Читать книгу Sky Hammer - James Axler - Страница 8

Los Angeles, California

“Look, gentlemen, we can do this all night,” the President of the United States said, lifting a carafe and pouring himself a cup of lukewarm coffee, “but I really don’t think that—”

He stopped talking abruptly as the vice-president walked into the boardroom flanked by a cadre of grim-faced Secret Service agents.

“Sir, there is an important call for you from NORAD, sir,” the VP said.

The President went still at the coded phrase. Any sentence that started and ended with the same word meant all hell had just broken loose somewhere.

“Sorry, gentlemen,” the President said, wearily standing. “This is a matter of national security.”

The gruff men in expensive suits murmured their understanding as the President left the room.

Moving along the corridor, a dozen Secret Service agents closed around the President and more joined him from every doorway they passed. Soon, he was surrounded, and could no longer see where they were going. The leader of the United States had to simply follow wherever his bodyguards were leading.

Upon reaching the driveway, the Secret Service agents parted to reveal a line of identical black limousines, all of them with the exact same license plates. There were five of the vehicles, and the President was directed to the fourth in line. As he approached, the rear door opened and his personal assistant, Kevin Molendy, stepped out.

“This way, sir,” he said, moving out of the way.

The man was wearing a bulletproof vest under his suit jacket, which was odd, but the President said nothing as he stepped into the limo and took a seat. Several people were waiting for him, four of them Secret Service agents. The rest were members of his Executive Council: Oswaldo “Oz” Fontecchio, his national policy adviser, as well as Hillary Hertzoff, his national security adviser, and Matthew Mingle, the current head of the CIA.

Thank goodness, Hal Brognola wasn’t here, the President observed with a sigh. That would have meant real trouble.

As Molendy climbed inside, a Secret Service agent closed the door and the limo started to roll. The President knew that the vehicles wouldn’t maintain formation, but rotate positions randomly, making it impossible for a sniper to know in which vehicle he was riding. An assassin would have to strike all of the limousines to even have a chance of success, and the plain black limos were all million-dollar cars, containing more armor than most light tanks, including the tires. Even if hit with a grenade, the rubber would blow off, but the limo would continue moving smoothly on the wide steel plates hidden inside.

“Okay, what happened?” the President asked as the limo took a corner.

“Sir, there has been an attack on the wall in Israel,” Hertzoff said in clipped tones. It was as if every word was precious and she didn’t want to waste any. “Hundreds are dead, perhaps more, with collateral damage in the millions.”

“Missiles or car bombs?” the President queried.

Leaving his seat, Molendy opened a small wall panel and started making fresh coffee.

“Neither, sir. It was a meteor shower,” Hertzoff replied.

“A what?” the President demanded as the smell of Jamaican Blue Mountain filled the air of the limousine. “A meteor shower?”

“Yes, sir. About a mile of the wall has been completely flattened in the border town of Abu Dis.”

“A meteor shower,” the President repeated slowly, leaning back in the seat. “How sure are you about that?”

“No confirmation as of yet, sir.”

“And what does this have to do with the CIA?” he asked, accepting a steaming cup from the aide.

“We got a tip about the attack from an agent in Paris about ten minutes before it happened,” Mingle answered with a frown. “The report said something about an attack on Abacus, or so we thought. It seemed like garbled data. Until Israel.”

“And?” the President prompted. Then he frowned. “Wait a minute, wasn’t the dedication ceremony supposed to be held today?”

“Yes, sir. Exactly.”

No way in hell that was a coincidence. “Get the agent on the phone,” the President commanded. “I want to talk to him direct.”

Mingle shook his head. “Impossible, sir. He appears to have been terminated in what might have been enemy action.”

“Appears? Might have been?” Fontecchio said, leaning forward in his seat. “Sir, the café was hit with flamethrowers and grenades! Twenty civilians are dead and the French government is furious!”

“We’re checking further into the matter,” Mingle replied smoothly.

“Did this meteor shower hit during the brick-laying ceremony, by any chance?” the President ventured as a guess.

Hertzoff nodded. “Yes, sir. Just as it began.”

“Is the prime minister dead?”

“No, sir,” Fontecchio answered. “Not a scratch. But the town is in shambles. The people are rioting and running back and forth across the border.”

“The Israelis will stop that nonsense soon enough with some concertina wire,” Fontecchio stated resolutely. “Not a problem.”

“Good. I want a full report on the matter within the hour,” the President snapped. “And contact the Joint Chiefs, I want our status raised to DefCon Three.”

Fontecchio balked at that, but said nothing. DefCon One was peacetime, DefCon Five was war. After 9/11, the United States hadn’t dropped below DefCon Two. Peace seemed to be a thing of the past, merely a notation on the war board, but nothing to do with the real world.

“Yes, sir,” Fontecchio replied uncomfortably.

The passengers in the limo swayed slightly as the vehicle took a corner, the rear limo moving ahead of them as they dropped to a new position in the convoy.

Turning to his aide, the president asked, “Isn’t there a ship christening tomorrow?”

“Yes, sir,” Molendy answered without glancing at the personal computer sticking out of his pocket. “A new aircraft carrier will be launched from the San Diego naval shipyard.”

“Don’t cancel the ceremony,” the President ordered. “Have the Secretary of Defense christen the ship.”

“Yes, sir. And what should I tell the secretary?”

“Nothing.”

“Yes, sir. And the press?”

“Same thing.”

“No problem, sir.”

“Then contact Space Defense, I want to know what’s happening up there.”

“NASA reports no unusual activity in space,” Hertzoff reported. “If there was a meteor shower, it’s over by now.”

There came a soft buzzing and Molendy pulled out a cell phone. The device was huge, almost the size of a paperback book; it cost more than most small airplanes and contained some of the most sophisticated electronics in existence.

“White House,” the aide said. Then he hit the mute button. “Sir, you have a call from a General Stone.”

“Who?” Mingle muttered, his annoyance clearly discernable.

Placing down his empty coffee mug, the President took the phone. “Hello, General…yes, I…well, no…damn.” Then the President was silent for a long time. “Okay, see you on the plane.” As the line went dead, the President closed the lid on the cell phone, automatically scrambling the memory and sending a false signal to the White House library. There was no redial function on this cell phone. Especially not to Hal Brognola, head of the Sensitive Operations Group based at Stony Man Farm.

Molendy accepted the phone and tucked it away opposite his bulky journal.

“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.”