Covert One 6 - The Moscow Vector (36 page)

No, she thought coldly. That’s a bomb—a satchel charge.

Run, Randi told herself. Run away now! Her mind suddenly in overdrive, she turned and fled, sprinting away from the van as fast as she could move.

Gun in hand, she raced past stalled cars whose drivers were still staring in shock at the mangled van.

“Get out! Get out!” she yelled at them in German, gesturing with the Beretta. “There’s a bomb!”

And then the satchel charge exploded.

A sudden flash of blinding white light ripped through the darkness behind Randi. Still running flat-out, she hurled herself down, curling up for protection just as the shock wave, roaring outward from the very center of the powerful blast, rolled over her. The massive wall of superheated air bounced her high off the pavement and then tossed her tumbling end over end across the ground. At the same time, a giant fist—the overpressure caused by the blast-seemed to squeeze every ounce of oxygen out of her lungs.

Slowly, the flaring white light faded. Everything went piteh-black. The world around her vanished as she fell out and away from consciousness.

She came to only seconds later, lying curled up against the side of a car thrown sideways across the road by the blast. Half deafened, with her ears still ringing, Randi forced herself first to sit up and then to climb back to her feet, wincing unwillingly at the pain from tortured muscles and bruised and bleeding patches of skin.

All around her on the street, other dazed and injured people were pulling themselves out of vehicles that had been hammered by the shock wave or hit by flving debris. Others, streaked with blood or cradling broken limbs, were stumbling blindly out of their bomb-damaged homes and businesses. The enormous explosion had torn open roofs, toppled chimneys, and shattered Every window facing the street, sending shards of broken glass sleeting through living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, and storefronts.

Slowly, Randi turned and stared back at the place where the surveillance van had been.

The Ford was gone, replaced by an ugly tangle of twisted, burning wreckage. All of the other cars that had been parked within fifty meters of the shattered van now lay canted across Clayallee—crumpled, smashed, and wreathed in billowing orange and flame. Thick black smoke drifted across the road.

Randi blinked away tears. There was no time now for sorrow, she decided coldly. If she lived long enough, that would have to come later.

Forcing herself to focus, she quickly checked over her equipment. Her radio was dead, probably wrecked beyond repair when the explosion sent her skittering across the pavement. Well, it doesn’t really matter, she thought bleakly. After all, she had no one left to contact. She spotted her Beretta lying on the sidewalk a few meters away and awkwardly limped over to pick it up.

Frowning in concentration, Randi carefully examined the pistol. Although the Beretta’s grip and barrel were scraped and scarred, its firing pin, trigger spring, hammer, and slide all appeared undamaged. One side of her mouth twitched upward in a bitter, self-mocking grin. From the look of it, the 9mm weapon was in better shape than she was.

She hit the magazine release catch, dumped out the half-empty clip, and dropped it into one of her jacket pockets. Then she slapped in a fresh fifteen-round magazine, pulled back on the slide, and lowered the hammer. She was ready.

Randi slid the pistol back into her shoulder holster and took one last, grim look at the burning wreckage scattered across Clayallee. She could hear police, fire, and ambulance sirens warbling louder and louder as the German authorities began reacting to the disaster.

It was time to go.

She turned away and hobbled to the west, pushing deeper in among the trees of the Grunewald forest preserve until she was well out of sight from the road. There, Randi turned north and forced herself into a painful loping run, moving faster and faster among the shadows and the silent, white-cloaked woods.

Main Space Command Center, Near Moscow

Colonel-General Leonid Averkovich Nesterenko, the tall, dapper commander-in-chief of the Russian Federation’s military space forces, marched briskly down the corridor connecting his quarters with the Operations Control Center. Bright fluorescent lighting overhead and a constant flow of fresh-smelling, cool air from ventilation shafts made it difficult to remember that this massive installation was buried hundreds of meters below ground, shielded from attack by massive slabs of steel-reinforced concrete. Its heavily guarded entrance and exit tunnels were concealed in the dense birch forests north of Moscow.

The two armed sentries on guard outside the Operations Center stiffened to attention as he approached. Nesterenko ignored them. Ordinarily a stickler for the finer points of formal military courtesy, he was far too pressed for time just now.

Nesterenko pushed quickly through the door and hurried into the vast chamber beyond. As his eyes adjusted to this huge room’s subdued lighting, he could see row upon row of control consoles. The officers at each console were either busy monitoring the satellite and early warning radar systems in their charge, or conferring quietly via secure communications equipment with colleagues at launch sites, ground stations, and local command posts across Russia.

At the far end of the Center, an enormous, wall-sized screen showed the world and the key spacecraft and satellites orhiting around it. Bright yellow dotted lines depicted each object’s predicted orbital path, while small green vector arrows indicated their current positions.

The duty officer, a much shorter, square-jawed man named Baranov, hurried to Nestrenko’s side. “The Americans are maneuvering one of their Lacrosse radar-imaging reconnaissance satellites, sir,” he reported.

Nestrenko frowned. “Show me.”

The shorter man turned and snapped an order to one of his subordinates at the nearest control console. “Bring up the data on Lacrosse-Five.”

One of the blinking arrows on the huge wall screen changed color, flashing from green to red. At the same time, a new dotted line began slowly di-verging from the satellite’s previously observed orbital track.

“We detected the burn approximately five minutes ago,” Baranov told him.

Nestrenko nodded, glowering as he studied Lacrosse-Five’s new predicted course. “What are our American friends up to?” he murmured. He turned back to Baranov. “Show me a close-up of that projected track where it first crosses our borders. And put up overlays showing the locations where we can expect the Americans to gain significantly better reconnaissance capability from this new orbital path.”

The image on the wall screen flickered and then expanded rapidly, zoom-ing in to focus on a much smaller area —the Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia. Glowing boxes marked out huge swathes of territory along a diagonal running northeast from Kiev to Moscow and beyond. The assembly areas for the tank and motor rifle divisions slated to invade the Ukraine were right in the middle of one of those boxes.

“Damn,” Nestrenko muttered. The Lacrosse satellite carried a powerful synthetic aperture radar imaging system, one that could “see” through clouds, dust, and darkness. The ZHUKOV assembly areas were hidden beneath layers of radar-absorbent camouflage netting, but no one could be sure that this experimental material would successfully deflect such close scrutiny.

“We have a Spider in position,” Baranov reminded him quietly, pointing at another vector arrow blinking on the display. “Our targeting computers predict that it will be in effective range for another thirty minutes.”

Nestrenko nodded tightly. The Spider was one of Russia’s most secret space weapons systems. Disguised as ordinary civilian-use communications, weather, and navigation satellites, each Spider also contained anti-satellite weapons for use against enemy space platforms in low earth orbit. In theory, such an attack could be carried out covertly. But in practice? If detected, any Russian effort to destroy an American spy satellite could easily be construed as an act of war.

Then he shrugged. This decision was beyond his authority. He stepped forward to the nearest console and picked up a red secure phone. “This is Colonel-General Nestrenko. Patch me through to the Kremlin,” he told the operator on the other end firmly. “I must speak with the president immediately. Inform him that this is a war priority communication.”

In Orbit

Four hundred kilometers above the earth’s sun-flecked seas and its great brown, green, and white masses of land, a Russian meteorology satellite officially registered as COSMOS-8B swung through its regular elliptical orbit, moving at twenty-seven thousand kilometers an hour. In reality, the counter-feit satellite was a weapons-carrier code-named Spider Twelve. Now, as it flew high over the coast of Africa, the spacecraft’s high-frequency data-relay antenna began receiving coded transmissions containing new programming for its onboard computers.

Within sixty seconds of receiving the last transmission, Spider Twelve went active.

Small altitude rockets fired, spewing small puffs of vapor into space.

Slowly, the long cylinder-shaped satellite spun through an arc until its blunt nose aimed at a point in space above the earth’s distant curved horizon. When Spider Twelve reached the desired angle, the rockets fired again, arresting its rotation. A relay closed and hatches popped open at the base of the nose.

Six smaller space vehicles —cone-shaped anti-satellite warheads —drifted out through the hatches and slowed slightly, braked by clusters of tiny maneuvering thrusters firing in a preprogrammed sequence. As they decelerated, the warheads began falling toward the earth, arcing downward through a great curve that would bring them within striking range of that distant, precisely calculated point.

When the six warheads were several kilometers away, Spider Twelve performed its last programmed act. Self-destruct charges placed at key points throughout the ten-ton satellite exploded in short, sharp, blinding flashes that were bright enough to be picked up by both American and Russian early-warning sensors orbiting high above the globe. The detonations ripped Spider Twelve to pieces, shearing antennas, solar arrays, and puncturing fuel tanks.

Spewing water vapor and fuel, the tangled wreckage began tumbling through space, shedding smaller fragments as it fell slowly toward the upper fringes of the earth’s atmosphere.

Covered by the brighter explosions behind them, the six anti-satellite warheads also detonated. Each burst sent a hail of thousands of small, razor-edged pieces of titanium into space. Together, they formed a giant cloud of shrapnel, a deadly cloud flying onward at more than seven kilometers a second.

Forty-five seconds later, and more than three hundred kilometers down-range, the shrapnel cloud intersected the orbital track of Lacrosse-Five, one of only two U.S. radar-imaging reconnaissance satellites circling the globe.

Main Space Command Center

“Our tracking radar confirms multiple shrapnel impacts on Lacrosse-Five,”

Baranov said jubilantly, listening closely to a report relayed by one of his watch officers. He turned his head toward Nestrenko. “Preliminary damage assessment shows that the American spy satellite has been totally destroyed.”

The colonel-general nodded calmly. He picked up the red phone again.

“This is Nestrenko,” he said calmly. “Connect me with the United States Space Command.”

He looked across at Baranov with a slight smile while waiting for his hot-line call to go through. “I will have to convey my sincere regrets and deepest apologies for the terrible damage accidentally caused by this catastrophic explosion on board one of our COSMOS-class weather satellites.”

“Do you think the Americans will believe you?”

Nestrenko shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. What is most important is that they cannot possibly launch a replacement for their wrecked radar spy satellite in time. Soon, very soon, we will no longer be forced to care so much about what the Americans believe. Or what they may do.”

The White House

It was still early in the morning when a uniformed Secret Service agent ushered Fred Klein into the president’s den upstairs in the East Wing. The room, full of old books, prints of works by Fredric Remington and Georgia O’Keeffe, and photographs of the rugged New Mexico landscape, was all Castilla’s own —his private refuge from the routine frenzy of the White House’s more public spaces.

The president himself sat in one of the room’s two large recliners, moodily paging through the morning intelligence brief. A tray nearby held his untouched breakfast. He motioned toward the other chair. “Sit down, Fred.”

Klein obeved.

Wearilv, Castilla pushed the pile of papers aside and turned to his old friend. “Has there been any more news from Smith or the others in Moscow?”

“Not yet,” Klein told him. “But I expect another report in a matter of hours at most.”

Tire president nodded somberly. “Good. Because I’m going to need as much information as I can get —and I’m going to need it very soon. Certainly within the next forty-eight hours.”

Klein raised an eyebrow.

“I’m more and more convinced that whatever the Russians are planning is coining up fast,” Castilla explained. “Which means that our window for heading them off is closing even faster.”

“Yes, sir,” the head of Covert-One agreed. If the rumors Smith and Fiona Devin had picked up about the accelerating tempo of Russian military preparations were accurate, the U.S. and its allies would already be hard-pressed to react in time.

“I’m calling a secret meeting with high-level representatives of some of our closest allies,” Castilla told him. “Those who still pack a respectable military punch —the UK, France, Germany, and Japan, for a start. I want us to forge a united response to the Kremlin, a series of concrete measures that will force Dudarev to back down before he pulls the trigger on whatever operation he’s planning.”

“When?” Klein asked quietly.

“The morning of February 22,” the president said. “I don’t see how we can afford to wait any longer than that.”

Klein frowned. “That’s a very tight deadline,” he said at length. “I don’t know that I can promise concrete results by then.”