Orbital Velocity

“Law enforcement agencies in eight nations are running themselves ragged dealing with riots orchestrated by this group, the Fist of Heaven,” Brognola explained. “If anything, our boys are right where they need to be.”

“And you’ve confirmed that this is an international amalgamation of white-supremacist groups?”

“There’s a violent Christian identity organization in the U.S. called the United Legion of Messianic America,” Brognola answered. “We have also encountered elements of ODESSA, the Jakkhammer Legacy, the Justice Coalition of Argentina and a Japanese pseudo-Christian cult called Masa Minori.”

The President sighed. “All those crazies would have to come out of the woodwork on my watch.”

Brognola managed a weak smile. “They say the caliber of a man is judged by the scope of his enemies.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing with all these psychotic bigots?” the President asked.

Brognola looked out the window of the office, his gaze settling on the map of the world. The President waited a moment before the big Fed heaved his shoulders with a sigh, returning his attention to the conversation. “Ask me after this is over, sir.”

Brognola left the President alone in his office to contemplate the worldwide crisis.

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

In the jungles of the Congo, in the border region between the Republic of the Congo—ROC—and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—DRC—life was especially cheap. In the ROC, slavery was still a very real and modern threat, while the Kiva conflict in the DRC continued to claim lives the way only an ethnically charged civil war could. Right now, though, an African American man tried to move as fast as he could without aggravating the injury of his companion, also American but several shades lighter than his friend and growing more wan by the moment. The Latino’s normally tan features were now clammy, his black hair stuck to his forehead.

John Carmichael struggled to keep David Arcado moving, one hand hooked under his armpit with Arcado’s limb drawn across Carmichael’s shoulders. Arcado’s face was pale, his eyes sunken, his forehead soaked with sweat. Carmichael looked down at the bullet wound in Arcado’s side, his hand clamped around the injury. Blood painted the hand bright red, meaning that he was losing oxygenated blood. No wonder Arcado was wheezing.

“Let me sit,” Arcado rasped. “You can get the hell out a lot faster alone than lugging me along.”

“Fuck that shit,” Carmichael replied. “We don’t leave soldiers behind.”

Carmichael glanced back at the game trail they’d tromped along. He could see where dark, drying blood had smeared on leaves, which meant that the guards of the illegitimate launch facility wouldn’t have too much trouble following them. “If we stop now, there’ll be all manner of arrows aimed at you.”

Arcado swallowed hard, eyeing the bloody trail he’d left behind. “Which is why you need to dump me.”

“No,” Carmichael growled. “We ride together, we die together.”

“Not with the information in your head,” Arcado told him, trying to wrestle his arm away from the black man. “You’ve got to get moving.”

“Stop fighting me,” Carmichael complained. Suddenly he felt something hard jammed into his ribs. Carmichael looked at the snub-nosed .357 Magnum locked in Arcado’s fist. “You shoot me, you’re defeating your own purpose.”

Arcado gritted his teeth, then lowered the .357. “You see that streak rising from the ground?”

Carmichael didn’t want to look, but through the gap in the forest canopy roof, he could see it: the cottony column of smoke that spiraled up into the clear blue skies above. His shoulders fell as he knew what was at the top of that pillar of expended liquid oxygen fuel. He didn’t know the payload atop, but it was an orbital launch missile, akin to an Atlas IV, reverse engineered from old American designs. Whatever was riding into the heavens on millions of pounds of concentrated thrust, it was nothing good, not when it was being rocketed out of Earth’s atmosphere from a forsaken, hidden corner of the world.

“I see it,” Carmichael answered. He took a deep breath.

“And what was that shit you kept telling me? Your country before everything else?” Arcado told him, gripping a fistful of Carmichael’s BDU shirt, twisting it to bring Carmichael’s ear closer to his mouth.

“If you stay here, then we need to give you as much of a chance as you can get,” Carmichael whispered harshly. “Give me a spare bullet.”

Arcado nodded as Carmichael withdrew his folding multitool. “Want mine, too?”

“Yeah,” Carmichael answered. Taking the .357 Magnum round between the two folding pliers, the black agent pried the bullet from its casing. With a shell full of fast-burning, high-intensity powder, he had what he needed. “Move your hand.”

Arcado grit his teeth. “This is going to suck.”

Carmichael poured the powder into the wound, then pulled his stainless-steel lighter. It fired on the first flick, and when the flame touched the gunpowder, it flared. Arcado’s fingers dug into Carmichael’s biceps, his eyes clenched tightly shut as the bullet-torn flesh cauterized under the flashing heat. The pain was horrendous, if the muscle-squeezing grip Arcado inflicted on him was any indication. When the wound was seared closed as the powder burned out, Arcado finally loosened his clawlike clutches on Carmichael.

“I was right,” the Latino gasped.

“You usually are, damn it,” Carmichael replied. “Even when you say I need to leave you behind.”

Arcado nodded. “You left me a round short.”

“So you’re not looking to die nobly?” Carmichael asked.

“Fuck that noise,” Arcado answered. He leaned back, gulping down a fresh breath. Carmichael sorted through his gear, pulling four extra magazines from his reserve for his partner. Arcado reached out weakly to add them to his stash. With shaky hands, the Latino drew his Beretta and worked the slide to make certain it had a round in the breech.

Carmichael tried to ignore how physically weakened his partner was. The two men had a duty to get information to the outside world, and one man could travel more quickly through the heavy jungle than one healthy man escorting an injured companion. Arcado was far from suicidal, but he knew that here in the jungle, without medical attention and a bullet lodged in his abdomen, he was only going to be engaged in a delaying action. Arcado’s real role was to give Carmichael space, wiggle room to get to civilization.

It wasn’t going to be a short journey, either. Carmichael was on foot, without high-tech communications and only a small amount of ammunition. Arcado was going to stem the tide of a small army, from the looks of the launch facility. They didn’t know who had been sent out after the two, and Carmichael couldn’t give his friend any odds that were worthwhile.

“You’ll be all right here?” Carmichael asked, the words catching in his throat.

“If I say no, you still ain’t sticking around,” Arcado growled. He leaned on his rifle and pushed to his feet. Carmichael reached out to brace his friend, but the Latino shook him off.

“You’ll need all your strength to do your job,” Carmichael told him. “Being a stubborn asshole isn’t going to help you with anything. Or do you want a bunch of gunmen to run my ass down?”

Arcado grimaced, then held out his hand. “Me, me, me. That’s all you ever whine about. Don’t you ever think of anyone else?”

Carmichael held him up, but held his tongue. Arcado was joking, trying to cut through his worries. “Shut up.”

“Don’t get serious on me now,” Arcado whispered. “I need a few laughs.”

Carmichael kept quiet, not wanting to demoralize his friend any further. He helped Arcado into a position that allowed for decent cover and concealment along their trail. The spy settled into a nest.

“Get running, John,” Arcado whispered. “I don’t know how much time I’ll buy you, but I’ll pay for as much as I can.”

Carmichael nodded, giving his friend’s shoulder a squeeze.

He turned, cursing himself for doing his duty at the expense of a friend.

ILYA SORYENKOV LOOKED at the threat matrix list on his desk. He was the Moscow bureau chief for the federal security service, or FSB. Though he had to deal with the FSB’s rivalry with the CSR, which was the central intelligence service, he was fairly certain that he wasn’t cheated out of any information from the daily threat matrix. Details of the CSR’s operations would be kept from the FSB, but if there were rumors of trouble, the agency that held back information about an impending crisis would be scalped in the press. Soryenkov dropped into his chair and picked up the file of accumulated data.

For all the problems that had been going on for years, through a particularly corrupt administration that pounced at any chance for a return to the bad old days, Soryenkov had felt a little hope. The new president was willing to make some deals to alleviate some of the tensions that were threatening to draw Russia and her sister states into civil war, Chechnya especially. Soryenkov’s work was never really going to be done. Since the collapse of the KGB, lots of old grudges were being settled, and trouble in the form of organized crime was steadily worsening with the addition of trained espionage and special operations veterans flooding the ranks of the Russian mafiya.

He looked at the top sheet in the file. The envoys to the latest G8 conference were returning home today. Soryenkov had spent the past couple of days coordinating the Moscow police and FSB in setting up security for their return. It had been a fairly sedate conference, protestors more peaceful than usual. The Russian was glad for that. The Iraq war was winding down, and Chechnya was no longer being used as a tool to reinforce the need for the old, harsh methods by a would-be hardline revivalist.

Soryenkov looked at a printout of a recently received bit of chatter. Several Moscow news sources had received an ominous yet anonymous threat. Conventional radio and television had received the same line, as well as several Moscow-area blogs. The message was short and to the point.

“For failure to humanity, the Fist of Heaven smites thee.”

Soryenkov rubbed his forehead as he read it. He had operatives looking for any prior indications of a group called the Fist of Heaven. There were only half-whispered rumors regarding the Fist, but there had been mention of a similarly named group, the Celestial Hammer, which had threatened the whole world with satellite-launched dirty bombs. However, that group had threatened far more than just Russia, causing damage in Cuba with a weapon that had triggered a deadly tidal wave. The man-made tsunami had destroyed a fishing village near the U.S. Marine base at Guantanamo Bay.

Soryenkov looked over his notes about potential missing nuclear waste, then thought the better of it. If one organization had experienced a catastrophic failure of agenda by bombarding the Earth from low orbit, he didn’t feel that it was likely another group would try such a tactic so soon afterward. That kind of a mistake would set their plot back even before it began due to the nature of the international response. The now-defunct terrorist group’s example would make it unlikely that someone would utilize crude, improvised dirty bombs as their primary form of governmental influence.

The FSB chief rubbed his chin. The Celestial Hammer may have been a failure, but it was only because they didn’t have a properly dedicated orbital weapons platform. Certainly they had the potential to cause millions of deaths, but their system of attack was a jury-rigged design that utilized easily available, low-profile technology, or insiders allowing them access to China’s space program. Soryenkov hated to think what would have happened with a more dedicated system, like the proposed kinetic bombardment satellites controlled by various nations with space programs. The thought of a twenty-foot-long, one-foot-in-diameter chunk of high-density metal being “thrown” at a city at a velocity of 36,000 feet per second…

There wouldn’t be any radioactive fallout, but the impact would be comparable to a ground-penetrating nuclear device. That was merely the calculations for a “crowbar” of tungsten of those dimensions. Basically, from low orbit, a projectile would carry thirty-two megajoules per kilogram of mass, a figure that was between six and seven times the equivalent power of a kilogram of TNT.

He looked out the window at the Moscow skyline. The U.S. military had a “smart” missile, essentially an artillery tube with steering stabilizer fins, a two-ton hunk of metal that could be dropped by a ground-attack fighter with enough force to penetrate one hundred feet of concrete. On a whim, he picked up his calculator and came to a figure of sixty thousand megajoules of energy. From what he remembered of World War II conventional weaponry, a ten-thousand-pound bomb only put out twelve thousand megajoules of energy. One of the proposed “Rods from God” had five times the punch of a weapon that destroyed entire city blocks in the air war between the RAF and the Luftwaffe.

“That technology is years off,” he whispered, as if to dispel the sudden dread that overwhelmed him. Out the window, he saw a puff of smoke. Soryenkov wondered if it had been a car bomb, but it was too far away and had kicked up too much debris. Something else blurred through the air and struck the ground. While the shock wave of the distant impact finally rumbled through the floor, the windowpanes cracked as the building flexed.

“I said that technology is—” There was a third, fourth and fifth impact, all occurring more or less at the same instant. Soryenkov’s window shattered an instant later, but by then, he’d already thrown his arms across his face to keep the broken glass from carving him apart.

There were no more spears cast down from heaven, no more buildings vaporized into dust by two-ton hunks of steel striking them at terminal velocity. But when Soryenkov next looked through the broken window of his office, he saw a city rocked to its core. Columns of dust rose lazily skyward as alarms wailed across the city.

Damnation had rained down on Moscow in the form of a weapon that wasn’t supposed to exist.

CHAPTER ONE

London, forty-five minutes after the Moscow incident

“Oy, lads, fancy a couple Britneys?” the bartender asked Gary Manning and David McCarter as they focused on the LCD-screen television hanging over the bar. The TV news was dominated by the aftermath of the disaster in Russia. The bartender’s question pulled Manning’s attention away from the pad of paper where he’d been scribbling angles he’d guessed at from video footage and the oblique shapes of the impact craters.

McCarter looked at the bartender. Though he’d lost most of his accent, McCarter still could hear a touch of Polish in his speech.

Manning’s look was quizzical in response to the pub man’s comment. He turned to his friend for an explanation. “Britneys?”

“Rhyming slang,” McCarter explained. “Britney Sp—”

“Her name rhymes with beers,” Manning cut him off. “How’d she get across the pond to influence London barkeeps?”

“Sitting naked in music videos does a lot to improve international popularity,” McCarter answered. He looked at the bartender. “Two more pints, mate.”

“The Babel concept,” Manning muttered. “Languages are far from immutable, more like living creatures. Viruses actually.”

“Language is a virus?” McCarter asked.

“More appropriately, an information virus,” Manning told him. “Viruses are a part of this planet. The first transfer of information was in the form of a virus, one simple organism transmitting DNA code to another in the creation of life. All data is viral in nature, be it a new word in a language or a catchy set of lyrics in a song. Every bit of information is a single permutation of that first virus.”

McCarter looked at the pad on which the Canadian demolitions expert had been calculating trajectories. “What about those angles? Did someone put a satellite in orbit right over Moscow?”

Manning tapped the end of his pen against his chin. McCarter could see a brilliant light working behind the Canadian’s eyes. “We don’t have footage of their whole approach. All I can tell is that they came in off of a supra orbital arc. Whether it was akin to the supergun or a satellite-mounted kinetic weapons system I couldn’t tell without proper examination of their approach vectors. Even then we’d be dealing with over-the-horizon launches.”

“You know, maybe the Farm picked up something,” McCarter offered.

Manning shook his head. “Unlikely. A release of kinetic darts would have a minimal thermal profile. There’s no indication of any rocket thrusters so they would be untrackable except when they hit the atmosphere. Then the friction of their passage through the air would provide for infrared tracking, but we’re looking at trailing a projectile at thousands of feet per second…”

“Terminal velocity. We experienced that kind of speed ourselves,” McCarter replied.

“A little too closely,” Manning returned. He smiled. “I bet you had the time of your life playing bumper cars with space shuttles.”

McCarter held up his thumb and forefinger to indicate a small amount. “A bit, mate.”

Manning chuckled, and McCarter looked away from him, his eye catching something going on in the corner. He’d come to the pub to watch the two booths full of young men wearing football jerseys. He counted twelve of them, all shaved-headed, with faces that looked as if they’d taken multiple punches over the years. These were soccer hooligans if they were anything, a breed of troublemaker with whom McCarter was quite familiar. A couple of them were looking at their cell phones, the brightly glowing LCD screens reflecting in their eyes lending them a haunting, soulless appearance.

“Gary, you know all about technology. What’s it called when groups assemble due to instant messages?” McCarter asked.

“Flash mobs,” Manning answered immediately. “Given a proper network of like-minded people, flash mobs are hard, almost impossible to anticipate and difficult to track. Why?”

McCarter nodded toward the hooligans who were assembled at the two booths. Manning narrowed his eyes, studying the group as the two men with the cell phones pocketed them and gestured to the other jersey-clad men. The group threw down their money on the table for the waitress to scoop up as she took their order for the current round. In a London pub, you paid before you got your alcohol. She returned with a tray of lager bottles, which the hoodlums grabbed off her tray. Where they had been garrulous moments before, now they had fallen into silence.

“As always, good instincts,” Manning noted. “There’s no game on tonight, and these guys are in a hurry for something.”

“We’ve got a little bit of time before we’re called in. Let’s see where they’re headed,” McCarter suggested.

Manning nodded. He left a tip for the bartender and the two men exited the pub, staying back but still within sight of the small mob of ruffians. Both Manning and McCarter were members of Phoenix Force, the foreign-operations strike team of Stony Man Farm. McCarter had summoned Manning to London to assist him in checking out rumors that someone had been organizing the roughhousing young men of the hooligan scene. There had already been plenty of arrests of more enterprising hooligan gangs doing muscle work for organized crime and street-corner drug dealing. This had been part of a disturbing trend from London to Vladivostok. The clique mentality of the thuggish sports fans had given the roughnecks an impetus to organize, and they had found plenty of opportunity to make money from mayhem and destruction.

McCarter frowned. “Viruses tend to spread in patterns, right?”

Manning nodded. “Especially social constructs.”

McCarter’s frown deepened. “This isn’t the normal kind of sport fan. These are ruffians who have taken their social ostracism and turned it into gang mentality. In the U.S., street gangs are nothing like the Crips and Bloods who developed in the 1970s into gun-wielding thugs. But right here, we’re seeing the same kind of evolutionary changes occurring among the hooligans.”

“In order to fund their lifestyle, they commit robberies or they sell drugs,” Manning agreed. “And they could increase their level of violence—”

“As if they aren’t savage enough in hand-to-hand,” McCarter interrupted.

“Then you don’t want to imagine them with shotguns or rifles,” Manning said.

McCarter nodded. He kept his eye on the group. He’d kept watch over them all morning. The soccer thugs had been on a pub crawl all night long, and it was close to nine now. So far, he had Stony Man’s cybernetics teams studying Twitter notification streams and other text message hubs to look for signs of organized communication networks. The young men were now on the move soon after a near apocalyptic event in Moscow. McCarter couldn’t believe that this was a coincidence.

He pulled his phone and sent a secure text to the Farm, hoping to catch someone’s attention.

“Hooligans in motion. Copy?”

There was no response, and the Briton wrinkled his nose. Of course the Farm wasn’t going to take the electronic organization of London street gangs as a priority over a high-powered strike on a major international capital. He looked over at Manning, who gripped the strap of his backpack. Both McCarter and his Canadian partner were well-armed with handguns and knives, but the satchel contained more potent equipment.

McCarter was someone who had a predisposition to action and had developed a level of lethal ruthlessness when dealing with opponents who had no qualms about murder. However, the thought of opening fire on unarmed foes was something that the Special Air Service veteran found abhorrent. Manning’s backpack had a pair of shotguns, but the twelve-gauge weapons were filled with nonlethal shells. The initial loads inside the pistol-gripped pumps were tear-gas-spewing ferret rounds, but there were bandoliers filled with mixed gas and spongy baton rounds. While the ammunition wasn’t intended to be deadly, they could kill if Manning or McCarter chose their shots carefully.

McCarter felt that if he was going to drop an assailant permanently, he’d use either his beloved 9 mm Browning Hi-Power or his new backup pistol, a Springfield Armory Enhanced Micro Pistol. The EMP was also a 9 mm pistol, and it also shared the same mechanism that allowed him to carry the Browning locked and cocked; the EMP was simply a resized version of the Hi-Power’s cousin, the John Moses Browning–designed 1911 pistol. The flat EMP fit easily into an ankle holster. Manning had his choice of sidearms, as well. The big Canadian had opted for a .357 Magnum Colt Python with a 9 mm Walther P5 for backup. For quiet but bloody work, the two carried chisel-bladed knives in sheaths around their necks.