Virus

by Bill Buchanan

  Everyone else in the room was shocked beyond belief. Could this be happening? Centurion designating new target classes without Cheyenne Mountain’s approval? The consequences of the message were too horrible to acknowledge. If Centurion could designate broad new target classes, he could just as easily order them destroyed. Shock does not capture the essence of the general staffs response; it was more like a massive coronary.

  Put All Alphas on the Kill Stack, 12/10/2014, 1449 Zulu

  Space Station Freedom

  After the position of every airborne aircraft had been tracked and entered into the object database, PAM issued another terse radio transmission in less than one hundredth of a second. Intolerant of threats, her message was lethal.

  Wed Dec 10 14:49:56 Z 2014

  To: ALL DEWSATs

  put all known ALPHAs on kill stack

  With this one command message, PAM orchestrated the largest air disaster in the history of aviation.

  Lord Have Mercy, 12/10/2014, 1449 Zulu, 7:49 A.M. Local

  Flying Observatory,

  Specially Modified High-Altitude Boeing 777,

  In Flight Over White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico

  Although startled by the flight engineer lunging through the door, the pilot was still slow to respond because of the explosions overhead. Transfixed by the fireballs spreading across his screen, the pilot seemed in a trance, totally absorbed by the sight of the exploding ASATs. As the fireballs gradually disappeared from view, the pilot thought he saw a golden thread of light, like a sunbeam, shining down from the heavens on Hailey’s Comet. It happened so fast, he couldn’t be sure of what he’d seen.

  Suddenly, the world outside blazed with a radiant light. The pilot squinted, then noticed Hailey’s Comet on his TV screen. Racing across the sky, Hailey’s Comet shined like a brilliant white-hot star, brightening the sky overhead like the midday sun. Then, like a supernova, she spent her explosive energy in one blinding flash of light and heat. The destruction of Hailey’s Comet was so fast and violent that her crew never understood what happened. Mercifully, the initial explosion rendered them unconscious before their bodies were incinerated to ash. As hydrogen from her ruptured fuel tank superheated, the resulting secondary explosion shattered Hailey’s Comet into a million shards of graphite fiber, scattering her remains across the desert below, like funeral ashes on an endless sea of sand.

  Praying, Lord have mercy on their souls, the pilot made the sign of the cross.

  Suddenly, the pilot felt his skin burning, as if he were on fire. Feeling panic, his stomach balled up into a knot as he broke out in a profuse sweat. He looked at the flight engineer and saw terror in his eyes. Oh my God!

  Grabbing his throat mike, he screamed, “Mayday!” but never finished his signal.

  Immediately, the cabin went dark except for the battery operated gauges. The screaming roar from both jet engines quickly disappeared and the Sky Pix aircraft dropped like a lead shot sinker. Hoping to restart his engines, the pilot instinctively pushed forward on the yoke, forcing his wounded aircraft into a steep dive, but he never got the chance.

  In the blink of an eye, the DEWSAT laser delivered an explosive force equivalent to twenty sticks of dynamite into the fuel tank buried inside the aircraft’s right wing. Instantly, the tank ruptured and the beam ignited fuel erupting from the wing tank. Following the wing tank’s explosion, the aircraft collapsed under its own weight, tumbling out of the sky. Separating from its right wing at the engine mounts, engulfed in flame, the Boeing 777 spiraled downward toward the desert floor. Spewing fuel, the ruptured tanks fed the flames until a secondary explosion violently severed the aircraft body from its remaining wing. Within seconds, the flying observatory was reduced to a blackened mass of smoldering remains strewn willy-nilly across the white desert sands.

  Whispered Prayer, 12/1012014, 1449 Zulu

  Space Station Hope

  Only seconds after launching her first flash traffic to Headquarters, another ominous message scrolled across Scott’s screen. Its meaning—immediately clear. The message— put all known alphas on kill stack—required no discussion and marked the lowest point in Linda Scott’s life.

  Stunned beyond words, there was nothing she could do and no one could help.

  Without conscious thought, Scott’s fingers robotically manipulated the keyboard, constructing her second flash message to Headquarters. Once complete, Guardian sent it. Except for the whirr of cooling fans, the control room was absolutely silent.

  It was eerie, as if Scott were outside herself, watching her hands type. Her mind slowed, her heart felt numb, she was lost, drifting. Had she died? Was this some terrible nightmare? For a few moments that felt like a lifetime, she wondered if this was really happening. She saw herself typing, but had no sense of touch. It was as if her fingers took over, created the message, then directed Guardian to send it. Days later, she’d have no recollection of sending the message or its contents.

  Once her fingers stopped, once her typing was done, she moved to the observation window facing all heaven and earth. There she slumped forward in despair, unaware that both Mac and Gonzo were arduously praying for her, for themselves, and for all humanity. Raising her eyes in agony, with the weight of the world bearing down on her shoulders, Scott whispered a desperate, heartfelt prayer. “God ... dear Lord in heaven ... please show me the way. My back’s against the wall and I’m out of options ...” As Scott spoke these words, she felt the loneliness, the hopelessness of having nowhere to turn and broke down sobbing. “Thousands of people are going to die—and for no good reason; they’re going to die for no reason at all... God. Without Your help, there’s nothing else I can do. Give me strength, please show me the way . . . God ...”

  The Unthinkable, 12/10/2014, 1450 Zulu, 7:50 A.M. Local

  Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

  Mason watched the last few frames of video transmitted from the Sky Pix flying observatory before she went off the air—six ASATs and Hailey's Comet exploding in a matter of seconds. No one could move. Everyone in the control room stood as if riveted to the floor. Someone began quietly sobbing.

  “Would you play it again?” Mason asked in a whisper. That was his polite way of giving an order under stressful conditions. The tension in the Crow’s Nest was now palpable—the room deathly still. Mason frowned, scratching his head. “What do you think happened?”

  “I would rather not speculate at this point, sir, but I fear the worst,” Napper replied solemnly. “I wanna run these pix through our slow-motion lab for analysis. They’ll tell us something.” Staring over General Mason’s shoulder at the computer screen, Napper’s drawn face turned a ghostly pale. The only color on his countenance came from the salt-and-pepper stubble on his unshaven face.

  Napper tapped his radio headset, then held Mason’s broad shoulders firmly to shore them up. “Another message from Hope, sir.” Mason held his breath and read the second flash message Scott transmitted in the past two minutes. A terror, unlike anything Mason had ever felt, clawed at his guts.

  FLASH MESSAGE: Wed Dec 10 14:50:26 Z

  2014

  TOP SECRET

  SAC EYES ONLY

  TO: Supreme Allied Command Headquar-

  ters FROM: SDI Space Station Hope

  SUBJECT: ALPHA kill SYNOPSIS: Armada attacking every air borne aircraft-

  END OF MESSAGE

  “God—help us.” Mason’s tone was that of a man who’d discovered cancer was ravaging his only child. One thought haunted him, circulating through his mind, relentlessly tormenting his soul. I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. Mason’s broad shoulders drooped and he shook his head. He felt numb. He didn’t have any answers and no plan. Initially, his heart and mind couldn’t comprehend the full implications of the message, his self-protection circuits tripped into massive overload.

  Everyone in the room was taken aback by the tone of General Mason’s delivery. Always under control, if General Mason was shaken, it must be serious. His st
aff said nothing, but they felt a wave of sympathy for their leader. They wanted to do whatever they could do to turn this situation around and make it right.

  For the second time, Mason projected the message on the outside wall for all in the room to read.

  Everyone exhaled as if they’d been punched in the stomach, followed by a prolonged silence. Was this a mass nightmare? Stunned, the consequences of this message were too horrible to acknowledge.

  Mason ran through everything in his mind, but it was impossible to absorb. Tired minds make mistakes, he thought, but there is no time to rest. Events unfold faster than you can think! The consequences were too ghastly to contemplate.

  No one spoke, and Mason didn’t rush. He understood it would take some time to sink in.

  Overwhelmed and weary, John Sullivan and Sam Napper shook their heads in disbelief, thinking there must be some mistake. They couldn’t accept the unthinkable given in such a large dose as this.

  Mason prayed for strength, then mentally rallied after reminding himself that a big part of leadership was guiding people in a direction that they might not want to go. There would be difficult times ahead and they had to pull together. He repeated a phrase that had worked for him in the past: “Let’s back up and take this one step at a time. We’ve got to decide what we think.”

  18

  Clear Skies, 12/10/2014, 1450 Zulu, 9:50 a.m. Local

  Air Traffic Control Room,

  Hartsfield International Airport,

  Atlanta, Georgia

  A cold front moved through in the early morning hours, clearing the air around the greater Atlanta metro area. Weather surrounding Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport was perfect for flying—crisp, cool, unlimited visibility. Air traffic was flowing smoothly—increasing, but not yet peaked for the day.

  Hartsfield’s air traffic control room reflected air safety’s state of the art, the best man and technology could produce to ensure safety for travelers passing through the busiest airport in the world. Inside Hartsfield’s darkened control room, radar screens told the story of another working day. The control room was partitioned into three sections: Arrivals, Departures, and Flybys. One group of controllers worked twenty-six approaching aircraft, a second group worked twenty departures over twin runways, and a third group worked seventeen aircraft flying by Hartsfield, possibly bound for any of fourteen airports in the Atlanta area.

  Air traffic controllers coordinated aircraft within a three-dimensional cylinder of airspace surrounding Hartsfield. The cylinder had an eighty-mile diameter and extended to 40,000 feet. Every controller had responsibility for a separate sector of airspace. Packed full with wall-to-wall people and radar screens, the control room atmosphere was professional and matter-of-fact. Good people, constant training, well-rehearsed safety procedures, and redundant backup systems kept the traffic flying safely in all types of weather.

  Working to keep all their birds in the air, controllers juggled sixty-three aircraft moving through Hartsfield airspace. Each blip on their radar screens displayed the aircraft’s position, altitude, direction, speed, carrier, and flight number.

  At 9:50 a.m. Atlanta time, an event occurred in the skies over Atlanta that no air controller would have imagined possible. Looking down from the high ground 115 miles above the Atlanta area, an orbiting DEWSAT sorted every ALPHA entry in its database by altitude. The highest flying aircraft were considered the greatest threat. After sorting the ALPHA threat list, the DEWSAT put each aircraft on its kill stack, firing on the highest flying aircraft first. One by one, the sixty-three blips began to disappear. Flyby controllers noticed it first because they worked the highest flying aircraft. The aircraft identification information disappeared first, then the blips quickly lost altitude and disappeared off screen.

  In the blink of an eye, the aircraft ID for United flight 209 disappeared from a flyby air controller’s radar screen. Rubbing her eyes in disbelief, the flyby controller touched the aircraft’s radar blip with a light pencil, thereby requesting an aircraft ID. She’d expected the carrier and flight number to appear on her screen, but there was no response from the aircraft.

  She was sure that aircraft’s ID had disappeared because she’d contacted it recently. Maybe there was a problem with the aircraft’s transponder. Trying to contact United two-zero-niner by radio, she received no reply. As she stared at the radar blip, she noticed it was losing altitude, dropping like a lead brick into the controlled airspace immediately below her sector. Immediately/her guts wrenched. There was real danger of a midair collision. United two-zero-niner did not respond, and it was dropping into a sector filled to near capacity with arriving traffic.

  Declaring an emergency, sweat began to bead across her brow. Her senior shift supervisor, a woman built like a fireplug with a cool head in high-stress situations, quickly vectored traffic around the danger area below United two-zero-niner.

  Only seconds later, a second flyby controller declared an emergency in his sector, and the senior shift supervisor studied the bigger airspace picture before making her decision. Single emergencies they could manage safely, the system was designed with margin to compensate for single point failures, but responding to multiple simultaneous emergencies took careful consideration. She looked at her big screen, the one showing all the aircraft and noticed a pattern. One by one, each aircraft’s ID transponder failed. Fifteen seconds after the first emergency had been declared, all seventeen aircraft in the flyby sector had lost their transponders and were falling like rocks.

  Impossible. There must be a serious problem with the radar or computers covering the flyby sector. Immediately, the supervisor typed a command into her control console switching to their backup system. The radar display screens flashed as the backup system switched in, but the display showed the situation was worse. Seventeen aircraft had disappeared from the flyby sector and fallen into the arrival and departure sectors. Suddenly, arrival and departure controllers began declaring simultaneous emergencies.

  Aircraft were falling out of the sky like fiery rain.

  The supervisor looked around the control room in horror. All thirty-two controllers were simultaneously declaring emergencies and looking to her for direction. Everyone wanted desperately to do something, to do the right thing, but no one knew what to do. No one could know. This was an air traffic controller’s worst nightmare, a pilot’s worst nightmare—chaos in the sky over Atlanta.

  She picked up the red phone, her direct connection to the tower. Nothing. They had to answer! This was the emergency phone!

  The tower crew had their hands full with problems of their own. Within sight of the runway, the open carcass of an arriving Boeing 767 lay burning, nosed into an open field of red Georgia clay. Blocking both departing runways, mercifully sacrificing themselves so that others might not fly, the bodies of two fuel laden passenger aircraft lay ablaze after rotating nose down and wing over immediately following takeoff.

  By 9:53 a.m., all air traffic over Hartsfield had cleared, radar screens once cluttered with traffic were empty. Every air traffic emergency had been logically and callously terminated.

  Shoot, 12/10/2014, 1450 Zulu, 7:50 A.M. Local

  Inside The Ground Fire Laser Blockhouse,

  Los Alamos National Laboratory,

  Los Alamos, New Mexico

  “DEWSAT acquisition,” announced the Ground Fire radar operator in a dispassionate voice. His radar screen displayed a sunflower-shaped blip rising rapidly over the southern horizon. “Target lock in T minus twenty seconds and counting.”

  Checking the clock bolted on the curved outside wall of the building, the German lab director observed, “On schedule.” The laser blockhouse looked like a short, stocky observatory—a cylindrical building about 120 feet across with a rotating dome roof.

  Looking overhead, the director watched the dome simultaneously rotate and open as sections of the roof retracted. A powerful motor rotated a greasy, grit-covered gear which turned the dome roof, creating a gri
nding noise which reverberated around the building. Once the target had been acquired, the slot in the roof automatically opened and the dome rotated into firing position, aligning the gun port in the roof with the DEWSAT’s track across the sky.

  Once the dome roof and laser were in position, interest in the blockhouse shifted to the gunner.

  Looking through his infrared bore sight, the gunner remarked, “She’s not positioned as expected, but we’ve got a clear shot.”

  “That’s good,” the lab director said, moving directly behind the gunner. The lab director and three support technicians huddled around the gunner’s television monitor. The monitor showed the gunner’s bore sight view, a greenish infrared image with crosshairs centered squarely on the DEWSAT’s long stem.

  The gunner threw a switch on his control console, then watched his countdown timer. “Overhead shot in T minus ten seconds. Locked on target—auto firing sequence enabled.”

  Suddenly, the DEWSAT fired her attitude positioning thrusters, pointing her stem and mirror toward the blockhouse.

  “Target’s coming about, sir! We’ve lost our shot!” the gunner exclaimed. The stem was now hidden behind the DEWSAT’s thirty-three-foot mirror. Feeling panic and looking through his bore sight, the gunner centered his crosshairs on the only part of the target he could see—the mirror.

  “We’re illuminated in all bands!” screamed the radar operator, his voice breaking from the strain. “Target knows our position!” The DEWSAT had triangulated on the Los Alamos radar signal and used it as a beacon.

  The lab director didn’t need to hear this twice. “Override automatic firing sequence—shoot!”

  “But.. ”

  “Shoot, man, shoot!”

  “Target’s deploying countermeasures—we’re losing track!”

  “Saturate the area. Blow it out of the sky!” There were no other viable alternatives.