Death Orbit (13 page)

The Football City troopers were experts at this sort of thing. This was why they were patrolling beyond the defense perimeter in the first place. Still, it was rather unnerving to detect possible infiltrators along this part of the defense line. The terrain was extremely inhospitable, full of sinkholes and deep streams; the only solid ground was marshland, some of it wet enough to take a man down to his ankles or more. Maybe it had been another animal that had frightened the estrich. A gator, or even a fox, something with four legs and a snout, out looking for a midnight snack.

But with everything and everybody on high alert since recent events down around the Keys, the troopers knew they couldn’t take any chances. Quickly, silently, seven of them began digging into the soft, mucky soil.

The eighth man radioed back to the base.

Colonel Donn Kurjan, aka “Lazarus,” took the call from the Football City troopers.

Kurjan was commanding the forward defense bunker on the north side of the Kennedy Space Complex. Located in an abandoned “fire hole,” a place where space workers could seek shelter in case of an accident on the pad, the bunker was filled with communications gear, NightScope screens, motion-detection equipment, and ultrasensitive listening devices. From here, Kurjan could direct the battalion of mixed troops that held positions all along the left-handed arc that stretched from the Atlantic to the lower Banana River and crowned the top of the huge rejuvenated space complex.

Solid and wiry, with a penchant for plain, black combat utilities, Kurjan was one of the most respected officers in the UAAF hierarchy and a member of the inner circle. He’d been skiing in the territory that had been Utah when the trouble had erupted off the Florida Keys and was rushed to Kennedy to coordinate the crash program of heightened defensive awareness. They didn’t call Kurjan “Lazarus” for nothing—he’d been in many tight spots, in many covert actions, and many times behind enemy lines, given up for dead, only to reemerge intact and with his mission accomplished. Like a cat, Kurjan seemed to have at least nine lives, maybe more.

On this night, he would use up another of them.

The call from the Football City radioman came at exactly five minutes after midnight. Speaking in code, he gave his position and then went onto a scramble frequency. This was Kurjan’s first clue that something big might be up. He immediately beeped the radio shack back at the UAAF main combat center beneath the VAB, telling the officers on duty there to stand by.

He went on the scramble line with the FBSF radioman. The trooper told him of the patrol’s suspicions that all was not right in the north swamp, adding the part about the estrich. Kurjan quickly signaled his technicians to activate the sight/sound/motion gear in the direction of the swamp. Then he turned back to the scramble phone to talk to the FBSF radioman again.

But the line had gone dead.

Kurjan heard the first explosion just a second later. It sounded like a big
whomp!,
and it shook the fire hole even though the bunker was made of 12-foot concrete blocks held together with two-inch reinforced steel girders. This was followed by two more tremendous explosions, and then a third and a fourth. Kurjan still had the scramble phone in his hand and was trying desperately to raise the FBSF troopers, but there was no reply. It would later be determined that the first explosion—a Katyusha rocket containing a warhead filled with high-explosive—had landed right on top of the Football City troopers’ position, killing all of them instantly.

They heard the trumpets next. Whether it was a hundred or possibly a few blowing some kind of amplification device, their sudden blaring shook the concrete bunker almost as violently as the first barrage of Katyusha rockets. The trumpets were so loud, two technicians manning the listening devices had their eardrums blown out. Another found his nose had started bleeding. Alarmed, Kurjan ordered the listening posts to shut down and bumped up the NightScope monitors instead.

What he and the others inside the fire hole saw was a scene from a nightmare. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of armed men were swarming out of the swamp through the marshes, heading for the northern defense line. These men were like something from another time. They had long beards, woolen clothes, and steel helmets with horns. Each man was carrying at least two weapons: a rifle or machine gun of some kind in one hand, and an ax, a long sword, or in some cases, a spear, in the other.

Every TV monitor was showing the swarm of armed men sloshing through the muck and mud, explosions going off all around them. There were more rockets and what appeared to be artillery shells going off amid the attackers. But they weren’t coming from the defense forces; rather, they were being fired by the attacking side itself.

It was a pattern Kurjan had seen before. He quickly leapt to the hotline phone and called back to the VAB. There was no time for the niceties of coded messages now. He simply yelled, “Attack on the north line! Near penetration on the wire!” twice into the radiophone before tossing it away and retrieving his M-16.

At the rate the attackers were advancing, they’d reach the first defense line in less than two minutes.

The alert horn went off at the emergency UAAF air base inside the Kennedy Space Complex at exactly 12:07.

The temporary base, set up on the extremely long runway previously used for the American space shuttle landings, had just been established earlier in the day, as part of a hurry-up contingency plan to protect the complex. As such, it had a wild variety of aircraft on hand, all of them from units that had been called on to send aircraft from various parts of the country as quickly as possible.

On hand were a half-dozen reconditioned F-86 Sabre jets recently purchased from the Central Empire of Peru; a single TA-4K two-seat Skyhawk; two P-2H Lockheed Neptune antisubmarine ships converted as light bombers; a single F-105 Thunderchief; and an A-37 Dragonfly light attack plane. The big daddies of this motley crew, however, dwarfed the mélange. Three massive G-5 gunships, the monstrous aerial workhorses of the United American Armed Forces, had arrived late that afternoon. They were, specifically,
Bozo 2, Football One,
and
Spock’s Dream.
Part of a massive reconditioning program started the year before, these Galaxies were just three of the two dozen C-5s either presently in operation or being reconfigured out at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Each of these frightful aerial platforms carried a vast array of weapons sticking out of portholes on the left side. Anything from Gatling guns to multiple-rocket launchers to howitzers could be carried aboard these flying behemoths, their design being a nightmarish extension of the C-47 Spooky gunship idea born many years ago during the First Vietnam War. These Galaxies had quickly gained a reputation around the world as the worst things short of a nuclear bomb that any attacking ground force could come up against. All three were now being hot-started and rolled out onto the ultralong airstrip.

As with the airplanes, there was a vast array of UA personnel manning them. Two of the C-5 gunships were carrying ground personnel filling in for regular crew members. Aircraft mechanics, maintenance workers, even some spacecraft technicians had been pressed into service for the emergency.

But probably no one was more out of place than the man strapped into the co-pilot’s seat of the first C-5 gunship to get into take-off position,
Bozo 2.

His name was Stan Yastrewski. He was by training a Navy man. He’d served on a Trident submarine during the Big War and on several other combat vessels in the postwar years, including the UA’s first aircraft carrier, the
USS Mike Fitzgerald.
Known to everyone as “Yaz,” Yastrewski most recently had been serving as General Dave Jones’s chief of staff. He, too, was a close friend of Hawk Hunter.

Though a highly valued member of the UAAF command structure, Yaz had the perverse ability to find himself in the middle of the most unusual predicaments. Short of being captured by aliens, just about everything that could happen to a person both in and out of a combat situation had happened to him. (Being the love slave of the beautiful yet highly unbalanced terrorist queen Elizabeth Sandlake was probably the pinnacle so far of his unusual career.) It was a lot he’d finally come to accept in this crazy, upside-down world: if something strange was going to happen to someone, Yaz just assumed that it was going to happen to him.

Just how he got to be sitting in the co-pilot’s seat of the massive C-5 gunship was yet another example of this. He’d been visiting his family in Maine when the first reports of trouble in Florida had come in. He made it to Boston within a few hours and caught the first available UAAF flight south. It happened to be the massive gunship
Bozo 2.
On the way, the Galaxy received a message that a provisional fighter-bomber squadron was being formed at the old Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, and that the C-5’s co-pilot, a guy named Raycroft, had been drafted into it.

Because Yaz had actually spent some time behind the controls of some smaller UA aircraft, though as a co-pilot only, he was asked to come up and sit in the second-banana seat for the rest of the trip down to the KSC. The airplane had been on the ground no more than a few hours when this alert horn went off, not nearly long enough for a regular C-5 co-pilot to get to Canaveral. So Yaz was strapped into the number-two seat instead.

The guy actually flying the gigantic airplane was named Vogel, an Air Force pilot from way back. In the back were 17 men pressed into service as gunners and loaders.
Bozo 2
was one of the “kitchen sink” Galaxy gunships. Like its namesake,
Bozo 1,
which was destroyed in Vietnam,
Bozo 2
carried any and every gun and weapon its designers could fit into it. There were 21 gun ports on its left-hand side. Eight were filled with Phalanx Gatling guns, four at each end of the fuselage, each one capable of firing 300 uranium-depleted rounds
a second.
Six more gunports had M102 105-mm howitzers sticking out of them; these more or less centered in the middle of airplane. Filling the gap forward of the howitzers and before the big Gats were three Kongsberg FK 20-mm single-barrel anti-aircraft guns, specialized weapons built for firing a variety of high-explosive shells. In the four remaining rear ports, the designers had somehow crammed into place a pair of ZSU-23 S023mm quadruple anti-aircraft guns, a single Bofors 40L70 40-mm AA gun, and, outrageously, an Israeli-designed IMI MAR-290 multiple-rocket launcher.

The ammunition and power systems for all this took up nearly 80 percent of the Galaxy’s lifting capacity—but that was one thing about one of these monsters going into combat: the load got progressively lighter the more the weapons were fired. The shorter the distance between base and the combat area, the more the C-5 could lug into the air. In this case, the distance from base to the northern defense line was only three miles.

Vogel turned
Bozo 2
out toward the head of the runway, right behind one of the P-2 Neptunes. The Nep would be serving as a light ship. It not only carried a full load of star flares, but a powerful array of halogen lights had been attached to its belly via the service pod connectors. Its armament would be only a single M60 gun in the nose and another in the tail.

Off in the distance, Yaz could see the glow of flames and gunfire rising from the swamps on the north end of the space complex. His headphones were filled with a cacophony of voices, a direct line from the command bunker beneath the VAB, in which the various defense forces were being rushed into position to repel the sudden onslaught. Just the pitch of the voices in this tense choir told Yaz the surprise attack was large and serious. From the sounds of it, a division-sized attack force was trying to break through on the north side.

There was no time for procedures such as take-off clearances and weather checks; as soon as the Neptune lightship was airborne, Vogel gunned the C-5’s quartet of engines. Though he was no expert in aeronautics, Yaz knew the giant gunship would need every foot of take-off space it could get. Overloaded as it was, and with its engines hot-started and not yet up to proper trim, it seemed like a small miracle would be needed just to get them off the ground.

But Vogel was a pro—and he knew he had some gas to waste. So he simply ran all four engines up to peak and got the gunship quickly screaming down the runway. Yaz was yelling out the airspeed to him, the minimum take-off speed, he guessed, was at least 110 mph. But somehow, Vogel managed to coax the big ship into the air at around 97-plus. One moment they were rumbling along the ground, the C-5 shaking like every lock washer and tie-rod was coming undone, the next, the big plane had groaned itself into the sky and everything had become incredibly smooth again.

Vogel got barely 1000 feet of air underneath her when he turned toward the combat area.

Already the fight was ten minutes old.

The Neptune lightship was the first UA aircraft to reach the battle scene.

The crew was shocked by what it saw. Swarming through the marshes and swampland in front of the first UA defense line were not hundreds but thousands of attackers. Many had already breached the first line of defense and were now blowing holes through the seven rows of concertina wire separating them from the second defense line. Just as the defense procedure dictated, the UA forces had pulled back to an area between the second and third defense perimeter, a kind of no-man’s-land pockmarked with small bunkers, concrete firing positions, and time-delayed mines. Behind this was the main defense line—known as the Three Wire—and beyond that, a last-ditch position known simply as Four-Four. After that, it was a clear run of about a mile to the outer reaches of the space complex itself.

The crew of the P-2 was so stunned by the size of the attacking force, its front and rear gunners opened up without even waiting for an order to do so. The Neptune pilot put the airplane into a long, low orbit and quickly illuminated his halogen array. Suddenly night was turned into day. The halogen arc stretched for a quarter mile in all directions. In full luminescence, it showed the area between the swampland and the second defense line was absolutely covered with attackers.