“Of course, it wasn’t going to be easy. Because, you see, the investigation was based in one of the most secure buildings in the world—the Pentagon in Washington. The place is nothing more than a huge slab of concrete—and much of it underground. It employs an anti-terrorist force that operates twenty-four hours a day. Every form of monitoring device you could imagine can be found there, and since 9/11, no commercial plane can get anywhere near. The Pentagon is thoroughly protected against chemical, biological and radiological attack. I know, because I considered them all. But even a brief examination showed me that any such approach was doomed to failure.
“And now, if you’ll permit me, I’ll move on to the second problem that I mentioned. It may seem completely unrelated to the first. For a long time, I thought it was. But you will see in a minute how it all connects.”
Alex said nothing. He was aware of Magnus Payne and the men who made up Force Three watching him.
He was still wondering how they fitted into all this. And where was Kaspar, the man with the tattooed skull? Even now, nothing quite added up. Alex shifted in the chair, trying to get some feeling back into his hands and feet.
“My other problem was Ark Angel,” Drevin went on. “Space tourism has always interested me, Alex, and when the British government approached me to go into partnership with them, I must confess I was flattered. I would benefit from the money they would put into the project. I would be at the forefront of one of the most challenging and potentially profitable enterprises of the twenty-first century. And it would provide me with the one thing I most needed: respectability! The Americans might view me as a criminal, but it would give them pause for thought when they saw that I was having supper with the Queen. It occurred to me that they might find it rather more difficult to drag me off to prison when I was Sir Nikolei Drevin. Or even Lord Drevin. Sometimes it helps to have the right contacts.
“And so I agreed to become partners with your government in the Ark Angel project, the world’s first space hotel. It’s above us right now. It’s always above us. And I can never forget it. Because, you see, it has become a nightmare, a catastrophe. Even without the Americans and their investigation, Ark Angel could easily destroy me.”
Drevin frowned and took a large sip of brandy.
“Ark Angel is billions of pounds over budget. It’s sucking me dry. Even with all my wealth I can no longer support it. And it’s all the fault of your stupid government. They can’t make a decision without talking about it for months. They have committees and subcommittees. And when they do make a decision, it’s always the wrong one. I should have known from the start. Look at the Scottish parliament! The Millennium Dome! Everything the British government builds costs ten times as much as it should and doesn’t even work.
“Ark Angel is the same. It’s late, it’s leaking and it’s lost any hope of ever being completed. The whole thing is falling apart. And for months now I’ve been thinking, if only the wretched thing would simply fall out of the sky. I could scrape back at least some of my money because, like every major project, it is insured. More than that, I’d be able to wipe my hands of it. I’d be able to wake up without having it, quite literally, hanging over my head. There were days when I seriously considered paying someone to blow it up.
“And that, Alex, is when I had my big idea. It’s as I told you. Two problems that came together with one single solution.”
Drevin leant forward and at last Alex saw quite clearly the madness in his eyes.
“I wonder how much you know about physics, Alex. Even as we sit here now, there are hundreds of objects orbiting above us in outer space, from small communications satellites to giant space stations such as the ISS and Mir before that. Have you ever wondered what keeps them there? What stops them from falling down?
“Well, the answer is a fairly simple equation consisting of their speed balanced against their distance from the earth. You might be amused to know that, theoretically, it would be possible for a satellite to orbit the earth just a few metres above your head. But it would have to go impossibly fast. Ark Angel is three hundred miles away. It’s therefore able to maintain its orbital velocity at just seventeen and a half thousand miles per hour. But even so, every few months it has to be reboosted. The same was true for Mir when it was in orbit, and for the International Space Station now. Every few months, rockets which are known as progress vehicles have to push all these large satellites back into space. Otherwise they’d come crashing down.
“In fact, some of them do exactly that. The Russian space probe Mars 96 fell out of the sky on 17 November 1996 and the pieces rained down across South America. In April 2000 the second stage of a Delta rocket narrowly missed Cape Town. The world has been very lucky that so far there has been no major catastrophe. Well, almost three quarters of the planet is water. There are huge deserts and mountain ranges.
The chances of a piece of space junk hitting a populated area are relatively small. Even so, most astronomers would agree, it is an accident waiting to happen.
“Are you finding this hard to follow? I’ll make it easy for you. Imagine swinging a conker on a piece of string around your hand. If you slow down, the conker will fall and hit your hand. And there you have it.
The conker is the space station; your hand is the earth. It doesn’t take a great deal to cause one to crash into the other.
“And that is exactly what I intend to do.
“Tomorrow, when Gabriel 7 blasts off, it will be carrying a bomb which has been exactly timed and which must be exactly positioned within Ark Angel. Everything has been worked out on computers and the program is locked in. If you look at a map, you will find that Washington is positioned at around thirty-eight degrees north. The angle of inclination followed by Ark Angel—its flight path—is also thirty-eight degrees. This means that every time it orbits the earth, it passes directly over Washington.
“The bomb wilt go off two hours after Gabriel 7 has docked with Ark Angel—at exactly half past four. This will have the effect of knocking Ark Angel out of its orbit. The space station will begin to topple towards the earth. It will enter the earth’s atmospheric drag and after that things will begin to happen very quickly.
The more atmosphere that surrounds it, the faster it will fall. Soon it will be tumbling—out of control. Or that is how it will seem. In fact, I have secretly programmed what are known as de-orbit manoeuvres into Ark Angel. Although it will seem to be moving haphazardly, it will be as accurate as an independently targeted nuclear missile.
“Can you imagine it, Alex? Ark Angel weighs about seven hundred tonnes. Of course, much of it will burn up as it re-enters the earth’s atmosphere. But I estimate that about sixty per cent of it will survive. That’s about four hundred tonnes of molten steel, glass, beryllium and aluminium travelling at around fifteen thousand miles an hour. The Pentagon is the primary target. The building will be destroyed. All the people working there will die, and every last scrap of information will be incinerated. I rather suspect that the shock wave will destroy most of Washington too. The Capitol. The White House. The various monuments.
The parks. A shame, because I’ve always thought it a rather attractive city. But very little of it will be left.” Alex closed his eyes. Jack Starbright was in Washington, visiting her parents. Maybe she would survive the hideous explosion that Drevin had planned. But thousands of people—hundreds of thousands—would not. Once again Alex
