“Okay. Try and take care, Wally.”
“Good-bye, Lan.”
Sloane’s features replaced Lomack’s on the screen. “Lan,” he said without preliminaries. “They picked up Hixson. He was shacked up in a motel twenty miles outside the city with another Goddard name who must have been on the list.”
“You got the son of a bitch!” Keene exclaimed.
“Damn right. The FBI are interrogating them now.”
“Are they getting anywhere?”
“It looks like it. Hixson’s cooperating and agreed to carry on normally so as not to give away that he’s blown—I guess, trying to work a deal that’ll get him out. Seems we’re talking about an H-hour just before dawn tomorrow. We know the times, their movement plan, how they’ll be coming in. With that information, our CT guys can have their units right there—plus the surprise. They say they’ve got all the odds.”
Keene frowned as he thought about it.
“You don’t look too pleased,” Sloane commented.
“The intention must be for Hixson and this other guy to be collected sometime. Obviously you’re going to have to let them go. They have to be there.”
“That’s true,” Sloane agreed. “But for my money we can trust him. He’s got no future with Voler now, and he’s desperate. I can smell the sweat from here. With us he might have an out. That’ll be enough to turn him. I know the type.”
“Let’s hope you’re right,” Keene said. He was still uneasy. Why wait that long if the lander from the Osiris was already down? Maybe they had a larger party to collect together than had been realized. “Are Beckerson and his party still coming as planned?” he asked curiously.
“Leaving tonight on schedule,” Sloane answered. “No changes. Why?”
“Oh, just checking. I’ve got my own plans to think about too,” Keene said vaguely. So Cavan’s suspicions in that regard seemed to have been misplaced. Keene was glad that he had held back before making insinuations. He just hoped that when the showdown came at Andrews, nobody would lose their head or start overreacting in the ways that get people killed. Too many people would be there that he cared about.
* * *
An hour after Keene talked to Sloane, reports started coming in over the channels that JPL was linked into that a meteorite carpet had unrolled in a thousand-mile hail, which was falling from Minneapolis to Ottawa. Aerial shots showed parts of Detroit on fire and miles of suburbs with houses demolished, roads blocked by stricken vehicles, and in low passes, people frantically waving at the camera aircraft to send help. Footage from the ground in Chicago looked like the aftermath of an air raid: fire trucks and ambulances in smoke-filled streets littered with rubble; mangled cars; rescuers digging into piles of glass and debris fallen from shattered high-rises. A dazed woman talked incoherently about “a river of stones that came down out of the sky. They just kept falling and falling. . . .” Nobody knew the extent of the damage among the smaller townships and rural dwellings spread across such a huge area. The police commissioner in Toronto was filmed as saying, “There have to be thousands dead out there. . . . We’ve no way of telling. Communications are out. Everything’s out. Jesus, and this is only the beginning!”
And then Charlie Hu told Keene that he was wanted at the Tracking Center in one of the other buildings, which was still managing to maintain a link to the Osiris by juggling with the surviving relay satellites. Idorf was asking for him, and the President in Washington was also on the circuit. Four craft that had failed to identify themselves were approaching the Osiris and had ignored attempts to communicate. Idorf wanted to remind whoever had dispatched them that one of the Osiris’s laser bombs was armed and ready to launch. Until the Kronian delegation was returned safely to the ship, the hundred-mile limit that he had declared previously still stood.
31
Keene, Colby, and Charlie Hu stood in a semicircle of tense-faced controllers and technicians, facing an array of consoles. The screens showed Idorf on the Control Deck of the Osiris, President Hayer with several aides and service chiefs in Washington, and various data plots. All that could be ascertained of the approaching vessels were their positions, courses, and estimates of their likely sizes from radar echoes. They still hadn’t responded to signals. Nobody knew where they were from, or even if they were crewed or being remotely operated. The only observation satellite in a position to make a visual identification had been malfunctioning for several hours and couldn’t be oriented in the right direction. Suspicion was that they were the launches detected earlier in eastern Asia, but attempts to contact the authorities in those regions had so far elicited either no response or denials. Colby Greene’s guess was that Voler and Company—hardly surprisingly—had not been the only ones to think of escaping to Kronia by commandeering the Osiris. While Keene and the others had been on their way across from the other building, the Osiris had launched its bomb. The weapon was now sitting in a parallel orbit a little over fifty miles off, ready to fire.