'Maybe you ought to get under the desk, Bernice, so you don't accidently stop a bullet.'
As Bernice took that advice, Charley asked Rip, 'Would you mind explaining what we're doing up here when — '
'Later. Don't let anyone get in here.' He pointed toward the stairs. 'Oh, here are a couple spare magazines.' He tossed them on the desk.
Charley got behind the desk and pointed the rifle toward the stairs. 'I'm waiting for a miracle, Rip. Get busy.'
Bernice spoke up. 'Would you mind terribly, Charley, explaining what is going on?'
Rip ran to the corner of the room facing the hangar. He got down on his knees so only his head was visible through the window.
This had better work!
He tried to clear his mind. Closed his eyes, pressed the palms of his hands against them, took three or four deep breaths.
Okay.
He visualized the saucer, how it would look if he were sitting in the pilot's seat.
He waited a moment.
Another small wait, three or four seconds, then he commanded,
Captain Ikeda, Red Three, was ready to call it a bad job. He couldn't figure out a way to open the saucer's hatch. Such a small thing, and yet it had beaten him.
He was walking toward Red One, Koki Owada, who was still crouched by the hangar door, telling him on the radio to destroy the saucer with the antitank missile, when he heard a hum behind him. Not loud, just a gentle hum.
Ikeda glanced back over his shoulder. The saucer was suspended in midair about a foot off the concrete.
Ikeda staggered, then caught himself. He turned, faced the ship.
Now the gear was retracting.
'Red One, this is Three. There's someone in the saucer. You'd better destroy it now!'
Koki Owada turned to the soldier outside the hangar, who passed the antitank launcher through the door.
When Owada turned around, the saucer was moving!
It crossed the concrete floor, accelerated, and smacked into the closed hangar door. The building quivered from the impact.
From his perch in the atrium, Rip saw the roof of the hangar ripple. Okay! He backed the saucer up, ran it at the door again, faster. The impact made the hangar roof shimmy.
Should he raise the saucer, use it to lift the hangar roof? The saucer would be lifting against the joists that held up the roof.
First the door. Overhead doors were relatively flimsy; this one should cave in easily.
The saucer rammed the door so hard the upper hinges tore loose. Only the lifting cables were still holding it up.
Owada was right beside the lower right corner of the overhead door. He was trying to activate the battery in the missile launcher when the saucer hit the door again and the near door edge whipped out, just flicking against the toe of his boot.
Owada lost his balance and fell.
He picked up the launcher as the saucer backed up for another ram. The door was off its hinges. It would go through this time.
Before he could get the launcher on his shoulder, the saucer shot forward, tore the door loose from the building, and went soaring upward. Owada ducked to get out of the way of the falling door panels.
When Rip saw the saucer clear the hangar on the far side, a wave of relief flooded over him. Yes, yes, yes!
He brought the saucer around in a turn, flew it up to his level, then slowed it as it neared the atrium.
The first Tomahawk missile reached its initial point and pitched upward. It climbed quickly to three thousand feet, then pitched over steeply. The radar in the nose went into its target acquisition mode.
The aim point was a ventilator shaft on top of a roof. There! Computer analysis of the radar return identified the shaft to a 99 percent certainty. The computer checked the shaft's position in relation to the missile against its predicted position based on GPS coordinates, determined that it was within parameters, and began issuing steering commands to the missile's canards and flying tail.
The missile accelerated downward.
Rip Cantrell brought the saucer gently in against the glass and framework of the atrium as a burst of rifle fire sounded behind him. He was distracted for only a second, then concentrated on the saucer before him.
Glass exploded from the windows, blew around in a cloud as the framework twisted, buckled, and collapsed from the force of the saucer pressing against it. Punctuating the sound of falling glass and twisting metal was the staccato hammering of Charley's rifle and the high-pitched eerie wail of Bernice's screaming.
Koki Owada, Red One, came around the corner of the hangar with the launcher on his shoulder. He leaned against the side of the building to steady himself, put the crosshairs of the optical sight on the saucer, which was settling down amid the twisted wreckage of the atrium.
The first Tomahawk missile plunged through the hangar roof a scant six inches from the venI'llator shaft and penetrated two feet into the reinforced concrete floor of the hangar before the warhead exploded.
The force of the blast lifted the roof of the empty hangar and pushed its walls away from the building.
Koki Owada was struck by the wall just as he pulled the trigger of the missile launcher. The antitank missile roared from the launcher, shot across one hundred yards of manicured lawn, and punched a hole in the side of Hedrick's house. The missile went through three walls before the contact fuse impacted something solid enough to detonate it — the concrete elevator shaft in the center of the house.
The force of the exploding warhead bulged every door on the shaft and caused the elevator, which was at the top — atrium — level, to smash upward against the lifting machinery, ripping it from its mountings. The entire elevator and all its equipment fell down the shaft with a mighty crash.
Huddled in the library as explosions rocked the house and sifted dust down from the ceiling lights, Hedrick heard Red Sharkey's radio squawking. He picked it up and held it against his ear. Sharkey certainly didn't mind: He was lying dead five feet away.
'Hedrick here.'
'Mr. Hedrick, the saucer is sitting on top of your house, and the hangar just blew up.'
'On top of the house, you say?'
'Right on the bloody top. Collapsed the atrium framework, it did. Now it's sitting up there like a hen on her nest.'
That bitch, Charley Pine!
Crouching, he made his way to his desk, opened the bottom drawer. The radio-control device for the bomb was still there, right where he had left it. He got out the device as the Europeans and politicians watched, set it on the desk, flipped on the battery switch.
Green light.
