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The elevator reached the bottom of the shaft and the doors opened with a musical chime. As they exited into a long corridor, Brognola noted the extra blacksuits standing guard. “Expecting trouble?” he asked pointedly.
“Always,” she replied grimly.
As the pair passed a staff room, Brognola could see that it was empty, the break table covered with half-filled cups of steaming coffee, along with partially eaten doughnuts and sandwiches. Mounted in the corner of the ceiling was a flat-screen monitor showing a local news anchor talking excitedly into a microphone and standing in front of a smoky view of Cape Canaveral.
“Damn, the news media has the story,” Brognola muttered irritably. “But I guess we couldn’t kept it from them for very long.”
“I did my best,” Price said, not glancing that way. “At least I have most of the news channels convinced it was merely a fuel leak explosion and not a terrorist attack.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Had the NASA spokesperson deny it vigorously…before they could ask.”
In spite of the situation, the big Fed almost grinned. “Yep, that would do it, all right.”
She shrugged again. “It usually does.”
Reaching the far end of the corridor, they hurried to one of the electric cars that would take them along the underground passageway that led to the Annex building. Moments later, after passing through security, Price and Brognola headed to the Computer Room.
A hushed excitement filled the large room with palpable force. A soft breeze murmured from the wall vents, the pungent smell of strong coffee came from a small kitchenette, and the soft sound of muted rock music floated on the air. Hunched over elaborate workstations, four people were typing madly on keyboards.
“Damn it, there are too many of them!” Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman growled, callused hands pushing his wheelchair a little closer to the wall monitor.
“And this isn’t even half of them,” Carmen Delahunt said, her face hidden behind a VR helmet as her gloved hands fondled the empty air opening computer files on the other side of the world.
“Explain,” Kurtzman demanded, turning the heavy chair in her direction.
“A lot of these companies don’t have computerized files for me to hack,” Delahunt replied. “Some are actually using handwritten ledgers, for God’s sake! There is no way that I can ever track down all of the shipments.”
“Shipments of what?” Price demanded as she advanced closer.
“Air,” Kurtzman said, briefly glancing at her, then turning to wheel back to his workstation. His desk was a mess, covered with papers, CDs, hastily scribbled notes and several books on military history with handwritten corrections in the margins. A steaming mug of coffee stood next to his keyboard.
“Air?” Brognola demanded, crossing his arms.
“Liquid air, actually,” Kurtzman explained, locking the wheels into place. “We did a spectral analysis of the MPEG from the cell phone and found out the X-ship was using conventional rocket fuel.”
“LOX-LOH?” Price demanded skeptically. “But that’s impossible! The combination doesn’t give enough energy to power an SSO!”
“Which means they have some way to boost the reaction, but there’s no denying the facts,” Kurtzman retorted gruffly, tapping a few buttons. “See for yourself.”
With a flicker the main wall screen revealed a wind rainbow with a few interspersed black bars.
“See those color absorption lines?” the cyber wizard said pointing a thick finger at the black bars. “That’s oxygen and hydrogen, no doubt about it.”
“Can they be tricking the sensors somehow?” Brognola asked hesitantly.
Reaching for the mug of coffee, Kurtzman paused to arch an eyebrow. “Trick the visible spectrum?” he asked, sounding incredulous. “No, Hal, the things are using LOX-LOH as fuel. That’s a fact. How they get those reaction pressures is beyond me, though. Hunt is working on a few ideas, but has nothing yet.”
Hearing his name, Professor Hunting Wethers looked up from his workstation for a moment, then returned to the complex mathematical equations scrolling across his monitor. The side monitors were full of three-dimensional images of rocket engines and charts of shock-diamond explosion pulses inside the exhaust flames.
“It doesn’t matter how the terrorists are boosting the engine power of the X-ships,” Price said. “What is important is that if they’re using regular fuels, then they just refuel after every attack.” She paused. “Which means they must have refueling stations hidden all over the world, mountaintops, in the middle of a forest or a desert, anywhere at all. Distance means nothing to these ships.”
“That’s why you’re checking into industrial air plants,” Brognola added, his interest piqued. “To try to track down any recent shipments of liquid oxygen.”
“Close enough,” Kurtzman said. “Only it’s—”
“Hydrogen,” Delahunt interrupted, her gloved hands brushing aside firewalls and massaging access codes. “There’s too many medical uses for liquid oxygen, so hydrogen is much easier to track.”
“Anything usable yet?” Brognola prompted.
“No,” the woman replied curtly, her frustration obvious. “There are simply too many air plants in the world.”
“Roughly a double deuce of them worldwide,” Kurtzman added.
Mentally, Price translated the figure. “Twenty-two thousand plants?”
“At least. Lots of uses for compressed air, you know. Hell, we pack munitions in pure argon, and use liquid halogen in our fire extinguishers! And who’s to say the terrorists haven’t built one for themselves in Borneo or Outer Mongolia.”
“Liquid hydrogen…what an interesting possibility,” a voice murmured. “Yes, that might just work.”
“What do you have, Akira?” Kurtzman demanded, twisting in his chair while setting down his empty mug.
Over at the third workstation, a handsome youth of Japanese ancestry thoughtfully blew a bubble of chewing gum before answering. “I’ve been considering the inability of the heat-seekers to attack to the X-ships,” Tokaido said, unwrapping a fresh piece of bubble gum. Briefly he inspected the sugary piece before sliding it into his mouth. “The only possible answer is liquid nitrogen.”
Frowning, Kurtzman was about to ask a question, then his face brightened. “You mean, a defusement pattern, like Looking Glass?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Damn, that’s clever,” Kurtzman muttered. “Yes, I’ll bet that would work as a heat shield. Not for very long, but obviously for long enough. These things travel so fast.”
“Speed is the key,” Tokaido confirmed, tapping a button before a series of charts flashed into existence on the wall screen.
Price and Brognola looked hard at the diagram. They both knew that Looking Glass was the code name for the 747 jumbo jet used as the mobile headquarters for SAC, the Strategic Air Command, the people who controlled all of the nuclear weapons in the nation’s arsenal. The 747 was heavily armed, and the Air Force had boasted for decades that it could not be shot down. Studying the screen, they now knew why. The moment radar registered an incoming missile, Looking Glass would automatically release a stream of liquid nitrogen that chilled the air around the jet engines, momentarily masking their heat signature. With nothing to lock on to, the enemy missile would simply sail right past the mobile headquarters.
“Doesn’t Air Force One use something similar?” Price asked.
“Sure, the Secret Service invented the idea.”
“How much liquid nitrogen would an X-ship need for this tactic?” Brognola demanded. “Those big engines must be hotter than a hellfire barbecue.”
“At least,” Tokaido replied, snapping his gum. “I don’t know how large a crew they carry, but I’d guess—and it’s purely a guess, mind you—that an X-ship is probably only good for two maybe three ventings. After that, they’d be as vulnerable as any ship. Unfortunately…”
“Unfortunately, after the first missile salvo, they take off faster than lightning,” Kurtzman said, working a calculator program on his console. “Damn it, we’d need a concentrated strike of ten Sidewinders launching in unison, overlapping two other salvos, to get a definite kill on the first attack.”
“Can you set the SAM batteries of the Farm to do that?” Price asked.
After a moment Kurtzman nodded. “Yes,” he said hesitantly. “But we’d have to replace the blacksuits with a master computer, and that would take at least a week.”
“Useless then.” Brognola sighed, grinding a fist into his palm. “But we better send out the word about the overlapping salvos in case somebody else can do it. Maybe the U.K. They have a lot of automation in their defense systems.”
“Consider it done,” Tokaido said, already typing madly.
“Have there been any demands from these people yet?” Kurtzman asked, reaching for his mug. Upon finding it empty, he pushed away from the workstation and headed toward the kitchenette. “Any requests to release prisoners, transfer money to a Swiss bank account, get troops out of the Middle East, anything at all?”
“No,” Brognola stated. “And that’s the part that scares me the most.”
“Agreed,” Price said. “It means that these people are not planning to negotiate for anything, but simply seize what they want. And who can blame them? As of right now, nobody can stop them.”
“That is not quite correct, Barbara,” Wethers said slowly, leaning back in his chair. “I have been studying the videos of these attacks, and been running some rough calculations. They can’t fly.”
“Are you kidding?” the woman asked.
“Not at all,” the distinguished professor replied, pulling a briarwood pipe out of his shirt pocket and tucking it comfortably into his mouth. Smoking was forbidden in the Computer Room, but he found chewing on the stem highly inducive to the thinking process. “If the X-ships are using a standard LOX-LOH fuel, and we know this for a fact, then they simply cannot generate enough power to fly as fast and as far as we know they do.” He shifted the pipe to the other side of his mouth. “Which sounds like a contradiction, but is not. What it means is, they’ve somehow augmented the combustion.”
“Any idea how?” Brognola asked, feeling out of his element. He was a cop, not a scientist.
“Indeed, yes,” Wethers replied with a wan smile. “There have been some NASA experiments to increase the power of a standard shuttle engine by boosting the ignition with microwaves. Now these have worked in a laboratory, but failed on the launch pad. A microwave impeller can indeed increase the power of a rocket engine several times, more than enough to accomplish what we’ve seen.”
“So why haven’t we done that?” Price demanded impatiently.
“Because the intense magnetic fields would soon kill the crew,” Wethers said. “That is, unless there is sufficient shielding to protect them. But that would weigh so much it’d completely neutralize the boosting effect.”
“If you boost the engine, the crew dies,” Kurtzman said thoughtfully, starting a new pot of coffee. “So either the crews of the X-ships are all suicides, or they have no idea what the engines are doing to them.”
“This could give us some critical leverage to turn one of the terrorists when we find the people behind these attacks,” Brognola said.
“Personally, I’d rather simply blow off their heads,” Price stated. “But it’s more important to stop these lunatics.”
“How does it kill them?” Kurtzman asked. “Damage to the brain tissue, destroys the nervous system, or invokes artificial leukemia?”
“Leukemia,” Wethers stated. “Exactly the same as the technicians who work on improperly shielded power lines and cheaply built electrical substations, but on a much more intense level.”
“Really? How soon would it affect them?” Brognola demanded. “If we’re talking years…”
“At the levels of power necessary to boost a ten-story spacecraft, I’d say no more than a few days at the most.”
“At least that gives us a place to start,” Price said.
“Unless each crew only does one mission,” Wethers amended. “Then another team takes control of the ship…no, wait, that would be a logistical nightmare. The terrorists might have hundreds of refueling depots hidden around the world, but to also have each one staffed with a reserve crew is ridiculous.”
“Could the ships be fully automated?” Price inquired. “Computer operated with no live crew?”
“Impossible,” Kurtzman countered. “Good work, Hunt. Start looking into whatever would be needed to build the microwave…beamers?”
“Impellers.”
The man gave a curt nod. “As you say, impellers. Carmen, check into any large purchases of antileukemia medicine purchased within the past month.”
“I’ll also look for any shipments that have gone missing, or been stolen,” the former FBI agent added from behind the VR helmet, her gloved hands rapidly opening and closing files.
“In the meantime, I’ll access the logs of the NSA Keyhole satellites to try to find out where the ships first launched from,” Kurtzman stated, heading for his workstation. “If we can pinpoint their place of origin, that could tell us—”
Suddenly a printer set against the wall started humming and pushed out a single sheet of green-tinted paper. Changing direction, Kurtzman rolled toward the machine, but Price got there first.
“The FBI was checking the two American companies trying to build SSO transports and found only smoking ruins,” she stated. “The working models, blueprints, schematics—everything is destroyed.”
Brognola bit back a curse. So far, the terrorists were way ahead of them, with Stony Man playing catch-up and doing a poor job. “What’s the official story?”
“That each airfield was struck by lightning, which caused a wildfire.”
The big Fed grunted. That was close enough to the truth for the present. But pretty soon somebody was going to figure out the truth and then it would be chaos in the streets. “Were there any survivors?” he asked hopefully.
“Lots. As soon as they get out of the hospital, the FBI will debrief them.”
“I’ll want a copy of those reports.”
“No problem, I’m already in their system,” Kurtzman replied, the FBI emblem fading into view on his computer screen. “As soon as there is something, I’ll have a blacksuit deliver it to your office.”
“Don’t bother, I’m here for the duration,” the big Fed replied, going to the wall and claiming a spare chair.
“What’s the status of the field teams?” Price asked, glancing at the clock on the wall. “It’s been over an hour since we sent the recall signal.”
“No response yet,” the cyber wizard replied gruffly, looking at a submonitor. “Which means they’re either in the middle of a fight or have gone silent.”
“Or they’re dead.”
There was no possible reply to that, so everybody in the room continued with their work. But the air seemed a little bit colder now as the people pointedly ignored the clock on the wall, the frenzied typing suddenly sounding painfully similar to machine-gun fire.
CHAPTER THREE
Fayetteville, South Carolina
A cool rain fell across the sprawling military base, washing the red clay dust from the side of the stout brick buildings.
“Here we go!” a burly sergeant shouted, gnarled fists resting on his hips. “You have five minutes, then we leave without you!”
Bursting into action, the elite troop of Marine specialists dived off their bunks and scrambled across the barracks, grabbing duffel bags and yanking on unmarked jackets to cover the handguns riding in their shoulder holsters. There were no sirens to announce the intentions of the combat troops, only a small red light flashing above the exit to signal the call to war.
Through a rain-smeared window, the sergeant could see the brilliant columns of combat searchlights sweeping the stormy clouds, and he knew that a dozen radar globes were probing the sky far beyond the range of visible sight. The balloon had gone up only minutes earlier, but already the gate to Fort Bragg was closed and locked, a full platoon of armed soldiers in body armor standing guard, along with a pair of Bradley Fighting Vehicles. The Bradleys were angled toward one another, forming a narrow channel too small for any truck or car to get through, and spike strips had been laid in case somebody tried to ride a motorcycle through or around the imposing the blockade.
Located near the artillery range were half a dozen long-range cannons, their barrels pointed at the sky. Everything the base had was primed and ready for battle, big antiaircraft shells set to explode at different heights to fill the sky with a deadly maelstrom of shrapnel.
Massive Abram battle tanks were parked on the parade grounds, positioned back-to-back in a large circle for fast deployment. Wearing slickers and “hot com” helmets, grim soldiers walked the flat roofs of the PX and library, carrying Stinger missile launchers and lugging cumbersome, four-barrel, HAFLA multirocket launchers.
“One minute!” called the sergeant, checking his watch. “Move it or lose it, people!”
“About time we finally saw some action,” a private said, grinning as he lay his black letter on a shelf. Everybody going into combat was strongly urged to leave a goodbye note for his family in case he didn’t come back. That was just standard operational procedure for the U.S. Marines.
