“That would make it—what?—almost three hours, give or take, since Phoenix said they took off.”
Even as he said it, Hal Brognola knew Price and Kurtzman already knew as much, but just hearing his own voice…
Would do what? the big Fed thought. Delay the inevitable call?
“Hell,” Brognola swore, “and with Rushti claiming a Russian radar and tracking station near Okhotsk coast told him it was clocked at Mach 3 and heading southeast and with the bearings we got…”
Neither the mission controller nor the cyberteam leader spoke, as Brognola let the statement trail off.
Kurtzman, he saw, brought up the digital map on the wall monitor. His laptop modem was hooked to the feeder mount at the base of the wall, and at the same time Tokaido was shooting up-to-the-second intel from the Computer Room. Oddly enough, despite the fact the oxygen seemed sucked out of the War Room and the walls had all but closed in, Brognola felt a steely calm. Then wondered if he was only clinging to hope, but what else could any of them do? This wasn’t a business for the faint of heart.
As Kurtzman framed the area in question—from eastern Siberia and which encompassed the entire Pacific Ocean to the West Coast from Seattle to San Diego—Brognola knew he was seconds away from grabbing up the red phone and informing the President of the United States a thermonuclear bomb was God only knew how long from erupting on American soil.
“Hal, at this point it’s all very bad news,” Kurtzman stated. “The ship being marked as American is a cheap ruse, but it may buy them just enough time. And with stealth technology that may even be years ahead of what we have now…” Kurtzman hit a few keys and five red lines with numbers over each and running from about the 55th parallel to the 33rd appeared on the monitor. “Those are estimated impact times and targets—Seattle, Portland, San Francisco—”
“L.A. and San Diego,” Brognola cut in. “What about Hawaii?”
“They’ve either hit it or they’ve sailed past. If past the islands, they would be far north and have another target or targets in mind,” Kurtzman said. He tapped a few more keys and outlined a red area from what looked Vancouver to San Diego and a chunk of the Pacific Ocean off the coast.
“Mainland U.S.,” Brognola said.
“Another problem is that there’s no way we can hack into any sat and park it or even steer it over the Pacific or find one…”
“I understand all that, Bear,” Brognola said. “What you’re showing us is pretty much an educated guess of its flight path, with projected distance, altitude, time to impact based on true ground speed.”
“Hal,” Price suddenly said, her voice solemn but edged with urgency. “We’ll assume they have so far remained undetected. You’re going to have to call the President.”
“The best we can do with what little intel we have is track its path on educated guesses,” Kurtzman said. “Basically, we’re out of touch, totally blind at the moment. Under the circumstances we have to assume the worst of worst-case scenarios and make the preemptive call.”
The big Fed felt his head nod ever so slightly. There was no choice. Fighter jets, or a missile launched from a submarine or a battleship, but either way the RLV had to be blown out of the sky. ASAP.
And, in the process, they would lose both McCarter and Hawkins. It was next to no consolation that Brognola knew that to a Stony Man operative they all understood and accepted the ultimate sacrifice. No questions, no pleas, no stalling for more time. Sudden death was part of the job description, but Brognola always lived in what was tenuous hope, at best, that the day would never come where they would lose another of their field operatives. It was something of a hollow hope always, considering the world in which they lived and fought, and how the stakes were so high, so volatile.
“Hal?” Price said. “Unless we hear from David or T.J., and even then…”
Brognola nodded and reached for the red phone.
THE RLV’S TERRORIST commander was grinning, bobbing his head, and McCarter knew it was now or never. He was hitting the delete key, rising from his chair when the ex-SAS commando depressed the release catch, and for a millisecond hoped to God they hadn’t jammed it somehow.
He was free!
Hawkins was a blur of human lightning in the corner of his eye, but McCarter was locked in raging tempest himself, seizing his own initiative, sliding the blade out of its sheath and plunging the razor-sharp steel into the fanatic’s throat. The pistol fell from his grasp as the terrorist staggered back a step, his eyes bulged in shock and horror, one hand reaching up to claw at the embedded steel. But McCarter held on—for his own life and the lives of millions—and tore the blade deep and across, through jugular, sinew, the final thin layer of flesh. The blade swept out behind a torrent of blood, the terrorist reeling back until he slammed into the bulkhead, gurgling, thrashing, his eyes rolling back in his head as he toppled to the deck.
McCarter was about to step over the convulsing body to help his teammate when he found he needn’t bother. Another spreading pool of blood was all the grim testament the Briton needed that the ex-Ranger had delivered a near decapitating strike himself.
They were hardened professionals, used to dispensing violent death, but both of them held their ground for a moment—stunned by their own lightning kills, that it was over in less time than it took to blink—keeping the blades poised, as if fearing the dead would suddenly rise.
McCarter strode the few steps with Hawkins to the pile of gear and parachute packs stacked near what he reckoned was the bank of payload controls. Hawkins held up two handfuls of shredded canopy, but showed the Phoenix Force leader the other packs were stuffed and ready. Another nylon bag contained helmets, oxygen bottles, gloves. Whether they would have enough time to check and repack the chutes, slip into the enemy’s pressure suits for a jump in what he was sure was subzero, airless altitude was anybody’s guess.
McCarter was turning to charge back for the main instrument panel, moving to radio his teammates when Hawkins shouted, “David.”
And McCarter found that the terrorists, for whatever reason—arrogance and the now fatal conviction of their own invincibility—had decided not to throw their sat link overboard. McCarter hesitated, looked back out at the windshield as they shot from the cloud bank. Suddenly he felt the craft dip, the motion nearly rocking him off his heels. He’d logged more frequent flyer commando miles, he figured, than there were stars in the solar system. That was no turbulence.
They were losing altitude. Fast.
Another shudder, and he knew the speed was being cut back, and drastically.
“David, if you’re thinking about looking at those missiles and maybe trying to disarm them…”
He was, in fact. Then he realized any second an American fighter jet or a Tomahawk missile could be launched from a sub. And, if it was true about the payload being touched off if the RLV’s airspace was breached, they would never know what hit them.
“Get into one of those pressure suits, T.J., and go blow the hatch. I’ll phone home.”
“Hey, look at this.”
McCarter found Hawkins holding up a flare gun. Rescue was hardly guaranteed, not by a longshot, but McCarter felt the tight smile tug at the corner of his mouth.
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
BROGNOLA PUT THE PHONE DOWN, felt their questions hanging in the air.
“The President’s gone to the Situation Room,” the big Fed told Price and Kurtzman. “They had a suspicion, once it breached airspace of a remote U.S. naval base on an island northwest of Hawaii that’s not even found on any world map. But the Man told me that I only confirmed it.”
They said nothing, but Brognola sensed they knew the bottom line.
“All hands, including British warships stationed in the Pacific, I understand, have been alerted. The works, people, have been scrambled.”
And he knew he needn’t bother running down the A and B list of fighters, subs, carriers.
Brognola felt his lips part as the mission controller and the cyberteam leader stared at a wall monitor that meant absolutely nothing in real time.
The Man knew the score. The Man knew who was on board. He had hard intel that the terrorists had been eliminated, what the package was, what the flight path and intended target.
All thanks, Brognola thought, to the efforts of five brave men.
Brognola clenched his fists. His knuckles popped, the sound echoing through the War Room like a pistol crack.
“Twenty minutes,” Brognola said. “That’s the proposed time frame he said was needed to try to pinpoint a ‘reasonable’ window of collateral damage, as far as shipping lanes, air traffic, while at the same time every control tower on the West Coast is being handed a presidential directive to reroute, bring back, keep grounded…well…”
“But they were jumping,” Kurtzman said, a note of hope in his voice, “just as soon as David signed off.”
Would it be enough time, enough clearance? Brognola wondered. He recalled the grim math Kurtzman had just done, minutes ago, and it was according to FEMA and NSA calculations of nuclear blasts.
One megaton, one city. That’s what the brains in the U.S. intelligence think tanks called it. A one-megaton blast—a direct hit—in the average downtown American city would vomit out a crater two hundred feet deep, one thousand feet across. Within that first circle anywhere from one hundred thousand up to half a million people would be vaporized instantly, depending on population density, the lay of the urban landscape, while legions of other living creatures would be set ablaze. Buildings would literally melt, assuming a few were even still partially standing, or would be ignited into towering torches. Two miles beyond ground zero, and the blast waves were still going strong as they hurtled out 150 mph winds that were superheated like the core of the sun. Now…with twenty megatons, and simply multiply those numbers…
“Hal? What did he say about our people?”
Brognola looked at Price and answered. “He said he’d call back as soon as it was done.”
AS A FORMER COMMANDO of the Special Air Service, and during his stint as a Stony Man warrior, David McCarter was no stranger to jumps at any height, HAHO, HALO or a straight six-hundred-foot combat plunge. Nor was Hawkins as an ex-Army Ranger unfamiliar with all the risks and any number of anticipated and unforeseen disasters that could strike at any time during a jump.
McCarter kept on plummeting toward the Pacific Ocean, and for the life of him he couldn’t determine how high up, which direction he was tumbling…
The world rushed up at him in a maze of flying shadows and broken light. With the rapidly growing velvet expanse of a glassy surface and where only the smallest detail of whitecaps betrayed the swells…
And he knew the big bang was coming.
He twisted, one gloved hand reaching for the ripcord, his head swiveling in its oxygenated helmet. There was no sign of Hawkins, but the ex-Ranger had jumped first—and he had been a split second behind out the hatch—and it was a miracle all by itself they had even survived hitting the air and being blasted past the wings and tail at speeds that were close enough—or so it seemed—to Mach.
They had set their chronometers, roughly gauging descent, how far they would drift apart…
McCarter checked his watch.
One last look at the blackness below and he couldn’t be sure if they were at twenty thousand or two thousand feet, but they needed as fast a plunge down as possible before opening the canopies. To get caught in the air, floating down while anywhere near what Kurtzman claimed had to be a fifty-mile relative safety zone from the twenty megaton airburst…
He kept waiting for the moment, braced for the worst, prepared for the end.
There was no sign of the RLV—not that he expected to see the flying nuclear space bus—but he’d been informed that the White House would be alerted, would have long since been told the terrible truth.
Which meant every available fighter jet scrambled, every nuke sub and battleship and carrier scouring every square mile, and he was surprised the sky—dark to the east—had not yet lit up.
The clock struck.
McCarter tugged on the steel pin. He was waiting for what seemed like an eternity for the familiar bone-jarring, gut-wrenching jolt that told him the canopy had opened when there was no mistaking the sudden burst of dazzling white light to the distant east for what it was.