Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 03 (8 page)

           
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

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-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 monitor
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 full-sized 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 and was aboard as a backup if the first launch failed.

           
Jon Masters’ cocky attitude toward
this important launch made Colonel Foch very uncomfortable. But, he thought,
the little snot had every reason to feel cocky—in two years of testing and over
two dozen launches, not one ALARM booster had ever failed to do its thing, and
not one NIRTSat had ever failed to function. It was, Foch had to admit, quite a
testament to the genius of Jonathan Colin Masters. Worse, the bastard was so
young. Boy genius was an understatement.

           
When Jon Masters was barely in grade
school in
Manchester
,
New Hampshire
, his first-grade teachers showed Jon’s parents a one-hundred-page
treatise on the feasibility of a manned lunar landing, written by a youngster
who had only learned to write a few months earlier. When asked about the essay,
Jon sat his parents down and explained all the problems inherent in launching a
rocket to the moon and returning it safely back to Earth—and the Apollo space
program had just gotten under way, with the first lunar landing still three
years away.

           
It didn’t take Jon’s parents a blink
of an eye to figure out what to do next: he was enrolled in a private high
school, which he completed three years later at age ten. He enrolled at
Dartmouth
College
and received a bachelor of science degree
in aeronautical engineering at age thirteen. After receiving a master’s degree
in mathematics from
Dartmouth
, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and after a
tumultuous five years finally earned a doctorate in engineering at the age of
twenty.

           
The first love of Masters’ life was
and always had been NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration,
and in 1981 he went to work for the space agency immediately after leaving MIT.
The Shuttle Transportation System, or STS, program was just heating up by then,
and Jon Masters was an integral part of the development of special applications
that could take advantage of this new flying workhorse. Almost every satellite
and delivery subsystem developed for the shuttle between 1982 and 1985 was at
least partially designed by Jonathan Masters.

           
But, even as the shuttle
transportation system was gearing up for more launches per year and more ambitious
projects, including the space station, Jon Masters saw a weakness. It was an
obvious problem that was creeping into the successful STS program—the
spacecraft were accumulating a lot of miles, with even more miles slated for
them each year, and no more orbiters were being built. When the success of the
shuttle program became obvious, Masters thought, NASA should have had one new
orbiter per year rolling off the assembly lines, plus upgraded solid-rocket
boosters and avionics. But they had none.

           
Jon Masters took an active interest
in the numerous small companies that built small space boosters for private and
commercial applications. In 1984, at age twenty-four, he resigned from NASA and
accepted a seat on the board of directors of Sky Sciences, Inc., a small
Tennessee-based commercial space booster company that sometimes subcontracted
work for the fledgling Strategic Defense Intiative Organization, the federal
research and development team tasked with devising an intercontinental
ballistic missile defense system. Soon afterward he became vice president in
charge of research for the small company. Masters’ presence on the board gave
the company a shot of optimism—and a new line of credit—that allowed it to stay
fiscally afloat.

           
With the NASA shuttles grounded
indefinitely following the
Challenger
disaster in 1986, expendable boosters were quickly back in vogue. While NASA
was refurbishing old Titan ICBM rockets for satellite booster duty and bringing
back the Delta line of heavy boosters, in 1988 Jon Masters, now the
twenty-eight-year-old chairman of the board and new president of Sky Sciences,
soon renamed Sky Masters, Inc., announced that he had developed a new low-cost
space booster that was small and easy to transport and operate. Called SCARAB (Small
Containerized Air Relocatable Alert Booster), it was a ground-launched rocket
that could be hauled aboard a Boeing 747 or military cargo plane, set up, and
launched from almost anywhere in a matter of days or even hours. SCARAB
restored NASA and the military’s ability to launch satellites into Earth orbit
on short notice.

           
His next project was a booster
system similar to SCARAB but even more flexible and responsive. Although SCARAB
could place a two-thousand-pound payload into low Earth orbit from almost
anywhere on Earth, it still needed a runway for the two cargo aircraft that
carried the rocket and the ground-launch equipment, an extensive ground-support
contingent, and at least fifteen hours’ worth of work to erect the launch
structures and get the rocket ready to fly. In several practice tests, Masters
needed no more than thirty hours from initial notification and delivery of the
payload to T minus zero. But he wanted to do better.