Death Orbit (42 page)

After the first group of Antonovs had been unloaded and sent on their way, more German airplanes began showing up. Coming in at a rate of one every four minutes, they landed more cargo, hand tools, fuel, and heavy equipment. Many were carrying troops as well. By 0815 hours, a second section of runway had been repaired and was ready for use. By 0820, ten more troop-carrying Antonovs had arrived.

By 0845 hours, there were five times as many German soldiers on the ground at the KSC as there were UA troops.

The first of the Nazi XHL cargo planes arrived at the Kennedy Space Center just after 0930 hours.

The Fourth Reich had somehow secured four of the most unusual XHL (“extremely heavy lift”) airplanes ever built. They were 377-PGs, also known as “Super Guppies.” The four-engine cargo planes had an upper fuselage that was so extended, so puffed up, they looked more like huge flying blowfish than guppies. Originally designed to carry oversized components for the NASA space program, each plane’s airframe was so bulbous, it seemed like it would be impossible for the aircraft to get off the ground, never mind fly.

But fly they did, and now a quartet of these strange-looking beasts was circling the KSC, waiting for clearance to land.

Watching the scene from the top of the still-smoldering VAB building, even General Dave Jones was impressed. And considering what the Super Guppies were carrying in their enormous cargo bays, he knew the sooner they came down, the better.

So he grudgingly keyed his hand-held radio set and spoke three words to the KSC main control tower: “Bring them in.”

Immediately he could hear the engine pitch on all four airplanes change. A minute later, the first Super Guppy was touching down on the newly repaired shuttle runway.

“Magnificent airplanes, no?” the man standing beside Jones asked.

“Sufficient airplanes,” Jones snapped back. “And most likely obtained as a result of killing some innocent people.”

Admiral Doenitz laughed.

“General Jones, you are being far too dramatic,” he declared. “Don’t you think in light of the dire situation that it is wise to lay aside our differences?”

Jones stared back at him through the midmorning sunlight. Doenitz had been his shadow ever since the Nazis began arriving at KSC. It was just another part of the agreement he’d hammered out with the German commanders atop the Super Magic Mountain earlier this morning. Jones knew that the only way he could really keep an eye on the Nazi CO was to have him always within arm’s reach. And Doenitz knew it was the only way he could keep tabs on Jones, too. So they’d been joined at the hip for the entire morning, and would be for most of this unsettling operation. Doenitz, though, was proving to be an enormous pain in the ass.

“I could never lay aside my differences with a Nazi,” Jones replied plainly, and for the fourth time of the morning. “You people are the most repugnant A-holes on earth. Throughout history, you’ve brought more suffering and more pain and misery to more innocent people than any other entity I can think of.”

Doenitz looked genuinely confused. He sucked in a load of smoke from his long Parisian cigarette and let it out with a spit into the high wind.

“But what is your point, General?” he asked.

Jones’s angry reply was cut off by the roar of the first Super Guppy reversing its engines upon touchdown. The bizarre airplane quickly taxied off the main strip, allowing the second of its kind to set down. Behind that came the third and fourth. With frightening efficiency, the airplanes were directed to an unloading area where four separate armies of handlers waited.

The first group of handlers scrambled aboard the first cargo plane even before it had stopped rolling. Soon doors were opening, fork trucks were screeching, and loading ramps were being lowered. The first huge package slid out of the first plane so quickly that Jones was once again silently impressed. The bubblelike cargo planes didn’t even have to shut down their engines. Once their cargo was unloaded, it was back to the runway and a roaring take-off inside of 120 seconds.

It was all happening in an unbelievably short amount of time. Jones had put his stopwatch on the fourth plane’s unloading. Sure enough, the big package was taken off and the Super Guppy was back in the air in less than two minutes.

Throughout it all, Jones could hear Doenitz chuckling in the background. The German officer knew exactly what Jones was doing and what he was thinking.

“Your timepiece is probably slow,” the Nazi said through a perpetual haze of cigarette smoke. “Unless, of course, it is of German manufacture…”

Just like the big Antonov cargo planes before them, the Super Guppies just kept on coming.

There were twelve of them in all. They would arrive in groups of four and would be attacked by the horde of the off-loaders as soon as they touched down. Once their cargo was disgorged, they went back out on the runway for take-off. The only thing it could be compared to was an auto race like the Indy 500, where a pit crew could gas up a race car and change all four tires in seconds. The Germans managed to make even that kind of operation look slow.

The Guppies were making the round-trip to the Double-Trouble base in the wilds of Cuba in record time, too, cutting down what should have been at least an hour-and-a-half flight and turnaround to a round trip lasting no more than 45 minutes.

This meant that shortly before noontime, all of the nuclear warheads that had originally been stored down inside the weapons stockyard in Cuba were now lined up in neat little rows, just off the partially reconstructed runway at the KSC.

The first Cult battleship was spotted off the coast at 1300 hours.

Unlike their Nazi allies, the Cult were not slaves to keeping a schedule. This battleship, the rather infamous
Ishima,
had been the first gunship pulled out of the firing line once the Cult command had ordered their battleships to stop bombarding the Florida coast around 2
A.M.
that morning.

Under new orders, the
Ishima
had made for Cuba at top speed, arriving in the northern port city of Talmero around 6
A.M.
Here it took on a piece of cargo that was too heavy even for the Supper Guppies to handle. Just as the
Ishima
began securing this load, two more Cult battleships appeared off Talmero. Then two more, and two more. A total of seven Cult battleships had been pulled off the line and sent to this Cuban port. At the moment, their mighty engines and tremendous draft were needed for something other than supporting nine enormous guns.

The special cargo were the components for the three Energia rockets that had also been kept at the secret Double-Trouble base. Only the battleships had enough deck space—barely enough—to take on all stages of the rockets and transport them up to Kennedy quickly. Loading them was no problem, as it turned out. It was getting them up to the KSC where the Cult nearly dropped the ball.

The
Ishima
was late in arriving back at the KSC because its captain had miscalculated the tides getting in and out of Talmero. He was two hours behind schedule, just as the six other ships would be. But this time was more than made up during the unloading of the Energia pieces off the battleships, once again due to Nazi efficiency.

In anticipation of the battleships’ arrival, the Fourth Reich engineers had laid a pontoon bridge out into KSC Bay, building an unloading platform at its terminus. As soon as the
Ishima
reached this floating dock, Nazi engineers swarmed aboard her, and taking over the battleship’s cargo crane, unloaded the first three stages of the first Energia rocket.

These components were quickly put on a rolling cart the size of two railroad cars and using a track laid down previously by the engineers, they were pulled by hundreds of Nazi troops up to the beach, through the dunes, and over to the area around launch pad 39-A, deep inside the space complex.

Once the
Ishima
was unloaded, it sailed away to be replaced by the second battleship, and then the third, and so on. This gigantic unloading and transporting operation proceeded throughout the afternoon and into the night until, by 2200 hours, all of the pieces for all three Energia rockets were close by the 39-A launch pad and already in some process of reassembly.

The only involvement of the UAAF in any of this was the employment of the Ch-54 Sky Crane, which helped out by taking some of the more delicate Energia components off the battleships and depositing them up near 39-A. This was the only assistance General Jones would allow in the unloading operation, though UA equipment and manpower would have sped things up even more.

But Jones was already weighed down with the burden of dealing with the Nazis and the Cult in the first place.

He would rather risk being late for the end of the world than to have the mortal sin of collaboration on the souls of all his men as well.

It was near dawn the next morning—three days before the end—when the Cult battleships anchored in KSC Bay began disgorging cargo of a different kind.

Each ship was now being served by its own floating gangplank, courtesy of the Nazi allies. The huge vessels had been silently riding the tides since the unloading of the Energia rockets, their lights extinguished, their crews silent and out of sight.

But now—symbolically, with the rising sun—the Cult sailors began appearing on deck. They were dressed in combat fatigues with sidearms but no larger weapons. There were seven ships in the harbor in all; combined, this put the number of Cult seamen on hand at close to 7,000.

On word from each individual ship commander, the sailors began filing down their walkways. Several ships’ bells began ringing and klaxons began blaring in traditional Cult fashion as this small army trooped across the pontoon bridge and up into the KSC.

If the sight the day before of the Nazi troops landing at the KSC had rankled those in the remaining UAAF forces, then the appearance of the Cult members coming ashore was enough to get their blood really boiling. All of the KSC defenders knew what was happening, knew about the comet and why the Fourth Reich and the Cult were here. But actually seeing the loutish Cult members land unopposed was almost too much to take. Many of these UA soldiers had fought against the ruthless Cult in the last Pacific War and against their allies in the recent Southeast Asia conflict. By their actions alone, they considered them to be subhuman, thoroughly brainwashed, and not worthy of the ground they walked on.

As it turned out, this was an opinion shared by the Fourth Reich Nazis as well.

It took two hours for the crews of the seven battleships to disembark and walk to the agreed-upon staging area out near the rebuilt shuttle runway.

Jones was still in his perch atop the VAB building, watching over the KSC like a king trying very hard to prevent his domain from being further infected by the heathens. For once, Doenitz was not at his side. The Nazi commander was down on the field, where the Cult crews were gathering. He’d told Jones his staff had planned a short ceremony to welcome and show solidarity with the Cult crews and that he would have to preside over it. He invited Jones to participate as well. Jones replied that his desire was to be far away from this event as possible; he vowed to stay on top of the VAB until the ceremony was over.

Now, staring out through his powerful binoculars at the area abutting the runway, Jones could see the long, ragged line of Cult sailors standing at what approximated attention in their ruffled, undisciplined ranks, their brows beginning to sweat in the hot Florida sun.

A small platform had been constructed in front of them, and sure enough, Doenitz and the rest of his officer corps had taken their places on it, as had the five remaining top officers for the Cult. Lined up also as part of the ceremony were the crisp heavily armed troops of the 2nd Dresden Combat Brigade, which had landed the night before. At approximately 6,700 men, they nearly equaled the number of Cult sailors who had come ashore.

A public address system had been set up, and even in the high winds atop the VAB, Jones could hear Doenitz’s distinctive Prussian voice droning on and on in front of the restless Cult troops. While the speech was going on, a team of Nazi construction troops had continued working on a trench directly behind the Cult assembly point; the sound of their heavy machinery nearly drowned out what Doenitz was saying.

Still Jones watched the whole thing through his spyglasses, taking special note of how long Doenitz’s officers spoke, as opposed to the Cult COs, who’d barely croaked out a few words before the Germans had whisked them away from the microphone. This went on for about a half hour. Finally, Doenitz took to the podium again.

Jones considered putting away his spyglasses at this point. The last thing he wanted to do was hear Doenitz speak again. But then he noticed something very unusual happening down on the parade ground. Doenitz had just spoken a few distinct words in German into the microphone. But unlike his speech, these were more direct, almost as if he were giving orders. Jones could see looks of confusion and bafflement come across the Cult officers on the stage and the sailors lined up before them. The soldiers of the 2nd Dresden Brigade took one step forward.

Then they all fired their weapons…

There were screams and a kind of mass grunting—Jones could hear it all the way on top of the VAB. There was also a huge cloud of white smoke and the
pop-pop-pop
of many automatic weapons firing at once. But it was over very quickly. When the smoke cleared and Jones was finally able to refocus his binoculars, he was astonished to see piles of Cult soldiers lying shot at the feet of the Nazi troops. Those who weren’t dead were now being dispatched by Nazi troops walking among the massive sprawl of bodies. The Nazi construction troops now came forward, the same ones who’d been digging the trench behind the Cult troops as they’d listened to Doenitz drone on and on. Using the back-hoes and bulldozers, they began pushing the bodies of the Cult sailors into the huge trench and covering them over, even though some of the victims were wounded and still alive.