Doomsday Conquest

“Yes?”

“It’s sodium chloride.”

“Salt? You are telling me, comrade,” Kolinko said, throwing an arm at what was at the deep end of the pass, “that those men were—what? Turned into pillars of salt from outer space?”

Dovkna nodded inside his bubbled head. “That is precisely what I am saying.”

Kolinko staggered back a step, then froze, aware of the pleas and pitiful cries he’d up to then forced deaf ears to. Now, his mind tumbling with questions and fears holding no foreseeable answers or solutions, he stared up at the Tajik rebel, hovering some twenty feet in the air.

CHAPTER TWO

Nuclear power was a disaster begging to happen. Off the top of his head, he thought of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the most notable of grotesque nuclear reactor accidents, or the ones at least known to the world at large. Where they were concerned, he pictured—from an educated guess based on experience and access to classified intel—their reactor cores blew, most likely, due to incompetence, quasi-ignorance of the volatile nature of fission reaction under extreme stress, and the brazen zeal of self-proclaimed genius in search of the next quantum leap, that bold but proved foolish notion that Science Man adhered to the belief they could learn more about nuclear power through trial and error. Tell all that, he scoffed to himself, to those dying in protracted misery under radioactive clouds that were most likely still spreading to God only knew how far and wide.

Madness, he decided, and for what? All in the name of progress? The advancement of civilization or global annihilation? Either way, Man may prove someday to be his own worst enemy, but he hoped he wasn’t around to see it, though his three children might. No tree-hugger or global-warming doomsayer, he was an ace Stealth pilot of two Gulf wars, in fact, who’d churned up whole square miles of earth into smoking craters where not even a dandelion could sprout in the next foreseeable generation. But he still believed Man either took care of Mother Earth, or Mother Earth would take care of Man. That in mind, nuclear-powered submarines and battleships, he weighed, were nightmare scenario enough, but easily dispensed with as far as cover-ups went. Scuttle the works and the truth sank to the bottom of the ocean, where only a few in the loop were the wiser.

All those potential catastrophic voyages, but vessels chugging along over vast stretches of empty ocean?

No sweat.

Try flying, he thought, a supersonic fighter jet with a nuclear reactor’s guts cored with U-238, meant to torque up the yield of Pu-239 to keep on giving the gift of record-shattering speed and hang-time. Talk about flying Armageddon, but the doomsday potential for such a craft, he knew, hijacked and commandeered by the enemies of America, was less than zero.

At least for the immediate future.

Still, the more United States Air Force Major Michael Holloran pondered the facts as he knew them, considered what was housed, aft in their superbird, the more he believed he harbored some dark bent toward suicide. Or was it simply his nature, he wondered, a hyperachiever in his own right, pushing the limits of personal reality and talents to the edge, a middle-finger salute to fate to dare force him to stare into the abyss, face his own mortality? Certainly, he knew, whatever drove him to chase the next figurative or literal horizon had cost him two marriages, rendering him a man alone now among the gods of ultratech, transcended in some way beyond the norm he couldn’t quite define, but could surmise he wasn’t sure he liked all that much, given what he knew.

Get a grip, he told himself. He had a job to do.

They were sailing along at supersonic speed, Mach 5 to be exact, eighty thousand feet and change above the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, bearing down on the U.S. border; ETA a little over three minutes and counting. With what he knew lay ahead, those anxious thoughts began whispering louder over everything that could go wrong, near hissing, he imagined, like the highly flammable pure oxygen being pumped into his helmet. This was, after all, the maiden voyage of a classified prototype and ultrafighter jet that shouldn’t—and officially didn’t—exist.

Three years earlier a celestial mystery had fallen to the continental U.S., and it now powered the craft. And lent it properties far exceeding the narrow prism of Man’s understanding.

Thus, lack of knowledge about unknown properties and alloys—and he knew whatever the truth was being jealously guarded from those who now bore the task of flying the thing, as in himself and his copilot—should provide fear enough for him to reconsider the sanity of all involved.

For instance, the reinforced glass—if that’s what it even was—was as classified as the fuel that could propel them to Mach 10, more than three times faster than the now-retired SR-71 Blackbird, which had previously owned the world’s speed record of plus Mach 3. Officially—sort of—the fuel was classified as supergrade JP-7, the juice that kept the Blackbird aloft and a streaking black blur beneath the heavens. Why, then, was it pumped into the wings from a massive lead-encased tanker by hazmat suits in a hangar guarded by both armed sentries and batteries of surface-to-air missiles and M-1 Abrams tanks? Or was the answer so obvious…

The visor trapped the sound of his own grim chuckle.

In practical working theory, he knew they shouldn’t have even gotten off the ground, but the superjet and its power source defied all laws of aerodynamics, nuclear physics and gravity. Whether or not the reactor was a prototype, for instance, scaled down to near-dwarf stature in comparison to the mammoths that powered nuclear plants, it was still housed in a steel container, wrapped, in turn, by thick concrete walls. Therefore, the tremendous weight alone should have created drag enough to virtually snap off the tail.

Oh, but there were answers, he knew, as unbelievable as they might sound.

Yes, perhaps they believed him, in the dark and blissfully ignorant, those black-suited DOD superiors, their armed goons and aerospace engineers contracted out by Lockheed, but he’d caught on the sly the floating rumors. Since no secret was really ever such, he’d come to know that what they referred to as “the Divine Alloy” was a molten ore of some type from deep space. Whatever the unknown substance, he knew it was blended somehow with carbon-fiber laminates and aluminum and titanium, stem to stern on their ultratech ride. Likewise, cockpit and reactor housing were coated with the Divine Alloy. Which, believe it or not, made the superjet, code-named Lightning Bat, lighter than air, but able to withstand all the mass, thrust and gravity that Earth could pound mortal flesh with, once the shield was activated prior to takeoff. Moreover, their shield, sealed inside by the alloy, converted the cockpit into some vacuum of space, spared them G-force that should have crushed their insides to pulp. Rendered weightless by the Divine Alloy, they would have floated to the ceiling, pinned there, if not harnessed into their seats.

Holloran checked the instrument panel. All green, all systems go, he found. Comprised of intricate supercomputers, once the codes were punched in, he knew from two years of 24/7 training and virtual reality flight simulators that technology did roughly ninety percent of the work. From speed to navigation, down to calibrating the payload in the fuselage, Lightning Bat nearly had a mind all its own.

So why did that disturb him?

It was just about time, he knew, checking the digital readout to countdown, aware their audience was anxiously waiting back at Eagle Nebula, ready to monitor the test flight via camera link-up, once Lightning Bat descended and leveled out within a hundred miles of the area in question.

He was about to look over at Captain Thomas Sayers when he glimpsed something flash across the cockpit shield.

“Did you see that?”

“What the hell?” Holloran wasn’t sure what it was, but he would have sworn blue lightning had just streaked past Lightning Bat’s tapered nose. They weren’t low enough for any bolts of lightning, no storm systems to factor in, according to their Doppler radar. A shooting star, then? Meteor fragments?

Sayers repeated the question over the com link, Holloran staring up into the infinite black of the cosmos, when blue light jagged, but flashing this time, he believed, from inside the cockpit. Or did it shoot from the instrument panel? he wondered. After too many sorties in combat to count, having seen flying “things” he had more than once been warned by nameless spooks to never speak of, he wasn’t one to push panic buttons. But he felt the hairs rising on the back of his neck just the same, instinct warning him that something was either wrong or about to go south.

“Check all of our computer systems, Tom,” he told his copilot. “A to Z.”

“Roger, sir.”

“While you do that,” he said, wrapping one black-gloved hand around the side-arm controller, while tapping in the access code to the electro-optical navigational computer, “I’ll start dropping us down and prepping this puppy for its big audition.”

Holloran hoped he sounded confident, relatively gung-ho to the younger man, but he’d been dumped on the receiving end of too many SNAFUs to not trust his churning gut.

“PROTOSTAR EAGLE NEBULA Central Command to Lightning Bat Alpha. We are confirming your altitude and speed. Four thousand feet and holding steady, but you will have to decrease your speed to well below subsonic. Give us four hundred, Lightning Bat Alpha, and we can track you with visual confirmation.”

As the pneumatic doors hissed shut behind him, Gabriel Horn found he was just in time for the big show. The ground control station of Eagle Nebula wasn’t exactly the sprawling network of NASA’s command nerve center, he knew, but there was eyes-only supersophistication enough here to warrant all hands signing blood pacts for a black project so secret only a dozen men in Washington were aware of Lightning Bat’s existence. And, as head of Special Action Service, it was his duty to make damn certain all knowledge here either stayed under the compound’s roof or went to the grave with these people.

In that exclusive realm, however, there was critical mass, and building beyond the Eagle Nebula nest.

Easing up on their six, his rubber-soled combat boots padding silent as a ghost over sheer white concrete, Horn counted twelve aerospace brainiacs. The Chosen, he thought. Or the damned, depending on how well they held their tongues in check, though in his experience, considering at least three of the Seven Deadly Sins—pride, greed and envy—a couple of them, maybe more, would find a nasty and mysterious fatal accident in their futures. He could always count on the worst in human nature.

They appeared little more than shrouds at Horn’s first glance, white lab coats casting off a sort of glimmering hue as the fabric, woven out of nylon-silk, seemed to reflect light from the workstation with its running bank of monitors. Com links tying them all to Lightning Bat Alpha, their voices were a mixed babble to his ears as they relayed instructions to Major Holloran, confirming this and that.

Showtime.

Horn ignored the Air Force colonel boring daggers into the side of his head, focused instead on the cameras as they locked in on the arrowhead-shaped fighter jet. Briefed as thoroughly by Eagle Nebula’s commanding officer as he had expected, Horn knew the test flight was now monitored by four, long-range camera-fitted Black Hawks and two prototype Gulfstream SBJs. The supersonic executive jets, customized for military purposes, had the sleek Stealth hybrid covered, fore and aft, with the only variant being altitude at each end. To cover the fireworks, the Black Hawks were ranged around the compass, hovering now over the blast area.

All set for bombs away.

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.