Starfire. Don PendletonЧитать онлайн книгу.

      CHAPTER TWO

      “What the hell was that?”

      They were gasping, all but turned to stone, squinting at the blinding orange-white ball as it roiled across the floor-to-ceiling plasma relay monitor. Swelling until the cloud ran off the twenty-by-twenty-foot screen, the image jumped, then flickered with static as titanic shock waves reached out for the observation satellite. They were too stunned, too late to readjust the ob-sat’s altitude and pull it back from the nuke’s asteroid-like hammerblows. Gyroscopes, radar, radio, John Ellison knew, the whole computerized nerve center, in short, that could monitor and transmit the situation from those space eyes wiped out.

      All systems go, however, from where he stood.

      While the twelve-man, three-woman workforce launched into scientific babble all over Control Room Omega, scrambling from bay to bay to check monitors and digital readouts and bark questions into throat mikes, Ellison kept a straight face. Hanging back, he listened as the director demanded to know what in God’s name had just happened.

      God, the NSA man knew, had nothing to do with it.

      What they knew was that the suspicious unidentified low earth orbit satellite their Keyhole and NASA-affiliated observation and military satellites were tracking had just detonated in a measured read of fifty-kiloton self-immolation. The same explosive yield, to their mounting horror and panic, that had just blown a chunk of Western Queensland outback into radioactive dust from a rocket fired from the killer satellite.

      Ellison stole another moment to watch their frenzied search for quick answers they weren’t about to find anywhere in their computer systems. Director Turner looked torn between the wall monitor’s leaping fuzz, firing questions at his scientists and the red phone mounted on his personal command desk in the far corner. NORAD, the Pentagon, the CIA, down to NASA and every American military and law-enforcement agency in the continental United States and abroad with access to satellites would know by now the United States, its allies, and the world at large was just thrust to the edge of Armageddon. Ellison knew the combined authority of all that clout was scrambling right then to reach the Joint Chiefs, the President, anybody on his staff with a secured cell or sat phone. Only they would flood the White House with SOS to be flung back into this black hole of unfathomable mystery and international menace, the likes of which no power on Earth had yet to face.

      Ellison left them to their terror and confusion, looked up at the observation deck. Behind the thick-glass bubble stood his one and only superior. The man in charge was casually working on a cigar, looking down on the workforce like some king on a throne about to pass judgment on his subjects.

      In truth, he just had.

      Ellison made eye contact with the man known only to the others as Sir. It was quick, but Sir lifted a hand to the blind side of their commotion, long enough to shoot him a thumbs-up.

      THE SKY WAS ON FIRE.

      Or so it looked to Boltmer in his flying vortex.

      Unless he’d been nailed to the hull of a battleship, he knew there was nothing he could now do but let himself get dragged, lifted, dropped and bounced across the ground. Human tumbleweed. The shimmering radioactive halo that fanned across the heavens was the least of his concerns. Round one was punishing enough, as he and Karlov had hurtled in tandem, sailing west. How far they’d been tossed he couldn’t say, but he was still breathing.

      The only good news so far.

      He soared, slammed to earth, then was sucked up, flying on. The raging sea of debris and dust jettisoned west was now being swept back in the furious clutches of the afterwinds. The world blurring along in the eye of this storm appeared little more than a streaking black whirlwind, all but blinding Boltmer to whatever else was being vacuumed beyond maybe a yard from his flight path.

      Had he been inclined to pray…

      The magnetic tug began losing steam, he sensed, as the violent slamming of limbs lessened by noticeable jarring degrees. Another fifty feet and he crash-landed, dragged like a tow line, another yard or so.

      It was over.

      He had survived. For the moment.

      He breathed deep through the rubber mask over nose and mouth. Another intake of oxygen and he started to feel he might make it. Despite the Tempur lining in his suit—the special foam material, he knew, that was used to protect astronauts against G-force—Boltmer groaned as he felt the ache and throbbing nonetheless down his battered side, in his joints.

      He clambered to his feet.

      And found he was just in time to watch the final act. The mushroom cloud kept billowing out, angrier now, if that was possible. Glowing like the blazing maw of some gigantic incinerator—or the pit of Hell—it kept climbing, expanding yet more, rising on for what the principals told them would be its ceiling of five to six miles—or more—toward a sky that all but looked to burn.

      Boltmer felt shaken to the core of his being.

      He checked his temperature gauge, and froze, eyes bugged as he took a read.

      Just over seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit, but dropping now. Then the numbers began falling hard, as they told him would happen, once the brute strength of blast furnace afterwinds sucked themselves back into the rising vortex. The temperature at their own gale-force impact and shortly thereafter was measured and recorded already on a minimodem.

      Forget whatever the experiment’s goals, Boltmer’s grim concern became extraction. From there, they walked until their tanks redlined. If their contact was late, what with their ride out of the hot zone supposedly constructed with engine parts of classified alloys and which was also a self-contained oxygenated vehicle and decon chamber…

      Boltmer was slowly turning when the hairs on his neck bristled. He caught the moaning as it filtered through his helmet, finally pivoted about-face, and gasped.

      They came staggering out of the black pall. Boltmer choked down the bile squirting up his chest, cold fear and the unholy sight doing a tap dance on nerves taut as garrote wire.

      They were nothing less than a vision of the damned.

      What sounded like strangled cries or deep-throated moaning from the zombies grew louder, began pounding his helmet like invisible fists. Clear they were desperate to speak, probably shout, then Boltmer assumed their vocal cords, perhaps their tongues had been fried. They came twitching, convulsing, bridging the gap quick, and straight toward him, as if sensing another living presence.

      He stared, paralyzed by horror. Their flesh had been microwaved in the searing winds, with black holes—but like glowing embers, it seemed—where the eyes were burned out, dark red streaks oozing down cheeks where skin was cooked off to the bone. Same for the scalp, hair and flesh gone to expose gleaming patches of skull. Boltmer couldn’t tell if they were clothed, if that was flesh or bone or both on down the black-and-red walking cadavers, then felt his senses boggled to another level of numbing repulsion. Nothing but mindless terror or the will to live should have kept them standing. Any oxygen—or most of it, he had to believe—had surely been incinerated out of the immediate vicinity, or turned into living fire, if nothing else.

      They collapsed in a boneless heap.

      He knew he needed to conserve oxygen, but Boltmer sucked deep from the main tank to calm his racing heart.

      Granted, he was all about the money, but after what he had just witnessed, he had to wonder.

      Up to ten miles they told him the flash could melt down retina, the initial blast shear away skin to the bone. How many more zombies were left wandering the countryside? he wondered, panning the firestorms, ten to two o’clock. Beyond this night, how many would die a slow, agonizing death from radiation sickness in the weeks, the