“Yes, sir,” Scott answered, suddenly aware that he’d been tasked to speak for NASA. But he knew that that wouldn’t last long. As soon as Patricia Simone was out of the cabinet meeting he’d get his marching orders from Headquarters. NASA took its chain of command seriously, as did he—especially as a military officer. But be that as it may, he wasn’t about to argue with the President; that would all be sorted out later.
“And one more thing,” the President added. “I want to know the second that communications are reestablished with the station.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President. I understand completely—” Scott stopped in midsentence.
“Excuse me?” said the President.
The control center’s giant monitor suddenly blinked.
The control room fell dead quiet, as if all one hundred people across its floor had been frozen in a block of ice.
Stunned, Scott spoke slowly. “Mr. President … you’ll get that last order you gave me fulfilled sooner than you’d think.”
Sounds of chairs shifting. “How’s that?”
“The link with the ISS … it’s just been brought up.”
JAPANESE MODULE (JPM)
Kimberly’s hands flew over the keyboard, trying to determine exactly where the two killers were located in the ISS, when the monitor suddenly blinked and the ISS logo came up on her screen.
Her eyes went wide. One of the downlinks to Johnson had just been reestablished! Something was about to be transmitted.
Stunned, Kimberly’s hands flew to her face. She didn’t know what to think. After all her efforts to hack into the four downlink channels, and being thwarted every step of the way, this suddenly came out of left field. Had the link been brought up by Farid?
As if working on their own, her fingers raced across the keyboard once more, trying to send a message down to MCC, the NASA mission control center.
But her efforts were in vain. A visual image of Farid and his cohort Bakhet filled the screen. Once again, Farid’s computer skills had overridden her efforts to send a frantic message down to NASA, to tell them she was still alive and she was going to do everything in her power to defeat these SOBs.
As she desperately tried to circumvent the digital quarantine that Farid had created against her, it dawned on Kimberly that this couldn’t be just the work of one individual. Even Farid, with his profound working knowledge of the ISS, his insider know-how about how all the station’s systems functioned, could never have managed to circumvent her efforts so quickly. This had to be more than one person working against her, and from the professional manner in which all her efforts had been circumvented, she realized that this had to be a highly organized endeavor.
This had been a well-planned attack on the ISS, to take total command and dominate every one of its functions, after first exterminating the station’s crew. That meant they wanted absolute control of the station for some major, preplanned purpose.
As she came to this conclusion, Farid’s voice, with his proper British accent from his Eton and Cambridge days, spoke over NASA’s video and comm link to the world:
“Today marks the beginning of Dabiq, the Final End of the Folly. The glory of Al-Qahhar will dominate, and the world will see His victorious glory.”
Kimberly drew in a breath. She remembered from her father’s Islamic background that Al-Qahhar was the Subduer, the Supreme One and Irresistible—not the Compassionate and All Understanding, the Allah she had been brought up to trust and understand.
This was an incredible sharp turn from everything she’d been taught and led to believe since a little girl. Even worse, this was incredibly more dangerous. What did he mean, the Final End of the Folly? The final? Was he about to announce a harbinger to the Final End?
The view on the laptop’s screen switched from Farid to an aerial view of New York City, taken either by Google Earth or perhaps the space station itself. The picture’s resolution was so fine and detailed that Kimberly could see individual cars on the streets. Farid’s voice came over the speaker.
“In four days the infidel city will cease to exist. The flaunting cesspool of wealth, the so-called International Space Station that keeps the downtrodden subdued, will hurtle from the heavens and crash into New York.” A cartoon image of the ISS’s thousand-mile path across the ground blinked next to the view of New York City; the path ran from Florida to New York.
“As a vengeful meteor from above, their godless monument of steel and technology will obliterate their center of depravity, their so-called financial center of the world, the fount of all evil. The one-million-pound space station will impact New York City with far more energy than the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima.” The computer-generated graphic of the ISS’s impact trajectory enlarged to fill the screen. “And as the ISS breaks up in the atmosphere, it will spew radiation in a path a thousand miles long and hundreds of miles wide, poisoning your country forever with plutonium. Your loathsome city will be destroyed, your contaminated east coast will be uninhabitable, and millions more will die.
“New York City—in four days, meet your death.”
The video feed switched off.
For several shocked moments Kimberly stared at the now-blank laptop screen. She realized that her hands were trembling, shaking. Stop it! she commanded herself, and began to tap at the keyboard once more in an attempt to break into Farid’s brief broadcast, to let NASA know that she was still alive, and to try to somehow stop this unbelievable insanity.
What was Farid thinking? Why would he do this? If his TV feed had been broadcast to the public, not only would the media go nuts, but there might well be rioting, terrified people by the millions trying to get out of the city, away from the coast, with car wrecks and traffic jams up and down the whole Eastern seaboard.
Did Farid really think he could somehow deorbit the ISS and crash it into a specific location, such as New York City? It was crazy to even think he could be that accurate. And spewing a radioactive path of plutonium? What was that about?
She suddenly felt cold. The RTGs. The Russians had just flown them up on the last Progress, compact nuclear power sources. It had been all over the news; everyone knew this was the next phase for the ISS in the human exploration of space. Each multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator carried over ten pounds of Pu-238, or 360 total pounds of highly radioactive plutonium in the three dozen RTGs. Although the radioactivity would spread over a large distance, Pu-238 had a half-life of eighty-eight years and the public might never venture into the contaminated area.…
But the final target was so precise a location, and with the uncertainty of where the ISS might be deorbited, it was insane to even think that Farid could ever come close to hitting the city, or even New York state, for that matter. With the way the atmosphere changed from second to second, it would take incredibly good luck to hit anyplace from Florida to Maine.
But on the other hand, Kimberly realized, if the panic didn’t come from the fear of impact, it would be the fear of being contaminated by a cloud of deadly plutonium falling from the sky. And if his broadcast had been transmitted to the public there could well be rioting and other acts of fear-driven violence, starting in New York and spreading up and down the coast, as well as inland. The average American didn’t have a clue about radiation, how aerodynamics really worked, or even basic orbital mechanics. So although the threat of hitting New York and contaminating the eastern seaboard might be small, it was the panic and rioting that would cause all the damage.