Death Orbit (25 page)

But then more sobering notions came flooding in. Matus couldn’t help but think about what had happened at Surf City and the strangeness surrounding the disappearance of the four young girls. Though the townspeople were still looking for them, few had any hope they’d ever be found. He stared into the unfolding dawn now, removing his Fritz helmet and rubbing his tired neck. A rare wave of philosophical feelings washed over him. He was hardly a religious man, but he did recall some Bible training from when he was a boy… something about how the faithful and the innocent would be lifted up into the heavens before the final battle between good and evil heralded the end of the world.

At that moment he looked straight up into the brightening sky and saw that it was turning the color of blood. From one dark horizon to the other, the sky was becoming a bright, deep crimson, as vivid as a sunset, yet just minutes from the dawn. Matus felt a chill go right through him. He’d never seen anything like this before.

Then it hit him: maybe today
was
Doomsday and the end
was
near. After all, the signs were everywhere. The red sky. The eerie calm. A world gone completely insane. Wars raging full tilt around the globe, the fighting worse since the Big War. Maybe this
was
all part of one big cosmic conclusion. Maybe the four missing girls were in a vanguard of innocents that the cosmos had decided to spare, a divine evacuation before Armageddon arrived.

Matus shook his head. It all seemed to make so much sense under this blood-red sky. And yet, deep down, he realized these apocalyptic musings actually made him feel better.

Maybe those who had disappeared were the lucky ones, he thought finally. Maybe they’d be spared the glimpse of hell that might soon come…

He was broken out of these deep thoughts by an urgent cry from one of his electrical techs. Matus raced back to the Patriot command hut where a message from the bunker below the VAB was waiting.

“Click on your long-range imaging radar,” one of the command officers told him. “And get everyone up there ready for action.”

Matus did as he’d been told and soon punched up the Patriot’s powerful acquisition radar. To his astonishment, he found himself looking at a long-range live TV feed that showed a formation of at least two dozen small jet bombers apparently heading right toward them. The Patriot’s threat-archive screens were identifying them as Ilyushin-28s. The targeting radar said they were now 31 miles off the coast and coming on fast. Matus called back down to the bunker, reported what he saw, and asked for further instructions.

The reply was curt and brief.

“Start firing,” the anonymous bunker officer told him, adding rather ominously, “and you can start praying, too.”

The first Patriot missile went up from the roof of the VAB 15 seconds later.

The 17-foot rocket whooshed away from its launcher at an incredibly high speed, leaving behind a trail of white, almost luminescent smoke as it turned over and disappeared beyond the horizon.

Matus was seated in the Patriot management center’s main control chair, astonished as he watched the missile approach the oncoming bomber formation on the live TV feed. The imaging was so clear he could clearly see the bombs hanging from the lead Beagle’s wings, the airplane’s slapdash blue and white camouflage scheme, and even the two pilots ensconced inside the aircraft nose.

Then, just like that, the bomber was gone, replaced by a flash of light and then a ball of flame. Their first Patriot had hit its mark. A chorus of buzzers and flashing lights on the control panel confirmed this.

But just as soon as this plane vanished, another one came up to take its place. And then another behind that, and another behind that. Now the forward Patriot batteries were firing, as well as those arrayed on the ground around the VAB. Matus somehow found the button which gave his TV screen a long range. Within seconds he was looking at the entire formation of Ilyushins again, this time as the waves of Patriots were cutting into them.

His battery locked onto another target and automatically fired its second missile. A third target was acquired seconds later, and the third missile went up in a flash. Matus was astounded. Never had he seen combat played out so quickly, so up-close and violent. It was like watching a movie. The planes dropping from the TV screen looked like products of a special-effects team; the people inside them did, too. Everything looked so real, it seemed unreal.

But the racket coming from outside the hut dragged him back to reality quickly enough. The whooshing of Patriot missiles going off was nearly deafening now. Somewhere, air raid sirens were wailing. Big guns could be heard, though Matus had no idea who was firing them or at what targets.

The VAB-rooftop Patriot battery fired its fourth and fifth missile a few seconds later. Both left in a hurricane of smoke and exhaust, heading up into the dreadful red sky and quickly disappearing over the horizon. Equally fascinated and horrified, Matus watched them take out two more bombers on the wide screen, destroying them utterly with their high-explosive fragmentation warheads, setting off the underwing weapons even as the doomed pilots tried desperately to unload them.

The rooftop launcher fired its sixth and final missile about 10 seconds later. Matus chose not to stay and watch this one go up. He left the command chair and ran back out to the rooftop. The Beagle formation, or what was left of it, was now 12 miles away. He was sure he’d be able to get a visual on them very soon.

The scene that greeted him on the outside was like something from a Bosch nightmare. Missiles were going off all around him. The crimson sky above the KSC was crisscrossed with contrails, seemingly hundreds of them. Off in the distance, he could hear many violent explosions; it was like the air was vibrating with incredible shock waves. With each successive blast, his ears began to ache a little more. It was getting so loud, so fast, he was sure they’d start bleeding soon.

Strangely, though, the beaches below him still looked tranquil, peaceful, inviting. He couldn’t stop thinking about how warm the water must be, how high the waves were, and how much he would have liked swimming around in them, just as he’d done so many times before as a kid…

Another loud explosion shook him back to real time. This one was not up in the clouds somewhere, but very, very close. He turned to see an enormous geyser of smoke and flame rising up from the main communications building about a half-mile north of the VAB. The smoke was quickly blown away to reveal the place had been vaporized. There was nothing left—no building, no antennas, no satellite dishes. Nothing but a hole and a huge ring of fire around it.

Matus knew instantly what had happened. He pulled out his long-range binoculars and trained them out on the eastern horizon. Sure enough, he could see a handful of bluish specks out there, each of them kicking up a geyser of smoke and water behind it. They were the Sparviero fast-attack boats. One of them had just fired a Styx missile at the KSC and had destroyed the comm shack.

Now three more Styx had been launched. Matus could see their fiery trails coming out of the water and right toward him at incredible speed. He had just enough time to shout a warning to the troops on top of the VAB when the trio of missiles went over their heads, emitting an ear-piercing screech as they streaked by. An instant later, all three came down, not on any KCS building, but out on the shuttle runway behind the base. There were three enormous explosions—they were so powerful, Matus imagined he could feel the VAB actually shaking. When the smoke and fire cleared, it revealed three gigantic holes in the middle of the very long airstrip.

A series of shouts brought his attention back to the front of the building. Three I1-28 Beagles were roaring in right over the beach. They were so low, Matus was actually looking down on them. They were also flying so close together, they seemed like one aircraft.

Matus didn’t even have to yell out a command. Suddenly everyone on the rooftop was firing at the three bombers. The 1st Airborne guys opened up with their own twin big fifties. At least two Stingers went off. Even some of his own engineers were firing down on the jet bombers with their M-16s.

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.