by T I WADE
Ryan smiled, so did the agent. “Unfortunately Ms. Yoon, I don’t really know what to do with you. We don’t have a confinement center to hold you, and I just can’t leave you hanging, sorry, floating around. What am I to do with you? We don’t even have a pair of handcuffs aboard America One. It’s not that type of ship.”
“Ask the Lieutenant to look in my bag of belongings in the ISS station. He will find a pair of handcuffs. It will be better, and more lady-like to be chained to something, than to float around in space like discarded waste. If you please, metal legs?” she smiled at VIN now floating behind her. He returned ten minutes later. Both Fritz and VIN finished unwrapping her after they handcuffed her wrists behind her back. Ryan smiled as she continued to threaten the two men with death if they touched her in the wrong place.
Both men smiled, knowing that she wasn’t really dangerous, the handcuffs were of good quality, and she was at a disadvantage still floating around.
The four were the last to enter the cafeteria. The newbies had been shown the elevator ropes, and Ryan was commended by all the visitors on the size and quality of his ship. He bowed and thanked them. They were certainly a respectable group of knowledgeable people to receive accolades from.
He answered a few questions, and passed on several pertaining to the systems of his ship.
“I‘m sure to you I look like Captain Nemo in the movie, ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea’, and you may feel like his captives. Because of the recent change in leadership in the United States, I have decided that I will risk using one of my shuttles to return you to Earth in about a month’s time. While you are aboard America One each of you will be chaperoned 24/7 until you leave us. Doctor Rogers and Nurse Martha will look after Dr. Martin. Martha and Suzi, you have your orders. Igor, Boris, Commander Popov, the same for you. Commander Philips, I’m sure you will enjoy being with Captain Pete, Allen Saunders, or Michael Pitt when they are not on duty on the Bridge.” He introduced the men. “You are not allowed on the Bridge, and nobody apart from the crew is allowed through the round door. It will not open without proper thumb implants.
I need to ask all of you a question. Did the Chinese agent, Ms. Yoon, ever treat any of you badly before or after she held you hostage?”
“No, she was professional, and treated us reasonably well allowing us to eat, drink, and relieve ourselves for the two days we were held captive. That is my own opinion,” replied Commander Philips.
“Da, I agree,” stated Captain Popov.
“Ja, she was OK,” admitted the German scientist. “Just, she bound my hands a little tight.
“I’m sure she had orders to do what she did, and she did not harm us in any way,” added Nancy Martin.
The Chinese biologist said nothing; she just looked at Yoon with contempt. The agent was still bobbing on and off the floor like a half-dead balloon with the limited gravity, while the rest all had on metal shoes.
“Mr. Noble, Mr. Warner please give her some shoes and handcuff her to one of the chairs to free up one of her hands,” ordered Ryan. They did so as fresh coffee in sealed containers, and snacks were brought into the cafeteria.
“You made this all up here, Suzi?” the German biologist asked, her mouth already watering.
“Only the chocolate cake and the Danish, Petra. The coffee is still from earth, and so are the sandwiches. We still have tons of deep frozen supplies from Earth; enough for another year or two.”
The ISS crew marveled at the display placed in front of them.
“I am starting to believe that I am on the Nautilus, Mr. Richmond,” said Commander Philips smiling, and eating ravenously like the rest of the hungry ISS crew.
“Yes, but unfortunately up here in space all good things will come to an end,” replied Ryan. “Captain Nemo fished from the bottom of the sea. We don’t have that opportunity up here.”
For the next twenty minutes everybody got to know each other. Jonesy, Maggie, Penny, Kathy and Jamie entered after closing down the three shuttles.
“You certainly have the pick of the crop from the air force,” remarked Dr. Nancy Martin as the girls entered. “Maggie Sinclair, I heard you were dead! Now you walk in here, like you own the place.” For a second Maggie was stumped until Nancy reminded her that they had been in the same class in their first year at the Air Force Academy in Colorado.
“That’s right, the Nancy Martin. You wanted to be a pilot, your parents wanted you to study medicine, and they won. I remember now, we had those goodbye drinks on your last night and got rather ratted together. I’m glad to see you made it. Head of a fancy department at John Hopkins I hear.”
“Yes, I always had a good feel for surgery, a dead accurate hand, and thanks to my parents that was the direction I chose.”
“Married? Kids?” Maggie asked.
“Married once, no kids, married to my work. And you? You look like you might be.”
“Yes, to Mr. Jones here, ex-United States Air Force test pilot and soon to be a father. We are all pregnant up here. Even our friend Jamie found out two days ago that she’s pregnant.”
“No television, I assume?” smiled Commander Philips. Everybody laughed.
“Nein,” smiled Suzi feeling her large belly. “Earth-made but to be a space baby.”
“The doctor’s wife, Nurse Martha Rogers, our only nurse on board will be first to deliver in two weeks!” added Maggie.
“Looks like I have to deliver my own,” Doctor Rogers smiled at the surgeon. “Dr. Martin, would you like to assist? I would be honored.”
“Of course, Doctor, the honor is mine,” she smiled.
Ryan was happy to see the comradery. One of his main worries was that his crew would become unfriendly, unsociable “robots” on this long journey.
“Looks like you might need me to assist in a few more, with all these pregnant ladies, Doctor,” she added. “Hope you sent up a lot of diapers, Mr. Richmond. You are sure going to need them. Must be something in the water down there in Nevada,” she joked.
There was little accommodation completed on the ship. Half the crew still waited for their apartments to be finished. Ryan asked the doctor if the visitors could sleep in the empty hospital ward. There were six unused beds and the ISS crew was to be moved into the hospital. Except Agent Yoon. She was still the big problem, and after the last couple of years, it would take a lot to gain Ryan’s trust.
Fritz offered to chaperone her, and the hospital beds had far more metal to tie her to during sleep hours. The rest of the ISS crew suggested that they could keep an eye on her during sleep hours, and Fritz could during wake hours. Ryan finally agreed and that problem was solved.
Life on America One went back to normal when her new altitude was reached a couple of days later.
***
The U.S. president was evicted from the Oval Office; unfortunately, his Secret Service agent was killed in the attack. The storming of the Oval Office was kept quiet from the media, except to say that the president had relinquished the famous office, and was now under guard in a safe house in Washington.
Twenty-four hours later he and his wife were found dead inside the house. Both had committed suicide leaving a long note about being deserted by the American people, and how he, as president could have saved the country from itself.
Twelve hours later Congress passed an emergency law enabling the former president to be was sworn in as interim-president for a minimum term of one year, or until new elections were held. The vice president remained in office and life began to get back to normal in Washington.
The FBI was closing in on a small jet that seemed to always stay one step ahead of them. It carried Bishop and McNealy; Mortimer’s whereabouts were still unknown. The president and thirteen of his closest conspirators had been taken in or were already dead; there were three to go. The seventeen men who had tried to commandeer the country were now out of power and not a threat to anyone.
Nobody knew that there was an eighteenth, the alpha-wolf, who had hel
ped get the president elected in the first place using unlimited amounts of money and contacts. It had cost him over $100 billion of his personal wealth to sway the elections to serve his purpose, and he wasn’t even an American!
Chapter 8
Mortimer, Bishop and McNealy
The sleep and wake cycles for everyone aboard America One were scheduled in eight and sixteen hour shifts. Few departments worked around the clock and there were insufficient personnel to staff three shifts a day. In biology, the seven cubes did their own thing. The plants didn’t need human help to grow, just computer assistance to turn lights on and off. Special changes to lighting in daytime and nighttime, heat checks, and everything else was done during wake hours; pollination by the bees or the midges occurred only in wake hours. At night two guards at a time guarded the cubes, and walked the corridors in three-hour shifts. The guard crew was comprised of the males from the air force, astronauts, VIN and Fritz, and Jamie, who was at the very beginning of her pregnancy.
The Bridge was continuously manned by an armed person-in-charge: Captain Pete, Ryan, Suzi, Maggie, Kathy, or Penny. Sometimes VIN sat with Suzi during her shift, and looked out at the solar system often using the powerful telescope to search out stars and constellations. The swishy door could be locked down from inside.
The walking exercise was necessary for the astronauts. Even though they worked out in the gym daily, the several miles of light gravity walking each night helped them stay as fit as was possible in space. It would be easier once the whole craft was rotating, giving them more gravity to challenge their thinning muscles.
The doctor warned Ryan that normal gravity conditions were becoming more and more necessary to help the crew maintain muscle mass. Several more adjustments to the engines, especially the one that wouldn’t ignite no matter what the mechanics tried, were needed before the craft could start rotating.
Ryan had just completed a meeting with his mechanics on when to start minimum revolutions when Captain Pete alerted him that he had a radio message from the new president. Over the last two weeks, the air force pilots aboard had worked out a radio scrambling system using 200 different frequencies in one-minute intervals to communicate in space. Each had a name and even the names revolved on different frequencies every week.
A second, totally different system was enacted for radio messages between Earth and space. Three more geostationary satellites had gone offline and the entire world was struggling to communicate and exchange information using systems available only in space.
Older ground-based systems and undersea lines of communication were at full usage, and were being taxed to the limit. Powerful radio communications directed into space were far easier, and this was the only way the president could speak to Ryan.
“Good morning, Ryan. Its 10:00 a.m. here in Washington.”
“Good morning to you, Mr. President, it’s the third hour of my wake time up here, and I believe around 4:00 p.m. in the Sahara which we are over right now. We have thirteen minutes before we go over the horizon.”
“I need your help. We are about four to six hours behind Bishop and McNealy in their jet. It’s not the same one they have always used. I believe it is the Gulfstream, Mortimer’s own jet. They seem to fly and land three times a day at certain pre-arranged airfields. Through this system of theirs, we have apprehended over 100 personnel, who have supplied them with fuel, food, and board. Their time is running out. It seems that their latest ride is a jet that can take them over the Atlantic. We think that they are heading eastwards to refuel somewhere in the middle of the country for a flight over to Europe. We also believe that they are going to join up with Mortimer, who we have been told is hiding somewhere in Greece, on one of the islands. I want you to get one of your laser shuttles ready, and set up surveillance over the East Coast. We can give you a list of all the civilian and military flights in and out of the country at all times. Your job will be to check out and follow flights that are not logged from any civilian or military airports, and ascertain that military flights are the type of aircraft the flight plans state. How close do your cameras need to be to visibly see an aircraft?”
“I would say at a low Earth orbit, about 200 miles,” replied Ryan.
“Can you use your main ship to keep up a visual on outgoing flights while your shuttle is out of range?” the president asked.
“It could, but at such a low altitude the mother ship could be target practice for Chinese missiles, and I will not put America One and its crew in danger. What I can do, if this surveillance is for a short duration, is compute any not-accounted for flights working all of my shuttle computers with just one camera. You only need verification of the correct aircraft through one visual, but my computers could put a lock on it and my other shuttles could follow the lock while the others are over the horizon.”
“So you could use your three shuttles as a sort of GPS tracking system?” the president asked.
“Correct, plus we could input all the information into our ship’s main computers and at least keep its flight direction accurate.”
“Could you have Mr. Jones aim his laser at the jet’s engines if he is in a position to halt their flight?”
“I’m sure he would enjoy that!” smiled Ryan.
Ryan activated the three shuttles to disengage from America One, and descend to the lower orbit to find the criminals that had broken up his airfield and cracked his ribs. Jonesy was ecstatic to have an opportunity to get even with Joe Bishop, the man who had prematurely terminated his air force career.
No one really cared about Hal McNealy, but the jet could provide Ryan the means to track down the last of the big fish, Mortimer, who was somewhere in the vast area of the eastern seaboard. The time had finally arrived for Ryan to even the playing field.
Three hours later, the plan of action would commence. Long lines of civilian aircraft would depart the USA in the same flight windows, usually ten to twenty miles apart, to fly to destinations 1,000 to 3,500 miles away. Computers on Ryan’s shuttles would be programmed to follow the busy evening commercial flight patterns coming in from over a hundred airfields on both sides of the Atlantic.
Each pilot, civilian or military, had been warned to watch for any unregistered aircraft that might appear on their radars in the “wait and see” phase of the plan. Meanwhile, Jonesy, already over China, was decreasing altitude as rapidly as possible in SB-III to get a shot at the man who had ended his career. It was now open hunting season. Allen Saunders, flying SB-II, was several thousand miles behind the more modern shuttle, and Michael Pitt, piloting SB-I, was slowly descending a couple of thousand miles behind Allen Saunders. The three shuttles were decreasing altitude rapidly, but had vastly different forward speeds. They needed to span out so that one of them was over the U.S. or northern Atlantic at all times and they needed six hours to stretch around the globe. SB-III, however, was the only one that was armed,
Michael Pitt was the first shuttle to receive a report of an unidentified aircraft, a small jet flying out of Texas towards the East Coast.
“Get her down, Maggie,” Jonesy said to his co-pilot.
“I’m descending at maximum velocity, we will be less than 200 miles above Texas when we get over the state in twenty minutes,” she answered.
Traveling at 31,000 miles an hour forward speed, Maggie had decreased their altitude from 1,000 miles to 300 miles in three hours. She had used up 20 minutes at full burn, pulled half of their hydrogen fuel out of the first tank, and still Earth only looked slightly larger than at 1,000 miles. With their high forward speed, their orbits were getting faster and faster, and she was about to decrease their speed with reverse side thrusters.
Jonesy was determined to blow the jet aircraft to bits, but he knew that Ryan wanted it followed until it reached its destination. He didn’t know what aircraft it was, but if he could get a visual on it, he could work out its range. It might have taken off from a small tarred airfield in Texas, or it could have flown across from the West
Coast.
A second report of an unregistered flight was found out to be a small propeller aircraft at high altitude flying north over Florida; it did not have the range but was tracked, just in case.
Within the next ten minutes, two more flights were recorded by civilian aircraft flying across the U.S. One was flying in the opposite direction, the second one, a small jet, was heading north towards Canada. Three of the four aircraft were fast enough to be jets. It seemed that more civilian pilots weren’t filing flight plans since the satellite systems were down; officials would be meeting these aircraft wherever they landed. Aircraft without registered flight plans didn’t know that they were being watched once again from eyes in space.
At 197 miles above Earth, a slowing SB-III reached the west Texas border area. Relatively accurate geological co-ordinates were given by all the civilian aircraft picking up the four aircraft, and Jonesy maneuvered his shuttle to fly along the route given for the first jet. At such a rapid speed, he would only have a few minutes to try and get a fix on the jet. It was like finding a speck of dust, but at least he could input the last known co-ordinates into his computer and, with his laser aiming device, he could try and get a visual on the target.
Maggie carefully maneuvered the shuttle enabling Jonesy to aim his camera in the general area. Allen Saunders, 9,000 miles behind him, would be over the same area in about twenty minutes and could take over from Jonesy. Michael Pitt was positioning himself to do the same for Allen. Jonesy checked the last known coordinates received from an American Airlines pilot flying a 737 towards Miami. The unidentified aircraft was pretty low at about 12,000 feet, and heading in the same direction at about the same speed, (510 miles an hour) 100 miles ahead of the 737.
The calculations, including the last known position of the 737, air speed, altitude of 31,000 feet and direction were physically punched into the computers. Jonesy was surprised when the latest position of the American Airlines jet came up on the screen less than ten seconds later. The radar had a lock on it, and he dialed the camera in and within a minute had a blurred shape which resembled a silver aircraft. It was only 200 miles ahead of him, and he played with the infra-red, the heat, and the visual camera screens, finding that the heat emissions from the jet’s two engines were a little easier to see at this distance.
