Orbital Velocity

Carmichael didn’t want to look, but through the gap in the forest canopy roof, he could see it: the cottony column of smoke that spiraled up into the clear blue skies above. His shoulders fell as he knew what was at the top of that pillar of expended liquid oxygen fuel. He didn’t know the payload atop, but it was an orbital launch missile, akin to an Atlas IV, reverse engineered from old American designs. Whatever was riding into the heavens on millions of pounds of concentrated thrust, it was nothing good, not when it was being rocketed out of Earth’s atmosphere from a forsaken, hidden corner of the world.

“I see it,” Carmichael answered. He took a deep breath.

“And what was that shit you kept telling me? Your country before everything else?” Arcado told him, gripping a fistful of Carmichael’s BDU shirt, twisting it to bring Carmichael’s ear closer to his mouth.

“If you stay here, then we need to give you as much of a chance as you can get,” Carmichael whispered harshly. “Give me a spare bullet.”

Arcado nodded as Carmichael withdrew his folding multitool. “Want mine, too?”

“Yeah,” Carmichael answered. Taking the .357 Magnum round between the two folding pliers, the black agent pried the bullet from its casing. With a shell full of fast-burning, high-intensity powder, he had what he needed. “Move your hand.”

Arcado grit his teeth. “This is going to suck.”

Carmichael poured the powder into the wound, then pulled his stainless-steel lighter. It fired on the first flick, and when the flame touched the gunpowder, it flared. Arcado’s fingers dug into Carmichael’s biceps, his eyes clenched tightly shut as the bullet-torn flesh cauterized under the flashing heat. The pain was horrendous, if the muscle-squeezing grip Arcado inflicted on him was any indication. When the wound was seared closed as the powder burned out, Arcado finally loosened his clawlike clutches on Carmichael.

“I was right,” the Latino gasped.

“You usually are, damn it,” Carmichael replied. “Even when you say I need to leave you behind.”

Arcado nodded. “You left me a round short.”

“So you’re not looking to die nobly?” Carmichael asked.

“Fuck that noise,” Arcado answered. He leaned back, gulping down a fresh breath. Carmichael sorted through his gear, pulling four extra magazines from his reserve for his partner. Arcado reached out weakly to add them to his stash. With shaky hands, the Latino drew his Beretta and worked the slide to make certain it had a round in the breech.

Carmichael tried to ignore how physically weakened his partner was. The two men had a duty to get information to the outside world, and one man could travel more quickly through the heavy jungle than one healthy man escorting an injured companion. Arcado was far from suicidal, but he knew that here in the jungle, without medical attention and a bullet lodged in his abdomen, he was only going to be engaged in a delaying action. Arcado’s real role was to give Carmichael space, wiggle room to get to civilization.

It wasn’t going to be a short journey, either. Carmichael was on foot, without high-tech communications and only a small amount of ammunition. Arcado was going to stem the tide of a small army, from the looks of the launch facility. They didn’t know who had been sent out after the two, and Carmichael couldn’t give his friend any odds that were worthwhile.

“You’ll be all right here?” Carmichael asked, the words catching in his throat.

“If I say no, you still ain’t sticking around,” Arcado growled. He leaned on his rifle and pushed to his feet. Carmichael reached out to brace his friend, but the Latino shook him off.

“You’ll need all your strength to do your job,” Carmichael told him. “Being a stubborn asshole isn’t going to help you with anything. Or do you want a bunch of gunmen to run my ass down?”

Arcado grimaced, then held out his hand. “Me, me, me. That’s all you ever whine about. Don’t you ever think of anyone else?”

Carmichael held him up, but held his tongue. Arcado was joking, trying to cut through his worries. “Shut up.”

“Don’t get serious on me now,” Arcado whispered. “I need a few laughs.”

Carmichael kept quiet, not wanting to demoralize his friend any further. He helped Arcado into a position that allowed for decent cover and concealment along their trail. The spy settled into a nest.

“Get running, John,” Arcado whispered. “I don’t know how much time I’ll buy you, but I’ll pay for as much as I can.”

Carmichael nodded, giving his friend’s shoulder a squeeze.

He turned, cursing himself for doing his duty at the expense of a friend.

ILYA SORYENKOV LOOKED at the threat matrix list on his desk. He was the Moscow bureau chief for the federal security service, or FSB. Though he had to deal with the FSB’s rivalry with the CSR, which was the central intelligence service, he was fairly certain that he wasn’t cheated out of any information from the daily threat matrix. Details of the CSR’s operations would be kept from the FSB, but if there were rumors of trouble, the agency that held back information about an impending crisis would be scalped in the press. Soryenkov dropped into his chair and picked up the file of accumulated data.

For all the problems that had been going on for years, through a particularly corrupt administration that pounced at any chance for a return to the bad old days, Soryenkov had felt a little hope. The new president was willing to make some deals to alleviate some of the tensions that were threatening to draw Russia and her sister states into civil war, Chechnya especially. Soryenkov’s work was never really going to be done. Since the collapse of the KGB, lots of old grudges were being settled, and trouble in the form of organized crime was steadily worsening with the addition of trained espionage and special operations veterans flooding the ranks of the Russian mafiya.

He looked at the top sheet in the file. The envoys to the latest G8 conference were returning home today. Soryenkov had spent the past couple of days coordinating the Moscow police and FSB in setting up security for their return. It had been a fairly sedate conference, protestors more peaceful than usual. The Russian was glad for that. The Iraq war was winding down, and Chechnya was no longer being used as a tool to reinforce the need for the old, harsh methods by a would-be hardline revivalist.

Soryenkov looked at a printout of a recently received bit of chatter. Several Moscow news sources had received an ominous yet anonymous threat. Conventional radio and television had received the same line, as well as several Moscow-area blogs. The message was short and to the point.

“For failure to humanity, the Fist of Heaven smites thee.”

Soryenkov rubbed his forehead as he read it. He had operatives looking for any prior indications of a group called the Fist of Heaven. There were only half-whispered rumors regarding the Fist, but there had been mention of a similarly named group, the Celestial Hammer, which had threatened the whole world with satellite-launched dirty bombs. However, that group had threatened far more than just Russia, causing damage in Cuba with a weapon that had triggered a deadly tidal wave. The man-made tsunami had destroyed a fishing village near the U.S. Marine base at Guantanamo Bay.

Soryenkov looked over his notes about potential missing nuclear waste, then thought the better of it. If one organization had experienced a catastrophic failure of agenda by bombarding the Earth from low orbit, he didn’t feel that it was likely another group would try such a tactic so soon afterward. That kind of a mistake would set their plot back even before it began due to the nature of the international response. The now-defunct terrorist group’s example would make it unlikely that someone would utilize crude, improvised dirty bombs as their primary form of governmental influence.

The FSB chief rubbed his chin. The Celestial Hammer may have been a failure, but it was only because they didn’t have a properly dedicated orbital weapons platform. Certainly they had the potential to cause millions of deaths, but their system of attack was a jury-rigged design that utilized easily available, low-profile technology, or insiders allowing them access to China’s space program. Soryenkov hated to think what would have happened with a more dedicated system, like the proposed kinetic bombardment satellites controlled by various nations with space programs. The thought of a twenty-foot-long, one-foot-in-diameter chunk of high-density metal being “thrown” at a city at a velocity of 36,000 feet per second…

There wouldn’t be any radioactive fallout, but the impact would be comparable to a ground-penetrating nuclear device. That was merely the calculations for a “crowbar” of tungsten of those dimensions. Basically, from low orbit, a projectile would carry thirty-two megajoules per kilogram of mass, a figure that was between six and seven times the equivalent power of a kilogram of TNT.

He looked out the window at the Moscow skyline. The U.S. military had a “smart” missile, essentially an artillery tube with steering stabilizer fins, a two-ton hunk of metal that could be dropped by a ground-attack fighter with enough force to penetrate one hundred feet of concrete. On a whim, he picked up his calculator and came to a figure of sixty thousand megajoules of energy. From what he remembered of World War II conventional weaponry, a ten-thousand-pound bomb only put out twelve thousand megajoules of energy. One of the proposed “Rods from God” had five times the punch of a weapon that destroyed entire city blocks in the air war between the RAF and the Luftwaffe.

“That technology is years off,” he whispered, as if to dispel the sudden dread that overwhelmed him. Out the window, he saw a puff of smoke. Soryenkov wondered if it had been a car bomb, but it was too far away and had kicked up too much debris. Something else blurred through the air and struck the ground. While the shock wave of the distant impact finally rumbled through the floor, the windowpanes cracked as the building flexed.

“I said that technology is—” There was a third, fourth and fifth impact, all occurring more or less at the same instant. Soryenkov’s window shattered an instant later, but by then, he’d already thrown his arms across his face to keep the broken glass from carving him apart.

There were no more spears cast down from heaven, no more buildings vaporized into dust by two-ton hunks of steel striking them at terminal velocity. But when Soryenkov next looked through the broken window of his office, he saw a city rocked to its core. Columns of dust rose lazily skyward as alarms wailed across the city.

Damnation had rained down on Moscow in the form of a weapon that wasn’t supposed to exist.

CHAPTER ONE

London, forty-five minutes after the Moscow incident

“Oy, lads, fancy a couple Britneys?” the bartender asked Gary Manning and David McCarter as they focused on the LCD-screen television hanging over the bar. The TV news was dominated by the aftermath of the disaster in Russia. The bartender’s question pulled Manning’s attention away from the pad of paper where he’d been scribbling angles he’d guessed at from video footage and the oblique shapes of the impact craters.

McCarter looked at the bartender. Though he’d lost most of his accent, McCarter still could hear a touch of Polish in his speech.

Manning’s look was quizzical in response to the pub man’s comment. He turned to his friend for an explanation. “Britneys?”

“Rhyming slang,” McCarter explained. “Britney Sp—”

“Her name rhymes with beers,” Manning cut him off. “How’d she get across the pond to influence London barkeeps?”

“Sitting naked in music videos does a lot to improve international popularity,” McCarter answered. He looked at the bartender. “Two more pints, mate.”

“The Babel concept,” Manning muttered. “Languages are far from immutable, more like living creatures. Viruses actually.”

“Language is a virus?” McCarter asked.

“More appropriately, an information virus,” Manning told him. “Viruses are a part of this planet. The first transfer of information was in the form of a virus, one simple organism transmitting DNA code to another in the creation of life. All data is viral in nature, be it a new word in a language or a catchy set of lyrics in a song. Every bit of information is a single permutation of that first virus.”