Death Orbit (19 page)

At this point, one of the radio officers aboard the
Marconi
made contact with the KSC air controllers and filled them in on what they were hearing from the Seamaster. The KSC men told the
Marconi
that they had lost all contact with the flying boat about 20 minutes before, or just after it had passed over the spy ship. They then asked if the
Marconi
had picked up this mysterious ship on its radar or sound-detection systems. The
Marconi
replied that it had not.

That’s when the last radio call from the Seamaster reached the spy ship.

“This vessel is acting in a very odd fashion,” it began. “We can see crewmen on the deck, we are flying very low now, at five hundred feet, and they don’t seem to see or recognize us. We are hailing them with navigation lights, but there is no response. Ship is flying an old American flag. Repeat. Ship is under sail with old American stars-and-stripes. It doesn’t look like a fifty-star field, either…”

Then, finally, “We’re going in further, to get a closer look. Stand by…”

Then all contact with the Seamaster was lost.

The radio officers aboard the
Marconi
tried frantically for the next 30 minutes to raise the flying boat, to no avail. Even when air controllers at KSC joined in, hailing the Seamaster on a number of open frequencies, there was no response. It was numbing experience and more than a little frightening. In the course of 90 minutes, seven UAAF aircraft had been lost in clear weather under very mysterious circumstances.

When the
Marconi
finally reached the area where both the Seamaster and Flight 19.5 had made their last reports, it could find no evidence of any of the aircraft—or of the mysterious ship that they both must have seen.

The spy ship would stay on station for the next two hours. Seven more search and rescue aircraft were dispatched from Banana River, but none found any trace of the Sabres or the huge flying boat.

Word of the bizarre disappearances swept the KSC very quickly. Shock and dismay followed. All UA military facilities up and down the East Coast were put on alert. The loss of all the pilots, and especially Yaz, was taken very hard at UA joint command. General Jones, in particular, was devastated.

Only later would he receive a top-secret report generated from the maritime files kept aboard the USS
Marconi.
Its search computer had finally found a match based on the description of the mysterious ship given in the last reports from the Seamaster.

The computer identified it as the USS
Cyclops,
a U.S. Navy collier, a ship designed to carry coal.

It had left Barbados with a load of manganese ore in March of 1918—and was never seen again.

Cape Cod

T
HE STORM RAGING OFF
Nauset Beach had reached a new level of ferocity by midnight.

It had been determined by the UAAF weather station up in Boston that the powerful hurricane that had swept the mid-Atlantic had suddenly stopped and was now swirling in place about 150 miles off the coast of southern Massachusetts.

This lack of movement was called the “Felix Effect,” after a similar hurricane of that name had parked itself off the American East Coast for several days years ago before finally moving off and dissipating. Knowing that opposing high and low pressure fronts were responsible for stalling the storm, the UA weathermen were at a loss as to how long the hurricane would be battering Cape Cod and the nearby islands. In any case, they didn’t expect any significant change in the next 48 to 72 hours.

The storm had already blacked out most of Cape Cod. The electrical service, never the most stable to begin with, had failed up and down the peninsula a long time before. Now the only lights seen through the wind and rain were those being powered by emergency generators inside the handful of coastal military installations. Everyone else was relying on candlepower or nothing at all.

It was particularly dark inside Skyfire, the farmhouse atop Nauset Heights.

The lights had failed completely around dusk after a long windy, rainy day in which the electricity had been blinking on and off intermittently. Frost was sitting on the overstuffed couch in the tiny front room, his knees shaking, his stomach aching from indigestion, dehydration, and stress. He was holding a lit candle, his fingers cupped around it, trying to keep the flame alive in the drafts blowing through the porous farmhouse.

Outside the wind was howling, the rain fierce. The lightning and thunder had been constant since morning. There were at least five other people in the house, but Frost wasn’t too sure exactly where any of them was. He’d been spooked ever since his ethereal encounter up in Gander, and with the long trip down here and the strange events since—well, he felt lucky just to be sitting here, breathing normally and thinking in a somewhat rational way.

His knees were shaking, though, and that had never happened to him before. He’d been in air combat many times; he’d faced down some of the most bloodthirsty air pirates during his days as a Sky Marshal; he’d survived the siege and battle at Khe Sanh during the most recent war in Vietnam. During all that and more, his knees had never shaken. Oddly, this bothered him the most.

He was a professional soldier, and as such, he knew when adversity struck it was always best to consider what the hell was wrong and then lay out contingencies to fix the problem.

What was wrong?

He was sitting in a haunted house, that’s what was wrong. Upstairs, in the main bedroom, were four ghosts. Or at least, Frost thought they were ghosts. Actually, they were the four young girls Dominique had first shown him shortly after his arrival. How did they get to Skyfire? They didn’t know. Where did they come from? They weren’t sure of that either. Only the oldest girl had talked, and that was briefly to Dominique, after she’d discovered the four sitting in the bedroom. This girl, who was missing part of her bathing suit at the time, told Dominique that she and her friends had been playing on a beach somewhere when suddenly, they woke up to find themselves inside the bedroom, crying, sunburned, and very lost. They had said nothing ever since.

And now Frost was sitting here, trying to keep the candle going and think about something other than the thunder and lightning and wind and the girls upstairs and his own frightening experience that had caused him to come here in the first place. He could only wish this was all a dream and that he would soon wake up in his bed up at Gander and he could blame the meal brought to him by the overly helpful enlisted man. But even then, Frost knew he would have a problem. If this was a dream and he was dreaming of the children upstairs, then that meant a maelstrom of bad luck would soon be coming his way. His grandmother had told him years ago that it was bad luck to dream about children, especially young girls. Either way, Frost had decided, he was in for some bad times.

There was another thing his grandmother had told him, suspicious old windbag that she was. But this one had stuck with Frost, too, mostly because his grandfather, a stately man of regal European stock, had concurred when he’d told him about it. The world will go a little crazy just before it comes to an end, Grandma had said. Things will go just a little off-kilter; Nature will short-circuit a bit before the Final Day. This way, she’d claimed, everyone who’d been good enough to get into heaven could start packing their spiritual bags for the trip. In fact, these good souls would begin disappearing even before Doomsday arrived. Yes, that will be a nightmare for the missing persons bureau! Grandpa had said.

And what will happen to the rest of the people, Granny? What will happen to the ones who weren’t so good, the ones left behind while all the true believers suddenly started disappearing? Granny had put it this way: where they were going, there would be no need to pack a bag.

These were the disturbing retrograde thoughts that were flying around in Frost’s head. The candle kept teasing him, seemingly going out, only to flare up briefly just as soon as he’d begin to panic. The wind grew worse, if that was possible, as did the rain. The old house was creaking so much now, Frost’s ears were beginning to sting. Christ, didn’t Hunter do
any
work on this place while he was here?

Apparently not.

There was a crack of lightning followed by a particularly sharp crash of thunder. It sounded like a small nuclear device going off. This time Frost’s candle did go out for good, leaving him alone in the suddenly dark room. Now it was more than his knees that were shaking. From above he heard another crash, as if someone had just fallen. Then, more pounding and tumbling sounds from upstairs.

Where was Dominique? She’d left the house sometime before—to get candles, he thought. Or was it to take in the hay? Had she returned? Frost wasn’t sure.

Another crash from upstairs; another bolt of lightning, illuminating everything outside and nothing inside. What was going on upstairs? Were those ghostly kids still up there? Were they in trouble? A shiver the likes of which he’d never felt before went through Frost. He heard a scream—high, short, shrill. It was one of the kids. They
were
in some kind of trouble. And that meant he would have to go up those stairs and try to help them.

He stood up, surprised he could, his legs were shaking so much. He had no weapon, no gun or even a knife, to take with him. All those things had been left back in Gander. Whatever he was about to do, he would have to do it unarmed.

He took a few tentative steps toward the stairway—that’s when heard another scream, followed by some whimpering. Something bad was happening up there, Frost knew. Despite his almost pathetic condition, he knew he had to get up there and see what it was.

Somehow, he found the gumption to put his foot on the first stair and start climbing. It was pitch black at the top of the stairs, and Frost couldn’t get over the dreadful feeling that he was really ascending into some kind of black hole, a void from which nothing could escape, not even light.

He stopped about halfway up, using the excuse that he should allow his eyes to adapt to the darkness. But in the next short breath he knew this was bullshit: he’d been sitting in the near-dark for hours, and this was as good as his eyes were ever going to get.

Still, he stayed frozen on the fifth creaky step, wondering just when the hell it was that he lost his manhood. Where did the courage to drive a jet fighter through the sky in pursuit of some dangerous enemy go? What happened to the balls he’d needed to stick it out under the falling shells at Khe Sanh? Now he couldn’t even walk up the stairs in the dark.

Another tiny scream. And now more crying, somewhat muffled. Frost sucked it up and went up the last five stairs as fast as he could, which was still somewhat slow. Finally he reached the landing and was confronted with the closed door which led into the bedroom where the mysterious children had first appeared.

Sure, all the goody-two-shoes will start disappearing from the face of the Earth and they will ride up into the clouds—but what the hell had Granny told him about people suddenly disappearing and popping up in other places? Nothing that he could recall. With a shaking hand, Frost reached out and nudged the door open. The whimpering got a little louder.

The four girls were sitting on the bed in the exact same positions as when he’d last seen them. Only one of them, the oldest, looked up at him. The others seemed to be terrified and mesmerized at the same time, their eyes glued on the closet door, which was just an arm’s reach away from the foot of the old four-poster bed.

Two of these girls were crying; the third, who was the youngest, was in such a state, she was having a hard time just catching her breath. Frost was beyond trembling at this point. He’d never been so scared in his life. Another bolt of lightning. Another crash of thunder outside. All four girls jumped at the tremendous sound. But this is not what was scaring them.

Whatever was doing that, was behind the closet door.

Frost looked at the older girl and she pointed first to the door and then, to the floor at the bottom of it. A puddle of water was forming under the door itself. Something inside the closet was dripping wet.

Frost took two very small steps into the room and found himself within reach of the door. This was the moment of truth. These kids looked as if the devil was in the closet, and now Frost had taken it upon himself to find out exactly what it was and do battle with it, if necessary.

Maybe he hadn’t lost all his courage after all, he thought, as his shaking right hand grabbed hold of the doorknob.

He gave it a twist even as he caught a whiff of seawater in his nose. Then he pulled it open…

Suddenly he found himself letting out a little yelp. There was a man inside the closet. He was dripping wet. His eyes were closed, yet his mouth was moving. He was dressed in a soaking flight suit and still had a radio wire and an oxygen mask draped across his chest.

Frost felt his eyes go wide and his jaw drop. He was certain he was inside a nightmare now because he recognized the man in the closet even as he fell forward into his shaking arms.

It was Yaz.

In Orbit

I
T WAS ON THE THIRTEENTH
orbit of the fourth day in space when the Zon’s first and second GPC computers finally failed.

It was not an unexpected event. Just 20 inches long and about 10 inches high and wide, the 60-pound GPCs (general purpose computers) were the brains of the Zon’s operations. They were the reason the spacecraft could launch, get into orbit, stay there, and, if everything was still together, reenter the atmosphere and return to earth. They were, in effect, the remote control unit for the spacecraft, the highly advanced autopilot.

But the GPCs had been working on overload ever since the flight had begun. With all the violent maneuvering to avoid the space mines, and the constant need to switch back and forth between automatic and manual control, GPC 1 and 2 just couldn’t take the strain. Like endlessly turning a light bulb on and off, the wear and tear finally got the best of them.