The Korean Intercept (2 page)

Kate took no comfort, as she usually did, in the magnificent drone of the shuttle in flight. She told herself that there had to be some explainable reason behind what was happening and that Houston Control would reveal it to them in due course.

Twenty minutes later, they entered the earth's atmosphere. As the atmosphere grew denser, its resistance provided braking action for the spacecraft, generating incredible surface friction, heating the leading edges of the orbiter, turning the shuttle's underbelly a vivid orange. The thrusters lost their effectiveness and the rudder and the elevons began clutching the heavier air. The computers controlled the entire flight.

Scott and Kate did not speak until Scott could take no more of it. He thumped the armrest of his chair with a balled fist, his eyes glued to the digital altimeter as it ran backward.

"This is nuts. Totally, absolutely nuts. We're not even going to make it to Japan at this rate of descent; I don't care what navigation and radar say. Something is all wrong. According to the computers, we're already over Manchuria, for crying out loud."

Kate was closely following their descent trajectory on a computer screen. "Altitude twenty-two miles, nine minutes from touchdown."

"We're going down inside China or North Korea if we're lucky, the Sea of Japan if we're not so lucky," Scott said.

"The hell with orders." He activated the radio downlink. "Houston Control, this is
Liberty
. Come in, Houston. This is an emergency. I repeat: come in, Houston." The airwaves crackled with nothing but static. He tried hailing Mission Control three more times in rapid succession. Nothing. Then he told Kate, "We're going to full auto."

Her eyes remained steady on the indicator screens. "It doesn't make sense."

"Oh yes, it does. We've been snookered. Houston didn't abort this mission and reprogram the computers, and they didn't order us to Stealth."

"Then who did? What's going on?"

"What's going on is that someone faked that transmission. Someone is bringing us in."

Kate looked at the darkness outside. "Bringing us in? But that's incredible. Can it be done?"

Scott nodded, his expression grim. "It's being done. It's the only answer that makes any sense. All systems are consistent; they just seem to have a mind of their own. And with Stealth activated, Houston doesn't have us on their radar. No one does." He flicked control switches as he spoke. "Figures. No systems response whatsoever. We have no manual control."

"Altitude is forty-four thousand feet. Speed one thousand one hundred."

"That puts us on a descent rate of ten thousand feet per minute," Scott noted, his tone neutral with professional objectivity. "That's a glide slope seven times steeper than a commercial airliner, with no idea where we're touching down."

"But, Ron… with the Stealth activated—" She allowed the sentence to taper off.

"Right." He nodded. "Whoever's bringing us down can't pick us up on their radar, either. And that gives me an idea that might be the only chance we've got."

"Care to share it with me?"

He gave her a tight grin. "Whoever they are, they overrode the Houston program in our computers. But they can only bring us down so far. Then they'll have to give me back manual control at least for the landing. That gives us a very small window."

"To do what?"

"Let's find out."

Liberty
covered seven miles, dropping 13,000 feet, during the next eighty seconds.

At 11,300 feet, traveling at a speed of 410 miles per hour, the middle systems screen indicated that the digital autopilot was disengaged, meaning that control of the shuttle was returned to the pilot. Gripping the hand controller, Scott commenced manually steering the vessel. The shuttle continued eating up its glide slope. He carefully moved the hand controller forward to put
Liberty
into its first of four necessary braking S-turn maneuvers.

Kate read out airspeed and altitude so that he could focus his attention on flying. "Speed three hundred ten. Altitude fourteen hundred."

Outside the windows, the reflection of their landing lights could be seen off a rugged, rocky terrain.

"There it is," Scott said. "Looks like we're expected."

A lighted runway less than two miles away came rushing up at them out of the dark, glimmering parallel lines of silver surrounded by impenetrable blackness like a carefully set pair of diamond necklaces placed side by side on black velvet. There were lighted structures adjacent to the landing strip. Kate's peripheral vision registered an oversized satellite dish and military helicopter gunships, but she had too many other things on her mind to pay them much attention right now.

Scott waited until the last possible moment before activating a switch that deployed the landing gear. Kate's voice continued to briskly relay their rapidly descending speed and altitude.

The runway was practically below them now, a shade to starboard. Scott eased the land controller slightly to the right, applying the right rudder while cutting back his air brake slightly. This was the critical moment. Whoever had brought them down into this dark corner of the world would be monitoring their radio transmissions during this brief window of time when he had full control of the shuttle. Scott glanced at the altitude/vertical velocity indicator on the headup display as the runway rushed up to meet them. When the main gear was five feet from the runway, at a speed of 200 miles per hour, with the runway lights rushing by so fast that they were twin silver lines to either side of the craft, with the whistling thunder of
Liberty's
powerful engine enveloping them, he did three things simultaneously. He shoved the control stick forward. He punched up the International Distress Frequency. And he barked into his headset microphone as the shuttle's powerful engine's whistling keened to a higher pitch, the craft picking up in speed and altitude.

"This is U.S. space shuttle
Liberty
. Mayday. Mayday. This is
Liberty
. Mayday. We are going down. Repeat, this is
Liberty
. Exact location unknown but we are going down. Repeat. This is
Liberty
. Mayday. Mayday."

By this time the runway was rapidly falling away behind them when, at an altitude of 1,000 feet, the radio went dead. The monitor screens and the cabin lighting system went dark.

"That's it," Scott said. A hint of drained weariness tinged his voice for the first time, the first crack in his mask of professionalism. "They've shut us down again. We don't have power." He spoke across the radio to the crew below in the living quarters, who had been monitoring his and Kate's conversation via the transceivers in their helmets. "Okay, everybody. Buckle up and brace yourselves."

There came several responses of "Yes, Commander." Then the shuttle
Liberty
became silent, the engine noise replaced by an eerie, breathy sound as the shuttle's forward momentum carried it into a freefall glide. There was only the terrible sensation of downward plummeting into black nothingness.

Kate asked, "Do you think anyone picked up our signal?"

Scott vainly struggled with controls that would not respond. "If we survive this crash, that's our only hope," was all he had time to say.

 

Hamgyong Province, North Korea

 

His name was Ahn Chong.

He was sixty-seven years old. The village of Hongsan, his home, was on the eastern slope of Mount Paekdu, which rose above the surrounding mountain ranges like a towering warlord encircled by humbled subjects. North Korea is almost completely covered by north-south mountains separated by narrow valleys. Except for the time in his youth when he had been a soldier, this region of the frontier separating North Korea and China was all of the world Ahn Chong had ever known. His was a life of hardship as unchanging as the mountains.

His frayed woolen jacket offered scant protection against the bone-piercing chill of a night wind. His face could have been centuries old: leathery and wrinkled, with dark, intent eyes. One kilometer to the west, the others of his village were asleep. The wind rattling the thatched roof of his hut had drawn him from a fitful sleep of dreams of when he and Mai were young. He had risen from the straw pallet they had shared and, as usual, donned his short jacket, the baggy trousers and straw hat. He had crept away from the hamlet of mud-walled farmers' huts and made his way across the cooperative's stony fields where potatoes and cabbage, turnips, lettuce and beets barely matured during the short growing season. The ground was frosted over and crunched beneath the rubber soles of his sandals.

He had topped the hill and made his way by starlight to the graveyard, to the small hillside clearing surrounded by pines and a few twisted fruit trees where nightly he would kneel at his wife's grave. Though he knew that Mai's spirit was mercifully free of the physical suffering that had made her last year of life so unbearable for them both, his heart ached. That her mortal remains were so close to him in this ground somewhat eased the loss he felt within. These private moments with her memory renewed him and gave him the strength to face one more night and another tomorrow without her.

His life with Mai had never been without suffering and struggle. But the struggle had always seemed easier, worthwhile, because his woman, a good woman, was there to share the struggle with him. They were married when they were fourteen. They had met as children in the days of World War II when Japanese soldiers had used Hongsan as a staging area for attacks into China. The Japanese, who had massacred most of the adults when they withdrew, killed their parents. Youngsters like Chong and Mai survived only because their parents, fearing the worst, hid them in the mountains. Such tragedy had bonded them together for life, a life that became little better under the occupying heel of the Russians after the war and no easier when the country was handed over to its own Communist dictators three years later. Mai had already given birth to the first of their three children when Ann Chong was conscripted and sent south to fight the Americans in the winter of 1951, so long ago, the one time he had ever been more than fifty kilometers from his village and his family.

He now had full-grown children, and they had gone on with their lives since their mother's death. Ahn Chong did his best, but bitterness would not leave him, bitterness as ever-present within him as the empty place in his heart left by Mai's passing.

If Mai had become ill in the south, below the 38th parallel, she would have survived. His ailing wife would have received treatment. But the central government withheld food and clothing from the northern frontier provinces, as well as education and medicine, with an iron hand. That his son-in-law was chairman of the collective's Worker's Council, that the new military air base had been constructed less than three kilometers away, meant nothing. Another nameless, faceless old peasant woman had died and no one cared, it seemed, except for her widowed husband. Ahn saw her face whenever he closed his eyes: wrinkled and aged, leathery as his own, but even ravaged by illness, the most beautiful face he had ever known. He heard her voice in the whisper of the wind through the pines.

And so he came to kneel at her grave this night as he always did, to commune with her spirit and meditate on the words of the Buddha.
Do not weep. It is the very nature of all things most near and dear unto us that we must divide ourselves from them, leave them, sever ourselves from them. Every life is filled with partings
…

The heavens tore abruptly open above him, ripped asunder. It happened with such abruptness, such totality, such ferocity, power and nearness that Ann reflexively, instinctively threw himself across the mound of earth that was Mai's grave.

Something—something big—stormed by at what must have been treetop level, its backwash blasting over Ahn harsher, far colder, than the night wind. A shape momentarily blotted out the sky. There was not the thunder of a jet, only an extended
whoooosh
! that enveloped him as if it were inside his head. Pressing himself to Mai's grave, flattening himself to the ground, he knew that it could only be some sort of aircraft coming from the direction of the airfield. Then he heard the aircraft—whatever it was!—impacting into the earth on the other side of the hill that rose away from the graveyard, in the opposite direction from his village. There was no explosion, only the protracted sound of tearing metal as the huge
something
skidded across rock. Then complete silence re claimed the night, except for the wind.

Ahn Chong leapt to his feet. Dogs were barking, but the noises of the crash would have been muffled from the village by the hills and sloping terrain.

He hurried up a rocky hill, in the direction of the crash.

 

After the endless scream of tearing metal upon impact, the abrupt silence seemed absolute.

The first sound Kate Daniels became aware of was the whisper of wind outside of the fuselage.
Liberty
was enveloped in darkness. She turned her head. Her body responded slowly. The popping of joints creaked loudly and helped to clear her brain as her eyes adjusted.

Next to her, Scott asked, "Are you all right?" His voice was strained, hoarse, and she knew instantly that something was wrong with him.

"Thank God, Ron, I thought we were done for." She fought to keep her breathing normal. "Yes, I'm okay. How about you?"

"Broken leg, I think. At least I set us belly-down."

Kate ascertained that none of her bones were broken and none of her muscles were pulled or torn. The plight of the man next to her generated complete clarity of thought. She unclasped her safety harness and went to him. Reaching for a magnetized flashlight, she flicked it on, playing its light across his legs. The right one was twisted at an unnatural angle. His flight suit around that knee was torn and bloody.

She reached for his safety buckle. "Let me help you out of there."

He waved her off. "I can get myself out. Check on the crew."