“What the hell was that?” Sergetov yelled, deafened by the blast, then, looking up, “You’re hit, Comrade General!”
Alekseyev ran his hand over his face. It came away red. His eyes stung, and he poured the contents of his canteen over his face to clear them of the blood. Major Sergetov slapped a bandage on his general’s forehead with only one hand, Alekseyev noticed.
“What happened to you?”
“I fell on some of this damned glass! Stay still, Comrade General, you’re bleeding like a slaughtered cow.” A lieutenant general showed up. Alekseyev recognized him as Viktor Beregovoy, 8th Guards Army’s second in command.
“Comrade General, you have orders to return to headquarters. I am here to relieve you.”
“The hell you say!” Alekseyev bellowed.
“The orders come from Commander-in-Chief West, Comrade. I am a general of tank troops. I can carry on here. If you will permit me to say so, you have performed brilliantly. But you are needed elsewhere.”
“Not until I’m finished!”
“Comrade General, if you want this crossing to succeed, we need more support here. Who can better arrange that support, you or I?” Beregovoy asked reasonably.
Alekseyev let out a long angry breath. The man was right-but for the first time Pavel Leonidovich Alekseyev had led-really led-men in combat, and he had done well. Alekseyev knew it-he had done well!
“There is no time to argue. You have your task and I have mine,” the man said.
“You know the situation?”
“Fully. There is a vehicle in the back to return you to headquarters.”
Alekseyev held the bandage to his head-Sergetov hadn’t tied it properly-and walked out the back of the shop. Where the door had once been, he found a gaping hole. A BMD infantry carrier was there, its motor running. Alekseyev got in and found a medical orderly who clucked over the General and went immediately to work. As the carrier pulled off, Alekseyev listened to the noise of combat diminish. It was the saddest sound he had ever heard.
LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE, VIRGINIA
There was nothing like a Distinguished Flying Cross to make a person happy about flying, and she wondered if she might be the first female Air Force pilot to have one. If not, Major Nakamura decided, what the hell? She had a gun-camera videotape of all three of her Badgers, and a Navy pilot she’d met in Brittany before catching a flight Stateside had called her one damned fine pilot, for an Air Force puke. After which she had reminded him that if the dumbass Navy pilots had listened to her, maybe their air base wouldn’t be in a body and fender shop. Game, set, and match, she grinned, to Major Amelia Nakamura, USAF.
All the F-l5s that could be ferried across the Atlantic had been ferried, and now she had another job. Only four of the 48th Fighter Interceptor Squadron’s Eagles were still at Langley. The rest were scattered up and down the East Coast, including the two pilots who were qualified for the ASAT antisatellite missiles. As soon as she’d heard that, she had made a phone call and informed Space Command that she was the Eagle driver who had worked out the ASAT flight profile, and why take a combat pilot off the line when she could handle the mission very well, thank you.
She checked to make sure the ugly missile was properly attached to the airframe. It had been taken out of secure storage and reexamined by a team of experts. Buns shook her head. There had only been one real test of the system before a moratorium had been slapped on the project. A successful test, to be sure, but only one. She hoped it would work. The Navy really needed help from the Air Force pukes. Besides, that A-6 driver was cute.
The major finished her walkaround, taking her time-her target wasn’t over the Indian Ocean yet-then strapped herself into her Eagle, ran her eyes and hands over the gauges and handles, adjusted the seat, and finally input the numbers painted on the wall of the aircraft shelter into the aircraft’s inertial navigation system so that the fighter would know where it was. Finished, she began to fire up her engines. Her flight helmet protected her from the shriek of the two Pratt and Whitney engines. The needles on her engine gauges rotated into proper position. Below her, the crew chief gave the aircraft a careful examination, then waved to her to taxi the aircraft into the open. Six people were out there, standing behind the red warning line to protect their ears from the noise. Always nice to have an audience, she thought, ignoring them.
“Eagle One-Zero-Four ready to taxi,” she told the tower.
“One-Zero-Four, roger. You are cleared to taxi,” the tower controller replied. “Wind is two-five-three at twelve knots.”
“Roger that, One-Zero-Four is rolling.”
Buns brought her canopy down. The crew chief snapped to attention and gave the major a perfect salute. Nakamura answered it with panache, advanced her throttles slightly, and the Eagle fighter moved off to the runway like a crippled stork. A minute later, she was in the air, a silky smooth feeling of pure power enveloping her as she pointed her Eagle at the sky.
Kosmos 1801 was just completing its southbound leg, bending around the Straits of Magellan to head north over the Atlantic. The orbital pass would take it two hundred miles off the American coast. At the ground-control station, technicians prepared to switch on the powerful sea-surveillance radar. They were sure an American carrier battle group was at sea, but had been unable to locate it. Three regiments of Backfires were waiting for information that would allow them to repeat the feat accomplished on the second day of the war.
Nakamura eased her fighter under the tanker’s tail, and the boom operator expertly shoved the refueling probe into the back of her fighter. Ten thousand pounds of fuel transferred into her tanks in only a few minutes, and as she disengaged, a small cloud of kerosene vapor escaped into the sky.
“Gulliver, this is One-Zero-Four, over,” she called over the radio.
“One-Zero-Four, this is Gulliver,” replied a colonel in the passenger compartment of a LearJet cruising at forty thousand feet.
“All tanked and ready to go. All on-board systems show green. Orbiting at Point Sierra. Ready to initiate intercept climb. Standing by.”
“Roger that, One-Zero-Four.”
Major Nakamura kept her Eagle in a small turning circle. She didn’t want to waste a drop of fuel when she started her climb. She shifted ever so slightly in her seat, which for her was a violent show of emotion when flying, and concentrated on her aircraft. As her eyes traced over her cockpit instruments, she told herself to control her breathing.
Space Command’s radars picked up the Soviet satellite as it passed the bulge of South America. Computers compared its course and speed with known data, matched them with the position of Nakamura’s fighter, and a computer spat out its commands, which were relayed to the LearJet.
“One-Zero-Four, come to heading two-four-five.”
“Turning now.” The major brought her fighter into a tight turn. “Holding on two-four-five.”
“Stand by . . . stand by-initiate!”
“Roger.” Buns pushed her throttles to the stops and punched up the afterburners. The Eagle leaped forward like a spurred horse, accelerating through Mach 1 in seconds. Next she eased back on the stick, bringing her Eagle into a forty-five-degree climb, still accelerating into a darkening sky. She didn’t look out. Her eyes were locked on her cockpit gauges: the fighter had to maintain a specific flight profile for the next two minutes. As the Eagle rocketed into the sky, the altimeter needle whirled around its clockface. Fifty thousand feet, sixty thousand feet, seventy, eighty, ninety thousand feet. Stars were visible now in the nearly black sky, but Nakamura didn’t notice.
“Come on, baby, find the son of a bitch she thought aloud.
Beneath the aircraft the ASAT missile’s tracking head came on, searching the sky for the infrared heat signature of the Soviet satellite. A light blinked on Buns’s instrument panel.
“My weapon is tracking! Repeat, my weapon is tracking. Auto launch sequence equipment is activated. Altitude ninety-four thousand feet seven hundred-breakaway, breakaway!” She felt her aircraft lurch as the heavy missile dropped free and immediately brought her throttles back to low power and brought the stick back to loop the fighter. She checked her fuel state. The afterburning climb had nearly emptied her tanks, but she had enough to make Langley without tanking again. She had already turned for home when she realized that she hadn’t seen the missile. It didn’t matter anyway. Nakamura turned west, letting the Eagle settle into a shallow dive that would terminate on the Virginia Coast.
Aboard the LearJet, a tracker camera followed the missile upward. The solid-fuel rocket motor burned for thirty seconds, then the warhead separated. The Miniature Homing Vehicle, an infrared heat sensor embedded in its flat face, had long since acquired its target. The Soviet satellite’s on-board nuclear reactor radiated waste heat out into space, and the resulting infrared signature rivaled the sun. As its microchip brain computed the intercept course, the MHV made a tiny course alteration and the distance between warhead and satellite dropped at a precipitous rate. The satellite was northbound at eighteen thousand miles per hour, the MHV southbound at over ten thousand, yet another hi-tech kamikaze. Then-