He bounced against the smooth shell of the rocket, gradually losing speed.
Came to a stop near the juncture of the rocket and the nose cone.
You may think you’re getting damned good at EVA, McKenna, but let’s not go and make a habit off it.
Glanced again at the station.
It looked dead.
Took a deep breath.
And swung the equipment box toward the nose cone.
The magnets epoxied to the plastic case practically reached out and grabbed the smooth metal of the cone. With four solid clicks, the box adhered to the warhead container.
He hoped to hell the warheads weren’t booby-trapped like the nuke experts thought they might be.
He reached for the large switch in the back of the box and wondered what it would be like to be at the core of a nuclear detonation.
Wouldn’t ever know, even if I were at the core, probably.
Snicked the switch upward.
And heard the electromagnetic generator begin to wind up. It was powered by five twenty-eight volt batteries inside the box.
According to Benny Shalbot, the one thing that hard disk drives, Read Only Memory chips, and Random Access Memory devices hate is magnetic fields. It scrambles their electronic brains. We give the damned warhead computer enough electromagnetic impulses, it won’t remember it’s a bunch of bombs, much less the bombs’ targets.
Nothing apparent to McKenna took place. Nothing exploded, but he didn’t know whether or not the ICBM now had scrambled eggs for a mind.
I hope to hell you’re right, Benny.
With a couple jets of nitrogen, McKenna crossed the gap between the rocket and the station. He banged into it a triple hard, and corrected his own impression of his EVA agility.
He heard movement inside.
If they’d been asleep, they were now wide awake.
Looking up, he saw the camera start moving, spinning around, angling up and down.
He worked his way down the side, then below the station, and found himself staring at another camera he hadn’t known was there.
Tapped a thruster button and moved forward, toward the porthole.
The camera followed him.
Found the raised edge of the porthole with his hand and stopped his progress.
Reached down to his leg and ripped off the Velcro strap holding the shaped plastic charge to his thigh.
Slapped it against the thick glass of the porthole.
Looked up and saw widened eyes staring back at him from the other side of the glass. The man started scrambling around, panicky, looking for his space suit.
Twisted the timer stick buried in the plastic, then hit the thrusters and shot away from the space station.
A hundred yards from the station, he reversed his thrust to come stationary and looked back.
Waited.
The explosion was pitifully small. He couldn’t hear it, of course, but the visual impact was tiny.
A small white flash.
And then the contents of the station burst forth, spewing through the smashed port in a stream of paper, one body, pieces of plastic, monitors, plastic containers, clothing, unidentifiable flotsam, and another body.
The stream came to a standstill in seconds, then floated lazily away from him.
He didn’t look at the bodies.
He looked upward and saw a MakoShark approaching slowly.
It looked inviting at first.
But it didn’t have symbols on the wings.
Aleksander Maslov was concentrating on his usage of the Orbital Maneuvering System to bring the MakoShark as close to the warhead as possible when the station porthole erupted.
“Oh, my God! Aleks!”
He looked up to see the debris exploding outward from the station.
He scanned the region quickly, but saw nothing else, nothing to account for the sudden deaths of Bryntsev and Filatov.
The ICBM didn’t move. He noted the black box fastened to the nose cone, and he wondered what it might be.
But he didn’t have the time to wonder for long.
He moved the rocket throttles forward and felt the acceleration as the motors fired.
“Aleks! We can’t leave them.”
“They’re dead, Boris. As is the New World Order.”
“But Aleks…”
“Prepare to jettison the cargo.”
“How did they…”
“I don’t know, Boris. I know that I am not dying in space. Jettison the bloody cargo.”
“Of course. Right away,” Nikitin said.
In the War Room of the Pentagon, all of the Joint Chiefs had gathered with the civilian secretaries. The National Security Advisor, the White House Chief of Staff, and a few members of the security council were also present. Most of them talked in low voices or maintained a respectful silence.
Since it was his command involved in the operation, Brackman had control of one communications console, and he and Thorpe had been trading places at it every half-hour. He had drunk far too much coffee.
“Alpha, Red. We have visual on an explosion at the station.”
Not nuclear, please.
“Go Country! Dig in the spurs!”
That sounded like Major Munoz.
“Red’s hot.”
A long, long silence.
Brackman tapped Thorpe on the shoulder and took his place at the console.
“Red’s closing. Two-two out.”
“Hey!” Must be the backseater, Olsen. “Delta Green!”
“Delta Red, Semaphore. Take out the MakoShark.” “Semaphore, I’ve got to find Blue One.”
“Take out the MakoShark,” Brackman repeated.
And heard the release of a dozen lungfuls of air behind him.
“Roger, Semaphore,” Haggar said, reaching for the armaments panel. “Everything’s lit, Swede. Take what you want.” Delta Green had started her rocket motors. In seconds, she was gaining momentum.
Haggar dragged back on the control stick, firing thrusters and trying to get a lead on the maverick space craft.
“One-seven miles to target, Country. I’m launching two Wasp IIs.”
They screamed off the pylon, reaching out, probing the darkness.
The direct visual image of Delta Green went off the screen.
A few flickers, and the image was regained by one of the Wasp IIs camera eyes.
“He’s accelerating fast,” Olsen said. “It’s going to be close.” The screen view showed the Wasp II was narrowing the gap. The rocket exhausts of the MakoShark loomed larger and hotter.
“I see ’em, hot exhausts,” Munoz cut in. “Go, Swede!”
The screen seemed to fill with exhaust as the Wasp II pursued the accelerating spacecraft from behind.
And then the exhaust dimmed, still producing at one hundred percent, but getting smaller.
“My Wasp flamed out,” Olsen said. “No more fuel.”
“Goddamn it!” Haggar blurted. “Semaphore, he outran the missile.”
“You still have him visual, Red?”
“Negative.”
“How about you, Blue Two?”
“Negative, Semaphore. He ran off my screen.”
“Very well. You may now join up on Yellow and Orange. Semaphore out.”
On the ICS, Haggar said, “You suppose he meant right away, Swede?”
“Probably. They’re worried about ground launch of the other SS-X-25s.”
“Semaphore can wait for one damned minute,” she said.
She hit the thrusters and flipped Delta Red end-over, then tapped in rocket power for a second.
Forty seconds later, she was laying on the forward thrusters to slow the MakoShark as it approached the ruptured Russian space station.
“Blue One, can you give me a locator beacon?”
“Coming up, Country. I’m a couple hundred yards off the station.”