Ballistic, p.1
Ballistic, page 1
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
EPILOGUE
BALLISTIC
TRAVIS S.
TAYLOR
Ballistic
By Travis S. Taylor
A Russian ICBM site is attacked just north of the Ukraine border. The nuclear warheads are missing! A Special Operations and Intelligence Community Task Force is rapidly put together to respond, but where it should deploy is unclear. A fire ravages a cosmonaut training facility in which five spacesuits disappear. And the Task Force finds a cache of detailed schematics of highly complex rocketry systems. The Task Force reaches out to Dr. Amy Sue Harrington of the Missiles and Space Intelligence Center in Huntsville, Alabama. To Dr. Harrington, it all adds up to the unthinkable: someone—someone extremely well funded—is taking aim at the International Space Station.
But Colonel Vladimir Lytokov and his team of mercenaries aren’t planning to bring the ISS crashing to Earth. They’re taking the fight to orbit, boarding the station and hijacking it. As the ISS traces its path across the heavens, Lytokov rains down destruction from above, effectively holding the entire globe hostage.
BAEN BOOKS by TRAVIS S. TAYLOR
THE TAU CETI AGENDA SERIES
One Day on Mars • The Tau Ceti Agenda
One Good Soldier • Trail of Evil
Kill Before Dying • Bringers of Hell
WARP SPEED SERIES
Warp Speed • The Quantum Connection
WITH JODY LYNN NYE
Moon Beam • Moon Tracks
WITH JOHN RINGO
Into the Looking Glass • Vorpal Blade • Manxome Foe
Claws That Catch • Von Neumann’s War
WITH MICHAEL Z. WILLIAMSON, TIMOTHY ZAHN, KACEY EZELL, AND JOSH HAYES
Battle Luna
WITH LES JOHNSON
Back to the Moon • On to the Asteroid • Saving Proxima
BAEN BOOKS NONFICTION BY TRAVIS S. TAYLOR
A New American Space Plan
The Science Behind The Secret
Alien Invasion: How to Defend Earth (with Bob Boan)
Ballistic
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Travis S. Taylor
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9202-0
eISBN: 978-1-62579-872-5
Cover art by Kurt Miller
First printing, August 2022
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Taylor, Travis S., author.
Title: Ballistic / Travis S. Taylor.
Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen Publishing Enterprises, [2022] | “A Baen Books Original”—Title page verso.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022019109 (print) | LCCN 2022019110 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982192020 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781625798725 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: War stories. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3620.A98 B35 2022 (print) | LCC PS3620.A98 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019109
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019110
Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Electronic Version by Baen Books
www.baen.com
This book is dedicated to the myriad of workers—military, civilian, and contractors—who have labored for decades to create a defense against missile attacks, be they from superpowers or rogue states and rogue actors. These great and brilliant people have fought through constant political whirlwinds and upheavals in their program funding and job security but they have continued to press forward with technologies that someday might prove to be the shield a free world needs to protect itself from madmen. Keep up the good work, folks.
PROLOGUE
Somewhere near the Southwestern United States and Mexico Border
One Year Ago
“The tether is secure. We’re clear to egress to the entrance.”
“Copy, J.” M slid slowly across the tether under the power of the water jets on the mockup suits. He landed against the hull with a muted thud as his boots made contact with the ceramic composite hull just above the large three-meter-diameter hotel window. He quickly attached another tether to a handhold to keep himself in place, realizing that his maneuvering in space would be much more uncontrollable as there would be no water viscosity to slow his movements and reaction forces. “Removing outer casing cover and setting the hull-clamp.”
“Good, M,” J said while doing his best not to be distracted by the bubbles rising from the rear of the mockup space suit’s automatic buoyancy compensation device, or ABCD. “We’ll have to be careful here or we could explosively decompress the chamber.”
“Doesn’t matter at that point,” M said. “We just won’t have any survivors inside the hotel is all.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” V sounded sincere as he tethered himself beside his companions. “I’m just asking, comrade.”
“Just a thing,” M said. “Initiating impact driver now.”
M pulled a cover from the metallic device revealing two toggles and one red-light push button like an old-school video game cabinet. The device was approximately eight centimeters thick and twenty centimeters on a side. It was somewhat heavy on Earth and underwater but in space that wouldn’t be an issue. In fact, it was more likely that it would be molded in place or bolted to the structure. Inside the box there were several mechanisms. A tubular U-shaped handle protruded from the middle of it, large enough to get a space-suit gauntlet around.
“Firing.” M flipped both toggles and then hit the red push button. Four spring-loaded pitons fired simultaneously inward into the handle mechanism, releasing the box from the ceramic and aluminum layers of the airlock door, generating a slight surge in the water around it. “J, ready to blow the hatch mechanisms.”
“Copy,” J replied. He’d already placed the charges in the predetermined critical points along the periphery of the Davidson-Schwab Inflatable Hotel Module—DSIHM—airlock door and was ready. The door was almost two meters in diameter and had been designed for egress and ingress of Orlan space suits. If it explosively decompressed it could kill them instantly from impact. “Stand clear. Three, two, one.”
Pop!
“Okay, ready to pull the hatch to the DSIHM airlock,” J instructed.
“Okay in three, two, one!” M said, giving the handle on the interior door a twist and then pushing against it with his jets in the forward position. He pushed until he felt it give and then the hatch let loose, releasing large air bubbles from a trapped air pocket inside. The bubbles floated out and upward to the surface of the large rock quarry. Once the hatch was blown clear, he hit his mockup thrusters and entered feetfirst, waiting for his boots to make contact with the bulkhead nearest him. He fired a burst from the modified underwater pseudo-recoilless paintball gun at a mannequin just inside the airlock compartment, hitting it in the chest with a blue spatter. He quickly tethered off to the main entrance hatch.
“Interior breached. Seal off the outer hatch!” M said.
“Got it.” V thrusted into place slowly and sealed the hatch with a metallic thunk that was muted due to them being underwater. Had they been in space it would have been silent.
“Okay, at this point, either the door to Node three is opened f rom the inside, or it isn’t,” M said. “Either way, we’re going in. J, while we secure the platform start installing the launcher and secure the warheads to the DSIHM bulkheads.”
“Copy that,” J replied.
“Command? K? Initiate the startup sequences for the launcher and begin the restart of the platform systems.”
“Roger that, M. Initiating the launcher startup sequences. Let me know once they are installed on the DSIHM exterior,” S replied.
“Copy, M. Platform computer system restarting…now.” K said.
“Good…” M waved V and J into the now open platform hatch.
“Take the hill?” V asked.
“Take the hill,” M said.
CHAPTER 1
Undisclosed Location
Southern Russia Border
Tuesday (Present Day)
1:03 a.m. Coordinated Universal Time
6:03 a.m. Local
Colonel Vladimir Lytokov squinted a bit as the rising sun glared against the windshield, exacerbating the mild hangover he was struggling with. The oranges and reds were beginning to spread across the sky and shine over the tops of the taller birch and pine trees along the ridge ahead of them. He reached in his shirt pocket for his sunglasses and fumbled with them as the vehicle bounced like a kicking mule, almost dropping them twice before he could get them in place. A brief memory of his days flying MiGs flashed in his mind, but the fighters had never made him nauseous. Vladimir had spent more than seven thousand hours in the Mikoyan and Gurevich creations including his favorite, the MiG-35. He’d done bombing runs over most of the former southern Soviet states and even been a test pilot with the MiG-41 program. He’d been through high-gee maneuvers, flat spins, and had to punch out on three different occasions. Even the concussion he’d gotten from the latter was no match for his current hangover. But, it was only a “mild one.”
Vladimir swallowed the lump in his throat, drawing a smirk from his subordinate seated in the driver’s position. He choked back a retort along with the bile rising in his esophagus. His face was oily and covered with a light sheen of sweat. He white-knuckled the armrest briefly before massaging the bridge of his very Russian nose and then placing the shades on. The lenses powered on and quickly adjusted the tint until the optical recognition chip saw his squint wrinkles relax and his pupils adjust to normal. Vladimir could hear the ding-dong doorbell sound telling him that the glasses had made the local connection with the audio implant behind his ear. The heads-up display, or HUD, window view through the virtual glasses would kick on if there was any important information for him to see. There was.
The MZKT-79221 mobile transporter erector launcher—“TEL” rhyming with Hell, as the Americans had coined it—was one of the most rugged, versatile, and capable vehicles on the planet. If there was such a thing as being more of a “tank” than an actual tank, the TEL was it. A history that had turned out to be the ultimate battle of strategic wits, a chess match of warfare and super technologies, had forced the vehicle into being. Decades of Cold War pressures to technologically and militarily overpower the Americans had forced an environment where pure and simple Russian, hard-nosed, devil in the details, bang on it until you make it work or go to the gulag, rocket science and engineering had led to a solution that worked, and worked well—in fact, worked better than any other system similar to it on the planet.
The sixteen-wheeled vehicle rolled through the rough terrain across the uneven hillside so close to the southeastern-most Russian border near northeastern Oral, Kazakhstan, that at times Vladimir wondered if half the truck wasn’t across the mostly imaginary country borderline creating imminent diplomatic issues with what was left of NATO, the World Security Council, the Ukrainians, the Europeans, the Kazakhstanis, and, mostly, the Americans. But Vladimir didn’t care. He had a job to do and he was going to do it come Hell or winter blizzards—fortunately, spring was approaching and most of the snow had melted.
The TEL plowed over saplings of ash, pine, and maple trees along the way, tearing such a large path in the greenery that, if anyone were looking, one could compare their path to borders on the map. Most certainly the Americans were looking, or at least they would be in about nine minutes and thirty seconds. Of course, it was all a show for the United Nations Security Council. The Russian president had for more than a decade been posturing and showing off the nation’s military might, especially their nuclear one, and the MZKT-79221, with a Topol-M on it at the southern border for all the world’s spy satellites to see, was the ultimate flexing of those muscles. The Russian president had made a show of making comments about placing the missiles in Canada, but that was certainly show. That would be as bad or worse than the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The Topol-M had no need of being deployed in Canada. From the TEL, the Topol-M could hit anywhere in the world undeterred in about thirty-two minutes or less if so desired. Vladimir and his crew were simply playing a part on the global diplomatic and strategic stage.
His team was just one of many across the country posturing and, for all intents and purposes, vainly showing off. Vladimir also knew from intelligence briefings that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was doing exactly the same thing and only “sort of” hiding what they were doing. They weren’t moving TELs. Instead, they were building launch sites for the Deng Fong rockets that could go orbital and carry nuclear weapons. The world was becoming more and more dangerously close to the threat of something bad.
The current showing of military might on the world stage was more heated than it had ever been during the Cold War era, and the only thing keeping the world from the brink of nuclear war was the fact that all the world liked having “stuff” and doing “things.” From the old guard Soviet KGB that was still secretly running Russia to the CCP, all of the current figureheads enjoyed their lives of luxury too much for the lean times of global war. But that type of world peace, Vladimir knew, was a threadbare tapestry—and one only needed to know which thread to pull to unravel it.
Vladimir checked his watch and noted the time and relaxed as best he could while being thrown around in his seat against the restraints. He had to gulp down the lump in his throat, again. While the MZKT-79221 was a marvel of Russian engineering it was also a testament to the Russians having little care for creature comforts. The ride was rough as hell and then some. There was no comfort to be had.
They didn’t need to be caught over the border by a spy satellite photo that could be embarrassing for the Kremlin, at least those were their standing orders. Kazakhstan was its own sovereign country with its own demarcated and established borders. But as far as the Russian government was concerned it was still a part of the empire that might have to be “reintegrated” back into the homeland someday and therefore the Russian president had told them to “push the boundaries to the edge of unclassified GLONASS positioning capabilities.” That was a farce, he knew. The Russian Global Navigation Satellite System was just as capable as anything the American Gobal Positioning System satellites could do. GLONASS could put the TEL within a meter of where it needed to be. But, diplomatically, one could always argue loss of satellite connectivity. They might get away with as much as a kilometer across the border—the key word being “might.”
As far as Vladimir was concerned there was little that would stop the Russian military in an all-out war, perhaps not even the Americans and CCP combined. But there was no chance the Chinese would align with the West. They’d damn near toppled them economically during the first pandemic invasion. No, there was little might that could stand against Mother Russia.
The RT-2PM2 Topol-M nuclear missile sitting behind him was a testament to his sentiment. The missile itself was a brilliant piece of Russian rocketry and the reentry vehicles and single warhead—treaty allowed them to carry only one—couldn’t be targeted by American antiballistic missile defense systems, at least not as far as any intelligence briefings had said. The Topol-M was state of the art more than a decade prior and was still unrivaled by any other nation and yet the Russian military had produced an even better one, the RS-28 Sarmat “heavy,” which had recently just replaced the R-36M the Americans called “Satan.” This new one was often referred to as the “Satan-2.” The fact that an ICBM more threatening to the Americans than “Satan” himself was being deployed excited him. Vladimir really hoped to get a close up look at one of them someday. Someday, soon.
