26,000 miles? That’s a small fraction of the lunar orbit! That’s somewhere near the geosynchronous orbit, IIRC!!!
It could have smacked around some working satellite(s) or redirected the orbit of a dead one and wreaked some havoc up there.
Close to the Geo orbit (22,236 miles or 35,786 km) but still far enough away that it wouldn’t even hit the geosats that have been boosted into the graveyard orbit (~+250km). Bottom line, close to zero probability of a COLA event and it’s just the authors spicing things up with an imaginative pen to boost viewer readership.