Starfire. Don Pendleton
to consider his answer, measure the man.
They were nameless sources of intelligence he had used over the years. Sometimes the big Fed went to them, but usually they sought him out through a series of encrypted e-mails they had arranged. Whether to pick his brains or to attempt to confirm suspicions and rumors of the existence of Stony Man Farm, he met them at a mutually agreed-upon time and place. He always seemed to walk away, taking everything, giving nothing, but only insofar as he knew.
They came as the usual clone of buzz cut, dark clothing, chiseled but nondescript faces, a security force of normally two shooters on hand, as was the case now. One mountain of granite with earpiece, throat mike and HK-33 was posted outside the door, the other wraith, Brognola had likewise last seen, was waiting behind the wheel of the black GMC with government plates. There could be more hardmen, likewise snipers buried in the woods for all he knew. But he had come armed with more than foresight and a bad gut feeling. Since nearly being murdered in the past during one such encounter, Brognola had Able Team in tow, more than confident that they had him covered. If the Stony Man commando sensed the slightest threat, the pager on his hip would vibrate to abort, go tactical. Barring that, there was the handheld radio unit clipped to his belt, and Carl Lyons wasn’t one to speak softly when it hit the fan.
“SADS,” Brognola finally said, deciding he could play the Shadow Man’s acronym game. “They are Earth’s last insurance policy against NEOs, or near earth objects.” He cleared his throat into a long moment of stony silence. “If this is a history on the threat of comets and asteroids, I know about the mile-wide Meteor Crater in Arizona, about Tunguska in Siberia where something like fifteen to twenty miles of forest was leveled by a twenty-megaton blast. I know a one kilometer space rock is considered a ‘large impactor.’ I know about twenty or thirty billion tons of said space rock hurtling toward Earth and impacting at about ten kilometers a second is what science considers the threshold for an extinction level event, which, I think, would yield something in the area of one million million megatons of TNT. Oh yeah, and a two or three mile rock would create global catastrophe. Earthquakes, firestorms, tidal waves of hundred-foot or more walls if it hit water. Hurricane winds off any chart we now measure them by would ensue and hurl tens of billions of tons of dust and debris into the air. The sun would vanish. A new Ice Age would start.”
The Shadow Man snorted.
Brognola felt the guy’s penetrating stare, then, annoyed at whatever his act, glanced around the room. The only furniture was four chairs and the steel table at which Brognola sat, all of them bolted to the concrete floor. He suspected there was a cellar, as evidenced by a short, arrow-straight fissure midway across the room. It was barely noticeable to the naked eye, and he would have missed it altogether had it not been for the white light burning from the single bulb hanging over his head. The no-name op remained standing in the outer limits of light in the deep corner, as if deciding what and how much to say. Brognola was reaching for the black folder when a match flared.
The Shadow Man lit his cigarette, flipped the match away and said, “You can get to all that on your own time, Mr. Brognola. I’m here at considerable risk to my own life, which puts you in the same position. Listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you, no matter how tedious you may think me getting to the point.” Shadow Man puffed, dug a hand into his pants’ pocket. “These SADS and their monitoring of ELEs are kept fairly secret from John Q. Public, other than a passing knowledge they may be out there. In our Milky Way there are two-thousand-some NEOs alone. Most are no larger than your average pebble. Whoever controls space just above Earth, Mr. Brognola, controls the planet. Whoever controls the knowledge of these ELEs alone, why, they can monitor and track them and decide—depending on their trajectory and size—whether to blast or let them pass on by. No warning to us mere mortals here below. Knowledge then being the perfect weapon, or the perfect judgment.”
“What’s any of this have to do with what happened…”
“Extinction level event, Mr. Brognola. The future belongs to those who can control an ELE. Act of God or man-made.”
“So, we watch for the rock that wiped the dinosaurs off the face of the Earth. Hey, you’ll have to excuse me if maybe I’m translating for you here, but we—the good guys, I’ll assume—need to be the only ones in the neighborhood controlling orbiting satellites with nuclear platforms, whether to blast an ELE into quadrillion golf balls or threaten another nuclear power with a preemptive strike from the stars.”
“I wouldn’t go on sounding so glib and dismissive.”
Brognola pulled out a cigar, stuck it on his lip. “My mistake. I assumed you were in a hurry.”
“If most of the human race, say, is destined to go out like the dinosaur, as you put it, then the question facing us, who have the knowledge and foresight, is what kind of world will Man inherit.”
“Or who will inherit.”
The Shadow Man paused, as if Brognola had crossed some line in the sand, then went on. “Because of the coming threat of the cataclysmic impactor, there are nuclear-armed satellites in space, but I’m sure you already know this. Yes, we can safely assume the propaganda will keep pumping it out how such weapons are outlawed. And if they are, by chance, made public knowledge, then they will be deemed defensive measures against the killer asteroid. Lies by omission, we call it. What happened, thus, in Australia, is a result of someone getting the edge on this technology. Our educated suspicion is that a black ops renegade faction of the European Space Agency decided to field test a new toy. But, worse, our side in the space race—that would be NASA who is monitored and provided security by the NSA, which is contracted out on behalf of the Department of Defense—has, as you know, been working for some time with our supposed European space friends to launch any number of shuttles. Mutual-shared space stations for research and development, and so forth. Nobody asks what’s really going on up there. Ignorance in this instance is bliss for the majority of common man. Beyond myself, however, only a few in our cloistered intelligence circles are aware that all this rainbow coalition reach for the stars is merely a mask to hide the demon.”
Brognola waited for the final grim point, but the Shadow Man fell silent. The big Fed waited him out.
“Washington will keep scrambling to conceal the truth about what we think happened in Australia,” the Shadow Man finally said.
“Which is?” Brognola prompted.
“This is where you might come in.”
“How come I got the lucky draw? And what makes you think—”
“It is called Galileo. It’s a classified NASA complex north of Dallas. They are fronting as a SADS, but the Galileo program is only part of a more sordid truth. One such truth is that behind the scenes they’re building RLVs—reusable launch vehicles.”
“Space shuttles.”
“Not quite.” The Shadow Man seemed to vanish behind a dragon’s spray of smoke. “The single key difference between a space shuttle and an RLV is that our current shuttles lose their external tank shortly after liftoff. The single-stage-to-orbit RLV, on the other hand, is fully reusable. Winged-configuration will give it fuel tanks…the long and the short is that it has the capacity to become the prototype space plane, requiring little more than ground maintenance, refueling, then it’s wheels up once more.”
Brognola clenched his jaw at the infuriating silence. “And?”
“Galileo has an RLV long since off the drawing board. We hear it’s about six months or so from its maiden voyage. And it’s platform is specced to house both a thermonuclear payload and particle laser weapons. But that’s not the real problem.”
WHEN LYONS FOUND he couldn’t clearly mark the shooter in thermal imaging, confusion threatened to freeze his hand. Every yard ever gained in enemy blood to battle the evil that men did, he thought, and he had never seen anything like this! A living ghost was bent on cutting him to ribbons!
Weapons fire strobed in his night vision as he bolted three or four feet, firing his subgun from the hip before he was chased to the broader span of the next available tree armor. The HK