Grant tried to console himself with the thought that Tyler would agree he had no choice. The good of the country came first. Tyler had been an officer in the Army, with responsibility for ordering men into harm’s way. But Jess was an innocent victim. She’d never made the pact that you would give your life for the greater good.
Both military veterans, Grant and Morgan had made that bargain. It didn’t need to be said between them that they were willing to die to keep the spaceplane from launching.
“Morgan, talk to me.”
After a few seconds, he heard, “I’m here.”
“How are you doing?”
“I was able to hold down my lunch. My vision’s a little blurry, but it’s clearing up.”
“And the vertigo?”
“Better. I can handle the stick now.”
Grant let go and she put the plane into a steady climb on the intercept heading. She seemed to be doing okay.
“We’re going to come up from below and behind them. Even if they’re aware of us from listening to ground control, they won’t be able to see us until we’re almost upon them. When we’re close, I’ll slow to a one-hundred-knot closing speed so that I make sure not to miss. At that velocity we’ll still do enough damage to destroy the plane.”
“And ours.”
“That’s why we’re going to eject just before impact. Under each of your armrests is a trigger. Feel for them but don’t pull them.”
Grant touched them. “Got ’em.”
“When the time comes, you’ll pull both armrests straight up and squeeze the triggers. The canopy will blow off and a rocket will eject the seat. Sit up straight to minimize the possibility of fracturing your spine. The wind will slam into you. Your mask should stay on, but if it doesn’t you’ll pass out before you reach twenty thousand feet. The parachute will open automatically.”
“How will that affect the flight path of the plane?”
“At the speed we’ll be going, the plane will be like a missile. The inertia will keep it steady for a few seconds.”
“We pull at the same time?”
“No, pulling the handle will eject both of us, one after the other.”
Morgan was the expert, so Grant had to take her word that all this would work.
“I still expect that afternoon together,” he said.
“I promise. I’ll be there.”
A distant white speck caught Grant’s attention.
“Target dead ahead,” he announced to Morgan.
In seconds he could see the bone-white Lodestar, its enormous wingspan cleaving the blue sky. They were coming up directly behind the carrier, which grew in size rapidly.
“I’ve got it,” Morgan said. “Are you ready?”
“Just tell me when.”
“I’ll count down. Throttling back.”
Grant’s chest strained against the safety straps as the afterburners cut off. They were now doing a stately six hundred knots. Ejecting at this speed and altitude was dicey at best, especially because he wasn’t wearing a flight suit. If he didn’t die of hypoxia, he might freeze to death before he got to a lower altitude.
The Lodestar was now close enough that Grant could make out the Skyward below it.
Tyler and Jess had no clue what was coming. Grant rationalized that they would die anyway if the Killswitch were detonated, but the taste of guilt was too strong to ignore. If he could trade places with them, Grant would do it in an instant.
“I’m sorry, guys,” he said under his breath. “So sorry.” He silently prayed for them.
“It’s time, Grant,” Morgan said. “I’ll see you on the other side.”
“Can’t wait.”
The Lodestar loomed in the windscreen. Morgan was aiming dead center. The T-38 would tear through the middle of the fuselage. Grant hoped that Tyler and Jess would never know what happened.
Morgan began her countdown.
“Pull on one. Five.”
Grant wrapped his fingers around the armrests and triggers.
“Four.”
Morgan’s voice sounded strangely at peace.
“Three.”
Like she knew this was a moment to be savored.
“Two.”
Like she was finally back where she belonged.
“One. Bail out, bail out, bail out!”
Grant jerked the armrests up, and his world became a rush of sensation. The sound of the explosive bolts blowing the canopy off. The intense cold of the air lashing his arms. The crushing force of the seat catapulting him out of the plane. The coppery taste of blood as he bit his lip. The tunneling of vision from sudden deceleration as the air dragged him to a stop.
As he tumbled through the air, a drogue chute deployed to halt the spin, and that’s when he saw that she had overestimated their closing speed. He’d ejected when they were still hundreds of yards from the Lodestar.
But Grant couldn’t see Morgan’s chute anywhere. She hadn’t bailed out.
For an instant Grant thought something had gone wrong with the ejection mechanism. But then he realized she’d tricked him into ejecting. Morgan was staying with her plane until the end.
The Lodestar pilot must have seen the plane behind him because at the very last moment he banked to the left. If Morgan had ejected, the T-38 would have flown right by it.
Instead, Grant saw why she’d been selected as a fighter pilot. Morgan reacted to the evasive maneuver by snapping the T-38 sideways and flying through the starboard wing of the Lodestar.
The T-38 was transformed into a fireball so large that Grant could feel the heat of the burning fuel. Morgan didn’t have a chance to eject.
The starboard engines of the Lodestar cartwheeled away. Flames shot from the stub of remaining wing, and the Lodestar did a barrel roll, turning upside down.
Grant struggled to breathe in the thin air, fighting to maintain consciousness. He owed it to Tyler to be a witness to the end.
Grant expected the carrier to break up from the extreme aerodynamic forces, but the Lodestar fuselage remained intact, demonstrating the strength of the bird-bone frame holding it together. The aircraft continued its lazy spin until it was right-side up again.
Then to Grant’s horror, the Skyward was released from the Lodestar. It dropped away and the Lodestar fell behind, the fire eating away at the carbon wing.
The Skyward’s rocket fired just before the Lodestar exploded, taking it safely out of range of the burning wreckage.
True to its name, the Skyward stood on its tail and shot into the blue atop a tongue of fire propelling it to four times the speed of sound.
Grant had never felt so helpless as he watched the plane disappear into the heavens.
“So sorry,” he whispered as the blackness took him.
FIFTY-EIGHT
The deep indigo mesmerized Colchev. As they accelerated toward the stars, the color of the sky faded through a rainbow of blues. He turned his head against the punishing g-forces and saw the Earth receding at pace he couldn’t have imagined. Distinct ground features became imperceptible, only the shoreline recognizable as they soared over Lake Michigan.
The myriad windows of the Skyward had saved the mission. With nothing to do until the Skyward launched, Colchev had been taking in the panoramic view when he happened to look over his shoulder and saw the jet bearing down on them.
He had screamed a warning at Zotkin, but only in time to avert a catastrophic collision. In one last heroic effort before the Lodestar disintegrated, Colchev’s old friend jettisoned the Skyward, initiating the automated flight sequence.
He admired Zotkin’s sacrifice and vowed that his name would have a place of honor along with those of the other men who gave their lives in support of this mission.
Colchev suddenly felt the weight of responsibility crash down upon him. Now he was the only one left to carry out their plan. The future of the world was up to him.
Although they had launched prematurely, Colchev was confident that they would reac
h a sufficient altitude to make the operation a success. All he had to do was shut down the engines when the fuel gauge neared the five percent mark, leaving him enough to get clear of the gamma radiation emitted when the Killswitch detonated.
Colchev tore his eyes away from the hypnotic sky and focused on the task at hand. The engine was gulping liquid hydrazine at a prodigious rate, embodied in the five g’s that plastered him to the back of his seat. It was a tremendous effort to raise his arm, but the engine shutoff switch was within reach.
Just two more minutes.
* * *
Tyler was too busy trying to wrestle his way out of the bungee cord to admire the view.
He didn’t know who had made the kamikaze attack, but he thanked them for giving him a sliver of hope. During the violent roll he had hung upside down in his belt, providing just enough slack to pull his hands from underneath the restraints.
The Skyward’s engine howled behind them, but he knew the sub-orbital trip would last only a few minutes more. He contorted his arms in an attempt to undo the belt release, but the angle made it impossible to reach with his fingers. His best shot was to use his elbow to unlatch it.
He had to remember to keep silent as he worked. Colchev was still attending to the instruments. Tyler had been thinking about how Colchev would bail out of the Skyward, and it occurred to him that the spaceplane wouldn’t have a control to manually depressurize the fuselage as Colchev had said he would do.
Once Tyler realized Colchev’s likely depressurization method, he knew Colchev wouldn’t hesitate to shoot both of them. Tyler had to get to Colchev before the Russian discovered that he was free.
Tyler got his elbow under the latch and pushed it out, his muscles overtaxed by their quintupled weight. But the effort was enough.
The straps fell back into the seat. Although he was loose, the bungee was still wrapped around his wrists, and he had no way to untie it. He would have to get Jess to do it, but the brutal acceleration glued him to the chair.
Then the rocket cut off. One moment he weighed a thousand pounds and the next he was floating above his seat like a balloon.
Using his tethered hands, Tyler propelled himself over to Jess, who was shaking off the effects of the g-forces. He raised both hands for her to be quiet. He hoped Colchev’s helmet would prevent him from hearing their movement.
Tyler unbuckled her as silently as possible. He attached her seat’s oxygen hose to her suit, then closed her visor and locked it shut, making the suit airtight. He quickly unraveled her bungee cord and then held his hands out for her to reciprocate.
His cord was cinched up even tighter than hers, so she had trouble getting at the knot. She looked up, frustrated, and then her helmet twisted as if she spied something over Tyler’s shoulder.
He turned and saw Colchev getting out of his seat, the SIG Sauer pistol in his gloved hand.
* * *
The engine had cut off on schedule, and Colchev experienced freefall for the first time. For a moment it felt like his innards would come pouring out of his mouth, but the sensation passed quickly. In the movies astronauts in zero gravity are often portrayed as if they’re swimming through molasses, but Colchev had the opposite feeling, as if he had no more corporeal form than a ghost. The slightest nudge could send him flying.
After checking that his internal oxygen supply was functional and his helmet was closed, his next task was to decompress the cabin so that he could open the hatch. The differential between the cabin and the vacuum outside resulted in twenty thousand pounds of pressure on the door. He had to equalize them, which was what the pistol was for.
Shooting a hole in the skin of the Skyward was necessary for Colchev’s plans. It was a common myth that puncturing a plane’s window would cause the fuselage to explosively decompress and that anyone near the hole would be sucked out. Experiments on various aircraft had shown that the only effect would be the slow leak of air until it was depleted. At this altitude the blood of anyone not protected by a pressure suit would boil.
No sane aircraft designer would provide a way to intentionally depressurize a cabin, so Colchev had to resort to a cruder method. He couldn’t shoot through the windows because they were stronger than ballistic glass, but the carbon-fiber body was not bullet resistant. His plan was risky, but the whole venture had been risky. Besides, he would arm the Killswitch beforehand so that if something went wrong and he died as a result of the decompression, the weapon would still detonate.
He rose out of his seat and grabbed the headrest to turn around. Even in the bulky pressure suit, he felt as graceful as a butterfly.
His gleeful mood was suddenly chilled by the unbelievable sight of Tyler Locke, his bound hands outstretched, sailing toward him.
* * *
Tyler was only halfway through the cabin when Colchev saw him, but he was committed to his course. There was no way he could duck if Colchev fired at him, and he hadn’t had time to let Jess untie him, so his wrists were still stuck together.
The pistol came around, and Tyler thought he was dead.
But Colchev didn’t account for the effects of microgravity. As he swung his arm around, the change in angular momentum was enough to throw his aim off. He fired, but the bullet whizzed past Tyler’s helmet and punched through the fuselage behind him.
Colchev rapid-fired two more shots, but he’d apparently forgotten about Newton’s Third Law of Motion: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. He hadn’t anchored himself before firing, so the recoil of the gun sent him flying backward. His second and third shots embedded themselves in the windows.
Though the first shot hadn’t hit Tyler, the.40 caliber hollow-point had done its original job. Wind whistled as air rushed through the ragged bullet hole. It would be a matter of seconds before the cabin atmospheric pressure was zero.
Tyler shut his visor as he soared toward Colchev, but it was only a delaying action. The air inside his suit was extremely limited. Without the connection to the spaceplane’s internal oxygen, he’d be hypoxic in about a minute.
He reached out and kicked the pilot’s seat, altering his trajectory so that he hit Colchev squarely in the stomach with both fists. The pain he could see on Colchev’s face through the Icarus suit’s clear visor told him the impact made an impression.
Tyler swung his elbow out and knocked the pistol away. Colchev slapped at Tyler’s helmet, causing him to somersault backward. He was already getting light-headed from the lack of oxygen, but holding his breath wouldn’t help. He had to make this a short fight. The whistling of the air was gone, meaning the pressure inside was now equal to the vacuum outside.
Colchev launched himself toward the Killswitch, but Tyler grabbed his ankles before he could reach it. Tyler halted his own forward momentum by looping his toes around the edge of the pilot’s seat.
The sudden stop whirled Colchev toward the hatch. Too late, Tyler saw Colchev grasp the emergency release handle and yank it.
The hatch door swung open. Colchev pushed away from it back toward the Killswitch. As Colchev struggled mightily against his grip, Tyler held on, but Colchev now had the advantage.
Because Tyler wasn’t hooked to the internal oxygen, the carbon dioxide level in his suit would soon reach a lethal concentration. He could already feel himself getting dizzy. It was only a matter of time before he passed out.
* * *
Jess had to do something. Tyler was in a war of attrition with Colchev, and the Russian had the upper hand. And if Tyler was unable to beat him, she wouldn’t stand a chance in a fight with him.
The Killswitch was what Colchev was stretching for. She realized that with the hatch open, she could put the unarmed weapon permanently out of reach no matter what happened to her and Tyler.
Her heart pounding, she detached herself from the oxygen hose and pulled herself along the seats until she was floating above the Killswitch. Though the LCD timer read three minutes, it wasn’t counting down; Colchev hadn’t activated it yet. It
didn’t matter that Jess had no idea how to disable the bomb. She had another solution.
Colchev waved his arms violently from four feet away, straining to get to her, but Tyler wouldn’t let go even as he was on the verge of unconsciousness.
Jess unhooked the quick-release bindings that were holding the Killswitch in place. She grabbed the end of it, and as she expected, the heavy bomb was now easy to maneuver.
With a firm grip, she aimed it at the open hatch. She braced her feet against the fuselage wall and then sprang forward.
Jess flew across the cabin, and when she was sure the Killswitch would clear the opening, she let go and flailed for purchase to prevent herself from following it out into the abyss.
Her hand latched onto the armrest of the nearest seat, and she swung around, her legs dangling through the open hatch.
Jess screamed at the thought of falling into space and used all of her strength to pull herself back inside. She glided to the back of the cabin where she saw the air hose floating next to her seat. She attached it and inhaled the cool oxygen blowing through.
Her terror abated, and she came to her senses long enough to see Tyler go limp. Colchev wriggled free from his grasp and pushed himself forward.
Jess steeled herself to fight him as best she could, but instead of coming for her, he went toward the base of the first row of seats. He rummaged around for a moment and then came up holding a fire extinguisher.
He placed his feet against a window and bent his knees. Then he did something that made Jess gasp in astonishment.
Colchev pushed off from the window and shot out the Skyward’s hatch into open space.
FIFTY-NINE
The Roswell Conspiracy tl-3 Page 32