The wind was strong enough to not disregard little mistakes.
“Oops,” Munoz said.
McKenna got a feel for the stick, put the nose down, and raced off the platform toward the east. “Just find us a radio channel, huh?”
Munoz had to use the unscrambled frequency for Tac-2.
“Snake Eyes, that you in the chopper?”
“Roger, Delta Green.”
“You fly like shit.”
“That’s because he thinks it’s a bicycle,” Munoz said.
“Cancha, I want you to put down at Daneborg. Think you can get it on the ground there?”
“Tight, Snake Eyes, but we’ll do it. I’m going to radio ahead for fuel.”
“Good. Take off. Robin Hood, you there?”
“Got ’im.”
“You still have some of our flight gear. And I don’t know if we’re going to figure out this German equipment. You want to lead us to Daneborg?”
“I always wanted a Pathfinder code name.”
Conover had been relieved to hear McKenna’s voice on the air.
Abrams had told him on the intercom, “Told you so.”
“Go to hell.”
When the coast came up, Conover lost altitude to 2,000 feet, and they passed silently over Peenemünde.
“Okay, you can get us back some altitude, Con Man”
“What’d you see?”
Conover had not watched the night-vision screen. His focus was on the HUD. He was starting to get a few red lights on electrical and hydraulic systems.
“Not good,” Abrams told him, then went to Tac-1. “Alpha Two, Delta Yellow.”
“Go ahead, Yellow,” Pearson said.
“The rocket’s on the pad, Alpha. Tanker trucks around, vapors like they’re transferring hydrogen and oxygen. Lots of lights and lots of people scurrying around. Very active. They’re going to launch that hummer soon.”
“Thank you, Yellow. Alpha out.”
Conover didn’t like the sound of it. He wondered what the target was, and given what had just taken place in the Greenland Sea, was almost as certain that he didn’t want to know.
Twenty
General Brackman felt as drained as if he had been flying the combat mission himself.
Despite the fact that it was all over except for the mop-up, he and Thorpe remained in the crow’s nest overlooking the Command Center. Milly had replenished the coffee and the Danish. Delta Yellow was approaching Greece. Delta Green had taken off from Daneborg. On the big plotting board, the Soviet and British-American task forces continued to close in. They would be there by midmorning to begin the monumental task of plugging the wells.
Brackman did not understand the technology, but someone had said that the wells were to be pumped full of concrete for several hundred feet below the seabed and the well casing above the seabed broken off. The Germans would be allowed to tow their platforms out of the Greenland Sea and to remove them from the ice.
Just details. The small things had to be cleaned up. He would have to testify before Congress, of course, and justify the loss of a three-quarter-billion-dollar aerospace vehicle.
The politicians would bring pressure on the German government. Already, the CIA was reporting exceptional activity at the High Command’s headquarters in Bonn. Middle of the night changes in leadership?
And one pressing detail.
“What about this rocket at Peenemünde, David?”
Thorpe sighed and looked over at him. “I don’t know, Marv. The launch could have been scheduled for months. Even years. The only thing that bothers me, beyond knowing about those MIRVs, is the fact that Weismann has been seen around there so much.”
“Maybe Sheremetevo will have something when he calls.”
Brackman had spoken to the Soviet general half an hour before, after Delta Yellow’s report.
Finally, a telephone buzzed, and after a duty officer signaled him, Brackman got up to cross the room and take the receiver.
“Brackman.”
“Marvin, this is Vitaly.”
“Your people find out anything?”
“The rocket is warheaded only with high explosive, Marvin, but the target is your space station.”
“Goddamn. You’re certain?”
“The information was obtained in Berlin, from Eisenach’s headquarters. The German ballistics and rocketry experts have been working on the programming for some time.”
“Thank you, Vitaly.”
Brackman hung up the phone. He looked at the map. All of the 1st Aerospace Squadron was earth side, beat up, and exhausted.
Themis was defenseless.
A few hundred pounds of HE detonated in the hub would completely destroy her, scatter the spokes, upset the orbits of the individuals units. There would be expensive pieces of space station re-entering the atmosphere for years.
The people. His people. He could get them into the lifeboats in time.
Some of the spokes could be released and perhaps saved. The fuel module. The nuclear reactor was also quickly detachable.
Brackman checked the map.
The intelligence officer was watching him, concern evident in his face.
“David, could we see the satellite deployment?”
Thorpe gave the order and purple circles appeared on the map. The ID tags next to them identified the satellite type, orbit, and coverage.
“That Rhyolite over Poland, David, in geostationary orbit. Can it pick up Peenemünde?”
“Maybe the edge of it, Marv. We can give it a look-see.”
“Do that. We need to know when that rocket launches.”
Weismann and Oberlin had been in the control bunker for the past hour, sitting in an observation room above the launch and flight controllers. Both of them were talking on telephones.
The commander of the 20.S.A.G. had attempted several times to reach Eisenach, but there were no communications between the platforms and the mainland. He had finally reached Schmidt.
The admiral sounded entirely defeated. “Your elite wing no longer exists, Weismann. They performed poorly.”
As he listened to Schmidt’s long list of criticisms, the rage built within him, and he finally slammed the telephone down.
Oberlin looked at him, holding his hand over the mouthpiece of his phone. “There are brownouts and blackouts all over Germany, Albert. The platforms are off-line.”
Weismann barely heard him. “That fucking Schmidt!”
“What?”
“He won’t defend the wells against the invading task forces.”
“That is treason,” Oberlin said. “I will shoot him myself.”
“He says there’s nothing left to defend.”
Oberlin’s shoulders sagged. “Then, it is all over, Albert. There will be investigations, charges, court-martials.”
Weismann looked at the video monitor. The last truck, one of those containing hydrogen, was driving away from the launch pad. Gespenst I stood proudly in her gantry, wreathed in the vapors of condensing oxygen. Most of the launch personnel had already withdrawn. She was brightly lighted from floodlights on the ground and on the gantry shroud which had been rolled a quarter of a kilometer away.
He saw the digital clocks mounted on the far wall of the bunker. It was 0114 hours. The second clock gave the time to launch: 01.21.43.
The flight time to impact was one hour and six minutes.
“No, Max. We have one more chapter to write.”
“The minute that rocket launches,” Brackman told her on the secure microwave telephone link, “the NORAD and JPL people will begin determining its track. If it looks as if it will come anywhere near Themis, you are to abandon the station. That is an order, Colonel Pearson.”