Don Pendleton: Doomsday Conquest

He was about to look over at Captain Thomas Sayers when he glimpsed something flash across the cockpit shield.

“Did you see that?”

“What the hell?” Holloran wasn’t sure what it was, but he would have sworn blue lightning had just streaked past Lightning Bat’s tapered nose. They weren’t low enough for any bolts of lightning, no storm systems to factor in, according to their Doppler radar. A shooting star, then? Meteor fragments?

Sayers repeated the question over the com link, Holloran staring up into the infinite black of the cosmos, when blue light jagged, but flashing this time, he believed, from inside the cockpit. Or did it shoot from the instrument panel? he wondered. After too many sorties in combat to count, having seen flying “things” he had more than once been warned by nameless spooks to never speak of, he wasn’t one to push panic buttons. But he felt the hairs rising on the back of his neck just the same, instinct warning him that something was either wrong or about to go south.

“Check all of our computer systems, Tom,” he told his copilot. “A to Z.”

“Roger, sir.”

“While you do that,” he said, wrapping one black-gloved hand around the side-arm controller, while tapping in the access code to the electro-optical navigational computer, “I’ll start dropping us down and prepping this puppy for its big audition.”

Holloran hoped he sounded confident, relatively gung-ho to the younger man, but he’d been dumped on the receiving end of too many SNAFUs to not trust his churning gut.

“PROTOSTAR EAGLE NEBULA Central Command to Lightning Bat Alpha. We are confirming your altitude and speed. Four thousand feet and holding steady, but you will have to decrease your speed to well below subsonic. Give us four hundred, Lightning Bat Alpha, and we can track you with visual confirmation.”

As the pneumatic doors hissed shut behind him, Gabriel Horn found he was just in time for the big show. The ground control station of Eagle Nebula wasn’t exactly the sprawling network of NASA’s command nerve center, he knew, but there was eyes-only supersophistication enough here to warrant all hands signing blood pacts for a black project so secret only a dozen men in Washington were aware of Lightning Bat’s existence. And, as head of Special Action Service, it was his duty to make damn certain all knowledge here either stayed under the compound’s roof or went to the grave with these people.

In that exclusive realm, however, there was critical mass, and building beyond the Eagle Nebula nest.

Easing up on their six, his rubber-soled combat boots padding silent as a ghost over sheer white concrete, Horn counted twelve aerospace brainiacs. The Chosen, he thought. Or the damned, depending on how well they held their tongues in check, though in his experience, considering at least three of the Seven Deadly Sins—pride, greed and envy—a couple of them, maybe more, would find a nasty and mysterious fatal accident in their futures. He could always count on the worst in human nature.

They appeared little more than shrouds at Horn’s first glance, white lab coats casting off a sort of glimmering hue as the fabric, woven out of nylon-silk, seemed to reflect light from the workstation with its running bank of monitors. Com links tying them all to Lightning Bat Alpha, their voices were a mixed babble to his ears as they relayed instructions to Major Holloran, confirming this and that.

Showtime.

Horn ignored the Air Force colonel boring daggers into the side of his head, focused instead on the cameras as they locked in on the arrowhead-shaped fighter jet. Briefed as thoroughly by Eagle Nebula’s commanding officer as he had expected, Horn knew the test flight was now monitored by four, long-range camera-fitted Black Hawks and two prototype Gulfstream SBJs. The supersonic executive jets, customized for military purposes, had the sleek Stealth hybrid covered, fore and aft, with the only variant being altitude at each end. To cover the fireworks, the Black Hawks were ranged around the compass, hovering now over the blast area.

All set for bombs away.

When the payloads were launched, gun cameras in the guidance systems of each nose, he knew, would track their flight paths, speeding bullets, near skimming U.S. government-owned prairie of North Dakota, until impact flashed obliteration then oblivion across the screens. Four payloads all told, he thought, what were technically cruise missiles, streaking at low altitude for the mock-ups, powered at subsonic speed to target by jet engines. Digital contour maps, born from radar and aerial and sat imagery, told the computer navigational systems in the warheads where to go.

Predestined supertech boogie-woogie.

Only these mothers of annihilation, code-named the Four Points, Horn knew, housed a series of thermal cluster bombs, eight to a package, two more inside each eight. As he did the math, recalling the computer graphics outlining the blast radius, he pictured smoking craters—or dozens of raging infernos—eating up something in the combined neighborhood of four to five square miles.

Sweet.

Welcome to the war of the future, he thought, aware that if this test run was successful, the empty wastelands of Nevada were next up, and in for a whole other galaxy of big bangs.

As Horn glimpsed Colonel Jeffreys moving his way, he pulled the pack of Camel unfiltered cigarettes from his pants pocket, stuck one on his lip. Clacking open his Zippo lighter and torching up, spitting tobacco flecks then dragging deep, he saw the head aerospace genius, Dr. Benjamin Keitel, glaring his way.

“Hey! Are you nuts? There’s no smoking in here!”

Horn washed a dragon’s spray of smoke toward Keitel, the man flapping his arms like a headless chicken, a couple more of his comrades jumping into the act. The geek was squawking out the virtues of nonsmoking to Jeffreys when Horn blew another cloud in his face and told the colonel, “Maybe you want to remind Dr. Frankenstein here who’s really in charge?” He ignored Keitel’s diatribe, adding, “Maybe you want to inform him I don’t exactly hand out pink slips at the end of the day for insubordination?”

“Get back to work,” Jeffreys told the aerospace engineer, who muttered something to himself then returned to his monitors.

Horn stared ahead, puffing, as the good colonel scowled him up and down. He could almost hear the man’s thoughts. Beyond the shoulder-holstered Beretta 92-F, if not for the white star emblem over his heart on his blacksuit, Jeffreys could pull rank.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t be so free in issuing implied threats like that, Mr. Orion,” the colonel said, layering disdain on his code name like a curse word.

“Well, you’re not me.”

“And I pray every night that blessing will continue.”

“Really?” Horn smoked, bobbed his head, got the message, hoping the day came when Jeffreys crossed into what he liked to call the Black Hole. “Fear not, Colonel. I’m not about to turn my quarters into a torture chamber,” he said, then, looking at the two female engineers, smiled and added, “or a rape room.”

“You son of a… Don’t you have some business to attend to, regarding an AWOL and, may I add, critical employee of this program?”

“We’re working on it. Something this sensitive, Colonel, it takes time,” Horn said as Jeffreys moved into his personal space.

“Time better served if you were, I would imagine, out there as point man in the hunt.”

Horn was searching for some threatening reply when he caught the change in tone from Keitel, questions hurled from his work bay, edged with concern as they were snapped into his com link. The SAS commander took a few steps forward, sensing a problem as he peered into the monitors where the executive jets mirrored Lightning Bat. The air became lanced, he felt, with rising panic as he saw what he believed were blue flames—or sparks?—leaping from the black ferrite-painted surface of the fighter jet, dancing next, nose to tail, there then gone. What the hell had just happened? he wondered, Kietel barking the same question to Major Holloran. Lightning Bat’s coating, he knew, was meant to absorb radar radiation, standard for any Stealth fighter to render it near invisible. Only he was privy there was more to the fighter jet’s body, from nose to swept-back Delta wings to tail, than earthly alloys.