CHAPTER ONE
Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, Shanxi Province, China
February 12, 8:59 A.M., China Standard Time
Dr. Yang Dàyóu did not bother to follow the countdown clock. He stood at ease—more drained than relaxed—his pale hands poking from his creased white lab coat. His expression was neutral though his brown eyes were alert. His hair was prematurely white, reflecting a life fully lived over the course of sixty-three years.
The mood inside the steel-reinforced aboveground bunker was prickly with expectation. Unlike the cool, very dry air outside, the atmosphere inside was warm; part of that was the inadequate heating system at the over century-old facility, and part was the presence of seventeen humid, expectant bodies.
Most of the attention was on the two banks of console monitors. The narrow eyes of General Zhou Chang, military commander of the Qi-19 project, shifted impatiently between the countdown clock and the two-inch-thick window that looked out on the launch site. They moved in precise syncopation with each short breath, little machines set beneath the crisp military cap atop the general’s six-foot-four frame. The official was very much like one of Yang’s devices, an engine with just six cylinders. Chang was either watching or demanding; his language consisted of “yes” or “no”; and his associates and subordinates were either for him or against him. For better or worse, those qualities had brought the team to this point.
Standing close beside the general was his right-hand officer, Lieutenant Colonel Tang Kun. The short, bald stoic Kun ran security for the facility; ran it with a keen eye and steel will.
Yang did not need to see the clock. He knew where on the countdown they were by the actions of each man and woman in the room. Outwardly serene, the only visible sign of Yang’s anticipation was an occasional smoothing of his gray mustache with an index finger. He was dressed in a crisp, white lab coat, starched so it would not wrinkle when he worked—a concession to orderliness which inspired confidence in others. There was a government-issued smartphone in his pocket; nothing went out without first passing before the eyes of Shen Laihang, the civilian chief of security at the center.
Dr. Dàyóu was chief engineer at the launch facility, also known as Base 25. The nation’s leading aeronautical expert, the engineer had spent most of his career here, not only building missiles but helping to design every new building and every upgrade to the old structures. He spent more time here than he did at his home.
But it was not as a proud father that Yang gazed at the launch pad, a half mile away. It was as a cautious, watchful one. The morning sun shined bright on the result of two years of intensive labor, a brilliant and intricate device poised for launch.
A countdown is not just a ticking clock, Yang knew. It is potentially a ticking bomb, a series of coordinated, sequential events where countless mechanisms could fail. And in the case of the Qi-19, there were at least eleven points where that was dangerously true.
You did your best, he reminded himself as he ran through each of the countdown checkpoints in his head. Science was valid, but he had a staff of several hundred workers, and humans were faulty. Not all of them scientists, he thought without looking at General Chang.
“Mobile launcher lock—final check,” said a voice.
The missile sat on Yang’s adaptation of the Russian MA3-7917, a fourteen by twelve, twelve-wheel transporter-erector-launcher. The missile transport was both faster and more stable than the Chinese WS-51200 sixteen-wheel TEL, qualities this new missile would require. Because of the American Project Blackjack satellite spy network, all Chinese missiles had to have siloed as well as mobile variants. Counteroffensive algorithms were challenged when the launch profile was constantly changing.
Yang saw the countdown shift to the next-to-last technician in the front. Fifteen seconds from now he would learn whether that work would bear rich fruit or—
“Launch sequence commencing!” the technician’s young voice broke the silent room. The man was not shouting but it seemed so. The process shifted to the last man, the ignition-checklist engineer, able to abort the countdown anytime in the next ten seconds. After that—
Yang Dàyóu had been through dozens of launches in his storied career, but none more important than this. Everything about the technology was new, his fingerprints proudly on every part of it. They were down to seven, six, five, four—
“Red light from the coaxial injector!” the checklist engineer announced.
General Chang shifted so he could see the man’s panel.
“What is this?” he demanded.
Yang Dàyóu had already moved to where the young specialist was pointing rigidly, almost accusingly. Even without looking the engineer knew where they were, what had tripped things up: the last checkpoint in his mind, refurbish eleven. The red light was pulsing on an LED schematic of the sleek, silver-blue hypersonic missile. It was flashing between the hot gas intake and the sleeve.
“There appears to be a crack in the secondary plate,” Yang said ominously as the count of two dissolved to one.
“Abort!” General Chang shouted.
But it was too late and Yang knew it. The rocket of the upright ballistic missile ignited, blasting fire at 1,000 degrees Celsius into the open silo beneath it.
The engineer’s eyes pinched slightly as with fear rather than expectation he looked out at the Qi-19. His creation was a flattened cylinder, sixty feet long, topped by a twelve-foot-long glider. It was different from the 18, which had top speeds of five-times sound. His design would achieve up to six-point-three times the speed of sound, far outracing the latest antimissile defenses as it delivered its payload high in the stratosphere.
A moment after ignition, the bottom of the missile briefly inflated like a balloon and the two sleek tailfins of the Qi-19 blew outward. They tumbled away on clouds of heavy black smoke, which churned and grew and obscured the expanse of scrub-plains surrounding it. The underbelly of the dark clouds was a sea of fire that shaded from white to red as it stretched from the ruined blast walls of the silo.
Almost at once, the main body of the Qi-19 folded haphazardly toward earth, apparently buoyed by the rising fires. The skin of the missile turned its own shade of matte black in the inferno. The dark blue payload came loose next. It toppled from the ring at the top and fell over backwards, its delta wings sizzling and smoking and vanishing in a quick instant. There were small puffs of explosions from what was left of the glider as its own internal fuel system was ignited and quickly consumed. The sharp nose of the plane pointed earthward; it seemed to be directing, to their demise, the modular packets of electronics that slipped through large and growing holes in the aircraft’s sides and belly.
The destruction was absolute and over in too few beats of the heart of the missile’s creator. Everyone in the room, save General Chang, was held fast by the awful spectacle playing out before them, the low grasses between them and the launch site lost in the holocaust of burning fuel.
Then the shock wave hit the bunker with a rattling concussion. Most of the personnel were wearing headphones; those who were not, like Chang, like the guards at the door, covered their ears as the blast struck like a wrecking ball. The bunker stopped rumbling and shaking within moments and then the rolling heat splashed across the front, raising the temperature more than 20 degrees.
As though propelled by the impact, General Chang of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force spun on the smaller scientist.
Lieutenant Colonel Kun stepped between them, more to moderate the general than to protect Yang. He unholstered his QSZ-92 semiautomatic. With his other hand the officer grabbed the engineer by the upper arm, squeezing hard.
While Chang’s angry eyes pinned the man where he stood, the lieutenant colonel silently motioned for two guards to come forward. The pair was standing on either side of a bolted metal door. They wore open-necked jackets and Western-style trousers, all a deep sky blue. Sitting smartly on their heads were white peak caps with a blue brim. On their right shoulders was the red shield of the air force police. Armed with QBZ-95 assault rifles, the two men quickly made their way through the small concrete bunker.
“Remove Dr. Dàyóu to his quarters,” Chang ordered thickly, all but spitting out the word “doctor.”
“This is a mistake, General,” the engineer said quietly. Though the man was visibly rattled, his mind was picking apart what he had just witnessed. “This was not a design flaw but a material—”
“No!” Chang shouted. His gaze burned deeper into the man, as if to remind him that this was not for the ears of those around them. “Take his telephone and remain inside with him. I will be there presently.”
The military police moved to the left and right of the engineer and faced him. Their stern expressions were rich with condemnation: what the thirteen technicians and military personnel had just witnessed was Dàyóu’s fault. The chief engineer had lost his face. The stain on the research unit, on the airborne branch of the military, on their nation itself, was all traceable to his failure.
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