Dark Dragons (42 page)

*

“What the hell are those?” Taggart asked.

PAVE PAWS suddenly had radar locks on twenty-two
unidentified objects, each with tangent velocities of MACH twenty-three, an
incredible 5.4 miles per second.  They had originated from a single point
in space 457 miles above the western United States.

“Oh my god, they’re air-to-air missiles,” Towsley said.
“They’re targeting the ScramHawks.”

The supercomputers under the COC plotted speed, course and
time on intercept data, and computed that none of the ScramHawks over North
America would reach the inbound asteroids.

“Fuck!”
  Taggart tore off his headset and
smashed it on the floor at his feet.

Towsley knew of the horrifying physics behind asteroid
impacts, especially the little, dirty ones.  Asteroids smaller than two
hundred feet in diameter were, because of their size, doomed to explode in the
air before reaching the ground.  The sudden deceleration due to heavy air
resistance encountered in the lower stratosphere caused intense heat and pressure,
resulting in a massive airburst and a fireball of infrared radiation that could
vaporize everything out to twenty miles in radius.  The core of the
superheated fireball, however, would still retain its cosmic speed due to
kinetic momentum and plunge into the ground, creating a crater seven times the
diameter of the original asteroid.  The end result was nothing short of a
nuclear-like explosion.

The red ScramHawk trajectory line and its attached FCD box
over Beale Air Force Base suddenly disappeared from the screen.  Then the
GEODSS site in Socorro, New Mexico . . . then the PAVE PAWS radar at Clear Air
Force Station, Alaska. . . .

Towsley closed his eyes.

*

George Harlan did not have time to close his eyes.  His
eyelids had already been seared from his face along with the rest of his skin
and clothes facing east toward the vaporizing flash ten miles away above
Beale.  Black smoke roiled off the eastern side of every object around
him.  He wanted to scream but couldn’t.  Three seconds ago, he had been
pumping gas into his Chevy truck at a Citgo, shouting at his daughter in the
backseat to stop teasing her little brother, but now George was on fire,
thrashing his arms about and wondering why he and everything around him was
ablaze:  the gas station, the trees, the Taco Bell next door, the hot
chick with the big boobs squeegeeing her windshield.

George Harlan had one last look at his four year-old son
strapped in his carseat, clapping his hands to daddy’s new trick before an
ear-splitting, 1,200-mph shockwave blew him, his truck, his kids and the world
around him into oblivion.

*

Medusa Stare trained one of its 8-inch visible-light
telescopes in the vessel’s direction and jumped in magnification.  Immediately,
a fuzzy black-and-white image of an object appeared in the lower corner of the
top screen, and the subtle discord in the COC fell silent.  A green
highlight square appeared around the image and jumped forward to fill the
entire screen.  The computers aboard Medusa Stare brought the monster from
deep space into focus.

On a smaller 72-inch HD screen on the lower left front wall,
a monitor reserved for civilian news broadcast, the words
ABC News Special
Report
suddenly appeared.  Towsley reached down on his console and
toggled his headset to that TV monitor.

“Good evening, I’m Brad Younger reporting from ABC studios
in New York City.  Our affiliate in Sacramento, California, KXTV, is
reporting of what appears to be a massive explosion from the vicinity of Beale
Air Force Base which is forty miles north of the California capital. 
There are reports of forest fires and shockwaves felt hundreds of miles
away.  Cell phone traffic coming from Linda, California, a town of
seventeen thousand people just ten miles west of Beale Air Force Base, has
ceased.  We are also receiving reports just now coming in to our studio of
other gigantic explosions and shockwaves in Texas and Cape Cod,
Massachusetts.  All of this is occurring at the same time that a moon-like
object has appeared in the skies of Earth.  For those living in North
America, you can see it if you go outside and look southeast just above the
horizon. . . .”

There it is.  Let the chaos, looting and freeway
traffic jams commence.
  Towsley switched his headset back to the COC’s
main comm circuit.

Medusa Stare had track-lock on thirteen unidentified objects
in a straight line, speed and sizes unknown, heading for what appeared to be
Low Earth Orbit trajectories.  But Towsley knew what they were. 
Darren had mentioned thirty-mile long assault cruisers with X-shaped fuselages
and triangular troop carriers moored to them.  Medusa Stare signaled that
it had detected a fourteenth object, then a fifteenth.  Moments later, a
total of twenty-one assault cruisers had been cataloged, one-by-one inserting
themselves into polar orbits 1,100 miles above the earth’s surface where they
would pass over the equator along a different longitude with each orbit. 
The ScramHawks could never reach them at that altitude.

“National Command Authority has put us at Def-Con One,
general,” Admiral Breuer said.  “First Air Force reports that our U.S. air
defense fighters are scrambling.  Global combat forces are also on
Alert-One status.”

It won’t matter,
Towsley thought.  He had a picture
in his head of Darren, Tony, Nate and Jorge down in PostOp Two oblivious to the
coming apocalypse, milky-white Propofol slithering through their brains, the
comas deep, their faces angelic.

“Air Force One has departed Andrews with the NCA and Joint
Chiefs aboard,” Admiral Breuer said.  He turned to look at General
Taggart.  “Pentagon says they’re heading here, sir.  ETA, twenty-two
hundred hours.”

General Taggart did not move in his leather-bound command
chair that he liked to call “The Throne” at the back of the COC.  The seat
had once belonged to Strategic Air Command’s second god of war and its most
influential, General Curtis E. LeMay, Taggart’s personal Jesus.  The damn
thing still had cigar burns on the arm rests.

“Thank you, admiral,” was all that came from the back row.

Morale among the command staff in the COC had definitely
turned south.

The Proximity Alarms in the COC went off, and Major Hilly
quickly silenced them with the flick of a switch at his station.  The
alarms were tied into a computer program that searched for unidentified objects
picked up by military and civilian airport radars across the United States.

“U.S. Northern Command reports numerous bandits in the
atmosphere,” Captain Connors, the chief communications officer said over the COC’s
radio net.  “Both Western and Eastern Air Defense Sectors are reporting
Air National Guard units have visuals on the airborne contacts.”

Towsley knew these had to be fighters like Caliban’s. 
He was beginning to feel nauseated.

“NORAD has lost contact with Malmstrom Air Force Base . . .
Ellsworth Air Force Base.”  Captain Connors turned in her seat to look at
Towsley.  “Barksdale in Louisiana. . . .”

These were America’s ICBM and strategic bomber bases. 
Towsley looked up at the projection map of North America and saw a single red
circle passing northward over the continent along a polar orbit, Medusa Stare
providing the tracking data with one of its infrared telescopes.  A single
Vorvon assault cruiser was knocking out the U.S.’s strategic nuclear sites
comfortably from its lofty altitude 1,100 miles up.

A black-and-white live video feed from the satellite
displayed a surprisingly detailed image of the 30-mile long vessel.  It
looked like an elongated clamshell with an X-shaped aft section, forty troop
carriers moored to the wings.

A bright light as blinding as an arc welder flared from the
tip of the assault cruiser’s clam-shaped fore section, temporarily flooding
Medusa Stare’s infrared thermal cameras.  At the same time, an equally
brilliant flash erupted on the earth’s surface ahead of the ship, producing a
rapidly rising mushroom cloud.  Some kind of laser cannon or plasma
projector.  A NORAD operations status box on the screen indicated that
communications with Minot AFB, North Dakota, suddenly fell silent. 
America’s entire armament of Minuteman III ICBM’s had just been defanged by a
single alien vessel like so many teeth.

Medusa Stare also visually had locked onto a single vessel
that——somehow—— maintained a stationary position 530 miles above North
America.  The surveillance satellite indicated the ship was just over
eleven miles long.  It was extremely slender with a bulbous stern which
tapered smoothly down to a fine point, resembling a giant turkey baster with a
hypodermic needle at the end.  Some kind of command and control ship with
a long antenna perhaps?  A possible target if they could ever reach it.

On the radar projection map, seventeen ScramHawks suddenly
appeared from three hidden batteries based in the Rocky Mountains and quickly
engaged the alien fighter formations over the U.S., a surprise attack that
caught even Towsley unaware.  And apparently the enemy.  Seventy
thousand feet over Missouri, two 9-ship squadrons of alien fighters attempted
to peel away from the five SAMs targeting them.  They were too slow. 
The moment the five ScramHawks and eighteen alien vehicles disappeared from the
radar screens, a cheer, for the first time, erupted from the men and women in
the COC, the wildest coming from the five-man team in the ScramHawk Air Defense
pit at the front of the room.

The only problem——the hidden SAM batteries were no longer
hidden.  Seven squadrons of Vorvon fighters quickly engaged the three
air-defense sites, which reminded Towsley with a stinging bit of irony of his
old Wild Weasel job.  More ScramHawks were loosed upon the incoming
enemy.  Some missiles made it to their airborne targets, but most were
destroyed in mid-flight.  Communication with all three SAM batteries
suddenly died, and their green computer icons were replaced with blinking red
squares on the map screen.  Of the sixty-three fighters which had attacked
the missile sites, forty-five had survived.  No cheers burst from the Air
Defense pit this time.

The lightning speed of this uncanny battle and the tenacious
ferocity of the enemy were relentless.  A dreadful iciness soaked Towsley
to his core.  It was strange to see the end of the world this way,
watching millions of people die from asteroids in the form of red circles and
blue triangles flown by valiant U.S. fighter pilots dying by the dozens to
protect their airspace from red dots.  It was like watching war with an
Xbox.

Towsley twisted the cap off his Diet Coke to finish the last
two inches, but the bottle never reached his lips.  He became aware of a
soft hum rising in the center of his head and squint his eyes slightly from the
tickling sensation.  It built to a gentle vibration across his forehead.

Hear us . . . hear us .
. . hear us . . . hear us . . . hear us . . . hear us . . . hear us . . . hear
us. . . .

He turned to his right at Admiral Breuer who stared back at
him with a look of complete shock and horror on his face, an expression
emulated by everyone around the COC.  The entire command staff could feel
it too.  Captain Connors had both hands over her mouth.

Hear us . . . hear us .
. . hear us . . . hear us. . . .

General Taggart had finally moved from his chair.  He
was on his feet with his fingertips to his ears.  It was not sound. 
It wasn’t even English, but the English-speaking staff in the COC somehow
understood it.

Hear us . . . hear us .
. . we are children of the invicid . . . to the tribes who have left the lands
of eridu carefully heed our demand . . . cede to the invicid no less than four
million hatchlings under the age of fifteen solars within single half-orbit of
the inner most planet. . . .

The ABC News announcer on the civilian TV monitor had
stopped speaking, his eyes staring straight ahead and then to someone to his
left off screen, turning around in his seat to look behind him at the studio
crew at their computers.  He faced the camera again, a look of utter dread
on his face.

It’s happening everywhere,
Towsley realized. 
Oh
my god, everyone can hear it . . . a seven billion person global psychic freak
out!

. . . delegation of the
invicid will assist the tribes who have left the lands of eridu with this most
glorious selection . . . failure to comply with delivery of hatchlings will
result in a global punishment which shall now be demonstrated with restraint .
. . watch closely . . . watch closely. . . .

Four million hatchlings under the age of fifteen.  The
telepathic message was clear.  Towsley felt that iciness sink
deeper. 
They want our children.  They want them all turned over
within a half orbit of the planet Mercury——some forty days from now.

“Our Ku-bands are being compromised,” Captain Connors
reported over the COC radio net.  “C-band, Q-band, all commercial
satellite telecommunication signals are being hacked.”

ABC News had gone static on the civilian monitor.  But
a mysterious image was trying to break through, a snap shot of something fading
in and out of the static.

Watch closely . . .
watch closely . . . watch closely. . . .

“We’re receiving an ATSC standard MPEG-Two downlink on our
civilian monitors.  All microwave receivers across the U.S. are being
pirated.”

“Put it on the top monitor,” Taggart ordered.

The top high-definition screen displayed the static-filled
ABC broadcast, but seconds later, the TV snow disappeared.  In its place,
a green night vision image appeared of the strange hypodermic needle ship now
pointing downward toward the Earth’s surface.  The needle had elongated
deeper into the atmosphere over what looked like a bubble which had formed
around Washington D.C.  Towsley recognized the area of the U.S. capital
because he could see Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware peninsula to the east and
the widening Potomac River to the south curving its way toward the
Atlantic.  The bubble looked to be around five or six miles in diameter.