then slinked away like cowardly dogs.” A tall, dark-haired man, standing alone near the great stone fireplace, turned toward General Santos. “You have still not explained to us, General, ” Second Vice President J~~e Trujillo Samar said in a deep voice, “what that barge was doing in the neutral zone, anchored to Pagasa Island. . “And what are you implying, Samar?” First Vice President Daniel Teguina, who was seated near the President’s desk, challenged. Teguina was politically an ally of Samar but ideologically a complete opposite. Part of the coalition formed during the 1994 elections was the appointment of forty-one year-old Daniel Teguina. Much younger than Mikaso, Teguina was not only a vice president, but also the leader of the Philippine House of Representatives, an ex-military officer, newspaper publisher, and leader of the National Democratic Front, a leftist political organization. With General J~~e Trujillo Samarwho besides being the second vice president was also governor of the newly formed Commonwealth of Mindanao, which had won the right to form its own autonomous commonwealth in 1990-these three men formed a fiery coalition that, although successful in continuing the important post-Marcos rebuilding process in the Philippines, was stormy and divisive. “Those were innocent Filipino workers on the barge.. .” said Teguina. Samar nodded and said, “Who were illegally drilling for oil in the neutral zone. Did they think the Chinese were going to just sit back and watch them work?”
“They were not drilling for oil, just taking soundings, ” said Teguina. “Well, they had no business there, ” Samar insisted. “The Chinese Navy’s actions were outrageous, but those workers were in clear violation of the law.”
“You’re a cold bastard, ” Teguina cut in. “Blaming the dead for an act of aggression “Enough, enough, ” the elderly Mikaso said wearily, gesturing for the men to stop. “I did not call you here to argue. Teguina glared at both men. “Well, we can’t just sit back and do nothing. The Chinese just launched a major act of aggression. We must do something. We must-“
“Enough, ” Mikaso interrupted. “We must begin an investigation and find out exactly why that barge was operating in those waters, then. “Sir, I recommend that we also step up patrols in the Spratly Island area, ” General Santos said. “This may be a prelude to a full-scale invasion of the Spratlys by the Chinese.”
“Risky, ” Samar concluded. “A naval response would be seen as provocative, and we have no way of winning any conflict with the People’s Liberation Navy. We would gain nothing… “Always the general, eh, Samar?” Teguina asked derisively. He turned away from him to the President. “I agree with General Santos. We have a navy, however small-I say to send them to protect our interests in the Spratlys. We have an obligation to our people to do nothing short of that.” Arturo Mikaso looked at each of his advisers in turn and nodded in agreement. Little did he realize the extraordinary chain of events he was about to set into motion with that slight nod of his head. OVER NEW MEXICO, 100 MILES SOUTH OF ALBUQUERQUE 9 JUNE 1994, 0745 HOURS LOCAL with his boyish face, long, gangly arms and legs, his baseball cap, and his thirty-two-ounce squeeze bottle of Pepsi-Cola-he drank five such bottles a day yet was still as skinny as a rail-Jonathan Colin Masters resembled a kid at a Saturday afternoon ball game. He had bright-green eyes and short brown hair-luckily, the baseball cap hid Masters’ hair, or else his stubborn cowlicks would have made him appear even younger, almost adolescent, to the range officers and technicians standing nearby. Masters, his assistants and technicians, and a handful of Air Force and Defense Advanced Research and Projects Agency (DARPA) officials were on board a converted DC-10 airliner, forty-five thousand feet over the White Sands Missile Test Range in south-central New Mexico. Unlike the military and Pentagon officials, who were poring over checklists, notes, and schematics, Masters had his feet up on a raised track in the cargo section of the massive airliner, sipping his cola and smiling like a kid who was at the circus for the first time. “The winds are kicking up again, Doctor Masters, ” U.S. Air Force Colonel Ralph Foch said to Masters, his voice one of concern. Masters wordlessly tipped his soda bottle at the Air Force range safety officer and reached to his control console, punched in instructions to the computer, and studied the screen. “Carrier aircraft has compensated for the winds, and ALARM has acknowledged the change, ” Masters reported. “We got it covered, Ralph.” Colonel Ralph Foch wasn’t mollified, and being called “Ralph” by a man-no, a kid-twenty years his junior didn’t help. “The one-hundred-millibar wind patterns are approaching the second-stage ‘Q’ limits, Doctor, ” Foch said irritably. “That’s the third increase over the forecast we’ve seen in the past two hours. We should consider aborting the flight.” Masters glanced over his shoulder at Foch and smiled a dimpled, toothy smile. “ALARM compensated OK, Ralph, ” Masters repeated. “No need to abort.”
“But we’re on the edge of the envelope as it is, ” Colonel Foch reminded him. “The edge of your envelope, Ralph, ” Masters said. He got to his feet, walked a few steps aft, and patted the nose of a huge, torpedo-shaped object sitting on its launch rail. “You established your flight parameters based on data I provided, and you naturally made your parameters more restrictive. ALARM here knows its limits and it still says go. So we go. “Doctor Masters, as the range safety officer I’m here to insure a safe launch for both the ground and the air crews. My parameters are established to-“
“Colonel Foch, if you want to abort the mission, say the word, ” Masters said calmly, barely suppressing a casual burp. “The Navy doesn’t get their relay hookup satellites on the air until tomorrow, you can spend the night at the Blytheville, Arkansas, Holiday Inn again, and I can bill DARPA another one hundred thousand dollars for gas. It’s your decision.”
“I’m merely expressing my concern about the winds at altitude, Doctor Masters . . “And I replied to your concerns, ” Masters said with a smile. “My little baby here says it’s a go. Unless we fly somewhere else to launch, away from the jet stream . . “DARPA is very specific about the launch area, Doctor. These satellites are important to the Navy. They want to moni tor the booster’s progress throughout the flight. The launch must be over the White Sands range. “Fine. Then we continue to monitor the winds and let the computers do their jobs. If they can’t properly compensate without going outside the range, we turn around on the racetrack and try again. If we go outside the launch window, we abort. Fair enough?” Foch could do nothing but nod in agreement. This launch was important to both the Navy and Air Force, and he wasn’t prepared to issue a launch abort unilaterally. The object called ALARM that Masters so lovingly regarded was the Air Launched Alert Response Missile; there were two of the huge missiles on board the DC-10 that morning. ALARM was a four-stage space booster designed to place up to three-quarter-ton payloads in low-to-medium Earth orbit by launching the booster from the cargo hold of an aircraft-in effect, the DC-10 was the ALARM booster’s first stage, with the other three stages provided by powerful solid-fuel rockets on the missile itself. The ALARM missile had a long, slender, one-piece wing that swiveled out from its stowed position along the missile’s fuselage after launch. The wing would supply lift and increase the effectiveness of the solid rocket motors while the booster was in the atmosphere, which greatly increased the power and payload capability of the booster. An ALARM booster could carry as much as fifteen hundred pounds in its ten-foot-long, forty-inch-diameter payload bay. On today’s mission, each of Masters’ ALARM boosters carried four small two-hundred-pound communications satellites, which Jon Masters, in his own inimitable way, called NIRTSats-“Need It Right This Second” satellites. Unlike more conventional satellites, which weighed hundreds or even thousands of pounds, were placed in high geosynchronous orbits almost twenty-three thousand miles above the Equator, and could carry dozens of communications channels, NIRTSats were small, lightweight satellites which carried only a few communications channels and were placed in low, one-hundred-to-one-thousand-mile orbits. Unlike geosynchronous satellites, which orbited the Earth once per day and therefore appeared to be stationary over the Equator, NIRTSats orbited the Earth once every ninety to three hundred minutes, which meant that usually more than one satellite had to be launched to cover a particular area. But a NIRTSat cost less than one-fiftieth the price of a fullsized satellite, and it cost less to insure and launch as well. Even with a constellation of four NIRTSats, a customer with a need for satellite communications could get it for less than one-third the price of buying “air time” on an existing satellite. A single ALARM booster launch, which cost only ten million dollars from start to finish, could give a customer instant global communications capability from anywhere in the world-and it took only a few days to get the system in place, instead of the months or even years it took for conventional launches. NIRTSats could be repositioned anywhere in orbit if requirements changed, and Masters had even devised a way to recover a NIRTSat intact and reuse it, which saved the customer even more money. Masters’ customer this day was, as it usually was, the Department of Defense, which was why all the military observers were on hand. Masters was to place four NIRTSats in a four-hundred-mile-high polar orbit over the western Pacific to provide the Navy and Air Force with specialized, dedicated voice, data, air-traffic control, and video communications between ships, aircraft, and land-based controllers. With the NIRTSat constellation in place, the Navy’s Seventh Fleet headquarters and the Air Force’s Pacific Air Force headquarters could instantly talk with and find the precise locations of every ship and aircraft on the network. Coupled with the military’s Global Positioning System satellite navigation system, NIRTSats would continually transmit flight or sailing data on each aircraft or vessel to their respective headquarters, although the vessels might be far outside radio range. The second ALARM booster carried another four NIRTSat satellites
