Starfire (14 page)

“Luke, assign a researcher to find out the symptoms of every known sickness or affliction that astronauts can suffer,” Barbeau went on, “and then I want him to watch every second of every public appearance Phoenix makes to see if he exhibits any of those symptoms.” Cohen had his cell phone out in a flash and issued the instructions. “So what do you think the feedback will be?”

“I agree with your points, Miss Secretary,” Cohen said. “At first, I think most voters will think it's cool and exciting that the president flew into space and did a spacewalk, talk about his bravery, et cetera. But shortly thereafter, maybe by the time the morning talk shows start discussing this and people start to learn more about the dangers and risks, they might question his judgment and his ability to hold the office. The pressure to resign might be intense.”

“If he thinks he's going to start gutting the military to pay for his fancy space weapons and cyberwarfare stuff, he's sadly mistaken,” Barbeau said. “Take away two aircraft-carrier battle groups? Over my dead body. I want to build
more
carrier battle groups, not take them down! I want to go to shipyards, Navy groups, air bases, and veterans groups and talk about what the effect of doing away with two carrier battle groups will have on the economy as well as national defense. Cut the size of the nuclear deterrent in half? Cut tanks and fighters? Maybe he's already suffering some kind of space sickness. He's just committed political suicide. I'm going to see to it that he pays a price for this stunt.”

“I can't believe he started talking about entitlement reform,” Cohen said. “That's okay to do before the convention if you're in a primary race, but he's already got the nomination. No one is challenging him.”

“He's going to regret that too,” Barbeau said acidly. “Find out how much one of those spaceplanes and that space station costs, and then find out how many people it will disadvantage if everyone loses even ten percent of their benefits to pay for a spaceplane that ninety-nine-point-nine percent of Americans will never even see, let alone fly. Find out what it cost to fly his butt up there and back, and then compute how much education, infrastructure, and medical research we could have done but for the president's joyride.”

Stacy Anne Barbeau stepped over to a large mirror in her suite and examined her makeup. “You think you made history today, Mr. President?” she said. “You think you're a big astronaut hero? You made the biggest blunder in your political career, buster, and it's going to cost you. I'll see to that.” She looked at Cohen through the mirror. “Luke, make sure there's someone in Makeup ready for me and that my TV studio is ready to feed, and tell CNN I'll be ready in five.”

T
HE
K
REMLIN
, M
OSCOW

R
USSIAN
F
EDERATION

T
HAT
SAME
TIME

“
Chelovek deystvitel'no bezumno!
The man is truly insane!” Russian president Gennadiy Gryzlov thundered at the television in his office at the Kremlin. “Phoenix thinks he is going to control all of outer space? He will soon learn just how wrong he is!”

Just forty years old, Gennadiy Gryzlov was the son of the former president Anatoliy Gryzlov, and his career paralleled his father's to a great extent. Gennadiy Gryzlov had graduated from the Yuri Gagarin Military Air Academy and attended basic flight instruction at Baronovsky Air Base in Armavir and bomber flight training at Engels Air Base in southwestern Russia, and had been selected to attended command leadership school in Moscow just two years later. He wanted nothing more than to follow in his beloved father's footsteps, and determined to do so without his family's extensive government and petrochemical industry connections.

But shortly after completing command leadership school in Moscow but before he returned to Engels Air Base to take command of the 121st Guards Heavy Bomber Regiment, a Tupolev-160 Blackjack supersonic bomber unit, an event happened that changed his life forever: Engels Air Base was attacked by an American unmanned stealth bomber called an EB-1C Vampire, a heavily modified supersonic B-1 Lancer bomber, destroying dozens of Russian bombers awaiting orders to take off and destroy a nest of terrorists in Turkmenistan. Hundreds were killed in the air raid, including many of Gryzlov's closest friends and fellow aviators. Both father and son were devastated and spent more than a month attending funerals and memorial services and planning how to rebuild the base and the bomber force.

It was never officially revealed, but the elder Gryzlov told his son who he thought planned the air raid: an American Air Force general by the name of Patrick McLanahan, acting without orders or authority from the American White House or Pentagon. Both men turned their sadness at the devastation into a white-hot burning desire for revenge against McLanahan.

With the destruction of Engels Air Base, Gennadiy shifted his focus from flying bombers and, with the help of his father, attended the Alexander Mozhaysky Military Space Academy in St. Petersburg, with a slot already reserved for him at the Cosmonaut Training Center at Star City. But his training there too was interrupted. An American bomber unit attacked a Russian defensive antiaircraft battery in Turkmenistan . . .

. . . and, it was soon discovered, the raid was planned and ordered by Major General Patrick McLanahan, again without proper authority from his superior officers.

That raid, Gennadiy knew, had pushed his father over the edge. President Gryzlov recalled all bomber crewmembers and sent them to Belaya Air Base in Siberia for training. Gennadiy was able to use his father's influence to stay at Mozhaysky, but he carefully followed the activities of the vast array of long-range aircraft at Belaya and other bases like Irkutsk, Aginskoye, and Yakutsk, including sleek Tupolev-22 Backfires, reliable turboprop-powered Tupolev-95 Bears, supersonic Tupolev-160 Blackjacks, and Ilyushin-62 aerial refueling tankers. Something big, Gennadiy knew, was going to happen.

In late summer 2004, it did. Waves of Russian long-range bombers attacked American air defense and early-warning radar sites in Alaska and Canada with AS-17 “Krypton” antiradar missiles and AS-16 “Kickback” supersonic attack missiles, then launched AS-X-19 “Koala” long-range hypersonic cruise missiles with micro-yield nuclear warheads against intercontinental-ballistic-missile launch control centers, bomber bases, and command and control bases in the United States. The United States lost almost its entire land-based ballistic missile force, a large portion of its strategic bomber fleet, and tens of thousands of military personnel, family members, and civilians in the blink of an eye.

It soon became known as the “American Holocaust.”

Gennadiy was happy and pleased with the bravery of his fellow heavy-bomber crewmembers—many of whom were lost over the United States and Canada—and proud of his father for finally striking a decisive blow against the Americans. He hoped McLanahan was under one of those nuclear warheads. In the meantime, all training at Mozhaysky was canceled, and Gennadiy was ordered to report to Aginskoye Air Base in southern Russia to stand up a new bomber regiment where more Tupolev-160 Blackjack bombers that were being refurbished and returned to service would be sent. Russia was beginning to go on a war footing, and Gennadiy was happy that he was not going to be stuck in school while other brave Russian aviators would be going toe-to-toe against the Americans.

The preparations for war with the United States had hardly begun when the unthinkable happened. Yakutsk Air Base in Siberia was overrun and captured by a small force of American commandos, and the United States began flying long-range bombers and aerial refueling tankers from the base. Within days, American bombers were roaming most of Russia from Yakutsk, hunting down and destroying Russian mobile intercontinental-missile launchers and underground launch control centers with ground-penetrating precision-guided cruise missiles and bombs.

Gennadiy was not surprised to learn that the bomber force was led by none other than Patrick McLanahan.

President Anatoliy Gryzlov was forced to make a fateful decision: to destroy Yakutsk before the American fleet could devastate the mobile ballistic-missile force, the mainstay of Russia's strategic deterrent. He ordered bombers to launch nuclear-tipped AS-X-19 Koala cruise missiles against the American-occupied base, without first warning the Russians still being held there. Although most of the cruise missiles were shot down by American air-to-air missiles and by a sophisticated airborne laser system installed on a few B-52 bombers, a few managed to hit the base, killing hundreds, Russians and Americans alike, who were unlucky enough not to make it to hardened underground shelters.

Gennadiy felt sorry for his father, who had been forced to make an awful decision and kill Russians to prevent the widespread destruction of the nation's prized ICBM force. He wanted so badly to be with his father and lend him some moral support, but the elder Gryzlov was undoubtedly safe and secure in one of over a dozen alternate command centers in western and central Russia. Gennadiy's greatest concern now was for his base and his regiment, and he ordered all nonessential personnel into shelters, fearing an American counterattack, and an acceleration of preparations for the Blackjack bombers that would hopefully be arriving shortly.

Gennadiy was deep into organizing his regiment and planning their activities when he received the devastating news the next morning: an American bomber task force of modified B-1 and B-52 bombers had blasted their way past western Russia's sophisticated air defense network and attacked Ryazan Alternate Military Command Center, 120 miles southeast of Moscow. The devastation was complete . . . and Gennadiy's father, the center of his universe, the man he wanted nothing more than to emulate, had been blown into dust. He made immediate arrangements to head back to Moscow to be with his mother and family, but before he left Aginskoye he learned that his mother, upon hearing the news about her husband, had committed suicide by an overdose of sleeping pills . . .

. . . and, once again, he learned that the commander of the bomber task force that killed his father, and thereby also his mother, was General Patrick McLanahan. The rogue American aviator had been promoted to lieutenant general shortly after the attack and made a special adviser to the new/former president of the United States, Kevin Martindale, placed in charge of rebuilding the long-range strike force.

Gennadiy Gryzlov turned into a different man after that day. He resigned his commission and left the military. He'd always had a high level of energy, but now his personality became more akin to that of a whirling dervish. He took control of his family's oil, gas, and petrochemical companies and had them positioned perfectly when oil prices began to skyrocket in the later part of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and he became one of the wealthiest men in the western hemisphere. He remained a bachelor and became one of the most popular and recognizable playboys in the world, pursued by wealthy women and men everywhere. He translated his wealth, popularity, and good looks into political capital and was appointed minister of energy and industry and deputy premier of Russia in rapid succession, then elected prime minister by the Duma even though he had never served in the legislature, aligning himself for higher office. He ran for president thereafter and was elected to the office by more than 80 percent of the voters in the 2014 elections.

But now the face of the tall, handsome young man, easily the most photographed male face on planet Earth, was contorted in a mixture of disbelief, rage, and resolve. Sergei Tarzarov, the president's chief of staff, trotted into Gryzlov's office when he heard the president shouting. “Get Sokolov and Khristenko in here on the double,” Gryzlov shouted to his chief of staff, his longish dark hair whirling around his head as he stomped around his office. “I want some answers, and I want them
now
!”

“Yes, sir,” Tarzarov said, and he picked up a phone in the president's office. Tarzarov was almost a generation older than Gryzlov, a thin and unimposing-looking man in a simple brown suit, but everyone in the Kremlin knew the former intelligence officer and minister of the interior was the power behind the presidency and had been so since Gennadiy's father was in office. “They saw the broadcast and are already on the way, sir,” he reported a few moments later.

“Why, that smug, preening, clueless bastard—I will show him how to make a statement to the world,” Gryzlov snapped. “It was nothing but an election-year stunt. I hope it blows up in his face! I hope he dies in a fireball during reentry. Then the American government will be in a state of complete chaos!”

“Receiving data from the ministry of defense,” Tarzarov reported after checking his tablet computer. “Minister Sokolov ordered an update of our space offensive and defensive forces and ground, air, and naval forces that support space operations. He and General Khristenko will brief you as soon as they arrive.”

“Why the hell did we not know that Phoenix was going to fly to that space station?” Gryzlov shouted. “We know what that bastard does almost before
he
knows it, and we have plants, eavesdroppers, listening devices, cameras, and informants all over Washington. Get Kazyanov in here too. No, get the entire security council in here.” Tarzarov made another phone call and reported that Viktor Kazyanov, the minister of state security, Russia's top espionage and counterintelligence service, was also already on the way to the president's office.

“Mr. President, Phoenix has got to be totally crazy to pull off a stunt like that,” the minister of defense, Gregor Sokolov, said as he quickly strode into the president's office a few minutes later. “If he was not damaged goods before he blasted off, the cosmic radiation and lack of oxygen will surely get to him—if he really did all the things he claimed to do, and all of this is not an elaborate election-year fake—and then the American space program will be deader than it was after the space shuttle
Challenger
blew up.”