Lopez was out of her chair and running within an instant.
Lopez dashed into the watch station even as Hellerman and Jarvis were coming the other way, having driven at a breakneck pace across the city. She had called in what she had learned from Wilms straight away, but it had taken time to get back to Manhattan.
‘Did you find anything?’ she asked desperately. ‘Was Wilms telling the truth?’
‘Oh yeah,’ Hellerman replied, ‘he was telling the truth all right. You’re not going to believe what this guy’s been up to.’
Lopez had been secretly hoping that Wilms’ story had been a bluff to get him out of Rikers, but now she saw Jarvis’s gloomy expression as he spoke.
‘Wilms’ telecommunications company launched twelve satellites in the 1970s,’ he said. ‘Trouble is, his network only has four in orbit.’
‘Wilms used NASA launches and also purchased other launch vehicles in Russia to enable him to launch more objects into orbit, all of them part of his KIL system,’ Hellerman explained.
‘How the hell do they work?’ Lopez asked.
Hellerman showed Lopez to a computer monitor, where an image of a satellite in low Earth orbit awaited.
‘A kinetic orbital strike is the act of attacking a planetary surface with an inert projectile, where the destructive force comes from the kinetic energy of the projectile impacting at very high velocities,’ Hellerman explained. ‘The satellite contains a magazine of tungsten rods, each some twenty feet long, and a directional thrust system. When a strike is ordered, the satellite releases one of the rods out of its orbit and into a suborbital trajectory that intersects the target. The rod accelerates as it approaches periapsis and the target due to gravity, reaching tremendous velocities shortly before impact. The rods are shaped to maximize terminal velocity.’
Lopez’s mind reeled. ‘How fast would they be moving when they hit the planet?’
‘Roughly five miles per second,’ Hellerman replied.
‘That’s fast,’ Lopez said. ‘How much damage could they cause?’
‘Hard to predict because there are so many variables and as far as we know, they’ve never been built or tested before,’ Hellerman explained. ‘The Outer Space Treaty prohibits weapons of mass destruction in orbit or outer space. However, it only prohibits nuclear, biological and chemical weapons as part of its statement. Since the most likely form of kinetic ammunition is inert tungsten rods, in most cases kinetic bombardment remains legal.’
‘If you can afford to build them and put them in orbit,’ Jarvis replied.
‘How come everybody’s not doing this?’ Lopez asked.
‘They have done in the past,’ Hellerman pointed out. ‘During the Vietnam War there was limited use of the Lazy Dog bomb, a steel projectile shaped like a conventional bomb but only about one inch long and a half inch in diameter. A piece of sheet metal was folded to make the fins and welded to the rear of the projectile. These were dumped from aircraft onto enemy troops and had a similar effect as a machine gun fired vertically. Observers visiting a battlefield after an attack said it looked like the ground had been ‘tenderized’ using a gigantic fork. Bodies had been penetrated longitudinally from shoulder to lower abdomen.’
‘Project Thor was a research program at Boeing in the 1950s,’ Jarvis added, ‘which is pretty much what Wilms must have based his own design on. The system most often described is an orbiting tungsten telephone pole with small fins and a computer in the back for guidance. The system described in a 2003 United States Air Force report was that of a twenty foot long, one foot diameter tungsten pole controlled with a satellite and capable of hitting any spot on the globe with a velocity of around Mach ten.’
Lopez looked at the map of Antarctica displayed on a screen nearby.
‘Can we track this thing?’ she asked.
‘Cheyenne Mountain is already providing us with a tracking solution,’ Jarvis explained. ‘The team at Cheyenne are calculating orbital trajectories and such like as we speak.’
Lopez turned to Hellerman.
‘How long would it take between launch and impact of one of these tungsten weapons?’
‘The time between deorbit and impact would only be a few minutes, and depending on the orbits the system would have a world-wide range.’
‘Damage radius?’ she pressed him.
Hellerman sighed.
‘In the case of the system mentioned in the 2003 Air Force report above, a six meter long tungsten cylinder impacting at Mach ten has a kinetic energy equivalent to nearly twelve tons of TNT. Some sources suggest a speed of nearly forty thousand feet per second, which for the aforementioned rod would amount to a kinetic energy equivalent to one hundred twenty tons of TNT.’
Lopez looked again at the map and she knew that they were running out of time.
‘Wilms must already have tasked his satellite with the hit,’ she said. ‘Is there any way we can knock it out of orbit or intercept it in some way?’
Jarvis shook his head.
‘There are no other options,’ he replied, ‘and with Wilms out of the picture Majestic Twelve would likely have taken control of the KIL Satellite.’
‘And it’s the perfect kill,’ Hellerman said. ‘The ice will refreeze the impact zone within days. Nobody will ever know what happened down there.’
‘The satellite must have codes,’ Lopez said, ‘a way for us to hack it.’
‘Get back to Wilms and get them from him,’ Jarvis ordered. ‘Any way you like, just get them or this will all be over long before we can get Ethan and Hannah out of there!’
XLII
‘We’re almost there.’
The interior of the Seehund was bitterly cold as Ethan guided the submarine using the electric motors toward a shimmering veil of water above them. From below he had almost missed the submarine pens in the gloom, only the faint halo of illumination coming from glow sticks tossed across the docks revealing its location at the last moment.
Ethan gently angled the hydroplanes upward and prepared to surface as he looked down at Amy.
‘We don’t know what’s happened here since we left, so be ready for anything.’
Amy nodded, her features pinched with concern as the Seehund rose up and Ethan peered up out of the dome as the submarine finally broke the surface of the pens. To his relief he saw Riggs and Del Toro rush to the side of the dock with mooring lines as Ethan held the submarine in position alongside the dock and they tied the vessel down. Ethan shut down the engine and immediately reached out for the dome latches, unlocking the seals and pushing the dome up and open.
A waft of clean, cold air breezed in to the submarine and Ethan breathed it in deeply as he levered himself out of the cockpit.
‘Did you get it?’ Riggs asked.
Ethan nodded as he jumped down onto the dock and stretched his legs, Amy jumping down after him. ‘We got it. It’s attached to the cable on the bow.’
Riggs looked at the cable.
‘Good,’ he replied. ‘Let’s get it out of the water and into the base. The sooner we get this sorted, the sooner we can get the hell out of here.’
Ethan saw Hannah hurry across to him. ‘We lost contact and thought that you’d both gone under.’
‘We almost did,’ Ethan admitted as he watched the SEALs hurriedly attach the cable to a winch on the edge of the dock. ‘I don’t know what that thing is but it’s lighter than we expected. It came up without any trouble but it shuts off any electrical devices within a few yards of it.’
Doctor Chandler’s voice reached him from behind.