Hell's Gate(81)
Lastly, the bomb that had been planted onto the sled itself by the camouflage-clad man detonated, turning the core of the sled’s engine cluster into flaming shrapnel that shredded its nose cone; but by then the sled had been used up and jettisoned, and was already following its own trajectory, groundward and into the forest.
The Silverbird II was safely away, still accelerating and climbing higher.
Roughly two minutes after Voorhees had punched the ignition button, his “bottle rockets” peeled away and spun earthward, followed by the empty hypergolic fuel pods. With the ship accelerating toward the ionosphere, powered now only by its internal fuel tanks, the atoms through which the hull passed vibrated redder and brighter with each notch upward on the vehicle’s speedometer. Inside the cockpit, the engineer shielded his eyes against the glare, but as the atmospheric gases rarefied to near extinction, the glow grew weaker and then went out.
Voorhees checked his stopwatch, counting down until he had arrived at the appointed moment. Then he reached down and eased back on the throttle. Immediately he felt a wonderful sensation of buoyancy—the first manifestation of free fall.
The freshly minted astronaut allowed himself the hint of a smile. “I’ve made it,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion. “I’ve made it.” The violence on the ground had been left far behind.
Directly ahead, the stars blazed forth so brightly that, even through tears, he could resolve Mars and Jupiter as actual disks, and not just points in the sky. Far to the port side, the lights of Caracas shimmered faintly, like a delicate, phosphorescent cobweb draped over the land. To starboard, the Atlantic spread before him, revealed in its immensity by the first predawn rays of the sun. Then, within seconds, the new day illuminated land and ocean alike, as if someone had switched on a floodlamp.
The wonder of it all held him spellbound for another minute, until the fiery glow of hydrogen and ozone returned, and the space-plane’s nose began to swing earthward.
Below Silverbird II, in the shadows, Voorhees saw dawn’s earliest light creeping toward Florida. But none of that was important anymore. He checked his stopwatch again, calculating a course correction that would have stunned Dr. Eugen S?nger, had he been there to observe it.
The mission had called for attacks on the American capital as well as the city of Pittsburgh, the center of the Allied steel industry. After that, the rocket would turn hard to the east, with the last bomb released on a trajectory toward New York City. S?nger had chosen the Empire State Building as a hypothetical ground zero, but all any of the rocket men could really say about the Silverbird’s targeting capability was that “it made sense—in theory.”
Finally, if everything went as planned, the pilot would have a choice of either bailing out or trying to land the rocket, something like a seaplane, minus a seaworthy keel, off the southern coast of Long Island, where a submarine would be waiting to pluck the rocketeer from the Atlantic.
“Or at least, some of his body parts,” Voorhees had joked, upon hearing S?nger’s U-boat rescue plan for the first time. For some reason, his little joke didn’t seem quite so funny anymore. Voorhees knew that if the North Atlantic presented so much as a one-foot swell (and when didn’t it?), the underbelly and the wings would rip the multiton rocket into a thousand pieces. If he survived, the standard U-boat was not equipped to save the plane even if it floated perfectly intact. Either way, land it on water or bail out, his beautiful space-plane would die alone and pilotless, on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean.
But those plans had been drawn up long before Voorhees found himself the only man still alive who could fly the rocket. And not long after that, Maurice Voorhees had devised his own plan.
With limited time to work out the details, Voorhees decided to keep it simple: Kimura’s bombs would be ditched over the Atlantic, where they could harm no one. He would then steer the ship’s nose toward land, Virginia or Washington, D.C., itself, where he hoped to find an airstrip, or at least somewhere flat to set down for a long, long belly-scrape of a landing.
The engineer shook his head. Yes, that’s going to be a bit of a poser. But I would rather ski across flat concrete or through a field of corn than rough water.
If he vented all of his fuel ahead of time, he might survive the landing. The ship’s insides were, after all, mostly insulated, balloon-like tanks, filled with the liquid natural gas they’d collected from the river itself. With the tanks empty, the ship would be as light as a feather, more or less. Voorhees was confident that he could land the Silverbird intact and that, maybe, just maybe, the spacecraft could be saved, or at least replicated from its wreckage. Certainly, the Americans would see, in this ship, the world to come. And hopefully, they would find something better to do with it.
Now, less than a hundred kilometers below, Voorhees could make out roads and towns in the dim, pre-sunrise light, and he could distinguish clouds marching before the winds.
As the rocket-plane continued on its course, a hammerhead of air strengthened around the hull, bringing a sensation of weight back to Voorhees’s feet and snapping him out of sightseeing mode. Voorhees made another course correction, just before the Silverbird II made a perfectly timed skip off the outer atmosphere, like a stone skipping along the surface of a pond.
High above coastal South Carolina, the horizon receded from the pilot—again, and the sky above became blacker as he regained altitude; but alarmingly, the glow outside the ship did not diminish as much as he had anticipated.