The Seventh Angel (25 page)

EKV
:

Three hundred kilometers above the earth, Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle #6 shifted into terminal guidance phase. Somewhere far below, the Lockheed Martin rocket that had boosted the kill vehicle into sub-orbital space was now tumbling back into the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

The EKV could not see its target. In point of fact, it had no awareness of the target’s existence. It knew nothing of lethal aim-point guidance, convergent trajectories, or even that it was hurtling toward its own destruction at more than 25,000 kilometers per hour. The EKV’s sole attention was focused on the beam of digital telemetry streaming up from the antennas at Vandenberg Air Force Base. It monitored the beam continuously, and reacted instantly to the maneuvering commands imbedded in the digital signal—firing pitch, roll, and yaw thrusters on command—making minute corrections to its own motion vectors to match the predicted position of a Russian warhead that it could never see.

The EKV carried no explosive. It was a hit-to-kill weapon, designed to destroy its target with the kinetic energy created by its tremendous speed, in much the same way that speed and inertia could transform the simple lead pellet of a rifle bullet into a lethally destructive projectile.

The timing was flawless. The microsecond clock in the kill vehicle’s digital brain clicked down to zero at the precise instant that the EKV reached its designated coordinates in space. The kill vehicle and the target warhead slammed into each other at a combined closure rate of more than 50,000 kilometers per hour. The resultant explosion was like the flare of a tiny sun, as the tremendous force of the impact was converted instantly to several hundred megajoules of raw heat.

EKV #6 and its unseen target were no more.

* * *

U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska
:

Seen from the tracking screens of the Command and Control, Battle Management, and Communications Control Center of the United States Strategic Command, the destruction of EKV #6 and its target was considerably less dramatic. There were no brilliant flares or explosions, just a soft computer bleep, followed by three brief messages in the alert window:

Air Force Major Lionel Humphrey read the lines of text and let out a shaky breath. It was working … It actually seemed to be working …

“
Yeah!,” one of the console operators exclaimed. “Oh yeah! I think it’s gonna …”

“
Shut up!,” Lionel snapped. His voice was overloud in the quiet of the control room. “Don’t jinx it,” he said in a softer tone. “Just shut the hell up … and let it happen.”

* * *

Interstate 8 (San Diego, California)
:

The unofficial and un-recommended evacuation of San Diego began within minutes of the first emergency alert bulletin. The word tore through the city like wildfire. San Diego was a prime military target: the aircraft carriers at North Island … the amphibious warfare base on Coronado … the warships at 32
^nd
Street Naval Station … the submarine base at Point Loma. Any enemy who wanted to cripple the U.S. would nuke San Diego with the very first barrage of missiles.

It seemed like good logic. And in the pressure cooker of a city succumbing to terror, the idea morphed from educated guess to solid fact in the space of mere minutes. Suddenly, the word was everywhere … San Diego was a confirmed target. The only way to survive was to get out of the city
NOW
! People jumped in their cars and ran for the freeways like lemmings.

The first casualties were from a pileup on Interstate 8, near the Grossmont Boulevard exit—the inevitable product of too many vehicles moving too quickly through too small an area.

Near the middle of the pack and rolling at eighty miles an hour, the driver of a white Ford pickup misjudged his following distance and slammed into the rear of a green Toyota minivan. With a crunch of buckling steel and collapsing plastic, the minivan careened to the left, smashing into the right front fender of a silver BMW Z8 convertible and slewing the sports car sideways into the side of a fourth vehicle.

Startled by the unexpected impact, and by the split-second shock of his driver-side airbag ballooning instantly into his face, the BMW driver snatched his foot away from the accelerator pedal, and stomped on the brakes. It was an utterly natural reaction. Given the same set of circumstances, a lot of drivers would have done precisely what he did. But it was exactly the wrong thing to do.

With that simple act of reflex, a multi-car fender-bender was transformed into a chain-reaction, propagating backward through the speeding lines of traffic as cars, trucks, motorcycles, and buses crashed blindly into the wall of suddenly stationary vehicles to their immediate front. And amidst the rending of metal and the shattering of glass, drivers and passengers were crushed and broken right along with their vehicles.

The Russian warheads had not even penetrated the atmosphere, and already American citizens were beginning to die.

* * *

Alaska Regional Hospital, Anchorage, Alaska
:

Charlie Sweigart tapped gently on the door to Gabriella’s room, and then opened it enough to stick his head in. “Hello?”

There was no answer. Gabriella was sleeping.

Charlie shuffled into her room, his hospital slippers making soft shushing noises as they slid across the tiled floor. He wheeled his IV rack in behind himself, taking care that his IV tubes didn’t catch on anything as he quietly closed the door. He probably didn’t need the IV anymore. He was over the hump now, and well on the road to recovery, but the doctors kept reminding him that advanced hypothermia was nothing to play around with.

He felt okay now, or at least well enough to finish his recovery at home. Of course, there might not be any home left to go to. His apartment was in San Diego, and if the news reports were accurate, California was coming unglued. Even if the missiles were shot down, or turned out to be a hoax or something, his two-bedroom loft in Mission Hills might not survive the panic that was ripping through his city.

There was nothing he could do about that now. The missiles would strike, or they wouldn’t. His little home would be preserved, or it would be destroyed. Ten minutes from now, the lid might come off the pot completely, and the superpowers could all start lobbing nukes at each other. Planet Earth might finally get its Third World War, but nothing Charlie could do from this hospital would make the slightest bit of difference. He could do nothing but wait, and Gabriella’s room seemed like a good place to do that.

He turned and looked at her. The sight nearly stole his breath away.

The tall ocean scientist was curled on her side, blue hospital sheets bunched and tangled around her long-limbed body, golden hair fanning across the pillow and spilling over the curve of her cheek. For a half-second, Charlie thought about brushing the hair from her cheek so that he could see her face more clearly. But he didn’t want to wake her, and he wasn’t at all certain that his touch would be welcome.

Gabriella had said things to him in those last few minutes of consciousness aboard the
Nereus
. Charlie knew that her words might have been nothing more than a delirious symptom of her advancing hypothermia, or even a wishful hallucination from his own cold-addled mind. He didn’t care. He wanted to believe in them anyway. And he didn’t want to break the fragile spell of his hopes by waking her.

He wanted Gabriella’s words to be real, and he wanted her to mean them. But he couldn’t control that, any more than he could control the warheads hurtling toward his country. So he stood and watched the gentle rhythm of her breathing. And his heart was so full that he almost didn’t care if the world came to an end.

* * *

U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska
:

With another computer bleep, another trio of messages appeared in the alert window of the STRATCOM tracking screens:

To his right, Major Lionel could hear a man’s voice whispering, “Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Jesus.”

Lionel, who hadn’t felt the slightest desire to pray since he’d outgrown bedtime prayers at the age of nine, suddenly wondered if this might not be a good time to start again.

* * *

Highland Shipping and Commercial Freight (Provo, Utah)
:

Randall Dixon kicked open the door to the shipping office. The flimsy interior door gave way easily under the sole of his size-11 work boot. Particle board fractured and the simulated wood grain laminate split into several pieces as the broken door swung around on its hinges to bounce off the wall adjoining the doorway.

He hefted the ball-peen hammer he’d grabbed from the cab of his Freightliner. He caught a blur of movement out of the corner of his left eye as a little turd of a man dove for cover behind one of the desks. Dixon grinned. “Knock-knock, asshole.”

Silence, and then a quiet scuffling sound as that weasel Gillespie tried to burrow his worthless ass further out of sight.

Dixon took aim at a desk lamp and swung with the hammer. The lamp disintegrated in a shower of electrical sparks and broken glass.

“
Eleven violations,” he growled. The hammer came down again, pulverizing an acrylic paperweight full of tiny starfish. The blow sent several pieces of paper fluttering to the floor.

“
Eleven violations,” Dixon said again. “You wrote me up for every piddly-ass rule you could think of, didn’t you, you useless sack of shit?” To punctuate the last word, he brought the hammer down again. A coffee cup was jolted off the edge of the desk. It lay on its side, draining dark liquid into the coarse gray weave of the industrial carpet.

“
It ain’t enough for you to get me kicked off the long-hauls where a man can earn a living wage,” Dixon said. “You gotta go after my ticket, don’t you? I break my hump for this company for eight years, and that’s how you’re gonna repay me—by jerking my license to drive a rig.”

The only answer was a series of muffled beeps. Gillespie was trying to use his cellular phone to call for help.

Dixon raised the hammer and held it cocked. The next time he swung, it would be to bash in the little pencil-pusher’s brains. “Calling the cops, ass-wipe?” He laughed. “Won’t do you no good. You ain’t heard? Russian missiles headed right for us. In about five minutes, we all gonna be dead. Our ashes are gonna be glowin’ in the dark like one of them science fiction movies.”

He flexed his grip on the wooden shaft of the hammer and began edging around the end of the desk, moving quietly so Gillespie wouldn’t be expecting him.

“
You’re going
first
, you little shit,” he said. He spoke more softly now, hoping that Gillespie wouldn’t be able to tell that he was moving closer.

“
If I’m gonna be dead in five minutes,” he said, “I want the pleasure of killing you my
self
!”

On the last syllable, he lunged around the end of the desk and leapt toward Gillespie. The little man squealed in terror and threw his hands up to protect his face.

Dixon brought the hammer down with every ounce of anger in his soul. He felt one of Gillespie’s wrists break as the blunt steel head of the heavy tool blurred through its arc without slowing. With a crack like the snap of a bullwhip, the hammer collided with Gillespie’s skull.

The first whack probably killed the bastard, but Dixon hit him six or eight more times just to be sure the job was done properly. Then he dropped the hammer on the floor and went outside to smoke a cigarette and wait for the end of the world.

* * *

U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska
:

The computer emitted its now-familiar bleep, and three more lines of text appeared in the alert window:

Lionel scanned the last line.
Seventy-five percent?
Not a lot of safety margin there, but a kill was a kill. They’d managed to knock out three of the inbound warhead shapes so far. It was impossible to know how many of the destroyed targets had been decoys and how many had been real warheads.

Maybe they’d gotten all three of the warheads already, and the remaining four were all decoys. Then again, maybe all three successful intercepts had been decoys, and all three of the real warheads were still out there. The only way to be certain was to destroy them
all
.