A Kinetic High
by Gustavo Bondoni
The woman in the FBI windbreaker held out her hand. “I’m Agent Hamilton. Glad you could make it.”
“I wasn’t given much of a choice,” Captain Sal Garda replied. “Or any information. Hell, I don’t even know where I am.” A dirt road intersected a tarmac two lane with patched-over potholes. His chopper had landed about sixty miles back, where a car had been waiting for him beside a cluster of official-looking buildings in the middle of nowhere. Great, flat plains surrounded them.
“Yeah, that couldn’t be helped. Background check.” Her voice made it seem like it wasn’t a big deal, and he couldn’t really read her expression as she was wearing sunglasses despite the cloud cover.
“Background check? Are you kidding me? Did the one they did when I applied for the Space Force get lost in a crack? You know I’m not a security risk.”
“It’s not national security this one focused on.”
“What the hell was it, then?” Garda asked.
“Drugs.”
“I’m with the Space Force, not the DEA.”
“We know. But we still had to check. Your family . . .”
“I know who my family was. But that was forty years ago, and my dad was never involved in any of that. He was ten when my grandfather went to jail and never came out. That scared him straight.”
“Sorry, man,” the agent said. “All they told me was that they were checking up on you and to brief you when you got here if you were cleared. I don’t care about any of that other stuff.”
“Was I cleared?”
“You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.” She walked toward a group of men standing on the dirt road about a hundred yards away, so he followed. “Just a couple of things. Remember that here in Canada you’re not allowed to arrest anyone or shoot anyone.”
“I don’t do that in the U.S., either. And if we’re in Canada, shouldn’t I have gone through customs?”
She waved the concern off. “That’s been taken care of. The second thing is that you need to be careful around Senator Rennes. He’s an asshat, but he can get you pulled off this job with a phone call.”
“For all I know, he’d be doing me a favor.”
“Just say yes to everything he says. We’ll figure it out later, once he’s back in Washington.”
He wanted to ask what was going on, why he’d been pulled out of a meeting and flown halfway across the country—actually out of the country, in fact—without any information for something that seemed to have nothing to do with the Space Force.
The crowd of people ahead suddenly parted, revealing the dirt road. “Oh, crap,” Garda said.
“Yeah.”
“Meteor?” he asked.
“Kinetic impact.”
“Someone dropped a Rod from God?” He looked around. “On Canada?”
“It was aimed at the U.S.,” an older man from the group, dressed in a dark blue suit, said. “And it’s not a weapon. The weapon is what was inside.” He held out his hand. “I’m Senator Rennes. Thanks for coming on such short notice, son. I’m glad the Space Force is on the job. Maybe you can solve this, since the other agencies . . .” His voice trailed off as he glanced disapprovingly at Hamilton. “The other agencies don’t seem to understand just how much of a threat this is.”
“Yes, sir,” Garda replied. “We’ll take care of it. I’m Captain Garda.”
“Glad to see a military man on the job. I’m starting to feel confident we’ll clear this up.”
“I will definitely do my best. The first thing I need to do is look over the area to see what law enforcement might have missed. Do you mind if I take Agent Hamilton with me?”
“Of course not. Do your job,” the senator said. He returned to his group.
The crater was fifteen yards further down the road. Several officers in different uniforms stood around, keeping everyone at a safe distance. As soon as they were out of earshot of the senator, Hamilton whispered: “You really know how to kiss ass.”
“I work in Washington,” he replied. “I spend half my life deflecting unwanted political attention. Who are these guys?”
“Mounties and the CSIS. That’s like the Canadian version of the Bureau. They know their stuff, but in this case, everyone knows where the problem came from. It came from up there.” She pointed into the sky. “Your job is to figure out how it got up there in the first place.”
“And the soldiers?” Garda asked.
“They’re just pissed that someone blew a hole in one of their roads and there’s no one around to shoot at.”
The crater was roughly circular, thirty feet in diameter and about fifteen feet deep. “If this is really a kinetic strike, it’s a small one. A tankbuster at best. Maybe not even that.” Garda knelt on the rim of the hole and looked down into it, trying to see if he could spot fragments of the payload. “This doesn’t make any sense. Lifting weight into orbit is expensive. You don’t drop stuff from space for such a small result.”
“This isn’t an attack,” Hamilton said. “It’s a failed attempt at smuggling.”
“You’ll need to explain,” Garda said, standing and walking around the crater. “If I keep guessing, I’m just going to waste everyone’s time.”
“It’s a drug delivery system. High-end designer pills with some serious street values. Stuff you can’t get just anywhere. Silicon Valley billionaire candy.”
“That explains the cops. But why the senator? Is this some War on Drugs thing?”
“No. He’s here because these guys are also one of the main conduits for getting abortion drugs into nonabortion states without a paper trail. And Rennes wants them shut down with prejudice. Like right now.” She said it with no inflection, and he didn’t ask her feelings. She seemed like the kind that would do the job she’d signed up to do, even if she didn’t agree with everything it entailed.
“So this shipment was headed to . . . . . . . . . what? Montana? Wyoming? Where are we, even?”
“Nah. This was a screw-up. The info we’ve got says the payloads usually have brakes and chutes. Something must have gone seriously wrong for this one to slam into the ground. For all we know, it was supposed to land in Texas.”
Garda stood. “Since it’s going to take weeks to sift through this hole to pull out the scraps of whatever they used to deliver the payload, and since no one is going to be able to tell much from the remains except that they suffered a huge impact, I can give you my verdict now.”
“You haven’t even seen any of the evidence.”
“Won’t make any difference. The most likely cause for this”—he gestured at the demolished road in front of them—“is physical damage either during manipulation to get the rocket to the launchpad or on lift-off. I suspect the latter, as you’d probably do a check if it was the former. And I doubt it’s a software glitch, because something that would knock out both the guidance of the orbital section and the brakes on the reentry module would probably have caused mission control to abort altogether.”
Hamilton snorted. “You think drug smugglers would have aborted? What do they care if it lands on someone’s house? This isn’t NASA we’re talking about.”
Garda pointed at the crowd around the crater rim, the officials looking down on them. “Did you know how they were smuggling the stuff into the U.S.? Did you know they were using rockets?”
“A couple of informants mentioned rumors . . .”
“But you didn’t know,” Garda completed her sentence for her. “And now you do. Which is why you abort the mission. Look, the Space Force knows more about covert spacecraft protocols than anyone on the planet, and the rule of thumb is: If you can’t be a hundred percent sure that you’ll recover it before the bad guys do, you blow it up. Because if not, it can fall on a road in the middle of nowhere and get surrounded by cops. Granted, if you hit Canada, you’re more likely to drop it in an empty field or a forest and no one will notice, but you still need to cover your risk. If you know it’s broken, you abort to keep the secret. So this one was bent and battered physically, but they didn’t know. Which tells me a lot about their operation.”
Hamilton nodded. “You’re the expert.”
“Yes. But I suspect that conclusion isn’t why you brought the Space Force in, is it?”
From above, the senator’s voice boomed into the crater. “That’s exactly right, son. You gotta find the people doing this so we can send a few platoons of Special Forces to pay them a visit. And it would be really good for you to do it pronto.”
#
“We got one!”
Three weeks after his trip to Canada, Garda turned to see Reina Peters, the petite specialist on Space Fence duty for the evening shift, burst into his improvised office in Vandenberg Air Force Base. She wore a huge smile and waved a sheaf of printouts.
“How certain are you?” he said.
“I checked it four times before I came.”
“Show me.”
The numbers would take a specialist’s eye to read, so he just checked object weight and orbit before flipping to the diagram on page four. A tiny satellite, indistinguishable from dozens of pieces of space debris or decommissioned smallsats, had split into two barely an hour before. One small part had entered Earth’s atmosphere in a ballistic trajectory, but there was no sign of a collision, or of any other event that could have launched a chunk in a different direction at high speed.
The only explanation is that it had been launched deliberately.
“That landing projection . . . . . . . . . Kansas?”
“Yes, sir,” Peters replied. “A field just north of Ionia.”
“Never heard of it. Little place?”
“Tiny. But a good system of dirt roads and easy access to Route 36.”
“Perfect to get in and out quickly. Please send this data to the FBI office in Santa Maria.”
“Yes, sir,” Peters replied.
Garda pulled out his phone and dialed Hamilton.
“Please tell me you’ve got something,” she said. “Because if you’re calling to invite me out for tacos again, I’m still recovering from that last batch.”
“We’ve got something. We’re sending the data over, but I’ll give you the overview.”
“Tell me.”
He quickly put her up to speed.
“Thanks,” Hamilton said. “I’ll get this to Washington and Kansas. And I’ll be there in an hour.”
The drive from Santa Maria to the Space Force Base at Vandenberg was only a few miles and, half an hour after they’d spoken on the phone, Agent Hamilton stepped into his office.
She looked around. “I see you still refuse to get settled.”
The office, except for his laptop, phone, and a couple of notepads, was exactly as it had been issued three weeks before. Even the cardboard boxes holding the stuff the previous occupant hadn’t bothered to take with him sat where they’d been on his first day. “I’m not planning on staying.”
She chuckled. “You’re a noob, Garda. One of the first things a real investigator learns is that home is wherever you just got assigned to. So I’m enjoying the delights of Santa Maria, California, and you should be too.”
“Nah, you’re the noob,” he replied with a grin. “I’m a soldier, so base life is part of the job description. But if you have a desk in Washington, you work to keep it.” He turned serious. “What’s the story on the drop?”
“There are people on the way, but I doubt we’ll catch anyone on the site. You told me the drop time is between twelve and fifteen minutes, right?”
“Yeah. Twenty with braking. Half an hour if it’s doing something really weird.” As expected, the mangled remains of the canister that had dropped in Canada yielded almost no clue as to the functioning of the delivery system. All they knew was that it was made of several metal components weighing ten kilos in total, and that it had carried down a few kilos of drugs of various kinds. Exactly how many kilos, it was impossible to say without sifting through the entire volume of the crater, but chemical analysis had told them that they were mainly super-high-end entertainment pills.
And, of course, the abortion pills. Which was why the senator was on the phone from Washington every single day demanding results and threatening to kill careers if he didn’t see a lot of progress very soon.
Having a shipment land in Kansas—from where they could be driven into any number of antiabortion states without much trouble—would not put the man in a good mood.
“So we won’t find them there. But we’ll have a starting point to chase them. They’ll have a car. We’ll get footage. Security cameras, stuff like that, and start tracking the cars. There might be fingerprints. Hell, we might get lucky and someone will have been smoking and we can get a DNA sample. There might be footprints. You’ve given us a place to start.” She seemed genuinely excited by the prospect.
“I just hope this will make the senator happy.”
She shook her head. “I think that old man is beyond ever feeling happy. His emotional range appears to span from disappointed to furious.”
Garda sighed. “Still, we’d better call him.”
The call lasted ten minutes. The senator was not happy that they hadn’t caught the delivery on the fly and also arrested the dealers, and he also didn’t want to hear it when they explained that Garda would be a lot more useful at the Space Force Base than in the field.
An hour later, Garda and Hamilton were on a plane headed for Moritz Memorial Airport in Beloit, Kansas.
It took three days for Garda to get back to base, and he cursed every moment of it. Even though he had an open line to Reina at Vandenberg, who’d been assigned to backtrack the satellite by dint of having been on duty when the delivery happened, he wanted to be where the action was.
The FBI was just doing cop things. Hamilton explained them to him, and they were easy enough to understand—there were footprints and all sorts of forensic clues to the identity of the people who’d been there—but the only thing he contributed was to note the lack of an impact crater and the fact that nothing in the landing zone was a piece of rocket.
But they had to make it look good. The senator called them twice a day to check on progress, and both he and Hamilton had to report on the day’s activities, almost as if the senator expected them to contradict one another.
When he finally got back to California, he checked in on Reina so often that she told him, in no uncertain terms, that it was hard enough to backtrack a small object in a sea of orbital debris without her superior officer hovering over her shoulder.
Garda retreated to his office, looked around, and sighed.
So this was where his career would end. He’d been a promising young officer once. He’d graduated with honors from the Air Force Academy and immediately gone to work as an industry liaison for Air Force Acquisition. He’d parlayed that connection with aerospace suppliers—plus a series of excellent performance reviews—into quick advancement and a desk job in Washington in the Space Force.
His superiors saw him as the kind of officer you sent in to stabilize a department in trouble and to prepare them for their next permanent boss while Garda himself moved on to bigger and better things. It was like being a business consultant, but people called you “Sir.”
And now this.
Any meaningful chance of further advancement would end in a gray-carpeted windowless office in Vandenberg Air Force Base, nearly three thousand miles from the Beltway. His success had made him the logical choice for this job . . . . . . . . . but now he was getting nowhere.
Worse, he wasn’t the one who could move things along. He didn’t have the technical skills to do the tracking needed. He was there to make decisions with data in hand.
The decision to keep waiting while you gathered even more data was the kind that killed careers.
Even if it was the right one.
He turned off the light in his office and went back to his on-base Unaccompanied Housing unit. If he’d been there permanently, he’d have moved into housing in the community, but for a temporary posting, this was deemed acceptable.
And then, as his investigation failed to progress, everyone had forgotten about him. Everyone except the senator, that was. The senator would be the one to ensure he’d be passed over for promotion from here to the end of the world.
He sighed and dropped into his bed without even bothering to undress.
At four in the morning, Reina called to tell him that the night analyst had found a very good match on the probable origin of the launch vehicle.
“That’s great. Where did it come from?”
“North Mali.”
“What?”
The helicopter hugged the ground. The roar of the wind through the open door competed with the whine of the jet engine and the rotors above his head. Everyone had their goggles down against the sand from outside.
“You sure you want to do this?” the captain of the Rangers asked. “There’s no shame in coming out once the shooting stops. Plus, Dillard won’t have to babysit you.”
“I’m coming,” Garda replied. Instead of diminishing, his frustration had kept increasing over the two days it had taken to get the mission organized. Fortunately, the launch site was just across the border between Mali and the disputed territory of Western Sahara. No government was going to send jets out to annoy the Black Hawks. Hell, Garda didn’t even remember if anyone in the region even had fighters in operational condition.
“All right, then,” the captain replied. Garda thought there was a hint of approval in the man’s nod, but maybe it was wishful thinking. The captain nodded down towards Garda’s rifle. “You know how to use that thing?”
“The hollow bit points towards the enemy.”
“Good enough, I guess.”
He’d spent the entire flight explaining the Space Force to the Rangers. Half of them seemed to think the unit was a nonmilitary joke. The others were genuinely curious about what the Space Force did.
But now, all kidding and curiosity was lost in concentration and checklists. The Rangers had been tasked to secure a launchpad, and to keep it secure until Garda said they could leave, or for thirty minutes, whichever came first. The hard limit was placed on them by the amount of fuel the choppers could carry.
The helicopter landed with a thump. The men near the doors poured out into the desert night.
Dillard, the man tasked to take care of Garda, came up close and shouted: “Get your NV on. We go in fifteen seconds.” Pause. “All right, follow me.”
Garda’s boot sunk in the sand. He stumbled but managed to keep his balance and follow the soldier down the sandy slope. To his surprise, his boots scuffed against hard rock at the bottom: the sand had given way to some kind of flat surface. Without color, he initially thought it must be concrete, that they were running across the landing pad, but they soon came to a small rocky ridge about a foot high and he realized it was stone.
Dillard motioned him to stop and listened to the radio. “The team has reached the designated target. One vehicle present.”
They’d pored over satellite images for hours, watching people come and go from the launch area. They hoped another launch was imminent, but most of all, they hoped the target people would be there when they arrived. Drone imagery had shown one improvised fighting vehicle beside the base—a pickup truck converted to a machine-gun platform—but they couldn’t see if anyone was hiding inside the single building.
Dillard stood and motioned for Garda to follow. They came over a slight rise and the airfield came into view. Two Rangers crouched behind the empty pickup truck, using it as cover while, at the same time, denying it to anyone who might attempt a defense.
Garda breathed easier; that truck was the most dangerous enemy asset in the area.
Shouting emerged from the structure ahead, a building composed of two forty-foot containers with antennae and a small satellite dish beside the concrete launch area. If the intelligence analysts were correct, the containers held an ops room and a bunk area.
They both were insanely close to the launch pad.
“Area clear,” Dillard said.
“Did we catch anyone?”
“Let’s go see.”
They jogged to the makeshift buildings and arrived just as the Rangers were marching two men out of the dorm container.
Garda’s heart sank when he saw the captives. The shorts and button-down shirts they wore were barely a step up from rags, and both men were barefoot. He would have bet his next paycheck that they were just low-level guards who wouldn’t know a gyroscope from a yo-yo. “Get them on the helicopter, I’ll interrogate them later.”
That part of the plan was set in stone. They didn’t have time, so anyone found in the vicinity would be questioned on the carrier. Garda suspected it was illegal as hell, but it wasn’t his job to worry about it. His job was to evaluate the facilities.
“Is there anyone else here?”
“No, sir,” the captain said. As soon as the area had been secured, Garda went from being an annoying bystander to being in charge. At least until they had to leave, when he would be unceremoniously packed up—ready or not—and tossed into the chopper.
“All right.” Garda walked into the other container and felt his jaw go slack. They’re launching satellites into orbit with this? The equipment looked like something from a Cold War submarine. Switches and analog readers on the walls were easy to understand: fuel pressure gauges, flow meters, and the toggles to control each. They were familiar and fit for the purpose . . . . . . . . . which only made it worse. This control room was an insult to anyone who’d ever been involved in the complex process of launching a rocket.
After a quick inspection of the equipment—a Ranger with lights and a camera was photographing every square inch of the facility for later review—Garda tried to locate the central computer. If he could get a hard drive, some kind of memory storage, they might glean something useful from this.
If not, they had just made a very expensive and illegal incursion into a sovereign country and kidnapped two of the people they found there with nothing to show for it.
The senator would be delighted.
“Come on,” Garda said. “Where are you?”
But all he found was a standard computer rack, threaded with cables but devoid of actual computers.
Garda ran to the captain. “Were there any computers in the bunk room?”
“Nope. Just two phones. I assume they belong to the guys we grabbed.”
“Dammit,” Garda said. Then he took a breath and got himself back under control. “How much time do I still have.”
“Fifteen minutes before we leave. I need you to show me where you want the demolitions charges.”
“In the first place, you need to blow up the control center.” Garda waited while the captain relayed the orders. “And now come with me.”
They sprinted out to the gantry, a much shorter run than it should have been. The launch area should have been a couple of miles from the control room. Three miles was better. Yet these guys were close enough to feel the heat of the engines. If the rocket exploded . . . . . . . . .
It shouldn’t have surprised him that drug dealers would be indifferent to safety considerations, but this was ridiculous.
Garda gave a quick look at the gantry, the exhaust ducting in the concrete, and the clamps to hold the rocket in place. He estimated that this pad could launch vehicles up to one meter in diameter, a little smaller than Rocket Lab’s Electron, which was the current leader in smallsat launches.
Unlike the control room, the launch area appeared to be state of the art. The column and the fuel tanks wouldn’t have looked out of place at SpaceX’s facility in Texas. Someone had spent money.
He turned to the captain. “Do we have photos of this?”
“Every detail you could want,” the Ranger replied.
“Good, then put explosives on the base of that column there, and on the wall of the gas tanks. Make sure we’re far away when you detonate those.”
“Thanks for clearing that up, Space Force. We grunts are too dumb to be out of range when things go bang.” He turned away to give the orders, leaving Garda’s apology stuck in his throat. Then the captain turned back. “Get back to the chopper. Time’s up.”
Back in California, Garda looked up to see Hamilton standing in the door to his office. “Still on the job, or did you come to say goodbye?”
“I’m still on the job,” she replied with a wry grin. “Barely.”
“Yeah, me too. The senator is really pissed.”
“Too bad for him.” Then she shook her head. “I think he’s mad at himself more than at us. He made a big deal out of busting the abortion-pill ring because it will get him a ton of votes . . . . . . . . . but it isn’t even something he’s been a hard-ass about historically. He’s a political animal tied to a controversial issue he doesn’t even care about. Which is lucky for us.”
“Lucky? Why?”
Hamilton smiled. “Because firing us now would make the news. He wants this to blow over while he concentrates on aligning with some other vote-getting scheme. Plus, if we do solve it, he’s the one who’ll end up looking like a hero.”
“Hell, I don’t care anymore. I just want to get this thing closed so I can get back to my life.”
“Well, I won’t be much help. We caught the guys who went to pick up the Kansas drop. They were just couriers who work with a Mexican guy from the Sinaloa Cartel. We know the cartel doesn’t produce this kind of stuff. They just distribute it. So unless we send a force into Mexico to grab some top drug dealers, we aren’t going to get any decent information out of them. Feel like another chopper ride?”
“I have a feeling Mexico isn’t Africa. We can’t just fly there and grab people. Not unless the president is personally pissed,” Garda replied. “What brings you here?”
“I wanted to get out of the office for a bit. It didn’t feel like I was getting anything done.”
“And you came here?”
“I figure if anything is going to happen, it’ll come from your end,” Hamilton replied.
“Yeah. And we’ll get to raid another empty launch pad. Probably in a jungle this time. Since you’re here, you might as well come along. I was just going to talk to Peters.”
The corridor between the offices and the ops center was also gray and corporate. The Space Force, as the newest of the services, had decided to go with a modern look to their office needs . . . . . . . . . but in Garda’s eyes, all they’d achieved was to look like some corporate cubicle farm. Except the cubes were mostly empty.
The ops center was a refreshing contrast. When Garda had switched career tracks to the Space Force, this room was what he’d had in mind.
Screens covered an entire thirty-foot wall. Some showed numbers, but most had maps of the Earth with overlays on them displaying the orbits and positions of satellites, vehicles, and space stations of high interest. The ISS was permanently tracked, as was the Chinese Tiangong. Garda checked for any interesting developments and noted sourly that the X-37 was up again. It must have launched over the past few days, and he hadn’t gotten the memo about the mission. It felt like more than a mere oversight.
Four rows of workstations faced the data. Six operators sat scattered around the room. The faint, tinny sound of music emerged from at least a couple of headsets as the analysts worked.
Reina Peters’s station was in the second row at the center of the room, a supervisor’s slot. She turned when they entered and nodded to Garda. “Just one second, sir.” She finished typing a few more commands and stood.
The ops team’s conference room brought them back to Corporate America. “What have you got for us today?” Garda asked.
“Three new possibles. One is a smallsat launched from New Zealand. It’s probably legit, because it came up on an Electron launch four days ago, but we don’t have the mission parameters. I think it’s probably a misfile, and I’ve put in a request from the company. They should be at work in a couple of hours.
“Number two and number three are a little more suspicious, especially number two, which is the same size and weight as our original bogey. We haven’t tracked it back to its source yet, so we don’t know. It might just be another North Korean spy satellite. Or maybe Indian. Not everyone tells us when they’re sending something up.
“The last one is probably a dead end. It’s bigger than what we’re looking for and the orbit appears to be decaying. I’m not sure who put it up there. Probably a botched launch.”
Garda growled. He knew that filtering the enormous—and growing—field of satellites and space debris in orbit around Earth to find viable candidates was a massive task, and that what Peters showed him represented hundreds of man-hours of painstaking work.
He had to rein himself in to avoid telling her that it was pretty much useless. “Thank you. Looks like we need to concentrate on number two, then. What I’d like is for you to keep me updated in real time on when a kinetic launch could land in the U.S., as well as which areas it could conceivably hit.” He nodded toward Hamilton. “That way, we can have the FBI on alert.”
Peters looked down at her data. “This satellite is going over us every eighty-seven minutes. And in its transit over the U.S., it can hit pretty much everything between Florida and the northern tip of California.”
“I know,” Garda said. “But it’s all we’ve got.” They sat in silence for a long moment before he slammed his fist on the table. “This isn’t going to work.”
“We’re making progress,” Hamilton replied. “We already know that whoever is doing this is in negotiation with Sinaloa. And we also know, from the guys that you picked up in the desert, that the rocket engineers are either French or Belgian. There are threads to pick at.”
“It’s . . .”
“Look,” Hamilton continued, “this is how police work happens. You find a clue, you follow it back until you find more clues. You eliminate the ones that don’t seem to fit. Eventually, you find something that leads to something you can actually use. And that’s where things happen. It takes time.”
“We don’t have time.”
“Actually, we have all the time in the world. No one is dying because of this. These drugs go to high-end parties, and the abortion pills . . . . . . . . . they probably end up at college dorms going for a hundred times what they’re worth. The sense of urgency you’re getting is because it’s politically sensitive. But we’ll catch them before they do any damage.”
Garda glared at her. “And if the next drop isn’t drugs? Or if they’re laced with poison and they kill off half of our captains of industry at some blowout?” he breathed, trying to get his voice under control. “Or if the next one is a canister of weaponized aerosol Ebola in downtown Houston? We know drug money has been financing terrorism forever. This just takes that link to its logical conclusion.”
Hamilton and Peters said nothing.
“So what are we achieving with this? Can we stop them from dropping?” Garda said.
“Not unless you’re authorized to have one of our hunter-killers fire at an unidentified satellite,” Peters replied.
“You know I can’t do that.” This wasn’t like an incursion in a conflictive and sparsely populated part of the world. When you blew up a satellite, it created a buttload of debris, and caused major international incidents. “But we’ve established that what we’re doing now is useless against a real attack.”
“But what else can we do?”
The question echoed in the conference room. There was no real answer to that with any kind of technological support behind it.
Garda ground his teeth in frustration. He knew what they had to do. “Look for launches,” he said. “It’s the only way to reach them quickly enough.”
Reina Peters sat back on her chair and raised an eyebrow. “Do you think the Russians are launching drugs at us? The Chinese? Because our IR satellite coverage is pretty much focused on them. We’re blind to places like Mali.”
“It will be somewhere else,” Garda said. “And probably in the southern hemisphere.”
“Then our early-warning birds aren’t going to be much help. They’re not pointed the right way, and no one is going to redirect those for a police matter.”
“I know, dammit,” Garda said. “But we’re supposed to have the best space-based infrastructure in the world. I can’t believe that we can only detect a launch when the satellite comes into orbit.”
“So why can’t you?” Hamilton asked.
“We can detect the launches from anyone who really matters,” Garda replied. “The Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans. Hell, if the South Africans were still nuclear, we would have a satellite on them. But we don’t spend resources covering things that aren’t a threat.”
“I suppose that makes sense.” She looked around the room. “Come on, you guys. It’s not that bad. It might not seem that way to you, but we’re making progress. We’ll close this. Welcome to police work.”
“I’m not a cop,” Garda said. “I’m a soldier who got dragged into a political mess.”
“Stop thinking about that. The senator is probably concentrating on subsidies for corn farmers and protecting the cattle industry from the global-warming lobby. Treat this like a job. The politicians have forgotten about you.”
“I wish,” Garda replied. Then he felt his mouth drop. “Wait, that thing you said . . .”
“The corn subsidies?”
“No. The global-warming lobby. I just remembered something I read.” He stood. “Reina, do you know if Green Vigilance ever got off the ground?”
“Yeah. Well, mostly. They’ve got the constellation pointed at the Third World because Russia said that if they even thought about monitoring their territory, they’d shoot them all down. China said they’d help the Russians,” Reina said.
Hamilton stared at them. “What are you two talking about?”
Garda stopped. In his enthusiasm, he’d forgotten that Hamilton wasn’t likely to follow minor space projects. He turned to her. “It’s a program run by HomeBase that—”
“The eco-extremists? The people who blew up a part of Ford’s River Rouge plant?”
“They claim the bombers were a breakaway group that has nothing to do with the cause,” Peters replied. “And the Green Vigilance project is completely legitimate.”
“Yeah,” Garda added. “They sent a constellation of cubesats into space to monitor the heat emissions of major industrial sites all over the world, as well as to monitor ocean temperatures. They’re basically infrared cameras aimed the planet. When they announced it, the major industrialized nations told them not to point the cameras their way.”
Peters nodded. “Yeah. Most countries were quite civilized about it, but I don’t think anyone was really heartbroken when the Russians and the Chinese basically told them that if a single report about their countries was filed, they would break all the ecologists’ toys.”
“Even so, they’re perfect for spotting a launch . . . . . . . . . if we can get real-time access to them,” Garda said.
“Sounds expensive,” Hamilton said. “How can an eco-group afford a billion-dollar satellite constellation?”
“It’s not a billion-dollar anything,” Garda said. “With the cost of orbital launches for smallsats down to a few hundred dollars a kilo, most organizations can afford to launch things. Hell, that’s how our friends the drug dealers stay in business. In fact, with cheap installations and the lack of security measures, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re the cheapest launch system on the planet.” Garda grew more excited. “So, to keep everyone in the northern hemisphere from getting mad at them at once, the Green Vigilance project is basically making life miserable for the people in the south who are just trying to industrialize Third World countries. The Brazilians really hate them, but they can’t do anything about it. Most African countries hate them too.” He paused. “But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that they have the entire constellation staring at the world below the Tropic of Cancer. If anything launches, they will definitely see it. So, we should forget about the satellite that’s already up, and concentrate on spotting the next one.”
“And can we ask for access?” Hamilton asked, understanding what Garda was aiming for. “If the Space Force calls saying it’s a national security issue—”
“No dice,” Peters said. “HomeBase is a Finnish group. They think the U.S. is part of the problem. And even if they liked the country, they’d still hate the Space Force.”
Garda smiled. “They can hate us all they want. But I bet we’ll be able to access their feed.”
“How?”
“Politics.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and called up the contact that he’d dreaded seeing every day since the investigation began.
The senator answered on the second ring. “Do you know what time it is?” he asked irascibly. “At least tell me you’ve cracked the case.”
As always, Garda kept his tone respectful in the face of the senator’s anger. “I have an idea that could do it, but I need your help, sir.”
“The Pentagon is still all over my ass about your last idea.”
“I can imagine, sir. But this one will bring quicker results.” Inspiration suddenly struck. “And besides, it will piss off every environmentalist on the planet.”
The long silence on the other end of the line could have meant anything. Finally, when Garda thought he might have accidentally disconnected the call, the senator chuckled. “All right. You have my attention.”
“Well, there’s a group called HomeBase that . . .”
***
This time the helicopter door let in salty spray as opposed to just wind. And his companions were Navy SEALs as opposed to Army Rangers, but at least the raid was legal.
Well, semilegal.
If you got the right lawyer.
“Lights ahead!” the SEAL next to him shouted. “Three hundred meters to the target.”
Garda swallowed and gripped the rifle harder.
“Scared?” the SEAL asked.
“Too tired to be scared,” Garda replied.
It was true. As soon as Green Vigilance spotted the telltale bloom of bright heat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Garda had boarded a two-seat Air Force fighter for Florida. He landed in Homestead and was transferred to another two-seat fighter, Navy this time, which landed on the Dwight D. Eisenhower somewhere in the Atlantic.
From there, a Sea Ranger helicopter took him to another ship where the SEAL team was waiting for him.
Fifteen minutes after that, they were airborne again.
Information about what the team in California was uncovering about the launch and the payload trickled in at each stop.
The launch was confirmed to be a satellite the same size and trajectory as the one that had delivered the Kansas payload.
The launch had not been informed to any national aerospace administration.
China and Russia, who might have been responsible for a secret launch, not only denied any involvement, but also gave the U.S. permission to take any action required. They thought it was a terrorist thing, apparently.
“What are we heading into?” Garda asked the SEAL assigned to babysit him.
“Images show some kind of platform with a ship moored beside it. Not great in this rain, but that’s what intel says it is.”
“Oh, my God,” Garda said, slapping his head. “Sea Launch. It has to be.”
“Say again, sir?”
“I know what the objective is. It’s a platform from a company called Sea Launch that used to do orbital lifts out of Russian ports before they went bust. The platform isn’t going to run from us, but we need to make sure to grab the ship. That’s where the people we want are going to be. And the control room”
The SEAL looked him up and down. “You sure about this?”
“Of course I’m sure. Didn’t they tell you? I’m with the Space Force.”
The man’s eyes opened up, whether in surprise or disdain or respect it was hard to tell. “All they told me was to keep your butt in one piece.” He turned away from Garda, toward the front of the chopper. “Sir, I think you need to hear this.”
The team leader, a fiftyish man who’d been introduced simply as “the colonel” moved down to sit across from Garda, then listened wordlessly to his explanation. “Anything else we should know?”
“Like what?”
“Like can they blow the platform up with us on it?”
“Without a rocket? Yeah, they could, but only if they brought along way too much fuel. On balance, I’d say it’s unlikely.”
The colonel grunted. “Anything else nasty you can think of?”
“No, sir. Platforms are dangerous when there’s a rocket on them. After the rocket’s gone, almost all the explosive stuff goes with it. In fact, they’re designed to be extremely robust and to avoid blowing up.”
That got him another nod. “All right.”
The colonel sat back.
“Sir,” Garda said. “I have a question. Is there any way we can land people on the ship first? Any high-value targets are going to be there, not on the platform.”
“That is a much harder operation. The ship’s heliport is too small for this bird. We’d have to jump off a moving chopper, probably into enemy fire.”
Garda nodded. “I suppose you’re right. It just sounded like the kind of thing Navy SEALs are known for.”
The colonel grinned. “Damn right it is. I didn’t say we wouldn’t do it, just that it was a lot harder. You.” He put a finger in the chest of the man assigned to babysit Garda. “Make sure this guy stays behind something armor plated while we’re securing the area. It sounds like they might have sent us a useful advisor for once, and we don’t want to get him dead.”
“Yes, sir.”
The SEAL turned back to Garda. “You heard the man. Stand here, away from the door and beside this beam. That should keep you out of the line of fire.”
“What if we get shot down?”
“Do you think they might have missiles?”
“I . . . . . . . . . I suppose not,” Garda said.
“Good. Then we’re not getting shot down. Don’t worry about this. Drug dealers, especially the kind of people they send out on a ship like this one, aren’t precisely elite troops. We’ll be fine. Now stay put.”
The chopper’s steady approach through the rain suddenly changed as the pilot angled upward away from the waves. Garda wanted to see what was going on outside, but bodies and metal blocked his view. The SEALs were big, covered in bulky equipment and helmets.
“Stay put, sir!” his minder said, finally remembering his rank.
The chopper circled once and the men inside with him jumped through the door, amid shouted commands.
The belly of the chopper—Garda hadn’t even had time to see what kind of bird they’d taken—seemed empty without the operators. Even the deafening sound of the rotors seemed muted without the shouting. It was dark in there too.
The pilot rotated and lifted the craft to give the main guns a better angle if needed, but everything on deck appeared calm.
It shouldn’t have been. A shipload of drug dealers sending out a multimillion-dollar load should have been armed for trouble.
Garda swallowed. Had he screwed it up again? He leaned despondently against the metal plate of the chopper bulkhead, wondering if the SEALs would let him jump into the sea during the flight back. That would be better than facing the senator.
“Contact!” his minder shouted. “Shots fired!”
“Yes!” Garda said. The SEAL just raised an eyebrow.
“They’re calling in small-arms fire, and one AK.” The man listened for a few minutes. “The guy with the AK is down. The rest of them are surrendering.”
“Can we go see what we got?”
“No way. We wait until they call for us. There are a thousand places to hide on one of these boats and it only takes one bullet to ruin your whole day. Sir.”
Ten minutes later five SEALs returned to the helicopter. Two of them remained on the deck while two others loaded a wounded man—shot in the leg and cursing like a soldier who’d been shot in the leg—into the chopper, then climbed in after him.
The medic looked up at Garda and the man with him. “You two are supposed to go find the colonel. The ship is secure between here and there, but take care anyway.”
“Yes, sir,” the SEAL with Garda said.
The two men waiting below led them across the deck, up two flights of metal steps, through a door that led to the galley and then into a mess deck.
Two SEALs guarded a dozen men with zip-tied arms and legs who sat on the ground. The only prisoner not complaining was a bearded man who lay in a pool of his own blood, empty eyes staring at the roof.
The colonel barked a couple of orders and one of the men who’d come with Garda took his place on guard duty. The other man and Garda’s minder sprinted away, presumably to help secure the rest of the vessel.
“Captain,” the colonel said. “Were you the one who generated the intel on this op?”
“Yes, sir.”
The man nodded. “Well, you did a hell of a job. I think you hit the jackpot. I’ve got a good ear for accents and languages, and you’ve got at least three Mexicans here promising dire retribution from their cartel. They’re so dumb they think we’re from a rival gang.” He nudged a different guy with his foot. That one looked more Icelandic than Mexican. “And this one is a Belgian mercenary called Kim Norland. Even if these other guys turn out to be chumps, it was worth it to grab this one. War crimes in four different African conflicts.”
“And the rest?”
“Drug dealers. Rocket people. I don’t know. We’ve got a bunch more stashed in one of the dorm rooms, but these were the ones that looked important.” The colonel shrugged. “I guess it’s your job to sort them out.”
“You’re sure they said they were from a cartel?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Because if they launched drugs, it means my people can do their thing.”
“I’m sure,” the colonel replied.
He wasn’t the kind of guy you questioned twice, so Garda pulled out a satellite phone and approached the window. A moment later, Reina Peters answered.
“Yes, Captain?” she said.
“Take it down. It’s a drug payload.”
“Please confirm, I’m authorized to launch against the satellite.”
“Confirmed. Take it down.” He’d received all the necessary authorizations from higher-ups as he made his way from California to the Sea Launch vessel.
“With pleasure, sir. Missiles away.” She paused. “If you’re near the launch site, you might want to look up. The detonation should be visible from your position in four minutes.”
“Thanks,” Garda replied. He turned to the colonel. “Want to see something cool? I’ve seen you do your thing, and I’m impressed. I want to show you us doing our thing.”
The colonel raised an eyebrow and followed Garda up onto the deck.
***
Gustavo Bondoni is a novelist and short story writer with over four hundred stories published in fifteen countries and seven languages. He’s a member of Codex and an active member of SFWA. He has published six science fiction novels including one trilogy, four monster books, a dark military fantasy and a thriller. His short fiction is collected in Pale Reflection (2020), Off the Beaten Path (2019), Tenth Orbit and Other Faraway Places (2010), and Virtuoso and Other Stories (2011).
In 2019, Gustavo was awarded second place in the Jim Baen Memorial Contest and in 2018 he received a Judges’ Commendation (and second place) in the James White Award. He was also a 2019 finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest. His website is at www.gustavobondoni.com