Sky Hammer
The idea was simple, as good ones usually were. Take a plain steel rod, eight feet long and twelve inches in diameter. Add a couple of inexpensive steering rockets, cheap wings and a limited-capability computer. The whole thing wouldn’t have cost more than a couple hundred dollars.
Now place hundreds of these “spears” into orbit. A floating cloud of destruction waiting to be unleashed. When enemy forces were spotted, targeting information was sent to as many of the Thors as you needed to commit to the attack, and they would obediently jet out of space and into the atmosphere, constantly accelerating down the gravity hit, growing hotter and hotter from the friction with the atmosphere, until finally a white-hot, molten ball of steel moving at Mach Two arrived. There were few tanks, ships or gunnery emplacements of the time period that could have withstood the thundering impact of even a single Thor.
Even better, because of its speed and steep trajectory, a Thor should be impossible for missiles to track and blow out of the sky. The Thor was a cheap, deadly, unstoppable super-weapon.
With a few flaws. Space travel was still expensive back in the seventies, and there was no way to accurately give a Thor the precise location of a target. It was quite possible that a swarm of Thors might drift off course and slam into your own tanks, annihilating your own troops instead of the enemy’s.
The project was given the code name, Sky Hammer, and shelved in the deep top secret archives of the Pentagon. It was brilliant, but not feasible using technology of the time.
“So that’s what we’re facing,” Kurtzman said, turning off the screen. “Sky Hammer, a plain piece of molten steel falling from high orbit. The only things holding back the project before were the cost of space travel and the inability to accurately pinpoint a target. But a dozen nations have relatively cheap access to space these days, dirt cheap if they use an illegal version of the new Spaceship One rocket plane, and with a Global Positioning Device—GPD—bought off the shelf of any electronics store…” The man shrugged. “You’ve seen the results.”
“Everything old is new again,” Huntington “Hunt” Wethers muttered, scowling.
“Son of a bitch,” Delahunt whispered, reviewing the material again on her console. “And this is what hit Israel, a Thor.”
“More likely it was several of them,” Akira Tokaido stated grimly.
“Please bring up the TV news coverage of the wall,” Kurtzman requested, taking a sip of coffee. “I want to check something.”
Delahunt hit a macro and the CNN report appeared in a window within the view of space and started to play again.
“Hold,” Kurtzman said after a minute, and the scene froze. “There, look at that.”
Frowning, Wethers removed his pipe from his mouth. “The wall wasn’t blown up, it was smashed down.”
“Hit from above,” Kurtzman growled.
Wethers turned to Tokaido. “Better check to see if anybody is looking for a geologist at one of Israel’s universities.”
“To analyze the residue at the bottom of the crater?” Tokaido asked. “Yeah, makes sense. And that is the only way to know for sure, isn’t it?”
“Sadly, yes,” Wethers replied. “If there is a lot of pure steel down there…”
“But why did they wait until the ceremony started?” Delahunt wondered out loud. “Just to kill the prime minister? But they missed him.” Her head snapped up. “Paris!”
Biting back a curse, Kurtzman remembered the dying words of the NSA agent. He had said something about a new weapon for sale on the black market. Whoever was behind this had hit the wall as an advertisement. They probably announced in advance what was going to happen on the international arms market, and now that it had occurred right on schedule, they could start taking orders. With enough of them, anything could be smashed down by a Thor. Anything. The White House, Cheyenne Mountain, Hoover Dam… The targets were limitless and completely vulnerable. There wasn’t a defensive system in existence that could stop a Thor. Nothing. Only solid bedrock—and a lot of it.
“A Thor could crush the Farm, and we couldn’t do a damn thing except die,” Tokaido said softly, glancing at the ceiling. There were only white foam tiles in sight, but in his mind the sky was falling at exactly thirty-two feet per second….
“Okay, how do we stop it?” Delahunt asked.
Kurtzman sighed. “We can’t. The old figures were correct. Not a missile or antimissile, or antimissile laser can track and lock on to a Thor fast enough to do any significant damage.”
“Then we have to go after the people controlling it. That’s the vulnerable point, the operators.”
“Yes,” Kurtzman said, glancing at the world map. “Where they are.”
“If this news hits the airwaves and Internet, there’s going to be a worldwide panic,” Wethers stated bluntly. “A Sky Hammer alert would make the Cuban missile crisis look like an ice-cream social! Thousands of people will die in the riots when they try to reach subway tunnels, bomb shelters, anything underground.”
“And none of those would protect them.”
“Exactly.”
“It’s possible that we might have to shut down the Net,” Kurtzman stated. “Akira, prepare to arm the nexus point C-4 charges.”
The young man stopped what he was doing and got busy. The entire Internet was relayed though sixteen junction points. If those were blown up, the Internet was gone, possibly for months. That would cause a loss of billions of dollars to corporations, and nobody had the authorization to do that but the Secretary General of the UN. And very illegally, Stony Man Farm. It had taken them months to get the firing commands for the remote charges, and even then, they’d had to have a field team infiltrate each nexus to add their own control elements. This was something they had talked about for years in dread. Blowing the Internet was a doomsday option, a last-ditch effort to hold back the news that could cause the death of countless people. Nobody sane wanted to undertake this action, but the cyberteam had to be ready. Just in case. On the other hand, if the news got on the cable news shows, then the cat was out of the bag and all hell would break loose anyway, and there really wasn’t anything they could do about that event.
“Could Sky Hammer smash down the junction points?” Wethers asked suddenly.
Kurtzman nodded. “If the people controlling it know the locations, yes.”
“I’ll start a disinformation campaign about this,” Delahunt said, slipping on her VR helmet. The best way to hide the truth was to bury it under half-truths and lies. With enough misleading rumors circulating, nobody would ever believe that Sky Hammer existed.
Kurtzman grabbed a telephone on his console. “Barbara? It’s worse than we feared…yes, a Thor. It’s got to be. We better recall the teams immediately. This is going to get real bad, real fast.”
“I have them located,” Wethers said, working a mouse.
The main screen switched to a map of the world, two glowing blue stars marking the precise location of the Stony Man field teams. They were on opposite sides of the globe.
Kurtzman hung up the phone. “Okay, Barbara is calling Hal, and we have recall authorization. Bring ’em back.”
“We can’t,” Wethers stated. “See? They are both under radio silence.”
“Why?”
“They found their targets much sooner than expected and have engaged the enemy.”
Kurtzman narrowed his gaze. Damn! The teams were wasting valuable time taking out these minor dangers to America when the sky was literally about to fall down on everybody. Hours wasted. Time gone. Time they didn’t have to spare.
Kurtzman clamped his mouth shut. He knew the current enemy action was merely “cleanup,” but if the teams were in the middle of a firefight, any distraction at exactly the wrong moment could get all of them killed. There was nothing to do but wait, wait for them to finish the missions they were on.
“Come on, guys, shake a leg,” Kurtzman whispered. “Move it.”
CHAPTER THREE
Chicago, Illinois
The classic rock music of Peter Frampton was blaring over the wall speakers of the control booth. Lost in thought, the blurry DJ was staring out the window of the Sears Tower, and it took quite a while before he finally noticed the jingling instrument.
“Yellow!” he drawled, removing the handrolled cigarette from his mouth. The smoke was sweet and pungent, and highly illegal. “This is WQQQ, all radio, all the time. What can I do for you?”
“Pay close attention, Jew, or everybody dies,” a garbled voice spoke.
The DJ went very still at that and dropped the joint into a nearly empty beer bottle on the sound board. It hissed out of existence.
“What did you just say?” he asked, flipping a switch to record the conversation. Having worked his way up through the ranks, the DJ had started in the news department and knew the sound of a scrambled voice when he heard it. Lots of kooks and nuts called up stations proclaiming everything imaginable, from women sighting Elvis on a UFO, to men claiming to be an alien’s baby. But nobody ever had the coin to get a voice scrambler. That alone meant big bucks, and money plus crazy always spelled trouble.
“I said shut the fuck up, Moses, or we’ll bomb your little shithole of a station just to make the other kike radio stations pay attention. Understand?”
In the control booth, a union technician perked up in his chair at the sound of the voice, and quickly started punching numbers into a red phone dedicated for outside calls only. The DJ tried to wave the man from calling the police, but the engineer paid him no attention.
“My apologies, sir,” the DJ muttered. They thought the radio station was Jewish? The owner of the radio station was a Norwegian, Dave Linderholm, and he had no idea who owned the Sears Tower.
A crackle of static and the voice returned.
“Mind your betters, pig. Now, the wall in Palestine was destroyed by the American Liberation Strike Force,” the distorted voice continued. “And we…”
“Do you mean, the wall in Israel?” the DJ asked, confused.
“Shut up! There is no such country!” The phone crackled. “All of that land belongs to Palestine!”
“Even the parcels they sold to the Jews?” the DJ asked quickly, pointedly trying to egg the caller into saying something that would be banned on the air. That always helped the ratings, and sweeps week was coming up.
“Zion propaganda! Now, unless American ZOG pulls all of its troops back to U.S. soil, our next target will be the UN building!” There was a click and the line went dead.
Quickly shoving another recorded cassette of early heavy metal into the board, the DJ rushed into the engineering booth.
“What a freaking loon,” the DJ exhaled, running nervous fingers through his wavy crop of hair. “Did we get everything?”
“Loud and clear.” The engineer smiled, patting a digital CD recorder on the board. “By the way, what’s a ZOG?”
“Zionist Occupation Government.”
“What’s Zionist?”
“Tell ya later. Did we get a trace on the call?” the DJ asked hopefully, looking at the bewildering display of readouts, gauges, lights and meters. He was the talent, not a freaking atomic brain.
“Sure. It’s useless.” The engineer sighed. “The call came from a rest stop on Route 95, outside of Camden, right over the river in New Jersey.”
Clever. Stop your car, make the call, drive away before anybody can get there.
“Could it have been a fake phone location?”
“For people with a voice scrambler? Sure.” The engineer leaned back in his chair, the springs squeaking in protest. “So what now? Call the news director, or do we sell this directly to CNN?”
“We?” the DJ asked, stressing the word.
“I have the only tape, dude,” the engineer said, patting the recording machine.
The DJ glared at the machine, then shrugged. “Fifty-fifty?”
“Done.” The engineer grinned, extended a hand, and the two men shook.
“So who would you call?” the DJ smiled.
“The FBI, man,” the engineer stated with a wave. “These crank yankers might be the real thing.”
The DJ laughed, then he heard the reverberating drum roll of a Metallica song fading away and rushed back to his board to shove in a commercial for acne cream. When it was over, he shoved in the longest running song he could find, which bought him thirty minutes. Time to contact CNN and get a big check!
Heading back to the engineering booth, the DJ paused at the sight of the 9/11 wall poster of the Twin Towers. Vaguely he seemed to remember that everybody had lots of hint and clues about the forthcoming attack, but nobody had told the FBI.
“Aw, shit.” the DJ sighed and picked up a phone. “Hello, Operator? Please give me the phone number for the Philadelphia division of Homeland Security.” He paused. “Yes, ma’am, this is an emergency.”
“What are you doing?” the engineer demanded, horrified, rushing out of the booth.
“Doing the right thing. We’re ratting these assholes out, and I hope Homeland puts ’em in a cell down in Gitmo. With extra rolls of film.”
The engineer rolled his eyes heavenward. “That guy on the phone was right. You’re an idiot.”
“That may be,” the DJ said, feeling oddly patriotic. “But if you have any porn on the computer, better start purging. Homeland might check it out, and this dump needs you.”
“Sure, who else would work for these wages?” The engineer snorted rudely. Then he returned to the booth and started hastily accessing files on the station’s PC to delete them like crazy.
Trevose, Pennsylvania
“WHAT IS A ZOG?” Zdenka Salvai asked as her commander got behind the steering wheel.
“Something Nazis talk about,” Bella Tokay replied, tucking away the voice scrambler, then starting the stolen car.
The vehicle had been obtained outside of a strip club on Admiral Wilson Boulevard in Camden, located just over the bridge from Philadelphia. Few people told friends that they were going to a strip club, thus they were safe to kill. The owner of the vehicle wouldn’t be missed for a long time. Perhaps days. Eventually his body would be found; a corpse inside a plastic garbage bag soon filled it with fumes, and the bags often popped like balloons. It wasn’t the optimum way of disposing of a body, but it was sufficient for today. They needed only a few hours.
The redhead lit a fresh cigarette. “I hate Nazis,” she stated, puffing out every word. Her long fingers were stained yellow from the constant cigarettes and her teeth were the same. But few men ever noticed that, their vision rarely rising above her ample cleavage. Between her knees was a large object covered with a blanket. Some sort of metallic hose could be seen sticking out from underneath, and there was the faint smell of jellied gasoline.
Tokay laughed. “As do we all,” he agreed, releasing the brake and heading north on Route 1. Bethlehem was far away, but they had plenty of time. On the seat next to the man was a newspaper, the checkered grip of a compact machine gun barely visible beneath it.
“Think they will take the bait?” Petrov Delellis asked from the rear seat. Cradling a bulky X-18 grenade launcher, the giant Hungarian seemed to fill the back of the sedan. There was a clean new bandage on the side of his neck, a gift from the stubborn CIA agent in Paris. A goodbye gift.
“Of course they’ll take the bait,” Tokay replied smugly, steering around a flatbed truck hauling steel beams. “And they’ll waste precious time chasing us around, until the Castle is obtained, and then the boss lets us kill them.”
“We can’t kill them now?” Salvai said with a scowl.
Tokay smiled, cold and mercilessly. “Well, maybe one or two,” he answered.
Sandy Hook, New Jersey
AS GRIM AS EXECUTIONERS, Able Team strode out of the rolling smoke screen, firing their weapons at every step. Ricochets zinged and threw sparks along the concrete wall separating the parking lot from the little museum, and people with guns ducked behind the stout barrier.
Still bodies sprawled everywhere on the asphalt between the rows of cars, including a state trooper without a face, a 9 mm HK pistol still in his hand, unfired. A former Los Angeles cop himself, Carl “Ironman” Lyons felt a visceral surge of rage at the sight, but controlled his temper for the moment and kept going. The dead and the dying didn’t matter right now. Only killing the terrorist bastards who had invaded the beachfront park.
Unfortunately, Able Team had no counterattack plan, no clever tactics or fancy maneuvering. The numbers had fallen, and the three counterterrorists had arrived too late to stop the deadly assault on the vacation spot. Now all they could do was a full-frontal charge with guns blazing.
Moving from vehicle to vehicle, the three Stony Man operatives maintained a steady cover fire with their assault rifles and shotguns. Circling a bread truck, they caught one of the Red Star agents in the process of reloading his AK-47 rifle. The arming bolt had jammed, probably from overheating. The Chinese agent cursed at their sudden appearance and dropped the Kalashnikov to claw for a Norinco pistol at his side.
“Don’t do it, bub,” Hermann “Gadgets” Schwarz warned, leveling his M-16 assault rifle.
But if the Chinese agent understood the words, he made no sign, and the deadly Norinco .45 barely cleared leather when Gadgets sent a wreath of tumblers across the man’s chest. The Red Star agent was thrown backward against a car, shattering the side windows with his splayed arms. Gurgling into death, the agent slid to the asphalt, leaving a trail of red across the car. But Able Team was already on the move, constantly trying to stay ahead of the terrorists. A split second later, a Chinese-made RPG streaked out from behind the souvenir kiosk and the Buick erupted into a fireball from the white phosphorus rounds.
Popping up from behind a concrete wall near the public restrooms, a Chinese operative fired a long burst from his machine gun, riding the chattering weapon in a tight figure-eight pattern for maximum killpower. The cars in the parking lot were torn apart by the hellstorm of incoming lead, windshields exploding, hoods buckling, tires bursting, and finally a stray ricochet got a gas tank and a compact car violently detonated into a fireball, spraying shrapnel across a dozen other vehicles.
Taking a stance, Schwarz pumped a shell from the M-203 mounted under the barrel of his M-16. The bomb tracked perfectly, arching high to land on the other side of the concrete seawall. The Red Star agents scattered as thick volumes of smoke rose from the hissing charge. But a salty warm breeze was blowing in from nearby coast, already thinning the protective cover.
“On three,” Lyons said, readying the Atchisson autoshotgun in his arms. He had only a single 40 round drum with him, so every shot had to count. He hadn’t been expecting a firefight! “Okay…three!”
The men broke around another SUV, got onto the dented hood of a station wagon and jumped to the top of the seawall. Two Red Star agents were crouching behind the barrier, their weapons aimed for the open section ten feet away, obviously waiting in ambush.
“Hey,” Rosario “The Politician” Blancanales said softly.
The Communists started to turn and Able Team cut them down. Hopping to the terrazzo flooring, Lyon found a few more civilian bodies, mostly guards. Older out of shape men in clean uniforms, holstered revolvers at their side. This had been a part-time job for them, just something to help stretch their meager retirement pay.
On the nearby beach the corpses of several joggers dotted the shoreline, their blood still staining the waves as they washed over the still forms, giving them a horrible mockery of life.
“Look over there,” Lyons told his teammates.
Through the thinning smoke, the men could see the long barrels of the old WWII cannons rising above the small museum and fast-food stand.
Originally, Sandy Hook had been a large brick tower resembling a lighthouse, a stony keep equipped with muzzle-loading cannons to attack any Imperial British frigates harrowing the guerrilla fighters in the Revolutionary War. During World War II, it became a concrete fortress armed with banks of sixteen-inch cannons that could blow open the hull of any German warship. During the cold war underground installation had been added and Sandy Hook became a Minute Man missile base, designed to knock down Soviet ICBMs. Sandy Hook had long been a bastion of defense for the east coast of the nation, and had seen a lot of fighting, including an invasion of German frogmen near the middle of World War II, saboteurs sent to blow phone lines, collapse bridges, burn down hospitals and movie theaters, and generally inflict as much harm and terror as possible upon the American people. Softening tactics for Hitler. A prelude to invasion. Paving the way. The big guns of Sandy Hook had fired upon the midnight invaders just as they got out of the rubber rafts, and not a Nazi agent reached American soil alive. Or even in one piece.
But that was sixty years ago. These days, the Minute Man missile base had been moved inland, away from the vulnerable beach, and the gigantic cannons had been disarmed, the barrels blocked with a concrete plug, the hydraulic lines removed, the firing pins gone. Once the guardians of the United States, the cannons were reduced to slightly rusty exhibits on public display, relics of the past standing alongside a small outside museum that told of the glory days, with a small gift shop. But the Pentagon Theoretical Danger Team had postulated there was a potential terrorist danger to New York at Sandy Hook. Long ago, when the cannons worked, they had a range of twelve miles, and Manhattan was just over the horizon, nine miles away. But the titanic weapons had been neutralized, disarmed, virtually disassembled. It would take a major undertaking to get them live again. So the Pentagon had placed the museum on the Watch Alert list and then promptly forgot about the place entirely. It was too nebulous a threat to be taken seriously.
Suddenly two men in greasy mechanic’s coveralls appeared on the roof of the restrooms building and started firing assault rifles. Able Team dived for cover behind a painted wooden bench and came up returning fire. The chattering M-16 assault rifles held by Blancanales and Schwarz peppered the structure, driving the enemy under cover. When the firing stopped, they popped back and Lyon’s Atchisson sprang into action. In a bull roar, the weapon discharged 12-gauge shotgun shells in a long burst. The Chinese agents were literally blown apart, their bodies shattered from the hellstorm of steel buckshot.
Even before the corpses tumbled to the ground, Able Team was on the move again.
Early that morning, the first indication that something was amiss had been a radiation sensor hidden in a tollbooth plaza on the Garden State Parkway. Considered the finest road in the world, the GSP actually received visitors from foreign countries to study its construction so that the builders could return to their homelands and try to duplicate the modern marvel. Tourists from New Jersey visiting Portugal, Argentina or Australia often found themselves experiencing déjâ vu as they encountered an exact duplicate of the New Jersey road cutting through the rolling hills of a foreign landscape.
When the cars stopped to pay the toll, one of many along the rather expensive GSP, every vehicle was probed for contraband. Chemical sniffers found a lot of drugs and sometimes a corpse in the trunk. But this day the hidden sensors spiked as weapons-grade plutonium was detected coming off Exit 9.
Quickly, computer records were checked, but since there was no record of such a radioactive source coming onto the superhighway, the state police tagged the report as a possible glitch. The police filed a copy of the report with Homeland Security and a minute later Stony Man knew about it. Since Exit 9 was dangerously close to Sandy Hook, Barbara Price had sent Able Team to do a recon. When the men arrived, they’d expected to find an ore truck full of pitchblende, or maybe a mobile health clinic. Portable X-ray machines used radioactive thulium and often set off detectors by mistake.