Test Pilot's Daughter II: Dead Reckoning

by Ward, Steve

  “Thanks to me,” Heather said. “I had to teach you how to talk to a girl, remember?”

  “I only wanted to talk to you, Heather.”

  “I know sweetie, but you were just a kid. To tell you the truth I liked you a great deal, but I couldn’t allow myself to. . .well, you know. The fact is, you saved our butts. It took a lot of courage to hand-prop that airplane. You’re still my hero,” she said kissing him on the cheek.

  “Oh, you guys are just too cute,” Christina said. “Hey Michael, you said you spent a lot of time outdoors, do you know any good campfire stories?”

  “Let’s see, yeah, there’s one my grandfather used to tell, but it’s kinda scary.”

  “Scary? You can’t scare us. No way,” she replied.

  “Okay,” Michael started in, “He said when he was a young man he used to take his girlfriend out by the lake so they could make out in the car. It was winter and they had the windows pretty steamed up when he heard a loud tapping. He looked up and there was a huge man, a real ogre waving his arms like a maniac. He had no hands, but extending from his forearms were two large, shiny hooks. He hit the window hard, and the glass exploded. One of those hooks came flying in and caught his girlfriend by the neck.”

  “Okay, okay, that’s enough,” Heather interrupted. “Don’t need any more of that crap. I don’t need any nightmares tonight, not it this place. I left too many here already. Besides, that’s the oldest story in the book. . .a man with a hook? Herumph!”

  “Well, Miss Heather,” Christina said, “why don’t you tell us a story. Or better yet, sing us a song. How about Amazing Grace?” She had never forgotten how Heather had sung that song over Jessica’s grave. It was a spectacular moment under a starlit sky as her beautiful voice resonated over the quiet rush of tiny wavelets along the beach. It was a moment of peace that trumped all horrors.

  Heather sang as Christina stared into the flames transfixed. After they all applauded her effort, Christina spoke, not to anyone particularly, “You know something? Do you realize that man has been staring into flames like these for at least a hundred thousand years asking the same questions? We’ve come a long way, but where are we on the big issues?”

  “Wadaya mean?” Billy asked.

  “Fact is, we’ve made almost no progress on the most basic questions. Why are we here? Where does the sky end? How is it that I speak and weep, but animals don’t? Why can’t the trees talk? Are there others out there in the black sky, or are we alone? When did it all begin? When will it end?”

  “We know quite a lot,” Michael argued. “We know the beginning was about fourteen billion years ago at the Big Bang.”

  “Oh?” she raised an eyebrow. “We know that for sure do we? The Big Bang huh? Okay, if it all started with the Big Bang, who pulled the trigger?”

  “We know a great deal, Christina. We know that fish and animals have been around hundreds of millions of years, but man only about a million,” he stated with confidence.

  “But Michael, those are just theories. No way to prove it one way or the other.”

  “Well, evolution is no theory, it’s a fact, and we have all kinds of evidence. At least two branches of man evolved from apes, and only one line survived.”

  “Two lines? Apes, huh? DNA evidence shows we all came from a single source, a single female begat the entire population of the modern world. Now that’s over six billion people. I love it when eggheads claim theories as facts.” The wine was boiling in her brain, and she was ready for a dogfight.

  “Christina don’t you see? The real arrogance is believing we magically came from God to dominate over the world. That’s just wishful thinking, no evidence at all. Man came from ape.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yup!”

  “Michael, how long have chimps and gorillas been around?” She grinned.

  “Long before man,” he answered. “Eons.”

  “Well, don’t you see the flaw in your logic?”

  “No.”

  “Michael, if man evolved from apes, why didn’t the apes evolve? They were right there in the same environment for millions of years, yet they haven’t changed much at all. How do you explain that?”

  “Oh, uh, well, I don’t know exactly. That’s not a bad question.”

  “We believe the universe is fourteen billion light-years across, because that’s as far as we can see. Every time we build a bigger telescope, the universe gets bigger. When the Hubble was first repaired, they pointed it to the blackest spot in the sky, a place where nothing was known to exist. Astronomers, those who thought they were pretty damned smart, were flabbergasted. The Hubble showed thousands of new galaxies like our Milky Way. We know so much and yet so little. Earth is such a tiny dot in the vastness of space. And man? A mere spec of bacteria in the cosmos.”

  “Okay, miss smarty pants,” he laughed, “but one day we’ll have the. . .what? Holy Toledo! What was that?” He pointed to the east over the black ocean. A brilliant light illuminated the horizon, first a white ball that lasted about ten seconds then an orange glow rising straight up in the atmosphere in the shape of a mushroom.”

  They all turned to stare.

  A feeling of panic surged as Christina flushed with fear.

  “What’s the date?”

  “Seventeenth,” Billy answered quickly.

  “Oh my God!” she gasped. “Eid Al-Adha. I knew it! It’s a fucking nuke. Those bastards nuked Florida. Nothing else could make a mushroom like that.”

  “What’s Ed Ha Dee?” Billy asked.

  “Muslim holiday, the feast of Abraham.”

  “Couldn’t it be a rocket launch?” Michael asked calmly.

  “No, not unless it blew up. I’ve actually seen a launch from here. The light would arch across the sky and keep going. That’s a friggin’ mushroom!”

  “A nuke?” Heather cried. “Can’t be.”

  “I’m afraid it can,” Christina replied.

  Charlie, the CIA agent, got on his satellite telephone. “That’s funny,” he said. “No one’s answering.” He pounded on the handset like something was wrong. “Never failed me before.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Christina shot up on her feet. “Gotta get out of here! You guys get that chopper fired up, and fast. If that’s a nuke , the shockwave is moving 800 miles an hour. We may only have a few minutes before we get a Tsunami.”

  Both agents ran in the dark toward the chopper. The pilot climbed in securing his seatbelts and flipping switches for a quick getaway. In less than a minute the blades began to rotate.

  “Grab what you need, and leave everything else!” Christina shouted. “Let’s go!”

  In a cloud of sand and seawater, they were airborne. The glow in the east had disappeared. The pilot headed for the yacht which was only about twenty miles away in deep water.

  Christina pressed the intercom and said, “Better get some altitude boys in case we get hit by an air blast. Don’t even think about landing on that yacht; just hang up here until we know what the deal is.”

  “Roger that,” Jim replied.

  “Depending on the exact location, we should feel it in a couple a minutes.” She turned to her friends and said, “Pull your seatbelts in tight.”

  The pilot climbed through one-thousand feet up to five. Charlie looked like he was still trying to reach someone on his handset.

  Heather was wide-eyed with fear, “For God’s sake, I can’t believe the United States of America was hit by a nuke. What will we do? What about radiation? I thought we were okay until Christmas day.”

  Christina had pondered all the same questions and more. My God! Millions will be killed by the radiation alone. Where can we go? What will be left when we get back? Have we retaliated? How many more are on the way?

  Jim got on his radio, “Miami Center. . .Miami Center this is November 2-2-5-7 Sierra, how do you read, over?”

  There was a long pause, then a blast of static. Finally, “November 2-2-5-7 Sierra, loud and clear, go ahead.�
�� He turned to Christina with a strange look, pointed to his headset and flipped a switch so the passengers could monitor his conversation.

  “Miami Center, we’re about 75 miles east of Andros Island in the Bahamas. Is everything okay over there? We just saw one hell of a flash and a mushroom cloud.”

  “Yeah, we’re okay. Just got the report. Looks like a very large meteor or maybe some space junk hit south of Ocala, out in the swamps. Came in low from the west. We felt a pretty good jolt down here.”

  “That was quite a show,” said Jim.

  “We thought it was an earthquake. Can you imagine that? Gotta get off. November 2-2-5-7 Sierra clear this channel.”

  “Roger,” Jim replied. “Lady, looks like a false alarm. I’m heading for the boat.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was an asteroid, too small for astronomers to track, but big enough to pack a wallop. Some argued it was actually a large meteor, but the difference was like six of one and a half-dozen of another. In either case, Christina thought, it blew a big-assed hole in the swamp. Plowing through the atmosphere, the quarter-mile hunk of rock burned down to about 150 feet across on impact. It found the Florida landscape at a velocity of 50,000 miles per hour and dug a crater six-hundred feet across and three-hundred feet deep. Converting kinetic energy to heat, sound, and light, it released the equivalent of a one-megaton nuke. Providential that it hit an area where few lived, only twenty people were reported killed by debris.

  There was a spectacular 9-1-1 call from two unfortunate fishermen played over and over on CBN. Apparently they saw the thing coming and had time to call before they were obliterated.

  “Hoodiddy, we got yer supersized UFO out here nobody’s gonner believe. Holy Mac and cheese, mother of all fireballs right outta space. . .Huge, sounds like a freight. . .No! . .The sky’s on far. . .Comin’ right at us!” There was a crisp Bang, then the call went silent.

  No trace of the men was found, but they were tracked by the cell number. The brilliant flash and subsequent mushroom cloud was visible for hundreds of miles, recorded by scores of people with video cell phones. Frightening images of the rising inferno were broadcast for days, a harbinger for those touting nuclear holocaust. Rumors were rampant. Fear spread throughout the United States, and a booming business reignited in bomb-cellar construction. After years of apathy, people were demanding that Congress fund asteroid defense projects at NASA.

  The cosmic collision caused a great hubbub among those forecasting the destruction of Earth. There were reports of near misses over the past few years along with predictions of gloom and doom. It seemed only the movie makers in Hollywood had paid any real attention to the subject, but now everyone was interested. Of course, science showed it had all happened before, and it was just a matter of time before it happened again. All the larger asteroids with crossing orbits were tracked, and the best predictions held humankind safe for another ten-thousand years. The problem remained with those cosmic orbs that weren’t tracked, comets, orbital debris and things that came out of the deep reaches of space. Such a comet had broken apart on national TV before it hit Jupiter in 2001.

  Christina was delighted with all the new emphasis on the space program, but she had a lot on her mind. She had long thought seeking out and destroying or redirecting such threats should be a NASA priority. A good application for nukes, she thought, blow those little bastards to smithereens.

  After the most fabulous three days of her life, early Monday morning, Christina found herself back at JSC in the simulator. It would be four long days of training on the military version of DROID. Michael was on the mission too, but he was training to use the shuttle’s robotic arm to pluck the capsules out of the cargo bay. Should Iranian or Russian ICBMs make it through the upper atmosphere, New Hope with a total of five destructive DROIDs would be waiting in orbit. First, one would be deployed against the Soyuz 23 in an attempt to take out precision navigation systems before the expected attack. Should that fail, or should the Iranians launch anyway, the others would be in place for a third tier of defense.

  Under attack from an ICBM, DROID would fly in the opposite direction, approach head-on and explode in its path. That would release a large cloud of debris to intercept the missile at a relative velocity of almost 50,000 miles per hour. Christina had been assured any such missiles would self-destruct upon reentry. A bag of sand, she chuckled. Let’s hear it for low tech. It would be her job to put the weapons in place and stand ready to attack on Christmas Day.

  The training was monotonous and exhausting, as she went over the same procedures a hundred times every day for three days. “I’ve got it already,” she would tell her instructors, but there was a longstanding rule at JSC: “No astronaut is so dense he or she will not respond to constant repetition.”

  Early morning on December 22, she was to meet Michael for breakfast in the cafeteria, when Julia Baker, the Director’s secretary ran into her in the hall. Something was very strange as the middle-aged Julia didn’t normally show up for work until around 9:00 a.m. She looked as though she hadn’t slept for days, tears flooding her eyes. She grabbed Christina by the arm, looked up and down the hall and coaxed her into a small storage room. The normally composed secretary came across more like a paranoid schizophrenic, very dark around the eyes and visibly shaken. She pulled the door to and began to sob.

  “What the hell?” Christina said, but the older lady was crying too hard to reply. “Julia, calm down.” She gave her a hug trying to offer some comfort. “What in the world is it?”

  “The Director.”

  “What about him?”

  “Christina, I know what you’re up against, and I am so afraid for you. You mustn’t go on that mission.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sabotaged,” she whispered. She wiped tears from her face and appeared to be getting it together. “Don’t you know? He wants you. . .dead.”

  “I don’t know anything of the kind.”

  “Do you still have that thing in your back?”

  “What thing?” she reached around and finally remembered the subcutaneous transceiver. In the hectic period of the last two weeks, she had forgotten all about it. “How did you know about that?”

  “I know everything. I should’ve told you before. . .I am sooo sorry, Christina.” She looked her right in the eyes. “I overheard when the Director ordered that thing. The tech objected, but he insisted, threatened him with his job. The day you left for that meeting with General Wallace, I heard him tell Rhani how to track you down. Then he said something that made me shudder.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told Rhani. . .” she sobbed, “he told him, ‘Just make sure she doesn’t come back.’ I swear it, Christina. I didn’t know until that very moment that the Director had it in for you. Then, when I heard you were captured, I just felt horrible. If only I had warned you,” she started sobbing again. “Oh, I’m sooo sorry.”

  “Are you saying. . .”

  “I’m saying the Director tried to have you killed,” she spoke through clenched teeth.

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. He was the one who paid off the terrorists and had me rescued.” Christina was confused. Why is she telling me this? All of a sudden she remembered what Wallace said, “You’re making a big mistake, Christina, a very big mistake.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Julia said, “but I have evidence, several handwritten notes of instruction. Maybe Rhani was getting cold feet. I don’t know. He seemed to be playing both sides, and maybe he worried that if you were killed, this whole thing might blow up in his face. There is only one thing I know for sure. . .the Director was responsible, and I’m so afraid he has sabotaged your mission.”

  “My God, I don’t know what to believe anymore,” Christina sighed.

  “Did you know he plans on leaving the country tomorrow?”

  “What? He can’t leave; we have a launch in just three days. He’s the Director of NASA! He can’t leave during a m
ission. Does the President know about this?”

  “No one knows. . .no one but. . .me, I made the arrangements. He’ll be picked up at his home in the morning at ten. The idiot thinks I’m in love with him. He asked me to go too, but I refused. How could anyone love such a beast? Christina, listen to me; he’s leaving with a one-way ticket to nowhere. I beg of you. Don’t get on that shuttle!”