Lethal Payload

by Don Pendleton

  He passed a convoy of oversize half-ton trucks dripping with armed legionnaires heading for the space center. The center was only a few miles outside of town. As Bolan approached the great flat plains of the launch areas, he saw the double electric fences topped with razor wire. The roadside flanking the fences swarmed with people and parked cars. People played soccer in the open areas by the road. People ate and drank and played guitars. Everyone was constantly checking their watches and listening to the countdown on portable radios. French Guiana had a small population. Nearly everyone in the town of Kourou worked directly for the space center or supported its employees. Launchings were big events, and everyone who could turned out to watch them. Already, people were drifting away from their diversions and shading their eyes as they looked out across the launch fields.

  The slender white spire of the Ariane-5 rocket gleamed in the tropical sun. The gantry had been rolled away and the rocket stood alone.

  Launch was imminent.

  Bolan brought his motorcycle to a halt. He couldn’t bluff his way through the gate, and he would be cut to pieces in seconds if he charged it. Ramming double electrified fences on a battered BMW would be equally suicidal. He’d just have to go airborne. Bolan eyed the stately palm trees that lined the perimeter road.

  There was forty-footer a hundred yards down that would do.

  Bolan road his bike to the tree. Palms had stiff skins but were soft and pulpy on the inside, and quite easy to cut through. Unfortunately, he didn’t have an ax. The Executioner turned as a jeep drove slowly down the road. A pair of armed legionnaires were inside inspecting the scattered crowds.

  Bolan parked his bike. He smiled and waved them over.

  The jeep pulled off the road. One of the legionnaires got out. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and smiled.

  Bolan spun his FR-F1 sniper rifle around on its sling. The legionnaire barely had time to start in surprise as Bolan rammed him in the midriff with the muzzle of the sniper rifle. The man wheezed and bent, and Bolan’s buttstroke nearly lifted the legionnaire out of his boots.

  The legionnaire in the jeep shouted and fumbled for his pistol.

  Bolan closed on the vehicle in three strides. The windshield was down. He vaulted up onto the bumper and then the hood. The legionnaire just cleared leather with his Beretta when Bolan’s boot swung up under his jaw like a field goal kicker. The legionnaire collapsed in his seat.

  People nearby shouted and pointed at the policeman who had struck down two legionnaires.

  Bolan slung the sniper rifle and took up the unconscious soldier’s FAMAS assault weapon. The legionnaires were patrolling a military launch, and there had been vague threats of an attack. They were armed with rifle grenades. Bolan chose a blue, antiarmor munition and clicked it over the muzzle.

  People began pointing and shouting at Bolan in earnest.

  The Executioner walked up to the palm tree, took a rough estimate at how it would most likely fall and fired at its base.

  The FAMAS rammed back in recoil. The grenade’s shaped charge payload detonated and the jet of superheated gas and molten metal sheared through the base of the palm. People began screaming. The palm shuddered as its base was cut from under it, and Bolan ran for the BMW as the tree began to topple.

  A mixed group of launch watchers began clustering into an outraged mob.

  Bolan held the FAMAS rifle’s trigger on full-auto and sprayed an entire magazine over the crowd’s heads.

  People scattered screaming in all directions. Bolan tossed away the spent assault weapon and kicked the BMW into life.

  The palm let out a groan as it slowly fell across the road. Metal tore and sparks screamed as it crashed into the fence. Sap sizzled and the smell of charring pulp filled the air. The first fence had nearly collapsed, but the second had held the weight of the tree. The palm hung suspended at a fifty-degree angle. People were running every which way. Alarms began to ring on loudspeakers across the launch fields.

  Down the road, the convoy of legionnaire trucks came into view.

  Bolan took the BMW down the road a bit and then turned in a tight circle. He took an oblique angle at the trunk and popped a wheelie as he accelerated. The rear wheel ground against the trunk, and Bolan turned the front tire to fall across it. The bike skidded and the soldier nearly dropped it as it wobbled. The rear wheel bit and Bolan was on the trunk. He twisted his wrist back and sent the bike shooting along the trunk full throttle. The palm began to bow with the weight as Bolan picked up speed.

  The giant fan of leaves at the top of the tree had begun to burn. Bolan held the throttle down and the ancient engine screamed into the red line. He and the bike punched through the curtain of flaming palm fronds.

  His stomach dropped as he and the bike went airborne.

  Launch Control Bunker One

  “TEN MINUTES and counting.” The young launch control engineer’s voice grew giddier with each passing minute he announced.

  Sahad stared at the boards. All systems were go. His triumph was total. He stared out at the Ariane-5 with palpable anticipation. The rocket’s payload was the sum total of his life’s effort. Everything had been designed according to specifications. The orbital thrusters, the solar wings, the size, the shape, the weight, everything down to the last detail. Only there was no highly sensitive observation suite. The high-powered thermal imaging equipment, the ultra-sensitive radars, the highly sophisticated computers and powerpacks that serviced them had been omitted. No one save Sahad and his team knew this. They ran all the tests. They reported that everything was functioning perfectly. Outwardly, the satellite met all weight and design specifications.

  Only Sahad and his team knew that in the belly of the satellite lay a thermonuclear weapon, sheathed in powdered cobalt.

  The satellite would ascend into space in exactly the planned trajectory and assume its assigned orbit. However, when it passed over the United States it would deviate from orbit. It would fold its solar wings, fire its thrusters, and reenter Earth’s atmosphere. Nothing would guide it from that point. It would be a simple ballistic trajectory. The satellite would plunge to Earth. Sahad and his team felt they could predict with accuracy that it would hit somewhere within a one-hundred-kilometer radius of the target point. The target point had been adjusted a hundred kilometers east of the ocean to make sure of an overland detonation.

  Low altitude burst had been chosen so that the half-megaton explosion would draw up the maximum amount of dust and debris into the fireball. That dust and debris would become radioactive fallout. At the same time it would mix with the eight tons of powdered cobalt sheathing the weapon.

  The fireball would imbue the cobalt with radioactivity, but by its nature, cobalt emitted absorbed radiation in a vastly more rapid and violent fashion than most other elements. Every particle of cobalt would spew forth its absorbed radioactivity like a fiercely burning sun. In a matter of hours, every living thing within two hundred miles would have received a lethal dose of radiation.

  This of course, would be in addition to the heat and blast effects of the half-megaton explosion, and, over the course of time, the slower, more insidious radioactivity of the normal, persistent fallout of the regular dust and debris.

  Sahad’s smile was beatific.

  America’s darkest day was only a matter of hours away.

  Designing, building and substituting the weapon had been the easiest part of the plan. It had taken ten years for Irar Sahad to assume the identity of Babu Seth. Ten years earlier, two promising aerospace engineers had died. To the world at large, Irar Sahad had died in a car crash in Karachi. Babu Seth had been strangled while on vacation in Goa. Seth’s immediate family died almost simultaneously in a terrible fire, and Irar had taken his place, taking his scholarship to study aerospace technology in France.

  No one in Paris had known that the promising young Hindu scientist from Goa was really a highly motivated Muslim from Kashmir. He graduated with honors and did everything in his power to e
nhance the French space program. His mission had been vague. Perhaps the opportunity to blow up or destroy a U.S.-European joint space station, or to put a weapon in a satellite being taken into space by a U.S. space shuttle.

  Then when this project had begun, Sahad had felt the glowing glory of inspiration. His plan had been enthusiastically approved, and Sahad had put it into motion.

  Other sleeper agents, such as Thana in the Action Direct had gotten themselves transferred to French Guiana. The French foreign legion in Guiana was in charge of security at Kourou, and the Muslims among them had been converted to the cause and recruited. They had seen that others were recruited and transferred.

  “Five minutes and counting.” The launch control technician could no longer control his enthusiasm as he looked up from his boards. “She’s a beauty, Dr. Seth.”

  “Yes, Remi.” Sahad smiled benevolently. “She is—”

  Alarms began to shrill in the control room.

  “Remi! What is happening?”

  “I don’t know!” Every engineer and technician was scanning their boards feverishly. All read everything was perfect with the rocket.

  “Those are the security alarms.” Thana drew her pistol. “The perimeter has been breached.”

  Dr. Mohammedkhani was staring, dumbstruck, out the massively reinforced observation window. “There is a policeman on launch field one. On a motorcycle.” She picked up a pair of binoculars from the counter. “He has a rifle.” She lowered the binoculars in shock as they revealed the man’s face. “It is—”

  “Emergency launch!” Sahad’s voice rose to a hysterical pitch. “Launch now!”

  BOLAN TORE across the launch field. The legionnaires charging in pursuit did not worry him. The wheeled armored personnel carriers rolling out of the building complex and their 20 mm automatic cannons did. Bolan kept his eyes on his target as the alarms continued to clang and howl throughout the space center. The Ariane-5 was massive, and all Bolan had was a .30-caliber rifle with six rounds remaining in the magazine.

  He had two things working in his favor.

  Like all modern rockets, the Ariane-5 was made of aluminum, and aluminum as absolutely thin as the designers thought they could get away with. Save for some internal bracings, the rocket was a big aluminum balloon, and far from bulletproof.

  And that gigantic aluminum balloon was filled with more than a hundred tons of highly volatile chemical fuel.

  Bolan heard gunshots and tried to ignore them as he drove toward the control bunker. The bunker was a low, gracefully swept arc of concrete made to survive any rocket mishap. It was the only place on the field that offered any cover from the weapons that sought him.

  The French gunners were trying to track his speeding motorcycle, but the range was closing by the second, and there could be up to ten heavily armed legionnaires inside.

  The bunker was the only place that would give Bolan any chance at all of surviving what he was about to attempt.

  Another cannon joined the first, and Bolan flinched as the shell’s sonic booms cracked over his head one on top of the other in automatic fire. Bolan pulled the bike around the front of the bunker. Concrete ripped and shattered across the top as the structure temporarily sheltered Bolan. He dropped the bike and unslung his rifle. He glanced back at one of the bunker’s observation slits. Through the massively thick ballistic glass Bolan could see Mohammedkhani among a crowd of scientists staring at him.

  Bolan raised his rifle as he turned back to the task at hand.

  The soldier was not a chemical engineer, but he had been around rockets before. In their liquid states, the two fuel elements were stable, and it took the active effort of the rocket engine’s igniters and pumps to channel them, mix them and ignite them into propulsive fuel. But to keep them in the liquid state, the two elements had to be kept in sealed, separate chambers. If those chambers were breached in any way, the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen would begin boiling off into their gaseous state.

  They would then become highly volatile. Even more so when mixed.

  Bolan put the crosshairs of the FR-F1’s telescopic sight on the upper stage engine. He ignored the alarms and the sound of approaching vehicles as he scanned the top of the upper-stage and found the boil-off valve. The air shimmered around the valve with little ice flakes as the invisible, supercold hydrogen mixed with vapors in the air. Bolan lowered his sight. The boil-off valve for the liquid oxygen was much easier to detect as it intermittently spewed out white clouds of uncongealing oxygen.

  The hydrogen was on top. The oxygen was on the bottom. Bolan needed both of them boiling off, and a spark.

  Bolan raised his rifle and fired. His bullet struck the side of the upper-stage a few feet from where he judged the centerline to be. Nothing appeared to happen, and he dropped his aim two yards down and flicked the bolt and fired again. Bolan was instantly rewarded with a white plume of pressurized liquid oxygen squirting out of the side of the rocket and going gaseous. He examined his first hole and was pleased to see the shimmer of the invisible, negative 412-degree Fahrenheit gas forming ice flakes as it mixed with the outside air.

  The Executioner heard the thunder of helicopter blades.

  He worked the bolt and fired twice more, punching two more holes a foot apart from the first two. The gasses were clearly mixing, but he was not getting a catastrophic ignition.

  A helicopter swept over the bunker, and bullets sprayed past Bolan’s head and smashed into the bunker. He could clearly see Islamov leaning out of the bubble canopy with a FAMAS rifle. Bolan ignored the Russian as he raised his rifle and put his crosshairs on the pilot. Bolan fired and the canopy shattered with the bullet strike. The helicopter lurched as the pilot was hit. Islamov was nearly dumped from the helicopter, and his rifle fell from his hands as he held on for dear life. He heaved himself back in the cockpit and grabbed for the loose the joystick.

  Bolan swung his rifle back on the Ariane-5 and fired his last round.

  Nothing happened.

  Bolan dropped the spent rifle and drew the antique Lebel pistol he had taken from the policeman. He raised it in both hands and emptied it in rapid fire into the cockpit of the helicopter. The chopper banked steeply to the right and then roared off under control away from the bunker area. Bolan turned. He could hear the whining and roaring of the armored personnel carriers as they closed in on the bunker. He reloaded the revolver from the rounds on the police belt.

  The soldier glanced up at a sudden rippling, sibilant hissing noise.

  Pale flame jetted out of the side of the Ariane’s upper-stage like a match flaring. It was joined by a second, a third and a fourth as the liquid hydrogen and oxygen ignited under high pressure. The jets grew larger and longer as the holes in the tanks ripped wider under the burning pressure. Bolan turned and ran up the sloped front of the concrete bunker.

  Cannonfire ripped into life as the surprised gunners of the APCs saw Bolan jump up into their sights. Bolan ran across the roof and leaped down. The back of the bunker was a blank concrete wall save for a short, narrow stairwell that lead to a reinforced steel door.

  Bolan stood locked in the cannon sights of two armored personnel carriers with nothing but a revolver in his hand.

  The turrets of the two vehicles tracked down to put him in a crossfire.

  The world abruptly came to an end.

  Bolan threw himself down the stairwell as God clapped his hands behind him. The air shuddered with the violence of it. Tank after tank containing ton after ton of liquid fuel detonated from the upper-stage to the lower-stage and went of like a string of titanic firecrackers. Orange flame filled the world as the burning gasses roared over the bunker in a wave. Bolan curled into a ball at the bottom of the stairwell as his hair singed and his exposed skin tightened against the searing heat. Sheets of burning liquid oxygen and hydrogen flew through the air, boiled off, went gaseous and detonated like bombs. Behind Bolan’s tightly shut eyes, the world was a pulsing orange and white that silhouetted the
veins in his eyelids. The concussions shook Bolan’s very bones and seemed to bounce his brain in his skull.

  The fire expanded around the top and sides of the bunker, and Bolan’s world went white with blast furnace heat.

  19

  The bunker shook to its foundations with the explosion. Orange and yellow fire blasted against the observation slits and lit up the control room in shuttering shades of hell. Scientists and technicians screamed as the Ariane died in an orgy of fire.

  Sahad kept his feet and walked directly to his desk. He flipped open the latches of his briefcase and pulled out the brutally shortened shape of a Russian AKSU-74 submachine gun. He snapped in a 75-round drum and racked the bolt.

  Remi ran up to Sahad as he clicked the folding stock into place. The young technician was so torn between terror and tears at what had happened to the Ariane that he seemed not to notice the gun. “Dr. Seth! We must—”

  Remi stopped in midsentence as Sahad shouldered the weapon and pointed it at him.

  “Dr. Seth…”

  Flame shot from the muzzle. Sahad’s burst ripped the front of Remi’s lab coat to bloody shreds, and the young technician toppled over a control console. New screaming erupted within the control room at the sound of automatic rifle fire and the sight of Remi’s crumpled body.

  Rage filled Sahad’s breast. His dreams of smiting the United States with radioactive fire died as the last bits of the Ariane burned out on the launch pad. He turned that rage against the control-room team as he began firing burst after burst into the wildly fleeing scientists.

  The door in the back of the bunker and the tunnel that lead from the bunker to the main complex were the only ways out. Sahad stalked through the control room shooting anyone who moved toward either one. As he passed, he shot people cowering under their consoles. Sahad’s weapon ripped on. They would die. They would all die.

  Dr. Dutronc hit Sahad in a flying, blindside tackle. Sahad slammed up against a console, and the bigger man bore him over and onto the floor. He saw stars as Dutronc pumped his fist into his face again and again. Dutronc grabbed his adversary by the throat and began bouncing his skull against the floor violently.