Don Pendleton - Starfire

Kytol, feeling his blood boil like hot lava in his veins, and who had little patience when it came to finessing a situation, computer or otherwise, wanted nothing more than to whip the .45 Glock from the shoulder rigging beneath his windbreaker and blow the machine into countless pieces all over the room. But the slightly built wiry man, he knew, had been an informal member of the notorious Crna Ruka. The Black Hand was responsible for hacking into the Kosovo Information Center in 1998, and from there it was a short cyberjump to break into NATO databases. For all the good it did, valuable intelligence was stolen from NATO right before the bombs began raining on Yugoslavia. He may not like these men, their superior attitudes, because he didn’t understand what they did or how they did it, but they were—in their parlance—super-cyberwarriors. They were the best at what they did, and at the moment he needed them more than the other way around. The days were gone, Kytol knew, when wars were won solely on brute force and overwhelming violence.

Serjac finally deemed him worthy of an answer as he waved at the screen in front of the Russian. “You can see for yourself.”

Kytol looked at the digital readout in the top corner of Anatoly Dyvshol’s split screen. Forty-two seconds and scrolling down. The Russian worked his keys with a renewed burst of energy, and the solar-winged silver ball enlarged after a flashing series of zoom-ins, the real observation LEO satellite, he knew, now monitoring its orbit. The satellite hung against the endless backdrop of outer space, and Kytol watched as a slender arm on the portside extended from the platform and locked into place, conical nose aimed at the blue planet.

Thirty seconds.

As the Russian began the final countdown at five, Kytol lost the smile. His eyes widened as a cone of fire burst from the rocket’s thrusters, instantly swallowed, it seemed, by infinite blackness.

“Three, two…”

It looked to Kytol like a giant silver spear.

“One…”

Then it was hurtling toward Earth, vanishing rapidly for the sea of clouds, a streaking javelin, but packed, Kytol knew, with fifty kilotons of fissionable devastation.

THE SKY WAS FALLING.

And it was all Boltmer could do to pry his eyes off the tumbling numbers on the watch engineered into the wrist of his spacesuit.

Less than a minute to impact.

Boltmer had never felt such pure cold terror. Trajectory, rate of descent, distance and potency of each ring to their observation-monitoring post all calculated—with supposedly no margin for error—it would blow, dead ahead, in their face. Grimly aware he would, in fact, be living just outside a nuclear fission blast—Boltmer could barely concentrate on the final chore.

Lumbering in his robotic-like cocoon, he stepped up and snapped the supersuction cups mounted on the base of the black-tinted diamond shield to the floor with his boot. The list of a hundred-and-one things that could go wrong wanted to scream through his mind. They were on the outer limits of what the principals called the third ring. Instruments to measure wind and radiation levels likewise sewn into the arms of their suits—supposedly impervious to shock waves—with cameras to film the initial blast and its effects shielded inside a classified crystallized carbon composite and meant to bear up under flying debris and searing heat, the winds at this distance would still hammer them at over 200 mph.

Blast. Heat. Radiation.

The three big ones.

The sudden flash jolted Boltmer, a cry of alarm trapped and echoing inside the reinforced bubble of his helmet. It was dazzling, then flared beyond brilliant, like a thousand suns rushing together for one infinite supernova, the burst of light piercing even both sets of protective covering enough he had to squint.

Time seemed suspended, all but immeasurable in this frozen eternity, as Boltmer stood, awed and terrified by the expanding cloud.

The gauges on his arm, he found, were shooting numbers so fast they blurred.

It was coming.

“What the hell was that?”

They were gasping, all but turned to stone, squinting at the blinding orange-white ball as it roiled across the floor-to-ceiling plasma relay monitor. Swelling until the cloud ran off the twenty-by-twenty-foot screen, the image jumped, then flickered with static as titanic shock waves reached out for the observation satellite. They were too stunned, too late to readjust the ob-sat’s altitude and pull it back from the nuke’s asteroid-like hammerblows. Gyroscopes, radar, radio, John Ellison knew, the whole computerized nerve center, in short, that could monitor and transmit the situation from those space eyes wiped out.

All systems go, however, from where he stood.

While the twelve-man, three-woman workforce launched into scientific babble all over Control Room Omega, scrambling from bay to bay to check monitors and digital readouts and bark questions into throat mikes, Ellison kept a straight face. Hanging back, he listened as the director demanded to know what in God’s name had just happened.

God, the NSA man knew, had nothing to do with it.

What they knew was that the suspicious unidentified low earth orbit satellite their Keyhole and NASA-affiliated observation and military satellites were tracking had just detonated in a measured read of fifty-kiloton self-immolation. The same explosive yield, to their mounting horror and panic, that had just blown a chunk of Western Queensland outback into radioactive dust from a rocket fired from the killer satellite.

Ellison stole another moment to watch their frenzied search for quick answers they weren’t about to find anywhere in their computer systems. Director Turner looked torn between the wall monitor’s leaping fuzz, firing questions at his scientists and the red phone mounted on his personal command desk in the far corner. NORAD, the Pentagon, the CIA, down to NASA and every American military and law-enforcement agency in the continental United States and abroad with access to satellites would know by now the United States, its allies, and the world at large was just thrust to the edge of Armageddon. Ellison knew the combined authority of all that clout was scrambling right then to reach the Joint Chiefs, the President, anybody on his staff with a secured cell or sat phone. Only they would flood the White House with SOS to be flung back into this black hole of unfathomable mystery and international menace, the likes of which no power on Earth had yet to face.

Ellison left them to their terror and confusion, looked up at the observation deck. Behind the thick-glass bubble stood his one and only superior. The man in charge was casually working on a cigar, looking down on the workforce like some king on a throne about to pass judgment on his subjects.

In truth, he just had.

Ellison made eye contact with the man known only to the others as Sir. It was quick, but Sir lifted a hand to the blind side of their commotion, long enough to shoot him a thumbs-up.

THE SKY WAS ON FIRE.

Or so it looked to Boltmer in his flying vortex.

Unless he’d been nailed to the hull of a battleship, he knew there was nothing he could now do but let himself get dragged, lifted, dropped and bounced across the ground. Human tumbleweed. The shimmering radioactive halo that fanned across the heavens was the least of his concerns. Round one was punishing enough, as he and Karlov had hurtled in tandem, sailing west. How far they’d been tossed he couldn’t say, but he was still breathing.

The only good news so far.

He soared, slammed to earth, then was sucked up, flying on. The raging sea of debris and dust jettisoned west was now being swept back in the furious clutches of the afterwinds. The world blurring along in the eye of this storm appeared little more than a streaking black whirlwind, all but blinding Boltmer to whatever else was being vacuumed beyond maybe a yard from his flight path.