The first thing which the Counsellor noted was the sheer size of the cockpit, which looked not so much like a cockpit as the bridge of a ship. An array of multi-coloured lights moderated the gloom.
The second thing he noted was that the flight crew were either unconscious or dead. They were slumped forwards or sideways, held in their places by the safety harnesses.
The third thing to impinge on the Counsellor’s senses, as he turned to shout, was a brief, overwhelming dizziness as he breathed the poisoned air, followed by a tremendous spasm in his carotid artery, and the sensation of floating down towards the cabin floor.
An automatic mechanism in the tail of the Hercules detected the nose-up configuration of the aircraft and applied a correction. In fact it overcorrected and the plane, manned by lifeless pilots, began to head towards the ground two miles below. The mechanism, detecting this, pulled the plane back up, and the cycle was repeated, more steeply this time. It was on a downward cycle when, pushing aside the corpses of the Counsellor, an Air Force captain and his own aide, Admiral Tozer took his turn in the poisoned air. The port wing of the aircraft touched a steeple, sending a spray of stonework and a thirty-foot fragment of wing spiralling over the town of Carthage, Missouri. He pulled on the joystick, his lungs bursting, and there was a moment of blackness. He seemed to be floating towards the cockpit ceiling. A cluster of orange lights approached rapidly from the sky above. Disoriented, it was a second before he recognized them as the lights of a town. The lights shot over his head and then there was more blackness.
Fox One circled the fierce orange fireball at a safe height. Cars were beginning to stream out of Carthage towards the flames just beyond the town.
Cannon looked down without emotion at the fiercely blazing remains of the aircraft he had been scheduled to fly in. “I’ve got a schedule to keep. Carry on to Andrews. And ask Tinker to patch me through to the White House. We’d better let them know the Vice-President has just met with a tragic accident.”
The Whirlpool
Webb walked along the covered walkway, tingling with nerves. To his left a small waterfall poured off the roof.
The call to his old friend had converted ninety-nine per cent certainty to one hundred per cent. Nemesis was a deception and a fraud. It was a monstrous conspiracy.
He thought he knew why, and the answer terrified him.
Webb’s door was unlocked and the light was on. The sound of churning water came from within. Adjoining the bedroom was a long washroom with a vanity unit and a whirlpool tub. Judy was up to her chin in soap suds.
“Hi Oliver!” she waved a soapy hand as the astronomer passed.
Noordhof was straddling a heavy chair in the middle of the bedroom. His arms were folded on the back of the chair.
Webb kicked off his shoes and sat on the bed, at the pillow end, with his back to the ornate wooden headboard.
The churning stopped.
The colonel moved to the telephone, lifted the receiver and dialled. “A-okay here. Ten minutes.” He returned to his chair, and folded his arms again on the back, only this time he was holding an ivory-handled Colt revolver.
“What happens in ten minutes?” Webb asked, his mouth dry.
Judy emerged from the bathroom in a white dressing gown, her blonde hair wrapped in a towel. She sat down at a dressing table and started doing something to her eyelashes.
Noordhof said, “There’s nothing personal about this, Oliver. I like you. You’re just a little man way out of your depth. But before the squad turns up, I want to know how much you know. Do you know anything?”
“I know that Nemesis doesn’t exist.” Webb kept his eyes on Noordhof; but he sensed that Judy, at the dressing table, had suddenly frozen.
Noordhof showed surprise, then a flicker of admiration. “How in Hell’s name did you work that out, Doc?”
“Gut instinct.”
“Was that all?”
“Leclerc’s death was the first real thing. I think André got there before me. He came to me worried but didn’t live long enough to say why. I believe he’d worked out that the Russian deep space programme has a history incompatible with the multiple visits that would have been needed for a high-precision deflection. I also guessed that in the hours when he went missing, before he died, he realized it was a setup and he cleared out of Eagle Peak.”
“He tried. You were all under constant surveillance from the woods, Oliver. My people saw André, he saw them and took off in the cable car. Considering it had to look like an accident, I thought they showed real initiative at short notice.”
The soldier waved the pistol encouragingly, and Webb continued. “Item Two was Vincenzo’s manuscript. Quite a coincidence that I was translating it just before I was dragooned into your team.”
“You were slow on the uptake, Oliver. We thought we were going to have to ram the book down your throat.”
“I couldn’t understand why, if Phaenomenis had real information in it, the Russians would draw attention to it by stealing it from under my nose. What was it with these thefts? I began to suspect that I was meant to get hold of Vincenzo’s book, meant to identify Nemesis from it.”
Judy had finished with her eyelashes; she moved her chair next to Noordhof’s.
The Colonel scratched his head thoughtfully with the barrel of the revolver. “Good thinking, Oliver.”
“But a couple of things really got the alarm bells ringing.”
Noordhof waited politely.
“Karibisha. It’s too big. As a killing machine, it’s over-enthusiastic. At a million megatons it would set the whole world alight. The fireball would poison the atmosphere with nitric oxide. The Russians would have suffered tremendous damage along with the rest of the planet. They have first class people in this business and they would know that a Karibisha impact is global suicide.”
Noordhof tried to sound casual. “So did you share your suspicions?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.”
Judy said, “I doubt it. He wouldn’t know who he could trust. Anyway, I believe he was out here before his suspicions crystallized.”
Webb kept talking. “I knew I was being manipulated. I went along with it because I had to know who, and why. Somebody wanted me to get that book, wanted me to find an asteroid in it. Now who would want that, and why? I thought long and hard about that.”
“Is that it?” Noordhof asked.
“There were other things. No way could Karibisha have been seen that close to the sun with the claimed precision. The NASA report you showed me yesterday had to be a lie. After that, things have been falling into place quickly.”
The Colonel shrugged. “Yeah, the NASA report was a rush job. You threw us by asking for it. All those phoney US Naval Observatory observations, Goldstone radar data and so on. What the heck, you gave us less than a day.”
“Why me, Mark? Why choose me for your team?”
“We chose you with care, Oliver. We knew you were set on finding some comet in old star charts. So we supplied you with an asteroid instead. We got rid of all copies of Vincenzo but one to raise its profile in your thick head and to make sure you didn’t go making comparisons. You were supposed to be a pushover but you turn out to be a giant headache. I knew you were trouble when I saw you checking the switching circuit in the wheelhouse. You weren’t supposed to do that, Ollie. And your damn robot telescope had us in a real panic. I had to stall you for a full day while we got a team to rig the circuitry. And still you saw through it.”