“I don’t care if it comes from the Oval Office,” the lieutenant commander said. “That signal is just too weak for our birds to pick up. What kind of a freaking dumbjohn set up this pitiful little squeaker?”
“Ferret satellites have picked up signals a lot weaker than this one.”
Waving the spec sheet in his face, the captain said, “Yeah, but it’s not just the power of the signal all by itself. It’s the signal-to-noise ratio. Your beacon’s too goddam close to the port of Marseille. There’s all kinds of chatter coming out of the city, on every frequency you can imagine. It’d be like trying to listen to a mouse fart in the middle of some Italian opera.”
The deputy director performed a dramatic sigh. “So am I supposed to go back to the director of homeland security and tell him that you won’t even try to track their beacon?”
The lieutenant commander heard his unspoken words: That would not be a positive career move for you. She also realized that this must be just as important as he claimed, to get a deputy director down here on a holiday afternoon.
She stared at the spec sheet again, grumbled something too low for the deputy director to make out, and walked off to one of the monitoring consoles.
Washington, D.C.
From the giant structure of the power satellite, 22,300 miles above the equator, an invisible sword of energy lanced down toward Washington, D.C., powerful enough to kill anything in its path. It touched the ground in Bethesda and marched south-southeast, piercing the fat little clumps of cumulus cloud that floated across the land as it swept inexorably toward its target: Arlington National Cemetery.
Birds fell out of the sky, their feathers scorched, their innards exploded by the sudden blast of heat. Grass curled and browned as the beam swept by. Newly leafed trees puffed tendrils of smoke. Like a finger of death the energy beam swept slowly across the District of Columbia. The water of the Potomac sizzled briefly as ten thousand million watts of energy crossed the river and reached Arlington.
Automobile ignition systems conked out. Cars on the Key Bridge suddenly lost power and banged into a snarl of dented fenders and crumpled trunks. People inside the cars fainted from sudden heat shock; several died, slumped over their steering wheels. Electronics systems shut down in home after home; children wailed that their computer games had crashed while their parents clicked fruitlessly at the remote control units of their suddenly blank TV sets.
A power transformer on a telephone pole just outside Meriden Hill Park blew out in a spectacular shower of sparks and smoke. The children playing on the grass were startled.
Mrs. Rhonda Bernstein, minding her grandchildren at the park while her daughter and her fumble-fingered son-in-law prepared their backyard picnic dinner, was alarmed enough by the transformer’s blowout to fish out her cell phone and call 911. The phone didn’t work. Frowning, she shook it and pecked at the minuscule keyboard again. Not a peep.
These damned cheap things never work when you need them, she thought angrily. Some bargain. She was perspiring, she realized. I haven’t had a hot flash in five years, she thought. But this was worse. She couldn’t catch her breath. The blood was thundering in her ears. And the children had stopped playing. None of them was running around anymore. Two of them had fallen to the ground; the others just stood there looking scared.
Then she saw that the grass was turning brown. Before her eyes it was curling up and browning, just as if somebody had thrown it into an oven.
She had strength enough to get to her feet before she collapsed to the ground with a fatal heart attack.
“Hey, the magnetrons have come back up!” called one of the technicians at the control center in Matagorda.
Lynn Van Buren hurried over to the woman’s console and saw that indeed the satellite’s magnetrons were up to full power again. It can’t be Dan and the crew; they’re not even halfway there yet.
She had to stand on tiptoes to see over the console and yell to the guy two rows away, “What’re you getting from White Sands?”
“Nothing,” he answered. “Not a milliwatt.”
Van Buren frowned, thinking, The powersat’s beaming power again but the rectennas aren’t receiving a thing. Her pulse began to race; she could feel her heart thumping beneath her ribs. This could be bad. Really bad.
“Something screwy here,” called one of the other technicians. Van Buren hurried over to his console.
“Look at the accelerometer record,” he said, tracing a finger along a curve that glowed red on his screen against a rapidly changing set of alphanumerics. “The bird’s moving.”
“It can’t be!”
“Look at the friggin’ numbers!”
Van Buren stared. “It’s being maneuvered!” she blurted.
“Not by us,” said the technician. “We haven’t budged her since we settled her in that geosynch slot months ago.”
Van Buren raced to the communications console. “Pipe me through to the boss.”
“They’re in the OTV now,” said the communications technician.
“I know that!” Van Buren snapped. “Get him!”
The comm tech stared up at her. Van Buren never lost her temper.
How can it be so hot all of a sudden?” asked Irv Lamont.”One minute it’s nice, all of a sudden it’s like August.”
Eighty-six-year-old Lamont was playing chess at the sidewalk café with Cass Bernardillo, his friend of sixty-some years.
Bernardillo looked up from the chessboard. “Clouding up. We might get a shower.”
“The weather forecast was for sunny and mild,” Lamont grumbled.
“The weather forecast. What do they know? Remember last February? I had to shovel four inches of ‘sunny and mild’ off my driveway.”
“You should have moved to a condo,” Lamont said. “Let them do the outside work.”
“I’ve lived in that house for fifty-three years. The only way I’m gonna leave is feet first.”
Lamont made a sour face at his old friend. Then he ran a hand inside his shirt collar. “Christ, it’s hot.”
“Let’s go inside the restaurant. It’s air-conditioned inside.”
“They always keep it too cold.”
“So you want to broil yourself out here?”
Lamont started to answer, but collapsed over the chessboard, scattering the pieces to the sidewalk. Bernardillo slumped in his chair and slid to the pavement, too. Half a dozen people walking along the street keeled over. A car slammed into a light pole and then a city bus careened into a line of parked cars with a screeching, rending tearing of metal. People screamed. And more fell, dead and dying.
Al-Bashir’s eyes were riveted to the television screen. The president of the United States was getting out of his long black limousine, smiling at the crowd of people lining his path to the dais where he would deliver his speech and then present a ceremonial ring of flowers at the Tomb of the Unknowns.
“The beam isn’t there!” he shouted without taking his eyes from the screen. “It’s not there yet!”
The Egyptian, standing behind one of the seated technicians, said, “It isn’t easy to move that huge satellite. This has to be done carefully, delicately.”
“Get the beam on its target!” al-Bashir insisted.
“It’s moving across the city. Give us a few more minutes.”
Al-Bashir tried to control his impatience. A few more minutes won’t hurt. Let him begin his speech. Strike him down in the middle of his oration. Let the whole world see him broiled alive, him and his lackeys around him.
Then he smiled to himself. In a few minutes, half an hour at most, it will be done. Then I go upstairs for my reward. I deserve a reward for this. She’ll be mine, whether she wants to be or not.