Final Strike--A Sean Falcone Novel

by William S. Cohen

  * * *

  Three days after the launch, after a farewell dinner with Marshal Paskevich, Amador headed back to Washington with his communication team and Colonel Morgan, leaving Captain Kay Anderson behind with instructions to keep a log and “do whatever snooping you can about that new ICBM. Obviously, it’s a space weapon for knocking out satellites.”

  Karen Thiessan and Dick Gillespie left with the military team. Taylor had told them to take a couple of days off and then join him at Patrick Air Force Base. Taylor said he wanted more NASA participation in the HAIV project.

  The Kremlin public relations camera crew that had filmed the launch remained to make a record of events at Plesetsk Cosmodrome for a documentary whose distribution depended upon whether Rescue succeeded or failed. Lebed, wanting to placate Oxley over the restrictions on observers, arranged for the camera footage from Plesetsk to be streamed to Oxley, who had it transmitted via the White House communications network. The feed also went to Ben Taylor and General Hardwick at Patrick Air Force Base.

  The Kremlin crew quickly learned that there was little to film, primarily because so much at Plesetsk was secret. The cameramen depended upon Shvernik for suggestions. They filmed long interviews with him and several scientists who spoke about the wonders of space but not much about activities at the cosmodrome.

  On the eighth day of the voyage, Shvernik excitedly called the documentary producer who sent the Kremlin crew to him and had him repeat his news on camera in a makeshift studio. “A few hours ago,” Shvernik said, “NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii posted on the Internet an actual radar image of Asteroid USA, taken by a radar telescope dedicated to detecting asteroids.”

  Kay Anderson, alone in the common room, routinely watched the filming at the end of the day, when the crew ran the dailies. When she saw Shvernik’s announcement, she immediately called Amador and translated. Simultaneously, at Patrick Air Force Base, the NASA team and General Hardwick saw Shvernik speaking but could not understand what he was saying. Hearing “Hawaii” and seeing the image, Taylor assumed that asteroid watchers using NASA’s infrared telescope in Hawaii had managed to photograph Asteroid USA.

  Spinning slowly through the blackness of space was an oddly shaped object. It looked like a gray, pockmarked potato jammed into another gray, pockmarked potato.

  While Hardwick frantically sought an officer who understood Russian, Anderson reached Amador and translated what Shvernik was saying: “From this image and other data I have studied, I believe this is a metallic asteroid, made up mainly of nickel-iron, a naturally occurring alloy. Its size is about one and a half kilometers in diameter.”

  “Holy shit, sir,” Anderson said. “That’s nearly a mile wide.”

  Amador relayed the information on his direct line to Oxley, who said, “That’s a very big killer, Hector.”

  “What can we do, sir?”

  “Just hope and pray, Hector. Hope and pray. And keep this absolutely secret.”

  101

  At Patrick Air Force Base, a hangar surrounded by guards had been turned into the HAIV factory. Hardwick had taped Shvernik’s words and now Hardwick and Taylor were watching and listening again to a translation by a Russian-speaking Air Force intelligence officer.

  “One and a half kilometers!” Taylor exclaimed. “My God! I’ve got to check with NASA and get more information about what Hawaii captured.”

  Taylor re-ran the two-potato-like image again and leaned closer to the screen. “Look!” he said, pointing to a dim dot of light moving slightly behind the asteroid. “It’s a moon!”

  He rewound and replayed the image and called Falcone, who was in the Situation Room, where he had spent most of his days since Oxley declared martial law.

  “Sean, I’ve got to get in touch with Dr. Shvernik,” he said.

  “Something wrong?”

  “The White House gets the feed direct from Plesetsk Cosmodrome, right?” Taylor asked.

  “Right. But, to tell you the truth, Ben. I don’t watch. I mean, what’s to watch?”

  “There’s a moon. The asteroid turns out to be one with a moon. Lot of them do.”

  “So what, Ben?”

  “Can you bring up that feed right now?”

  “I’m sure the communications guys can bring it up. But what the hell for?”

  “Sean. Believe me. It’s damn important.”

  “Okay. I’ll get somebody to put it on the wall and call you.”

  Falcone called back in a few minutes and said, “It’s on the wall, Ben. Some ugly thing is moving slowly—a series of still images strung together, right? There’s a label. Something about Hawaii and—”

  “There’s a little dot of light. A moving dot of light,” Taylor said. “See how it moves? It’s a moon. The asteroid has a moon!”

  “Well, I’m sure that’s interesting to astronomers,” Falcone said. “But so what?”

  “In the fact book that Shvernik wrote,” Taylor said, “he says that the missile warheads—he called them the ‘payload’—were stripped of ‘missile-defense devices’—like decoy detectors. They had been removed to lighten the missile and keep its navigation system from being distracted. That means that when the missile handlers ‘armed’ the warheads—gave them their directional commands—the handlers did not include commands having to do with decoys. The warheads would not know about avoiding something that looked like the asteroid.”

  “God, Ben! You’re right,” Falcone exclaimed. “The command software on multi-warhead missiles includes warnings about decoys. If Shvernik removed those warnings, giving the warheads no fear of decoys, the presence of a moon means that the warheads could mistake the moon for the asteroid. I’d better call the President.”

  Falcone passed on the information to Oxley and urged him to call Lebed.

  “And tell him what, Sean?” Oxley asked.

  “Tell him what Ben just discovered,” Falcone said.

  “And what is Lebed supposed to do?”

  “For insurance, send a second Topol—one that retains its decoy-warning commands,” Falcone said. “We still have time before it reaches the asteroid.”

  Oxley drummed his finger on his desktop for a moment. “All right,” he said. He picked up the phone and said, “Hot-line.”

  Three minutes later Lebed was on the line. “Blake, what’s up? If it’s about the observer issue—”

  “That asteroid image Dr. Shvernik just showed,” Oxley said. “Did you see it?”

  “Well, no. I just—”

  “There’s a moon in it,” Oxley said impatiently. “The asteroid has a moon.”

  “I don’t see the point, Blake. I can’t—”

  “Boris, listen to me, please.”

  Oxley repeated what Taylor had told Falcone about the moon.

  “Sorry, Blake. I trust you and I believe Dr. Taylor is a fine scientist. But—I’m telling you a military secret—that Topol was the only one we have. It’s a missile in development. There is no substitute. I think what Americans say is that you have to play the hand you’re dealt. Have faith, Blake. Have faith.”

  102

  Rescue’s first warhead pulverized the first object it had sensed—Asteroid USA’s little moon. The second warhead reached its target, exploded, and tore off a large fragment that plunged toward Earth, preceding and paralleling the asteroid’s predestined path. The energy produced by two nuclear explosions added velocity to two colossal rocks that an instant before had been one.

  The first indication of Rescue’s failure came from the pattern of explosives detected by the National Reconnaissance Office, the intelligence agency whose sentinel satellites watch for nuclear explosions. The NRO sent a top-secret flash message to other U.S. agencies and the White House.

  Oxley called Lebed, who refused to accept Oxley’s report but showed his true belief by silencing Russian media. When Oxley tried to call President Zhang Xing, he was passed to a Foreign Secretary spokesman who said, “Thank you for the information. Preside
nt Zhang will restrict his interests to possible effects upon his nation.” The director of NSA told Falcone, “China has reacted by essentially shutting down. No television, no Internet, no telephone service. An electronic version of ostrich behavior.”

  The realization of Rescue’s failure spread through all societies in about the same way: the rulers and the rich learned first, passed the knowledge to kinfolk, and then informed their circles of friends, debtors, and financiers. Beyond the circles were the agents of the media, whose job was to finally inform the people, with various levels of accuracy.

  Many of the rich people in countries all over the world chose to fly, in aircraft they owned or chartered or demanded from their militaries. Their destination was a land that was high, dry, and ripe for another round of exploitation: central Africa, the continent that had fostered the human race. But Robert Wentworth Hamilton, now thoroughly obsessed by the belief that he had served as God’s tool, traveled in his private aircraft directly from Washington to Jerusalem. He found a humble flat to stay in, not far from the Valley of Jehoshaphat, where the Bible said that God would assemble all nations at The End Time. Nearby were Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, where God gathered the dust used to create the first human.

  103

  Taylor had calculated that, if Rescue failed, the HAIV would have to be launched from Patrick Air Force Base seven days before the predicted day of impact. So the HAIV was scheduled to hit what was left of the asteroid when it was only 232,692 miles away, more than 2,500 miles closer than the Moon. People on Earth would either see explosions and know that the HAIV had destroyed what was left of Asteroid USA. Or they would not see explosions and know there was no hope.

  Already, as the large chunk of the asteroid was hurtling toward Earth, GNN and other networks were showing a point of light in the night sky. People reacted to that light by acceptance of fate, by belief in divine judgment, by murderous anger, by belief in satanic power. Many died “stochastic deaths,” defined by epidemiologists as random deaths whose cause is not precisely known but attributed to fear.

  At Cape Canaveral, the mobs at the causeways had dwindled. There, as elsewhere in the world, acceptance had eclipsed rage and panic. Falcone convinced Oxley that there would not be any point in announcing the plan to try again by launching the HAIV. So few people knew that Earth was being given another chance to survive.

  The launch bunker was crowded and silent. There was no ceremony. On General Hardwick’s order, everything was to be routine. The countdown ended and the Atlas rose on a pillar of flame and smoke.

  Seven days later, there was an explosion in the night sky. All over the Earth people prayed and cheered their thanks. But Asteroid USA was both alive and slain. As deliverance came from the HAIV, destruction was also being delivered. Near dawn, a mammoth, blazing rock with a heart of iron—the fragment torn off by Rescue—ended its voyage to Earth. Its orbit put it on a path paralleling the surface of the Earth.

  It appeared first in the sky over Alaska, speeding across the dawn. It sliced off the top of Mount Denali, bounded down its slope, and, like a skimming stone on a pond, dipped and rose, dipped and rose. Each fiery dip was deadly—a forest … a village … a farm … Portland … an oil refinery … a maze of high tension wires and transformers. The obliteration of the electric grid blacked out the Western states from the Pacific Coast to the Rocky Mountains. Finally, the rock ended its skipping motion at Rock Springs, Wyoming. Once it was a city, population 23,036. Then, in a flaming moment, this place of craggy beauty was a crater three miles in diameter.

  104

  America was not alone in bearing the wrath of the universe’s wildings, the fragments too big to flame out.

  Singapore’s Prime Minister, Peter K. Yeo, like President Oxley, was determined to remain on station in his office, the captain steering his ship to safety or going down with it to his doom.

  He did not have to wait long.

  He stood on the white-washed balcony of the Istana, an extravagant Palladian mansion built in Singapore by the British between 1867 and 1869 to serve as the colonial governor’s office and residence. Yeo thought he saw something coming. Or was it just his imagination? It looked bigger than a bus. Not round, but oblong. Not …

  One of the asteroid’s body parts hit little more than a mile beyond the Changi Naval Base. The sea turned red and angry, rising up more than four hundred feet like some prehistoric beast, unleashing its fury in one giant, violent regurgitation over the entire city state. Those who were unable or unwilling to flee the island were swept out to sea to serve as new silt for the ocean’s seething floor.

  Other Asian nations fared little better.

  Tens of millions died under the towering tsunami that ran all the way from Indonesia as far north as Hong Kong and Shanghai. Miraculously, Japan, by comparison, suffered modest losses. It was thought by some that an unnamed mystical source—call it Mercy—had decided that Fukushima had punished the Japanese enough.

  The Middle East? Much of it was destroyed. It would take years before the survivors would be able to reconstruct their communities and social institutions.

  Maybe that was just as well. It would give mankind enough time to redraw the lines of cohabitation with a premium on the willingness to share the Earth’s bounty. Enough time to purge the old grievances and ethnic hatreds and pursue the untraveled path of reconciliation and peace.

  Time, indeed, would tell.

  And Russia? Well the bad boys in Moscow held a lucky charm. One chunk of Janus—to give Asteroid USA its true name—was about the size of a Volkswagen. It hit deep in the Siberian forests. It released the equivalent of about fifteen megatons of energy, about a thousand times greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. It flattened over one thousand square miles of trees, killing mostly bears, deer, and other wildlife. Several hundred woodsmen were burned to death. They would be commemorated as martyrs.

  Boris Lebed’s propaganda machine had kicked into full gear, heralding the Russian people as savior of the planet. The FSB’s censors made sure that most Russians never learned that their Topol had hit Janus’ moon and not the asteroid itself. Lebed’s popularity soared as high as that of the man he had had assassinated, Vladimir Putin.

  Perhaps one day, the Israelis would let the secret out.

  EPILOGUE

  Falcone stepped out onto the balcony of his penthouse apartment, a chilled glass of vodka in hand. From this Pennsylvania Avenue aerie, Washington looked serene—the Capitol Dome awash in light and the Washington Monument in stark silhouette. It was late evening. The night air was warm—kissed, it seemed, by a soft wind.

  Fourteen stories below, several couples held hands as they stared solemnly at the bronze sculpture of the Lone Sailor that stood with the collar of his peacoat turned up against the wind, his hands tucked in his coat pockets.

  Funny how the mind works. Whenever Falcone found himself staring at the sculpture, he always thought of his favorite movie, Viva Zapata!, the story of the Mexican revolutionary who led the effort to overthrow a corrupt president. While his mission succeeded, the new regime turned out to be just as corrupt as the one it had replaced. Nothing had changed.

  But for Falcone, Zapata embodied the value that one man with courage could defiantly stand up to the forces of evil in the world. Even if he ultimately failed, Zapata believed that the pursuit of justice was worth the fight. Heroes, like the Sailor below, stood ready, in one defining moment, to sacrifice all in the name of honor.

  For many the world over, it had been a day of commemoration. An international holiday. A year had passed since the universe’s angry stones had torched the planet. Millions had been buried at sea. Among them were Admiral Walter Gibbs, chief of naval operations, his aide, and the 6,102 officers and enlisted men and women of the aircraft carrier USS George Washington. Gibbs had insisted that he be at sea on the day the rock rain was to come. The carrier was in the path of the biggest of the towering tsunamis that swept the South Chi
na Sea clean of ships and islands, real and artificial.

  On land, millions of voices had been stilled under mountains of earthen rubble scattered around the globe. For reasons that scientists continued to seek, the dreaded electromagnetic pulse did not happen. But not since the days when dinosaurs drew their last breath had the world been so punished.

  When news of the asteroid’s approach first broke, millions of people panicked, fighting, clubbing, even shooting their way to precious safety zones. Food stores and pharmacies were quickly depleted, and gun shops emptied. Ammunition became more valuable than gold.

  When electrical power went down throughout many parts of the country, every modern convenience people had come to depend upon had, in one violent moment, been stripped away. Lights. Water. Heat. Gas. Food. Medicine.

  Once people recognized that guns were not going to save them, they gathered together in search of communal safety. Adversity, on a scale never known before, forced individuals and families to set aside inveterate tribal differences to pool their talents and resources. E pluribus unum. They were one tribe from many.

  The spirit of those who survived had been unquenchable. Resilience was the word that had been missing from Falcone’s vocabulary. The determination of the flower to push up through concrete.

  It did not take long to clear the detritus of death and physical destruction. Communication systems were erected quickly. Internet connectivity so fundamental to communication, transportation, and the distribution of goods and services was restored within a few weeks. The electrical grid that had been knocked down in Western United States took months longer to fully reconstruct because there was no ready supply of transformers. It was a remarkable, inspirational period of resurrection and renewal.

  Drinking slowly, Falcone could feel the alcohol spread its warmth deep into his chest. His thoughts turned to some of life’s great ironies.