by Stephen Moss
Lana switched her attention to the reports, monitoring each of them in real-time. Images flashed on various channels, all clearly from the same source. Stock footage, no doubt. They started with an amateurish-looking photo taken from a telescope at a university in Cameroon. It showed a line dropping from the sky, seemingly from nowhere.
Lana did not need to see more to understand its implications, but her mind continued to track the story as she thought about what she was seeing. She knew immediately what that line was. She had seen ones like it a thousand times.
She had first travelled on a space elevator when she was five. She had never seen a cable being strung before, as on Mobilius they just passed new ones up existing cables once they had the main hubs in place. But she had seen old footage of the first tethers being lowered to Mobilius. They were moving faster than she had expected. Even with massive unrest across the planet, they had managed to get this far in only three months since the fall of the satellites.
She pondered the implications and began to build a system request for her machine mind to start modeling how quickly they would be able to start construction of significant space-based manufacturing facilities.
As she did so, her mind continued to monitor the various reports. It watched as the president wrapped up his speech and then handed over to one Admiral Hamilton to field questions. She smiled. Her old friend Admiral Hamilton. He was on her list too, along with his son. But they were way down the pecking order.
Her real attention was elsewhere as her subroutines continued to monitor the feed. It watched as the president thanked the assembled members of the press and then stepped out of a side door. Then it saw something.
Suddenly her view changed.
She had programmed the system rule long ago. As a subroutine of her mind, the rule searched for any sign of her targets and was to notify her instantaneously if it located any such sign. The alarm sounded in her head, clearing her field of vision and instantly updating her on the tiny piece of information that had catalyzed it. As the side door had opened for the president, it had caught sight of half a face. It was nothing more than a profile of a nose and the front of one man’s cheek. But it was enough. The door closed behind the president and the view was lost.
But it was all her mind had needed. In the White House, waiting for the president to leave the press conference, supposedly out of sight, was Neal Danielson.
Sitting up, Lana did something all her systems told her was unnecessarily risky. She started to move. Not too quickly, but any movement at all might give away her position to the helicopters circling above. She needed to get out of the valley, over the ridge, so she could start to make her way to DC.
She sensed one of the Apache’s coming close and leapt lithely out of sight.
Inside the chopper, the systems sighted the movement momentarily as she leapt and the pilot saw a blip. They instantly went weapons hot, calling out to the rest of the team that they might have seen something.
They had trained hard for this. They knew that Lana might be able to bring down one of the deadly attack copters, having seen the images of Quavoce co-opting one in midair in Iran. To that end, they had installed kill switches into the weapons controls in case of attack. But this was no attack. After a minute of silence following the blip, they came down from high alert and decided they must have been mistaken.
But they still circled the spot where it had happened with backup from their sister ship. Lana moved more carefully now. Picking her moments with precision, she moved from shadow to shadow as the choppers banked in low and tight overhead, picking exact moments when she was obscured by the dense foliage of the canopy until she was out of their area of focus.
With no more movement the blip was eventually dismissed and twenty minutes later the Black Hawks had picked up Ayala, Ben and rest of the ground team. They would leave the final clean up to the local and state forces that had arrived to take over the scene. In company with the two Apaches, the group headed back to their base in Reston, Virginia, just outside DC.
On the ground a black figure moved through the muggy evening air amongst thick undergrowth along the bank of a river. It was one o’clock in the morning and she was forty-five miles from the White House, so she headed toward a nearby highway. She would leap aboard a passing truck headed into the big city and hitch a ride.
Until now, she had given the entire DC area a wide berth because of the heavy military presence throughout the city. But now she had a reason to risk it. With all its layers of protection, and with Ayala and her team nearby, she would have precious few minutes to find her quarry once she attacked the White House. Even if she moved quickly, she knew she would no doubt need to fight her way out afterward.
At least she knew what was going to be coming in after her, she thought, and her mind started calculating how to handle the potent force she had watched scouring the countryside for her, sorting through weaknesses, formulating combat tactics.
Chapter 19: Chopper
Viewed from ten miles away, it looked like an error in the world. A scratch on the sky like a paper cut, ending in the slightest of dots. It looked like the sky was about open up, revealing blackness behind the façade of blue and white. Hanging down from thousands of miles above, the cable dangled at a slight angle, the prevalent winds over a thousand miles of atmosphere pushing at it gently, although from a distance it seemed still, the forces spread over such distances as to become epic in nature.
As the three Royal Navy Chinook helicopters approached it, they kept in a strict formation. They had been specially configured for a unique task. Two pilots flew each, and they had heavy fuel tanks taking up their extensive cargo space. Tight band communications linked them together, patched through the HMS Dauntless below as it tracked the cable’s every movement. But the most notable modification was strung between them. Hanging on steel cables linking the front two heavy-lift choppers was a huge C clamp, facing forward like an open claw. Attached to the back of the clamp, the third chopper acted as an anchor, and, if something were to go wrong with either of its cohorts, they could detach from the team, and the third chopper could bank left or right to take its place as appropriate.
The helicopter team’s job was simple: latch on to the slowly swaying cable and help guide it down to the concrete and steel platform that now dominated the small island of Rolas, south of Sao Tome.
As the three big choppers came within a mile of the cable, it began to resolve, and the six pilots started to see how it gently moved in the jet stream. But as they got even closer, they saw that the gentle movements were on a massive scale, and they also began to make out the ball that hung at the end of this incredibly long chain.
The ball was trying to control the chain’s slow, ponderous movements as it lolled through ten-mile-wide swings, at first with bursts from its thrusters, always driving down, pulling the cable taut as it was slowly unreeled by the station above. It had been a constant balance, matching forces that had grown and grown over the weeks it had taken to get to this point. Changes in pressure at either end took days to reverberate along the cable’s length. So they were always calculating, predicting, a team of scientists and engineers focused solely on modeling and remodeling the cable’s behavior as it was lowered to earth.
Now the ball’s thrusters were all but silent, its job now more as counterweight, relying on its own weight to hem the great line as the final miles of its massive journey were closed as it approached home.
The helicopter pilots had practiced for weeks to lock in their maneuvers to the pendulous swing of the cable, they watched and they spoke in a constant flow of chatter, a language formed just for this moment, but rooted in the precise, high-speed chatter of aircraft carrier controllers, guiding their charges down to a moving runway.
As the tripod of helicopters swooped closer, they matched the lazy rhythm of the black line with a skill that bordered on art form. The clamp slung between them in its steel web, seeking its target. The cable towered ab
ove them, making them ever tinier by comparison. In the final moments, the rotors seemed to chug ever slower, the cable loomed ever larger, only a meter across, but reaching farther than they could imagine, up to the stars above.
Finally, the moment came. Eyes were focused, breaths were held, and, at the last moment, the ball at the end of the chain came to life again, as planned. It gave one more breath of fire, as if in protest at the cable’s capture. But in fact it was calling for its leash, a bark of acquiescence, to shake any final tremors from the line above, where the collar was being clipped.
They were in perfect sync, and the two lead helicopters slid either side of cable as it moved slowly from left to right. They felt the tremor as it glanced off one of the steel cables a meter shy of the clamp, and all three pilots watched with bated breath as the resultant wave went reverberating up the cable into the sky.
The carbon nanotubing that made up the nearly indestructible cable was extremely light, especially considering its incredible strength. But tens of thousands of miles of it still amounted to a spectacular weight, and an even more spectacular momentum. As the cable slid into the clamp, sensors closed it neatly and they had it.
Or rather, it had them.
The first tug was like a truck starting to roll down a hill, so slow it almost seemed gentle, but completely unstoppable. The left Chinook strained as it was drawn to the right, its partner veering wildly away from the cable tugging toward its rotors. As they had practiced, the rear chopper slid to the left and joined the tug, the two heavy-lifting helicopters exerting their full might to slowly tame the snaking beast between them. Over fifty thousand pounds of thrust clawed at the air, rotors screaming to halt the cable’s untenable sway.
From below, the HMS Dauntless tracked the operation, and watched as the cable began to bow gently. It would take many hours for the wave to reach the two shuttles anchoring its end. But in order to compensate, they were already applying a gentle thrust outward, tensioning the cable as it twisted to this new pressure. By the time the wave of energy from the tackle below reached the twelve men and women on Terminus, it would feel like a moment’s gravity as their ship quietly moved with the energy, and they would laugh as they momentarily ‘stood’ on walls and bulkheads, the illusion of gravity alien to them now.
With deliberate and powerful movements, and the help of the cable’s counterweight pulling at its length below, the three helicopters slowly wrestled the cable into submission, dampening fifty thousand miles of momentum.
Now began the long process of bringing the leashed cable to the waiting bars and piles of its Earth-based terminus.
- - -
Neal continued his lengthy explanation of what was happening on the big screen in front of them. His audience was small but auspicious: the president, Jim Hacker, and the CIA chief, Peter Cusick. The screen showed an image from the deck of the Dauntless as it tracked the three brave Chinooks, and the vast cable that dwarfed them.
“Now, I cannot stress enough how impressive that work is, Mr. President,” said Neal as he nodded his appreciation for the job the six pilots were doing. “Believe me when I tell you that the task those men are doing is both extremely difficult and extremely dangerous. If they stray into that cable it will mean a very unpleasant end for them, and possibly for the whole enterprise. They could, in theory, become ensnared. It is unlikely, but not impossible, and the sudden additional weight on the line without prior adjustment by Captain Cashman on Terminus could hypothetically bring the entire cable down.”
The room looked concerned at the apparent flimsiness of the whole plan, and Neal held up his hands placatingly, “Now, that is just a worst case scenario, and once the cable is anchored, Terminus can apply what we are calling contingency pressure, making the entire cable weight negative, essentially pulling constantly at the anchors we are going to attach.
“For now, the captain of the Dauntless is also under orders to intervene if the worst happens. With force if necessary, to protect the cable should anything go wrong. But I digress, and the hardest part is already behind us, anyway. Initial contact was always going to be the point of greatest disparity, and they have handled it with aplomb. From here on it should be plain sailing.”
They seemed somewhat mollified by his qualification, but still uneasy with the whole operation. Peter Cusick seemed particularly uncomfortable, and Neal suspected this was at least somewhat due to an ignorance about the science behind it. He was about to embark on an explanation of how an elevator to space made of carbon nanotubing had been an idea under active development by NASA for years, long before the Mobiliei’s arrival, when an alarm caught his ear.
Around the perimeter of the White House were a host of motion sensors and cameras. Outside these was a permanent cordon of police, while inside them was the first line of the Secret Service patrols. Lana had leapfrogged all of them.
- - -
Pulling to a halt in a stolen car, Lana parked illegally on the far side of Lafayette Park. She catapulted from the car at a sprint before it had even fully come to rest, her powerful legs accelerating hard across a small park, directly toward Pennsylvania Avenue. Barring the surprised shout of a policeman at the sight of her black silhouette powering down on him, the only announcement of her arrival was a small alarm set off by a motion sensor as she hurled herself into the air over the avenue and went soaring out over the White House lawn.
Two Secret Service men tried to track her black figure against the night sky as they shouted into their microphones, “Perimeter breach, north quadrant. Suspect fits description of Lana Wils …”
Their voices were cut off as they ran headlong into her weapons systems aiming down from where she was sailing through the night sky, a laser opening them up and spraying them across the pristine lawn as they ran to intercept her. As her long leap started to angle downward, she focused on four other Secret Service men arrayed in front of the house. They, in turn were bringing their Glocks up to bear on her.
She started to work her way through them, still in midair, taking the first down by lazing his face with fire, and then the second. She was about forty feet from hitting the destination of her massive arching jump, a window into one of the many halls of the White House, when she felt the return, two shells impacting heavily into her. It was a stark reminder of her last encounter with US special forces as two of the snipers arrayed around the roof of the White House brought their weapons to bear. The rounds were hot and fast and they visibly halted her progress.
Lana changed her target priorities, even as the two Secret Servicemen on the ground started to fire as well. She ignored them now, and their small arms fire, and instead sought out each sniper emplacement and assaulted it, sacrificing her momentum further as she unleashed her sonic weaponry as well.
Her flight seemed to falter in mid air as more rounds hit her and suddenly she was hitting the ground, desecrating the serenity of the famous lawn as she wantonly dug into it, propelling herself forward more like a panther than a human. More guards were already converging. More guns were coming to bear. This was a fiercely well-guarded place and she could not take them all.
But she did not plan to. She planned to get inside. To take the fight into the corridors and offices. She planned to do her killing up close, where the advantage swung wildly in her direction. And so she drove herself bodily into the remaining two guards directly in front of her.
As more and more rounds now pounded into her torso from above and from either side the bullets threw her off track. As she collided with the last guard in front of her, her black body was thrown to one side, and into the pillar to the left of the window she had planned to leap through, cracking the plaster.
But still she did not relent. She used the poor guard’s snapping body as a lever and wrenched him around to give her a final blast of forward momentum. Hurling herself into and through the window at last she snatched a chunk of the shattering glass in mid-air, and without even looking in the last guard’s direction she hurle
d the shard at the man. The two-pound splinter of tempered glass was travelling at thirty miles an hour when it caved his face in, throwing him backward and sending his instantly limp body reeling across the cloistered balcony to join his colleagues.
- - -
In another part of the building, Neal’s briefing went silent in the wake of the distant alarm. Within seconds of the perimeter breach, Secret Service men were crashing through the doors to the briefing room and dragging the president to his feet. They had heard the stifled warning from the first men to fall and knew it was Lana.
Assuming she had at last come for the president himself, they responded to the training Ayala had given them. Under their trademark suits they all wore black of a different kind, battleskin. Like that which Ayala’s team wore, it protected their bodies, and they now pulled black hoods out from under their collars, sealing them around their faces to extend the protection further. As they hustled the president out, they formed a phalanx around him.
A moment later, Neal, Jim, and Peter Cusick were left alone. Neal stared after them as Peter turned to him, “Guess we’re on our own.”
They shared a bewildered look in the wake of the shouts of the president’s guards as they coordinated his evacuation.
Peter’s face turned grave, “I’d suggest sticking with them, but honestly I think that you would only …”
Peter left the point unfinished, and Neal nodded. While the Secret Service agents secreted the president away to safety, Neal could only make things worse by joining them. The CIA chief had long since expressed his concern with Neal hiding away at the president’s location. He knew that Neal needed to stay connected with the commander in chief, but he also knew that the maniac known as Lana Wilson was not after the government, not yet. She was after Neal and Madeline, and as long as Neal was there he only increased the risk of an attack just like this one. But Peter also knew that if Lana ever satiated her desire to kill Neal, then it wouldn’t be long before she turned her focus to the president anyway.