over Pennsylvania…yes, thank you.” He set down the receiver. “Twenty minutes, Hal.”
Brognola grunted and tucked the folder inside his jacket. Unbidden, the earlier scenes on the wall monitor playing over and over in his mind. It seemed that World War III had started, and the good guys had lost the first battle.
Now everything depended on Stony Man.
CHAPTER TWO
Stony Man Farm, Virginia
In a rush of warm air, the Black Hawk helicopter set down on Stony Man Farm’s helipad. The side hatch was thrown aside and Hal Brognola stepped out clutching a slim manila envelope.
Waiving away the driver of the SUV who would have taken him to the farm house, the big Fed decided to walk the short distance.
By the time he reached the building the door was open and Barbara Price, mission controller, stood on the threshold.
“Here, you better see this,” Brognola said, thrusting the envelope forward.
“Already have,” Price said, pushing it back. “Aaron and his people are hard at work doing an analysis, and I’ve recalled both teams from their current assignments.”
“Excellent,” Brognola said, tucking the envelope away once more. He was not really surprised that the woman was already familiar with the report. Before being recruited into Stony Man, Barbara Price had been a top operative for the NSA. The woman led him into the farm house.
“Are those infrared cameras?” Hal asked as they walked across the spacious room.
Price nodded in acknowledgment. “I don’t know if it will give us a warning in enough time to respond, but it’s the best we could come up with in an hour.”
Reaching the elevator bank, Brognola pressed the call button. “Not bad, but just in case…” The doors opened and they stepped inside.
“I already have several auxiliary video cameras in the barn set to only see in the ultraviolet spectrum,” Price told him as the doors silently closed. “Once again, I have no idea if it will help, but…” She shrugged, leaving the sentence unfinished.
“Well, if it works, we can relay the information to all of our military installations, as well as every friendly nation,” Brognola replied as the car began to descend. “Unfortunately, any civilian targets these bastards hit won’t have that sort of equipment.”
“Yes, I know,” Price stated. “But Aaron has his people working on a few ideas about that.”
“Good to know. The one thing we don’t have is a lot of time.”
The elevator reached the bottom of the shaft and the doors opened with a musical chime. As they exited into a long corridor, Brognola noted the extra blacksuits standing guard. “Expecting trouble?” he asked pointedly.
“Always,” she replied grimly.
As the pair passed a staff room, Brognola could see that it was empty, the break table covered with half-filled cups of steaming coffee, along with partially eaten doughnuts and sandwiches. Mounted in the corner of the ceiling was a flat-screen monitor showing a local news anchor talking excitedly into a microphone and standing in front of a smoky view of Cape Canaveral.
“Damn, the news media has the story,” Brognola muttered irritably. “But I guess we couldn’t kept it from them for very long.”
“I did my best,” Price said, not glancing that way. “At least I have most of the news channels convinced it was merely a fuel leak explosion and not a terrorist attack.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Had the NASA spokesperson deny it vigorously…before they could ask.”
In spite of the situation, the big Fed almost grinned. “Yep, that would do it, all right.”
She shrugged again. “It usually does.”
Reaching the far end of the corridor, they hurried to one of the electric cars that would take them along the underground passageway that led to the Annex building. Moments later, after passing through security, Price and Brognola headed to the Computer Room.
A hushed excitement filled the large room with palpable force. A soft breeze murmured from the wall vents, the pungent smell of strong coffee came from a small kitchenette, and the soft sound of muted rock music floated on the air. Hunched over elaborate workstations, four people were typing madly on keyboards.
“Damn it, there are too many of them!” Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman growled, callused hands pushing his wheelchair a little closer to the wall monitor.
“And this isn’t even half of them,” Carmen Delahunt said, her face hidden behind a VR helmet as her gloved hands fondled the empty air opening computer files on the other side of the world.
“Explain,” Kurtzman demanded, turning the heavy chair in her direction.
“A lot of these companies don’t have computerized files for me to hack,” Delahunt replied. “Some are actually using handwritten ledgers, for God’s sake! There is no way that I can ever track down all of the shipments.”
“Shipments of what?” Price demanded as she advanced closer.
“Air,” Kurtzman said, briefly glancing at her, then turning to wheel back to his workstation. His desk was a mess, covered with papers, CDs, hastily scribbled notes and several books on military history with handwritten corrections in the margins. A steaming mug of coffee stood next to his keyboard.
“Air?” Brognola demanded, crossing his arms.
“Liquid air, actually,” Kurtzman explained, locking the wheels into place. “We did a spectral analysis of the MPEG from the cell phone and found out the X-ship was using conventional rocket fuel.”
“LOX-LOH?” Price demanded skeptically. “But that’s impossible! The combination doesn’t give enough energy to power an SSO!”
“Which means they have some way to boost the reaction, but there’s no denying the facts,” Kurtzman retorted gruffly, tapping a few buttons. “See for yourself.”
With a flicker the main wall screen revealed a wind rainbow with a few interspersed black bars.
“See those color absorption lines?” the cyber wizard said pointing a thick finger at the black bars. “That’s oxygen and hydrogen, no doubt about it.”
“Can they be tricking the sensors somehow?” Brognola asked hesitantly.
Reaching for the mug of coffee, Kurtzman paused to arch an eyebrow. “Trick the visible spectrum?” he asked, sounding incredulous. “No, Hal, the things are using LOX-LOH as fuel. That’s a fact. How they get those reaction pressures is beyond me, though. Hunt is working on a few ideas, but has nothing yet.”
Hearing his name, Professor Hunting Wethers looked up from his workstation for a moment, then returned to the complex mathematical equations scrolling across his monitor. The side monitors were full of three-dimensional images of
