Death Orbit (24 page)

Maas and his men came scrambling up the hill soon thereafter; one of them was carrying Higgins’s gear. They found it piled neatly beside their entry point in the fence, almost as if someone had stacked it there just so they would see it. This was as baffling as Higgins’s disturbing condition, but it was also a stroke of luck for the JAWS team, as it meant they would not be leaving any evidence of their daring recon mission behind.

The Sea Stallions started their engines at exactly 0205 hours, just five minutes off their schedule. Both aircraft took off just three minutes later, with all men accounted for and a wealth of video and audio information in their possession. The command officers of the team all rode back in the same helicopter.

Snyder, Maas, and Miller sat with their sedated colleague and held a whispered conversation, just low enough so the rest of the troopers could not hear. Their concern about Higgins was somewhat overwhelming, especially after their shared experience up on Chazy Mountain.

But they also had the operational situation to discuss. Despite the spookiness, their mission had been a success; they’d infiltrated the nuclear weapons storage yard and had come back with some hard intelligence.

But what had they discovered, exactly? They’d known going in that the weapons were probably not the type to affix to medium-range missiles, and therefore the southern part of the American continent was not in imminent danger of a sneak nuking—at least, not from these weapons.

No, it was what Maas had found that held the key. Energia rockets were like the tugboats of space. Their sole function was to boost heavy loads into orbit. The JAWS officers agreed that the presence of the big rockets—there were four in all—in the same storage area as the hodgepodge of nuclear weapons was probably not a coincidence.

So the bottom line was this: there were missiles here at the Double-Trouble site. But they weren’t the kind that could be used to carry the various warheads to targets.

Rather, they were superboosters, rockets that could be used to carry all those nuclear warheads out of the atmosphere and put them into outer space.

Kennedy Space Center

T
HE FORMATION OF I1-28
Beagle bombers was first picked up on the Kennedy Space Center long-range radar net shortly after 0500 hours.

The initial indication was that 16 of the small two-engine jet bombers were circling out about 42 miles off the coast of Cape Canaveral. Their speed was pegged by KSC radar at about 110 knots, dangerously slow for the usually speedy airplane, and a clue that the potential attackers might actually be loitering, possibly in wait of a second force.

Discovering the flight of Beagles was a stroke of luck for the UAAF commanders. An ancient C-119 Flying Boxcar, serving as a radar picket aircraft, had first gained the Beagles on its radar scope just as it was returning from a routine patrol around the Keys. Once the bombers were bumped up to the main tactical situation screen in the VAB bunker, the C-119 was told to back off and continue monitoring the bombers for as long as possible. Then all UA radar units up and down the eastern Florida coast were made aware of the situation.

What the UAAF command staff was looking at now was a bomber force that could seriously damage, if not outright destroy, the Kennedy Space Center—and take only a minute or two to do so. But the command staff also faced a monumental problem. Because of the urgency of the nature of the UAAF’s space program, the defensive aspects around the KSC were nowhere near complete. It was wholly ironic that the massive ground attack by the Norsemen two nights before had been staged against the space center’s northern flank, the only section of the vast perimeter to have been finished. Had the Norsemen hit from the west or the south, the outcome could have been entirely different.

The same was true for the space center’s air defenses. On hand were barely a dozen Patriot antiaircraft launchers, and four squads of 1st Airborne Division reserve troops equipped with portable Stinger missiles. That was it. All to protect a base that spanned 20 square miles and currently had nearly 1,000 highly skilled people on hand, along with a treasure trove of high technology.

Then there was the hodgepodge of aircraft currently operating from the five-mile shuttle runway. These were now a half-dozen C-5 gunships, so useless against a bomber attack that the UAAF commanders had sent an order to their crews to take off immediately and head west, away from the coast and any impending trouble. The same order was given for the Neptune lightships, the handful of troop carriers and unarmed cargo planes. Like ships leaving harbor before the storm, the airplanes were quickly being scrambled and flown out of harm’s way, leaving behind a depleted and vulnerable base.

With the mysterious disappearance of the six Sabre jets, the only air defense fighters at KSC at the moment were a pair of old F-105 Thunderchiefs—technically a fighter bomber—and a single F-106 Delta Dart, a refugee from the destroyed Key West base. To make matters worse, the fuel situation was very low at the shuttle runway airstrip. Most of the gas had been given over to the big gunships so they could get away. The Thunderchiefs and the Dart had about a full tank between them. A quick calculation by the KSC intell section determined all three airplanes could stay in the air for about six minutes each and no more.

There was, however, a joker in the deck—three of them, in fact. They were sitting 300 miles away on the pockmarked runway at Key West.

They were the pair of F-14 Tomcats and the single F/A-18 Hornet captured during the bombardment of the naval air station. Earlier that day, a small group of pilots and air intelligence officers, using information gained from interrogations of the Nazi pilots, had finally cracked security codes unlocking the flight control computers on the Hornet and one of the F-14s. They had started the F/A-18 earlier in the day and had reported all its flight systems up and working.

But what good could these airplanes do as far as the impending action up at KSC? Nothing, so far as the UAAF staff was concerned. But they made a quick scrambled flash to Key West anyway, informing them of the enemy bomber force forming off the eastern Florida coast.

At the time, it seemed like the prudent thing to do.

This is not to say that there weren’t
any
defenses being prepared around the KSC.

On the contrary, the building of fortifications, bomb shelters, defense lines, aircraft revetments, and AAA sites had been proceeding at a feverish pace, even more so since the events down in the Keys and in the aftermath of the Norse attack.

The morning before, the entire complement of the 104th New Jersey National Guard Combat Engineering battalion had been secretly airlifted out of their R & R area on the Jersey shore and rushed down to the KSC, two weeks ahead of schedule. With all the strangeness that had been happening with the unit in Surf City—as far as they knew, their girls were still missing—to a man, everyone in the unit looked forward to the change in scenery.

In the 24 hours they’d been on the ground, the defensive face of the KSC had begun to take shape. Two 24-man units were immediately sent to repair the damage on the northern defensive line; bulldozed slit trenches, reinforced with concrete and steel, now made up the bulk of the perimeter. Another team was sent to shore up the southern end of the vast space center, laying down minefields wherever they could and installing everything from bunji-stake pits to “foo lines,” trenches filled with natural gas piping to be ignited in case of attack.

The rest of the CE unit had begun work on setting up the Patriot antiaircraft missile emplacements, many of which had been flown in the day before the Norse attack. These SAM batteries were operational, but they’d been dispersed in a temporary fashion. The NJ104 engineers quickly set about moving them around to get the best in area defense from the 24 launchers on hand.

It had been a long, hard, strenuous job, but by midnight, 18 of the Patriot batteries were in their proper places. Ten had been arrayed in a wide semicircle to protect the VAB and the main KSC control buildings. Three had been set up to protect the small but important Banana River station. Three more had been installed around the complex’s huge fuel storage area. This left only two for protection of the makeshift shuttle-strip airport. The plans for the next day were to install four more of the anti-aircraft launchers around the runway, making its defensive alignment complete and leaving two in reserve.

But for what was coming, this was a case of everything being just a day short.

For Don Matus, acting CO of NJ104, the first news about the gathering of Beagles came in a phone call from General Jones.

Matus and the other staff officers of NJ104—Vittelo, Palma, Cerbasi, DeLusso, and McCaffery—had been working nonstop since their arrival at the space center, typically down in the trenches with their troops, manning shovels and picks, trying to get the impossible done ahead of schedule.

Matus and McCaffery had worked the past 20 hours setting up the Patriots around the VAB. Both men had collapsed and were out cold when the phone rang inside the battalion bivouac at 0505 hours. Coincidently, their barracks were shaking as the huge C-5s were taking off to make good their escape, flying low and slow over the empty administration building the engineers had taken as their own.

Matus was surprised to hear the voice of General Jones. The general’s friendly drawl sounded very tense—and thick with concern. He quickly briefed Matus on the situation and asked him to get his men back to the main part of the base as quickly as possible.

If and when the Ilyushins attacked, the men of NJ104 would be pressed into service—not as engineers, but as the manpower needed to work the Patriot batteries, something none of them had ever done before.

There was an art to firing a Patriot antiaircraft battery.

The acquisition radar was probably the best ever built; it could spot and paint targets flying many miles up and more than 40 miles away. The tracking systems were also superb—once the Patriot began following an intruder, it was almost impossible for that intruder to break the lock. While a battery of microprocessors and minicomputers actually ran the show from the moment the enemy aircraft was sighted, there was a manual override built into the UA’s version of the Patriot, just in case the operator wanted to launch against something coming in particularly low and particularly fast.

Something like an Ilyushin Beagle bomber.

By the time the NJ104 engineers made it to the area around the VAB bunker, the force of Beagle bombers off the coast had grown to 28. Even worse, a small flotilla of Sparviero missile boats had been picked up on surface radar, heading north up the coast. There was also a report from a UA spotter unit that maybe as many as three Enrico Toti submarines had been detected moving in the shallow waters off Vero Beach, also heading north.

This was highly disturbing news for the UAAF command staff. A massive attack was coming and the Kennedy Space Center was its intended target. By 0515 hours, every available man at the sprawling base had been mustered and sent to a defensive position. Many were directed to the beaches as the UA command feared that an armed landing might also accompany the attack or occur soon afterward. Others were put into trenches and behind defensive barriers dug the day before around the KSC’s most important buildings.

For Don Matus and two squads of his NJ104 engineers, the positioning would be a bit higher. They were assigned to a Patriot missile battery that had been airlifted to the top of the massive VAB by one of the base’s CH-54 Flying Crane helicopters. Two smaller Huey choppers were presently ferrying men from the ground to the top of the building. Matus went up on one of these flights, a short hop that took 60 seconds to complete and could be compared to flying up the side of an enormous concrete and steel mountain.

The top of the VAB was so high, the men who’d been placed there could already see the sun, slowly rising out of the ocean beyond the horizon. Matus and two of his electrical techs immediately went to work checking the power lines running into the Patriot missile battery. Though no one in the NJ104 team had ever worked a Patriot before, the computers inside the firing hut seemed fairly user-friendly. Once they’d determined that the antiaircraft system had enough electricity to operate, Matus and the techs sat down at the firing station and ran a quick diagnostic and training program through the system.

In clear, concise, and amazingly lifelike fashion, the computer ran a 3-D simulation on what it took to fire a Patriot. Basically it meant identifying the enemy aircraft, making sure all the systems were locked on it and then sitting back to let the software do its work. If everything went as it should, the missile would launch automatically when the bogey reached the outer portion of a 15-mile threat threshold and destroy the incoming aircraft about 35 seconds later.

But in combat, few things rarely went as they should—and no one knew that better than the men of NJ104.

Also positioned along the edge of VAB were four infantry teams carrying Stinger missiles, the smaller, portable, less powerful, but still dangerous antiaircraft weapons. These men were attached to the 1st Airborne Division Reserve, and as such, were probably among the most experienced regular combat troops at the KSC. They also had two .50-caliber machine guns set up, plus a small SBAT-127 multiple-rocket launcher which the Airborne troopers had captured in their travels.

Matus left the Patriot control hut and walked to the southeastern edge of the VAB; he needed to stretch some of the kinks out of his tired, lanky body. The waters of the Atlantic looked deceptively calm and sparkling in the growing dawn; it was hard to believe that anything other than the rising sun was waiting for them out beyond the horizon. The beaches, too, appeared to be eerily sane and inviting, despite the frantic activity as hundreds of UA troops rushed to their makeshift positions. It was the beginning of a perfect beach day. The waves looked high and clean and great for swimming. The nearby dunes and scrub trees would provide shade once the sun became too hot. A little lunch. Maybe a cooler of beer. Matus wiped a bead of sweat from his brow. If only we could take the day off, he thought…