Dark Star. Don Pendleton

left the world,” Chen-wa exhaled, amazed and appalled at the same time. “What a truly amazing vessel!”

      “Oh, we’re still Earthbound,” Nicholi replied over a shoulder. “Don’t have enough power to break out of orbit, but then we don’t have to, eh, boys?”

      Suddenly there was a tug from below and Chen-wa felt a rushing sensation in the pit of his stomach. “We’re descending already?” he demanded, tightening his grip on the chair.

      “And we’ll be down in only a few minutes,” the captain retorted. “Better hold on, there’s a storm over Hawaii. Could get bumpy up here.”

      “Is that where I will meet your master?” Chen-wa demanded excitedly. He was eager to join forces with these strange people. With a machine like this he could wage war on any government that he wished.

      “No, that’s where we dump the trash,” Sullivan snarled, slashing out with the flat of his hand.

      Caught by surprise, Chen-wa only saw a brief flash of light as bone splinters were driven into his brain, then there was only infinite darkness.

      “Is he dead?” Nicholi asked, watching the radar screen. There was already a lot of activity from Paris Island, but nothing dangerous coming their way.

      “Of course he is,” Sullivan replied curly, unbuckling his safety harness and awkwardly standing.

      Hauling the still twitching corpse out of the chair, Sullivan threw the body down the ladder to the main deck, then climbed after it. Stepping over the corpse, he placed a hand on the lever that opened the hatch.

      “Ready!” he announced loudly.

      There was a feeling of falling for a moment, then the engines surged with power and the sensation ended abruptly.

      “Dump him!” Overton shouted from above.

      Throwing the lever, Sullivan opened the hatch and a wave of heat poured into the X-ship, along with a reeking stink of sulfur. Dimly seen through thick clouds, below the vessel was a hellish vista of bubbling red lava. Gagging from the pungent fumes, Sullivan grabbed the dead terrorist by the collar and heaved him out of the hatch. The limp body tumbled through the smoky air and vanished inside the mouth of the volcano.

      “Clear!” Sullivan yelled, closing the hatch.

      Immediately the engines surged with power and the X-ship rose quickly.

      As the man started up the ladder, he noted a strong smell of sulfur that didn’t fade away, and realized it was coming from his clothing. Well, there was nothing he could do about that until they landed to refuel. There was always spare clothing, foods and weapons at every drop site. Colonel Southerland never missed a trick. Chen-wa being the case in point.

      “How’s the fuel?” Captain Nicholi asked, both hands working the joysticks. The temperature gauges were almost in the red zone, but as the ship climbed the hull rapidly cooled back to normal.

      “Just barely enough for us to reach Mexico,” Overton replied, checking the controls. “A double jump is really pushing the limits on this ship.”

      “Had to be done,” Nicholi replied gruffly, already starting the descent. “After this, everybody will be positive that Chen-wa is behind the attacks and waste a lot of valuable time on a worldwide hunt for the wrong man.”

      “A dead man,” Overton corrected as Sullivan climbed into view to reclaim his chair. “And there’s no way they’ll ever find his body.”

      “Got that right.” Sullivan grinned, buckling on the safety harness.

      As the colossal X-ship settled onto the hard-packed sand of the isolated desert, the three men shut down the huge rocket engines and exited the vehicle to start the dangerous refueling process. Now that the decoy had been engaged, they were eager to start the next wave of attacks.

      Soon enough, the whole world would be engulfed in the flames of war, and nobody would ever discover what the colonel and Dark Star had really accomplished in three bloody days.

       CHAPTER FIVE

       The Computer Room, Stony Man Farm, Virginia

      “How’s it going,” Price asked, placing a hand on Aaron Kurtzman’s shoulder

      “What? Oh, hello,” Kurtzman grunted, glancing up briefly. “Everything is fine. So far, so good.”

      “Why are you watching the Weather Channel?” Price asked.

      “It’s a wild idea I’ve come up with, and I’m trying to see if it works.”

      Grabbing the hard-rubber rims of the wheels on his chair, the man rolled himself away from the workstation. “Meanwhile, Akira is doing a global search for any information on theoretical X-ship designs, while running support for the teams, getting them government clearance, forging diplomatic immunity, erasing their flight plans…the usual stuff.”

      Both at the same time? Turning her head, Price glanced at the young man sitting at his workstation, chewing gum and listening to rock music. He appeared to be daydreaming, but the mission controller knew from past experience that she’d have to shoot the hacker to get his attention, nothing less would penetrate his iron wall of concentration.

      “Fair enough,” Price said, almost smiling. “I just saw Hunt outside the staff room. He mentioned a slight problem. So what’s the delay with Carmen? We helped develop the firewalls that Interpol uses, so she should be able to access their files at will.”

      “Normally, yes,” Kurtzman replied. “But an X-ship landed on the main file room of Interpol. Their master computer isn’t crashed, the damn thing is half melted. Millions of data files are gone forever.”

      “What about the off-site files?” Price asked. “Those should have been safe.” Every major corporation kept a duplicate set of important documents in a secure location miles away from the master files, just in case of a fire or corporate espionage. Governments did the same; the NSA kept their backup files at Menwithill in the UK, while M-I5 kept their files in Minnesota, and so on. Only the Farm did not use that standard safeguard, but it was the sole exception.

      “Yeah, the clever bastards got them, too,” Kurtzman growled, his face becoming hard. “And you know what that means, Barb.”

      “Interpol has a mole,” Price muttered. “A traitor working for the, as the President calls them, Skywalkers inside the organization.”

      “Or else the hacker for the people behind the X-ships is an absolute wizard at tracing encoded signals.”

      “Is that possible?”

      The man shrugged. “Anything is possible.”

      “Okay, I just read the FBI reports on Blue Origins and Armadillo Aerospace,” Akira Tokaido announced. “Both companies are nowhere near a functional SSO ship. The only useful information the FBI got is that the X-ships have to be singles.”

      “What does that mean?” Price demanded curiously. “Hand-built or something?”

      “No, the ships only have one control system,” Tokaido replied. “Take a NASA space shuttle, for example. Those have a complete backup system for everything. In case anything goes wrong, it can continue to fly without loss of performance. On some of the critical systems, there are even three or four backup versions. Control board, air recycling, teleflex cables, fuel lines, everything but the engines, toilet and crew, comes in a minimum of three.”

      “I see, and that adds a lot of weight,” she said, chewing over the new information. “So the Skywalkers took out everything not actually needed for flight, which massively cut the weight of the X-ships.” She frowned. “No, this doesn’t work, because they also have armored hulls. Wouldn’t that equal out the same weight as before?”

      “Not really. The armor is mostly just heat-proofing, the few hardpoints are an ultralight composite,” Kurtzman