The fingers of her right hand caressed the plastic surface of the joystick. Her eyes followed the blue dot, blinking its way across the screen.
She waited, knowing she would only have one chance at this. Her military background told her that the radar-controlled ANSAT would home in on the area with the largest mass, namely the core of the station. A direct hit there would certainly destroy the ISS.
The ANSAT got within fifty miles. That was the mark. She moved the joystick to the right, and the station’s rotational verniers responded by firing counterclockwise. She watched the screen as the station’s 3-D drawing began to rotate. Twenty seconds to impact.
The ANSAT was too close to make any large corrections as its electronic brain detected a shift in the relative location of its target’s center of mass. The microprocessor stored inside the missile’s cone ordered the firing of the small attitude control verniers to make a slight adjustment in the flight path, and in another few seconds the missile struck the south section of the boom, near the only functional set of solar panels, over two hundred feet away from any module. The ensuing explosion severed the solar panels in a brief display of orange flames.
Diane was thrown against the food galley, bounced and landed feetfirst against the large panoramic window next to the crew’s recreational station. Her shoulders and back burned. Through the largest and thickest piece of tempered glass ever put in orbit Diane Williams saw the damage as the station rotated clockwise, out of control, but at least in one piece. She had spared the core of the station from a direct hit. However, the blast had sent a powerful electromagnetic pulse through the cables connecting the solar panels to the station’s batteries, shorting them out.
Alarms blared inside the Habitation Module. Red lights, indicating a major power malfunction, flashed at each entrance to the module. Just as suddenly, sparks and smoke spewed from underneath the floor tiles near the Multipurpose Application Console. The bright overheads suddenly went off, replaced by green emergency lights. The computers, sensing that they had lost power from the main batteries, automatically switched to the emergency shutdown program, which began to power down all systems according to a priority sequence.
Stunned but fully conscious, the forty-five-year-old ex-Marine aviator thrust herself through the smoke and sparks and back to the Multipurpose Applications Console, where she snagged the joystick and tried unsuccessfully to stabilize the station. She tried to switch to automatic control, but the system did not respond.
Another alarm began to blare inside the station. Diane recognized its high pulsating pitch: The station was losing pressurization and oxygen. The air pressurization and revitalization system had shut down. At least the station had survived, but it would take a couple of shuttle flights to get it back in shape to support life.
Time to go.
Finding it harder to breathe, her ears beginning to ring from the air-pressure drop, Diane kicked her legs against the MPAC and floated out of the Habitation Module and into Unity. The Soyuz capsule was coupled to the node through a four-foot-long narrow tunnel.
Feeling dizzy, her vision fogging, Diane reached the connecting D-shaped hatch, opened it, and dived through the tunnel into Russian technology.
Her head feeling about to explode, she floated inside the cramped interior of the Soyuz capsule. Closing the access hatch, locking it in place, Diane strapped herself to the center of three seats arranged side by side.
Her vision tunneling, Diane’s fingers groped over the control pane searching for the pressurization lever, finding it, throwing it.
Hissing oxygen filled the capsule. The pounding against her eardrums stopped, and after a few deep breaths, her vision cleared, allowing her to inspect the capsule, which lacked an interior wall. Most of the electronic wiring and hydraulic tubing ran fully exposed along steel walls. A porthole directly above provided her only window to the outside, and at that moment it showed Diane the side of Unity.
Placing her hands on a set of levers on the sides of her seat, Diane pulled them up and twisted them ninety degrees.
The capsule jettisoned away from the station, throwing Diane against her restraining harness. Soon she saw nothing but space through the porthole.
Following a preprogrammed reentry sequence, the capsule fired the attitude-control verniers to position the Soyuz’s main thruster in the direction of flight. As she waited for the capsule to reach the point in orbit when the rocket would fire to start the reentry, Diane Williams snagged the radio headset secured with a Velcro strap by her left knee, and put it on. She switched on the communications radio and selected a frequency of 252.0 MHz to make a connection with the TDRS-White Sands-Houston link.
“Houston, SES, over,” Diane said from the Soyuz Escape System.
“Diane! What happened. We lost communication!”
“The station lost pressure and oxygen. It lost the south end of the boom and solar panels to the ANSAT. I’m afraid some systems and subsystems may have been damaged. But the station is in one piece and still in orbit.”
“Status of GPATS module?”
“Deactivated. I have both control keys—”
Her words were cut short by a powerful jolt as the single thruster fired. “Houston, SES. Just started deorbit burn,” Diane reported.
“Roger, SES. We’re tracking you. Estimated landing site is southern Ukraine.”
“Status of the warhead that got away, Houston?”
“Not good, SES. It struck a Russian tank battalion near the border with Chechnya fifteen minutes ago. First estimates are over two thousand dead and many more wounded.”
“Damn.”
“It could have been a lot worse, SES. The tanks were spread out over a large area. If it would have hit a heavily populated area casualties would have been much higher.” Her eyes watched the star-filled cosmos rush past her porthole as the capsule decelerated from its 24,000-miles-per-hour flight.
The burn ended and was replaced by a strong vibration as the first air molecules began to strike the capsule’s underside heat shield, heating it to incandescence.
Soon the vibrations grew, accompanied by a pink glow around the edges of the window. Inside her pocket of life traveling inside a decelerating hell of steel-melting temperatures, Diane Williams sat back and watched the pink glow turn into a bright orange just before the Soyuz craft became engulfed by the flames.
Closing her eyes, the ex-Marine tried to relax. She had made it against staggering odds. The remaining weapons aboard the station would remain safe until NASA could get another crew up there to repair it. But that no longer her concerned her.
The rumble of the capsule rushing through the upper layers of the atmosphere increased to a soul-numbing crescendo. Thin air and insulation compounds collided in a scorching outburst of flames. With the might and beauty of a meteor dropping from the sky, the Soyuz capsule sliced through the air at great speed.
Diane Williams dropped like a rock, the flames slowly fading away as the capsule decelerated to the point when the deorbit program disengaged the heat shield to expose three retrorockets to be used ten feet over ground to cushion the fall. At an altitude of thirty thousand feet, bright red twin parachutes deployed from the top of the capsule, giving Diane the jerk of a lifetime.
The first rays of sunlight shafted through her round windowpane, filling the interior of the Soyuz capsule with wan orange light. Mission Commander Diane Williams watched it in silence.
R. J. PINEIRO is the author of several technothrillers, including Ultimatum, Retribution, Breakthrough, Exposure, Shutdown, and the millennium thrillers 01-01-00 and Y2K. His new thriller, Conspiracy.com, will be published in April 2001. He is a seventeen-year veteran of the computer industry and is currently at work on leading-edge microprocessors, the heart of the personal computer. He was born in Havana, Cuba, and grew up in El Salvador before coming to the United States to pursue a higher education. He holds a degree in electrical engineering from Louisiana State University, a second-degree black bel
t in martial arts, is a licensed private pilot, and a firearms enthusiast. He has traveled extensively through Central America, Europe, and Asia, both for his computer business as well as to research his novels. He lives in Texas with his wife, Lory, and his son, Cameron.
Visit R. J. Pineiro on the World Wide Web at www.rjpineiro.com. R. J. Pineiro also receives e-mails at [email protected].
BREAKING POINT
BY DAVID HAGBERG
Spring Xiamen, Fujian Province People’s Republic of China
Their black rubber raft threaded silently through the densely packed fishing fleet at anchor for the night, the waves, even in the protected harbor, nearly one meter high. The four men were Taiwanese Secret Intelligence Service Commandos, and their chances for success tonight were less than one in ten. Of course all of Taiwan faced about the same dismal odds when it came to remaining free, squad leader Captain Joseph Jiying thought. But the heavy winds, sometimes gusting as high as thirty-five knots, did not help their chances much. They had been in constant danger of flipping over ever since they had left their twelve-man submarine twenty klicks out into the Taiwan Strait just off the entry between Quemoy Island and the Sehnu Peninsula. Now they faced the danger of discovery by patrol boats that darted around the harbor twenty-four hours per day, or by the underwater sound sensors laid on the floor of the bay, or by the infrared detectors installed on the shore batteries, and by the thousands of pairs of eyes always on the lookout. It was estimated that every fifth person in the PRC was a government informer. It meant that at least one hundred fishing boats at anchor tonight held spies.
Xiamen was a city of a half million people and home to an East Sea Fleet base that along with headquarters at Ningbo seven hundred kilometers to the north, and twelve others, was the dominating presence on the East China Sea and more specifically on the Taiwan Strait. Commanded by Vice Admiral Weng Shi Pei, the base was homeport to thirty-seven ships, among them one fleet submarine, three patrol submarines, including a Kilo-class, two frigates, one destroyer, and a variety of smaller boats, among them fast-attack missile, gun, torpedo, and patrol craft. The bulk of the fleet was berthed in a narrow bay to the southwest of the city, while a small naval air squadron was based at the municipal airport on the northeast side of the sprawling city. The sky was overcast, the night pitch-black, the water foul with stinking garbage, oil slicks, and a brown stain that clung to the carbon composite oars they had used since entering the harbor. It was too dangerous this close in to use the highly muffled outboard motor, but no one minded the extra work. It kept them warm.
They rounded the eastern terminus of the commercial port and entered the brightly lit fleet base harbor, the rubber raft passing well over the submarine nets. Keeping to the deeper shadows alongside the frigates and patrol craft, they made it to Dry Dock A, which an earlier recon mission reported was empty. Its massive steel doors were in the open position, and the box was flooded.
Their bowman, Xu Peng Tei, grabbed the metal ladder at the head of the dry dock, tied them off, and scrambled to the top. He cautiously peered over the steel lip three meters above them, then gave the sign for all clear and disappeared over the edge. At twenty-seven he was the oldest man in the group, and although he was not the squad commander, everyone called him Uncle.
Joseph and his other two commandos stripped the protective sheaths from their silenced 9mm Sterling submachine guns, checked the magazines and safeties, then climbed silently to the top of the dry dock and over the edge.
They dropped immediately into a low crouch, invisible in the darkness because of their night-fighter camos and black balaclavas. Joseph checked his watch. It was three minutes until 0100. They were on schedule.
Xu appeared suddenly out of the darkness and crouched beside them. He had also unsheathed his weapon, and the hot diffuser tube around the barrel ticked softly as it cooled. “It’s clear for the moment.”
“How many guards, Uncle?” Joseph asked.
“Two, as we expected. One outside, one in the guard post. They’re down.”
The mid-phase mission clock started at that point. “Ten minutes,” Joseph said, and they headed directly across to a low, windowless, concrete building a hundred meters away. Surrounded by a four-meter-tall electrified razor-wire fence, the only way in or out was through a gate operated from the guard shack. The outside patrols were on a fourteen-minute schedule, so ten minutes was cutting it close.
The building was the base brig, and for the moment it contained only one prisoner. The PRC was trying to be very low-key about him, which was the only reason tonight’s action had the slightest chance of success.
No one wanted to make waves, Joseph thought. Not the PRC, and especially not the United States. Well, after tonight, waves were exactly what they were going to get. And he expected that when the U.S. was finally pushed to the breaking point they would come through. Either that or there wouldn’t be anything left of Taiwan except for smoldering cinders and radioactive waste.
But he was betting his life tonight that the U.S. would save them one more time. If his four years at Harvard had taught him nothing else about Americans, he learned that they loved the underdog, and they loved their heroes coming to the rescue. Superman. It was the one serious indulgence he’d picked up in the States. He had copies of Superman comics numbers five through ten, twelve, fifteen, sixteen, and eighteen, from the thirties, plus a hundred others, all original and all in cherry condition. Truth, justice, and the American way … now the Taiwanese way, because he’d rather be dead than under mainland rule.
One guard, a neat bullet hole in the middle of his forehead, lay in the darkness beside the fence, and the other was crumpled in the doorway of the guard post just inside the compound.
The lights were very bright there, but no alarms had been sounded, no troops were coming on the run. But the clock was counting down.
Zhou Yousheng dropped down in front of the fence and quickly clamped four cable shunts across a five-foot section. Next he cut the wire between the shunts with insulated cutters and carefully peeled them back. Although the fence now had a wide hole in it, the electrical current had never been interrupted, so no alarm would show up at Security Headquarters across the base.
Zhou gingerly crawled through the opening and as Chiang Kunren clamped the wires back together and removed the shunts, he darted inside the guard post where he released the electric gate lock.
They slipped inside, dragged the dead guards out of sight, and relocked the gate. Joseph led two of his men up the path to the blockhouse. Zhou remained at the guard post. They all wore comms units with earpieces and mikes. One click meant trouble was coming their way.
Chiang, their explosives expert, molded a small block of slow-fire Semtex into the lock on the steel door. He cracked a thirty-second pencil fuse, jammed it into the plastique, then quickly taped a two-inch-thick pad of nonflammable foam over the explosive to deaden the sound.
He’d barely taken his hands away from the foam when the Semtex went off with a muffled bang.
“One of these days you’re going to lose a finger,” Joseph observed, and Chiang shot him a quick smile.
“Then I’ll have to ask for help every time I need to unzip my fly. Female help.”
A long, wide corridor led from the front of the building to the back, five cells on each side. There were no adornments, not even numbers over the cell doors. Only a few dim lightbulbs hung from the low concrete ceiling.
Shi Shizong, who was known in Taiwan and in the west as Peter Shizong, was in the last cell on the left. He rose from his cot when Joseph appeared at the tiny window. He was very slight of build and young-looking, even for a mainlander, to be the PRC’s most reviled villain. He preached democracy, and for some reason unknown even to him, his message and his presence touched a deep chord among half of China’s vast population. Farmers and doctors, factory workers and engineers, fishermen and even some politicians were buying into his message. In the three years he’d been preaching and someh
ow managing to stay ahead of the authorities, massive waves of discontent had swept across the country, thousands of innocent demonstrators had been killed, their homes and assets confiscated by the state, martial law had been declared in two dozen cities, and even the West had finally begun to sit up and take notice.
Three days ago Shizong’s odyssey had finally ended in a small apartment in Xiamen, with his arrest. The next day he was to be moved to a small, undisclosed city somewhere inland, where he would stand trial for treason. There would be no media, no witnesses, no publicity. He would be found guilty, of course, and would be executed within twenty-four hours of his trial.
His name and philosophy would soon be forgotten. It was something that China needed if its present government were to survive. And it was exactly what Taiwan wanted to prevent, at all costs. Reunification with the PRC was suicide, but reunification with a democratic China was not only desirable, in Joseph’s estimation, it was worth giving his life for.
“Here,” he called softly, and he waved Shizong away from the door.
Chiang rushed over, molded a small block of Semtex on the lock, cracked a ten-second fuse, shoved it into the plastique and stepped aside. This time he didn’t bother with the foam; the building itself would muffle the sounds.
The plastique blew with an impressive bang. Joseph hauled the door open and stepped inside the cell. “We’re from Taiwan Intelligence, Mr. Shizong. We’re here to rescue you.”
Shizong hesitated for just a moment, weighing the possibilities. This could be some sort of PRC trick. “Where are you taking me?”
“Taipei.”
Understanding dawned on his face, and he smiled and nodded. “I see,” he said, warmly. Joseph was instantly under his spell. Shizong had intelligence and kindness; he and he alone knew the answers for China.
Shizong was dressed in dark trousers, but his open-collared shirt was white. Joseph pulled a black blouse out of his pack and handed it to the man.
“We don’t have much time. Put this on over your shirt, please.”
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