скачать книгу бесплатно
When the payloads were launched, gun cameras in the guidance systems of each nose, he knew, would track their flight paths, speeding bullets, near skimming U.S. government-owned prairie of North Dakota, until impact flashed obliteration then oblivion across the screens. Four payloads all told, he thought, what were technically cruise missiles, streaking at low altitude for the mock-ups, powered at subsonic speed to target by jet engines. Digital contour maps, born from radar and aerial and sat imagery, told the computer navigational systems in the warheads where to go.
Predestined supertech boogie-woogie.
Only these mothers of annihilation, code-named the Four Points, Horn knew, housed a series of thermal cluster bombs, eight to a package, two more inside each eight. As he did the math, recalling the computer graphics outlining the blast radius, he pictured smoking craters—or dozens of raging infernos—eating up something in the combined neighborhood of four to five square miles.
Sweet.
Welcome to the war of the future, he thought, aware that if this test run was successful, the empty wastelands of Nevada were next up, and in for a whole other galaxy of big bangs.
As Horn glimpsed Colonel Jeffreys moving his way, he pulled the pack of Camel unfiltered cigarettes from his pants pocket, stuck one on his lip. Clacking open his Zippo lighter and torching up, spitting tobacco flecks then dragging deep, he saw the head aerospace genius, Dr. Benjamin Keitel, glaring his way.
“Hey! Are you nuts? There’s no smoking in here!”
Horn washed a dragon’s spray of smoke toward Keitel, the man flapping his arms like a headless chicken, a couple more of his comrades jumping into the act. The geek was squawking out the virtues of nonsmoking to Jeffreys when Horn blew another cloud in his face and told the colonel, “Maybe you want to remind Dr. Frankenstein here who’s really in charge?” He ignored Keitel’s diatribe, adding, “Maybe you want to inform him I don’t exactly hand out pink slips at the end of the day for insubordination?”
“Get back to work,” Jeffreys told the aerospace engineer, who muttered something to himself then returned to his monitors.
Horn stared ahead, puffing, as the good colonel scowled him up and down. He could almost hear the man’s thoughts. Beyond the shoulder-holstered Beretta 92-F, if not for the white star emblem over his heart on his blacksuit, Jeffreys could pull rank.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t be so free in issuing implied threats like that, Mr. Orion,” the colonel said, layering disdain on his code name like a curse word.
“Well, you’re not me.”
“And I pray every night that blessing will continue.”
“Really?” Horn smoked, bobbed his head, got the message, hoping the day came when Jeffreys crossed into what he liked to call the Black Hole. “Fear not, Colonel. I’m not about to turn my quarters into a torture chamber,” he said, then, looking at the two female engineers, smiled and added, “or a rape room.”
“You son of a… Don’t you have some business to attend to, regarding an AWOL and, may I add, critical employee of this program?”
“We’re working on it. Something this sensitive, Colonel, it takes time,” Horn said as Jeffreys moved into his personal space.
“Time better served if you were, I would imagine, out there as point man in the hunt.”
Horn was searching for some threatening reply when he caught the change in tone from Keitel, questions hurled from his work bay, edged with concern as they were snapped into his com link. The SAS commander took a few steps forward, sensing a problem as he peered into the monitors where the executive jets mirrored Lightning Bat. The air became lanced, he felt, with rising panic as he saw what he believed were blue flames—or sparks?—leaping from the black ferrite-painted surface of the fighter jet, dancing next, nose to tail, there then gone. What the hell had just happened? he wondered, Kietel barking the same question to Major Holloran. Lightning Bat’s coating, he knew, was meant to absorb radar radiation, standard for any Stealth fighter to render it near invisible. Only he was privy there was more to the fighter jet’s body, from nose to swept-back Delta wings to tail, than earthly alloys.
Jeffreys banging out questions, Horn rolled up Keitel’s back. And clearly saw what looked like blue lightning shooting from the cockpit.
“Lightning Bat Alpha!” Keitel nearly shouted. “You are nowhere near the targets.”
“Why are the bomb bays opening?” Jeffreys demanded, checking his watch. “They’re way ahead of their scheduled launch!”
Horn heard Keitel gasp an oath as he saw the missiles lowered from their bay by the robotic arms. “Lightning Bat Alpha, respond!” he hollered, eyes darting from a digital readout to the play-by-play screens, snarling next as he pulled the com link from his ears, static crackling through the room like a string of firecrackers. “Colonel,” Keitel said, eyes bugged to white orbs, “all Four Points are recalibrating their targets!”
“What? How?” he demanded, flying up on Keitel’s rear. “Where?”
Horn was crowding Keitel and Jeffreys when he heard Holloran patch through, the panic in the major’s voice loud and clear through the static. “Ground Control, come in, dammit! We have a colossal and definite problem!”
Keitel looked about to vomit, sounding on the verge of hyperventilating as he tapped the keyboard on his computer. As a digital grid map of North Dakota flashed onto the monitor, Keitel paused, staring in horror at the blinking red dots. “Oh, God, no. This can’t be happening!”
“What?”
Keitel turned to Jeffreys, his face ashen, and told him, “All four missiles are recalibrated to strike civilian targets.”
“SWITCH TO MANUAL override!”
Targets Engaged flashing in red on the head up display from the holographic image illuminated by laser light on the inside of his visor, Holloran stifled the urge to smash his fist into the instrument panel.
“I can’t,” Sayers told him, his fingers flying over the keypad that would shut the targeting computer system down. “Dammit to hell, it’s locked up!”
Holloran swore under his breath. This was the next-to-ultimate nightmare scenario—four cruise missiles with cluster bombs set to launch and take out civilian targets—as he heard ground control telling him what he already knew.
The two of them were on their own.
Do something!
For all the four-digit Einstein IQ between them—there was nothing Eagle Nebula could do on its end. Short of blowing them out of the sky with a SAM—and he wouldn’t put it past them—there was one other option, he knew, waiting now for those three dreaded words.
Initiate Fatal Abort.
From the beginning, no ejector seats, no self-destruct button had been designed for Lightning Bat. There was good reason for that, he knew, fully accepting from the onset the twisted reasoning that IFA meant finding a vast and wide-open stretch of nothing and slamming Lightning Bat to Earth. A suicide ditching, a fireball spewing radiation, but hopefully nowhere close to a populated area. Or, at worst, only a few souls hopefully still wandering around outside Ground Zero, until Eagle Nebula could ferry in the hazmat platoons while soldiers quarantined God only knew how many square miles around the compass.
Holloran switched his HUD to the inside of the cockpit shield, wondering why some systems worked and others were—well, acting on their own, rebelling, as if they had willpower, defiantly commandeering the vessel. He grabbed the side-arm controller, hoping to God if he could throw the wings to a quick dip, forty-five degrees, port and starboard, the missiles might impact on what was empty prairie. Provided, of course, he got the timing right, but with everything else unraveling…
The stick was jammed!
And the blue lightning came back, leaping from the instrument panel, as Holloran found their own retractable cameras lower from each side of the hull’s underbelly amidships, zooming in on the two robotic arms lowering their payloads.
Targets Engaged freeze-framed on the shield.
Holloran cursed, rechecking the new calibrations, locked in still, he discovered, ground control screaming in his ear as the payloads fanned out into crossbars on their monitors.
Covering north, south, east and west, two on an arm, one frame hung a few meters lower than the other, and for the sake of what was now doomsday clearance. Just as they pulled the damn things up on their computers, he knew, they were held for the moment by titanium clamps, talons that would release them at any second as he watched the numbers fall to single digits on his readout.
Holloran stared at the vast prairie, looked to a long, sweeping horizon that seemed to run straight into the setting sun. They were still some fifty miles from the Badlands, Holloran certain, or rather praying, they were as empty as the lunar landscape he knew them to be.
“They’re going to fire, Major!”
And Holloran watched in helpless rage and disbelief as four cones of flame shot out beyond the stabilizing fins. The missiles released and went streaking away on four points of the compass.
GROUND CONTROL, Horn knew, was an obscene misnomer, and by galactic degrees in this case. There were no command guidance systems, at least for this initial outing, to depend on laser beams to pin down the targets to within a few meters, steer and keep the missiles locked in to impact. No passive system, either, meaning they homed in specifically on infrared radiation, as in heat-seeking the likes of auto or jet engines—or warm bodies. The Four Points were their own Alpha and Omega, relying solely on active systems, which was radar already engineered into the missiles, their guidance computers flying them on, unstoppable and untouchable, to vaporize the targets. Keitel was in the process of pointing this out to Colonel Jeffreys, they were little more than limp baggage on this end.
“Sweet Holy Virgin Mother of…”
“I’m afraid we are way past any hand of God, Colonel.”
“Don’t get smart on me, Keitel! Where are those missiles fixed to strike, mister?” the colonel rasped, clear to all now he realized he had become a master of the obvious by rattling off questions he already had the answers to from double-digit briefs.
The good Major Holloran seemingly all but forgotten for the moment, Horn watched as Keitel slammed in a series of numbers on one of his readouts, then hit his computer keyboard, informing the colonel he would bring up the targets on the wall. Looking past the workstation, Horn stared at the project’s emblem, thirty feet by twenty, painted on the stark white wall, dead ahead. The Eagle Nebula, he recalled, was a bright cluster of young evolving stars, but a massive gas formation, still condensing though not nearly thermonuclear enough to shine like Earth’s sun. Imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope only as recently as 1995, the dark nebulosity was more widely known among the deep space stargazers as “the Pillars of Creation.”
Keitel flashed the digital wall map of North Dakota over the emblem, framing four red circles, then enlarging the targets with a few taps on his keyboard.
With one ear, chain-smoking now that all the PC air was cleared, Horn listened to the colonel shout a litany of questions laced with orders, but he was more intent, fascinated, in fact, by the sight of the gun cameras framing in real-time the prairie sweeping below. Again, Jeffreys demanded to know the new targets, what might be the number of projected civilian casualties, railing next at Keitel to initiate some sort of abort action.
“It’s too late for that, Colonel! The damage is already done!”
“The hell you say. You people created it, do something to uncreate it! Or we are all in a world of hurt none of us can begin to even fathom!”
Horn smiled around his smoke, enjoying their sweat and panic, these pompous asses who often looked down their noses at him, a wolf among sheep who held the power of life and death. The snooty broads, too, often thinking they needed some R and R with a real man who could launch them into some deep space they couldn’t begin to get from their wonder toys. Maybe soon, figure the ladies might need a comforting shoulder to lay their distress on. Hope sprang eternal, and now on more fronts, he knew, than in his loins.
The gathered herd here didn’t know it, but he had his own plans.
He listened to Keitel’s ominous report. It looked like the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation was slated for one big bang, Jeffreys groaning as he heard the guesstimate for dead and maimed Native Americans. If there was any good news to be grabbed from this vision of hell, it appeared the westbound warhead would detonate on some rancher’s spread near the eastern leading edge of the Badlands. On that front, Jeffreys barked for numbers on family members, Horn now sensing the colonel was on the verge of fainting as the virtual reality of the body count kept on piling up in his churning desk-lifer mind, higher, he imagined with a puff and grin, than every piece of shredded document or deleted CDROM he was probably the first blast away from racing to. Another ranch on the Four Points’ feeding frenzy, but far larger in terms of cattle as imaged by a satellite parked over the state, was up for some more cluster dusting. Finally, there was a town, population twenty-six, but one of the geeks informed them at that hour the saloon was a big-ticket draw, Horn filing the man’s name away, wondering how he came by that information. When Horn caught the town’s name, another grin tugged at the corner of his lip.
Little Big Horn.
It was most definitely cover-the-assets time before some twenty-first-century scalping got in full swing, he knew, perfectly albeit horribly understandable, given that more than careers were at stake.
Talk about Black Holes.
Already, though, as he saw the watching eye on the Black Hawk closest to one of the civilian targets framing what was a row of small wooden buildings on a barren stretch of plain—assume Little Big Horn—the solution to the grim problems of the immediate future was shaping up, and in sweet accord with his own dreams. Funny, he thought, how a little patience and fortitude could find destiny smiling when a man decided to stand his ground.
As the Black Hawk closed to monitor the coming inferno, Jeffreys reached a level of near hysterics, ordering Keitel to fall to Plan IFA.
“You’re kidding, right? Unless you want to order Major Holloran to crash Lightning Bat out there, and with what’s going to happen if they do, do you really want to explain one more nightmare than we already have to deal with? You do know what’s on board that craft? You do know what fuels that jet?”
“I’m fully aware of the gravity of the situation, mister!” Jeffreys fumed, Horn again believing he could read the man’s tortured thoughts, what with all that gyrating body language and panic like neon signs in the eyes. Damage control, without question, time to place the SOS to DOD, the Pentagon, get the blame game cranked up, heating to thermonuclear critical mass, but in all directions other than his starched uniform.
Horn heard Holloran shouting from Keitel’s com link, the hooked-in intercom likewise now blaring the major’s voice. But he was locked on to the monitors, worked his spectating view between the gun camera and the Black Hawk relay.
And it happened, but far more spectacular than he could have imagined.
The gun camera winked out first as its cluster avalanche slammed into what Horn believed was the broadside of the first building in a Little Big Horn replay of that fateful and very gruesome day for the white man, but with total annihilation here for all present, indiscriminate of race, sex and age.
Complete and absolute obliteration, Horn saw, boiled like the smoke and fire of the Apocalypse, straight for the Black Hawk’s relay.
Just about all done, he knew, except for the cover-up.
Apparently, Horn found, Jeffreys had seen more than enough, the colonel wheeling, striding for the exit. A finger flick of his smoke, arcing it across the room, and he was marching hard for the intercept. Barking for Colonel No-Stones to halt, Horn grabbed him by the arm as the doors hissed open.
“Get your hands off me,” Jeffreys warned, wrenching his arm free.
“Listen to me, Colonel, and hear me but good. This fiasco, which, technically, falls under your responsibility, has a solution.”
“Solution?” He paused, the jaw going slack, the dark look betraying thoughts he knew what was about to be dumped in his lap. “No…”
“Yes. Now, you want to make some phone calls. I’ll give you a number you’re already aware of to someone who will, in no uncertain terms, inform you that what just happened lands square in my department.” It was Horn’s turn to breach personal space, as he put himself nose-to-nose with Jeffreys, and said, “The next words out of your mouth, Colonel, better be what I—what we all—know we need to hear, or, ‘sir,’ there could be more for you to dread than testifying before a bunch of fattened calves on the Hill. Oh. I see I have your full attention.”
“I’m listening.”
“Okay. Now, if it makes you happy, here’s what I propose to do….”
CHAPTER THREE
Aaron Kurtzman wondered what it would be like to walk again. Maybe it was the ten cups and counting of coffee he’d consumed, all that tar floating in enough sugar to wire a small army, electrically hyper-charging the caffeine-soaked thoughts off on grim tangents best left alone. Maybe it was working through the night at his computer station, by himself, for the most part, locked up in his head, most of the world sleeping, including some of his comrades and co-workers at Stony Man Farm, though he couldn’t say for certain. Intensely private, he was not a man to dump emotional baggage on others, wear suffering on his sleeve or to cast blame like a human storm raging about until the misery was spread sufficiently to the four corners of the globe, but the thoughts and feelings were there, just the same, and he couldn’t deny them.
At that predawn hour, staring at the monitor of his computer, he suddenly imagined himself out of the bowels of the new-and-improved Computer Room, removed from this trapping of time and space, free, unconfined, able-bodied. And there he was, up top, strolling the grounds, sans wheelchair, the barrel-chested, powerfully built titan he recalled from the ghosts of years past, that Big Ten champion heavyweight wrestler of the University of Michigan, a young lion. Breathing in the cool, crisp air of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, he imagined, sun on his bearded face, drinking in the lush greenery of the Blue Ridge Mountains, unshackled from the shell that imprisoned him. He pictured himself on a leisurely jaunt, down a wooded trail, maybe a dog by his side for company, he’d always had a fondness for German shepherds….
Enough, he told himself. No, it never hurt to dream, he thought, or to pray even for a miracle, as long as he didn’t get mired in self-pity, one of the worst of human failings, in his mind. Rather, if it be the will of some Divine Force beyond his finite understanding… Maybe someday, some other time, space or dimension, beyond the physical constraints of Earth, there would be a new and improved Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman.
Leave it at that.
There was work to do.
Head of the cyberteam, the think tank of Stony Man Farm’s Computer Room—the nerve center for intelligence gathering that kept the warrior machine rolling in the trenches of the world’s flashpoints, overt or black ops—was his realm. As such, Kurtzman went back to tapping in the next series of access codes on his keyboard.
They were alphanumeric codes and bypass encryption, what he tagged “circumventors,” the sum total faster and far simpler than any software program he’d previously created, though this one was designed for more than hacking. The FORTRAN, or formula translation, was part of his Infinity program, the server software managing and sifting through data from interconnected systems at light speed, until only the critical information he sought was framed on his screen. The client-servers were never the wiser he or one of his team had just broken through about three firewalls, stolen whatever buried cybertreasures, then rebuilt those walls after a lightning and untraceable bolt back to Stony Man mainframes. Whether they changed their passwords on a frequent basis or not, on the client-servers’ end, Infinity was the cryptographer’s answers to all mysteries of the cyberuniverse. Those faceless, nameless clients almost always came from any alphabet-soup intelligence agency within the United States and the world over, likewise any military or law-enforcement agency mainframes Kurtzman needed to access.
He wasn’t sure what it was about the news report he’d been watching in a corner of his monitor since last evening, using the remote on his keyboard to snap through the local and national cable networks, but something disturbed him about the images of reporters being ushered away from what was clearly a large area quarantined by armed soldiers. Initial reports cited some natural disaster, or so the reporters were told by military spokesmen, belonging to what branch, though, no one knew or was allowed to say. Speculation had body counts mounting by the hour, but these nameless spokesmen were denying any such rumors. He heard about meteor showers, or something or other unexplained that had fallen from space. Each new report sounded flimsier than the last. He smelled cover-up, a brittle conspiracy ready to unravel with a good swift kick.
And the Smoking Gun and Infinity programs were hard at work, he saw, alphanumeric codes tumbling in the top left-hand corner, as his labor of love raced out to those far reaches of the cyberuniverse to cross all pertinent I’s, dot the t’s of truth that not even the brightest award-winning journalist could uncover. Every shred of data from all U.S. intelligence agencies, black-inked or otherwise, was correlated with daily news reports, written or televised. Once any paper or station’s Web site dot.com was filed away into Infinity—Smoking Guns’s memory, the two programs became their own investigators. Between that and the sat imagery they burglarized from the satellite parked closest to the area in question—AIQ—in this instance North Dakota, and classified documents regarding military black ops and their installations within the state, Infinity did virtually all of the work for him. At the moment he was left with more questions than answers, but felt something far beyond space phenomenon had turned four separate areas in southwest North Dakota into what appeared to him on the imagery as smoking craters his trained eyed told him were the result of aerial strafing.
He was wondering how far and how to pursue it, when he became aware his partner at this early morning hour had cranked up his CD to that kind of fuzzy contortion blasting out of his headphones that should have rendered Akira Tokaido deaf.
Kurtzman wheeled sideways, Tokaido bebopping his head in rhythm to the tune. He held his arms out, caught his teammate’s eye, and said in a loud voice, “What the hell, huh?”
Akira, still bopping, looked at Kurtzman’s mouth and said, “I can hear you just fine. You said, ‘What the hell, huh?’”
“Okay, smart-ass. Do you think you can get to work while you’re getting all wet in the eyes over that blaring duet?”
Still bopping along, Tokaido’s fingers began flying over his keyboard. Kurtzman saw his monitor split into two screens. “What am I looking at, Akira?”
Two more images crowded the number on Kurtzman’s monitor to four.
Tokaido killed his CD. “Clockwise, top to bottom. A major Russian weapons factory in the Pamir Range of Tajikistan, the usual we know about it, they know we know, and the beat goes on. We check it with some of our own sources, I’m sure they’d verify there’s more going on under the roof than your basic WMD alchemy, the floating rumor out of spookdom’s black hole being they’re engineering superweapons of the future. Next, for your viewing pleasure, what I believe—and since the DOD, NSA and Pentagon files I accessed had so many black deletions regarding this base I discovered at great length tagged as Eagle Nebula, thus you can safely assume black project—is our version of the Pamir weapons factory. Is East meeting West, both sides dreaming up the future together regarding superweapons? Don’t know, but I think it’s worth looking into, in this humble whiz child’s often overlooked opinion.”
Kurtzman made a face. “Cut the crap or I’ll take away your CDs.”
Tokaido paused, considering something, then went on, “Whatever they’ve engineered inside the walls of Eagle Nebula, however, is what I think either crashed or burned up what Infinity calculates is roughly two square miles and then some of scorched earth that makes the Badlands look arable.”
“And you know this, how?”
Kurtzman watched as Tokaido further enhanced the imagery and he saw what his partner was referring to.
“Where there’s smoke, Bear… Now, the four areas the media is being pumped by the military to claim were hit by something from outer space are actually the results of cluster bombing. I compared those images through Infinity’s war-gaming, and they jibe. Blast radius, destruction pattern, spiral all the way down to the intensity of the fires, which indicate thermite payloads were used. These AIQs, I have confirmed, were civilian targets. From the body count, or what you can make out on your screen, gives you an idea of how nasty this could get if it’s going to involve a cover-up.”
Kurtzman weighed the enormity of what he heard then saw, tallied at least a dozen bodies, or what looked like the remains of such, on one of the AIQs. “A test run, you’re telling me, that went awry?”
“I would hope it wasn’t done on purpose.”
