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“Is there a problem, sir?” Hertzoff asked in concern.
Trying to be casual, the President dismissed that with a wave. “Nothing of importance.”
The others took that as a notice that the conference was over for the moment, and got on their own cell phones to check for any missed messages over the past ten minutes.
Outside the limo, police motorcycles rode along with the executive convoy, keeping people away from the line of limousines. Wherever the President went, traffic snarled and a major city ground to a halt for the duration of his visit. But his mind wasn’t on maintaining good public relations right now. If Hal Brognola wanted a private meeting, then all hell had broken loose somewhere. Could be Paris or Israel. Maybe both.
Deep in thought, the President studied the city passing by outside, trying to recall the details of a scientific report he had read as a junior senator very long ago. Israel may have been hit by vaporware, something that was not supposed to exist. But very obviously did. Project Sky Hammer. If so, then nobody was safe, absolutely nobody, and there were going to be a lot more deaths real soon.
Pressing a button on the armrest, the President said, “Driver, maximum speed to the airport, please.”
Instantly a siren started blaring from under the hood, and the convoy of limos surged with speed.
Computer Room, Stony Man Farm, Virginia
THE LARGE ROOM was very quiet, the air vents steadily exhaled a cool breeze and the silent keyboards made tiny patting noises from the hurried impact of fingers. A coffeemaker burbled at the kitchenette and muffled rock music could be heard coming from somewhere.
“What’s this about a Thor?” Carmen Delahunt asked, lowering her glasses. “Okay, Aaron. Tell me we aren’t looking at a Thor here. I remember reading about the project in a journal.”
A virtual reality visor plugged into her console, ready to access the Internet anytime. But the million-dollar VR helmet was deactivated at the moment. After the Paris attack, the team had been looking for a possible traitor in the NSA or CIA. But then the attack on Israel occurred, and it had top priority.
Privately, Delahunt hoped the two incidences weren’t directly linked.
Slim and well-built, the red-haired woman was a classic Irish beauty, but she was also one of the elite, the four Cyberwizards who composed the cybernetic division of Stony Man Farm. Her desk console was directly attached to the bank of Cray supercomputers under Stony Man’s direct control.
“The display is coming up now,” Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman called from the small kitchenette along the wall, where he was filling his coffee mug.
Sipping and wheeling at the same time, he rolled back to his console, the chair fitting snugly underneath.
The console had several monitors. A few of them were dark, but the rest were busy scrolling with news reports from every agency in the world.
Impatient, Kurtzman tapped one monitor with a screen saver. Why was the file taking so long? Instantly the wooden glen disappeared to show the status of the top-secret download. Ah, here we go, almost downloaded from archives now.
“Okay, heads up,” Kurtzman announced, tapping his keyboard.
Everybody else stopped whatever he or she was doing and paid attention.
“I’m afraid you’re right, Carmen. The name of the thing is Project Sky Hammer,” Kurtzman said as the big monitor at the front of the room came to life.
The plasma screen pulsed with light a few times, then cleared into a view of starry space, the blue-white globe of Earth low in the corner. The technical data flowed past the screen, showing power curves, field strengths and striking power. That end of the data nearly went off the chart. The Stony Man cyber team read the flowing data carefully.
Back in 1977, a research scientist named Dr. Gerald Mahone started thinking about weapons and what part of a bomb actually caused death and destruction. It wasn’t the metal casing or even the shrapnel inside. As an example, he suggested taking a bullet and throwing it at somebody. A steel-jacketed, hollow point, .357 Magnum round would simply bounce off his or her chest and fall to the floor. The bullet, the casing, the metal, wasn’t deadly, per se. It was the amount of force behind the projectile that made it deadly.
Anything was lethal if it moved fast enough. There were hundreds of recorded cases where a tornado had driven a piece of straw into a telephone pole, or done the same thing with a bottle cap and a brick wall. Speed, raw velocity, made objects dangerous.
The space race was still strong back in the seventies, and America had been locked in a deadly struggle for supremacy with the Soviet Union. New weapons were needed all the time. So Mahone did some basic calculations and invented the Thor.
The idea was simple, as good ones usually were. Take a plain steel rod, eight feet long and twelve inches in diameter. Add a couple of inexpensive steering rockets, cheap wings and a limited-capability computer. The whole thing wouldn’t have cost more than a couple hundred dollars.
Now place hundreds of these “spears” into orbit. A floating cloud of destruction waiting to be unleashed. When enemy forces were spotted, targeting information was sent to as many of the Thors as you needed to commit to the attack, and they would obediently jet out of space and into the atmosphere, constantly accelerating down the gravity hit, growing hotter and hotter from the friction with the atmosphere, until finally a white-hot, molten ball of steel moving at Mach Two arrived. There were few tanks, ships or gunnery emplacements of the time period that could have withstood the thundering impact of even a single Thor.
Even better, because of its speed and steep trajectory, a Thor should be impossible for missiles to track and blow out of the sky. The Thor was a cheap, deadly, unstoppable super-weapon.
With a few flaws. Space travel was still expensive back in the seventies, and there was no way to accurately give a Thor the precise location of a target. It was quite possible that a swarm of Thors might drift off course and slam into your own tanks, annihilating your own troops instead of the enemy’s.
The project was given the code name, Sky Hammer, and shelved in the deep top secret archives of the Pentagon. It was brilliant, but not feasible using technology of the time.
“So that’s what we’re facing,” Kurtzman said, turning off the screen. “Sky Hammer, a plain piece of molten steel falling from high orbit. The only things holding back the project before were the cost of space travel and the inability to accurately pinpoint a target. But a dozen nations have relatively cheap access to space these days, dirt cheap if they use an illegal version of the new Spaceship One rocket plane, and with a Global Positioning Device—GPD—bought off the shelf of any electronics store…” The man shrugged. “You’ve seen the results.”
“Everything old is new again,” Huntington “Hunt” Wethers muttered, scowling.
“Son of a bitch,” Delahunt whispered, reviewing the material again on her console. “And this is what hit Israel, a Thor.”
“More likely it was several of them,” Akira Tokaido stated grimly.
“Please bring up the TV news coverage of the wall,” Kurtzman requested, taking a sip of coffee. “I want to check something.”
Delahunt hit a macro and the CNN report appeared in a window within the view of space and started to play again.
“Hold,” Kurtzman said after a minute, and the scene froze. “There, look at that.”
Frowning, Wethers removed his pipe from his mouth. “The wall wasn’t blown up, it was smashed down.”
“Hit from above,” Kurtzman growled.
Wethers turned to Tokaido. “Better check to see if anybody is looking for a geologist at one of Israel’s universities.”
“To analyze the residue at the bottom of the crater?” Tokaido asked. “Yeah, makes sense. And that is the only way to know for sure, isn’t it?”
“Sadly, yes,” Wethers replied. “If there is a lot of pure steel down there…”
“But why did they wait until the ceremony started?” Delahunt wondered out loud. “Just to kill the prime minister? But they missed him.” Her head snapped up. “Paris!”
Biting back a curse, Kurtzman remembered the dying words of the NSA agent. He had said something about a new weapon for sale on the black market. Whoever was behind this had hit the wall as an advertisement. They probably announced in advance what was going to happen on the international arms market, and now that it had occurred right on schedule, they could start taking orders. With enough of them, anything could be smashed down by a Thor. Anything. The White House, Cheyenne Mountain, Hoover Dam… The targets were limitless and completely vulnerable. There wasn’t a defensive system in existence that could stop a Thor. Nothing. Only solid bedrock—and a lot of it.
“A Thor could crush the Farm, and we couldn’t do a damn thing except die,” Tokaido said softly, glancing at the ceiling. There were only white foam tiles in sight, but in his mind the sky was falling at exactly thirty-two feet per second….
“Okay, how do we stop it?” Delahunt asked.
Kurtzman sighed. “We can’t. The old figures were correct. Not a missile or antimissile, or antimissile laser can track and lock on to a Thor fast enough to do any significant damage.”
“Then we have to go after the people controlling it. That’s the vulnerable point, the operators.”
“Yes,” Kurtzman said, glancing at the world map. “Where they are.”
“If this news hits the airwaves and Internet, there’s going to be a worldwide panic,” Wethers stated bluntly. “A Sky Hammer alert would make the Cuban missile crisis look like an ice-cream social! Thousands of people will die in the riots when they try to reach subway tunnels, bomb shelters, anything underground.”
“And none of those would protect them.”
“Exactly.”
“It’s possible that we might have to shut down the Net,” Kurtzman stated. “Akira, prepare to arm the nexus point C-4 charges.”
The young man stopped what he was doing and got busy. The entire Internet was relayed though sixteen junction points. If those were blown up, the Internet was gone, possibly for months. That would cause a loss of billions of dollars to corporations, and nobody had the authorization to do that but the Secretary General of the UN. And very illegally, Stony Man Farm. It had taken them months to get the firing commands for the remote charges, and even then, they’d had to have a field team infiltrate each nexus to add their own control elements. This was something they had talked about for years in dread. Blowing the Internet was a doomsday option, a last-ditch effort to hold back the news that could cause the death of countless people. Nobody sane wanted to undertake this action, but the cyberteam had to be ready. Just in case. On the other hand, if the news got on the cable news shows, then the cat was out of the bag and all hell would break loose anyway, and there really wasn’t anything they could do about that event.
“Could Sky Hammer smash down the junction points?” Wethers asked suddenly.
Kurtzman nodded. “If the people controlling it know the locations, yes.”
“I’ll start a disinformation campaign about this,” Delahunt said, slipping on her VR helmet. The best way to hide the truth was to bury it under half-truths and lies. With enough misleading rumors circulating, nobody would ever believe that Sky Hammer existed.
Kurtzman grabbed a telephone on his console. “Barbara? It’s worse than we feared…yes, a Thor. It’s got to be. We better recall the teams immediately. This is going to get real bad, real fast.”
“I have them located,” Wethers said, working a mouse.
The main screen switched to a map of the world, two glowing blue stars marking the precise location of the Stony Man field teams. They were on opposite sides of the globe.
Kurtzman hung up the phone. “Okay, Barbara is calling Hal, and we have recall authorization. Bring ’em back.”
“We can’t,” Wethers stated. “See? They are both under radio silence.”
“Why?”
“They found their targets much sooner than expected and have engaged the enemy.”
Kurtzman narrowed his gaze. Damn! The teams were wasting valuable time taking out these minor dangers to America when the sky was literally about to fall down on everybody. Hours wasted. Time gone. Time they didn’t have to spare.
Kurtzman clamped his mouth shut. He knew the current enemy action was merely “cleanup,” but if the teams were in the middle of a firefight, any distraction at exactly the wrong moment could get all of them killed. There was nothing to do but wait, wait for them to finish the missions they were on.
“Come on, guys, shake a leg,” Kurtzman whispered. “Move it.”
CHAPTER THREE
Chicago, Illinois
The classic rock music of Peter Frampton was blaring over the wall speakers of the control booth. Lost in thought, the blurry DJ was staring out the window of the Sears Tower, and it took quite a while before he finally noticed the jingling instrument.
“Yellow!” he drawled, removing the handrolled cigarette from his mouth. The smoke was sweet and pungent, and highly illegal. “This is WQQQ, all radio, all the time. What can I do for you?”
“Pay close attention, Jew, or everybody dies,” a garbled voice spoke.
The DJ went very still at that and dropped the joint into a nearly empty beer bottle on the sound board. It hissed out of existence.
“What did you just say?” he asked, flipping a switch to record the conversation. Having worked his way up through the ranks, the DJ had started in the news department and knew the sound of a scrambled voice when he heard it. Lots of kooks and nuts called up stations proclaiming everything imaginable, from women sighting Elvis on a UFO, to men claiming to be an alien’s baby. But nobody ever had the coin to get a voice scrambler. That alone meant big bucks, and money plus crazy always spelled trouble.
“I said shut the fuck up, Moses, or we’ll bomb your little shithole of a station just to make the other kike radio stations pay attention. Understand?”
In the control booth, a union technician perked up in his chair at the sound of the voice, and quickly started punching numbers into a red phone dedicated for outside calls only. The DJ tried to wave the man from calling the police, but the engineer paid him no attention.
“My apologies, sir,” the DJ muttered. They thought the radio station was Jewish? The owner of the radio station was a Norwegian, Dave Linderholm, and he had no idea who owned the Sears Tower.
A crackle of static and the voice returned.
“Mind your betters, pig. Now, the wall in Palestine was destroyed by the American Liberation Strike Force,” the distorted voice continued. “And we…”
“Do you mean, the wall in Israel?” the DJ asked, confused.
“Shut up! There is no such country!” The phone crackled. “All of that land belongs to Palestine!”
“Even the parcels they sold to the Jews?” the DJ asked quickly, pointedly trying to egg the caller into saying something that would be banned on the air. That always helped the ratings, and sweeps week was coming up.
“Zion propaganda! Now, unless American ZOG pulls all of its troops back to U.S. soil, our next target will be the UN building!” There was a click and the line went dead.
Quickly shoving another recorded cassette of early heavy metal into the board, the DJ rushed into the engineering booth.
“What a freaking loon,” the DJ exhaled, running nervous fingers through his wavy crop of hair. “Did we get everything?”
“Loud and clear.” The engineer smiled, patting a digital CD recorder on the board. “By the way, what’s a ZOG?”
“Zionist Occupation Government.”
“What’s Zionist?”
“Tell ya later. Did we get a trace on the call?” the DJ asked hopefully, looking at the bewildering display of readouts, gauges, lights and meters. He was the talent, not a freaking atomic brain.
“Sure. It’s useless.” The engineer sighed. “The call came from a rest stop on Route 95, outside of Camden, right over the river in New Jersey.”
Clever. Stop your car, make the call, drive away before anybody can get there.
“Could it have been a fake phone location?”
“For people with a voice scrambler? Sure.” The engineer leaned back in his chair, the springs squeaking in protest. “So what now? Call the news director, or do we sell this directly to CNN?”
“We?” the DJ asked, stressing the word.
“I have the only tape, dude,” the engineer said, patting the recording machine.
The DJ glared at the machine, then shrugged. “Fifty-fifty?”
“Done.” The engineer grinned, extended a hand, and the two men shook.
“So who would you call?” the DJ smiled.
“The FBI, man,” the engineer stated with a wave. “These crank yankers might be the real thing.”
The DJ laughed, then he heard the reverberating drum roll of a Metallica song fading away and rushed back to his board to shove in a commercial for acne cream. When it was over, he shoved in the longest running song he could find, which bought him thirty minutes. Time to contact CNN and get a big check!
Heading back to the engineering booth, the DJ paused at the sight of the 9/11 wall poster of the Twin Towers. Vaguely he seemed to remember that everybody had lots of hint and clues about the forthcoming attack, but nobody had told the FBI.
