Dark Star. Don Pendleton

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СКАЧАТЬ using regular fuels, then they just refuel after every attack.” She paused. “Which means they must have refueling stations hidden all over the world, mountaintops, in the middle of a forest or a desert, anywhere at all. Distance means nothing to these ships.”

      “That’s why you’re checking into industrial air plants,” Brognola added, his interest piqued. “To try to track down any recent shipments of liquid oxygen.”

      “Close enough,” Kurtzman said. “Only it’s—”

      “Hydrogen,” Delahunt interrupted, her gloved hands brushing aside firewalls and massaging access codes. “There’s too many medical uses for liquid oxygen, so hydrogen is much easier to track.”

      “Anything usable yet?” Brognola prompted.

      “No,” the woman replied curtly, her frustration obvious. “There are simply too many air plants in the world.”

      “Roughly a double deuce of them worldwide,” Kurtzman added.

      Mentally, Price translated the figure. “Twenty-two thousand plants?”

      “At least. Lots of uses for compressed air, you know. Hell, we pack munitions in pure argon, and use liquid halogen in our fire extinguishers! And who’s to say the terrorists haven’t built one for themselves in Borneo or Outer Mongolia.”

      “Liquid hydrogen…what an interesting possibility,” a voice murmured. “Yes, that might just work.”

      “What do you have, Akira?” Kurtzman demanded, twisting in his chair while setting down his empty mug.

      Over at the third workstation, a handsome youth of Japanese ancestry thoughtfully blew a bubble of chewing gum before answering. “I’ve been considering the inability of the heat-seekers to attack to the X-ships,” Tokaido said, unwrapping a fresh piece of bubble gum. Briefly he inspected the sugary piece before sliding it into his mouth. “The only possible answer is liquid nitrogen.”

      Frowning, Kurtzman was about to ask a question, then his face brightened. “You mean, a defusement pattern, like Looking Glass?”

      “Yes, exactly.”

      “Damn, that’s clever,” Kurtzman muttered. “Yes, I’ll bet that would work as a heat shield. Not for very long, but obviously for long enough. These things travel so fast.”

      “Speed is the key,” Tokaido confirmed, tapping a button before a series of charts flashed into existence on the wall screen.

      Price and Brognola looked hard at the diagram. They both knew that Looking Glass was the code name for the 747 jumbo jet used as the mobile headquarters for SAC, the Strategic Air Command, the people who controlled all of the nuclear weapons in the nation’s arsenal. The 747 was heavily armed, and the Air Force had boasted for decades that it could not be shot down. Studying the screen, they now knew why. The moment radar registered an incoming missile, Looking Glass would automatically release a stream of liquid nitrogen that chilled the air around the jet engines, momentarily masking their heat signature. With nothing to lock on to, the enemy missile would simply sail right past the mobile headquarters.

      “Doesn’t Air Force One use something similar?” Price asked.

      “Sure, the Secret Service invented the idea.”

      “How much liquid nitrogen would an X-ship need for this tactic?” Brognola demanded. “Those big engines must be hotter than a hellfire barbecue.”

      “At least,” Tokaido replied, snapping his gum. “I don’t know how large a crew they carry, but I’d guess—and it’s purely a guess, mind you—that an X-ship is probably only good for two maybe three ventings. After that, they’d be as vulnerable as any ship. Unfortunately…”

      “Unfortunately, after the first missile salvo, they take off faster than lightning,” Kurtzman said, working a calculator program on his console. “Damn it, we’d need a concentrated strike of ten Sidewinders launching in unison, overlapping two other salvos, to get a definite kill on the first attack.”

      “Can you set the SAM batteries of the Farm to do that?” Price asked.

      After a moment Kurtzman nodded. “Yes,” he said hesitantly. “But we’d have to replace the blacksuits with a master computer, and that would take at least a week.”

      “Useless then.” Brognola sighed, grinding a fist into his palm. “But we better send out the word about the overlapping salvos in case somebody else can do it. Maybe the U.K. They have a lot of automation in their defense systems.”

      “Consider it done,” Tokaido said, already typing madly.

      “Have there been any demands from these people yet?” Kurtzman asked, reaching for his mug. Upon finding it empty, he pushed away from the workstation and headed toward the kitchenette. “Any requests to release prisoners, transfer money to a Swiss bank account, get troops out of the Middle East, anything at all?”

      “No,” Brognola stated. “And that’s the part that scares me the most.”

      “Agreed,” Price said. “It means that these people are not planning to negotiate for anything, but simply seize what they want. And who can blame them? As of right now, nobody can stop them.”

      “That is not quite correct, Barbara,” Wethers said slowly, leaning back in his chair. “I have been studying the videos of these attacks, and been running some rough calculations. They can’t fly.”

      “Are you kidding?” the woman asked.

      “Not at all,” the distinguished professor replied, pulling a briarwood pipe out of his shirt pocket and tucking it comfortably into his mouth. Smoking was forbidden in the Computer Room, but he found chewing on the stem highly inducive to the thinking process. “If the X-ships are using a standard LOX-LOH fuel, and we know this for a fact, then they simply cannot generate enough power to fly as fast and as far as we know they do.” He shifted the pipe to the other side of his mouth. “Which sounds like a contradiction, but is not. What it means is, they’ve somehow augmented the combustion.”

      “Any idea how?” Brognola asked, feeling out of his element. He was a cop, not a scientist.

      “Indeed, yes,” Wethers replied with a wan smile. “There have been some NASA experiments to increase the power of a standard shuttle engine by boosting the ignition with microwaves. Now these have worked in a laboratory, but failed on the launch pad. A microwave impeller can indeed increase the power of a rocket engine several times, more than enough to accomplish what we’ve seen.”

      “So why haven’t we done that?” Price demanded impatiently.

      “Because the intense magnetic fields would soon kill the crew,” Wethers said. “That is, unless there is sufficient shielding to protect them. But that would weigh so much it’d completely neutralize the boosting effect.”

      “If you boost the engine, the crew dies,” Kurtzman said thoughtfully, starting a new pot of coffee. “So either the crews of the X-ships are all suicides, or they have no idea what the engines are doing to them.”

      “This could give us some critical leverage to turn one of the terrorists when we find the people behind these attacks,” Brognola said.

      “Personally, СКАЧАТЬ