Death Orbit (7 page)

Frost raised himself slowly and only then did he realize he could see right through the man.

“Hello there, Frostie,” he heard the words echo in his room, the last one tinged with a definite brogue. “It’s been a long time…”

Frost’s eyes were now wide open. His jaw had dropped and he was trembling. He recognized the man and the voice immediately.

“Jeezus, Fitz!” he cried out. “Is it really you?” The ghost of Mike Fitzgerald laughed once, then his face returned to its former frown.

“Yes, it’s me, Frostie,” he said sadly. “In the pink, if not the flesh…”

In Orbit

I
T WAS A GENTLE
beeping that shook Jim Cook out of his zero-gravity slumber.

The commanding officer of the elite JAWS special operations team was floating in place down on the crew compartment level of the Zon, his shoulders and knees straining slightly against a pair of sleep tethers. Two bubbles of saliva were hovering approximately three inches from his nose. People tended to drool in space, especially when they were in a deep sleep. This particular pair of sputum had been floating in front of Cook for the past hour or so.

The beeping woke him not because of its soft volume, but because it was a sound he hadn’t heard on the Zon before. It was a pulsing tone, a repetition of the slightly tense notes of A and G. It was not a warning buzzer per se. It was the spacecraft’s earth-to-space radio, and this was the first time it had come alive since the Zon had reached orbit.

This mission into space was the most secret operation ever undertaken by the United Americans. “Top Secret” didn’t come close to describing the security surrounding the Zon’s launch and the ensuing space-chase. Any radio communication between the spacecraft and earth controllers ran the risk of exposing the whole operation. It had been agreed upon from the beginning that contact between earth and the Zon would be nonexistent. The spacecraft would be on its own, running silent as it pursued the supercriminal Viktor II. This blackout decree would be breached only in case of an extreme emergency on either side, and then they would speak only in code.

This is why hearing the sound of the radio come alive woke Cook so quickly.

He shook the sleep from his eyes, unlashed his tethers, and pushed himself across the compartment to the radio set. A gentle engagement of the receive button was rewarded with a violent burst of static.

“Behold a mystery,” Cook heard a strangely echoing voice intone. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a twinkling of an eye, a trumpet shall sound. And the dead shall be raised. And we shall be changed.”

Still groggy, Cook thought at first he’d somehow broken into a stray radio or TV transmission from earth. Was this nonsense really originating from Mission Control at the Cape?

He quickly consulted a card listing all the emergency security phrases that was floating next to the radio set. None of them matched what he had just heard.

The radio began beeping again. He pushed the receive button and again was assaulted by a burst of static.

“We who are alive shall not prevent them who are asleep,” the same voice began again. “The Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout. And with the voice of an archangel, the dead shall rise first…”

Cook was now more confused than ever. If this was someone on the ground trying to tell him something in code, they were not reading from the same page. There was nothing on the security phrase list that even came close to what he was hearing.

“We who are alive will then be caught up together,” the creepy voice came back on. “The dead shall rise and they will mock you. And then it will be your time to die.”

With that, the transmission ended.

Cook tried for the next five minutes to regain the frequency of the strange broadcast, but to no avail. Whoever had sent the weird message was no longer on.

Confused and still punchy, Cook now faced another quandary. How should he report the odd incident? Normally, he would not have hesitated a bit. He would have floated up to the flight deck to tell those up there what had happened. But the way things were aboard the Zon lately, he knew they had enough problems to handle already.

Still, he pushed his way to the roof of the crew quarters and then over to the hatch, which led up to the flight compartment. Then he took a deep breath, undid the hatch lock, and drifted up.

The flight deck was dark and somber. The only light was coming from the green and red VDT screens; it cast an almost cartoonish glow on everybody and everything.

But what was happening up here was anything but humorous.

Hunter was sitting in the flight commander seat. His right hand was gripping the control stick so tightly, and had been doing so for so long, Cook believed he could see where it had actually bent a little.

Hunter was staring intently out the front windshield and into space beyond. His eyes were darting back and forth, up and down, this way and that. Like a human radar, he was sweeping the space in front of the speeding spacecraft, looking, searching…

JT was in the seat beside him. He, too, was gripping his control stick tightly, his eyes looking everywhere at once, though not as quickly as Hunter’s. Ben was in the seat directly behind JT, Elvis was behind Hunter, Geraci was behind Elvis. They were studying space directly above the spacecraft, which, because the Zon was inverted at the moment, was actually straight down, toward the cool blue globe of Earth.

Cook quietly floated into the flight compartment and took his place behind Ben. Ever since spotting the first piece of exploding space junk, the crew of the Zon had been forced to maintain this tense, mind-numbing vigil. One wrong move, one missed unidentifiable object, and they could all go up in ball of flame. It was the equivalent of a ship trying to wind its way through a minefield—at 17,500 miles an hour.

They’d come across six of the space mines since the first one—each exploding once it had placed itself in an orbital path about five miles in front of the Zon. Only by quick action on Hunter’s part had they been able to avoid the results of an explosion which created thousands of pieces of deadly space flak.

But the key to this defense was spotting the space mine before it could get into position and explode. And the only way to do this was to keep watching for the tumbling objects and get the Zon out of the way as quickly as possible. It had proved to be a stressful endeavor.

That these orbital bombs were being sent against them intentionally was no longer in dispute. It was obvious that someone somewhere was controlling the space mines simply because of the way they moved prior to detonation.

Because everything flying around in each orbital path was traveling at relatively the same speed, the space mines had to slow down in order to get into position to harm the Zon. There were a couple of different ways to do this: firing retrojets by remote control was one, sending a control message to the mine to start tumbling was another. Either way, the object’s velocity would decay and slow it down. Either way, this had to be done on purpose, by a guiding human hand. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind on board the Zon just whose hand was controlling these potentially disastrous weapons.

But they also knew that by sending these devices against the Zon, the same controlling hand was providing them with clues to its location.

Each time a space mine had been detected and avoided, Hunter and the others took note of its location, its estimated speed, and from which part of the sky it had come. The plots that resulted from this stressful tracking had pointed to one indisputable conclusion: whoever was dropping the space mines in the Zon’s path was just up ahead, maybe as close as 230 miles, and traveling in an orbital path just slightly higher than that of the Zon.

If they could continue to pick their way through the minefield, they could follow the orbital bombs right to their source… if they could stay up that long. As it was, the Zon had only about six days of supplies and power left.

Cook finally got his straps around him and settled down into the extra seat in the rear. He would have to pick his spot carefully. He figured Ben Wa would be the guy to tell about the strange radio transmission. Ben was very wise in a quiet kind of way. He would know whether to bother Hunter with what might be an unimportant piece of…

“Jeezus, Hawk!” JT suddenly cried out.

“I see it!”

“Latitude is…”

“No, trajectory is…”

“There it goes!”

“Christ—hang on!”

The next thing Cook knew, he was upside down. Hunter and JT were pulling mightily on the control sticks at the same time Hunter was pushing the flight computer control panel with fingers moving at lightning speed, giving orders to the Zon’s steering jets to fire in an exact sequence to get the spacecraft away. In the next instant, a tremendous light filled the flight compartment—to Cook’s unadjusted eyes it seemed like the sun had exploded right inside their little cabin. He was blinded by it; it was so intense his eyeballs began to ache. Purely by reflex he raised his hands to his eyes to shield them from this awful illumination.

When Cook opened his eyes again, he was staring straight up, meaning the Zon’s rear end was suddenly pointing back toward earth and its nose was pointing in the general direction of Alpha Centauri. Elvis went flying by him at this point, jolted in a kind of slow motion right out of his safety harness by the sudden violent maneuver.

Cook was forced to shift to his left to avoid a collision with Elvis’s boot. Then he found himself looking straight down again—this time it appeared like the Zon itself was plummeting right back to earth. Before his brain had time to react to this heart-stopping prospect, the Zon was jerked around once more. After a few more seconds, it returned to what had been its previous position.

Now everyone else on the deck was crowded over Hunter’s shoulder and looking out the window to his left. Cook floated up to join them and finally saw what they were looking at: the debris cloud, the powder puff of flak resulting from the mine’s detonation, was passing just below them.

“Hang on,” Hunter said. “Shock wave… right now!”

No sooner had the words left his mouth than the Zon was shaking violently once more. Everything began rattling, again in the slow, dull kind of way. The ship itself seemed to shudder right down to the heat tiles. How much of this could it take? But suddenly, in the next moment, all was calm. The control panels stopped flashing, the floor beneath Cook’s feet stopped vibrating.

All was safe once more. They’d dodged another space mine.

“Tracking, JT!” Hunter immediately called out.

A second later, JT was pushing buttons on his navigation computer, reverse calculating, in numbers and oddly stick-like graphs, exactly where the space mine had come from. As JT was doing this, he was calling out long lists of numbers, which somehow seemed to make sense to Hunter, who, it appeared, was doing calculations in his head faster than JT was doing them on the navigation computer.

It was like a
ding!
went off in the cabin. Hunter had reached the solution seconds before the new computer had.

“Same place. Same velocity,” he said bitterly. “They’re about 210 miles ahead of us. Maybe closer. Maybe 7500 feet above. Just up a notch.”

“They’re throwing these things back at us blindly,” Elvis said, finally settling in his seat again. “They’re probably figuring that the more they launch, the better the chances they’ll hit us…”

“…Before we reach them first,” JT finished the sentence for him.

“Well, don’t worry,” Hunter said quietly. “That won’t be long now.”

With that, he increased the Zon’s throttles slightly. The spacecraft nudged itself forward in response.

Cook sat back, all thoughts of the strange radio transmission forgotten for now.

The idea, he knew, was to sneak up on them slowly. And that’s what they were doing, bit by bit.

Off the Florida Keys

T
HE HUGE UNITED AMERICAN
seaplane was just beginning the fourth hour of its night patrol when it happened.

The flight, charged with keeping an eye on the straits separating the southern trip of UA Florida from lawless Cuba, had been progressing in a routine fashion so far. The crew members had already covered more than 900 miles, buzzing several suspicious vessels, but in all, they’d found nothing of any major concern.

It was a usual mission for an airplane that was actually quite unusual. The patrol craft was a one-of-a-kind XP6M-2 Seamaster, a gigantic jet-powered seaplane built back in the fifties and refurbished by the United Americans shortly after the so-called Circle War. The Seamaster had four huge engines mounted atop its slender boatlike fuselage at the point where its long, droopy wings met just aft of the cockpit. The Seamaster was not only the fastest seaplane ever built—it could reach .75 Mach easily—it also had a long-range capability, especially with the extra internal fuel tanks the UA engineers had installed inside its cargo bay.

It was heavily armed. Two radar-controlled miniguns dominated the nose of the seaplane, another pair guarded the rear. Slung under the long, slender wings were four hardpoints, two on each side, all capable of carrying a variety of weapons. This flight, the Seamaster was hauling two Harpoon antiship weapons and two AIM-9L Sidewinder air-to-air missiles, just in case.

Its speed, endurance, and sting made the Seamaster a formidable enemy to those brash enough—or stupid enough—to attempt an illegal entry across the Florida Straits. Every gun runner, drug smuggler, white slave trader, and moonshiner in the Caribbean knew about the so-called
Aero Carumba.
Since the Seamaster arrived on the scene about a year before, unlawful crossings, once a torrent, had slowed to a trickle.

On rare occasions, the big seaplane would detect an aerial target trying to dash across the 90-mile strait. In cases such as these, the big plane would give chase and begin tracking the interloper, AWACS-style, until fighter aircraft could be scrambled from the big UA naval air station on Key West. Only once in the past 12 months had the seajet been forced to use its own air-to-air weaponry. It had shot down a known drug-smuggling plane whose pilot had refused to heed all prior warnings. Never before had the Seamaster’s radar detected more than three airplanes flying around the strait at one time. Usually it saw nothing at all.