Cliff Ryder - Aim And Fire

“Hell, I’m a subcontractor—”

“Shh!” The urgent whisper silenced both men instantly.

Nate peered around. “What you got, Tracy?”

“A body.” Tracy knelt by the outstretched form of a man with a round, bloody hole in the back of his head. She rolled him over to reveal a once-handsome man, his eyes glazed and sightless in death.

“This is Joseph Allen, the founder of Spaceworks.”

Tracy looked up at the nearest door, which was closed. She waited until Nate and Briggs had taken covering positions, then pulled the door open, revealing a small, empty room with a hatch in the floor. “A falling-out among terrorists, perhaps?” she said.

“Who knows, but I’ll bet my next month’s pay I know which way al-Kharzi went.” Nate ran to the hatch. “You guys stop the launch. I’m going after him.”

“Not alone you’re not!” Tracy started to walk toward him, but Nate was already lifting the metal hatch. She heard a click before the world exploded around her. Tracy heard a deep thunderous roar from somewhere far away, echoing through the hallway and shaking the floor.

Oh, shit, she thought as she sank into darkness, the rocket’s launching. We’re too late.

“Preliminary data indicates that the SWAT team has taken control of the main control room, but they also reported that the rocket completed its launch cycle and lifted off twenty-three seconds ago. If its intended target is the Washington, D.C.–New York corridor, we have approximately eight minutes before optimal altitude and geographic coordinates are reached. Here’s the projected flight path.”

A radar screen popped up on Kate’s monitor. It showed a red line arcing out from El Paso on a direct route over the Midwest toward the East Coast. A three-year-old could have drawn a line indicating where it was going to end up.

Denny sounded as stressed as Kate had ever heard him—which wasn’t much, as the military-man-turned-businessman had seen too much in his lifetime to really be fazed by anything anymore. “I hope you stocked up on bottled water, because if this thing does go off, it’ll make the ’03 power outage look like a flicker.”

“What about a self-destruct? Doesn’t every rocket have one, in case it goes out of control?” Kate asked.

“Sure, if it’s a government-backed one. Private companies are supposed to, but since we’re dealing with terrorists posing as rocket scientists, who the hell knows? The SWAT guys said the scientists have locked down the computers, and they aren’t giving up the password.”

“Well, where’s our two cowboys? After everything they’ve done, sweating the access out of an engineer geek should be a walk in the park for them,” Kate said.

Denny bent over his own monitor, keeping track of three camera feeds and a half-dozen audio streams at once.

“Radio chatter says they heard a secondary blast right after they secured the room, but before the rocket launched.

They’re investigating right now.”

“Get every hacker on duty targeting that rocket with anything they’ve got to bring it down, preferably in an un-populated area. I’ll take any idea anyone’s got—self-destruct, laser beams, sun spots, anything. I’ve got one last ace up my sleeve, and it better be enough.”

She opened her window to B2S. “What’s your status?”

“Still working on it. I noticed a big spike in data transmission. Don’t tell me—”

“Got it in one, the rocket has launched. Your window of opportunity just shrank to six minutes and counting.”

As she spoke, Kate brought up another window that, un-beknown to her hacker, showed her every keystroke the girl was making.

“Okay, I’m in. Now I have to trace and link back to his control program, and take control of it. Once I have that, I can send this thing anywhere you want.”

“Fine, just do it in the next four minutes.”

Kate watched the seconds tick away, knowing that the rocket with its deadly cargo was racing closer and closer to her home, and that of about twenty million other people, with each passing moment. She pushed away the imagined carnage and destruction that something like this would spread in its wake. Not on my watch, she told herself. But at the moment, she was stuck in an all-too-familiar position—watching as one of her people tried to stave off disaster. Come on, girl, you can do it! Her screen flashed.

“All right, I’m in! I’ve got telemetry control of the rocket. Where do you want it?”

“Where is it right now?” Kate asked.

“At its current rate of speed, it’s crossing out of Missouri and into southern Illinois. How about putting it down in a large body of water?”

With the tap of a finger, Kate brought up a map of the southern half of Illinois and highlighted every body of water. “The only problem is finding one that isn’t right next to a populated area.”

“You better find something fast, ’cause this sucker’ll be hitting Indiana in about ninety seconds. Why not Lake Michigan? It’s close enough by now.”

Kate increased her scrolling, searching for any lake large enough to serve her purpose. “Now’s who’s putting the pressure on? Besides, I want that warhead, assuming it survives impact, and I’d rather have it not irradiating a Great Lake for about fifty thousand years.” Kate scanned through huge swathes of land with finger flicks, trying to find the right combination of depth and remoteness. “Jesus, why couldn’t they have flown over Minnesota? Wait a minute—I might have something. It’s not perfect, but it’ll have to do. Can you put it down in the westernmost fork of this lake?” She transmitted coordinates to B2S.

“I can try—you realize there’s a good chance the whole thing might burst apart on impact and scatter plutonium all over the place?”

“Better than plunging several million people into chaos.

I’ll fix it with the DNR later. Just do it now.”

The hacker switched to a phone line so she could talk to Kate as she worked. “Okay, here goes…coming up on the coordinates…sending the new change of course.

Guidance system has accepted it. According to my calcs, it should be hitting the lake right about…now. Hope we didn’t scare the crap out of some early-morning fisher-men.”

As Kate watched, the red line abruptly terminated in the southeast quadrant of Illinois. She sighed with relief.

“Congratulations, B2S, you probably saved about a million people’s lives.”

“I’ll be sure to remind you of that at my next evalua-tion. You need me for anything else?”

“Yeah, as long as you’re inside the Spaceworks network, make sure they can’t destroy any of their data. I have a feeling the FBI folks are going to find it very interesting. Let me know when you’ve got it locked down.”

“I’m on it.”

Kate was already switching to another channel to the Super Hercules. “MR-1, this is Primary. Repeat, this is Primary. I am altering your flight plan, priority one.

Change course and proceed to the downloaded coordinates. And tell the team to break out their hazmat gear and their scuba tanks, because they’re about to go swimming.”

Next, she dialed Tracy’s line, wanting to tell her the good news.

Tracy noticed a dull ringing in her ears, accompanied by a throbbing behind her temples that felt like a hundred tiny men were playing drums inside her skull. An acrid smell invaded her nostrils, and her eyes fluttered open to see a SWAT team member crouched over her, holding something under her nose.

“Hey, you are alive.” He helped her sit up slowly. “Careful, you took a pretty nasty jolt.” His voice sounded muffled, as if he was talking through thick cotton.

Tracy tried to speak, but her throat felt as dry as the desert. “Water,” she whispered. The SWAT officer produced a canteen, which she grabbed and lifted to her lips.