Pillar to the Sky (42 page)

Gary hesitated. His tour of duty was the journey of a lifetime, and he doubted if, once down, he would ever get the chance again. But he knew the logic—based not just on emotion but on simple physics—that bringing him down the rest of the way was a lot easier than sending him back up.

“Agreed.”

“Handing you off to Ground Control, you royal pain in the butt.”

For the next two hours the descent went smoothly until the next harmonic hit. Trying to move a cumbersome anchor point on the ground to set the wave up and get it to the frequency needed to sway the tower to one side of the potential impact had to be timed to within hundredths of a second.

That was always the design problem with a wire and cable versus a ribbon.

With a ribbon, a vehicle could rise and descend on one edge, while instrumentation and such essentials as small thruster units to control such moments could be mounted at multiple points along the other edge. A cable could never do that until built up enough to allow space for ascent and descent stages and spinners to pass, with enough diameter on the cable itself to mount such essentials to one on the opposite side.

There was still a reasonable margin of time. The old Soviet sat had cleared the equator nearly a thousand miles away in its last orbital pass. Of course its actual path was constant; the variable was the earth’s rotation beneath it. Gary got word that Eva was on her way back from Seattle, raging mad, and he asked that her transmission be blocked as he forced his mind to focus on the variables, definitely feeling the next harmonic wave coming up, the shock of its lateral movement jarring his vision for a second. It would peak, come racing back down, and would supposedly move the tower just as the defunct Russian sat passed exactly where the cable should have been, except that it was now flexed more a hundred meters off the satellite’s path. Another wave had been activated from the ground, calculated to meet and merge with the first one to ensure the distance, while small waves from the somewhat minimal move to avoid the earlier hunk of debris—which had actually passed far wide of the tower—continued to resonate along the Pillar. Again, in space, a miss by an inch was as good as a miss by thirty meters or a hundred miles.

“We are thirty minutes till passage,” the voice of tower control whispered in his headset.

He was in free fall now, a feeling no longer disconcerting and actually pleasant, and he briefly wondered how normal gravity would feel once back on earth. He did not look forward to the prospect.

“Let’s stop half a kilometer short of projected impact,” Gary requested. “I can observe from there and, once past, start dampening out the wave from near the midpoint.”

There was an assertion from the ground, which was repeated by Singh, now far above. He could tell they were getting tense. The calculations of where the harmonic would be at the precise microsecond of passage of the sat was everything, if the calculations offered by the Russians and confirmed by Tower Control were accurate. As the defunct satellite approached, with every passing minute the calculations were updated. It did not look good.

“Two minutes to passage.”

Gary could feel the traction wheels starting to engage, to act as brakes, a brief burn from the rocket pad kicking in as well to slow him down. A couple of g’s now as he decelerated. The Parkinson’s was triggering a lot of tremors, but for this crucial moment, by force of will, he was keeping his mind clear, watching the display monitor only inches away from his helmet, modeling the harmonic waves that were racing both down- and upward to merge at the point of potential impact.

All was looking good, with thirty seconds to go. He was now at full stop a half kilometer above the predicted point of impact.

“Ten seconds…”

He half expected to see the sat go whizzing by. Absurd, as it was moving at over five miles a second relative to his position; despite its size, it was like trying to spot a bullet in flight, though Gary did switch on the high-speed cameras, filming at 5,000 shots a second to capture the passage for later analysis.

He felt the harmonic from above hit him, the view of the tower below on his monitor screen. Everything lurched from the wave passing.

“Passage!” someone shouted on the comm link.

He actually did see a blur on the screen, and then, merciful God, was that a spark, a flash of light?

He felt a shudder run up through the tower. Was that a spray of debris trailing out from the sat, which was already gone from view?

He focused the camera in on where he saw the spark. Had there been an impact?

It was impossible to tell.

“Tower Control, I saw a flash of light.” His voice was shaky even as he spoke, the harmonic wave rattling him in the pod.

“Pod One, Tower Control. Yet to confirm. Proceed with caution.”

He punched the monitor screen, ever so gradually edging up the speed of the traction wheels that kept him firmly locked to the tower. Just a few miles per hour, barely crawling, but he could feel a vibration running through the pod. Something was wrong.

And then came the word from down below, a near mimic of a similar announcement generations ago:

“Pod One, we have a problem here.”

On the Platform

The alarms had gone off seconds before the passage of the sat and it had caught all by surprise. With all attention focused on the sat passage and controlling the wave to try to avoid a direct impact, the usual duty detail of local radar monitoring was a lonely post. But the elderly, bespectacled man in charge of it, Bill Webster—a long ago operative with a government agency that still had good contacts with “the corporation”—had been expressing concern for weeks that something was “building up.”

In a world in which wars and rumors of wars had been part of life since the beginning of recorded history, when conflict in the Middle East, in Central Asia, Southwest Asia, and East Africa, threats of nuclear deployment, EMP attacks, and in the last year increasing agitation over how the tower might impact the global economy, the tension was there. But like all such things it had almost become background noise, except for the dedicated few who did take it seriously and monitored it closely … while the rest of the world continued to wonder who would be the next dancing champion, win the various games that weekend, or what was the newest scandal with some airheaded bimbo in Hollywood.

The alarm sounded, overriding the chatter as Gary announced that he thought there had been a partial impact.

“I am tracking two trajectories, submarine launched, 220 degrees relative to our position,” Webster announced, whispered a curse, then switched his comm link into the open circuit for the entire control center back on. “Make that confirmation of two—I repeat, two—submarine-launched ballistic missiles 224 miles west-southwest of here, trajectory bearing 245 degrees.”

He paused for a moment, waiting for the next data sweep from the high-gain X-band radar installed at Tarawa.

“Climbing through 33,000 feet and still accelerating,” Webster announced, then paused again as Franklin ran over to stand behind him. “Tentative trajectory intersect with the Pillar at 210 miles above the earth.”

“Nuclear?” Franklin gasped.

The old man, having lived through and monitored dozens of crises clear back to the 1970s, was absolutely calm.

“Negative on radioactive read from the warheads. Nonnuclear.”

“Then what the hell?” Franklin cried.

“Still climbing, first-stage booster release.”

Franklin turned away, cursing. His “friends” in the American and British military had suggested that there was no major security concern now. There was, however, a new crisis off Taiwan, and Pacific assets had to be shifted there; thus the Aegis that had lingered off their coast was long gone, though an Australian ship, delayed by rough seas, was due to take up station in another day.

Franklin’s first thought was China, but then doubted that. China would be the last player to want to initiate a game of strike and then counterstrike on their own tower. Russia, given its high latitude, with no friendly nations on the equator, was out of the game entirely, and their negotiations with Brazil and Kenya had fallen through. Their leader was far too savvy to have his fingerprints on this kind of attack. But at this moment it didn’t matter who it was. Franklin had to focus on what was going to happen in the next three minutes.

There was no Aegis system in place to respond, and even if there was, Franklin already knew that with the missiles now streaking clear of the atmosphere, an interception was already impossible. He had anticipated some damn plane-launched attack and had quietly negotiated with Australia to provide coverage in the form of four Harriers based at Tarawa, supposedly there on extended “exercises.” But this?

“Two rockets still accelerating,” Webster announced, voice still icy calm. “I am picking up high-gain radar tracking on their part.”

A pause.

“Damn sophisticated. The missiles appear to be tracking on the tower cable. Estimated impact: ninety-five seconds and closing.”

A chatter started in the control room, which only a few minutes before had been entirely focused on the sat passage and the harmonic.

“Everyone, shut up!” Franklin cried, one of the very few times in his entire life when emotions overcame his calm exterior.

“Any thoughts on the source of launch?” he whispered.

“Negative, sir,” Webster replied. “Outside our sonar buoy range, and no ships on our side anywhere within two hundred miles.”

“Forty seconds…”

Webster was indeed accurate in his assertion about the accuracy of the missiles, though to try to hit a target only a few centimeters wide by a missile boosted up to 6,000 miles an hour was almost impossible—as opposed to trying to hit a static satellite, in which case the detonation of half a dozen tons of explosive, designed to send out thousands of shards of fragmentation, could very well be destructive. Moreover, missiles like this, which were in the same class as the Aegis, were designed to track and close on a target that was also moving thousands of miles an hour—not one that was stationary.

The first missile blew past its target with more than a mile to spare before it exploded, but the second one detonated straight toward the tower from a quarter mile out, with only slight deflection, striking it with frightful kinetic energy and half a dozen high-velocity shards partly spun out of carbon nanotubing. The impact was catastrophic.

The Pillar, though damaged by the Soviet satellite’s passage (half of its diameter had been sliced away), still managed to hold. It was the impact of the missile fragments and the shock wave from the detonation that sent it sheering laterally by several hundred meters. The harmonic wave that seemed manageable only three minutes earlier had turned into a tsunami that now raced up and down the length of the tower, coming at Gary at several thousand miles per hour.

It was indeed the “perfect storm” that could take the tower apart. Those who had engineered this coup de grace apparently planned it to coincide with the worries about the twin passages of debris. It was as if they had timed it to coincide with the threat of the debris passages. This attack had been long planned and just got lucky when the crisis over the debris hit. What was transpiring fulfilled and even exceeded expectations of those intent on destroying the dream. And they had timed it perfectly.

The submarine that launched the missiles had already submerged 1,000 feet and was silently running for home, ready to collect a multibillion-dollar reward for their country and, it was believed, for those aboard as well. In reality, for most—especially the sub’s lowly crew members—the reward would be a bullet in the back of the head to keep them silent forever. For others, it was tens of billions of dollars in various offshore accounts, until called upon again, if need be.

The threat to the price of global oil, the threat of a new technology disrupting the old power structure was dying.

18

“Work the problem, people,” Franklin announced, snapping on his headset back at his control station, trying to sound his usual calm self. He then indicated to the senior tower controller that he was taking charge.

“Do we have a break at point of missile impact?” was his first question.

A moment’s pause as his team checked the tensile stress exerted at the base of the tower. If it had been severed, they should already be observing it going slack as the lower two hundred miles of the tower fell back to earth.

“We still have contact. It appears to be holding, but tensile is going up over 100 percent of bearing capacity as the shock wave heads out in both directions.”

“Try to compensate here for starters,” Franklin said calmly. But the still clumsy system of actually moving the entire base back and forth to stop a “Galloping Gertie” from developing was indeed their weak point. The shock wave from the detonation came down like the crack of a whip, hit the tower, literally sending a vibration through the entire structure, then rebounded and snapped back up the tower. They were now facing several waves racing up and down the tower: the ones they had purposely caused in order to avoid being struck by the satellite, and the waves generated by the missile impact.

The computer model up on the primary screen, fed in from radar aimed at the tower, showed the waves moving up and down. Someone whispered, “Looks like a damn Slinky toy about to shake itself apart.”

Gary had inched his pod down to within a few meters of the damage inflicted by the satellite. It was not as bad as he first feared. It had not been a full-on blow—most likely it had been made by an antenna extension—but it had cut some of the strands, which were now drifting about loose, each two- to four-millimeter-wide strand laid around the initial core by the spinners drifting back and forth, weaving in space like deadly snakes. If one of them struck the pod with enough velocity, it could cut the vehicle open. He watched for several minutes, shifting the high-gain camera back and forth and zooming in, and finally perceived that three strands out of the twelve spun at this level had been completely severed.