Gunpowder Moon

  Hale nodded. “Specter? Do you concur?”

  “Um, roger that, Home 1,” Cabrera said over the com a few seconds later. “All systems nominal, initiating Ballgame on my mark.”

  Dechert switched his headset to a discrete channel and spoke in a low voice to Waters down on the flying deck. “Vernon, this is Dechert—are we prepped for SAR launch?”

  “Roger, Commander. Shuttle Two warming up, three jetsuits on board, flight plan Beta-1 loaded into the system.”

  He nodded, said “Copy,” and looked around the CORE to see if others had heard him. If they did, they didn’t look up. It had been decided that Hale, Dechert, and Thatch would launch a rescue attempt if something went wrong on the mission, and Waters would take command of the station. Waters didn’t like it, but Dechert knew he couldn’t leave Thatch behind on yet another mission, and he needed Vernon and Lane at Serenity 1 in case things went completely off their axis. Quarles had rigged up the jetsuits per his instructions, sneaking them down into the Hole to avoid being noticed while he made a few mission-specific modifications. Antimissile arrays, lasers, and EMP shielding had been placed around the perimeter of the station by the marines; it bristled now like a Viking fortress on the dead surface of the Moon. Everything was ready, and Dechert prayed to God that none of it would have to be used. If he took any comfort, it was in the utter calm that filtered through Cabrera’s voice as she radioed back to the station.

  “Ballgame in three, two, one, mark.”

  The shuttle nosed down and dropped to the dust-top, banking left and continuing the turn until it had almost reversed its course.

  “Slowing to 1300 knots, flying the wire on route Alpha-1,” Cabrera said. “Hundred and forty klicks to Crater Aratus.”

  They could see the rocky flanks of the Montes Apenninus now, the thermal imaging revealing the large, mounded humps of the mountains as diffusions of green light in the background. The scarred bulk of Mons Hadley lay just ahead. Dechert wondered where in its shadows the abandoned rover and lander from Apollo 15 sat. Apollo. What had Armstrong declared when he first stepped on the Moon? One giant leap for mankind?

  Now we’re stepping backward, he thought.

  “Looking good, Specter,” Hale said, his voice clipped and short. Dechert looked around the room. They all hoped that it was true.

  18

  The alarm rang two minutes into their run through the mountains, and it sounded just as it had in Dechert’s nightmares. Not the baritone chimes of Serenity’s master alert. This one warbled, as if it couldn’t put a finger on the danger it was trying to expose. It warbled again, and for a long, agonizing second, it was the only sound that anybody heard. Then the com exploded with chatter.

  “Threat alert, Home 1. We’re being painted,” Cabrera said.

  “Starboard side,” said another voice on the shuttle.

  “Confirmed,” Lane said. “Fire-control radar. High PRF. Active infrared, high probability of detection.”

  Adrenaline poured into Dechert’s veins, squeezing his chest. He looked at Hale, who locked and unlocked his jaw as he stood up over his console, gripping the sides of the tabletop until his knuckles went white.

  “Go to active radar,” Hale said. “Big bulge, wide-spectrum burst.”

  “Roger,” Cabrera said, and they could hear her copilot amid the background static of the com, calling out numbers. The shuttle’s sensors flared to active mode, firing out electromagnetic tendrils across the Montes Apenninus to find the source of the hostile radar. It didn’t take long.

  “Missile sites confirmed, mark one at two o’clock, bearing two-three-zero; mark two at two-thirty, bearing two-four-one. Confirmed high PRF.”

  Hale nodded. Only one country still used pulse-recurrence frequency in its surface-to-air missile targeting systems. The country that had warned them not to get too close to its territory on the Earth or the Moon. The People’s Republic of China.

  “Lock onto signal and go weapons hot,” Hale said. “Change course to one-three-five degrees, increase EMP shielding to full, confirm.”

  “Roger, weapons hot. Changing course to one-three-five degrees, accelerating to two thousand knots. EMP to full.”

  Dechert and Thatch glanced at each other and then back at the main monitor. Hale was getting them out of there, ordering Cabrera to turn to port, away from the fire-control radars hammering the shuttle’s hull. Cabrera banked left and skimmed into a broad, broken column of lunar foothills. It was a passive move, aimed to show the Chinese that she didn’t intend to start a fight. But the shuttle was only 180 kilometers away from New Beijing 2, well within the range that Standard had said could prompt the Chinese to attack.

  “You’re pulling them out?” Standard asked. “Captain, I’m not sure you . . .”

  Hale looked at Standard with a quick, menacing glare but didn’t take the time to say anything. The warbling alarm from the shuttle suddenly went shrill, like the flatline of a heart monitor. Then the forward-looking camera fuzzed over and the craft yawed violently to the right and rolled as if it had been punched, pitching the Moon’s horizon over on its side on the display screen.

  “Shit. EMP burst,” someone on the shuttle yelled through a sea of static. “Focused EMP.”

  “Shit.”

  “Power spike,” Cabrera said, still calm, working to correct the shuttle’s lurch to the side. She rolled to the left, too far, and then back again, stabilizing the ship. “Mains are down, going for restart.”

  “Restart.”

  “Got ’em back.”

  Quarles looked over at Hale. “They took a full burst, Captain, at least fifty kV/m,” he said. “Thrusters are up but spotty. I can’t guarantee they’ll stay online, and I don’t think the EMP domes will absorb another hit.”

  “Go suborbital, Lieutenant,” Hale said into the com, not waiting for any additional information. “Climb to thirty thousand meters and egress at one-one-zero degrees. Expedite.” He turned to Dechert and Thatch, the look on his face asking for agreement as much as telling them what he was doing. “Getting some altitude in case the thrusters go. A SAR team can pick them up in orbit if they have to.”

  “Good,” Dechert said, and Thatch nodded as well. If the shuttle’s thrusters flamed out at low altitude because of the electrical burst, the marines would probably crash into the mountains. But if Cabrera could somehow get them into low orbit and away from the Apennines, it wouldn’t matter if the engines shut down. A team from Low Lunar Orbit 1 or even Peary Crater could rescue them. Dechert watched the shuttle’s altimeter numbers rise as they ran across the bottom of the screen, and he silently willed them higher.

  But another alarm went off as Cabrera clawed for altitude. This one piped in a clear, universal language, loud enough to bring up everyone’s head. Multiple, high-toned pips, a sound so shrill that the human ear had been trained to pay attention to it.

  Missiles.

  “SAM launch!” Lane shouted, and Cabrera acknowledged her a second later in a voice that somehow held its composure.

  “Specter defending. Tracking two missiles, six o’clock low, range fifteen kilometers,” she said. The young lieutenant didn’t wait for orders from Hale this time. “Going to the deck, going to the deck.”

  She pitched the shuttle over and shot back down to the Moon’s surface, increasing power and bolting into a broad valley, the craft rocketing downward like a bird with its wings tucked in. Dechert felt the nausea in the pit of his stomach climb into his throat as he watched them descend. No pilot liked to go to ground when suffering a power spike, but Cabrera had no choice. It would have been suicidal to stay at altitude with SAMs boring in on them. Dechert remembered what his air wing commander had once told him about flying against missiles that were locked on to you: “Hug the Earth like she’s your mother, because your daddy’s the air, and he ain’t gonna help you.”

  “Missiles now at five o’clock low, range six kilometers, speed twenty-four hundred meters per second,” Lane said.

&n
bsp; “They’re EM-guided,” Cabrera said. “Maybe HQ-40s.”

  “Go weapons free,” Hale said, and his voice held a controlled fury as he pulled an old-fashioned stopwatch out of his pocket and clicked on it. “Launch countermeasures and fire back down the threat points.”

  “You’re locked onto ground targets one and two, weapons free,” Lane said.

  “Roger, Home 1,” said Cabrera. “Weapons free, missiles locked. Fox three. Fox three.”

  “Launching antimissile spread,” said another voice on the shuttle. Dechert assumed it was the copilot. He sounded more nervous than Cabrera.

  They could see the bright flashes of light on the nose-cone camera as the shuttle fired two missiles toward the Chinese launch sites and dropped an antiballistic cluster, which began tracking the incoming missiles so it could launch its own spread of miniature, bullet-size smart rockets. The miniature rockets were supposed to enclose over the missiles like folding umbrellas in an effort to detonate them short of their target, but the Chinese missiles also were smart, able to detect and avoid the little buzz bombs and remain focused on their quarry. It then became a contest of whose programming was stronger.

  Numbers ran through Dechert’s mind in a runaway jumble—missiles at 4700 knots, shuttle at no more than 2600 knots—a little more than five kilometers and closing. How much time did that give them? Five seconds? Maybe less?

  The shuttle descended to the Moon’s surface with the nose pitched down at a severe angle, and it looked for a sickening moment like the speeding craft was going to slam into the surface. Cabrera pulled up just as the nose camera filled up with Moon.

  “Jesus,” Thatch said, “I can’t even read how low she is.”

  Hale looked over at him, his face enflamed with the warning lights blinking in the room. “She’s trying to throw off the missiles with moondust,” he said, and everyone in the room understood. Dechert closed his eyes and imagined the picture: the shuttle at no more than twenty meters above the ground, flying faster than a sniper’s bullet and spitting up in its wake the ankle-deep, microfine regolith that had formed at the foothills of the Montes Apenninus over millions of years. It would be like flying a Galaxy-class cargo plane over a sandy beach in Florida, at full power. Maybe the tons of rock and moondust being spit up in the shuttle’s wake would throw off the missiles, or at least confuse them enough to let the countermeasures bore in and destroy them.

  And it was working. Cabrera pulled the ship hard to the right and the threat tone still piping through the com seemed to lose some of its potency, as if the projectiles closing in on the shuttle had become less certain of their intentions.

  “Firing secondary countermeasures,” Cabrera said, and the camera fuzzed over white again as chaff flared out of the shuttle’s belly and exploded behind the craft.

  “I’m reading hits on ground targets one and two,” someone in the back of the shuttle said into the com. “Confirm, Home 1. We have no visual.”

  “Roger that, Specter,” Lane said. “Confirmed hits on targets one and two. Tracking remained strong right up to detonation.”

  Standard banged his open hand on the console in front of him and whispered something between his teeth. Hale and Dechert stole a quick look at each other; regardless of what happened to the marines in the next few seconds, blood had been drawn on the Moon. Several Chinese commandos had surely died at the end of those radar-guided, five-hundred-pound projectiles.

  The room went silent. Everyone looked up, wondering what was missing. It took them a full second to realize that the threat radar on the shuttle was no longer whining.

  “Home 1, Specter,” Cabrera said. “Incoming missiles have lost lock. Maintaining speed and course at two-seven-five.”

  Was it over? The adrenaline thudding through Dechert’s temples and pouring heat into his ears left a ringing echo in his head. He looked up and saw everyone in the room frozen, not yet exhaling. After a few seconds, Thatch rubbed his hand through his curly mop of wet hair. Lane’s spine lost some of its straight precision, and Dechert could hear Quarles mumble “Jesus Christ” into his chest. Other than Dechert and Hale, none of them had ever been in combat before or even seen it from afar in real time. They all looked pale and sick with relief.

  Then the alarm came back. A quick, persistent beeping, repeating much faster this time. Dechert’s head snapped up. What the hell?

  “Specter defending!” For the first time in the mission, Cabrera’s voice was too loud.

  “Snapshot,” her copilot yelled. “Three thousand meters and closing.”

  Three thousand meters? How the hell could that be? Dechert looked over and saw the blackness in Hale’s eyes, his pupils blown open, as it became clear to both of them at the same time: The shuttle had been drawn into an ambush. A kill-box set up by the Chinese.

  “Banking right,” someone on the shuttle said. “Launch . . .”

  The missile detonated behind them a second later, its explosive charge pushing the shuttle forward in space as if it had been swatted by a bat. The craft’s rear end yawed to the left, and now the alerts and sirens filtering into the CORE droned together in a continuous, discordant symphony. Cabrera tried to right the sideways lurch. Too far. The ship spun counterclockwise. Slowly at first and then faster. The horizon blurred on the viewscreen as the shuttle began to spin out of control.

  “Starboard and aft thrusters down,” Cabrera said over the panic of electronic noise. “Go for restart.”

  “Restart. No fire.”

  “Try again.”

  “Restart. Negative on restart.”

  “All thrusters down.”

  Quarles looked over at Hale and spoke in a quiet, measured tone. “Mains and secondaries are off-line, Captain. Everything’s down. I think we should . . .”

  But Dechert didn’t hear the rest, because it didn’t matter. He looked around the CORE, which had spun into slow motion like the shuttle out on the Serenity basin. He could see Standard trying to make sense of the picture being beamed back to their monitor. He had never witnessed a spacecraft in a flat spin. His mind was trying to figure out how the camera had malfunctioned. Dechert almost yelled at him that if you fire enough missiles or EMPs at something, it’s sure to fail, but held his tongue. The CORE felt silent even with the mass of beeping alarms. The lights blinked less often. The sounds distorted in Dechert’s ears and then became artificially clear. Thatch clicking his teeth together. Quarles sucking in his breath. Hale, a statue, standing over his console, palms out on the gunmetal table, pulling his thumbs across the polished surface in a dull, desperate rasp.

  “Flameout, Home 1 actual, I’ve got nothing,” Cabrera said. Her voice was calm again, and she waited for a long second before she spoke her next words in the professional monotone of a pilot. “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.”

  Hale remained still except for his thumbs, which were trying to punch through the tabletop. “Copy your Mayday, Specter.”

  The shuttle spun horizontally, nose to tail, a few hundred meters above the Moon’s surface and slowly descending. Not high enough. In the blur of the infrared display, Dechert could see a low massif approaching in front of them. It inched closer with every spin until it began to fill the monitor. There was no way they could clear it. The alarms continued to drone.

  “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday,” Cabrera said again. “Angels below one. Terrain in front. Going in, seventeen-point-two degrees north, four-point-six east.”

  “We’re tracking you, Specter,” Hale said, and it was the calmness, the steadiness of his tone that cut through the transmission and reached his team on the Moon. “Launching SAR team to your location.”

  “Roger that, Home 1 actual,” Cabrera replied. “Beacon lit.”

  It was all just talk. The picture on the viewscreen continued to spin, faster now. The alarms on the CORE’s main console continued to pipe. Then the screen went black and all the noise stopped.

  19

  Dechert breathed in deep and felt the hot air expand his lung
s. It was the air you inhale when you open the door of an oven to check what’s cooking inside. Dry and roasting. The sky to the west flamed orange as dust rose over the desert. Beams of heat hit his face and then passed by, and looking up, Dechert saw that he was sitting under the fat fronds of a date palm, which moved in the shimmering heat and cast the ground below in parallel lines of daylight and shadow. A helicopter’s rotors thwopped in the dead air somewhere nearby.

  “Pocket cowboys. Kiss my left nut, Matchstick, you are the luckiest sonofabitch in the Bake.”

  They were sitting in the sand around a sawed-off oil barrel, playing poker as the day ground itself down and the Muslim call to prayer echoed through the limestone jumbles of the Bekaa Valley. Matchstick—the skinny kid from Scranton whose helmet bounced on his head like a paint can whenever he broke into a run. B-Dog—the machine gunner from Memphis who had “Recidivist Soul” tattooed across his back. Dawes—the pensive corporal who frowned with his eyes and never told anyone where he was from. Snook—the trailer-born Florida cracker who had been an expert at fishing the saltwater flats of Cockroach Bay long before he became an expert at killing men.

  “It ain’t luck, Snooky,” Matchstick said, pulling a pile of spent cartridge shells toward his stack. “It’s called playing tight-aggressive.”

  “Shit. The boy thinks he’s Johnny Chan Jr.”

  The afternoon slipped away grudgingly, as it always did in the desert. Billows of heat created distant rivers in the air as the sand began to cool. Helicopters buzzed in and out of the base, the great insects of war. Artillery fire thundered along the river basin. The thunk of mortar rounds echoed now and again as they came into the wire. Indirect fire, they called it. There was nothing indirect about it when a round landed close enough to rattle your teeth.

  The day had gone well; the week, badly. Two mornings ago, they had lost Jimenez, the radioman from Texas whom everyone called Habanero because he ate hot peppers by the dozen. He could squirt the damned things into his eyes, and occasionally did, when some poor bastard from D Company laid down a big enough bet. Nobody thought Habs would ever die. Not a guy who could pour juice from the hottest natural substance on the planet over his baby browns like it was so much eyewash. Not a guy who had never looked scared, even when the fire was coming in fast and heavy. His death had hit the squad hard—had hit Dechert hard—and nobody had said a word about it since they lined up his boots in the makeshift boneyard behind the mess hall.