"General Shenko, as a representative of the Committee for State Security I must ask you to accompany me." The voice was gentle. Almost benevolent.
General Shenko turned and confronted his counterpart in the green serge uniform of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopas-nosti. Shenko was grateful this one wasn't as arrogant as the garden variety Chekist.
"Very well," replied Shenko. He took his pack of Chesterfields off the console and stuffed them into the breast pocket of his rumpled uniform, then turned to leave the Flite Centre. Over his shoulder he gave one last instruction. "Tell Baikonur not to waste a second," he said flatly.
Malyshev nodded as he watched the door close behind his general.
A final puff of Chesterfield smoke seemed to hang in the air.
The gargantuan doors of the shuttle hangar slowly rumbled open to reveal a duplicate of the Mikhail Suslov. The size, shape, and markings of the winged spacecraft appeared to be the same as the original shuttle, except for black, sootlike impressions along its side. Had the genuine Suslov survived, the reentry friction would have burned similar markings onto the white fuselage.
Ground technicians hurriedly hooked the nosewheel onto the tow tractor, and as soon as the doors cleared the wingspan, the duplicate began moving out onto the 5,000-meter runway built especially for shuttle landings.
The special tow tractor used only a fraction of its pulling horsepower, since the replica Suslov was fabricated from sheets of phenolic plastic laminated to a plywood frame. Its core was hollow except for some steel ingots loaded aboard to provide it some stability in heavy wind.
When the decoy reached the end of the tarmac, a ground crew detached the hitch and attached a deployed barking parachute to the tail section. A generator cart was wheeled underneath the craft and started, then a technician plugged the electric cable into a connector on the decoy's belly. The connector was hooked up to a network of heating coils imbedded in the plastic skin.
A covey of rescue and ground-service vehicles then drew up around the decoy as if the genuine Suslov had landed.
The ground crew chief surveyed the scene and was satisfied with himself that the exercise had gone a lot smoother — this time.
Gen. Rodger Whittenberg, Commander in Chief, United States Space Command, stared intently at the television monitor while the Suslov's reentry burn was replayed for the third time.
"Okay, that's enough," he told the airman, then turned to the colonel. "I want to see the digital pix from this tape as soon as they come out of the laser printer, and I want a Keyhole pass over Baikonur ASAP. We need to see how well that shuttle held up on reentry."
"Yessir," replied his intelligence chief. "We had a KH-12 slated for a pass over Krasnoyarsk to check on some new ABM construction, but that can wait. The Keyhole's flight path has already been altered, and she'll be coming over Baikonur in about forty minutes. We'll catch it in daylight on the first pass."
"Good… good." At least we don't have to worry about getting Keyhole pix these days, Whittenberg thought.
After the American shuttle Challenger exploded in a fireball over the Atlantic back in the 1980s, and NASA had been unable to get so much as a kite aloft for the longest time, the United States, the richest and most technically advanced nation on earth, had limped along with a single KH-11 Keyhole reconnaissance satellite in orbit. The dearth of photointelligence during that period was grave, and it lasted over two years — largely because the defense establishment had painted itself into a technological corner. The new generation of reconaissance satellites, the KH-12s, had been designed specifically for shuttle transport and couldn't be launched by any other means. No shuttle, no satellite. It was that simple.
But times had changed, and for this Whittenberg was grateful. When the current administration came into office, the new President had embraced both the space program and Star Wars with an almost rabid vengeance. Calling it his Final Frontier agenda, he galvanized the American people behind a renewed effort in space. So effective was he that one newspaper columnist wrote, "The halcyon days of the Apollo program have returned to planet earth." This rekindled emphasis on space was not lost on Whit-tenberg, who was in essence the American military space "Czar." Now, instead of a single, aging spy satellite, he commanded four new-generation KH-12 satellites that crisscrossed the globe in various orbits.
Whittenberg left the newly renovated and enlarged Space Defense Operations Center, usually called "SPADOC," and started the long walk through the underground passageway toward his office. As always, the subterranean journey irritated him. Whittenberg had been a pilot in the Strategic Air Command for years, and he was the kind of man who liked wide vistas. Woricing inside a high-tech salt mine was not to his liking, but since he'd been hand picked for the SPACECOM post by the President, there wasn't much he could do about it. He suppressed his discomfort one more time and hustled down the tunnel toward his destination.
Chosen because of its location and geologic complexion, Cheyenne Mountain had been developed into a unique engineering marvel — almost on a par with the Golden Gate Bridge or Hoover Dam. It had taken three years of blasting to hollow out the granite innards of the mountain, and another two years to build its four-and-a-half-acre latticework of fifteen underground buildings and assorted passageways. This hard rock inner sanctum housed what could best be described as the central nervous system of America's defense capability.
In a heavily guarded compound on the exterior of Cheyenne Mountain, a forest of antennas pulled in a kaleidoscope of signals from remote sensors all around the globe. On the Arctic tundra the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) aimed its over-the-horizon radar toward the Soviet Union and beamed its data back to Cheyenne Mountain. Twenty-three thousand miles above the earth, an infrared launch detection satellite called Teal Sapphire kept watch over Soviet missile pads, ready to send a warning should a rocket lift off. Under the sea, American hunter-killer submarines tracked their Russian counterparts, providing location data on enemy missile boats via ultralow-frequency radios that could transmit underwater. All of these signals were relayed to the exterior antennas compound by satellite, landline, or microwave link, then they were carried by fiber-optic cables into the basement of the mountain.
SPACECOM, which included the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) under its flag, possessed within Cheyenne Mountain the most massive array of computing power in the free world. Although its equipment was not as fresh from the factory as the National Security Agency's computers, or as state-of-the-art as those on the Star Wars platform, in terms of sheer size and bulk Cheyenne Mountain was the world's largest computing center. It had to be. For in the event of a nuclear attack, it was from the mountain that the President would receive those precious minutes of warning to initiate his country's response. The electronic sensor information collected by NORAD was fed into the computer complex, where it was sorted, analyzed, and collated, then routed to the proper screen within SPADOC. All of the information on the technicians' monitors, and on the large projection screens that dominated SPADOC, was on call to the NORAD commander in his "Cockpit" or "Crow's Nest," which overlooked the cavernous room. In the event of an ICBM or bomber attack, the NORAD commander could quickly piece together a picture of the situation and pass on warning and assessment data to the President and major military commands.