The Medusa Stone pm-3 Read online

  “Atlantis, this is Vandenberg. Targets now four miles distant, closing at eight miles per minute. They are two thousand feet above your orbit.”

  “Roger, Ground. Fifteen seconds.” Colonel Wayne’s eyes locked on the digital counter, his finger poised on the release trigger.

  Because of the shuttle’s attitude, the four receiver satellites were approaching Atlantis’ belly, sliding by at a slightly quicker relative speed. The crew would not be able to see them until they had passed, appearing above the shuttle’s tail on their silent journey.

  “Atlantis, stand by for payload separation in… three… two… one. Mark.”

  Wayne jerked the trigger on the control stick at the same time Nick Fielding activated the maneuvering thrusters to ease the shuttle lower in orbit to avoid colliding with the satellite.

  Even as Wayne was stowing the manipulator arm, the computers on board the Medusa woke to the commands of Ground Control. Like an umbrella, the satellite began to open, solar-collection panels extending that would charge the craft’s internal systems and help in its attitude and orbital changes. The energy output of the plutonium reactor only powered the positron wave gun. Moving the satellite around the planet was accomplished with a solar/chemical rocket that would need fuel replenishment every one to three years.

  Watching through a video screen, Wayne and Fielding stared in awe as the Medusa grew in size, panels built to exacting tolerances telescoping and unfolding like Japanese origami. In moments, the ice cream cone shape had transformed into a cruel phantom that was stooped over the earth like vengeful gargoyle. Medusa looked like Death, if Armageddon’s messenger had been fashioned by man.

  “Here come the Four Horsemen,” Fielding muttered.

  The four receiver satellites appeared over the shuttle’s tail, faint glimmers against the star field. Just as they came into view, the Medusa received a command from Vandenberg, and a thin wisp of expended fuel pulsed from one of its jets. It accelerated away to join the others.

  Len Cullins had come to the aft flight deck and looked over Fielding’s shoulder. “Makes you wonder what we could accomplish if we spent our time creating rather than destroying, huh?”

  Wayne looked at him sharply. “You even think that way again, I’ll have you court-martialed.”

  “What the hell was that?” Alarm piqued Nick Fielding’s voice. He was staring out the window, angling his body so he could track the hurtling satellites.

  “What?” Wayne asked, turning away from Cullins.

  “I saw a flash right behind the receiver birds, like the sun reflecting off something metallic.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, sir. It was only for a second, and they’re getting too far away to see clearly, but I definitely saw something.”

  Wayne opened a channel to Vandenberg. “Ground Control this is Atlantis. We have a visual of debris behind Medusa. Can you confirm? It appeared to be in dangerous proximity.”

  “Roger that, Atlantis.” The ground controller could not mask the anxiety in his voice. “We just got a flash warning from U.S. Space Command at Colorado Springs. They’re bumping up the power to their radar station at Cavalier Air Station in North Dakota, but preliminary telemetry puts it on a collision course. Stand by.”

  “What was it, Nick?” Cullins asked.

  “I don’t know. It didn’t look big, but there’s no way to really tell.”

  “Atlantis standing by,” Wayne said to Vandenberg Control.

  Several seconds ticked by. Only the sound of the shuttle’s machinery and the low moans from Dale Markham punctuated the silence.

  “Vandenberg Control to Atlantis. Duke, this is General Kolwicki. We want you to change attitude and increase the speed of your orbit to give us a visual assessment of what’s happening. Whatever’s behind the Medusa is so small we can’t get an accurate fix.”

  “Yes, General. Changing attitude now.” Wayne nodded to Fielding, who had moved back to his station at the reaction control system. Using small bursts of gas, the shuttle swung 90 degrees until it was in a head-down position facing the fleeing Medusa.

  “Atlantis, ground track shows you gaining on Medusa at fifty feet per minute. Please increase orbital speed. Distance to Medusa, one thousand yards.”

  “Roger, Ground.”

  While Wayne and Fielding remained at the aft crew station, Len Cullins ducked back to the cockpit to look through the main view windows as they hunted down the unidentified object dogging their five birds. He slid into his molded seat and stared into the emptiness, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever Fielding had seen. He could hear Wayne speaking with General Kolwicki, the head of America’s space command, through the communications net.

  “Range, five hundred yards. Whatever’s chasing our birds will overtake in fifteen seconds.”

  Cullins began counting backward in his mind. At eight seconds he could see the five satellites glimmering just above earth’s hazy blue horizon. They looked like golden fireflies at this distance, their details lost in the planet’s reflective glow. At four seconds, he could see them more clearly; the central bodies of the receiver platforms with their spiderweb collection dishes spread wide. At two seconds, he saw a dull silver flash behind one of the receiver satellites, so brief that had he not anticipated it, he would have thought it a chimera.

  Ground control called out “Now,” and a magnetic torque wrench lost during a Gemini space walk twenty-five years earlier, one of a hundred thousand pieces of space junk, passed through the collection dish of one of the satellites, latched on to a steel casing panel, and unbalanced the entire unit. The violence of the impact was lost in the void because there was no sound, but it hit with the force of a bullet and the receiver satellite began to tumble. As a horrified Cullins watched, it flipped three times before slamming into the main satellite.

  “Oh shit, we’re going to lose it.” Cullins heard the unperterbable General Kolwicki shout.

  “That’s affirmative, General,” Cullins said as he watched Medusa start falling toward earth.

  * * *

  Two hundred and sixty miles below the Atlantis, General Reginald Kolwicki watched America’s most expensive military accident unfold. In just three and a half minutes, Medusa went from crowning achievement to unrecoverable debacle. Telemetry from the positron gun platform confirmed that the satellite was in a degrading orbit and that it would not respond to ground commands to fire its maneuvering rockets. It was falling, and there was nothing the forty assembled men and women in the control room could do to prevent it.

  “Try the autonomous flight program,” Kolwicki said to a computer technician who’d been typing furiously, trying to regain control of Medusa.

  “No response, sir. The central processor is off-line.”

  “Are you getting anything from the damned thing?”

  “Positron gun is on stand-by, and all encryption routines are nominal.”

  “Great. Medusa is about to burn up in the atmosphere, but it wants to still take pictures and keep the data a secret.” Kolwicki growled at the irony. “How much longer?”

  “Medusa will enter the atmosphere in twenty-five seconds. Total loss in thirty seconds at the most.”

  “Shit.” A career military man who saw his career burning up in outer space, Kolwicki had no options. “What’s the bird’s position?”

  “Over North Africa, tracking southeast. It’ll burn up above the Indian Ocean.”

  “Might as well turn on the positron gun as she goes down. Maybe we’ll gain something from this snafu.” Kolwicki felt like a ship’s captain knowing his command was going under and still ordering full steam ahead.

  “Sir?”

  “Just do it,” he snapped.

  Fingers flying in a blur, the tech snapped off several commands. The plutonium reactor keyed up, beaming supercharged positrons back to earth in a swath that cut across northern Africa from Chad, across Sudan and Ethiopia and finally to Djibouti and Somalia. In all, it took “pictures” of two
thousand square miles, but its data was incomplete. Several passes over the same area would be necessary to gather enough information to allow analysis of the subsurface topography. It was only after the satellite began entering the atmosphere and the friction-induced heat climbed dangerously that Medusa shut down in an automatic safety mode to prevent a radioactive accident.

  In Greek mythology, Medusa was a witch whose stare could turn men into stone. As Medusa fell from space and was enveloped in a white hot fireball of its own immolation, the satellite studied the barren African wasteland. Buried under tons of rock and stone, it saw something that man had hidden more than two thousand years ago in the hope that it would never be allowed to escape. Like its ancient namesake, Medusa’s glance would bring death.

  Northern Eritrea

  January of this year

  Jakob Steiner was beyond caring that he was about to die.

  Death would be a welcome release from the torture of the past hour. His body was so racked with pain and the effects of dehydration that his will to live had evaporated as quickly as the sweat that had once poured freely from his skin. He had stopped sweating soon after his tormentors took up the chase, pushing him hard across the arid landscape. His khaki bush shirt and pants had once been wet with perspiration but now showed only white circles of dried salt under his arms and at his groin. At first he’d thought he was outpacing the Shifta bandits as they dogged him across the rocky desert, but quickly he realized that his initial burst of speed could not compete with the machine-like endurance of the terrorists. They’d managed to catch him easily and now lagged only a few paces behind. He could hear their boots on the loose soil, smell their unwashed bodies over his own stench.

  They were toying with him. They could have killed him earlier with a shot from the AK-47s all four carried. Yet like a pack of hunting dogs, they chased him, hounding him with occasional shouts, pushing him beyond his own level of endurance so he ran on pure instinct, fight or flight. An hour had passed, an hour of unrelenting fear, and Steiner was reaching the point where he could not continue, when fight became a better option than flight.

  Steiner hadn’t had a drink of water since just before returning to his camp following another unsuccessful foray into one of the hundreds of box canyons in this part of the country. Zarai, his native guide, had remained in the Spartan camp as ordered whenever the scientist went exploring. Steiner gave no reason to the Eritrean, and custom demanded that Zarai not ask.

  This morning marked the eighth day the two men had spent in the desolate region, a barren section of Eritrea’s lowlands consisting of jagged ridges and mountains too steep and dry to be inhabited. Because there was nothing in these formidable canyons and plateaus to attract the agrarian Eritreans, the duo were almost certain to be the first explorers in the region since the Italian occupation prior to the Second World War.

  Steiner had come into the camp shortly before eleven. A shrieking wind had picked up, throwing grit in his eyes and clogging his nose and mouth so he’d walked the last few miles with a bandanna tied around his face and his expedition hat pulled low. He could hear the nylon of his and Zarai’s two tents snapping like the sails of a racing yacht.

  For the first time since Jakob had begun his explorations, Zarai was not waiting for him in his usual position, hunkered over the low smokeless fire he used to brew endless cups of tea. In fact, the fire had been kicked out. The circle of stones ringing the pit was scattered across the space between the two tents, and Zarai’s treasured teakettle lay haphazardly on the smooth sand. Steiner was too tired to sense any danger until he was pulling off his boots on the camp stool in front of his tent.

  It was the smell that drew his attention first. The fine hairs on the back of his hands rose. He could feel the premonition of danger like a thousand centipedes marching up his arms to his chest. Jakob stood, his filthy, sweat-smeared socks whispering on the sand as he spun in place, sensing that he was being watched.

  Without warning, Zarai came flying through Jakob’s tent, propelled by some unseen force. Steiner staggered back, tripping over his own feet so that he fell heavily, his eyes unable to tear away from the sight of his guide dying just a pace away.

  Zarai’s face was covered with blood that had leaked from the sockets where his eyes had been. Fat black flies buzzed quickly back to their sanguinous meal, blanketing his head only seconds after his body came to rest. Zarai moaned weakly, brushing his curled hand along the sand in an effort to reach his mutilated face.

  Jakob screamed, a high-pitched keen not unlike a young girl’s, his stomach turning to oil. He crabbed across the ground in an effort to distance himself from his companion’s pitiable figure.

  Zarai clawed weakly at the ground again and went still, his last gasp no more than a whisper in the wind.

  Then four greyhound-thin men came into the camp. They were dressed in stained and dusty uniforms, the camouflage pattern all but washed out, the cuffs, collars, and countless pockets showing frayed edges. While the clothing they wore was tattered, all four were in the prime of their lives, which for this part of Africa meant early twenties. Their matching Soviet assault rifles looked well cared for and greased.

  The young men stood arrogantly, flat dark eyes regarding the cowering Steiner with contempt. Unlike Zarai, who had lighter skin and Arab features, a reminder of Eritrea’s long association with the Middle East, these men were so black their skin had almost a blue tinge. Their features were classical negroid: high foreheads, thickened lips, and wide, handsome noses. While Steiner’s field of expertise was archaeology, he recognized that these men were from Sudan, born in the ancient lands of Kush. Steiner knew enough of modern politics to know his life could not be measured in minutes.

  A civil war had been raging in Sudan for decades, fought between the northern majority of Muslims against the Christians from the south. Sudan’s small but appreciable animist population was caught in the middle. Relief agencies had been granted only sporadic entrance into the country to minister aid, so estimates of those killed were unreliable, but they ranged into the millions. In the past few years, driven by disease and malnutrition, many of those fighting in the south had turned to more mercenary activities — raiding aid shipments, plundering the camps of the quarter-million Eritrean refugees living in the country, and staging cross-border sorties for food or medicine and, more commonly now, to kidnap victims to be held for ransom.

  Jakob Steiner lay on the ground, his socks stained the same dun color as his khaki clothes. His eyes were wide and fearful as he looked at the four men towering over him, four men who doubtlessly had perpetrated some of the despicable things Zarai had spoken of during their nights in the camp.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked in German, his voice made raw by thirst and fear.

  He got no reaction from the four terrorists, but noticed that one was carrying a large machete that hung from a hook on his belt. Zarai’s blood was a red-black stain on the weapon’s blade. He repeated the question in English. Again, the men looked at him blankly, ignoring the flies that had descended on the camp like a plague. Two jagged-wing vultures circled high above, gliding on the thermal updrafts produced by the sun hammering the desert.

  “I have nothing,” Jakob stammered. Even if the men didn’t understand the words, they could certainly hear the pleading tone in his voice. “Just a little food, enough for another day or two, and just a small amount of money. I have more money in the capital, Asmara. I could send it to you, but you must let me go.”

  Silence, save the wind blowing across the camp.

  “I am a scientist. I study ancient bones. I have no powerful friends. I am worth nothing to you as a hostage. Please let me go.” Jakob was crying now, tears running into the dust caked on his face. “Please, take anything you want, but let me go. Do not hurt me!”

  The four Sudanese did not react as his voice rose to a shrill whine. Then the terrorist with the machete, who was a little older than the others, kicked Steiner’s boots ac
ross the few feet of open ground separating them from the Austrian scientist.

  “You are a spy from America here to enslave our people,” the cadre leader said in English as if he had memorized the words.

  “No,” Jakob shouted, hopeful for the first time because one of the men understood him. “I am not from America, I am Austrian. I come from Europe. I am not a spy. I study old bones, the bones of our ancient ancestors. I am not here to steal from you.”

  “You are from America. You are going to die. Put on your boots and go. We will give you a quarter of the clock dial to run, and then we will hunt you down.” The young Sudanese showed off a cheap watch slung loosely around his wrist. Steiner had fifteen minutes to get into his boots and run.

  “But I’m not from—”

  “Run!”

  Steiner didn’t even bother lacing his boots. He merely slipped them on, ignoring the small piles of sand that had already accumulated in the toes, and began sprinting.

  It took the terrorists only a half hour to catch their quarry, but they did not move in for the kill. They ran behind Steiner, taunting him, goading him. It went on like this for another hour, an hour of Steiner hearing his own painful breathing tearing through his chest and his sore and swollen feet tripping over the jagged ground. Jakob hadn’t run like this in his entire life. His legs were rubbery beneath him, his feet slapping ineffectually against the hardpan. His pudgy arms were pumping slower and slower, like a machine grinding down for want of fuel.

  The Sudanese slowed to a walking pace behind the shambling Austrian. Their breath came slow and even, and only a little sweat gleaned against their skin. Sensing that the chase was at an end, the leader came forward and smashed down on the scientist’s knee with the butt of his AK-47. The joint crumbled and Jakob fell to the ground, rolling in a thin cloud of chalky dust.

  Settled comfortably on their haunches, the Sudanese ringed Steiner, their assault rifles held between their knees. The leader lit a Turkish cigarette and passed it to his men, each taking a long draw before giving it to the next. The cigarette made three complete circles before the leader took one last drag, pinched off the burning tip to shred the remaining leaf, and tucked the filter in the pocket of his uniform blouse.