surrender, smiling broadly. “I enjoy these exchanges, and I’d like you to put your thoughts down in a memo to my national security team later on, but let’s get back to finishing the space-policy draft, shall we?” He glanced at the agenda for the meeting. “The big issue at the end of the last meeting was the question of the space policy violating or abrogating any existing treaties or alliances. What did we-” And at that moment the phone rang. The vice president rolled his eyes in mock exasperation. “I promise, we are going to finish that draft this hour. Excuse me.” He picked up the phone. “Yes, Denise?”
“Mr. Kordus for you, sir.”
“Put him on.”
“Mr. Vice President?”
“Hi, Walter.”
“Conrad got a call from Miller at the Pentagon, something about the space station,” the president’s chief of staff said. “Said it was urgent. The president’s getting ready to touch down in Arizona and asked me to ask you to find out what’s going on.”
“I’ll take care of it.” The line went dead. Phoenix hung up the phone, then pressed the intercom button. “Denise, give Mr. Carlyle a call for me, will you?”
“Mr. Carlyle is on his way to the Situation Room with Secretary Turner, sir. He should arrive in the next few minutes.”
The vice president’s eyes narrowed, and he picked up the phone. “Right now, Denise? What’s going…?” He listened for a moment, then hung up and said to his panel members before him, “I lied, guys-we won’t finish the draft today. I’ll e-mail you all to reschedule.” He got to his feet, and the others jumped up as well. As Phoenix dashed for the door, he said over his shoulder, “Mr. Dobson, you’re with me.”
The two walked quickly to a staircase, were met by a plain-clothes Secret Service agent, hurried down to the first basement floor, and then entered the tunnel connecting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to the White House. It was a short walk upstairs to the White House Situation Room, where Phoenix found National Security Adviser Conrad Carlyle, Secretary of Defense Miller Turner, and Secretary of the Air Force Salazar Banderas. On the large computer monitor in the front of the room was an image of Brigadier General Kai Raydon and Undersecretary of the Air Force Ann Page, on a secure videoconference link. Phoenix pointed to Dobson. “Tim Dobson from CIA, helping me on the space-policy review; I asked him to come along. What’s going on, guys?”
“It’s possible the Space Defense Force weapon garages are being attacked, Mr. Vice President,” Turner said.
“What?”
“General Raydon, run it down for the vice president,” Miller said.
“Yes, sir,” Kai began. “Mr. Noble and my engineers and staff carefully studied data from the Kingfisher interceptor garages, along with other sensor data, and discovered two things: The same faults occurred on all the affected garages; and the faults occurred in virtually the same spots over the Earth.”
“Someone was shooting at the weapon garages?”
“Yes, sir, but not with a kinetic weapon, but with data. We believe the Russians are bombarding our satellites with viruslike data that enters the garages’ computer system through their digital radar sensors and causes certain systems to shut down or crash.”
“How do you know it’s the Russians, General?”
“The faults occur shortly after the satellites pass over Russian signals intelligence and space surveillance sites,” Kai replied. “Specifically, sites in Venezuela, the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia, Socotra Island off the coast of Somalia, and Murmansk.”
“Can you verify that?”
“They proposed modifying the weapon garages with signal-gathering packages that can collect any intrusive outside signals and send them to the space station for analysis, sir,” Carlyle said. “Their engineers are working to devise a suitable package.”
“But as of now…?”
“No, sir, we can’t positively say the Russians are doing the damage.”
“Can you jam or block the outside signals?”
“Not yet, sir,” Raydon said. “We’re working on defensive software for the garages-basically antivirus software. Our only other option right now is to shut down the digital active electronically scanned array radars whenever they come within range of a Russian site, but then we’d be letting them know we know what they’re up to.”
“Seems to me you have no choice-it’s probably costing a ton of money to repair those things,” Phoenix said. “What about the Chinese?”
“We believe the cause of the explosion of the Kingfisher-Eight garage was the result of a successful Chinese DF-21 antisatellite-missile attack,” Raydon said.
“I’ll ask it again: Can you verify that?” the vice president asked after a stunned pause.
“No, sir, we can’t,” Ann Page said. “The satellite that could have done so, Kingfisher-Eight, was already damaged-due to the data attack by the Russians, we believe-and shut down when the missile was launched.”
“But we can detect missile launches with other satellites, right?”
“We believe the launch was hidden from heat sensors by a decoy: A large fire near the launch site obliterated the rocket launch.”
“So you’re not sure there was a DF-21 launch.”
“It could have been launched from there, but no, sir, we didn’t actually see it,” Ann admitted.
“But we did learn that the weapon garage hadn’t malfunctioned-it actually detected the incoming ASAT missile and tried to launch an interceptor,” Kai said. “We interpreted the sudden, uncommanded arming as a fault causing an explosion, but it was actually the garage detecting the attack and maneuvering to try to defeat it.”
“Unbelievable,” Phoenix said, shaking his head. “But you have no proof of any of the attacks, right?”
“The signal gatherer will tell us if the Russians are trying their own version of netrusion on our garages, and we’ll have to shut down the AESA radars until we find a way to block the harmful data,” Kai said. “As far as the Chinese DF-21s are concerned: Every malfunctioning weapon garage and every unprotected satellite in low Earth orbit is a target, and the more sites the Chinese build, the more satellites will be at risk.”
“So you’re saying we’re completely on the defensive here?” the vice president asked. “We can’t stop the Russians from injecting viruses into our satellites, and we can’t stop the Chinese from building ASATs all over the world? I don’t buy any of that for a second. The president is going to need more options, gentlemen. Let’s start putting some plans together.” He picked up a telephone on the conference table as the others left the Situation Room, leaving the vice president with Dobson and the images of Raydon and Page still connected on the secure videoconference line. “Get me the president, please.”
A few moments later: “Hi, Ken,” President Gardner said. “Did you get the briefing?”
“I did, sir. It’s staggering. None of our satellites are safe.”
“I wanted you to get that info to show you how important my proposed global ban on antisatellite weapons is, Ken,” the president said. “The arms race in space is on. And as soon as we figure out a way to stop one form of attack, another one will pop up, and then we have to pay to find a way to defeat it. It’s nothing but a treadmill, Ken, and I want to get off. The revised National Space Policy is the first step. If we have to do a unilateral antisatellite- weapon ban to show the world how serious we are, then so be it.”
“But what are we going to do now, sir?” Phoenix asked. “ Russia and China didn’t just demonstrate their antisatellite capabilities-they actually attacked our satellites!”
“And they got our attention, too, which I believe was their intention all along,” the president said. “But we don’t have real proof they did anything, do we? We have a lot of circumstantial evidence, but nothing definite. There’s nothing we can do.”
“An American airman died in space because of what the Russians and Chinese did, sir.”
“And as an attorney, you know that you need a lot more than circumstantial evidence to prove murder beyond a shadow of a doubt. I’m just as angry as you over the death of that officer, and it probably would not have happened if the attacks hadn’t happened-”
“‘Probably,’ sir?”
“-but in the absence of concrete proof,” the president went on, apparently ignoring Phoenix’s remark, “there’s nothing we can do except work to make sure such weapons are banned forever. We’d look foolish confronting the Russians or Chinese with unprovable accusations.” The president paused, but Phoenix said nothing. “Am I correct,
