He hadn’t asked that in years, or if he did Patrick had to say “no.” Bradley was not heavy but he was tall, past Patrick’s chin and almost to his mouth when standing together. At the very least, carrying him would have been unwieldy. But he stooped down, scooped him up, and cradled him in his arms. “Thanks, Dad,” Bradley said, and fell asleep immediately.
For the first time, perhaps in a long time, Patrick found it easy to keep his mind focused on this important task, rather than the dozens of equally important ones awaiting him.
EPILOGUE
“Crossing the Iranian horizon…now,” Colonel Kai Raydon said. Almost the entire crew of Armstrong Space Station was floating near the radar technicians and displays as the station’s powerful sensors began sweeping Iran with its ultra-precise, high-powered, high-resolution beams.
Tehran had mostly been spared destruction by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Only two Shahab-2 rockets had hit, both on Doshan Tappeh Air Base, resulting in relatively few casualties. The Air Battle Force had destroyed or intercepted a total of eighteen Shahab-2s, plus another twenty-four Shahab-2s and twenty Shahab-3 rockets aimed at targets to the west.
But there was one more missile to be destroyed. They had received indications by their constellations of NIRTSats that the third remaining Shahab-5 missile based near Kerman in southern Iran was preparing for launch. It was too dangerous for the Air Battle Force to send in its bombers to try to destroy the silo, and there were no ships available in the area with conventional cruise missiles. There was only one weapon system available to deal with the big Iranian missile.
“Starting to receive imagery of the Zarand launch site, crew,” Raydon reported. “Genesis, are you receiving?”
“Affirmative, Odin,” Dave Luger responded from the command center at Dreamland. “‘Avenger’ has already approved execution — weapons free.”
“Copy, Genesis,” Raydon responded. “Thirty seconds.” As the station got closer to the target area and the radar’s line of sight became less angled, they could make out more detail. “Looks like the silo door is open, gang,” Raydon reported. “Crew, we have authorization. Weapons free, batteries released. Ann, fire ’em up.”
“Roger that, Colonel,” Ann Page replied from the Skybolt control module. “Crew, attention in the station, MHD magnetic fields coming alive.” The lights dimmed briefly, and then they heard a rhythmic vibration traveling throughout the station.
At that moment Raydon saw a large column of heat burst upward from the Iranian missile silo, completely obscuring their view. The sensor operator zoomed out…just in time to watch a Shahab-5 missile shoot out from inside the silo! “Missile launch, missile launch!” the tech shouted. “Confirmed Shahab-5 missile launch…veering south now, altitude twenty-five thousand, fifteen miles downrange…sensors confirm the target as the north-central Indian Ocean.”
“Bastards — they actually launched a missile against Diego Garcia,” Raydon said angrily. He floated over to the Skybolt control console to be sure that the radar and targeting lasers were locked onto the Shahab-5 missile rising through the atmosphere. “Ann, do me a big favor and destroy that sucker for me?”
“You got it, Kai,” Ann said. “Crew, stand by for weapon release.” She hit a button on her console that commanded the Skybolt system to life:
In the Skybolt laser module, two small nuclear reactors began sending a chunk of molten metal through a non-conducting pipe that had a strong electromagnetic field in the middle. When the metal reached the reactor heads it vaporized into a gas, which shot it back the other way through the pipe. When it moved away from the head it turned back into a solid just as it passed the magnetic field, creating a massive slug of electricity that was stored in a capacitor. As the slug traveled through the pipe and reached the other reactor head, it turned back into a gas and was propelled in the opposite direction to start the process over again. The generator could operate for centuries like this with absolutely no moving parts.
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
