The MHD generator quickly picked up speed, sending tremendous pulses of electricity through the capacitors until it filled, then released the electron energy all at once into the laser chamber. This sequence occurred several thousand times a second, creating massive pulses of electron laser energy that were reflected up and down the magnetic laser amplifier, increasing its power even more until the laser light reached its maximum power, then shot out of the amplifier, into a collimation chamber to focus the beam, then out of the module through the directional adaptive mirror and into space.
The higher the Shahab-5 rose through the atmosphere, the more vulnerable it was to the electron laser beam. The intense heat, focused precisely on the rear one-third of the missile where its first-stage liquid fuel was stored, burned through the rocket’s skin within three seconds, then detonated the rocket fuel. The plume of fire traveled through the sky for several seconds, blossoming outward as it climbed until the fuel was completely burned up.
“Target destroyed,” the radar sensor operator reported. “Confirmed kill.”
“Good job, Ann,” Raydon said. “I’m very impressed. You sure know how to cook.”
“Damn right I do, Kai,” Ann said. “Damn right I do.”
“Missile destroyed — less than one minute after launch,” Russian General Kuzma Furzyenko, chief of staff of the Air Forces of the Russian Federation, commented, shaking his head at the report coming in via secure text messaging from a Russian spy ship in the Arabian Sea. “Amazing. Quite amazing.”
“I’m glad you’re impressed, General!” retorted Ayatollah Hassan Mohtaj, acting president and Supreme Leader of Iran. “That was a half-billion-dollar ballistic missile that was just destroyed…and on your request! I hope you realize your government is going to compensate us fully for the cost!”
“You will be fairly compensated, Mohtaj…you just won’t be paid anything,” Furzyenko said.
“Oh? How, then?”
“By helping keep your asses alive,” the general said.
“First we turn over the body of their commando, the robot machine, and the equipment from their spaceplane over to you for free, and then we waste our most sophisticated missile on a test flight for you, and we will not be paid? That is simply not fair, General.”
“We can simply take our troops back to Russia and leave you to your fate,” Furzyenko said. “Is that fair enough for you?” Mohtaj opened his mouth but said nothing. “Who will destroy you first if we left, priest? Buzhazi? The Qagev princess and her followers? The Americans? The Israelis? Your fellow Iranians? So many enemies, so little protection. Think about it before you speak to me again with that tone of voice, priest.” Mohtaj gulped indignantly but said nothing. The Russian glared at him, then picked up his secure telephone and waited for the encrypted connection. “General Furzyenko here, sir.”
“How did it go, General?” Russian president Leonid Zevitin asked.
“The Americans took the bait as you predicted, sir,” Furzyenko said. “We simply waited until we knew Armstrong Space Station would be in a good position to attack, then had Mohtaj command the Pasdaran to launch the Shahab-5 missile over the Indian Ocean.”
“You didn’t actually target it for Diego Garcia, did you, General?”
“It would have impacted in the Indian Ocean but far short of the island, shortly after second-stage ignition — it would have looked like an unsuccessful launch.”
“Any chance the missile was shot down by one of their airborne lasers?”
“Their one known AL-52 aircraft has terminated its patrol north of Tehran and is being refueled somewhere over the Persian Gulf,” Furzyenko said. “We know they have one or two flyable 747 AL-1 airborne laser aircraft, but we believe if they are operational they were kept back guarding the homeland and were not part of McLanahan’s Iran operation. Our picket ships have detected no other aircraft in the area, although their stealth bombers could have sneaked past us. We will get telescopic infrared photographs of the space station that should confirm that the Skybolt laser fired, but I am confident that it was Skybolt that destroyed the Shahab-5.”
“So Martindale has resurrected the space laser again,” Zevitin said. “This is a major violation of the Outer Space Treaty and a clear and serious escalation of hostilities all around the world. The United States has militarized space, again.”
“Agreed, sir. This calls for a quick response.”
“And there will be one, General,” Zevitin said. “I guarantee it. What of our fanar unit?”
“Fanar was moved away from the Strongbox right after we destroyed the spaceplane,” Furzyenko said. “We left its surveillance radar in place and put a decoy trailer at the site, both of which the Americans destroyed. But the laser is on its way here to Mashhad under heavy guard. We’ll fly it back to Russia right away.”
“Very good, General, very good,” Zevitin said. “Gather your analyses and post-strike reports and report to me as soon as possible, and we’ll plan Russia’s next move against the newly aggressive President Martindale and his pet bulldog, General Patrick Shane McLanahan.”
“Nakanyets!” Furzyenko said happily. “At last!”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Janet and Bryan Raydon and Linda and Richard Offerdahl for their generosity.
Thanks to astronaut Mike Mullane, author of Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut (New York: Scribner, 2006), and Thomas D. Jones, astronaut and author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to NASA (New York: Alpha, 2002) and Sky Walking: An Astronaut’s Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), for their help on understanding the wonders and dangers of space flight and for their thoughts and opinions on the military use of space.
Thanks to the organizers, sponsors, exhibitors, and presenters that I met at the 2006 International Symposium for Personal Spaceflight, held in Las Cruces, New Mexico, part of the X-Prize Cup weekend demonstrating and rewarding the newest advancements in private spaceflight technology. I especially wish to thank Patricia C. Hynes, Lowell Catlett, and Thomas Burton for their hospitality and help.
I would also like to thank Andy Turnage, executive director of the Association of Space Explorers, for his support, along with ASE members (all of whom had to make at least one orbit around the Earth) Jay C. Buckey Jr., Thomas Jones, and Dr. John-David F. Bartoe, with whom I was lucky enough to hang out with at the symposium and gain some “behind-the-scenes” insight on living and working in space.
Your comments are welcome! Visit www.AirBattleForce.com or e-mail me at readermail@airbattleforce.com. I may not have time to reply, but I read every e-mail.
About the Author
Former U.S. Air Force Captain DALE BROWN was born in Buffalo, New York, and now lives near Lake Tahoe. Strike Force is his nineteenth novel. He graduated from Penn State University with a degree in western European history and received a U.S. Air Force commission in 1978. He was still serving in the Air Force when he wrote his highly acclaimed first novel, Flight of the Old Dog. Since then he has written a string of New York Times bestsellers, including, most recently, Plan of Attack, Act of War, and Edge of Battle.