"No." Over interphone: "Marty, come in…" No reply. "He was in Enterprise. Saint-Michael switched to the air-to-air UHF frequency. "Marty, this is Jason. Report. Report, damn it…" But when he looked out the observation port again he saw where Marty had disappeared to. The shuttle Enterprise was speeding away from Silver Tower, and Saint-Michael just caught a glimpse of it before it disappeared. "Marty, on board Enterprise… come in."
Marty Schultz was sitting in the left-hand commander's seat on Enterprise's flight deck, nudging her thrusters forward in an attempt to fly the shuttle away from the space station and the attackers bearing down on it. He'd already made up his mind. He wasn't going to be the hunted; he was going to be the hunter. Not to be vainglorious, but, well, better to go doing some good in the space shuttle that had been his inspiration than wait around for the Russians to shred the patchwork shuttle with their missiles. He keyed the microphone button on the control stick. "Sorry to be late reporting, General. As I guess you've noticed, I've been sort of busy here on Enterprise—"
"What the hell do you think you're doing? Where do you think you're going?"
"One at a time, General. What I was doing was getting ready to load Skybolt… saw the Russian plane's missiles hit America… Hampton and Horvath bought it… Where I'm going is away from Silver Tower. Figure those planes will be on my tail pretty quick now. Well, I've always wanted to see what this baby can do. Now I'm going to find out…"
Saint-Michael wanted to kill him… He was so upset the irony of that thought went right by him… First it had been Jerrod Will. Now it was Marty Schultz. What was it with these shuttle jocks? Did they all have to be heroes…?
"Marty, listen…"
But Marty wasn't listening. Leaving Enterprise's thrusters on full power he unstrapped himself from the commander's seat and moved across the flight deck to the payload specialist's station. The cargo bay doors were open and he could see out through the twin aft-facing observation windows into the cargo bay and behind Enterprise.
He activated the reaction-control-system thruster controls at the payload station, checked them, then unstowed the manipulator arm. Swinging the arm out of the cargo bay he pointed the TV camera aft, set it to wide-angle view and swept it behind the shuttle.
Almost instantly he had a picture — perfect view of two Soviet Elektron spaceplanes giving chase. "I got two Elektrons, on my tail," he radioed back to the station. "These gumballs are in for a surprise…"
"Damn it," Govorov said over the command radio, "don't let that shuttle get away."
Kozhedub and Litvyak had fired two Bavinash missiles each at Armstrong, when Govorov saw the shuttle suddenly bolt from the vicinity of the lower pressurized modules. He had no way of knowing if it was a bluff or not, but the shuttle did seem to be piloted by a space-suited astronaut, so he ordered both his wingmen to give chase.
For a moment he hoped Litvyak would leave the job to Kozhedub because, from his vantage point about a kilometer behind and above his wingmen, Govorov had seen Litvyak's second Scimitar missile, a single missile, obliterate the spaceplane America docked at the station, creating an instant ball of flames. Flames in outer space were a rare sight. The blast must have had the force of at least a kiloton of TNT.
Deciding it was not necessary to wait for his wingmen to return, Govorov pressed a switch on a newly installed panel near his right knee. Behind him, a hydraulically powered pallet lifted the space-reactive bomb out of Elektron One's cargo bay. The side of the weapon opposite the pallet was uncovered, revealing a series of mechanical grapples all along the outer surface of the bomb.
He was going to maneuver Elektron One underneath the station's central keel, as close as possible to the pressurized modules without running the risk of hitting an antenna or a piece of the debris that seemed to cluster everywhere around the crippled station. When he was positioned properly he would gently nudge the bomb up onto the central open-lattice keel until the grapples caught, then release the bomb and pallet from his cargo bay. Once away from the station — five to ten kilometers was safe in this case — he would detonate the bomb. It would be fast and sure. No more mistakes…
He began his slow, careful approach to the station, maneuvering well above the central pressurized modules to begin a visual scan of the station. Not the time to charge ahead blindly. Logic said the station's crew should have abandoned the station in the shuttle or spaceplane, but it was such an incorrect assumption that got Voloshin killed on the first mission. There was time. He would wait and watch the explosion, watch as the huge American space station folded and tore apart. As for the men who might still crew the station, well, he would try not to feel for them. At least they would die quickly… He nudged his control stick forward and watched as his laser range finder counted down the distance to the station: three thousand meters, twenty-eight hundred, twenty-six…
They were close enough now…
From the magnification setting on the aft camera Marty Schultz estimated that the two Elektron spaceplanes chasing him were no more than four or five miles behind. Enterprise, powered by its two monomethyl-hydrazine engines, had accelerated another thousand miles an hour since the chase had begun, but the Russians were slowly but surely catching up.
Just as he wanted. He shut down the engines and using only the aft thrusters spun Enterprise head-over-tail until she had turned a full hundred eighty degrees back toward her pursuers. He then grasped the arm controls and, studying the TV monitor that gave the best view of the cargo bay and the manipulator's claw, reached into the cargo bay with the arm and extracted a large cylindrical drum device from an attach-point in the center of the bay.
He had conceived his plan shortly after making Enterprise flyable. Realizing that a Soviet spaceplane attack might come with very little warning, making it impossible for them to abandon the station, he'd suggested loading up Enterprise's cargo bay with Thor interceptor missiles and launching them by shuttle-directed remote-control.
In spite of the disaster after the first time they'd tried to launch Thor missiles for station defense, Saint-Michael had agreed to the plan, at least the idea, and told Marty and Hampton to load the missiles. But by the time the Soviets had announced their assault by firing their chemical laser, he'd changed his mind. Enterprise would only be used to carry the Skybolt laser module to a high-storage orbit.
That had been it — until Marty had gotten back aboard Enterprise to get ready to accept the Skybolt laser module Ann would be detaching. From his docking point beneath the central keel near the Skybolt module, the eight remaining Thor missiles he'd taken off the shuttle only hours before had been well within reach of his remote manipulator arm. When the Soviet spaceplane attack had begun it had not been difficult to detach two missiles, activate the mechanical ejector-arming mechanism, stow the missiles in Enterprise's cargo bay, and jet away from the station. He had deliberately circled Armstrong once to get the Russians' attention, then flown away with as much speed as possible…
It took thirty seconds for Marty to extract the two missiles from the cargo bay, then clicked on the air-to-air comm channel. "Armstrong, this is Enterprise. Come in."
"Marty." Saint-Michael's voice again. "Where are you?"
"Where I should be, General. Listen, you have to launch-commit the Thor missiles now."
"You got some of the Thors, on board?" Saint-Michael didn't wait for a reply, instead immediately threw himself toward the far side of the master SBR control console hunting for the Thor missile controls. Almost every control panel had been moved or replaced, and during the first spaceplane attack the impact explosions had thrown any unsecured panels all across the module. But after a few frenetic moments of searching he found the Thor arming controls and ordered an automatic launch-commit on all Thor missiles.