The Kill Button Read online

  THE

  KILL BUTTON

  A Novel

  TOM HRON

  PROMAN, INC.

  ANCHORAGE – PHOENIX

  Copyright © 2012 by Tom Hron.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the written permission of the author and the publisher except for the use of short quotations in book reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing, 2012

  ISBN-13 978-0-9840515-8-8

  ISBN-10 0-9840515-8-9

  Proman, Inc.

  Anchorage - Phoenix

  [email protected]

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  AREA 51, NEVADA

  Harry Sharp’s life had become a snake pit where deception was a virtue and fiction was the truth. He was caught in a game of blind man’s bluff with deadly weapons, but quitting was out of the question.

  “Blue Ghost, cleared for takeoff.”

  He clicked his flight helmet’s microphone twice to acknowledge the controller, taxied between the runway lights, and took a deep breath. There would be nothing but the night sky when he lifted off and rocketed straight up for the first 50 miles. Scanning the flat panel’s flight data once again, he applied full power. The Aurora slammed him into its seat and turned the darkness incandescent with white-hot fire. Other than those people he had worked with at the Skunk Works in Palatal, California, and then at Groom Lake in Area 51, no one knew that he and the supersecret demonstrator even existed, official policy for the air base that Washington, D.C. always denied it operated.

  He watched the altimetry numbers spin by—20,000 meters, 30,000 meters, and 80,000 meters. Time to roll over on his back, steer the beginning track, and set the trajectory for a low earth orbit, 115 miles high, he thought to himself. He double-checked the computer command, the orbital maneuvering, and the reaction control systems because there was great danger in what he was doing. The Aurora hadn’t been taken into LED before, and if the combined technologies of the SR-71 Blackbird, the Space Shuttle, and the F-35 Lightning II failed on the first try, no one could help him. The new strike-fighter was invisible to everyone, no matter how sophisticated their radar was. His stomach trickled with sweat as if spiders were crawling around. Stay calm, he told himself, because he was almost there. He shut down the engines and checked the groundspeed at 18,000 miles an hour. In less than 90 minutes he’d be back home.

  He keyed the microphone button. “Blue Ghost is straight and level.”

  Every downlink was to be innocuous, even though the on-board computers had scrambled his voice, since the Air Force didn’t want anyone having the slightest clue. The top-secret project was as important as life and death to the very few who knew about it.

  “Roger, and would you check your FDS?” answered the controller.

  Clicking his mike again, he pressed the enunciator panel’s test button and watched all the liquid crystal displays flash green. Why had Groom Lake asked about the flight data subsystem? he wondered. That seemed odd, and had something malfunctioned?

  He loosened his shoulder harness, wanting more freedom in the weightlessness around him. Riding the world upside down, he thought. New York City’s golden lights, like a spidery jewel, passed below him in the dark. Just beyond, he saw the black abyss of the Atlantic Ocean and a yellow sunrise coming around the planet. The brown and green Canary Islands came first, adrift in the dawn on a sapphire sea. Africa lay in the distance, the red Sahara stained by sienna and desert varnish, each color highlighted by the sparkling Mediterranean Sea. Sicily, Italy, and the Alps, dark green with emerald lakes and the yellow coast of Croatia nearby, were on the distant side. The Middle East, reddish orange beside blue, was striated with clouds drifting on the jet stream.

  He watched long sand dunes go by, heaped in rows and brightened by the sun to crimson on top and blue on the bottom. Gleaming in Tibet’s bright air, the Himalayas rose to meet him, gray-blue glaciers plowing down their sides and Mount Everest towering over everything. Siberia lay on the far side, Lake Baikal breaking its forbidding darkness. Moments later, the olive ground and the muddy rivers of China slipped beneath him. Japan and the Pacific Ocean, scattered with thunderclouds of white lightning, were just ahead. He had caught the nighttime once more.

  He illuminated the reentry checklist, turned the Aurora tail first, and commanded the orbital maneuvering engines to burn a thrusting sequence for deorbit. When he saw 200 knots, he swung the nose again, rolled upright, and felt the control system level the wings. The night-lights of Los Angeles were only 4,000 miles away.

  “Dreamland, Blue Ghost is back with you,” he said. An hour had passed since his last radio transmission, revealing just how fast the new fighter could reach any part of the world, make its target kill, and return to the States.

  “Roger, call us on final approach,” said the controller.

  Once again, he pressed the mike button. “Okay, I’m starting my descent now.”

  Groom Lake would know that he’d left orbit and was coming back into the atmosphere again. There wouldn’t be any need for further communications until he’d reached 400,000 feet and the entry interface had set the nose and the wings at 40 degrees angle of attack. The avionics said that he was getting close, descending at 25,000 feet per second.

  Suddenly, static sounding like geomagnetic disturbances from solar flares filled his flight helmet and the demonstrator started oscillating. What in hell had gone wrong? His heartbeat and breathing jumped because somehow he’d hit a pulse of high-frequency radio waves.

  The controller’s voice burst into his helmet. “Blue Ghost, your approach is too steep. Reenter orbit—reenter orbit!”

  He was within thirty seconds of being cremated, and the people watching the night sky along the West Coast would think they had just seen a shooting star, because that’s how fast it would be.

  “Negative, Dreamland, I’m on the joystick.” He would ricochet off the atmosphere and be lost in space if he overcorrected. The spiders were really crawling now!

  “Blue Ghost, go backup—go backup—”

  “Negative, too late—” He was losing it and didn’t have time to talk. When an orbiter came down, reentry procedure required that you roll left and right while decreasing the angle of attack so the heat and the energy of the ship would dissipate. But he didn’t have enough left of his flight displays to be sure of anything, let alone the pitch and roll angles. The leading edges were beginning to burn.

  “Blue Ghost, abort—repeat abort. Reenter orbit!”

  “Neg—” Then he realized the radio had failed because he’d gotten the fuselage too hot. He was on his own.

  The aft reaction control system was still alive, letting him fly with its thrusters, manually firing them with the joystick. There was a chance that he could save the aircraft.

  He quick
ly rolled left and right, S-turning against what little horizon he could see, using the roll angles to lower the vertical component of lift, slowing the Aurora, trying to get the descent velocity below 19,000 feet per second. The speed brake could only be used below mach 10, and he had to decrease the angle of attack as well, to 15 degrees at 100,000 feet. The ailerons and the rudder wouldn’t activate until he’d slowed to mach 3. A thousand things raced through his mind.

  He prayed, punched on the speed brakes, then watched them turn orange, melting before his eyes. They had slowed him a little, but not enough. Now there was no way to save the Aurora, and he’d be lucky to stay alive. Again and again, he fired the RCS thrusters, rolling, keeping the surfaces as cool as possible, waiting for the rudder and the ailerons to activate once the sensors had measured enough dynamic pressure. If he could only reach 100,000 feet, he might still live. Embers started flying past his windows.

  At last he saw that he was low enough, but now the flight controls were jammed with melting debris, leaving him spinning out of control. With only seconds left to save himself, he blew the cockpit module free, screaming as it smashed against his body. He readied himself for the second explosion, wondering if he would live through it.

  The ejection system had been made in two parts—the module for near-space and the seat capsule after a safe altitude had been reached. His mind’s eye saw himself falling and falling from 100,000 feet, plummeting until there was enough oxygen to live.

  End over end he tumbled, everything turning blacker because of the lower altitudes. What only took nanoseconds felt like hours, and he began to believe the second part had failed, that he’d hit the ground at warp speed.

  When he had almost given up hope, the explosive charges on the seat blew him into the sky, the pitch-black void where he had no visual reference at all. The parachute slapped him into reality and finally he knew up from down, a simple thing having never tasted so good before. He screamed, then screamed again, partly for the joy of living through the ejection and partly for freeing himself from the terror he’d felt. But, as he floated down, he knew his nightmare was far from over.

  The Groom Lake controller pulled his headset off and faced the two men behind him, an Air Force brigadier general and a silver-haired man in a tailored gray suit and black Gucci shoes. No one else was in the room.

  The brigadier general fixed his eyes on the controller. “I want to remind you of the secrecy oath you signed. None of this ever happened and if you say anything … to your wife, your brother, I don’t give a damn who, you’ll face the death penalty or spend the rest of your life in jail. Is that clear?”

  Looking sick to his stomach, the controller quickly nodded, turned, and started switching off his radios.

  The silver-headed man tapped the general’s shoulder and cocked his head to one side, gesturing they should leave. “We need to talk,” he said. “Let’s find someplace quiet.”

  Both walked downstairs to a conference room scattered with magazines, newspapers, and paper cups half full of cold black coffee. The walls were painted latrine-green and a round clock hung on the wall opposite the door. For a moment, they sat silently beside a table.

  “What do we do about all the phone calls we will get?” finally asked the general, taking off his coat and tossing it over the back of a chair. “You can bet the press will call Nellis Air Base and ask about flying saucers and similar crap. There was a hell of a flash and sonic boom where Sharp came down. What do we do, stonewall everybody?”

  “We don’t have any choice.” Like someone lost in thought, the silver-haired man tilted his head and added, “It’s three a.m., and anyone up at this hour looking for UFOs has to be crazy. The press won’t be a problem if we say the right things.”

  “What do we tell the White House?” The general glanced at the clock. “We’ve got a couple of hours and I don’t feel like ruining my career, not at my age.”

  “You won’t have to worry if you work with me. I’m at a lot more risk than you, so let me handle it.”

  “Do you think there’s any chance somebody will find the wreckage, or that Sharp lived? Either could be a big problem depending on what we do, and I sure in hell don’t feel like getting court-martialed either.”

  “It must have blown into ten thousand pieces, nothing bigger than a pop can. Harry Sharp … well, it’s almost impossible that he lived, but we have to make sure it doesn’t matter even if he did.”

  Blinking, the general sat quietly once again. Finally he said, “No one around here knows all that much about our special weapons projects except for me, and the people who worked on the Aurora were only given the need-to-know stuff for their specific part in its development. I’ll scatter them around the country so they can’t be found. I’m never permitted to say anything to anyone for national security reasons, since everything is so top secret, and just to be safe I’ll watch the crash site with a new drone that no one knows about. You just keep me out of it if something goes wrong, okay?”

  “You have my word.” The silver-haired man stood up. “Let me see Sharp’s file and use your phone. Meantime, you go home and get some rest. I’ll see you before I leave.”

  They left the conference room, walked down the hall to the general’s office, and, after handing over a red folder, the general left. Sitting down, the silver-haired man started reading. A clock made to look like an aircraft altimeter sat on the credenza behind him, ticking … ticking.

  Harry had been thirty-four years old with black hair and brown eyes. He had grown up in Montana, gone to school at the University of California, San Diego, joined the Air Force and trained as a fighter pilot. He had flown F-15 Strike Eagles and F-22 Raptors and then become an Air Force test pilot. In 2008, he’d left the service, dropped out of sight for a while, next went to work for Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works Aeronautical Sector. A couple of years later they’d sent him to Nevada to test fly the Aurora.

  His file looked almost too good to be true, the only unusual items being the unexplained absence and a divorce. He owned a condominium in Las Vegas and dated showgirls now and then, though, understandably, had spent most of his time at Area 51. His father and mother had passed away several years ago and there were no siblings. Even the divorce had gone well with Catherine and him going their different ways without much argument between them. Now she worked for Senator Robert Jefferies in Washington D.C. A file photo showed that Harry had been a good-looking guy with a bit of Apollo in him.

  The man in the tailored suit checked his Rolex watch, picked up the telephone, and dialed a series of encrypted numbers. After several rings the line answered.

  “Mr. President, this is David Skeleter and we’ve had a terrible loss out here.”

  There was a long pause as the phone gave off a stifled voice.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but we think he was killed,” Skeleter answered.

  There was a second pause.

  “All right, I’ll give you a full report when I get back. Good-bye.”

  CHAPTER 2

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  Alexis Mundy watched her boss, who was glancing over his shoulder as if someone were stalking him, become more schizophrenic by the moment. Dewey Chambers had always been a bit paranoid, but this was different. Executive Order 12958 was driving him crazy, and since he ran the Central Intelligence Agency’s classified library, there was good reason for him to be jumpy. The directive, titled Opendoor by the White House, called for the declassification of all secret documents 25 years or older. It had hit headquarters harder than if they had discovered another Aldrich Ames or an in-house Red Chinese spy. The bosses upstairs were upset and their anger was coming down on Dewey and her. They were to sort through the World War II files and send them over to the National Archives, who, of course, wanted everything. But the Top Floor didn’t think that was a good idea. There were people still alive who had been case officers, double-agents, and spooks back then, and they wanted their pasts kept secret. Dewey laid the file he’d just
finished reading on his desk, square with the desktop’s sides and corners, another compulsion of his that had taken on new proportions. “Get me NR seven-six, box CBC fifteen, account two-eight-two A, seven-six, nineteen forty-four,” he said, “and please keep it sealed.”

  Leaving her desk, she walked along the shelves and shelves of dusty boxes in classified, all smelling like rotten leaves they had been in storage so long, searching for the one he wanted. After a few minutes she found it and came back.

  “Should I log the folder you just finished?” she asked, pointing at the one on his desk.

  “No.” He squirmed a little. “Finish the ones you have, then I’ll give you these on Monday.”

  She walked back to her computer and continued logging the paperwork he’d given her earlier. He had the first say-so on what should stay secret, having been told by the bosses to err on the safe side (what the White House and the National Archives didn’t know couldn’t hurt them). In addition, before anything was sent over, the Top Floor would check her inventory, giving them the opportunity to confiscate the documents they didn’t like. Nevertheless, that didn’t explain why Dewey had asked for a file out of sequence with all the others he’d read … She forgot about it and went back to work.

  Dewey surprised her again. “Get me NR eight-two-eight, CBS twenty-three, account five zero-nine A, ten-twenty, nineteen forty-four.”

  She got up, found the file, and carried it back to him. What on earth was he doing, because he’d asked for another one out of sequence?

  “Is there something wrong?” She waited beside his desk. “Do you need help?”

  “No.” He placed the file she’d just given him on top of the first, straightening its edges so that it lay square with the one below it. “Thanks, but I won’t need you any longer.”

  She returned to her work, bothered by his strange behavior, even measured by his usual eccentricities. Both were opposite in almost every way. He was short, gray, and bleary-eyed—she was tall, blond, and blue-eyed. He never worked out—she had a dancer’s body. The only thing they had in common was their unusual memories, particularly for numbers. Give either a telephone number and they could remember it forever, and they were computer geeks as well. Clearly, he had discovered something red hot and didn’t know what to do. But why were the dates and account numbers so different from the rest?