by David Capps
“Keep it there!”
The gunner swept his fire back and forth inside the shrinking opening. The saucer started to glow a dull white, which appeared bright green in their goggles. The saucer began to rise into the air, but the ramp stopped with a foot and a half to go before it was closed.
“More!” Jake shouted to the gunner.
The landing struts on the saucer inched up into the underside as it struggled to gain height.
It’s been six, maybe seven seconds, Jake thought. There must be more than three hundred bullets bouncing around inside of that thing. They have to be damaging something.
Suddenly the saucer tipped toward the slightly open door and fell to the ground. The glow disappeared.
The two Ospreys on the outside of the formation slowed and hovered over the tree tops with their side gunners firing into the landing zone, clearing the way for the other two Ospreys to land. The Osprey carrying Jake’s team and the President’s Unit swung right, left side facing the antenna building. The fourth Osprey was right behind them, both rapidly dropping toward the ground. The rear platform was lowered quickly as the President’s Unit stood, weapons ready, waiting to hit the ground running. Jake, Honi, Stafford and Ken were right behind them.
The Osprey hit the ground with a heavy thump. They all rushed onto the ground and toward the building. The Osprey in the air on the right focused its Gatling Gun fire right into the open door of the building, preventing anyone from coming out and joining the fight. As soon as all the soldiers were on the ground, those two Ospreys lifted off and turned to take the place of the two still in the air, which two rotated to the outside and swung around to land.
An explosion blew open the front of one of the Ospreys that had just lifted off. It banked hard to the right and spun down into the trees. A second Osprey, swinging in to land, was struck in the right engine pod by a blinding flash of light. The pod exploded and the Osprey tipped and dropped to the ground, pieces of the large blades shattering and shredding nearby trees. Jake looked up, over the trees. The bright glow of a saucer was streaking across the sky toward them, powerful light beams flashing at the Ospreys still in the air. The damned saucer came back!
Just then, Jake heard the screeching of fighter jets. Four Navy F/A-18E Super Hornet Joint Strike Fighter Jets curved around the landing zone at nearly Mach 2, pointed directly at the incoming saucer. Multiple sonic booms echoed across the canopy of trees. The first four jets fired two missiles each at the flying saucer. Eight fire trails rapidly closed in on the saucer, which moved vertically at an amazing speed. It then quickly moved forward, flying over the missiles, and fired blazing flashes at the Super Hornet jets. Each jet was hit, lost control, and curved away from the saucer, heading down into the trees. Four explosions from the damaged jets rocked the deep forest as the planes crashed.
I hope the pilots got out, Jake thought. Four more Super Hornets flew in right behind them, launching another eight missiles at the glowing saucer. Meanwhile the first eight missiles had turned and were closing in on the back side of the saucer. Eight rapid flashes leapt from the back of the saucer destroying the missiles. The second set of four Super Hornets banked sharply to the side as another four screamed overhead and fired more missiles.
Still more screaming Super Hornets closed in on the saucer, four from the far left, four from the far right and four flying right over Jake, all firing two missiles each. The air was filled with burning trails of air-to-air missiles closing in on the saucer. The saucer again shot vertically at an unbelievable speed and fired bright flashes at the Super Hornets, striking each of them and sending them spiraling to the ground. As the saucer fired at the incoming missiles, twelve more Super Hornets joined the fight, boxing the saucer in from three sides. Two dozen more missiles were fired as they quickly closed in on the saucer. Some of the missiles had been fired high, ready to take on the saucer, should it jump higher into the air, which it did. Now the saucer was being forced to move away from the battle. Another wave of twelve Super Hornets rose into the air, firing more missiles toward the saucer. As the saucer retreated, it fired more brilliant flashes of light at the missiles, destroying them one after the other.
Two more waves of twelve Super Hornets closed in from the sides of the saucer, launching even more missiles. The saucer continued blasting missiles out of the air, but more were being fired by the jets than the saucer could shoot down. Gradually the tide turned. To avoid being hit by a missile, the saucer retreated into the distance.
Jake looked over at the crashed third Osprey. Soldiers were slowly climbing out of the wrecked plane and stumbling toward the building. The Osprey that had been firing into the open door of the building had also crashed. The fourth Osprey landed and its soldiers surrounded the building in a defensive formation. The entrance to the building was now open for a frontal assault. The Special Forces soldiers and the President’s Unit swarmed the door, firing into the interior as they entered. Jake, Honi, Stafford and Ken were right behind them.
The interior of the building was lighted, so they had to flip their night-vision up and out of the way before they entered. The brightness blinded them for a second until their eyes adjusted. Some of the Special Forces soldiers and some of the President’s Unit had fallen and were lying on the floor, wounded. Jake, Honi, Stafford and Ken quickly stepped over some of their downed comrades, identified targets and fired. Jake’s first clip was empty. He dropped the clip from the underside of his rifle and snapped the second one into place. Honi was doing the same.
Three men in white lab coats raised their arms in the middle of the firefight. One of them had a bright red blood stain spreading across his coat from the lower left side of his abdomen. Every enemy soldier was down and bleeding. The Army Special Forces soldiers and what remained of the President’s Unit swept the weapons away from the men on the floor and checked to see who was still alive. Four were found alive but unconscious. The Special Forces soldiers placed the enemy soldiers’ hands and feet in plastic cuffs and dragged them away from the desk mounted to the wall farthest from the front door. Medics attended immediately to wounded Special Forces soldiers and those of the President’s Unit.
Honi rushed forward and checked the two computers on the top of the desk.
“No, no, no. They’ve all been hit. We can’t recover anything.”
The three men in white lab coats stood, glancing at each other. They appeared confident that their mission had been successful. The soldiers pushed each of them to the floor and placed them in plastic cuffs. Jake calmly walked over to the wounded man and placed the hot barrel of his M-16 near the guy’s nose so he could feel the heat and smell the burned gunpowder.
“You’re too late!” he yelled. “It doesn’t matter what you do to us, it’s done. You’re all going to die!” His arrogant expression remained.
Jake walked away and started opening drawers and cabinets.
“What are you looking for?” Honi asked.
“Anything that might help.”
Andropov peeked around the corner of the door frame.
“Come on in,” Honi said.
Andropov slowly made his way around the soldiers who had fallen in battle and came over to the desk. He looked at the shattered computers on the bullet-ridden desk and raised his eyebrows.
“That’s not helpful.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Jake continued to search through drawers and file cabinets. He thumbed through the files. Most of them were in German, but some were in English. He looked at the titles. More reading for Andropov, he thought. He continued looking. When he closed the last drawer he looked back at Honi.
“Nothing.”
He looked around at all of the dead enemy soldiers on the floor. All of this death and destruction, he thought. And what did we gain? He looked at Honi. She was staring back at him while she leaned with her back against the desk, her hands clamped around the edge of the desk top. He looked at her small hands, and remembered how fast they moved and
the amazing power she controlled. He looked away, and then his mind caught on something. He looked back at Honi’s hands. It wasn’t her hands that had caught his attention; it was a recessed shelf under the desk top. In the bright room light, it was mostly hidden in shadow. The shelf ran the entire length of the desk top, which appeared to be twelve feet long.
Jake looked at his M-16. It had a small high intensity light mounted under the barrel. They hadn’t needed it with the night-vision goggles. He turned on the light and began shining it under the top of the desk. The shelf was only four inches below the desk top and recessed four inches back. As he swept the shelf with his light he saw books, food wrappers, note pads, file folders and crushed coffee cups. Near the left end was a flat object tucked back against the wall, a foot back from the edge of the shelf. He reached in and pulled the object out into the light.
Honi looked down at it in amazement. “It’s a laptop computer.”
Jake examined it in more detail. It had a dent in the left front corner. Other than that, it looked to be in working order. He examined the dent. Copper, he thought. A copper jacketed bullet had grazed the corner of the computer and spun it to the back of the shelf. He looked at the three men on the floor in their white lab coats. One of them was watching him. He looked nervous.
Jake motioned toward the three men with his rifle.
“Put them up in chairs.”
Dave Smith from the President’s Unit came over to him.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking it’s not over yet. If it really were, they wouldn’t care about a working computer.”
Dave turned and smiled at the three men they had strapped to the chairs.
“Well. This is going to get interesting.”
Dave walked over in front of the three men, took out his K-Bar knife and waved it in front of each man. Not one could take his eyes off the knife blade as it moved close to their faces. Dave studied their facial micro-expressions closely and walked back to Jake.
“Guy on the right,” he whispered to Jake. “He’s the one who knows.”
Jake handed the computer to Honi. She opened it, plugged the power cord into the outlet against the back wall, and powered it up.
“We need a login,” Honi said.
Jake looked at the man on the right, approached him and stuck the barrel of the M-16 against his chest, pointing at his heart.
“Login!”
The man spit at Jake’s face. His name tag was pinned to his lab coat: Schmidt, Jake thought. Could be German, maybe English.
“Anyone here read German?” Jake asked.
“I do,” Andropov said softly.
“Okay. Everybody start going through the files. We’re looking for logins, passwords, and personnel files–anything that is going to help us get into this computer.”
The men of the President’s Unit spread out quickly as did Honi, Stafford and Ken. They started sorting through the file cabinets, pulling and reading anything that even looked hopeful. Ken Bartholomew found the personnel file for Schmidt and brought it over to Honi.
She looked at the file. The guy’s first name was Heinrich. She typed in HSchmidt for a login and hit enter. Invalid username came back on the screen. She checked the file again. Heinrich had a middle initial in his name. She added that. It didn’t work. She checked the year of his birth and added that to the end of the username. Still didn’t work. She tried all lower case letters. Not that, either. She typed the login in all upper case letters.
The screen changed, requesting an encryption key.
All uppercase, she thought. What an ego. “Okay. Now we need an encryption key. It could be any phrase, sequence of numbers, letters or any combination thereof. Find it.”
Every soldier in the building started going through each scrap of paper looking for what might be the encryption key.
“Look at the guy on the right,” Dave whispered.
Jake studied the man’s facial expression. He looked confident.
“Okay,” Jake whispered back. “It’s not on a piece of paper. Where is it?” Short encryption codes were easy to remember, but ineffective. Longer ones worked well, but were hard to remember, unless they were formed from the first letter of each word in a well-known phrase. Jake hoped that wasn’t the case. Discovering the phrase could take days, if they found it at all. He studied the walls for signs, posters or photographs. Nothing. The walls were bare. So were the floor and ceiling. Jake glanced back at the man in the chair. He had a smug, confident look that Jake found irritating. Jake glanced at his countdown watch—25 hours, 3 minutes and 17 seconds to go until the final solar storm hit.
Jake looked again at the man in the chair. He looked away, just not fast enough. The watch, Jake thought. He recognized the countdown watch. Jake walked slowly around the room, checking the walls again. He wandered in back of the three seated men and checked their wrists. Each one wore a countdown watch. Jake slowly checked the dead enemy soldiers. None of them wore a countdown watch.
“Get these three out of here,” Jake said firmly. “Secure them in the Osprey.”
The soldiers cut the three men loose from the chairs and marched them out to the plane. Dave Smith approached.
“You know where the encryption code is?”
Honi, Stafford and Ken gathered around him.
“It’s on this watch,” Jake replied, removing it from his wrist. He studied the watch face in detail: Numbers from 0 to 23, the minute, second and hour hands, and the numbers for the day. That was it on the watch face. That and a fuzzy gray line running around the outer edge.
“Could the encryption code be a sequence of dots and dashes?” Ken asked.
“No,” Honi replied. “It would be numbers, letters or ones and zeros.”
“Ones and zeros?” Ken asked. “Could those be represented by a line and a dot?”
“Yes, they could. Why?”
“The gray circle around the outer edge of the watch face—it’s composed of very small lines that point toward the center of the watch face, mixed with dots.”
“How do you know that?” Honi asked.
“We had just examined some gold bearer bonds in New York. I had my jeweler’s loop with me, so I looked at the watch face through the magnifying lens.”
“You have your loop with you now?”
“No.”
“Search the room,” Jake ordered. “We’re looking for a magnifying glass or a jeweler’s loop.”
After ten minutes of frantic examination, they came up with nothing.
“Search the men on the plane. They have to have one—otherwise they couldn’t read the encryption key.”
Dave Smith and two of the other men from the President’s Unit ran out the door. Five minutes later they returned with a jeweler’s loop. Ken took the watch and the loop and examined the gray circle on the watch face.
“There are a lot of lines and dots on here. I don’t know where to start.”
“Look for three or four dots in a row,” one of the men on the President’s Unit said. “I’m Aaron Smith, electronics and computer specialist. May I?”
Ken examined the watch face. “I’ve got one set of three dots, not four, and many groups of two dots. What does that mean?”
“It means we start with the three dots followed by a line,” Aaron replied.
He sat at the computer and typed in three zeros and a one. “Next four?”
They continued around the circumference of the watch face until they came back to the three zeros. Arron hit the return key. The numbers cleared from the box and nothing else happened. They stood, looking at the screen, not saying anything.
“Did you read them clockwise, or counterclockwise?” Jake asked.
“Clockwise,” Ken replied.
“The watch runs the other way. Try it counterclockwise.”
Aaron started with the three zeros and a one. They continued around the watch face until the last sequence had been entered. Aaron looked up with his finge
r poised over the enter key.
“Go ahead,” Jake said.
Aaron pressed the enter key and the screen changed. This time it showed an oval line circling an orange spot in the center of the screen. Boxes with numbers in them were nestled into the top corners of the screen. On the left side were two boxes with unfamiliar mathematical formulas in them. They were very similar to each other with some minor differences in some of the numbers. The top box was labeled R, and the lower box had PG in it. The right side had only one box, and it was counting down in hours and minutes.
“This is our countdown timer,” Jake said. “Can we change the count?”
Aaron clicked on the box. Nothing happened. He moved the mouse indicator over the box on the right. No change.
“It’s an indicator. Not a control. It can’t be changed.” Aaron moved the mouse indicator over the formulas in the left boxes. The indicator changed from an arrow to a vertical line. “These are input boxes.”
“Isn’t there some place to enter an abort code?” Jake asked.
Aaron looked at the screen and shook his head. “I think we’re way past that, sir.”
Andropov slowly approached the computer and looked at the screen.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“The satellite in orbit around the sun?” Jake said.
Andropov checked the timer value. “Six hours, forty two minutes and thirty-eight seconds. I’m afraid we are too late.”
“Why?”
“Because we are on the dark side of the planet. You can’t even send a signal toward the sun until dawn. It has to be line of sight. By then the bomb will have detonated and the solar storm will be on its way.”
“Then they had to have sent the detonation signal before it got dark. They sent it before the deadline. It was already too late before we got on the Osprey.”
“They had to know the world wasn’t surrendering to them,” Stafford said. “None of the supreme leaders were installed. It was obvious.”
“So now seven billion people are going to die,” Jake said.
CHAPTER 20
