Fire in the Sky

by Don Pendleton

  The man pursed his lips, then shrugged. "Simple enough. Just getting the thing launched on the shuttle wouldn't have been enough to silence Butler's objections. The satellite itself could still have been examined in space after the launch and before it was pushed out of the shuttle's cargo bay. A laser cannon could never have been disguised enough to fool someone who knew what he was looking for. And Butler wasn't just a crackpot. He was the inventor of liquid electricity. Someone would have believed him. It left absolutely no choice to the mission controller. To protect the three laser weapons he already had up there in space, he had to fire the laser on the fourth while it was still in Challenger's cargo bay. A burst of a thousandth of a second right through the hull and into the solid fuel boosters and…" the man made an explosive motion with his hands "…powee!"

  Bolan felt a chill ripple down his spine. He put the receiver up to his ear. "Hal...?"

  "Yeah," the man said quietly, choked up. "I heard."

  "We've got to move."

  "Proceed to Homestead Air Base," Brognola instructed. "It's in Leisure City on the east coast of the Everglades. We'll have a plane chartered for you at Orlando Airport. We're arranging for troops and we'll vac Bob Ito directly there. Good luck to you, Mack, and Godspeed."

  "What do I do with Julie?"

  "Mack, you can't let her out of your sight. Right now she's carrying around in her head the most important information in the world."

  "I see."

  "Do you?"

  "Good luck on your end of it," Bolan replied.

  There were several seconds of dead air, then Brognola said, "Mack...I intend to see my wife and kids again."

  "Understood," Bolan returned, hanging up the phone.

  He looked at Julie. "Stay here. There's nothing more you can do."

  She rushed into the protective circle of his arms. "If we're going to die, Mack, I want to die with you."

  He hugged her fiercely. Then the responsibility took over. He turned to Robbie Hampton. "We're on the move."

  Hampton just stared at him, not wanting to comment. In the presence of a man of action, the man of words was totally outside of his element. He couldn't control the directions. "I really want you to know that I hope you succeed," he said finally.

  "You should," the warrior replied. "Especially since you're going to be right there with us. This is your nightmare. It's all based on your thought processes. You're the only one who can crack it."

  * * *

  With the bay doors closed, the four rotor blades of the Army Sikorsky S-70 Black Hawk sounded no louder than the average waterfall, no more grating on the nerves than a continuous jackhammer on concrete at five feet. The Black Hawk was designed primarily to carry an eleven-man assault squad, but now it held only four passengers, three of them unarmed.

  Bolan and Julie Arnold sat beside each other, strapped into swing seats, and faced Bob Ito and Robbie Hampton in the near darkness of the bay. All of them were dressed in olive-drab coveralls, U.S. Army insignia over the heart. Beneath them, Florida swampland stretched out deep and inscrutable as far as they could see.

  Bob Ito was writing furiously in a spiral notebook under the haze of a directional wink light. He looked up frowning. "If we don't come up with a password," he shouted above the continuous thrashing noise of the rotors, "I'm going to need four hours minimum to try to crack their system with a purge utility."

  Bolan looked at his watch, the luminous dial confirming what he already acutely knew. "It's nearly 3:00 a.m.," he said. "It means we'd have to take the damned thing by 5:00."

  "It's the safest method I can think of. I may be able to simply sneak in and look at the program without disturbing it. Any other method implies direct assault and, I fear, failure."

  "Then we're lost," Hampton told them. "While we're all running around on a wild-goose chase looking for that research complex, the real thing will be slipping away from us."

  "That's still undecided," Bolan argued.

  "There's no question about it. They cannot have built an air raid bunker deeply enough to do them any good in Florida City. Hell, that was all reclaimed swamp. It's about a foot above sea level."

  "We reach fail-safe pretty quick," Bolan said, "where we have to decide which target to go for." He looked out the bay window. On the road a hundred feet below, they were still being paced by the twenty-truck convoy, the four hundred fully armed airmen it carried thinking they were out on surprise maneuvers.

  Julie looked at Hampton, shaking a finger. "How long before Jerry Butler's disappearance from Grolier did you tell him that the Air Force was watching him?"

  "I never said that per se. We were arguing the outcomes of research one night, in which he took the stance that he'd never let anything he'd developed be used for military purposes. I laughed and told him that his reasoning was impossible, that once he had invented something on the government's nickel, it was theirs to do with as they chose. Then I told him that there was a project called GOG whose purpose was to make sure of that."

  "How long before his disappearance?" Julie persisted.

  "A year or so," the man replied. "He was anxious about it because he had just finished the prototype testing on a small engine and was worried about it. What are you getting at?"

  "Something very simple," she said. "It was Jerry's code that put us onto the test site at Gila Bend. How could he have discovered that? Did you tell him?"

  Robbie shook his head. "I don't even know what you're talking about."

  "That's what I thought. Then, given a year, he had to come up with his own sources of information. I knew Jerry Butler pretty well. When he was onto something, he was like a bloodhound. You could never get him off the scent."

  "You think that he cracked the computer?" Ito asked, his tired eyes alight.

  "I not only think he cracked it," she said, "I think he left us the information to crack it, too."

  "What's she talking about?" Hampton asked.

  "The code," Bolan answered. "The code was divided into three parts, two of which we were able to translate. The first phrase was Gila Bend, the second, Baylor Goggle and Optical. We weren't able to translate the third."

  "What was it?" Ito asked.

  "Seasonal Gift of God," Julie said.

  Ito and Hampton looked at each other. "You think," Ito said, "that the password is hidden within that phrase?"

  "It makes sense," Bolan replied. "Butler was a genius who left behind a gift. Smart enough to know his information was lethal, he left the code behind for anyone smart enough to crack. The first two clues were important links in the chain. From what I've seen, the only thing left would be the password, the same password he used to crack his way into the system."

  "How did he come up with it?" Ito asked.

  "Unfortunately," Julie said, "we may not figure that part out until after we've figured out the code. Remember, two years ago, Jerry didn't have anything to lose by experimenting with the codes."

  The door separating the cockpit from the bay slammed open, the helmeted pilot leaning his body partway into their compartment.

  "Mr. Bolan, Mr. Brognola is on the horn for you, sir." The man reached a hand around the divider and rapped on the wall. "You can take it here, sir."

  "Thanks." Bolan grabbed the radio mike hanging on a spur on the wall, turning on the juice right next to the inset speaker. He listened to the static crackle loudly through the speaker, then pushed the call button on the side of the mike. "Bolan here. Over."

  "You're nearing fail-safe," Brognola's voice staticked in response. "We've decided to go with the Florida City site. Over."

  "No!" Hampton yelled. "That's nuts!"

  Bolan pushed the button. "Hal, my man down here insists that can't be correct. Over."

  "It's an executive decision. A known quantity versus unknown stabbing in the dark. Over."

  "I know I can get us close!" Robbie shouted.

  "What do you want me to do?"

  The man leaned closer, his face intens
e in the semilight. "You're the one who told me that it was my nightmare. Well, listen to me. According to my nightmare, there is absolutely no way that we will do anything but waste valuable time going to that phony site. Hell, anything can go down on paper...that bedrock has been there for a couple of billion years!"

  Bolan thought for a minute. "Can you get me coordinates on it?"

  "Can I ever!" Robbie grabbed Ito's pad and wrote furiously.

  "Mack, are you there?" came Brognola's voice.

  Bolan pushed the button. "Hal, we're going to send the convoy on to Florida City while we check out the other possibility. If we're wrong, this baby does about two hundred miles an hour as the crow flies. We'll be able to hoof it back. Over."

  Robbie ripped the page out of the notebook and handed it to Bolan.

  "Roger. I'm not excited about it, but I guess a little insurance flight out there won't hurt. Over."

  "Good enough. We'll work this out. Over."

  "Or die trying. Over and out."

  Bolan knocked on the dividing door, the pilot throwing it open immediately, his face bathed green in the glow of his instruments.

  "Fly us to these coordinates," he called to the man, handing him the paper. "Put your foot to it. Let us know when you get there."

  "Yes, sir!"

  Bolan felt the pilot kick in the two big General Electric turbo shafts, the chopper angling off in an almost forty-five-degree angle.

  "You won't regret this," Robbie vowed.

  "Oh, I don't know," Bolan replied. "There's plenty of regret to go around already."

  They beat a heavy path above the treetops, the reference points giving them some idea of just how fast they were going. Bolan sat, tensing, a coiled spring desperate to loosen. He lived with his eye on his watch, the minutes dragging by to 3:00 a.m. and beyond, every click of the second hand another second off the life clock of the world.

  Everything had gotten quiet in the bay, each person lost in thought, and when the pilot banged the door open fifteen minutes later, they jumped.

  "We have reached the coordinates, sir!" he called through the opening.

  "You got a spotlight?" Bolan yelled.

  "Yes, sir!"

  "Take us down as low as you can go and use the spot. We're looking for a cleared area, a military installation."

  Robbie leaned forward. "There will probably be a lot of cleared area cemented in. Probably not too many surface buildings."

  "Roger!"

  Robbie shut the door. "Everybody strapped in?" he asked, and saw thumbs-up all around him. "Good."

  He reached out and sprang the latch on the bay door, sliding it open. They were at treetop level, hovering.

  "Just keep watching!" he said.

  The door came open again. "Sir!" the pilot called. "I have just received word from the convoy outside of Florida City. They have found a large cleared and drained area, but no installation of any kind."

  "I told you," Robbie said smugly.

  "Tell them to proceed toward these coordinates," Bolan ordered. "Tell them…"

  "Look!" Ito shouted, pointing south through the trees. "Something's there!"

  "Circle back to the southeast," Bolan told the pilot.

  "Yes, sir."

  The bird angled again, and they came around quickly, the spotlight picking up the shining white concrete right away.

  "My God," Julie said. "That's it!"

  "Quick," Bolan called to the pilot. "Send these coordinates to the convoy and tell them to hurry."

  "Yes, sir."

  The man shut the door, and Bolan turned to Robbie. "How many men do you think would be down there?"

  He took off his glasses, playing with them as he gathered his thoughts. "You'd need enough to act as a small armed force, but not so many that it would make for too large an installation. The need for oxygen and water increases exponentially the larger the building and becomes infeasible. Plus you've got security problems with more people. I'd say, forty, fifty men tops."

  "Oh-oh," Ito said. "Look down there on the perimeter. It appears to be…"

  "A SAM site!" Bolan yelled, a small ground-to-air on radar track spewing fire as he spoke and screaming out of its portable launcher. "Hold on!"

  At their altitude, the missile reached them in seconds, a huge explosion shaking the chopper violently, spinning it around. The cockpit door banged open, revealing nothing but open sky.

  "We're going down!" Bolan yelled, as the world spun crazily around him. Trees blurred past and all they could do was ride it out, Julie somehow finding Bolan's hand in the writhing confusion and holding tight.

  The ride down took only seconds, trees giving way to acres of concrete, and they stopped with a jolt as the tail smashed into a Quonset hut. The entire bay was smashed down into the structure with the rending of dying metal and the screams of human beings.

  And then it was over.

  Bolan, head giddy, lay within a tangle of twisted framework, staring up at the floor. His first conscious thought was that he was dead, the second was that he was alive but paralyzed, unable to move. Then someone groaned beside him. It was Julie, her body tangled up with his. They were lying on the ceiling of the bay, staring at Robbie and Bob Ito, who were still strapped, groaning, in their seats.

  Bolan tried moving, but it was impossible. He and Julie were still strapped in their seats, which were broken and tangled with the jumble of their bodies.

  "Mack...?" Julie spoke in a small, barely audible voice.

  "Are you all right?" he asked.

  "I… I think so. I just can't seem to move."

  "We're tangled up together," he explained.

  "O-oh." Ito groaned from above them.

  "Are you all right?" Bolan called, as he moved his arms and legs, taking stock and trying to work himself free. They didn't have much time.

  "I think my arm is broken."

  "Robbie," Bolan called. "Robbie."

  The man moaned loudly, as if coming out of a deep sleep.

  "I think he's coming out of it," Ito said, pain in his voice.

  All at once a beam of light etched through the jumble of their prison, then another from the other side. The warrior could hear voices and knew their troubles were just beginning. More light, flashlights, sliced into the chopper, sending crazy shadows into an already surreal landscape. Then Bolan heard a cutting torch being lit.

  It took nearly thirty minutes to cut them out of the wreckage. They were pulled roughly from the remnants of the S-70, Bolan's combat harness stripped from him before he was led away, hands behind his head.

  He was sore all over, but didn't think his body would have any surprises in store for him when the shock wore off. Julie was cut in three or four places, but seemed in decent shape, too, considering. Ito wasn't so lucky. His arm was badly broken, and he needed his free hand to hold it together.

  They were led into a blockhouse of some kind, then down several flights of stairs, all sealed, that finally led them to an elevator.

  They were herded inside the elevator, Julie working her way up to Bolan and whispering, "Did the pilot have time to radio our position to the convoy?"

  He shook his head. "I don't know." He'd been wondering the same thing since his first coherent thought after the crash.

  It was during the interminable ride down that Bolan realized why Robbie Hampton had been so insistent upon this location. There was no way that an installation like this could have been built in a drained swamp.

  They were being guarded by Air Force personnel, E-4s and lower, all of them dressed in regular-issue fatigues, as if unprepared for real combat. It began to give him an idea about the basic attitude of the installation that might come in handy later — if there was to be a later.

  The elevator finally stopped on the fourth level, and they walked out onto an area that seemed to be devoted to barracks and an armory, leading Bolan to suspect that this was the back door. They were pushed forward then led down corridors that were sculpted rock supported b
y titanium beams.

  Airmen watched them from doorways of freestanding structures within the high-ceilinged chamber. The men were tensed, their eyes dark as they whistled and growled at Julie, the only woman in the compound.

  Robbie, a hand to the back of his neck, was gazing around in wonder. "It's like watching one of my stories come to life."

  "Quiet!" a squat E-4 barked, and pushed Robbie forward with the stock of his M-16.

  They passed the open doorway of a gymnasium, several airmen in boxer shorts playing basketball on a full-size court, while others lifted weights off to the side. Everyone was awake, tensely waiting for the end of the world.

  When the hallway branched off in two directions, their captors led them down the right fork, in the direction of an arrow that bore the message Food Services.

  They walked the short hallway, then through double swing doors into a small, harshly lit cafeteria, its stainless-steel serving counter shut down except for the red light on a huge coffee urn. Several uniformed men and a civilian dressed in a suit were seated at the end of one of the long tables, drinking coffee and smoking. Bolan recognized one of the men, a face he'd never forget. It was Kit Givan, the man who was promoted for killing Julie's husband.

  "The civilian," Julie whispered from beside him. "It's Mark Reilly, my Company contact."

  A general stood slowly at the head of the table, a hard man going to fat. His face was pudgy and red, as if his collar was too tight for him, his stomach barely contained in his tight shirt — a proud man unwilling to accept the fact that he wasn't in the same shape as he once had been.

  "You people are trespassing on government property," the general stated, "and are in violation of federal law."

  "Cut the crap," Bolan said, taking several steps away from the group. "We know who you are and what you are."

  "Well, aren't you the one." Mark Reilly stood, raising his cup of coffee. "You've sure caused me a lot of trouble this past week. I really take a great deal of pleasure in knowing that you've come to me so I can be the one to cut your throat."

  "We don't need to be unpleasant, Mr. Reilly," the general admonished.

  Bolan smiled, recognizing the man's voice from a tape recording. "General Cronin. The gang's all here." He turned to the others. "This is General Albert Cronin, the man who blew up the Challenger and destroyed those innocent people."