The Cold War Reheats in PHANTOM ORBIT
Phantom Orbit
Written by David Ignatius
Published by W.W. Norton & Company
May 7, 2024
Hardcover, 384 pgs.
The Cold War. It was a time when the US and the Soviet Union didn’t quite get along. Suspicions everywhere. No one was completely trustworthy. And here in the United States, we all knew the Russians were coming, the Russians were coming.
Only they didn’t. And the Cold War ended with pretty much a fizzle. (Of course, given the current political climate in this country, maybe they made it over here after all…)
Phantom Orbit makes an interesting choice in starting things with a Russian protagonist; Ivan Volkov is a student of math and orbital mechanics. He finds opportunity to study at a university in China, where they take note of his skill and hope to recruit him for their own satellite program. And as we learn through the course of the story, everyone who’s interested in Volkov is connected in some way to an intelligence agency, and that includes the CIA in the form of Edith Ryan, who gets too personally involved and loses her position at the China station.
Ryan, for her part, gets only a little POV coverage in the beginning of the book, her story picking up years later after Volkov attempts to make contact with the CIA to warn them that there’s a “kill switch” that’s been loaded into various satellites that have been built by the Chinese.
A bulk of the story follows Volkov as he navigates the space between being a student and trying to avoid being recruited as an informant for the KGB during his time in China. All he wants to do is work on space technology — rockets and satellites — and he isn’t in the least bit interested in political intrigue, even though he knows that living in Russia means at some point he’s going to get caught up in it whether he likes it or not. It’s an interesting character study as he evolves into a more cynical space, but ultimately I was a bit disappointed because of just how little happens in this story.
Volkov and Ryan are both on the outer edge of a bigger series of events that happen “off screen” away from the narrative of the book. There are hints of things happening elsewhere, but we only get glimpses, teases, as the two are reunited under a blanket of suspicion. And while I wasn’t expecting Ignatius to be another Tom Clancy, I still found myself wondering when something was actually going to happen. The realization that the Chinese have designed a master “kill switch” for satellites should have been a much bigger thing. I mean, this is happening all during the Cold War, for the most part, and it continues into the modern era post-pandemic. At the very least, I would have expected the tension to ratchet up as Volkov got deeper into realizing just what his academic pals in China were really about.
From a craft standpoint, Ignatius definitely has the chops as a writer. And you can tell he’s got familiarity with the subject matter, having been a reporter covering the Cold War for so long. But in the end, the story kind of fell flat for me. There was just enough technology, just enough intrigue, just enough personal entanglements, just enough to draw me into the story. But most of the time is spent with things happening to Volkov. He doesn’t drive the story, and I think that takes some of the energy out of it.
