-five miles to the northwest a low-pressure system moved across the water, increasing swells. Wind whipped the water into frothy, turbulent waves. The seas were unnavigable and dangerous for all but the largest supertankers and cargo ships.
But twenty-one hundred feet below the surface the water was absolutely still and darker than any place on earth; no light could penetrate through the crushing depth. Although the seabed was relatively shallow compared to the rest of the South China Sea, life took on unworldly, exotic features to survive in an environment where forces were over sixty times greater than atmospheric pressure.
A spot of light pierced the absolute darkness. The intense glare lit up the sandy bottom and swept back and forth in a smooth pattern, as though searching for some elusive feature. Moments passed. The light methodically expanded its search until it illuminated a half-buried length of man-made material.
The beam stopped. It grew brighter as it focused on an underwater cable, completely out of place in the otherwise homogeneous sand.
Minutes passed and the 453-foot hull of the USS Jimmy Carter slowly approached the high-speed transmission line. Specially equipped thrusters positioned the massive submarine next to the cable until it hovered near-motionless over the seabed. An opening dilated in the hull; operations initiated for remotely tapping the polyethylene-clad, fiber-optic line that ran from Mainland China to the Spratly Island spaceport.
Three hours later the submarine released a buoy, trailing its own, thin fiber-optic cable as it shot to the surface, twenty-one hundred feet above. The line wavered as it reeled out, moving with the shifting currents.
Popping up from the water, the buoy splashed down; an antenna unfolded and despite the squall, solid-state gyroscopes kept it pointed to a pre-positioned point in the sky.
Within seconds, the USS Jimmy Carter transmitted purloined, encrypted data to the buoy, which relayed it to an overhead constellation of satellites. The data bounced from satellite to satellite until it was downlinked to Fort Meade, Maryland.
DAY TWO
JAPANESE MODULE (JPM)
Kimberly woke with a start. She was trapped, caught, confined, bound. In a flash, though, she realized that she was wrapped in the bungee-cord restraints that she had wound around herself so she wouldn’t go floating across the module while she slept.
She glanced at the vestibule. The hatch was still tightly sealed. Farid and Bakhet had not broken through. Grimly, she realized that if they had found a way into the module she would never have awakened from her troubled sleep.
The only way she’d been able to get to sleep at all—despite her bone-deep weariness—was that she knew it was impossible for them to get in without making a racket, either by depressurizing the vestibule, breaking that hatch window, or even somehow cutting through the JPM module’s aluminum side. But the memory of the way they had slaughtered her crewmates haunted her as she dozed fitfully in the normally comfortable zero-gee environment.
She untied the cloth straps and floated free, stretching as she forced herself fully awake. Her hip ached from where she’d been hit by the prybar that they’d thrown at her, and she swam over to the first aid supply to replace the bandage. Preparing the gauze, she reached down and gingerly pulled the wrapping off her hip; a small corner stuck to her skin, but as she exposed the wound she saw that at least it had stopped bleeding. She methodically coated the area with more antibiotic and covered it again, taping the sides.
She’d been lucky to find an extra med kit in the JPM, and would have to somehow raid the U.S. lab if she needed another. But she knew that this would be the last time she’d attend to the wound. If she couldn’t stop the terrorists soon it wouldn’t matter if the injury got better or worse.
She floated over to the ham radio and started to key the mike, once again trying to establish contact with the ground. Looking at the world map on her laptop monitor, her heart sank: She saw that the ISS was now in the ascending mode, just south of the Middle East. She’d have to wait until she was over Australia or back above the northern hemisphere before she could speak to anyone using line-of-sight. She grumbled to herself in frustration and clicked off the low-power radio.
Still muttering unhappily, Kimberly pushed over to the experiment bench. Trying to cool down, she studied the data links that were still transmitting down to Earth. She hoped she would discover that one of the researchers on the ground had noticed the enormous flow of data that she was sending over the links—or even more obvious—the messages on the digitized pictures she’d been sending.
All they have to do is take a little time and look at their damned incoming data, Kimberly groused to herself. There was no way that any halfway awake person could miss her efforts to insert information over the links. But yet, nothing. No response to her messages, nor any indication that any living human being had even looked at the experimental data she had doctored.
Kimberly figured that since Vasilev’s murder had been broadcast over NASA TV, that all ISS activity on the ground had probably ground to a halt. As a scientist herself she understood that such catastrophes took precedence over scientific curiosity.
But yet there were some people out there who were more concerned about science than anything else in the world, oblivious to everything around them except for getting the results from their experiments. She remembered one of her fellow scientists when she had briefly worked as a postdoc for the Space Telescope Science Institute, at Johns Hopkins. Her colleague cared about nothing except her science: despite local or national disasters, she never missed a day at the lab, through hurricanes, floods, and even a massive protest demonstration.