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.
Chapter Thirty-Three
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.”
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.
“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
