Sky Hammer

“Is there a problem, sir?” Hertzoff asked in concern.

Trying to be casual, the President dismissed that with a wave. “Nothing of importance.”

The others took that as a notice that the conference was over for the moment, and got on their own cell phones to check for any missed messages over the past ten minutes.

Outside the limo, police motorcycles rode along with the executive convoy, keeping people away from the line of limousines. Wherever the President went, traffic snarled and a major city ground to a halt for the duration of his visit. But his mind wasn’t on maintaining good public relations right now. If Hal Brognola wanted a private meeting, then all hell had broken loose somewhere. Could be Paris or Israel. Maybe both.

Deep in thought, the President studied the city passing by outside, trying to recall the details of a scientific report he had read as a junior senator very long ago. Israel may have been hit by vaporware, something that was not supposed to exist. But very obviously did. Project Sky Hammer. If so, then nobody was safe, absolutely nobody, and there were going to be a lot more deaths real soon.

Pressing a button on the armrest, the President said, “Driver, maximum speed to the airport, please.”

Instantly a siren started blaring from under the hood, and the convoy of limos surged with speed.

Computer Room, Stony Man Farm, Virginia

THE LARGE ROOM was very quiet, the air vents steadily exhaled a cool breeze and the silent keyboards made tiny patting noises from the hurried impact of fingers. A coffeemaker burbled at the kitchenette and muffled rock music could be heard coming from somewhere.

“What’s this about a Thor?” Carmen Delahunt asked, lowering her glasses. “Okay, Aaron. Tell me we aren’t looking at a Thor here. I remember reading about the project in a journal.”

A virtual reality visor plugged into her console, ready to access the Internet anytime. But the million-dollar VR helmet was deactivated at the moment. After the Paris attack, the team had been looking for a possible traitor in the NSA or CIA. But then the attack on Israel occurred, and it had top priority.

Privately, Delahunt hoped the two incidences weren’t directly linked.

Slim and well-built, the red-haired woman was a classic Irish beauty, but she was also one of the elite, the four Cyberwizards who composed the cybernetic division of Stony Man Farm. Her desk console was directly attached to the bank of Cray supercomputers under Stony Man’s direct control.

“The display is coming up now,” Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman called from the small kitchenette along the wall, where he was filling his coffee mug.

Sipping and wheeling at the same time, he rolled back to his console, the chair fitting snugly underneath.

The console had several monitors. A few of them were dark, but the rest were busy scrolling with news reports from every agency in the world.

Impatient, Kurtzman tapped one monitor with a screen saver. Why was the file taking so long? Instantly the wooden glen disappeared to show the status of the top-secret download. Ah, here we go, almost downloaded from archives now.

“Okay, heads up,” Kurtzman announced, tapping his keyboard.

Everybody else stopped whatever he or she was doing and paid attention.

“I’m afraid you’re right, Carmen. The name of the thing is Project Sky Hammer,” Kurtzman said as the big monitor at the front of the room came to life.

The plasma screen pulsed with light a few times, then cleared into a view of starry space, the blue-white globe of Earth low in the corner. The technical data flowed past the screen, showing power curves, field strengths and striking power. That end of the data nearly went off the chart. The Stony Man cyber team read the flowing data carefully.

Back in 1977, a research scientist named Dr. Gerald Mahone started thinking about weapons and what part of a bomb actually caused death and destruction. It wasn’t the metal casing or even the shrapnel inside. As an example, he suggested taking a bullet and throwing it at somebody. A steel-jacketed, hollow point, .357 Magnum round would simply bounce off his or her chest and fall to the floor. The bullet, the casing, the metal, wasn’t deadly, per se. It was the amount of force behind the projectile that made it deadly.

Anything was lethal if it moved fast enough. There were hundreds of recorded cases where a tornado had driven a piece of straw into a telephone pole, or done the same thing with a bottle cap and a brick wall. Speed, raw velocity, made objects dangerous.

The space race was still strong back in the seventies, and America had been locked in a deadly struggle for supremacy with the Soviet Union. New weapons were needed all the time. So Mahone did some basic calculations and invented the Thor.

The idea was simple, as good ones usually were. Take a plain steel rod, eight feet long and twelve inches in diameter. Add a couple of inexpensive steering rockets, cheap wings and a limited-capability computer. The whole thing wouldn’t have cost more than a couple hundred dollars.

Now place hundreds of these “spears” into orbit. A floating cloud of destruction waiting to be unleashed. When enemy forces were spotted, targeting information was sent to as many of the Thors as you needed to commit to the attack, and they would obediently jet out of space and into the atmosphere, constantly accelerating down the gravity hit, growing hotter and hotter from the friction with the atmosphere, until finally a white-hot, molten ball of steel moving at Mach Two arrived. There were few tanks, ships or gunnery emplacements of the time period that could have withstood the thundering impact of even a single Thor.

Even better, because of its speed and steep trajectory, a Thor should be impossible for missiles to track and blow out of the sky. The Thor was a cheap, deadly, unstoppable super-weapon.

With a few flaws. Space travel was still expensive back in the seventies, and there was no way to accurately give a Thor the precise location of a target. It was quite possible that a swarm of Thors might drift off course and slam into your own tanks, annihilating your own troops instead of the enemy’s.

The project was given the code name, Sky Hammer, and shelved in the deep top secret archives of the Pentagon. It was brilliant, but not feasible using technology of the time.

“So that’s what we’re facing,” Kurtzman said, turning off the screen. “Sky Hammer, a plain piece of molten steel falling from high orbit. The only things holding back the project before were the cost of space travel and the inability to accurately pinpoint a target. But a dozen nations have relatively cheap access to space these days, dirt cheap if they use an illegal version of the new Spaceship One rocket plane, and with a Global Positioning Device—GPD—bought off the shelf of any electronics store…” The man shrugged. “You’ve seen the results.”

“Everything old is new again,” Huntington “Hunt” Wethers muttered, scowling.

“Son of a bitch,” Delahunt whispered, reviewing the material again on her console. “And this is what hit Israel, a Thor.”

“More likely it was several of them,” Akira Tokaido stated grimly.

“Please bring up the TV news coverage of the wall,” Kurtzman requested, taking a sip of coffee. “I want to check something.”

Delahunt hit a macro and the CNN report appeared in a window within the view of space and started to play again.

“Hold,” Kurtzman said after a minute, and the scene froze. “There, look at that.”

Frowning, Wethers removed his pipe from his mouth. “The wall wasn’t blown up, it was smashed down.”

“Hit from above,” Kurtzman growled.

Wethers turned to Tokaido. “Better check to see if anybody is looking for a geologist at one of Israel’s universities.”

“To analyze the residue at the bottom of the crater?” Tokaido asked. “Yeah, makes sense. And that is the only way to know for sure, isn’t it?”

“Sadly, yes,” Wethers replied. “If there is a lot of pure steel down there…”

“But why did they wait until the ceremony started?” Delahunt wondered out loud. “Just to kill the prime minister? But they missed him.” Her head snapped up. “Paris!”

Biting back a curse, Kurtzman remembered the dying words of the NSA agent. He had said something about a new weapon for sale on the black market. Whoever was behind this had hit the wall as an advertisement. They probably announced in advance what was going to happen on the international arms market, and now that it had occurred right on schedule, they could start taking orders. With enough of them, anything could be smashed down by a Thor. Anything. The White House, Cheyenne Mountain, Hoover Dam… The targets were limitless and completely vulnerable. There wasn’t a defensive system in existence that could stop a Thor. Nothing. Only solid bedrock—and a lot of it.

“A Thor could crush the Farm, and we couldn’t do a damn thing except die,” Tokaido said softly, glancing at the ceiling. There were only white foam tiles in sight, but in his mind the sky was falling at exactly thirty-two feet per second….

“Okay, how do we stop it?” Delahunt asked.

Kurtzman sighed. “We can’t. The old figures were correct. Not a missile or antimissile, or antimissile laser can track and lock on to a Thor fast enough to do any significant damage.”

“Then we have to go after the people controlling it. That’s the vulnerable point, the operators.”

“Yes,” Kurtzman said, glancing at the world map. “Where they are.”

“If this news hits the airwaves and Internet, there’s going to be a worldwide panic,” Wethers stated bluntly. “A Sky Hammer alert would make the Cuban missile crisis look like an ice-cream social! Thousands of people will die in the riots when they try to reach subway tunnels, bomb shelters, anything underground.”

“And none of those would protect them.”