Death Orbit (40 page)

The battleship had just reached its new station about 55 miles off the coast from the KSC. The crew, enraptured by the elevation to divine status, were hardly on the highest alert. Few of the small AAA gunposts were manned and none of the big 16-inch turrets was occupied. The officers housing section was alight with candles and incense sticks, and weird atonal music filled the passageways. Bowls of saki were being passed among the officers; soon many of these men began disrobing. Below decks, a more intense if informal celebration was going on. The sailors were drinking “iki-juice,” a combination of
sake,
beer, tea—and hydraulic fluid. This potion could attain alcohol levels as high as 190 proof. Its ingestion frequency produced hallucinations and in some cases total blindness. Regardless, gallons of it were flowing within the crews’ quarters.

Still, there were some people on duty this night—some very special guests were holed up inside the ship’s stateroom and a high security presence had to be maintained. However, none of the radar warning sets were being attended to up on the bridge or in the ship’s combat control center, nor was anyone watching the air defense radars.

This is why none of the antiaircraft weapons onboard were fired when the sleek F/A-18 came out of the night and deposited the UAAF’s one and only laser-guided smart bomb onto the rear section of the
Sudai.
Penetrating a predetermined weak spot in the hull, the bomb traveled down through the enormous steering gearbox and exploded with a dull thud, destroying two of the battleship’s four propellers and heavily damaging the third.

Had this happened in a combat situation, the entire crew would have been called to battle stations and fire-fighting teams would have been dispatched to the scene of the explosion. But the noise onboard the
Sudai
was so loud at the moment, and the celebrating on all decks so boisterous, few people even heard the smart-bomb go off, and those who did chose to ignore it. After all, this ship was now protected by the gods. Nothing untoward could happen to it or its crew. Nothing…

Which is why no one saw or heard the pair of Sea Stallion helicopters approaching the ship, either. Their engines refitted with noise dampeners, their holds bursting at the seams with heavily armed 1st Airborne troops, the first chopper was able to set down on the aft loading pad just behind the
Sudai’s
third gun turret and disgorge nearly all of its 44 troopers before anyone on-board the battleship really knew what was happening.

Only after the second chopper set down was there any return fire. It came from the security troops guarding the stateroom directly under the bridge; they alone had been alerted by the sound of the bomb going off below the rear steering systems. When they rushed to the rear of the ship, they were astonished to see dozens of dark-uniformed soldiers running free on the aft deck.

A sharp, violent gunfight ensued, but the ship’s security troops were quickly overwhelmed. Two squads of UA troops climbed up to the massive rear turret and dropped a satchel full of plastic explosives into the crew compartment. The charges went off, their sounds somewhat muffled, but producing enough damage to foul the guns and prevent any immediate discharges.

Now the main body of UA troops, swelled to 80 men, began a headlong charge up to the bridge of the ship. Acting in concert with this advancement, the F/A-18 returned and laid down a murderous barrage of cannonfire across the main bridge wind screen, killing most of those on duty and destroying what was left the ship’s steering control and all of its communication equipment.

It took just four minutes of hard fighting for the UA troopers to reach the bridge and another two minutes of brutal hand-to-hand combat to capture it. At a cost of six dead and three times as many wounded, the 1st Airborne troops were in control of the
Sudai’s
most important location not ten minutes after landing on the ship.

Incredibly, the majority of the crew had no idea what was happening. The
Sudai
was enormous, and many of the sailors could not hear beyond the next bulkhead, never mind up on the bridge.

This made it even easier for the UA troops to flood down through the decks, surprising and shooting dozens of Cult officers as they still celebrated in their quarters, and entombing many nonofficers by sealing entranceways leading in and out of the vast sailors’ housing.

Less than 20 minutes into it, the leader of this bold and unusual operation—Catfish Johnson himself—was able to send a coded, scrambled message back to KSC command in the VAB bunker: “Objective secured. Minimal casualties. Beginning phase two now.”

To the people gathered in its luxuriously appointed state room, the first sign that anything was wrong aboard the
Sudai
came when the main cabin door suddenly vaporized in a puff of magnesium-laced smoke.

The twelve men sitting around the long, slender table had been eating octopus and drinking
sake
when the door suddenly disappeared. Up until then it had been a pleasant if not perfect evening. After firing more than 100 shells at the KSC, the
Sudai
had retired to its command station and was about to transmit a load of communications data back to Cult headquarters in Tokyo. Much of that same information was to be uplinked to Fourth Reich headquarters in Berlin as well. This daily procedure had actually been raised to the level of ceremony—just as the bestowing of flagship status had been on the
Sudai
—because of the VIPs who were now gathered inside the stateroom.

Five of them were the top commanders of the Cult flotilla, the battleship captains who had also just recently been elevated in the wake of the
Miajappe’s
sinking and the demise of the Far-Away Boys. A sixth man was Admiral Migi Kutigutti, the highest ranking officer in the entire Cult Navy.

But it was the half dozen people sitting across the table from these officers who made this meeting so unusual, and in a perverse sort of way, somewhat historic. They were all impeccably dressed in gray uniforms with white shirts and black ties. They were all wearing knee-high black leather jack boots with hobnails.

Each one of these men was wearing a bright red armband high on his right sleeve. Emblazoned on each band was a gold swastika, the mark of the highest officers in the Fourth Reich.

To say the alliance between the Cult and the Fourth Reich was a troubled marriage of convenience was a vast understatement. Many times throughout this six-month bonding, both sides had come very close to firing on each other, as opposed to working against their common American enemy and gaining what both recognized to be the most important prize in the world at the moment, the Kennedy Space Center.

Simply put, the Fourth Reich and the Cult operated on two entirely different levels. The Cult obviously took the blunt, uncivilized route toward attaining its goals; the Fourth Reich strove to take the more sophisticated approach. Yet they were both bound by their common infatuation with the world’s most dangerous man, Viktor II. And it was he who’d ordered their union forged, he who’d ordered it to do his bidding.

The six Fourth Reich officers were even higher on the command scale than the half-dozen Cult members. Two of the six Germans were field marshals, one was an
Oberfuhrer,
and the remaining three were admirals in the Fourth Reich’s powerful naval aviation corps. Sitting inside the
Sudai
stateroom, then, were twelve of the most powerful officers in the Cult/Fourth Reich alliance.

And now they were staring down the barrels of several dozen UA guns and peering into the eyes of several dozen extremely determined-looking UA soldiers.

Twenty minutes later, the majority of the officers captured inside the
Sudai’s
stateroom were being marched out onto the deck of the ship and herded to the rear.

Two of the captives—one of the Cult captains and one of the Nazi admirals—had chosen suicide over accompanying the raiding UA troops. The Nazi had swallowed a poison tablet; the Cult officer had impaled himself with a knife. It made little difference to Catfish Johnson and his men. To their minds, ten captured officers would be that much easier to spirit away than an even dozen.

It was now 0100 hours, and the amazing raiding operation was still on schedule. But time was becoming precious. The main fleet of battleships, though still battering the empty areas of the KSC with its huge guns, was only 20 miles away. It would be just a matter of time before one of the other captains tried to get in touch with the
Sudai
and upon receiving no reply, become suspicious.

For one or more of the Cult battle wagons to show up now would be disastrous, and no one knew that better than Catfish Johnson. He had no doubt that the Cult would sink one of its own, and even kill a top layer of officers, if it knew that the hated Americans had taken over the ship. More officers and another battle wagon they could get anytime. Killing a large number of Americans, when permitted to do so, was the Cult’s number-one priority.

So that was why Johnson and the rest of his men were waiting, rather anxiously, for a single red beacon to appear on the horizon.

That important crimson light was attached to the nose of the largest UA aircraft currently operating out of the Kennedy Space Center: the CH-54 Sky Crane.

The Sky Crane was about as far removed from a combat airframe as one could come. It was actually a cargo craft, a large, spidery-looking affair with a disjointed cockpit, a huge power plant, a large rotor set, and four long grossly extended legs. The Sky Crane could pick up and carry an external load roughly the size of a railroad boxcar. It could lift such a load over a range of about 100 miles. It could do so swiftly and under the right conditions relatively quietly.

The KSC’s Sky Crane was making a lot of noise at the moment, though. It was flying very close to the surface of the Atlantic, too close for a machine of its size and girth. Escorting it were the pair of overworked Huey helicopters, their holds filled with troops from the Football City Special Forces. All three aircraft were flying at top speed, no more than 50 feet above the wavetops, heading toward the recently captured battleship
Sudai.

The Sky Crane was carrying a steel box about 20 feet long, 12 feet high, and roughly 12 feet wide. There were air holes punctured into the top and sides of this steel box and within, several empty gasoline cans that could serve for toilets in a pinch. There were two portholes on the container, one at each end. These were covered with heavy bars and reinforced with barbed wire.

The container was a makeshift portable prison cell. Its intended inmates were waiting on the deck of the
Sudai.

Catfish Johnson finally did see his long-awaited red light around 0110 hours.

It broke the southern horizon as a faint patch of pink at first, growing steadier and brighter until finally it formed itself into a discernible little red ball.

Johnson immediately alerted his troops and now, finally, the third and last phase of the daring operation could begin.

As several squads of UA troops roamed the ship destroying its two forward turrets and all its main navigation systems, the 10 prisoners, stripped of their arms, their ties, and their boots, were put under the overlap of the ship’s still-smoldering number 3 rear turret. They were handcuffed, blindfolded, gagged, and injected with a small amount of sodium Pentothal. The well-known truth serum wasn’t being given to the enemy officers as a way of information inducement; rather, it was being administered to take advantage of its other talent as a sleeping drug.

Within a minute, all ten officers were out cold.

By this time, the Sky Crane was circling the captured battleship, its pair of Hueys in tow. Using an incredibly deft touch, the Sky Crane’s pilot brought the huge chopper to a hover above the rear of the ship. Then, slowly, on cables installed on lift motors hanging underneath the chopper’s four long legs, the container was lowered to the aft deck of the
Sudai.
Working quickly now, the prisoners were loaded on-board the container end-to-end, each one laid out on a blanket.

Once the human cargo was on-board, the Sky Crane was given the okay to lift the container. It did, but with much squeaking and groaning. Finally, though, the steel box was tucked underneath the Sky Crane’s very slender fuselage and locked into place.

Without a moment’s hesitation, the pilot turned 180 degrees and began slowly to move away. Covering his rear were the pair of Hueys, still bulging with Football City Special Forces troops. Somewhere overhead, the captured F/A-18 was providing cover, looking out for any high-flying aerial threats that might disrupt the delicate operation below.

So far, none had been spotted.

Once the Sky Crane and Hueys left, the two Sea Stallions appeared once again. Slowly, carefully, they came in, one at a time, and picked up their load of Airborne troopers, both living and dead. Johnson himself was the last one off the big battleship. As his Sea Stallion was moving away, he nodded to one of his officers to push a button on a radio-activated control device. There was a series of muffled explosions below decks on the
Sudai.
Two more powerful explosions followed, then two more.

Within sixty seconds, eight separate fires had broken out on the battleship, the results of incendiary bombs left behind by the 1st Airborne sapper squads. Now many of the sailors, previously held behind the locked doors in their housings below, were making their way to the decks above. It was a testament to the UA’s grudging humanitarianism that several of the explosions were placed in such a way that when detonated, they would free the sailors caught below decks.

These sailors arrived up top to find their ship quickly becoming engulfed in flames. There were life rafts and life preservers available for anyone who wanted to use them—at least it could not be said the UA didn’t give them all a fighting chance.

But even as the Sea Stallions moved away, the
Sudai
was nearly totally engulfed in flames and beginning to list to port.

By the time the Sea Stallions were 20 miles away, the
Sudai
was just a faint glow way out on the horizon.