But dying in a hail of gunfire was not surviving. Surviving was surviving.
Earl belted on his AutoMag pistol, checked both rifles, and careened out of the parking lot, slamming through a fence gate and onto the runway system, straight for the waiting shuttle.
Soldiers scattered out of his path as he barreled through. But Earl Armalide did not pay them any attention. His feverish eyes were fixed on the shuttle.
He was going to storm the shuttle singlehanded. Alone, a fugitive from justice, hunted on all sides, Earl Armalide would redeem himself. He would conquer the invading spacecraft, capture its wicked crew, and be received as a true American hero by a thankful nation.
The President would probably grant him a pardon. After all, what were the lives of a few IRS and FBI agents against the heroic capture of an invading force? Yes, the President would pardon him. He'd be on all the TV stations. Maybe someone would write a paperback book series with him as the hero. Call it Earl Armalide, Super-Survivalist. He liked the sound of that. He pressed the accelerator to the floorboard and wondered if they'd let him write the first book himself. In the control tower, Colonel Jack Dellingsworth Rader watched as a pickup truck barreled onto the runway and screeched to a halt at the side of the Yuri Gagarin. A man clambered from the cab, pulled himself onto the roof, and jumped into the shuttle's open hatch. Before he disappeared inside, Radar saw that he was bristling with weapons.
"Who is that man?" Rader barked into the field phone.
"I don't know, sir," the captain replied. "He's a civilian."
"I know that! Only an idiot civilian would do what he just did."
"We're still awaiting the backup team from NASA, sir, but I can send in a squad."
"And lose them too? No chance. We'll wait this out. Washington wants that thing intact."
Colonel Rader did not have to wait long. Less than ten minutes after the civilian disappeared into the open hatch, the hatch closed. The hatch should not have been able to close because its hinges had been mangled by plastic explosives. But it did close. Colonel Rader saw through his binoculars that the door looked as good as new.
Then the shuttle's tail jets thundered to life. The sound even penetrated the control tower's windows.
"It's taking off," the captain radioed.
"I can see that, you fool! Stop it. Get a vehicle in front of it. Two vehicles. One in front and one in back." But the captain was unable to get his men organized in time. The Yuri Gagarin rolled down the runway, turned smartly, and vaulted into the twilight sky.
As it screamed past the control tower, Colonel Jack Dellingsworth Rader looked down through the finest military binoculars available and saw that the control cockpit was completely empty. He could have sworn, however, that he saw the control yoke move as if under unseen hands.
That, of course, was impossible. But so was everything else about the mysterious Soviet shuttlecraft. After the Gagarin disappeared to the north, the second NASA anticontamination team arrived. They descended upon runway 13-Right like maggots on rotting meat. They swept the runway with Geiger counters, scraped up samples of asphalt, soaked up blood with sterilized sponges, and gathered other bits of physical evidence.
They started from where the shuttle had stood immobile and worked their way down its two-mile takeoff path.
The team leader found the first cube. It was a white square like a child's block. He picked it up in his white-gloved hand and the first thing he noticed was that the cube seemed to be made of material very similar to the rubberized fabric of his anticontamination suit. He placed the cube into a black box and sealed it hermetically.
They found six other cubes scattered along the takeoff path, as if they had been jettisoned from the escaping shuttle.
Four of the cubes were white. The other two were a silvery color. The team leader radioed back a question to the captain in charge of the operation.
"How many men in the first team?" "Four. Why?"
"I'd rather not say. But I think you'd better send a jeep out here to pick me up."
"Why?"
"I think I'm going to faint."
Chapter 4
They came to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, deep in Soviet Central Asia, in the dead of night.
They flew in separately from Moscow because they were too important to risk traveling on a single aircraft. A crash would have obliterated half of the Soviet command structure. The other, truer reason was that they did not trust each other.
The head of the KGB arrived first. He was a general in a green uniform and an abundance of chest medals. Then came his rival, the leader of the GRU, the Soviet military intelligence apparatus. His uniform was gray. They were met at the landing field by the chief scientific adviser to the Soviet space program. Behind them, the moon rose above the skeletal tower from which the Yuri Gagarin had been launched by the hulking Energia booster system only hours before.
The men waited stiff-necked in an operations building for the man who had summoned them to this critical meeting.
The General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics arrived in his personal jet just after midnight. He hurried to the operations building.
The others knew that the matter was grave when they saw that he was alone. Whatever this meeting was about, it was so critical the General Secretary dared not bring his advisers.
Guards were stationed about the entrances. The General Secretary personally shut off the lights when he entered.
"To discourage the guards from watching," he said grimly, taking off his astrakhan fur hat and setting it on the table before him. He regarded it intently for several minutes, as if it were a crystal ball. Faint moonlight threw the edges of his bald skull into relief.
The General Secretary had just opened his mouth to speak when a siren wailed in the darkness. Searchlights sprang into life. The crisscrossed under the cold stars, searching, probing for something.
One beam caught a flashing wing. Two searchlights converged on and followed a tiny Anotov-2 biplane as it settled onto the runway, bounced once, and came to an idling stop in front of the General Secretary's guarded plane.
A graceful figure stepped from the plane onto one wing and jumped to the ground.
The guards immediately unlimbered their rifles. Recognizing the pilot's slim-hipped walk, the General Secretary thrust his head out the door and ordered the frantic guards to stand down. He was just in time. They were leveling rifles at the pilot.
He turned to reassure the others.
"It is Anna. I left word where I could be found." The others nodded in the darkness. They all knew Anna Chutesov, special strategic adviser to the General Secretary himself. None of them liked her.
Anna clicked on the light switch when she entered. The four men blinked like startled owls.
"Typical male response," Anna Chutesov told them. "To hide in the darkness in a time of difficulty."
"It is to discourage lip-reading by the guards," the General Secretary said, half-apologetically. "There must be no leaks."
"You are too late. The whole world knows that our shuttle is in American hands. You cannot keep this a secret. Especially this."
"That is not the secret, Ms. Chutesov," said the chief scientific adviser to the Soviet space program, Koldunov. "The loss of the craft is bad, but that is not the worst of it."
"We will talk in the light, where I can see your faces, and you can see mine," said Anna Chutesov. "Lies breed in the dark. If the fear on your faces is true, then there must be no lies between us this night."
"Agreed," said the General Secretary. He did not fear Anna Chutesov, or dislike her as the others did, but he respected this willow-slim blond woman with the chilled steel mind, "Please sit."