“Vandenberg, we’re abeam the complex, turning three-forty degrees.”
“Roger. We don’t have you yet. Turn your landing lights on.”
“Roger, lights. No joy on the runway. We should be on final.”
“Keep the complex on your right and watch for the tracks.”
“We just crossed the tracks. It splits, and both tracks go south on my left. Still no runway.”
“MU87, the tracks should be on your right—ON YOUR RIGHT! BANK LEFT, BANK LEFT!”
The left side of the world fell away, and the haze racing through the landing light beams streamed sideways as the pilot threw the plane into a turn that seemed to bring it head-on into a succession of buffeting humps in the air; then the pattern reversed itself as they quickly rolled level again. The end of a strip marked by a few dim lights slid into view in Keene’s window. “Runway to the right!” he shouted, pointing frantically. The plane banked in the opposite direction, held for a few agonizing seconds while the airscrew clawed and the overloaded control surfaces hauled it around, and then leveled out again just as the wheels thudded against solid ground. The center line was off to the left, but the Cessna had sufficient room and slowed to taxiing speed without mishap. Charlie Hu emitted an audible, shaky sigh somewhere in the shadows behind. Keene found that his palms were sweaty and he had been unconsciously rubbing them on his knees.
“Okay, we’re down. Still can’t see much, though. . . . Oh, wait a sec. We have headlights ahead.”
“That’s a follow-me truck. Follow it to parking and remain on this frequency. And welcome to Vandenberg.”
The truck led them off via a connecting ramp to a taxiway. A large military transport silhouetted in the gloom began rolling forward to takeoff position. As the Cessna moved on by, two more transports became visible, waiting behind. Everything that could move, it seemed, was being got out before the wind front moved in.
Colonel Lacey was a big man with wide, pale eyes set in a florid, fleshy face, lank ginger hair, and a matching toothbrush mustache. Or maybe his hair just appeared lank from his running his fingers through it countless times, as seemed to be his habit when considering a decision, through who-knew-how-many hours of the night and probably the day before. He looked haggard, with dark scores underneath the pale eyes and perspiration stains showing through the shirt of his crumpled uniform. Frequently, when a moment presented itself, he would close his eyes and draw in a long breath, as if to gain a few seconds of respite. He was also, Keene could tell—though doing a commendable job of containing it—very scared.
“Okay, I’ve listened, and I hear what you’re telling me, and the bottom line is: I don’t care,” he told Keene, Colby, and Charlie Hu as they came out from a glass-walled office space where they had gone to talk privately. Lacey had received the visitors up in the tower since he couldn’t spare time to be away. Lt. Penalski was with them also, having left a sergeant in charge of the other five Marines, who had been given coffee in a room on the floor below. The pilot, who they now knew to be Sergeant Erse, was with the Cessna, checking for damage and getting the aircraft fueled and cleaned. Sloane had gotten through to Lacey from Washington about two hours previously to advise that the mission would be arriving, but not trusting communications security he had not elaborated on what it was about. Around them, staff sifted reports and passed on orders, while harassed controllers tried to make sense of the fragmented information coming in and grappled with the chaotic traffic conditions. The Cessna had been one of a few landings that night. Inside the launch complex, a minimum work force was readying the few craft that could be sent up at short notice to provide additional hardware in orbit for contingencies. A large “Samson” military transport was being held back in one of the hangars to evacuate them and the tower crew after the launches were effected. Otherwise, everything was moving out.
Lacey gestured at the windows commanding views out over the field. Water was running down one of the glass panels on the far side of the floor, where a crew outside was sluicing off the encrustation of dust with a fire hose. “We have a permanent population of three and a half thousand people on this base. Ten thousand contractors’ employees live in the surrounding areas, most of them with families. I’ve got a couple of hours to do what good I can with the planes I’ve got. After that, they’re just junk. That’s my first responsibility, Doctor. I don’t care about who’s going out in a shuttle. If they’ve got somewhere to go, good luck to them.”
An adjutant with a red-streaked face, wearing a tarmac jacket, interrupted. “Excuse me, sir.”
“Yes?”
“296 isn’t going to fly. The valve isn’t responding, and it’s a strip-down to replace.”
Lacey grimaced, running a hand through his hair. “Has that C-80 started loading?”
“Not yet. It’s just rolling up now.”
“Divert it out alongside 296. Get some stairs out there and transfer the passengers straight across. Don’t bring it back to the gate.”
“Sir.” The adjutant turned away to another officer who was waiting.
“But we don’t know what they’ve got planned,” Keene persisted. “If they show up with a FAST team and take over the runway area, it could halt your whole operation.”
“I’ll take that chance when we come to it. In the meantime, my operation is best served by moving out what I can.”
“Secure the approaches to the launch complexes at least. The APs aren’t moving aircraft.”
“What APs? Do you think we’ve been expecting an invasion? They’re on the other side of the base, getting everyone out onto Highway One.”
“Colonel.” Colby Greene was visibly exasperated, managing only with difficulty to refrain from shouting in the middle of the control tower floor. “As an officer of the armed services of this country, may I remind you that you took an oath of loyalty to—”
“A week from now there isn’t going to be any country,” Lacey said. “You know that. I know that. And the only reason we’re not getting open murder and rape on the streets right now is because most people haven’t realized it yet. My first loyalty is to the people I’ve worked with on this base. It’s a family thing now. I never took any oath that talked about protecting aliens from some other planet who didn’t think our system here was good enough for them.” Lacey paused to check an indicator screen above the floor showing the current departures, where the data had just been updated. “Besides, if what you’re telling me is correct, I’d be doing them a favor by not interfering. That way, they’ll be on their way home.” From the conversation earlier, it was plain that Lacey had no particular fondness for Kronians. In a way reminiscent of the ancient practice of venting wrath upon bringers of bad news, it had almost seemed that through some devious process deep in his mind he held them responsible for Athena’s having happened at all.
Keene and Colby looked at each other helplessly. Then Charlie Hu raised his hands in a placatory gesture. “Look . . .” he pleaded. “This isn’t going to help. We’re all under stress here. Let’s recognize it. Maybe the problem doesn’t need to be addressed out here at all. The important thing is what happens inside the launch complex. If we can get the right people in there alerted, they might be able to close off access to the shuttles before Voler’s people get here. . . . They know what the options are in there better than any of us do. I’ve got some names right here of people I believe are reliable. One or two have to be in there somewhere, right on the other side of the security fence. All we have to do is call. Colonel Lacey has gotten us in this far. That’s as much as we might need. Let me make some calls, and let him get on with his job.”
“How can they deny access to the shuttles?” Colby demanded. “Voler and his people still have the hostages.”
Charlie shook his head. “I don’t know. . . . If it becomes obvious that they’re not going anywhere, they might throw it in. Whoever they’ve got helping on the inside might turn around if they realize they’re on their own. Anything that complicat
es the issue opens up more chances for their plan to go wrong. What else do you want in the kind of time we’ve got? They could land out there at any minute.”
“I can deploy my men to cover the access gate from the landing area,” Lieutenant Penalski offered. “In these conditions, we could have them in prepared positions right up there on the edge of the runway—even after daybreak. It’s just a question of knowing where the plane will head after it lands. Maybe the tower could cooperate by directing it to us.”
Keene looked at him: young, eager, as if it was going to affect his record for a promotion next year. Seven Marines against a planeload of Air Force FAST specialists. The spirit of Balaclava was not quite dead yet. It seemed to affect Lacey too. He stared at the Marine, then at Charlie Hu silently pleading for reason, Colby fighting back his anger, and finally at Keene. “I might be able to rustle together a few APs to help,” he said gruffly, and strode away to a desk by the far wall to pick up a phone.
They stood watching anxiously behind Charlie as he tapped in the first code at a console in a corner of the control tower observation floor. Penalski had left to collect his Marines and scout the ground while waiting for the Air Police reinforcements to show up.
It turned out that Major Sorven, who headed one of the communications sections and had been Charlie’s first hope, had moved from Vandenberg several months previously. His successor was a Major Myran, but nobody knew where he was. “Can we try a guy called Crowe Thompson, then?” Charlie asked. Thompson was a civilian technician who had worked under Sorven.
The MP operating the phones sounded as if he was beginning to think that perhaps Charlie was a little crazy. “There isn’t anybody in the labs. Didn’t anyone tell you, it’s not exactly a normal working day today?” Keene and Colby exchanged glances. Colonel Lacey, standing with them, turned away for a second to catch the dialogue of one of the controllers behind, who was getting a distress call from something coming in over the Pacific.
Charlie licked his lips. “This is important,” he told the MP.
“Everything’s important.”
“Just hold a second, will you?” Charlie consulted his notes again hurriedly. “How about the launch complexes themselves? There are things going on in there. We can see the lights. Is there anyone answering in OLC-6 East?”
“Yeah, they’re busy over in there, all right.”
“The Boxcar Flight Checkout Area. Try and find an Andy Lintz. Like I said, it’s important. I wasn’t kidding.”
“Gimme a sec. I’ll check around.”
Orbiter Launch Complex-6 East was a refurbished version of the old SLC-6 facility built for the primal NASA shuttle and virtually dismantled following the cutback in operations after the Challenger accident back in the eighties. Now it handled the newer design of one-stage “Boxcar” orbiters that were simpler, easier to assemble, and had the convenience of being prepared and loaded horizontally and under cover, to be elevated vertically only for launch. Charlie had worked for a week with Lintz on a NASA-supplied image-processing computer that had been found faulty after it was delivered to the assembly area for installation.
Across the floor, an officer who had been hunched with two operators in front of one of the consoles straightened up and turned to call to Lacey. “Sir, we’ve got something coming in low and fast from the east, not responding to calls. Strong radar emissions. ATC has no information.”
“The lame duck’s signaling that it’s coming straight in,” the former operator reported from another part of the floor. “They’re on one engine, and it’s intermittent.”
“Clear the main runway,” Lacey ordered. “Dispatch crash tenders and ambulance, and hold further movements till it’s down.” He started to turn back to the officer and the other two operators, but then looked back at the screen in front of Charlie Hu as movement caught his eye. A woman in a green coverall and yellow hard hat had appeared; but she seemed to be distracted and was looking away.
“My name is Hu. Is Andy Lintz there? It’s vitally urgent that I speak to him. . . . Hello? Ma’am? . . . I said, is Andy Lintz there, anywhere?” The woman moved aside without replying, gesturing vaguely to somebody else and keeping her eyes on something distant that seemed to be happening behind the viewer. After a few seconds, a chubby, bespectacled man in a white smock showing grease stains appeared.
“Say, Charlie. . . .” He spoke in a low voice, as if not wanting to be overheard.
Hu tossed a quick, relieved grin back over his shoulder at the others and made a thumb’s-up. “Yeah, right, Andy. How’s it been going? Look, I need some help, and it’s really important. I’m with some people across in the Vandenberg tower right now. We think something serious is scheduled to happen in there fairly soon, and I need access to somebody reliable who can organize security.”
Lintz seemed only to be half hearing, and was watching something beyond the screen in the same inexplicable way that the woman in the yellow hard hat had. The sound of voices shouting indistinctly came through in the background, and then the louder echoing of something being said over a bullhorn.
“Yeah . . . well, it might not be a good time right now, Charlie. It seems we’ve got what you might call a ‘situation’ developing here. There are guys in combat gear waving guns, and somebody just yanked the Launch Supervisor out of his office. Could be you’re a little late, Charlie.”
A roar from outside the tower, rising rapidly and then falling again, signaled the unknown intruder making a low pass over the base. Charlie turned in his seat to confront the stunned expressions on the faces of Keene and Colby. Lacey, his face paling, stepped forward behind them. “We’re too late,” Charlie repeated, his voice barely above a whisper. “All this time we’ve been trying to figure out how to stop them getting in. And they’re in there already!”
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Most of the others around the floor were too busy with their tasks to realize what was happening. Lacey’s adjutant, however, had been following from a short distance and came across. “It was the C-130,” he breathed.
Numbed, Keene merely jutted his jaw at Lacey inquiringly. “We had an old C-130 come in earlier,” Lacey said. “With everything that’s been going on I’d forgotten about it. It had all the proper clearances from Launch Operations. We sent it up by Security Gate Three, which leads straight through to the Boxcar launch area. That has to be how they got in.”
“Queal fixed for it to be opened from the inside,” Colby groaned.
“The Distress Call is on final, looking okay,” the operator tracking the approaching plane from the west announced.
On the screen showing the inside of OLC-6 East, Andy Lintz looked up, sending what looked as if it was meant to be an apologetic grin to someone behind the viewing angle, and backed away with his hands raised. A moment later, the screen blanked out.
“What’s that intruder doing?” Lacey shot across at the other operators.
“Going into a tight turn about five miles out, climbing slightly. Looks as if it’s going to circle.”
“Maybe they’re not all in yet,” Colby said suddenly. “The C-130 might just have been the door-opener for Queal’s FAST team to make contact with the inside group.” He pointed to the console where the intruder was being tracked. “That has to be Voler and the rest of them showing up now. They were supposed to land as soon as the move was made inside, but the runway’s obstructed by that S.O.S. that’s coming in.”
It made sense. “Maybe . . .” Keene nodded slowly. But what could they do about it? An AP officer was trying to pull together a security contingent, but he hadn’t reported back. In any case it was all too late now. All they could do was watch impotently and wait for events to unfold. To have gotten this close . . . As the realization slowly soaked in, Keene found himself feeling sick somewhere deep in his stomach.
And then the adjutant officer took a call from the tower switchboard downstairs. “Somebody in OLC-6 is asking to talk to the tower supervisor,” he announced.
“Tel
l them to put it through here,” Lacey said. Moments later, a swarthy-faced figure wearing an Air Force parka and colonel’s insignia appeared on an auxiliary screen of the console that Charlie was sitting at. “This is Colonel Lacey, base commander, at present supervising tower operations. Who is this?”
“It doesn’t matter who I am. All you need to know is that we have control of the OLC complex and access to it from the runway area, and we are currently holding General Ullman and his immediate staff. Just cooperate, and nobody need get hurt.”
“His name’s Delmaro,” the adjutant murmured, moving alongside Lacey. “One of General Ullman’s staff officers.”
Keene started and caught Colby’s look as his eyes widened. Ullman hadn’t been part of it! Queal’s inside man was one of Ullman’s subordinate commanders. They could have gone to the top, all along. Keene’s feeling of nausea increased.
“What do you want?” Lacey asked tightly.
“Good.” Delmaro nodded. “The aircraft that is about to land on the main runway now is carrying the visitors from Kronia, who are under armed supervision. Their well-being, I don’t have to remind you, is a matter of considerable importance to the government of this nation. It will therefore be in your own best interests to cooperate. We require safe passage for them to Security Gate Three, where they will be received by a force from inside this complex. Is that clear and understood?”
The screen split to show a view looking out into the night, showing hooded figures with rifles moving away from the camera through a chain-link gate, perhaps taken from a vehicle parked in the vicinity. The message was that the people Delmaro represented had the gate and its approach already secured.
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