Shinichi Hirota stared in disbelief at the monitor as a dark figure disappeared into the tall grass behind the maintenance vehicle storage building. It was McGarvey.
His excited OIC called from downstairs. “He shot Mr. Lee and he’s on the loose.”
“I have him on the monitor,” Hirota replied, trying to keep some semblance of calmness in his voice. But this was falling apart in front of his eyes.
“The ten-minute warning has passed. What do you want us to do?”
“Escort Mr. Lee’s driver back here and hold your position,” Hirota ordered. He called the squad leader at the pad. “He’s coming your way.”
“We saw him. What do you want us to do?”
Hirota glanced at the launch clock. It was passing T-minus nine minutes. “You have six minutes to find him before you have to pull out of there.”
“Hai.”
The launchpad guards weren’t doing what Lee’s driver said they should. McGarvey watched from the shadows behind a pair of unmarked steel storage tanks seventy-five yards from the base of the rocket. By now they should have locked the gates and headed away from the pad. But they had left their two trucks on the road and had spread out along a line that directly cut him off, their M16 rifles at the ready. If he moved out of the shadows they would spot him.
They knew that he was back here somewhere. They could not stay this close to the rocket until the launch. At some point they would have to pull out. But all they had to do was keep him at bay until it was too late for him to do any harm, or to get out of there himself.
Keeping the steel tanks between himself and the patrol, McGarvey ran back into the tall grasses. Crouching low, he worked his way another fifty yards around the far side of the launch gantry. He could see the top of the rocket from his vantage point, but not its base or any of the installations around it. He couldn’t see the patrol but neither could they see him.
A white sky rocket rose into the night to the west of the gantry. McGarvey checked his watch. It was five minutes before launch.
A sense of desperation welled up inside him. He was a David with a 9-millimeter pistol going up against a Goliath rocket that developed a million pounds of thrust from a main engine and two solid fuel boosters. A peashooter against a bazooka. Impossible. Yet he couldn’t allow himself to think about backing off now. Even if the odds were a million to one against doing any harm to the rocket engines or the satellite, he had to take that chance. There was no other way for him.
He popped up for an instant, then dropped back down. The launchpad was empty, the guards were gone. He got an impression of a low, bunkerlike structure, its steel door open, to the right, just off the pad. But there’d been no movement.
He checked the action on his pistol and made sure he still had the spare magazine of ammunition, then unscrewed the silencer and put it in his pocket. Switching the safety off, he ran in a low crouch directly toward the rocket, stopping every few yards to look up and check for the guards. But they were nowhere in sight.
The grass abruptly ended twenty yards from the bunker, and McGarvey held up just within its protection. The launchpad was empty. By leaning forward he could see the main gate. The two trucks were gone, and the steel barrier was down, blocking the access road.
A red sky rocket whistled into the sky, followed immediately by a klaxon. T-minus ninety seconds.
“There he is,” a technician at one of the monitors shouted.
Hirota spun around in time to see a man racing directly for the base of the rocket, his right hand up. He had a gun and he was shooting at the rocket. Hirota couldn’t believe it. He snatched the telephone and got the launch director’s direct line.
“He’s on the pad! He’s firing at the rocket!”
The countdown clock was approaching sixty seconds.
“Stand by,” Kunimatsu’s maddeningly calm voice came back.
“Don’t you understand, you idiot? Stop the launch!”
“We’re showing only a slight fluctuation in lox pressure in number two tank,” Kunimatsu shouted Hirota down. “The launch goes as scheduled.”
“No!”
The line went dead.
McGarvey ejected his spent magazine and rammed the spare one in the grip as he continued running directly toward the base of the launch gantry. But it wasn’t doing any good. He wasn’t doing any real damage to the giant rocket.
He fired three more shots, when something very hard slammed into his left shoulder, spinning him around and knocking him to his knees.
One of the guards had been left behind. He stood at the corner of the bunker, firing his M16 rifle, but he was taking too much time with each shot, trying to hit McGarvey and not the rocket. It was a mistake.
McGarvey fired two shots from a kneeling position. The first one missed, but the second took the guard in the chest, knocking him backward off his feet.
McGarvey jumped up, waves of dizziness and nausea coursing through his body. He stumbled back to the downed guard who was already starting to recover. The man was wearing a bullet-proof vest and had merely been stunned.
McGarvey pocketed his pistol and snatched the rifle out of the guard’s hands. Using it like a club he tapped the butt into the guard’s forehead, and the man fell back, unconscious.
His left arm nearly useless, McGarvey turned, raised the weapon awkwardly, and began firing at the rocket. His shots stiched up from the base toward the nose cone, having the same lack of effect his pistol had.
He stopped a moment, something coming to the back of his head. Challenger. The shuttle had been brought down because a simple seal in one of the solid fuel boosters had leaked.
A rush of water suddenly entered the trough beneath the pad. The rocket motors lit off at the same moment McGarvey fired the last of the M16’s rounds into one of the solid fuel booster rockets. All of a sudden a spurt of flame shot from the side of the booster, growing almost instantaneously into a huge bloom of exploding gasses.
McGarvey grabbed the downed guard by the collar and dragged him around the corner of the bunker and through the open steel door, while all around him the night came alive with flames, the heat rising so fast it sucked the oxygen out of the air, making all rational thought impossible.
Hirota picked up the phone again and was about to call the launch director with a last-minute plea to stop the launch, when his mouth dropped open. The entire base of the rocket was suddenly engulfed in flame, blotting out everything on the pad, including Kirk McGarvey and the downed guard. They had lost.
He carefully replaced the phone on its hook, turned and without a backward glance left the security operations center, his future up in flames, as pandemonium broke out all around him.
Margaret Attwood had been in the middle of explaining her plight to Judith Rawlins when the rocket exploded on the pad. Both women turned toward the glowing ball of flames.
Fifteen seconds later the deep-throated boom of a very large explosion reached them, and Maggie’s first thought was for Kirk McGarvey, who was out there, and she shook her head in wonder.
The lights were on in the emergency bunker. The guard, huddled in a corner, watched as McGarvey hurriedly pulled on a silver fire-retardant suit. He was having a great deal of difficulty with the task because of his shoulder wound and the burns on his back where his jacket was scorched. But it would only be a matter of minutes before the first squads reached the pad.
“Do you understand English?” McGarvey asked.