Death Orbit Read online

  But the Ilyushins were way too fast for any of this fire to do any good. They streaked by the VAB in a flash, somehow got even closer to the ground, turned slightly to the right, and as one, unloaded their weapons on the cratered shuttle runway. Then, in a combined scream of exhaust and power, they pulled up slightly and disappeared over the western horizon.

  Suddenly the firing from the top of the VAB started up again. Another trio of Beagles was roaring in. The next thing he knew, Matus found himself on the railing, too, firing his M-16 at the oncoming jet bombers. They rocketed by so close to them, Matus imagined he could see his own stream of bullets pinging off the left wing of the nearest bomber. A Stinger went right over his head and began a high-speed chase of the three airplanes. Once again, all three airplanes headed for the shuttle runway. Once again, they dropped their loads in a precise bombing pattern. Once again, a series of enormous blasts shook the VAB and everything around it.

  The Stinger finally caught up with the attackers. It clipped the tail section of the middle airplane, blowing it off the bomber and causing the attacker to spiral first up and then straight down. The Beagle hit with the impact of a Styx, exploding on contact and blowing yet another hole in the already battered runway. The two surviving aircraft streaked away.

  There were cheers coming up from the troopers on the roof, but Matus knew better. It was obvious now that the attackers were intent on destroying the shuttle runway—and doing a good job of it. As if to emphasize this, three more Styx missiles went overhead, slamming down onto a trio of temporary support buildings lining the temporary air base.

  Three more Beagles were coming over the beach. Furious, Matus threw a new clip into his rifle and began firing again. In his scope he could see the lead bomber, oddly framed against the aquablue sea and luxurious-looking waves. Two Stingers went shooting off the rooftop; somewhere below, a Patriot rose up to meet the trio of attackers. Suddenly the sound of firing and missile engines mixing with the roar of the oncoming jets reached a crescendo. Matus had never seen combat this intense, this desperate, this insane.

  Yes, the world had gone crazy, he decided in this split second, the sky in front of him actually crowded with bombers, missiles, and tracer fire. Yes, the missing girls had been taken to spare them what was to come. These were the opening shots of some final battle—all of this seemed frighteningly clear to Matus at this point.

  As the Beagles streaked by, one of them was caught simultaneously by a Patriot and a Stinger. It immediately slammed into the plane next to it and both blew up not 200 feet in front of Matus’s eyes. He could feel the heat on his face; the terrible noise rose in his ears. Yes, this was madness, he could see it, hear it, and taste it.

  Then came a scream. He turned to see a huge streak of fire in the red sky overhead, coming straight at him. It was a Styx missile, either fired directly at the VAB or falling short of its target on the runway. It slammed into the roof of the VAB a split second later, exploding with a mighty crash and taking out the northeast corner of the building.

  Don Matus found himself flying. He was heading out to sea. Below him was the beach he’d been admiring, and the blue water and those great waves. They would be the last thing he remembered as he was blown off the building and out onto the ocean.

  Those waves… they looked even better from up here.

  It was one of those flukes of combat—a pinprick of light amid the fog of war—that the two helicopters carrying the JAWS infiltration teams arrived back in the vicinity of the Kennedy Space Center shortly after the beginning of the murderous attack.

  Though under orders to maintain strict radio silence throughout the entire mission, including the ride home, the JAWS members were nevertheless able to listen in on the emergency frequencies coming out of the space center and thus were aware that their home base was being bombarded by both aircraft and Styx missiles.

  They could tell by the frantic radio calls going back and forth between the UA command staff and the defense forces that the attackers were concentrating on the makeshift air base and its communications capabilities—and studiously leaving alone the space center’s launch facilities and support buildings.

  This only lent more credence to the conclusion made by the JAWS team that the attackers didn’t want to destroy KSC as much as they wanted to capture it in order to launch the Energia rockets and their nuclear payloads into space. By the way things seemed to be deteriorating for the UA forces, how to prevent the enemy from doing just that seemed like an impossible task—short of destroying the space center.

  The pair of Sea Stallions came upon the frightening attack about ten minutes in. What greeted them were columns of smoke rising high into the red morning sky, sheets of flames from the destroyed communications buildings, a firestorm over the long, perforated shuttle runway, and the air filled with Beagle bombers and expended missile contrails. Offshore, the four small Sparvee rocket boats were maneuvering in closer to the beach in anticipation of launching another barrage.

  Further out on the horizon was a new, even greater threat. Six battleships belonging to the Asian Mercenary Cult were steaming toward the action. Now the role of the Toti submarines became clear—they’d been employed not to attack the KSC, but to check the depth of the bay leading into the space complex. Was it deep enough to support six huge battleships? Unfortunately for the UAAF, it was.

  It didn’t take a military genius to figure out the battleships were probably stocked to the gills with troops, a common practice of the Cult. In the past, the Cult had carried as many as 1,000 marines per battleship. This meant a potential landing force of 6,000 men was offshore, waiting for the softening up of the KSC defenses to finish before they attempted a landing.

  With barely 1000 people defending the space center, how could that landing be anything but successful?

  As it turned out, the fact that all of the JAWS officers were riding on the same helicopter was fortuitous. This way they were able to assess the situation in a more or less secure environment. But what should they do, exactly? It would have been acceptable for them to fly to an area unaffected by the battle and set down to wait until things were all clear. This course of action would have been perfectly understandable—after all, the JAWS team was returning from an combat-intensive infiltration mission. Many of the men had been up for at least 24 hours and after the long flight were probably depleted.

  But sitting on the sidelines just because you were a little tired was not the style of the UAAF and definitely not the style of the guys from JAWS.

  They knew they had to do something—something big and dramatic; nothing less would do. But there were a few problems. First, both choppers were running dangerously low on fuel. Second, two helicopters flying around low and slow in the middle of the attack would make inviting targets for the gunners aboard the battleships and the Ilyushins. Not to mention the danger of getting hit by friendly fire.

  After a quick discussion, the JAWS officers decided they should head in the opposite direction.

  With little fanfare, they directed the pilots of the two Sea Stallions to head further out to sea.

  The Sparvee fast-attack boat was a strange little weapon.

  It was no bigger than a speedboat, so small it could barely hold its crew of ten. Many of its surface materials were made of plastic and aluminum, none of them strong enough to stop a bullet. Because the boat required an inordinate amount of gasoline to get from one place to another, it carried several large reserve fuel tanks at its rear. Unprotected and vulnerable to the slightest spark, Sparvees were known to become completely engulfed in flames within 30 seconds of a fuel-tank rupture and sink in less than a minute, usually with all hands still aboard.

  But there was an upside to these dangerous little boats. They packed more firepower than some ships ten times their size. In reality, a Sparvee was less a boat and more like a floating missile launcher, especially ones readapted after the Big War. Gone were the front-mounted 5-inch naval guns. Now most Sparvees carried f
our Styx missile launchers, each capable of firing a semiguided SSM weapon carrying a warhead packed with several hundred pounds of highly explosive fragmentation bombs. One of these missiles hitting the right place on a heavy cruiser, a battleship, or even an aircraft carrier could probably sink that ship. Four missiles in the right place would destroy it utterly. It was the ultimate naval version of David and Goliath. And the Styx missiles worked just as well on land targets.

  The Sparvees were also hydrofoils, and as such, they could reach speeds as high as 50 knots. This was great for maneuvering as well as getting away once their missile loads were expended. But there was a downside to this above-the-water capability: it was very noisy at full throttle, so noisy that every man aboard a Sparvee had to wear a radio headset just to communicate with the man standing next to him. So noisy that sometimes the crew was unable to hear the loudest noises of a battle raging around them.

  So noisy it could drown out the racket of an approaching helicopter…

  Ernesto Sparviero had served aboard the noisy fast-attack boats for so long he’d taken the vessel’s name as his own.

  Ernesto’s squadron of four boats, known as Elixo, made up part of a naval mercenary team originally out of Genoa, Italy. They’d seen almost continuous action in the five years since the Big War, mostly around the Mediterranean or in the Arabian Gulf, but with forays as far away as the Indian Ocean and the Malay Peninsula.

  This job to the American continent was the longest and most enduring ever for the Elixo squadron. The trip over from Europe had been stormy and plagued with mechanical problems. Once in place near an isolated chain of islands in the northern Bahamas, the Elixo fleet had to wait for two months until the people who had hired them—their identities were unknown to Ernesto and his mates at the time—got their battle plans in order.

  More bad weather and a number of false starts delayed their seeing action even further. At one point, the four attack boats had to retreat to the islands south of Cuba after the mighty hurricane now battering the northeastern part of America had come too close to their Upper Caribbean hiding places.

  But finally, all of the attack elements came into place. While massing off northern Cuba a week ago, Ernesto and his men saw for the first time the Beagle bombers and the Toti submarines and knew that they were about to become engaged in a major action.

  But it wasn’t until they saw the flotilla of battleships—they looked like ghosts on the misty horizon that foggy morning seven days ago—and the squadrons of swastika-adorned F-18s and F-14s flying overhead that they realized exactly who their employers were. And that’s when it all began to make some rather frightening sense. They were working for two of the most ruthless, feared entities on earth: the Asian Mercenary Cult and the Fourth Reich. Their opponent would be the United Americans, undoubtedly the most respected.

  This revelation put fear into the hearts of Ernesto and his comrades. True, they were mercenaries, and by definition, they fought for the highest bidder. But even in their cold hearts they knew that getting in league with the Fourth Reich and the Cult would probably lead only to misery and despair, especially if they believed, as most people in the Old World did, that these two forces were actually just military fronts for a far more nefarious entity: Viktor II, the devil himself.

  All this made Ernesto and his mates very uneasy, and the night before they sailed from Cuba, they all took a vote to renege on their contract and return to Europe. Word of this reached one of the Cult’s low commanders, who sent two representatives to discuss the action with Ernesto’s immediate superior, a captain named Bilbaldi.

  The next morning, Bilbaldi’s head was found attached to a spike on the quarterdeck of Sparvee number 1. After that, the rest of the Elixo fleet reconsidered its decision to bolt.

  When the rest of the attacking force sailed north toward UA Florida, the Spavees of Elixo squadron sailed with them.

  Now Ernesto and his men were in the thick of it—and so far, things weren’t going that badly.

  The Beagle bombers were plastering the objective—which Ernesto and his crew thought was just a large American air base—and their Styx missiles had destroyed three of the four targets they’d been assigned, communications huts apparently vital to the UA’s operations. Further out to sea, the gang of Cult battleships was waiting, their holds filled with bloodthirsty marines just itching to get ashore and kill. From Ernesto’s point of view, standing on the bridge of Elixo 2, the action could be wrapped up by noontime. The Cult would have destroyed the UA air base and then invaded and killed whatever survivors were left. Then Ernesto and his colleagues could collect their money and start the long voyage home.

  So maybe their initial fears had been unnecessary, he kept telling himself. Maybe they could make a lot of money here and get out with their lives.

  But then again, maybe not.

  Ernesto’s men were loading and arming Styx launcher number 4 when he heard the strange sound.

  The years of working on the Sparvee boats had damaged his own hearing considerably—this was an occupational hazard they all endured—and at first he ignored the high-pitched whine that was somehow leaking through his headphones and into his dirty ears. He was maneuvering the boat in further toward the shoreline—the last missile shot was their furthest, a huge igloo-like communications building located about three kilometers in, and therefore isolated from the rest of the squadron. The Styx missile was originally built for ship-to-ship combat; firing one at a land target took a little more finesse. Ernesto knew the closer he could get to the shoreline, the better the chances of hitting the target. As their eventual pay would be based on the number of assigned objectives they actually destroyed, he was determined to put the last missile right on the money.

  He’d moved the boat to a position just slightly more than a mile offshore. From here, the columns of smoke and flame rising from the American position were so evident, Ernesto imagined he could feel the heat from the battle zone. He was quick to dismiss this as a figment of his imagination—just like the strange whining noise in his ears.

  His headset crackled once; it was a report from his first missile officer. Launcher number 4 was ready to fire. Ernesto did one last check of his position and radioed the helmsman, who was standing right next to him, to reduce speed and prepare to fire.

  Oddly, the helmsman did not respond. Ernesto repeated the order, then looked over at the man, who was looking straight back at him, a silent scream etched on his face. A gush of blood suddenly cascaded out of his mouth and nose. He fell forward, landing on the throttles, unluckily for Ernesto and the rest of the crew, stalling the engines at the worst possible time. The man then slumped to the deck. For the first time, Ernesto realized he had a hole in his back the size of a bocci ball.

  Startled and more than a little confused—Ernesto was certain that a stray shell from one of the other boats had killed his helmsman—he quickly spun around expecting to see another of the Sparvee boats right on his tail. What he found instead was a monstrous black helicopter hovering off the bow not 20 feet away from him, its open left door filled with heavily armed men firing their weapons down at him. The strange noise he’d heard but ignored had been the helicopter’s huge engines, unmuffled and straining, as they’d come closer to his speeding boat.

  Now Ernesto realized that three more of the crew were lying on the deck behind him, bleeding heavily, their bodies riddled with bullets, that the number 2 launcher was engulfed in flames, and that soldiers were jumping out of the unstable helicopter and onto his deck, firing their weapons in every direction but his own.

  What is this? These words echoed in Ernesto’s ears. His first thought, irrational and panicked, was that the Cult had sent these soldiers to kill him and his crew because of some transgression they’d committed. It wouldn’t be the first time a mercenary’s employer had decided to kill the hired help rather than pay them.

  But in the next moment, Ernesto realized these heavily armed men jumping onto his swift little boa
t were not Cult soldiers or anyone in their employ. They didn’t move like Cult warriors and they seemed more determined than mercenaries. That’s when Ernesto finally reached the only other logical conclusion.

  These soldiers were Americans, and they were here to capture his boat.

  Trying to fight them was futile. In the few seconds since Ernesto realized what was going on, more than 20 American soldiers had jumped to his deck, an action made infinitely easier since the boat’s powerful engines had stalled. Ernesto screamed an order into his microphone, telling his crew not to resist, to let the invaders have their way and maybe they would get out of this with their lives.

  But when Ernesto looked around and began counting the bodies on the boat’s tiny deck, there were nine, each one wearing the distinctive blue striped jersey of the Elixo squadron. Ernesto realized he had no more crew. They were all dead. He was the only one left—and now the Americans were climbing up to the bridge to get him.

  A few prayers ran through his mind in the seconds it took for the fierce troopers to reach him. They seemed awfully big to him; he was a slight Mediterranean type. They seemed to be in possession of more weapons, utilities, ammo belts, and combat gear than any one person could possibly carry. The first man to reach him slammed his fist into Ernesto’s jaw, then knocked him across the control column. Another kicked him hard twice in the seat of his pants. Another drew out a frighteningly sharp serrated knife and put it across Ernesto’s unprotected neck. The steel of the blade was so cold it seemed blazing hot to Ernesto. He was certain he would die in the next second.

  But the man with the knife bent down close to his ear, so close Ernesto thought he was about to bite it off. The man had a question for him. His voice gruff, his tone leaving no doubt that he would just as soon slit Ernesto’s throat as to save it, he asked him in very broken Italian: How many missiles do you have left, on board?