Death Orbit

by Maloney, Mack;

  Jones nearly laughed out loud. “Are you kidding? We thought it was you guys…”

  They looked at each other. Their eyes went wide with realization. Both men started to say something—but couldn’t.

  “We lost men, too,” Jones finally said, breaking the silence. “A flight of Sabre jets. A big Seamaster. About fifty miles due east of here. Were your people involved in shooting them down?”

  Doenitz shook his head no.

  “We lost three troopships dropping off the Norse Army, who attacked you first,” the Nazi officer suddenly revealed. “They simply disappeared as well. Into a fog. About fifty miles off this coast, too.”

  “We certainly didn’t sink them,” Jones told him. “We didn’t know anything about the Norsemen until they hit us.”

  Doenitz waved his hand in a very imperial manner.

  “They were simply fodder,” he said plainly. “Expendable louts. Just like our little yellow friends beneath the ground over there, we’re all better off without them.”

  Suddenly angered again, Jones bit his tongue. He wanted so much to launch into a lecture on the basic regard for human life, even in the case of Norsemen and Cult members, but he held himself back. What was the point? Why try to educate a Nazi while up in the sky, hanging like a huge, glowing electric lightbulb, a rock of ice more than 300 miles across was heading right toward them at 72,000 miles an hour? Jones’s only regret was that he would never see his wife again, or his family or any of his friends. He couldn’t believe a sophisticated animal like Doenitz could share such feelings—and he was right.

  “We had a number of missing airplanes as well,” Doenitz said, breaking the long silence again. It was clear his mind was firmly rooted on military matters, not those of love, hopelessness, and loss. “They just seemed to disappear, too. We sent them on an attack against you ten days ago. Off Key West. They weren’t shot down. They simply vanished, on their way back to base. They were two F-14s and a single F/A-18. Do you know what happened to them?”

  Once again, Jones began to say something, but held his tongue for a moment.

  “Lost off Key West, did you say?” he finally replied, with a shake of his head and the beginnings of a sly smile. “Nope. Can’t say I know where they are.”

  Thirty-one

  In Orbit, Twelve Hours Later

  THE STRING OF SPACE mines was more than 10 miles long.

  It stretched from the docking ring atop the cargo bay doors of the Zon shuttle to the end of the one of the twisted arms of the Heavenly Space Station, now more than 50,000 feet away.

  Strung out along this astral clothesline, several groups of space walkers could be seen moving about; they were the Nazi space-mine technicians, men originally housed inside the space station. For the past two days they’d been spending just as much time aboard the Zon spacecraft as they had inside their orbiting home.

  The ten-mile-long necklace of bombs was the grandest, most ambitious project ever undertaken by the Nazi space techs. Before this, their stint in space had merely involved taking the various pieces of space junk retrieved by the Me-363 Komets and adapting them into small-yield, chemical-explosive remotely controlled space mines. Eventually these techs believed they would be working on nuclear warheads that would be boosted into orbit by the Fourth Reich for refitting onto reentry rockets with which Viktor could then bombard the Earth below at will.

  Now the space techs were working with nuclear weapons—each of the bombs along the 10-mile string had some kind of nuclear device attached to it, but this string of orbital megatonnage was not intended for use by Viktor to rain thermonuclear explosions down onto the earth.

  Rather, it was being built to save the planet.

  At the very least, the Americans inside the Zon could boast that it was their design being constructed 10 miles out in front of them, although the Nazi space techs were doing all the work. Once the string of bombs—44 in all, they’d all arrived safely from the three Energia launches—were properly fused and set, the string would then be broken into three separate lengths. These would then be attached to the rear of the Zon by a series of cables. If everything went according to plan, this trio of bomb lines would be flown out to a position in very high orbit, where a EVA would unhook them and connect each length into a ring, each one with a descending diameter.

  The trio of concentric rings—one would be five miles around, the second three miles around, and the third two miles around—would then be placed in space, about 20 miles from each other. They would be arranged in such a way as to intercept the comet just as it was being drawn into the thick of the earth’s gravitation field. It was hoped the 44 nuclear blasts, going off mere microseconds from each other, would be enough if not to destroy the comet, then at least to alter its course and push it away from the earth.

  There were three problems with this scenario, however.

  First, the trio of nuclear rings had to be placed exactly in the right position at exactly the right moment; second, all bombs would have to detonate at the same time for the full impact of the 442,000 megatons to be effective; and third, whatever spacecraft placed the bombs in position would undoubtedly be vaporized, either by colliding with the comet or by getting caught up in the string of nuclear explosions.

  The only spacecraft available to make this suicide mission was, of course, the Zon.

  And there was only two people who could actually pilot the spacecraft that high and perform the crucial EVAs needed to place the nuclear rings in proper position.

  One of them was Elvis.

  The other was Hawk Hunter.

  There had been a huge argument among the Zon crew as to who should or shouldn’t go. The near universal feeling was that the two girls should be left in the dubious care of the remaining Nazis aboard the space station, and the rest of the original Zon members—Ben, JT, Cook, and Geraci—should join Hunter and Elvis on their last mission. There were some merits to this case: after all, the alternative was for the odd men out to retire to the space station with the girls, knowing full well that if the desperate plan didn’t work, then the best they could hope for would be that the mysterious space station would be incinerated along with the earth when the comet hit. If that wasn’t the case, then they’d be doomed to a slow death orbiting high above the devastated planet, with absolutely no hope of rescue or resupply.

  Even if the plan did work, they would still have to wait months, maybe even years, for any hope of a rocket being blasted off from the earth to orbit in order to take them back home. And all this time they would be under the yoke of the Nazis still inside the space station. What kind of life would that be?

  But Hunter had vetoed the plan that they all go on the suicide mission together because he didn’t want to be personally responsible for killing four of his best friends. Knowing he was going to die with Elvis was hard enough. One soul on his conscience was already a load—four more would be unbearable, in this life or the next.

  The most amazing thing about the past two days was that Hunter had come to a kind of truce with himself. It was not some acknowledgment of a tremendous inner peace that would give him the strength to go on this, his final mission. It was more an understanding that this was what he’d meant to do all along. All his skill, all his knowledge, all his adventures, and all his battles had been in preparation for this moment, this one-in-an-epoch chance of saving the entire planet. After all, he’d been trying to do it piecemeal for the past six years or more. He recognized the beauty in trying to do it all in one fell swoop.

  There was also another kind of peace running through him as he sat on the Zon flight deck and watched the Nazi space techs string the line of space nukes together. In plain and simple terms, he had nothing to live for after this. Dominique was gone, just as his family and many of his friends had gone before, and now he felt it was his time to go, too. He made no pretenses that there was a warm, fuzzy feeling attached to such a tragic conclusion—the part of the soul where this idea had come from was a cold and
dark place. But it was also a logical place—or at least, in Hunter’s present frame of mind, it seemed to be.

  It had been a very strange 48 hours since he’d radioed Jones with his plan to let the Nazis come into the KSC and let them try to launch the nuclear warheads into orbit. The UAAF would have to step aside and let the goosesteppers do their thing.

  That was exactly the same attitude shared aboard the Zon as the nuclear payloads arrived and the space station techs began stringing them together. Let the assholes do all the work, was how JT had put it over and over again.

  The people on the Zon had better things to do—like say goodbye to each other.

  They had devised a kind of reverse clock to count down the hours to the comet hitting the earth.

  The string of space nukes was finally completed and pre-fused, and this clock stood at minus 6 hours and 32 minutes.

  This gave the Zon crew absolutely no time for leeway—which was okay with Hunter. They had to collect the three bomb strings and be on their way. As it was, he was worried whether the Zon still had enough fuel in it to get them up to the place in high orbit where the triplet of bomb rings had to go. One thing was in their favor, though: they didn’t have to worry about conserving fuel for the return trip. There would be no return trip this time.

  For this mission, the ticket was strictly one-way.

  At minus 5 hours and 55 minutes, they got a report from the Nazi space-tech CO that the three strings had been separated as needed and if the Zon came over to the space station docking point, they would be able to fit it with the tow lines.

  Hunter quickly drove the Zon the five miles over to the space station, positioning it next to the docking arm as requested, all the while being careful not to waste any fuel. The battery of space techs began hooking up the three strings to the three tow lines, a task they estimated would take twenty minutes at most.

  But now came the hardest part of all.

  It was time for those not going on the Zon’s final mission to transfer over to the space station.

  Hunter was entrenched in the flight commander’s seat and Elvis, stoic as ever, was strapped into shotgun when the word went out that it was time for the others to go. Cook and Geraci were the first to come up to say goodbye.

  They both shook hands with Elvis and then floated over to Hunter. There was really no sense in avoiding the issue. This would be the last time they’d ever see each other again.

  “Wouldn’t have changed a thing, Hawk,” Geraci told him after a zero-G bearhug. “Not a blessed thing…”

  “Thanks, G-man,” Hunter replied. “Tell all the guys in the 104 I said thanks… for everything.”

  Cook came next. They’d known each other for a very long time.

  “I’d do anything to trade places with you, Hawk,” the JAWS commander told him. “Be glad to do it, too.”

  “Are you kidding, Cookie?” Hunter replied, trying like hell to be upbeat, but failing miserably. “You think the JAWS team would ever forgive me for that?”

  Cook nodded sadly, shook his hand again, and was gone.

  That’s when Hunter looked up and saw Ben. His heart caught in his throat. It was going to get progressively harder.

  They shook hands vigorously.

  “See you, Hawk,” Ben said, trying to make it as quick and painless as possible.

  “You got it, pal,” Hunter was just barely able to croak out. He looked away for a moment, just to clear his eyes, and when he turned back, Ben was gone.

  At that moment, one of the Nazi space techs appeared just off the Zon’s portside window. He gave Hunter and Elvis a stern thumbs-up. They took it to mean the three strings of nukes were attached to the tow lines.

  “We can get going any time now,” Elvis told Hunter.

  Hunter began pushing buttons and clearing computer screens in anticipation of the huge main engine burn they would have to accomplish if they had any hope of getting up to higher orbit.

  As he was doing this, Hunter was aware of someone else looking over his shoulder. It was JT.

  “So, how long do you figure this little adventure is going to take?” he asked Hunter, in his usual nonchalant way.

  Hunter was momentarily stumped. Exactly how should he reply to that?

  “About a lifetime, I suppose,” he finally answered.

  But JT was shaking his head.

  “C’mon, Hawk,” he said. “This is JT you’re talking to. You know how this book will turn out just as well as I do. You guys will go up there, blast the big snowball to smithereens, somehow have just enough gas left to get back down here, rescue us, capture that asshole Viktor again, and bring him back to terra firma—just like we planned to do. I mean, this is all just a mild diversion. You know, to make the plot more interesting…”

  Hunter just stared up at his friend in disbelief.

  “Your powers of denial are rather strong,” he told JT with a grim smile.

  “What denial?” JT insisted. “I’ve been with you through the whole kit and kaboodle. Don’t you think I know how it’s going to end? Sure, it will get hairy. And sure, it will come right down to the last second. And you’ll have one last nuke that won’t go off like it’s supposed to, and you’ll have to do a quicky EVA to get it back in line. But you know, and I know, and everyone knows you’ll pull something out of your hat and save the day and come back in one piece, and then, we’ll all live happily ever after…”

  Hunter was laughing at him now—so was Elvis, a rare treat. They just couldn’t help it. JT was actually being funny.

  “So, just remember one thing,” JT concluded. “While you’re up there icing the biggest hero-move in history, we’ll be sitting aboard the floating Reichstag, doing God knows what. So get it over with in a hurry, will you? Save the planet and then scoot back and save us, okay?”

  Hunter just continued staring up at his old friend; his face looked like he was completely serious.

  “Okay, buddy,” Hunter finally told him with a handshake. “We’ll try to make it as quick as we can.”

  JT smiled and then mock-saluted them both. Then he was gone, too.

  Now an eerie silence descended on the flight deck. The lights were dimmed as the main power systems began coming on-line. Elvis had a long conversation with the Nazi space-tech CO. They’d done everything they were supposed to, was the gist of this guy’s message. Now it really was up to Hunter and Elvis.

  The clock was at minus four hours and forty minutes now. Hunter leaned forward and then looked out the window back at the rear of the Zon. He could see the three strings of space bombs floating in three straight lines right beyond the tail section. Beyond that, the glare of the unnamed comet was rising like the sun over the edge of the earth.

  It was so bright, it hurt his unprotected eyes. They said it would soon be brighter than the sun, he thought, and they were right.

  He looked over at Elvis who had just completed the last diagnostic check. Everything that still worked onboard the Zon was up to near-peak efficiency. Hunter suddenly felt a pang of grudging admiration from the all-thumbs spacecraft. There was certainly a lot to complain about in its design and construction. But it had stayed together for them this long, and there was some kind of beauty in that, he supposed.

  Elvis finally completed his check and gave Hunter a solemn thumbs-up. The others had already transferred over to the space station, and now it was time to break the docking connection, turn the Zon around, and begin the last main engine burn. But just as they were about to do this, they saw the airlock activation indicator light up on their control screen.

  Someone was coming back aboard the Zon.

  “Who the fuck is this?” Elvis blurted out.

  They heard the commotion below as the airlock sprung open and first one, then two, then a third person got out. Then the first person floated over to the hatch leading up to the flight deck.

  “If this is JT to finally kiss goodbye I’m going to slug him,” Elvis said. Like Hunter, he was understandably anxi
ous to get the show on the road.

  But then they saw the figure rising up through the hatch from below and both of them felt their breaths catch in their throat.

  It wasn’t JT or Ben or any other part of the Zon crew coming for the one last goodbye.

  It was Viktor.

  He was rising out of the hatchway like a vampire rising from a coffin—except that he was going straight up.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me,” Elvis cried out.

  Viktor smiled as his pointed head touched the top of the compartment and he hung there like some kind of strange animal. He was dressed in all black, of course, his outfit complete in all its Luciferian regalia, from the foppish satin slippers to the long silk cape.

  Both pilots were infuriated to see him.

  “If you’re here for a pep talk, it’s a little too late,” Elvis told him sternly.

  Viktor waved his protestations away. “Be still, you hillbilly,” he said. “I’ve come to chat with the man who will soon be the earth’s greatest hero—posthumously, of course.”

  Hunter chose to ignore him. In light of the circumstances, all the hate he’d had inside for this man had dissolved into indifference. When compared to what lay ahead of them, Viktor was rather insignificant now.

  “You’re using up our air being in here!” Elvis shouted at him. “You’re smelling up the place, too!”

  Once again, Viktor just waved his words away.

  “I’ve not come to speak with you…” he sneered at Elvis. “So just shut up.”

  He drew closer to them. His shadow cast a dark silhouette across the control panel.

  “Nothing to say on this momentous occasion, Mister Wingman?” he taunted Hunter. Elvis was right—Viktor did smell. It was a perfume-thick scent that tried to mask the undeniable stink of the body odor of someone who’d ingested a lot of drugs. Viktor’s eyes were as red as the warning lights on their control panel.

  “You know, I do have a question for you,” Hunter told him suddenly.

  “You mean, like a last request?” Viktor mocked him. “Go right ahead…”