Operation Doomsday Read online

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  Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini's in her most dangerous spy role yet! She has only forty-eight hours to stop the Russians from opening a lunar capsule. For, if the capsule were ever to be opened, the deadly Moonstone Virus inside would contaminate and kill every living thing on Earth within fifty days. The Baroness must use everything she has — beauty, brains and body — to save the world from Operation Doomsday — total destruction!

  * * *

  Paul KenyonChapter 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

  * * *

  Paul Kenyon

  Operation Doomsday

  Chapter 1

  There were about thirty men scattered through the vast gray cavern of Mission Control, sitting wherever they could find chairs among the empty rows of dead consoles. Most of them were NASA brass. The rest were sober, business-suited men with that Washington look.

  A bright point of light appeared on the left edge of the enormous display screen at the front of the room. The light drifted toward center screen as the remote camera operator adjusted his alignment.

  "Is that it?" said the young doctor from the Center for Disease Control.

  "That's it," said NASA's deputy director. "The Russians are putting it down in the Taurus-Littrow region, just about where our computer projection said they would."

  The spark of light grew, still centered. The bleak horizon, looking like lumpy oatmeal, appeared as the remote lens, a quarter-million miles distant, tracked the spark downward.

  "The picture's coming from the camera they left mounted on the lunar rover?" said the man from Defense.

  "That's right," the deputy director said.

  "I thought it was supposed to be dead."

  "That's what we told the public."

  The thirty VIPs leaned forward as the spidery outline of the Russian lander took shape against the stars. The spark had grown into a blossom of flame. The lunar landscape rushed toward it. The flare died abruptly, and the Russian lander dropped the last few feet, sending up a slow-motion cloud of debris. The lander sat there, squat and ugly, while the dust settled slowly around it.

  "Smack in the middle of the Apollo 17 landing site," someone said unnecessarily.

  The camera operator swung the distant lens in a slow circle so the VIPs could see the litter left behind by Cernan and Schmitt: the boxy form of the solar wind spectrometer, the tilting grid of the laser reflector, the extended panels of the gravimeter. The camera paused for a moment when it came to the ungainly bug that was the American lunar module's spent landing stage. The Russian lander had come down barely a hundred yards away from it.

  After a while a hatch opened in the side of the Russian lander. It unfolded into a ramp. There was movement inside; light glinted off something metallic.

  A preposterous vehicle rolled down the ramp. It resembled a washtub on eight old fashioned wire wheels. There was a pair of TV cameras on movable stalks, looking like lobster eyes, and a set of mechanical claws.

  "Another Lunokhod," somebody murmured.

  "I don't like this," said the CDC man.

  "It can't do any harm if they take a look," said the FDA man reasonably. "It's not as if they were going to send samples back to earth, the way they did with Luna 16 and 20."

  The Lunokhod scuttled around the site, sniffing at the American equipment like an inquisitive cockroach. It paused at the solar wind spectrometer, its lobster claws quivering.

  "By God, if they knock that over, we ought to lodge a diplomatic protest!" the deputy director said through clenched teeth.

  But the Lunokhod backed off carefully. A ripple of relieved laughter swept through the room.

  "What the hell is it doing now?" the CDC man said.

  The Lunokhod was picking up small pieces of litter in its claws: a geological hammer dropped by Schmitt, the damaged fiberglass fender that Cernan had accidentally ripped off the moon rover back in 1972. It held the souvenirs up to its TV eyes for a close-up view, then stowed them in a compartment that opened up in the washtub.

  The FDA man stirred uneasily. "What'd it do that for?" he said. "Why didn't they just drop it when they were through looking?"

  The Lunokhod had discovered the TV camera mounted on the moon rover. It rolled up for a closer look. On the big screen, the thirty men in Houston could see the Lunokhod's own TV eyes swivel directly toward them, giving an uncanny illusion of an intelligent creature staring at them.

  "I wonder if it's the same driver who operated Lunokhod 1 and 2," the deputy director said. "According to a Russian joke, he's a Moscow cabbie."

  As they watched, the Lunokhod raised its lobster claws at them in a brief, unmistakable obscene gesture.

  "Insolent bastard!" someone said.

  The Lunokhod backed away again and began diligently collecting rock samples on the fringes of the area. Manipulating a small shovel with great skill in its pincers, it transferred the samples to a row of capsules mounted on a rack on the washtub. As each cylinder was filled, the Lunokhod sealed it, twisting a knob that evidently flooded the capsule with an inert gas.

  The CDC doctor gripped the arms of his chair. "Did you see that?" he said in a strained voice. "It filled that last capsule with those pearly rocks that look like feldspar."

  "Relax," the FDA representative said. "It's probably just going to take the samples back to some kind of automated laboratory aboard the lander — send the results of the analysis back to earth by telemetry."

  "That's right," the deputy director said soothingly. "Those Lunokhods are designed to stay up there and explore. The first one operated for ten months before the batteries gave out."

  "Then why the gas?" the CDC man said. "The moon's a vacuum anyway. You don't need an inert atmosphere to protect biological samples from contamination."

  The two doctors looked at one another in wordless surmise. The big room had suddenly become very quiet.

  Everybody stuck it out for the next eighteen hours, while the Lunokhod continued its sampling operations. None of the thirty men left the third floor Mission Operations Control Room, except for brief visits to the John. Food, coffee and cigarettes were sent in. A few of the onlookers catnapped in their chairs.

  By that time they were all rumpled and bleary-eyed. Even the Washington men had lost their impersonal tidyness. The man from Defense was snoring, his head on the console apron in front of him. His assistant shook him to wake him up in time for the next development.

  "What's happening?" he yawned.

  The Lunokhod was rolling purposefully toward the Russian lander, its mesh wheels leaving tracks in the gray porridge of the valley.

  "I think it's going to…" The assistant trailed off, and stared at the screen.

  The Lunokhod rolled up the ramp. It paused for a moment at the top, then disappeared into the square blackness of the opening. The hatch closed.

  A ring of clamps around the skirt of the lander fell away. A fiery belt appeared at the craft's waist, and grew wider.

  "There's an ascent stage," the deputy director whispered.

  The young doctor from CDC was clutching him by the sleeve. "You said the Lunokhods stay on the moon and explore!"

  The deputy director looked at him bleakly. "The Russians are showing us another space spectacular. This Lunokhod's going to return to earth."

  The ascent stage popped out of the spindly leg
ged base like an egg jumping out of an egg cup. A cloud of moon dust boiled upward, and then the Russian craft was rising above it, heading for home. In Houston, the remote camera operator followed it until it was a pinprick among the stars.

  "Oh my God!" the CDC man said, burying his face in his hands. "What are we going to do now?"

  The deputy director was already picking up the scrambler phone. The man from Defense, his face white as ashes, was at his elbow.

  "Put me through to the President," the deputy director said.

  While he waited, some of the VIPs tried to leave the Control Room. They found their way blocked by armed guards at the doors.

  "Mr. President," the deputy director said, "this is Houston." His voice broke. "It's happened. It'll be here in approximately sixty hours." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Doomstone."

  * * *

  The President had ordered everybody out of the room on the second floor of the Pentagon except for the senior Presidential translator — the Army colonel who was currently in command of the Hot Line.

  He'd brought only two officials with him: the Secretary of Defense and the director of the National Security Agency. The NSA director — like the President and the Secretary — had been routed out of bed in the middle of the night. But unlike his two superiors, he looked spruce and chipper. Heading an intelligence operation bigger and more secret than the CIA tends to make a man unflappable.

  "What time is it in Moscow?" the President said.

  The Hot Line commander glanced at his watch and made a calculation. "Nine oh four in the morning, Mr. President," he said.

  "Then they're not getting the Premier out of bed?"

  "No sir. He's an early riser. He's generally at his desk by eight-thirty."

  The President looked haggard. He hadn't taken time to shave. "Then what's taking him so long?"

  The colonel cleared his throat. "It should only be a few more minutes, Mr. President They'll have had to get him out of his office in the Kremlin, and then he'd have to walk across to the other side of Red Square to the party headquarters building, where they keep the Hot Line terminal."

  The teleprinter began to chatter. Instantly, the colonel was bending over the printout, reading the Cyrillic characters as they appeared. He began translating almost immediately.

  "To the President of the United States of America. From the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Your message headed Urgent, Code Omega, received. The Premier, and the chief science advisor for the Soviet Union, are present at this end, as you requested. We are prepared to receive the vital information you indicate you wish to transmit Please proceed."

  The President took a deep breath and began talking.

  The colonel moved to the English-language keyboard. His fingers flew over the keys, tapping out the message as fast as the President could dictate. It would be translated into Russian at the other end — standard operating procedure in a world where a slight misunderstanding over a word or phrase could lead to thermonuclear war.

  The electronically scrambled signals streamed into outer space from the big directional antenna on the roof of NSA's nine-story Operations Building Annex at Fort Meade, Maryland. They were picked up by Intelsat 4, in a parking orbit over the Atlantic, and bounced to Russia's Molniya I communications satellite. The old Hot Line cable system, routed through Stockholm and Helsinki, had been phased out ever since Washington and Moscow had begun to worry about possible cable sabotage by Scandinavian extremists.

  The colonel hadn't been prepared for the content of the message the President was feeding him for transmission. He was a professional, and his hands never faltered on the keys. But when he finished, his face was white.

  He looked mutely at the President. "Is it true, sir?" he said, breaking protocol.

  "It's true all right, Colonel," the President said.

  "What do we do now?" said the Secretary of Defense.

  "We wait," the President said. "They'll have to talk it over."

  They waited for an hour and a half. The President paced. looking at his watch from time to time. There was no conversation. Twice during that time, the President picked up the secure phone and gave instructions to waiting aides outside. Once there was a discreet tapping at the door, and he admitted a sleepy, unshaven White House assistant who handed him a thick folder with a President's Eyes Only stamp on the cover.

  The Cyrillic teleprinter began its machine gun rattle. Everybody in the room instinctively jumped. The colonel was the first to recover. Before the carriage had jumped to the second line, he was at an adjoining keyboard, craning his neck to read the emerging message, typing his translation by touch.

  When he finished, his face was even whiter. Wordlessly, he ripped off a length of stiff paper and handed it to the President.

  The President read the message and handed it to the Secretary of Defense and the NSA director.

  "It's no use," he said. "He didn't believe me."

  The Secretary of Defense looked at his watch. "The Russian capsule should touch down in approximately fifty-four hours. Couldn't you at least talk them into bringing it down in a remote area?"

  The President grimaced. "I can try. I don't think it'll do much good."

  "If they open that capsule, it's all over. For them and for us."

  The President said. "The Russians want a shot at some moon rocks too." He gestured toward the translated message. "They seem to think Doomstone is a ploy to undercut Soviet space prestige, now that our own lunar program is finished."

  The Secretary of Defense sat down. His hands were visibly trembling. "God help us all."

  The President turned to his NSA director. "What are our options, General?" he said quietly.

  "There's only one option, Mr. President," NSA said. "Operation Doomsday."

  The President nodded. He turned to the Secretary of Defense. "It's your responsibility to get Doomsday rolling. The machinery's ready. It's existed ever since the Houston Disaster of 1972."

  The Secretary got up and left without a word, taking the thick file folder with him. The President looked meaningfully at the Hot Line colonel. He got up and left too.

  "Is this room secure?" the President said.

  "I had a team from the COMSEC section check it out just before you arrived."

  "You understand we're going to have to use Coin on this one?"

  "I understand, Mr. President."

  "It may destroy Coin's effectiveness as an agent. Your superspy is going to have to attend the Doomstone briefings. His cover may be blown."

  NSA smiled thinly. "Maybe not, Mr. President. I think we can trust Coin to find a way to keep his identity secret. Our friends at the CIA are still going crazy, trying to crack Coin's cover."

  The President laughed in spite of himself. "General, I realize that I'm prohibited from knowing Coin's identity — I signed that particular presidential directive myself. And I appreciate how you've outfoxed CIA. But don't tell me you don't know who your own agent is."

  "I don't want to know, Mr. President. I'm just the man who passes on the assignments. And about a million and a quarter worth of operating funds." He looked at his watch. "I better get down to the cookie factory and turn the Key."

  The President nodded. "You do that. We're running out of time."

  * * *

  It was three o'clock in the morning when John Farnsworth got the call. He was watching a late movie on TV — he hadn't been able to sleep, and he was sitting in front of the set with three fingers of Scotch, neat.

  Farnsworth was a lean, confident man in his fifties, with the commanding good looks you often see in distinguished military men or the chief executives of large corporations. Even insomnia and a rumpled bathrobe couldn't take away his air of authority and good breeding. He had a lean, civilized face with a firm mouth and penetrating eyes, steel-gray hair and a clipped mustache.

  The slow on TV was an old Western. Randolph Scott was standing poised on a dusty str
eet, his hand hovering above his holster, facing down the bad man. He opened his mouth to speak.

  "Key, do you read me?" the TV set said. Randolph Scott's lips continued to move, out of synch. "Repeat, Key, do you read me? Please acknowledge."

  Farnsworth snapped to attention. He put down the Scotch and crossed the darkened living room to the television. It was a big color set, a little bulkier than ordinary. He reached around back and found the vertical hold knob. He pressed it instead of twisting it, punching in the code of the day.

  Two hundred miles away, in a windowless steel and concrete building on the outskirts of Washington, a giant IBM 7090 computer received Farnsworth's signal from the MESTAR (Message Storage and Relay) satellite that had bounced it. A couple of nanoseconds later it signaled its peripheral processors that it had located the person known as Key. Obediently, the computer peripherals stopped their electronic searching for Key at his office, country home, in his two automobiles and his private aircraft.

  The NSA communications officer on duty turned to the Director. "He's ready, General. You can go ahead."

  The NSA Director looked amused. "That damned computer knows who Key is, and we don't."

  "It knows where Key is," the communications officer corrected. "It doesn't know who he is. And the 'where' is just an electronic address programmed into the computer. He could be anywhere on this planet."

  "Security," the Director sighed. "All right, Andrews, leave me alone with this electronic monster." When the communications officer was out of earshot, he shoved a cassette into the optical scanner. He bent over the scrambler microphone and began talking.

  In his New York apartment, Farnsworth watched Randolph Scott and the dusty Western street fade from his television screen. Now there was a picture of an absurd little vehicle that looked like a washtub on eight wire-mesh wheels.

  The TV set spoke with the voice of the Director of the National Security Agency. "You're looking at the Soviet Lunokhod IV. Approximately six hours ago it took off from the moon with a load of rocks from the old Apollo 17 landing site."