chopper. It dipped dangerously as his weight upset the center of balance.
He was about to follow Hanley when a stream of autofire bracketed the helo.
“Go!” he shouted, and clutched the skid.
George didn’t need to be told twice. He revved the engine and tore away from the dock, where another pickup truck had appeared with two men in its bed, hammering away at them with AKs.
Hanging by his arms and legs like an ape, Juan clung to the Robinson’s skid for all he was worth. The wind buffeting him was brutal, and his wet clothes felt like ice, but there was nothing he could do about it.
The
Adams must have radioed ahead about the situation, because every light on the ship was ablaze and extra crewmen were on deck to assist in the landing. The helmsman had already turned the bow away from Eos Island, and the old girl was under way.
George gave himself plenty of clearance as he came over the fantail. He ignored the warning lights flashing and horns sounding in the cockpit that indicated his beloved chopper was in her death throes. He imagined the oil burning away in the overheated transmission, as he gently reduced his altitude.
Juan let go of the skid when he was a just above the waiting hands of the deck crew. They caught him easily and lowered him to his feet. They scrambled out of the way to give Adams the room he needed to set the Robinson on the deck.
“Helm, flank speed,” Juan ordered the instant the skids kissed the pad. “Sound general quarters and rig the ship for collision.”
Adams killed power as soon as he felt the skids bump down, but the damage was already done. Flames erupted from the engine cowling and around the rotor mast. Crewmen were standing by with fire hoses, and he and Max jumped from the chopper amid a torrent of spray.
George looked back when he was a safe distance away, his handsome face drawn. He knew the chopper was a total loss.
Juan clamped a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll get you a shiny new one.” They went inside before the wind became too strong. In the
CHAPTER 38
THOM SEVERANCE WASN’T SURE WHAT TO DO. THE guards at the dock had reported capturing Max Hanley as he tried to escape the facility through the exhaust vent, of all things, and then they said they were being attacked by a black helicopter. For a brief instant, he feared the UN was behind the assault, what with rumors of their squadrons of black choppers. He caught a few snippets of garbled conversation over the walkie-talkie and then everything had gone silent. The cameras mounted atop the guardhouse were out, so he finally ordered a vehicle to check out the dock.
“They escaped, Mr. Severance,” the guard captain reported. “Hanley and another man in the chopper.
The guardhouse has been destroyed and so has the dock. A lot of my guys are missing.”
“Are there any more of them?”
“I’ve got patrols sweeping now. So far it appears as if it was just the one man.”
“One man killed all your guards and destroyed the dock?” he said doubtfully.
“I have no other explanation.”
“Very well, continue checking, and report anything out of the ordinary immediately.
Severance raked his fingers through his hair. Lydell Cooper’s final orders had been very specific. He wasn’t to send the signal for another two hours. But what if this had been the vanguard of a much larger assault? To delay might mean failure. On the other hand, if he sent the signal early it could mean that not all the virus had been attached to the feed lines of the laundry machines on all fifty cruise ships.
He wanted to call his mentor, but this was a decision he felt he should make on his own. Lydell was en route with Heidi and her sister, Hannah. They wouldn’t arrive until after the virus was released. He had had full control of the Responsivist movement for years, and, yet, like a son taking over a family business, he knew that he was under a constant microscope and wasn’t truly in charge at all. He never forgot that Lydell could override any decision he made, without warning or explanation.
He had chafed at that a little, not that Cooper interfered much. But now with the stakes so high, he wished he had that safety net of being told what to do.
What would it matter if they missed a couple of ships? Lydell’s calculations of the disease’s vector only called for forty shiploads of people in order to infect everyone on the planet. The extra ten were insurance. When questioned why some of the ships escaped infection, he could claim the dispersal devices failed. And if they all worked, no one would ever know.
“That’s it,” he said, slapping his thighs and getting to his feet.
He strode into the ELF transmitter room. A technician in a lab coat was bent over the controls. “Can you send the signal now?”
“We aren’t scheduled to send it for another couple of hours.”
“That isn’t what I asked.” Now that his decision had been made, Severance’s haughtiness had returned.
“It will take me a few minutes to double-check the batteries. The power plant is off-line because of the damage to the exhaust system.”
“Do it.”
The man conferred with a colleague deep beneath the facility using an intercom, speaking in arcane scientific jargon that Severance couldn’t follow.
“It will just be another moment, Mr. Severance.”
THE RUSSIAN SATELLITE’S electronic brain marked time in minute fractions as it streaked over Europe at seventeen thousand miles per hour. The trajectory had been calculated to the hundredth of an arc second, and when the satellite hit its mark a signal was sent from the central processor to the launch tube. There was no sound, in the vacuum of space, as an explosive gush of compressed gas blasted the tungsten rod out of the tube. It was pointed almost straight down, and it began its fiery trip to earth, descending at a slight angle, as its builders had designed, so it could be confused with an incoming meteor. Hitting the first molecules of the upper atmosphere created friction that merely warmed the rod.
The lower it fell, the more the heat built, until the entire length of the rod glowed red, then yellow, and, finally, a brilliant white.
The heat buildup was tremendous but never approached tungsten’s melting point of over three thousand degrees Celsius. Observers on the ground could see the rod clearly, as it hurtled across Macedonia and the northern Greek mainland, leaving sonic booms in its wake.
THE DIGITAL CLOCK on the main monitor was into the single digits. Juan had avoided looking at it before Max’s rescue but now couldn’t tear his eyes off of it. Max had refused treatment in the medical bay until after the impactor hit Eos, so Hux had brought her kit up to the Op Center and was working on his injuries. The seas were smooth enough for her to do her job, even though the
Max usually had a sarcastic comment about Juan running his engines above the red line, but he knew full well what was coming and kept it to himself. They weren’t yet at the minimum safe distance from the blast, and if the Chairman thought getting out and pushing would help he’d do it.
Hali Kasim tore his earphones off his head with a curse.
“What is it?” Juan asked anxiously.
“I’m picking up a signal on the ELF band. It’s from Eos. They’re sending the trigger code.” Cabrillo paled.
“It’s going to be okay.” Max’s voice sounded nasal because of the cotton balls stuffed in his battered nose. “The wavelengths are so long, the full code will take a while to broadcast.”
“Or they could release the virus at the first sign of an ELF signal,” Hali said.
Juan’s palms were slick. He hated the thought that they had come so far only to fail at the eleventh hour.
He wiped his hands on his wet pants. There was nothing he could do but wait.
He hated to wait.
