she’d tricked him into ejecting. Morgan was staying with her plane until the end.
The Lodestar pilot must have seen the plane behind him because at the very last moment he banked to the left. If Morgan had ejected, the T-38 would have flown right by it.
Instead, Grant saw why she’d been selected as a fighter pilot. Morgan reacted to the evasive maneuver by snapping the T-38 sideways and flying through the starboard wing of the Lodestar.
The T-38 was transformed into a fireball so large that Grant could feel the heat of the burning fuel. Morgan didn’t have a chance to eject.
The starboard engines of the Lodestar cartwheeled away. Flames shot from the stub of remaining wing, and the Lodestar did a barrel roll, turning upside down.
Grant struggled to breathe in the thin air, fighting to maintain consciousness. He owed it to Tyler to be a witness to the end.
Grant expected the carrier to break up from the extreme aerodynamic forces, but the Lodestar fuselage remained intact, demonstrating the strength of the bird-bone frame holding it together. The aircraft continued its lazy spin until it was right-side up again.
Then to Grant’s horror, the Skyward was released from the Lodestar. It dropped away and the Lodestar fell behind, the fire eating away at the carbon wing.
The Skyward’s rocket fired just before the Lodestar exploded, taking it safely out of range of the burning wreckage.
True to its name, the Skyward stood on its tail and shot into the blue atop a tongue of fire propelling it to four times the speed of sound.
Grant had never felt so helpless as he watched the plane disappear into the heavens.
“So sorry,” he whispered as the blackness took him.
FIFTY-EIGHT
The deep indigo mesmerized Colchev. As they accelerated toward the stars, the color of the sky faded through a rainbow of blues. He turned his head against the punishing g-forces and saw the Earth receding at pace he couldn’t have imagined. Distinct ground features became imperceptible, only the shoreline recognizable as they soared over Lake Michigan.
The myriad windows of the Skyward had saved the mission. With nothing to do until the Skyward launched, Colchev had been taking in the panoramic view when he happened to look over his shoulder and saw the jet bearing down on them.
He had screamed a warning at Zotkin, but only in time to avert a catastrophic collision. In one last heroic effort before the Lodestar disintegrated, Colchev’s old friend jettisoned the Skyward, initiating the automated flight sequence.
He admired Zotkin’s sacrifice and vowed that his name would have a place of honor along with those of the other men who gave their lives in support of this mission.
Colchev suddenly felt the weight of responsibility crash down upon him. Now he was the only one left to carry out their plan. The future of the world was up to him.
Although they had launched prematurely, Colchev was confident that they would reach a sufficient altitude to make the operation a success. All he had to do was shut down the engines when the fuel gauge neared the five percent mark, leaving him enough to get clear of the gamma radiation emitted when the Killswitch detonated.
Colchev tore his eyes away from the hypnotic sky and focused on the task at hand. The engine was gulping liquid hydrazine at a prodigious rate, embodied in the five g’s that plastered him to the back of his seat. It was a tremendous effort to raise his arm, but the engine shutoff switch was within reach.
Just two more minutes.
Tyler was too busy trying to wrestle his way out of the bungee cord to admire the view.
He didn’t know who had made the kamikaze attack, but he thanked them for giving him a sliver of hope. During the violent roll he had hung upside down in his belt, providing just enough slack to pull his hands from underneath the restraints.
The Skyward’s engine howled behind them, but he knew the sub-orbital trip would last only a few minutes more. He contorted his arms in an attempt to undo the belt release, but the angle made it impossible to reach with his fingers. His best shot was to use his elbow to unlatch it.
He had to remember to keep silent as he worked. Colchev was still attending to the instruments. Tyler had been thinking about how Colchev would bail out of the Skyward, and it occurred to him that the spaceplane wouldn’t have a control to manually depressurize the fuselage as Colchev had said he would do.
Once Tyler realized Colchev’s likely depressurization method, he knew Colchev wouldn’t hesitate to shoot both of them. Tyler had to get to Colchev before the Russian discovered that he was free.
Tyler got his elbow under the latch and pushed it out, his muscles overtaxed by their quintupled weight. But the effort was enough.
The straps fell back into the seat. Although he was loose, the bungee was still wrapped around his wrists, and he had no way to untie it. He would have to get Jess to do it, but the brutal acceleration glued him to the chair.
Then the rocket cut off. One moment he weighed a thousand pounds and the next he was floating above his seat like a balloon.
Using his tethered hands, Tyler propelled himself over to Jess, who was shaking off the effects of the g- forces. He raised both hands for her to be quiet. He hoped Colchev’s helmet would prevent him from hearing their movement.
Tyler unbuckled her as silently as possible. He attached her seat’s oxygen hose to her suit, then closed her visor and locked it shut, making the suit airtight. He quickly unraveled her bungee cord and then held his hands out for her to reciprocate.
His cord was cinched up even tighter than hers, so she had trouble getting at the knot. She looked up, frustrated, and then her helmet twisted as if she spied something over Tyler’s shoulder.
He turned and saw Colchev getting out of his seat, the SIG Sauer pistol in his gloved hand.
The engine had cut off on schedule, and Colchev experienced freefall for the first time. For a moment it felt like his innards would come pouring out of his mouth, but the sensation passed quickly. In the movies astronauts in zero gravity are often portrayed as if they’re swimming through molasses, but Colchev had the opposite feeling, as if he had no more corporeal form than a ghost. The slightest nudge could send him flying.
After checking that his internal oxygen supply was functional and his helmet was closed, his next task was to decompress the cabin so that he could open the hatch. The differential between the cabin and the vacuum outside resulted in twenty thousand pounds of pressure on the door. He had to equalize them, which was what the pistol was for.
Shooting a hole in the skin of the Skyward was necessary for Colchev’s plans. It was a common myth that puncturing a plane’s window would cause the fuselage to explosively decompress and that anyone near the hole would be sucked out. Experiments on various aircraft had shown that the only effect would be the slow leak of air until it was depleted. At this altitude the blood of anyone not protected by a pressure suit would boil.
No sane aircraft designer would provide a way to intentionally depressurize a cabin, so Colchev had to resort to a cruder method. He couldn’t shoot through the windows because they were stronger than ballistic glass, but the carbon-fiber body was not bullet resistant. His plan was risky, but the whole venture had been risky. Besides, he would arm the Killswitch beforehand so that if something went wrong and he died as a result of the decompression, the weapon would still detonate.
He rose out of his seat and grabbed the headrest to turn around. Even in the bulky pressure suit, he felt as graceful as a butterfly.
His gleeful mood was suddenly chilled by the unbelievable sight of Tyler Locke, his bound hands outstretched, sailing toward him.
