Ark Angel

be possible for a satellite to orbit the earth just a few metres above your head. But it would have to go impossibly fast. Ark Angel is three hundred miles away. It’s therefore able to maintain its orbital velocity at just seventeen and a half thousand miles per hour. But even so, every few months it has to be reboosted. The same was true for Mir when it was in orbit, and for the International Space Station now. Every few months, rockets which are known as progress vehicles have to push all these large satellites back into space. Otherwise they’d come crashing down.

    “In fact, some of them do exactly that. The Russian space probe Mars 96 fell out of the sky on 17 November 1996 and the pieces rained down across South America. In April 2000 the second stage of a Delta rocket narrowly missed Cape Town. The world has been very lucky that so far there has been no major catastrophe. Well, almost three quarters of the planet is water. There are huge deserts and mountain ranges.
    The chances of a piece of space junk hitting a populated area are relatively small. Even so, most astronomers would agree, it is an accident waiting to happen.
    “Are you finding this hard to follow? I’ll make it easy for you. Imagine swinging a conker on a piece of string around your hand. If you slow down, the conker will fall and hit your hand. And there you have it.
    The conker is the space station; your hand is the earth. It doesn’t take a great deal to cause one to crash into the other.
    “And that is exactly what I intend to do.
    “Tomorrow, when Gabriel 7 blasts off, it will be carrying a bomb which has been exactly timed and which must be exactly positioned within Ark Angel. Everything has been worked out on computers and the program is locked in. If you look at a map, you will find that Washington is positioned at around thirty-eight degrees north. The angle of inclination followed by Ark Angel—its flight path—is also thirty-eight degrees. This means that every time it orbits the earth, it passes directly over Washington.
    “The bomb wilt go off two hours after Gabriel 7 has docked with Ark Angel—at exactly half past four. This will have the effect of knocking Ark Angel out of its orbit. The space station will begin to topple towards the earth. It will enter the earth’s atmospheric drag and after that things will begin to happen very quickly.
    The more atmosphere that surrounds it, the faster it will fall. Soon it will be tumbling—out of control. Or that is how it will seem. In fact, I have secretly programmed what are known as de-orbit manoeuvres into Ark Angel. Although it will seem to be moving haphazardly, it will be as accurate as an independently targeted nuclear missile.

    “Can you imagine it, Alex? Ark Angel weighs about seven hundred tonnes. Of course, much of it will burn up as it re-enters the earth’s atmosphere. But I estimate that about sixty per cent of it will survive. That’s about four hundred tonnes of molten steel, glass, beryllium and aluminium travelling at around fifteen thousand miles an hour. The Pentagon is the primary target. The building will be destroyed. All the people working there will die, and every last scrap of information will be incinerated. I rather suspect that the shock wave will destroy most of Washington too. The Capitol. The White House. The various monuments.
    The parks. A shame, because I’ve always thought it a rather attractive city. But very little of it will be left.”
    Alex closed his eyes. Jack Starbright was in Washington, visiting her parents. Maybe she would survive the hideous explosion that Drevin had planned. But thousands of people—hundreds of thousands—would not. Once again Alex found himself wondering how he had got himself into this. Had it really all begun with a doctor ordering him two weeks’ R & R?
    “And now I must tell you about Force Three,” Drevin said.
    “You don’t need to,” Alex replied. He had worked this part out for himself. “You need someone to take the blame. Force Three don’t exist. You invented them.”
    “Exactly.” Drevin waved his glass at the four men standing near by. “I consider Force Three to be the most brilliant aspect of the entire operation. Obviously, if Ark Angel is sabotaged, if it falls on the Pentagon, I will be the main suspect. So I had to create a scapegoat. I had to make sure that I was above suspicion.
    “I created Force Three. I hired the men you see here now. Under my instructions, they