the single bulb hanging over his head. The no-name op remained standing in the outer limits of light in the deep corner, as if deciding what and how much to say. Brognola was reaching for the black folder when a match flared.
The Shadow Man lit his cigarette, flipped the match away and said, “You can get to all that on your own time, Mr. Brognola. I’m here at considerable risk to my own life, which puts you in the same position. Listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you, no matter how tedious you may think me getting to the point.” Shadow Man puffed, dug a hand into his pants’ pocket. “These SADS and their monitoring of ELEs are kept fairly secret from John Q. Public, other than a passing knowledge they may be out there. In our Milky Way there are two-thousand-some NEOs alone. Most are no larger than your average pebble. Whoever controls space just above Earth, Mr. Brognola, controls the planet. Whoever controls the knowledge of these ELEs alone, why, they can monitor and track them and decide—depending on their trajectory and size—whether to blast or let them pass on by. No warning to us mere mortals here below. Knowledge then being the perfect weapon, or the perfect judgment.”
“What’s any of this have to do with what happened…”
“Extinction level event, Mr. Brognola. The future belongs to those who can control an ELE. Act of God or man-made.”
“So, we watch for the rock that wiped the dinosaurs off the face of the Earth. Hey, you’ll have to excuse me if maybe I’m translating for you here, but we—the good guys, I’ll assume—need to be the only ones in the neighborhood controlling orbiting satellites with nuclear platforms, whether to blast an ELE into quadrillion golf balls or threaten another nuclear power with a preemptive strike from the stars.”
“I wouldn’t go on sounding so glib and dismissive.”
Brognola pulled out a cigar, stuck it on his lip. “My mistake. I assumed you were in a hurry.”
“If most of the human race, say, is destined to go out like the dinosaur, as you put it, then the question facing us, who have the knowledge and foresight, is what kind of world will Man inherit.”
“Or who will inherit.”
The Shadow Man paused, as if Brognola had crossed some line in the sand, then went on. “Because of the coming threat of the cataclysmic impactor, there are nuclear-armed satellites in space, but I’m sure you already know this. Yes, we can safely assume the propaganda will keep pumping it out how such weapons are outlawed. And if they are, by chance, made public knowledge, then they will be deemed defensive measures against the killer asteroid. Lies by omission, we call it. What happened, thus, in Australia, is a result of someone getting the edge on this technology. Our educated suspicion is that a black ops renegade faction of the European Space Agency decided to field test a new toy. But, worse, our side in the space race—that would be NASA who is monitored and provided security by the NSA, which is contracted out on behalf of the Department of Defense—has, as you know, been working for some time with our supposed European space friends to launch any number of shuttles. Mutual-shared space stations for research and development, and so forth. Nobody asks what’s really going on up there. Ignorance in this instance is bliss for the majority of common man. Beyond myself, however, only a few in our cloistered intelligence circles are aware that all this rainbow coalition reach for the stars is merely a mask to hide the demon.”
Brognola waited for the final grim point, but the Shadow Man fell silent. The big Fed waited him out.
“Washington will keep scrambling to conceal the truth about what we think happened in Australia,” the Shadow Man finally said.
“Which is?” Brognola prompted.
“This is where you might come in.”
“How come I got the lucky draw? And what makes you think—”
“It is called Galileo. It’s a classified NASA complex north of Dallas. They are fronting as a SADS, but the Galileo program is only part of a more sordid truth. One such truth is that behind the scenes they’re building RLVs—reusable launch vehicles.”
“Space shuttles.”
“Not quite.” The Shadow Man seemed to vanish behind a dragon’s spray of smoke. “The single key difference between a space shuttle and an RLV is that our current shuttles lose their external tank shortly after liftoff. The single-stage-to-orbit RLV, on the other hand, is fully reusable. Winged-configuration will give it fuel tanks…the long and the short is that it has the capacity to become the prototype space plane, requiring little more than ground maintenance, refueling, then it’s wheels up once more.”
Brognola clenched his jaw at the infuriating silence. “And?”
“Galileo has an RLV long since off the drawing board. We hear it’s about six months or so from its maiden voyage. And it’s platform is specced to house both a thermonuclear payload and particle laser weapons. But that’s not the real problem.”
WHEN LYONS FOUND he couldn’t clearly mark the shooter in thermal imaging, confusion threatened to freeze his hand. Every yard ever gained in enemy blood to battle the evil that men did, he thought, and he had never seen anything like this! A living ghost was bent on cutting him to ribbons!
Weapons fire strobed in his night vision as he bolted three or four feet, firing his subgun from the hip before he was chased to the broader span of the next available tree armor. The HK subgun it wielded was real enough, but since it was inanimate, meaning no heat generated beyond the muzzle-flash of igniting gases, the weapon was a fuzzy black object in Lyons’s night vision, and was considered a “cool area.” So if the thing appeared to move like a human being, darting now for its own shield behind the staggered row of trees, jumbled rock and thick scrub, why didn’t it give off a white-hot ghost hue that would betray it as living flesh? As far as Lyons could tell, there was little more than the haziest of white shimmer that wanted to frame it as human, like the thinnest chalk outlines of a body at a murder scene.
Lyons went low, flung his HK’s muzzle around the edge of a tree base and milked two 3-round bursts, hoping Blancanales was on the way, the thought tearing through his mind that his teammate hadn’t paged, but if he was…
The Able Team leader melted back for cover, bearing up under a fusillade of subgun fire as a tempest of bark sliced past his face. He was about to check his handheld thermal imager to determine how many warm bodies were within its thirty-yard proximity when another stuttering volley of weapons fire invaded the Invisible Man’s blistering salvo. The ex-L.A. detective was whipping around the opposite edge, HK up and tracking, when the specter came dancing and convulsing out from cover. Its subgun flaying wild bursts left to right, Lyons saw the white mists, the one or two long fingers jet like the slimmest of javelins into his thermal imaging.
Hot blood.
A little more hosing from 9 mm armor-piercing rounds eating it up, the Invisible Man toppled, crunching to a boneless heap. Lyons found ragged white holes up and down its torso, then fading to black as the corpse began to cool and the infrared radiation of its life force fled.
Lyons spotted the haze that was Blancanales, twelve yards north and closing, but checked his thermal imager. Nothing was on the small LCD monitor except his teammate’s read, but Lyons did a full 360 sweep to be on the safe side, moving out to link up with Blancanales. His teammate’s HK subgun parting the shadows as he advanced with all due caution, Blancanales checked the perimeter, the angry set to his features indicating he was a startled flinch away from unslinging the black-ferrite-painted Multi-Round Projectile Launcher off his shoulder. After what they’d both just seen, the Able Team leader wouldn’t fault Pol in
