Phantom orbit, p.1
Phantom Orbit, page 1
Phantom Orbit
A Thriller
David Ignatius
For Sarah, Amy, and Adi
Neither a person nor a nation can endure without some higher idea.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, A Writer’s Diary
Prologue
Ivan Volkov studied the message on his computer screen in the powdery last light of the Moscow afternoon. It was an invitation to commit suicide, wrapped in vanilla icing. “People from nearly every country share information with the Central Intelligence Agency, and new individuals contact us daily. If you have information that might help our foreign intelligence collection mission, there are many ways to reach us.”
Volkov had read those words a half dozen times over the past week, on as many different computers. His head was on fire. He was tall, handsome once, an angular, weathered face from the Steppes. He loved his country, but even more he despised what it had become. Now, in the library of the Lebedev Physical Institute, on a virtual private network that Vladimir Vladimirovich himself could not break, he prepared to compose his text. He read the instructions once more.
“If you feel it is safe, think about including these details in your message: Your full name. Biographic details. How to contact you.”
These Americans were spoiled, really. They did not know pain. They were Adam, fallen. But they still ruled the ordered world, even more, now. After Russia invaded Ukraine, it was humiliated, hobbled, scorned by the decent world. But it still had its secrets. And it sought to eliminate anyone who might imagine sharing them. The Chekists had created an organization to kill betrayers that endured, now under a different name. It was the thing that Russia was still truly good at.
Volkov typed: “I am Anonymous. I live on a street with no entrance or exit. Here is my information: You are blind to the danger from above. Satellites are your enemies, especially your own. You have 16 ground monitors and 11 antennas to run your global navigation system. Do you trust it? That is only the beginning. Hidden codes can seem to make time stop and turn north into south. They will freeze your world and everything in it. Warning messages may be tricks. Beware.”
Volkov paused. No one should sign his own death warrant. But then he thought: This is not a choice, after what they did to Bucha and Mariupol—and to my own son. These are monsters, who have allied with monsters. Truly, they will turn the world upside down if they are not stopped. He read the instructions one last time.
“The CIA cannot guarantee a response to every message. We reply first to messages of most interest to us and to those with more detail. If we respond to your message, we will do so using a secure method. We go to great lengths to keep these channels secure, but any communication sent using the internet involves some risk. You can reduce some risk by using the Tor browser, a virtual private network, and/or a device not registered to you.”
Volkov shook his head. He took off his reading glasses. On his lips was the trace of a rueful smile. These Americans thought they had repealed the laws of gravity. They were the winners. They were so strong that they had become weak. They did not see what was in front of their eyes.
Volkov turned back to the keyboard and typed: “A war has already begun in space. You think you understand, but you do not. The worst has already happened. Only a few people know what I know. If you are smart, you will find me.” Then he pushed the button marked послать. Send.
Volkov closed his eyes. He was falling, but he was motionless. His body was heavy as lead and light as air. It was not enough, what he had done, but it was a beginning.
* * *
A young Russia analyst, camped amid a forest of workstations in the New Headquarters Building, was the first person in the agency to read the incoming message. It was from Russia; she knew that at least by the electronic tracings. She scanned the contents, looking for something real that could be examined or traced, but it was mostly a string of worry beads. The message referred to sixteen monitoring stations and eleven ground antennas in the United States’ Global Positioning System; but any prankster could find that information on the internet. Otherwise, there was nothing specific, no sources, no contact details, or even hints. Almost certainly it was nothing.
The junior analyst worked in a windowless room in the new annex, sifting through the electronic slush pile that accumulated through the internet portal, looking for bits of real intelligence. She was three years out of college; she was trying to do a good job. Hundreds of messages arrived every day. Half of them offered crazy new conspiracy theories about Russia. That was the drawback of having a public website that invited the world to send information to the CIA; it turned out that every crackpot had something to say. It was like the online comments section at the end of a news story. But they all had to be read, just in case.
The analyst was going to transfer the message to the “Reviewed without Action” file, which was the same as throwing it in the trash. But she read it again, and stopped at the last, dark warning. “A war has already begun in space. . . . The worst has already happened.” Probably that was nonsense; a drunken old crank, a kid stoned on drugs, or a deliberate provocateur in the SVR directorate that spun out dangles and deceptions.
The young woman kept a favorite admonition in a frame on her desk. “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” It was a quote from Oscar Wilde. Maybe an older, smarter officer would have discarded the message, sensing that it was a waste of time. But she didn’t know enough yet to act by reflex. So she marked the vague, oddly phrased warning for further review and sent it higher up the chain for someone else to take a look.
But riddles don’t solve themselves. There were so many other agent reports, intercepts, surveillance photos, and rumors for the Russia experts to sift through in the hideous war for Ukraine. The message from Anonymous sat in a senior analyst’s in-box for days. It might have been ignored altogether, if it hadn’t still nagged at the younger woman’s memory. She sent a query to Russia House asking if they’d found any collateral to support the dire message from the “VW,” the virtual walk-in, about killer satellites.
The analyst’s query created a paper trail. Now, in the unlikely event that this somber message turned out to contain a real piece of intelligence, someone would get blamed. For self-protection, the officer who oversaw collection and analysis about Russian space operations bumped it to the next bracket of intelligence assessment, at the Directorate of Science and Technology, which studied the vulnerabilities of the U.S. space program among many, many other technology assignments.
The message was reviewed; the box was checked. The responsible desk officer described it as “an unsourced and undocumented warning of vulnerability in the GPS system,” and rated its value as “low to moderate,” with a twenty to thirty percent chance that it contained actionable intelligence. His supervisor declined to take further action.
* * *
Volkov waited in Moscow for an answer, but none came. The dark of the Russian winter deepened. Soldiers were beginning to return home from Ukraine. Russia’s finest units, its paratroopers and special forces, had been shattered in the assault on Kyiv. Thousands more men had died in the meat grinder of Bakhmut. They tried to send the most horribly wounded ones to “recovery camps,” so that people wouldn’t see them. But everyone knew. You can’t keep a secret when people whisper about it every day. The soldiers were ashamed of themselves, even the badly wounded ones. That was the worst of it.
Volkov’s son Dimitry had a favorite passage from Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Before he died, he had framed it on his desk at the prosecutor’s office. “If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars.” Dimitry had fought on his conviction, yes, but he was gone. The powerful man that Dimitry had tried to expose, that man was still alive.
Volkov felt empty. It was as if his soul had left his body. He was just a sack of blood and bones, animated only by cowardice. Fear is a punishment; it robs our dignity. Volkov knew a secret, a real one, that could save lives, but he had been too frightened to give the Americans enough information to respond. What would his son say? Volkov knew the answer.
* * *
After a month of waiting, Volkov sent a second message. He used what CIA officers several generations before had called the “ten-cent pouch.” It was an ordinary letter, dropped in a Moscow mailbox. He sent it to an American woman he had met nearly thirty years before at Tsinghua University in Beijing—the woman he had suspected at the time was a CIA spy and someone who now might, possibly, understand what he was trying to say.
Volkov had kept her address all those years, hidden away. Maybe it was insurance, or leverage, or maybe he had really cared for her. Her name was Edith Ryan, and her home, three decades ago, was in a town called Holyoke in Massachusetts.
Volkov wrote her a simple note, nothing incriminating if it was read by the FSB mail monitors. Just a lonely man, in a reverie.
Dear Miss Ryan:
Perhaps you remember me. I am Ivan Volkov, who studied aerospace engineering at Tsinghua University when we were young and very poor. I am sorry I haven’t written for so long. I am 51 years old now, and my son, my only family, is gone. I am quite alone. I work now at the Lebedev Physical Institute. I am always happy to meet old friends. Perhaps you could contact me.
Yours sincerely,
Ivan Volkov
Volkov sent the letter, and he waited.
BOOK ONE: LAUNCH
IVAN VOLKOV AND EDITH RYAN
CHINA, 1995–1996
Dong Fang Hong 1; Launch Date: April 24, 1970
It was the first Chinese experimental satellite launched . . . from a launch facility near Lop Nor. The primary satellite mission was to broadcast the song “Dong Fang Hong” [“The East Is Red”], paying tribute to Chairman Mao, and to announce the time. The satellite was spherically shaped with a one-meter diameter. It ceased transmitting in June 1970. This was the first satellite launched by China on its own booster, making China the fifth nation to put a spacecraft into orbit using its own rocket.
—NASA Space Science Data, Coordinated Archive
1
Beijing, September 1995
Ivan Vladimirovich Volkov arrived in Beijing for the first time on a steamy late summer day. He had traveled from Ulan Bator, the last leg of a journey from his hometown of Magnitogorsk at the eastern edge of the Urals almost to Siberia. He was twenty-four years old and wanted to escape Russia, even then. The Soviet Union had collapsed. His father had died recently, in the rubble, you might say, after a lifetime of drinking too much vodka and eating too many lies. Volkov told his mother the night he left Magnitogorsk that if he stayed there, he would die, too.
Volkov was rail-thin, with high cheekbones and a shock of black hair. Somewhere in his distant past was a Mongol horseman. But in this life, he was a scientist, newly itinerant. He had been studying astronomy and mathematics at Moscow State University until his family ran out of money to pay tuition. He polished his English and looked for stipends abroad in America or Europe. Those were fantasy islands, but it turned out that China was hungry for young scientists. Volkov applied for a scholarship in a master’s degree program in astronomy at Tsinghua University in Beijing and was accepted. The university agreed to pay for his travel to Beijing.
He was hungry for the world, but he was also Russian to his bones. When he reached for his seat belt before landing, you could see the name of his local hockey team, metallurg, tattooed on his forearm. In his backpack, he carried for amusement not a novel or an adventure story, but a book of math puzzles. He closed his eyes as the plane began its approach. He told himself he was free, and he wanted to believe it. But like every child of Russia, he carried a weight.
Beijing was obscured by a haze of smog as Volkov’s flight approached the city. When the plane landed, Chinese passengers clapped. As Volkov exited the plane, a blast of humid late summer heat radiated off the concrete runway. He entered a low-rise terminal that buzzed like a convention hall at a party congress. The concrete pillars were trimmed with red bunting; uniformed attendants busily dusted the gray tile floors. At passport control, Volkov waited while officers from the Ministry of Public Security fussed over his visa.
“Russian?” asked the passport control officer. Why would a young Russian want to come to China? “Student,” said Volkov in English. The officer shook his head, but he stamped the passport.
A Tsinghua University representative was waiting for Volkov when he cleared customs; he was holding a placard with Volkov’s name in English block letters. The man was bald and shook hands very softly; he introduced himself as Lao Wen. “Old Man Wen.” Volkov would see him often in coming months, for, as Lao Wen explained, he would be the Russian graduate student’s “special friend.” Volkov asked if he could eat something; he was famished after his flights. Lao Wen took him to a McDonald’s inside the terminal.
The windows of the university transit bus were darkened; through the shaded glass and the haze, the city appeared as a crowded but indistinct blur. The traffic slowed as they reached the congestion of the outer ring road. Beijing in 1995 was a construction zone: the shells of new buildings, topped by spindly construction cranes, lined the boulevards; in the narrow hutongs beyond the highways, there was still the whir of old bicycles.
“Huan ying!” said Lao Wen brightly, as the bus turned toward a gate with a tall arch framed in white jade. Welcome! Beyond the gate was a broad lawn leading to a great domed auditorium. Farther on were quadrangles of classroom buildings and acres of green grass. Volkov took a deep breath. It was almost as if he had landed in America.
Lao Wen leaned toward the Russian. “You know what people say about Tsinghua? It is difficult to enter, but easy to exit. Be a good student. Don’t make trouble.”
The little bus came to a stop in front of the main administration building. The registrar told Volkov that the astronomy program for which he had been admitted was oversubscribed. But they had saved a spot for the Russian student in aerospace engineering. Someone had “placed” him already.
* * *
Volkov was assigned a room in the international dormitories. A single bed, a forlorn bureau, a wobbly desk, a dim lamp. It had a window that looked across the rooftops and tall trees to the university observatory. The tower stood like a lighthouse above the campus, topped by a metal sphere enclosing a telescope. Volkov wandered over to the observatory on his second day at Tsinghua. As he neared the tower, a guard stopped him and shook his head. Looking too closely at the telescope, let alone the stars, was forbidden.
The dormitory cafeteria food was too spicy for Volkov’s Russian stomach. He ate plain rice and spongy white bread, along with whatever vegetables weren’t too soggy from the steam table. That wasn’t enough; he was losing weight, so he began eating hot dogs and hamburgers from an American-style cafeteria across campus.
Midway through his first week, Volkov met another Russian graduate student, from Saint Petersburg. The Russian was too friendly, talking in Russian-English slang words. Baller! Krypton! He mentioned his father, in Saint Petersburg, a former party official who knew the people who knew. Volkov kept his distance. He tried to make friends with other foreign students in his first few weeks, but most of them were withdrawn, bookish types who spent their days and nights in the library. Botanik, they called them condescendingly back in Russia. Botanists.
Volkov made friends with a Bulgarian from the Mechanical Engineering Faculty, and one night they went to a club in Beijing. They couldn’t afford to drink, but they danced with some Chinese girls who thought they were cool, until they got ejected because they weren’t buying anything. The DJ played a track from a new Smashing Pumpkins album. Volkov shouted the refrain in English. One of the Chinese girls kissed him on the lips.
The Aerospace Engineering Department had a half dozen other foreign students. Like Volkov, they had come to study in China because it was cheap and academically respectable. Tsinghua had formed a Department of Aeronautics in the late 1930s, before the revolution, and the school had expanded with China’s ambitions. Many of its faculty members had studied in America and were publishing academic papers repackaging information they had gathered while at MIT or Caltech.
“Self-discipline and social commitment,” advised Lao Wen at one of their weekly meetings. That was the Tsinghua school motto. He commended Volkov for his self-discipline. His marks on the half-term exams had been excellent. He had scored the top grades among master’s candidates in his courses on radio astronomy and astrophysical fluid dynamics. Now, Lao Wen said, the university hoped that Volkov would also demonstrate social commitment.
“Of course,” said Volkov. He knew what that meant. He had been hearing similar invitations since he was a teenage boy and was instructed to join the Young Technicians Club in Magnitogorsk.
* * *
Volkov was lonely in Beijing in his first months, so he read. One of the few books he had brought with him from Moscow was a history of mathematics, with a foreword by the great American professor Isaac Asimov, which had been published in 1991 and translated into Russian. Volkov had won it as a prize for scoring the top grade from his district in the admissions examination for Moscow State University.
Volkov had no interest in history, usually. The way it had been taught when he was a boy in Magnitogorsk, it was all just lies. But he loved the narrative of mathematical discovery, which Russians revered as a kind of secular religion. And in particular, during his brief stint at Moscow State University, he had become interested in the German astronomer Johannes Kepler.
