Death Orbit (43 page)

Jones stood frozen while he watched the surreal scene, not quite believing it. With typical Nazi efficiency, all of the bodies were buried and the ground atop their mass grave covered and smoothed over in about ten minutes’ time. Then the Dresden Brigade packed up its gear and returned to the Pad 39-A area, where they’d been helping the Fourth Reich combat engineers restage the Energia rockets. The Nazi construction crew also returned to work, going about the business of fixing up the odd holes still left in the five-mile runway as if they’d done nothing more than take a short coffee break.

As for Doenitz, he jumped into one of the Fourth Reich’s trio of swift Lynx command and control helicopters and was soon setting down atop the VAB building. He approached Jones with an arrogant smirk, the ever-present cigarette holder dangling from his lips.

Hardened combat veteran though he was, Jones was actually sickened by what he’d just witnessed.

Once again, Doenitz was able to read his thoughts. He just shrugged and shook his head.

“There will now be more breathing room for both of us,” he explained to Jones coldly. “And it will smell a whole lot better around here, too.”

Another full day passed.

For the most part, Jones maintained his vigil atop the VAB, Doenitz rarely leaving his side.

Though Jones remained reticent, the Fourth Reich officer persisted in many attempts to engage him in conversation about a wide variety of subjects, from music, art, history to various military campaigns, to the comet that was speeding towards Earth.

As the sun began to set and the stars came out on this particular night, the unnamed comet was now visible to the naked eye. It was now much larger than the brightest star in the Big Dipper, brighter than everything else in the sky at the moment, save for the three-quarters waning moon. Very soon, it would be brighter than this as well.

But Jones refused to talk with Doenitz on matters other than the mission at hand, which was constructing the Energia rockets and getting them launchworthy as quickly as possible.

Still, the UAAF commander was amazed at how fast Doenitz’s troops were doing just that. The Nazi CO received updates on the work out on Pad 39-A every half hour, and he never hesitated a moment to relay the news of their progress to Jones. By 2200 hours, the first two stages on the first rocket had already been powered up; the third would be on-line soon. The loading of the first batch of nuclear weapons for lift into orbit was progressing swiftly as well. A total of 14 warheads would go up on the first launch attempt. If these made it, another 18 would go on the second Energia rocket, and then the remaining warheads would launch on the third. If everything went right, there would be 44 nuclear bombs of all shapes and sizes in orbit in less than 18 hours.

After that, the whole matter would be out of the hands of all those at the Kennedy Space Center and in the hands of those who were orbiting high above it.

It was close to midnight when Doenitz received a report stating that the first Energia rocket was ready to go, all stages were in place and powered up, the load of 14 nuclear warheads tucked snugly inside its payload bay.

When the Nazi officer snidely passed the news on to Jones, the UAAF commander came very close to accusing him of lying.

How could it be? Jones pressed himself, staring at the ghostly glow coming from Pad 39-A, about five miles away. How could a huge Energia rocket, the most powerful in the world, be moved, reconstructed, powered, loaded, fueled, and ready for launch into orbit in less than 36 hours—and actually 10 hours
ahead
of schedule?

It just didn’t seem possible.

As always, Doenitz read his mind.

“The answer is simple, General,” the Nazi told him, his face dark, his lips dispersing streams of cigarette smoke as he talked. “You see, we’ve been planning to do just this for a very long time. Capture this base, construct the rockets, load the nuclear devices, and launch. My men have been going over this very procedure every day, every week, every month for nearly a year. Believe me, after all that time, they know how to do it, when to do it, and how quickly it can be done. So you see, the actual completion of the mission is the only challenge left for them. They’ve chosen to do it both quickly and efficiently. For their spirit. For their beliefs. For their Fatherland. It’s hard to beat that kind of enthusiasm, is it not?”

Jones was loath to give Doenitz any reply, but finally his Irish got the best of him.

“Werner Von Braun and his Nazis put NASA into space the first time,” he replied icily. “You’re just doing it again under different circumstances. I mean, let’s face it, you guys are the follow-up crew. The
Wiederholenz.
And surely you, above anyone else, would agree that while history always seems to repeat itself, it usually forgets the guy who comes in second place.”

Doenitz’s reply was a long, angry stream of cigarette smoke that came fairly close to touching Jones’s nose.

“Fair enough, I suppose,” he said, in his most sinister voice. “But believe me, General, there are some things that history
won’t
repeat…”

It was exactly 0600 hours that morning when the bottom stage of the first Energia rocket ignited.

It sent a huge billow of flame across the bottom of Pad 39-A and out onto the wetlands and marshes beyond.

The rocket remained frozen for five long seconds. Then, slowly, gradually, it began to rise. It cleared the tower easily enough and, as these kinds of ballistic missiles usually do, began to pick up speed at an incredible rate the further it climbed into the sky.

Jones watched the thick missile rise into the air, the enormous swastika adorning its sides making him cringe. His eyes actually got moist with anger and hopelessness as the rocket began to disappear from view. Doomsday was coming, he thought, and we’re relying on the Nazis to give humanity one last shot. After all his years of fighting, and sending men to die for Liberty and what was right, what kind of an end was this?

But it was another question that had been really haunting him, one that was even more disturbing: what will the Nazis want if this impossibly bold plan actually works?

The very notion felt like a kick in Jones’s stomach every time it occurred to him. As he watched the Energia finally fade into the morning sky, he could see the Nazi ground crews already moving the second Energia stages to the launching pad, this even before all the smoke from the first had cleared away.

As always, the efficiency and coordination was rather frightening.

Maybe it would have been wiser, Jones thought, to just let the comet hit the earth and be done with it.

The second Energia went up at 1300 hours, seven hours to the minute after the first, and according to Doenitz, a full 90 minutes ahead of schedule.

The third and final rocket went up at 1800 hours, 6
P.M.
, just as the sun was beginning to set in the west, maybe for the last time.

Jones had watched all three launches from the VAB, Doenitz at his side, never missing a chance to pester him about the fabulous job all his good little Germans were doing. For the most part, Jones continued to ignore him, while also secretly marveling that what was happening before his eyes was real and not some kind of bad dream.

Night fell again and the great comet came out and stayed out. It was brighter than the moon this time, and tomorrow it would be brighter even than the sun. The only time Doenitz ever shut up was when he was staring up at the huge chunk of space ice that seemed so unflinchingly on course toward the earth.

They stood like this, watching it in silence, for a long, long time. The base below was quiet, too. There really was nothing left for anyone to do but wait. All of Doenitz’s troops had undoubtedly gone to sleep. All of Jones’s very anxious UA soldiers were undoubtedly awake, eyes lifted in rather pathetic hope, like Jones. And even a little like Doenitz.

The night grew clear, and with each passing hour, the comet got bigger and brighter. Around midnight, Doenitz began speaking again. This time, his voice was less stern, almost human.

“You know, General,” he began, “we had a number of very mysterious occurrences happen to us during this long ordeal. Missing men. Missing ships. Strange radio messages. Especially recently. We thought it was you. Your counterintelligence people, trying to spook us, as you say. It wasn’t you, was it? Reading biblical passages out over the airwaves?”

Jones nearly laughed out loud. “Are you kidding? We thought it was you guys…”

They looked at each other. Their eyes went wide with realization. Both men started to say something—but couldn’t.

“We lost men, too,” Jones finally said, breaking the silence. “A flight of Sabre jets. A big Seamaster. About fifty miles due east of here. Were your people involved in shooting them down?”

Doenitz shook his head no.

“We lost three troopships dropping off the Norse Army, who attacked you first,” the Nazi officer suddenly revealed. “They simply disappeared as well. Into a fog. About fifty miles off this coast, too.”

“We certainly didn’t sink them,” Jones told him. “We didn’t know anything about the Norsemen until they hit us.”

Doenitz waved his hand in a very imperial manner.

“They were simply fodder,” he said plainly. “Expendable louts. Just like our little yellow friends beneath the ground over there, we’re all better off without them.”

Suddenly angered again, Jones bit his tongue. He wanted so much to launch into a lecture on the basic regard for human life, even in the case of Norsemen and Cult members, but he held himself back. What was the point? Why try to educate a Nazi while up in the sky, hanging like a huge, glowing electric lightbulb, a rock of ice more than 300 miles across was heading right toward them at 72,000 miles an hour? Jones’s only regret was that he would never see his wife again, or his family or any of his friends. He couldn’t believe a sophisticated animal like Doenitz could share such feelings—and he was right.

“We had a number of missing airplanes as well,” Doenitz said, breaking the long silence again. It was clear his mind was firmly rooted on military matters, not those of love, hopelessness, and loss. “They just seemed to disappear, too. We sent them on an attack against you ten days ago. Off Key West. They weren’t shot down. They simply vanished, on their way back to base. They were two F-14s and a single F/A-18. Do you know what happened to them?”

Once again, Jones began to say something, but held his tongue for a moment.

“Lost off Key West, did you say?” he finally replied, with a shake of his head and the beginnings of a sly smile. “Nope. Can’t say I know where they are.”

In Orbit, Twelve Hours Later

T
HE STRING OF SPACE
mines was more than 10 miles long.

It stretched from the docking ring atop the cargo bay doors of the Zon shuttle to the end of the one of the twisted arms of the Heavenly Space Station, now more than 50,000 feet away.

Strung out along this astral clothesline, several groups of space walkers could be seen moving about; they were the Nazi space-mine technicians, men originally housed inside the space station. For the past two days they’d been spending just as much time aboard the Zon spacecraft as they had inside their orbiting home.

The ten-mile-long necklace of bombs was the grandest, most ambitious project ever undertaken by the Nazi space techs. Before this, their stint in space had merely involved taking the various pieces of space junk retrieved by the Me-363 Komets and adapting them into small-yield, chemical-explosive remotely controlled space mines. Eventually these techs believed they would be working on nuclear warheads that would be boosted into orbit by the Fourth Reich for refitting onto reentry rockets with which Viktor could then bombard the Earth below at will.

Now the space techs were working with nuclear weapons—each of the bombs along the 10-mile string had some kind of nuclear device attached to it, but this string of orbital megatonnage was not intended for use by Viktor to rain thermonuclear explosions down onto the earth.

Rather, it was being built to save the planet.

At the very least, the Americans inside the Zon could boast that it was their design being constructed 10 miles out in front of them, although the Nazi space techs were doing all the work. Once the string of bombs—44 in all, they’d all arrived safely from the three Energia launches—were properly fused and set, the string would then be broken into three separate lengths. These would then be attached to the rear of the Zon by a series of cables. If everything went according to plan, this trio of bomb lines would be flown out to a position in very high orbit, where a EVA would unhook them and connect each length into a ring, each one with a descending diameter.

The trio of concentric rings—one would be five miles around, the second three miles around, and the third two miles around—would then be placed in space, about 20 miles from each other. They would be arranged in such a way as to intercept the comet just as it was being drawn into the thick of the earth’s gravitation field. It was hoped the 44 nuclear blasts, going off mere microseconds from each other, would be enough if not to destroy the comet, then at least to alter its course and push it away from the earth.

There were three problems with this scenario, however.

First, the trio of nuclear rings had to be placed exactly in the right position at exactly the right moment; second, all bombs would have to detonate at the same time for the full impact of the 442,000 megatons to be effective; and third, whatever spacecraft placed the bombs in position would undoubtedly be vaporized, either by colliding with the comet or by getting caught up in the string of nuclear explosions.

The only spacecraft available to make this suicide mission was, of course, the Zon.

And there was only two people who could actually pilot the spacecraft that high and perform the crucial EVAs needed to place the nuclear rings in proper position.

One of them was Elvis.

The other was Hawk Hunter.

There had been a huge argument among the Zon crew as to who should or shouldn’t go. The near universal feeling was that the two girls should be left in the dubious care of the remaining Nazis aboard the space station, and the rest of the original Zon members—Ben, JT, Cook, and Geraci—should join Hunter and Elvis on their last mission. There were some merits to this case: after all, the alternative was for the odd men out to retire to the space station with the girls, knowing full well that if the desperate plan didn’t work, then the best they could hope for would be that the mysterious space station would be incinerated along with the earth when the comet hit. If that wasn’t the case, then they’d be doomed to a slow death orbiting high above the devastated planet, with absolutely no hope of rescue or resupply.