From the Publisher

THE PLACE The International Space Station. Docked to it, the Space Shuttle Constitution. Crewed by ten astronauts trained to recover the $100-million cargo aboard the first privately launched lunar sample-return mission.

THE EVENT Sabotage. The containers from the Moon hold more than rocks and moondust, and there are those who are willing to kill to keep that knowledge from the world.

So begins the riveting new novel by acclaimed writing team Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens — a relentless tale of high-tech conspiracy and suspense that reaches back to the darkest secrets of the space race of the 1960s, and ahead to the startling new technologies that will drive us to the Moon in the next decade.

Freefall marks the long-awaited return of the heroes of Icefire — the Reeves-Stevens novel Stephen King hailed as: "The best suspense novel of its kind since The Hunt for Red October."

Now U.S. Navy Captain Mitch Webber, outspoken oceanographer Cory Rey, and Air Force Major Wilhemina Bailey of the United States Space Command are reunited in an even more harrowing adventure that pits them against the ruthless inheritors of a staggering conspiracy that could change history.

From the covert infiltration of China's most secure aerospace facility and the stirring heroism of astronauts and cosmonauts confronting disaster in space, to sudden violence on ordinary suburban streets and the startling revelation of America's most secret space program, Freefall is a nonstop explosive read that in trueReeves-Stevens fashion makes readers wonder where truth ends and fiction begins.

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Chapter 1: RED COBRA 8

17:22 ZULU, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2

Captain Mitchell Webber, USN, fell through the night, a shadow on the full Moon. The muted roar of the silenced MC-130E Combat Talon I transport above him was already lost in the biting hiss of icy wind against his helmet. He held his arms close, kept his head down, angled his body for rapid descent.

He punched into the dense cloud layer at 11,000 feet, the transition from clear air marked only by the disappearance of the stars and the streaming rivulets of water on his laser-attenuation goggles. Writhing threads of condensed moisture flashed like pale green lightning in the glow of situational data displayed on the goggles' lenses.

Webber's concentration was absolute, focused on his dropping altitude, the final digits of the readout on his lenses' virtual REDEYE screen a blur. He felt the snap and flutter of his gear and harness straps against his drysuit, but no sense of motion. That would come later, he knew. In the last few seconds.

A voice whispered in his helmet speakers: the communications systems operator of the departing transport plane, transmitting on an encrypted channel. "Freefall Base to Angel One: Angel Two is flying."

Freefall was current designation for the Department of Defense's joint foreign-technology retrieval program, run by the U.S. Special Operations Command. Angel Two was Webber's baby-sitter on this mission: Colonel Daniel Varik, USAF Special Forces. Varik's job tonight was to ensure Angel One — Webber — got in and accomplished the primary goal. Getting out again was not a necessary condition of success.

Webbercaught the flash of a small red alert square on the computer screen in the upper left of his goggles, next to his Global Positioning Satellite coordinates: 39.37.09 N, 103.42.15 E. A yellow X slid out of the center of two brackets. He was drifting to the west.

Webber adjusted the angle of his fall by extending his right arm and leg, again with no corresponding sense of movement. But the yellow X re-centered in the target and his GPS numbers moved back into an acceptable range, guiding him to a satellite-determined drop zone six inches square. The flashing red alert winked out. Though still plunging blindly through clouds, he was back on the proper free-fall trajectory.

He refocused on his altitude reading, making sure it matched what he'd been told to expect. The base of the cloud cover at target coordinates was 1,500 feet above ground level. The number had come from the transport pilot, just before the green jump light had winked on in the belly of the plane.

He checked his terminal velocity — 120 miles per hour. At that speed, his life expectancy after punching the cloud base would be 8.5 seconds. He remained unconcerned. Navy SEALs did not succumb to doubt.

Then Webber broke through the clouds and everything happened at once. Absolute darkness was replaced by a curving constellation of glittering lights tracing the deep sloping face of the immense Shiyang Dam.

Simultaneously, Webber felt the explosive pop of the automatic-activation device in his main chute as its barometric sensor fired the piston that cut the deployment cord.

An instant later, his viewpoint changed and he was looking at the mountainous horizon against the faint moonglow of the clouds. That meant his main chute had opened and he was now descending vertically.

Webber glanced up to check the inner shell of his black, wing-shaped canopy silhouetted against the pale gray clouds. He confirmed his lines weren't fouled, then looked down, focusing past the REDEYE readout in his goggles.

The layout of what lay below him was exactly as he had memorized during the virtual simulations at Fort Benning: concrete dam, associated hydroelectric-generator outbuildings, and two narrow service roads that wound high into the hills on either side of the installation.

He no longer needed the GPS readouts to find his drop zone.

Webber tugged on his control lines to guide his parafoil to a spot 1,000 feet back from the midpoint of the dam. Ten seconds later, he plunged into the near-freezing, dark water of the Shiyang reservoir. Right on target, deep within enemy territory.

Not that the People's Republic of China was America's enemy.

Yet.

The target was one of twelve sites given the code name Red Cobra.

The first of these sites had a history dating back to the nineties, when China had embarked on a program of building hydroelectric facilities that would dwarf the ambitious construction plans of Chairman Mao and his Great Leap Forward. The gigantic reservoirs were to displace millions of rural Chinese and disrupt vast environmental ecosystems, while priceless archaeological treasures yet to be found would disappear forever. All in the name of modernizing agriculture and efficiently bringing inexpensive, renewable electrical power to the masses.

The agriculture analysts who consulted for the Central Intelligence Agency hadn't thought much of the new Chinese initiative. Their figures indicated the Chinese were building to overcapacity in both irrigation needs and power requirements. Until a low-level civilian analyst in NIMA — the National Imagery and Mapping Agency — stumbled upon a small anomaly.

While reconciling geospatial data of China's Gansu province, which had been radar-mapped from the space shuttle in 1994 with the results of the 2000 Shuttle Radar Topography Mission conducted by NASA for what was then the Defense Mapping Agency, the analyst discovered the topography of an otherwise unremarkable valley had significantly changed.

Instead of its earlier depth of almost nine hundred feet, Xiao Valley was registering a new depth of just under three hundred. The computer-comparison program, which was designed to look for topographical changes indicating new roads and construction that might reveal potential new military targets, automatically flagged this difference for a human analyst to review.

Following standard operating procedure, the analyst checked the coordinates' current state through visual imagery provided by the constellation of Keyhole satellites that monitored China on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis. Those images revealed the valley in question was now the reservoir of a large hydroelectric plant constructed sometime between the 1994 and 2000 shuttle missions, in an area where the local population did not appear to be large enough to justify its size.

Seven months after the NIMA analyst had noticed a change in topography, the combined efforts of the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and, finally, the National Security Agency, came to the astonishing though inescapable conclusion that the Chinese had flooded the valley to make it a reservoir, and then had built an underwater installation in it that had escaped satellite detection. The hydroelectric facility was merely a decoy to account for the construction activity associated with the hidden installation.

This sobering discovery led to a thorough review of China's more than 80,000 hydroelectric and reservoir facilities. At twelve of these facilities, signs of other hidden underwater installations were now revealed.

Code-named Red Cobra installations, the twelve sites were subjected to intense, ongoing investigation through orbital imagery, electronic signal intercepts, and, on occasion, on-site observations by clandestine teams of special forces operators.

Overall, the efforts of the American intelligence community were effective in peeling back the layers of secrecy surrounding the twelve Red Cobra targets. Some had been constructed for the assembly of weapons, some for storage of those weapons. Several were linked to high-energy laser- and microwave-weapons research, which explained why considerable power-generation capability had been built in areas where there weren't enough people to use it.

Only Red Cobra 8 had defied explanation.

Then, one month before Mitch Webber and Daniel Varik stepped into empty air over the center of China, 1,000 miles west of Beijing, satellite images showed Red Cobra 8 was being repurposed. From measurements of the height of the shadows they cast, transport trucks were arriving empty, and leaving full. Employee car and bus traffic diminished. Visible offices no longer remained lit at night.

The conclusion was obvious: Whatever activities had been under way at Red Cobra 8 were reaching an end. If America ever wanted to determine what those activities had been, there would be one last chance for a mission. And if Command's current theory of those activities was correct, there was only one person America could send in.

Mitch Webber.

Even as his momentum drove him deep into the near-freezing waters of the reservoir, Webber took action. His first move was to pull the backup oxygen-supply mouthpiece from his buoyancy-control jacket. Blew into it, cleared it of water, then breathed.

The device worked, buying him time to unlatch his parachute harness and unused emergency chute, then swap his jump helmet and goggles for a full-face diving mask, complete with Divelink transceiver for underwater communication. The instant he tugged on his mask, cleared it, and opened the valve on his LAR-V rebreather, time ceased to be critical for the rest of his transition procedure.

Because of the sophisticated computerized mechanisms in the LAR-V, he could now remain underwater for up to eighteen hours as the rebreather constantly absorbed his exhaled carbon dioxide in a soda-lime powder and replaced it with precisely measured volumes of oxygen. Under current conditions, though, Webber knew the actual limiting factor on the length of his dive was not oxygen, but the operational lifetime of the batteries powering the compact heating element strapped against the small of his back. In the reservoir's frigid water, he needed the heatpack's warmth that was circulated by his own blood flow through the rest of his body.

Still sinking, Webber calmly drew twin-vane black fins over his dive boots. Then he rolled up his waterlogged parafoil, jump harness, and unused backup chute, clipped lead weights from his harness to the bundle he'd made, and released it, consigning it to the depths of the reservoir.

Lightened, but still hampered by the drag of 120 pounds of equipment, most of it clipped to his dive harness in black, waterproof immersion bags, he took a bearing from his compass, then began to swim for the rendezvous point.

According to the temperature display on his wrist, the reservoir's water was 38° F. That meant he had a maximum exposure time of four hours, although the mission profile called for him and his baby-sitter to undertake less than sixty minutes of diving time.

If they lived that long.

According to the determinations of the DoD's combined intelligence agencies, inside Red Cobra 8 the People's Liberation Army Air Force was developing the long-rumored, fifth-generation Chinese F-20 fighter. The advanced craft was based in part on the Russian MiG-33 Fulcrum airframe, but reportedly with a radical new single engine design that would leave the American Joint Strike Fighter standing still.

Webber and Varik were tasked first with confirming that theory, retrieving whatever plans and images they could, then ensuring those plans and images reached Freefall analysts. They could accomplish their mission either by physically returning the intelligence, or by scanning and digitizing the intelligence in the field, then transmitting it to Special Operations Command by satellite-burst communications. The second scenario did not require either of them to actually leave Chinese territory in order to complete their primary mission. However, a Fulton skyhook extraction team was already in the air, standing by to pluck them both from the ground by means of balloon-borne cables. The United States Air Force had long ago perfected the sound, radar, and flight vector profiles that allowed them to operate individual aircraft over remote areas of China while remaining invisible to China's antiquated air defense system.

There was an additional task in the mission plan, and it was that objective that had brought Webber to this moment. Varik had been selected for the Freefall assignment because he was a trained special forces operator with exceptional skill and success in conducting infiltration/exfiltration missions. But Webber knew he had been selected because he was, in a word, a thief.

His career had begun eighteen years earlier in the Navy, and he had expertly moved from F-14 carrier operations to test pilot. The wider range of aircraft he flew, the more classes of aircraft the Navy trained him to fly, until he had completed foreign-technology familiarization tours at both Wright-Patterson and Groom Lake, popularly known as Area 51. Those postings had given him the opportunity to fly Russian MiGs and a variety of one-of-a-kind experimental and captured craft, only some of which could be called airplanes.

Halfway through his career, Webber received a strong suggestion from his commanding officer to apply for SEAL training as part of a special program to take technical specialists into the field.

In the past, Navy SEALs and special forces operatives of the other services had been tasked with transporting scientists and engineers to targets within hostile territory, so they could conduct technical evaluations of enemy weapons systems and facilities. Prompted by the alarmingly high fatality rate among those specialists, Special Operations Command created a new program to turn SEALs into expert technicians, and expert technicians into SEALs.

Webber had been one of the first graduates of the program. Subsequently he'd been trained to fly craft he hadn't even suspected existed, from the crewed variant of the Venturestar reusable launch vehicle, to the hypersonic, optical stealth plane code-named Nevada Rain. So far, his training had been put to good use on three occasions, all of which had involved infiltrating enemy territory by water, and leaving at the controls of advanced concept jets. Once, while on detached duty with the Department of Energy's Nuclear Emergency Search Team, he'd even stolen America's own Nevada Rain from Wheeler AFB in Oahu. To Webber's surprise, after six long weeks of debriefing on what was now called the Icefire incident, no charges had been preferred. Instead, he had been presented with an unadorned plaque citing his unnamed contributions to "a significant accomplishment."

Though no one in Freefall Command had seriously thought that he could — or even should — attempt to fly a prototype Chinese F-20 from the Red Cobra 8 facility, the mission plan did allow him the latitude to consider the plane a target of opportunity. The fighter's blueprints and specifications were preferred, particularly if they could be obtained without PLA Air Force personnel realizing they had been compromised, but as a last resort, the DoD was willing to accept delivery of an F-20 and deal with the diplomatic fallout later. The American military establishment had not forgotten how China had dismantled a Navy EP-3E surveillance plane after a Chinese F-8 fighter had collided with it over the China Sea. Despite the best efforts of the twenty-four crew members to disable and destroy their onboard equipment under perilous conditions, critical technology had been compromised.

The U.S. military continued to look forward to payback, and SOCOMM knew Webber could deliver.

Less than ten minutes after splashdown, navigating by the twin infrared illuminators mounted to the sides of their masks, Webber and Varik reached the top surface of the hidden underwater facility where it joined the dam's inner wall. Exactly as radar imaging had indicated, there was a large water inlet leading into the facility right at that point.

Webber and Varik adjusted their buoyancy-control jackets so they floated at the mouth of the eight-foot diameter pipe, forty feet below the reservoir's surface. The mission planners had been unable to determine the purpose of the pipe, and its appearance offered no additional clues. Webber and Varik would be first to discover its purpose. After a brief exchange of hand signals, they swam into the unknown.

At sixty feet, the pipe turned sharply upward within the dam's wall. As the two men slowly swam up through the pipe, both watched their depth-gauge indicators closely. The rebreathers released no air bubbles by which their rate of ascent could be visually judged.

At an effective depth of less than fifteen feet, the pipe once again curved to the horizontal. Another fifty feet along, Webber and Varik found four large inlets on the pipe's ceiling, each approximately three feet across. Just past the inlets, their infrared illuminators revealed a metal ladder connected to the pipe wall by metal rods.

Webber and Varik reached the ladder, then looked up to see that it extended into a circular alcove that rose another five feet above the pipe's upper surface. In the ghostly green glow of the REDEYE display, it appeared the alcove was capped by a standard, watertight hatch, complete with large handwheel.

"Depth gauge says that maintenance hatch'll be even with the water level of the reservoir," Varik said. His midwestern twang was mechanically flattened by his Divelink radio's custom voice-recognition chip. It ensured the microphone didn't transmit ambient underwater sound, but sometimes made divers sound like robots. "Best guess: There's a mother of a compartment on the other side of that hatch that's filled with water, and sometimes they have to drain it fast." Then he swam up the ladder, braced his legs and gave the handwheel a twist. Webber could see that it moved easily. A few seconds after that, the water above Webber came alive with a milky blue light that spiked past Varik's dark silhouette as the colonel climbed out through the hatch.

Thirty seconds later, Varik radioed back, "It's clear."

Not knowing what to expect, Webber climbed the ladder, left the water, and sat on the circular edge of the open hatchway's coaming. When he tugged off his mask, he recoiled as a strong smell of chlorine hit him.

When he had wiped his face clear of water, Webber saw that he and Varik were in the bottom of an enormous square-sided enclosure, some forty feet deep, with walls and floor tiled in large, gleaming white ceramic panels. Each of the enclosure's walls had steel ladders, and the three large inlets on its floor corresponded to those in the entry pipe below — apparently emergency drains, as Varik had surmised.

But the enclosure was not as remarkable as what was in it. Overhead and to Webber's right was what appeared to be a giant white cylinder, at least sixty feet long and fifteen feet across. The cylinder was lying on its side in a dry-dock cradle with supports that suspended it ten feet above the enclosure's white floor. Its surface was patterned with a uniform series of perforations, large and numerous enough for the regularly spaced overhead lights on the room's high ceiling to filter through them, like sunlight through a tin can blasted by buckshot.

At first, the object made no sense. But even as Webber was puzzled by it, Varik ignored it. The colonel was already out of his diving gear and unpacking his infiltration equipment. Then, as Webber kicked off his fins and unfastened the cooling vents on his drysuit, the answer was so suddenly obvious, he felt embarrassed it had taken him this long to make sense of his surroundings.

"Varik, this is a neutral buoyancy training pool for microgravity simulation in space. And that," Webber said as he pointed up to the bizarre cylinder, "is the Chinese space station."

Varik slung an equipment pack over his shoulder, holstered his Heckler & Koch Mk 23 .45 automatic pistol, then tugged on the headband that held his swingdown infrared eyeviewer. For now, he kept the postage-stamp-size transparent screen folded up against his forehead, out of the way until needed. "That doesn't make sense." He nodded to the closest ladder. "Let's move."

Webber grabbed his own infiltration pack and pulled on his IR viewer headband as he hurried after Varik. "Of course it makes sense. Look at that thing. It's even got a mock-up of a Shenzhou capsule."

The Shenzhou was China's workhorse crewed-spacecraft. The name meant "Divine Vessel," and the name suited. It was based on the Russian Soyuz design, and in full spaceflight configuration with solar arrays spread, the craft did resemble a Christmas tree angel. There was a full-size, perforated-metal replica of one docked at the far end of the space station mock-up.

Varik paused at the ladder, looked back at Webber with a tight expression creasing his lean, lined face. "This is a top secret military facility. The whole world knows China has a space program. They've got astronauts up at their space station right now, same as we do. It's no secret."

"Taikonauts," Webber said. "Chinese astronauts are called taikonauts."

"So I've heard," Varik said. He began to climb. Air Force colonels and Navy captains were of equal rank, but for this mission, Varik had the final word for infiltration procedures. Webber followed in silence.

At floor level, everything Webber saw confirmed his conclusion. There were racks of brightly colored standard SCUBA gear for the safety divers who would accompany the astronaut trainees into the pool. Banks of computer consoles were covered with clear plastic tarps. The Chinese National Space Agency might just have well copied the design of this pool from the Sonny Carter Neutral Buoyancy Lab at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

But Varik remained uninterested. He headed straight for a set of three double doors beyond the SCUBA racks. There were black rubber mats in front of them, covering the white-tiled floor. Signs with Chinese characters hung on each door.

Varik pointed a pen-size, flexible snakehead camera at the signs, looked at the display screen on the handheld machine-vision translation unit he carried.

"'Safety station exiting...,'" Varik read as the MVTU scanned the Chinese characters and roughly translated them on its screen. "'Immersion apparatus removed not through these doors.' 'Synthetic training arenas.' 'Advance productive forces.' " He slapped the MVTU to a silent Velcro patch on his equipment harness. "Synthetic training arenas. We'll go there."

But Webber pointed to the pool. "Isn't that what this is?"

"This room is not part of our mission."

"What mission?" Webber asked. "This facility isn't what SOCOMM thought it was. It's a spaceflight training center — not a military installation. We shouldn't be here. It's a job for the cloak-and-dagger boys."

Without waiting for Webber, or responding to him, Varik opened one door slowly, peered into the corridor beyond. "Let's move," he said, and slipped out.

Webber half expected to hear the stutter of automatic gunfire as a security guard cut Varik down, but he crouched to jam a corner of a black mat into the doorjamb to keep the door from locking, then followed the man anyway, eager to get this fiasco wrapped up quickly. It was one thing to risk his life and the diplomatic relationship between China and America for vital military intelligence that could help maintain peace. It was quite another to risk the same to find out what kind of freeze-dried food Chinese taikonauts preferred.

The corridor outside the neutral-buoyancy training room was as wide as a two-lane road, low-ceilinged, and dark. Only a handful of light fixtures were working. But it was easy to see why there were no guards on patrol. The corridor walls were lined with boxes of all sizes, from cardboard file cartons to wooden packing crates. Whatever the purpose of the facility, Command was right. It was either shutting down or changing venues.

Varik was already on the other side of the corridor, using picks on the lock of another set of wide doors. Beside those doors was what appeared to be a curved security counter with a neatly built-in computer console.

Webber moved silently to take up position next to Varik, then pointed to the Chinese characters on the sign above the doors. "What's that one say?"

Varik concentrated on his lock picks. "Number One Arena."

Webber's eyes narrowed. There was no possible way Varik could know that. The MVTU he needed to translate Chinese was still attached to his harness. He had not had enough time to use the device, then pack it up in the few seconds he had been alone in the corridor.

Varik had come to this door as if he had already known it would be here.

The lock clicked. Varik pushed the door open and entered. Webber followed him into a small dimly lit anteroom with white adhesive sheets covering the floor, sticky side up. He found that another convincing round of evidence for his conclusion.

"C'mon, Varik. This is to take dust off shoes. We're in clean-room conditions."

The colonel barely looked at Webber. He simply pointed at the adhesive sheet by the inner set of doors. "Then why is there more dirt by those doors than by the one we entered through?"

Webber checked the adhesive panels at both ends of the anteroom, saw that Varik was right. The adhesive was to take dirt off the shoes of people exiting this room. But why?

Varik stepped through the inner doors and Webber followed him again, this time into darkness.

Just as Varik did, Webber switched on his infrared flashlight and flipped down his IR viewer. The arm that held the transparent screen two inches in front of his left eye was tipped with a camera lens, its focus designed for infrared. The small wearable computer unit that processed the digital signal from the camera and then created the visual display on the viewer was located on his left shoulder. The small viewer created a pale green image that appeared to float before Webber's left eye, showing him that he and Varik were in a long corridor curving both left and right. The corridor's exterior wall was made of standard concrete block. Its interior wall appeared to be ribbed metal extending upward at least thirty feet. Webber estimated the interior volume of the enclosure it circled had to be at least several hundred feet across. He suspected this section of the facility was built deep within the thick wall of the dam.

"Over there," Varik said. He moved off to the left, to a metal door with rounded corners, raised about two feet above the corridor floor.

Without hesitation, Varik tried the latch handle. The door was unlocked.

There was only one possibility that could account for the colonel's confidence: He already knew what was on the other side of that door.

Varik opened the door, stepped up and through.

Webber matched his action, right behind him, but suddenly stopped. Instead of landing on solid flooring, his feet crunched into coarse sand and gravel.

Webber shone his IR flashlight all around.

In the heart of a sophisticated aerospace installation, he and Varik were standing on a dirt floor strewn with rocks. About one hundred feet away, an object the size of a small cabin stood just at the outside range of Webber's flashlight's IR beam, making most details impossible to see. But not all.

The object was standing on four angled legs. Webber felt the hair on his neck bristle as he fit the last pieces of the puzzle into the overall picture: the Shenzhou capsule, the space station mock-up, and now this — a lunar landing vehicle. He kicked at the granulated dirt. He was in a training chamber for lunar taikonauts.

Webber turned, using his flashlight to find Varik by an open electrical cabinet, just as the colonel threw a large rocker switch.

Banks of overhead floodlights suddenly flared into life, duplicating the unshielded brilliance of the sun on the airless Moon.

Webber threw up his arm to shade his eyes, stepped back, bumped into something large and heavy.

He spun around to face a taikonaut who had somehow sneaked up on him from behind. Reflexively, Webber lashed out with a kite blow to the man's chest, only to feel his hand hit empty fabric.

"I think you killed it," Varik said.

Webber flipped up his IR viewer. His attacker was an empty lunar spacesuit hanging on a spring-loaded harness used to simulate lunar gravity.

Varik broke out his camera gear. He handed Webber a Nikon digital camera, little more than a large lens with a pistol grip. "You cover the spacesuits and the scientific gear spread out around the lander. I'll cover the rest." Varik trudged off across the simulated lunar surface, leaving Webber with the empty suit.

For a moment, Webber studied the lander. The topmost part looked familiar — a large, spherical hull studded with a series of small rounded shells, resembling an updated version of the original Apollo mission's lunar module. But the lower half from which the landing legs angled out was unlike anything he had ever seen. What appeared to be outrigger pontoons made from wide curved strips of silvered metal extended from leg to leg. Additional pontoons, if that's what they were, seemed to line the underside of the lander as well.

Varik looked back at Webber. "Ten minutes, Captain. Then we're out." He began to take a series of photographs, turning a half step in a circle after each exposure, creating a panoramic view of the simulated landscape.

Webber switched on his own camera, started photographing the suit, now positive that no one would ever pay attention to the images he took.

More than ever he was convinced that this mission was not what it seemed. No one had expected him to find an advanced concept Chinese fighter in Red Cobra 8. Instead, Colonel Varik had been sent to find the Chinese lunar lander. Which meant, as far as Webber was concerned, both their lives had been put in danger for no useful reason. If this lunar training facility had been shut down, there was a simple explanation — the time for training had ended.

The Chinese were going to the Moon, and they were going sooner than anyone had suspected.

But the question Webber couldn't answer was why the U.S. military considered that to be a threat.

Copyright © 2005 by Softwind, Inc.

Read a Sample Chapter

Freefall

Pocket Star Books

Chapter 1: RED COBRA 8
17:22 ZULU, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2

Captain Mitchell Webber, USN, fell through the night, a shadow on the full Moon. The muted roar of the silenced MC-130E Combat Talon I transport above him was already lost in the biting hiss of icy wind against his helmet. He held his arms close, kept his head down, angled his body for rapid descent.

He punched into the dense cloud layer at 11,000 feet, the transition from clear air marked only by the disappearance of the stars and the streaming rivulets of water on his laser-attenuation goggles. Writhing threads of condensed moisture flashed like pale green lightning in the glow of situational data displayed on the goggles' lenses.

Webber's concentration was absolute, focused on his dropping altitude, the final digits of the readout on his lenses' virtual REDEYE screen a blur. He felt the snap and flutter of his gear and harness straps against his drysuit, but no sense of motion. That would come later, he knew. In the last few seconds.

A voice whispered in his helmet speakers: the communications systems operator of the departing transport plane, transmitting on an encrypted channel. "Freefall Base to Angel One: Angel Two is flying."

Freefall was current designation for the Department of Defense's joint foreign-technology retrieval program, run by the U.S. Special Operations Command. Angel Two was Webber's baby-sitter on this mission: Colonel Daniel Varik, USAF Special Forces. Varik's job tonight was to ensure Angel One -- Webber -- got in and accomplished the primary goal. Getting out again was not a necessary condition of success.

Webber caught the flash of a small red alert square on the computer screen in the upper left of his goggles, next to his Global Positioning Satellite coordinates: 39.37.09 N, 103.42.15 E. A yellow X slid out of the center of two brackets. He was drifting to the west.

Webber adjusted the angle of his fall by extending his right arm and leg, again with no corresponding sense of movement. But the yellow X re-centered in the target and his GPS numbers moved back into an acceptable range, guiding him to a satellite-determined drop zone six inches square. The flashing red alert winked out. Though still plunging blindly through clouds, he was back on the proper free-fall trajectory.

He refocused on his altitude reading, making sure it matched what he'd been told to expect. The base of the cloud cover at target coordinates was 1,500 feet above ground level. The number had come from the transport pilot, just before the green jump light had winked on in the belly of the plane.

He checked his terminal velocity -- 120 miles per hour. At that speed, his life expectancy after punching the cloud base would be 8.5 seconds. He remained unconcerned. Navy SEALs did not succumb to doubt.

Then Webber broke through the clouds and everything happened at once. Absolute darkness was replaced by a curving constellation of glittering lights tracing the deep sloping face of the immense Shiyang Dam.

Simultaneously, Webber felt the explosive pop of the automatic-activation device in his main chute as its barometric sensor fired the piston that cut the deployment cord.

An instant later, his viewpoint changed and he was looking at the mountainous horizon against the faint moonglow of the clouds. That meant his main chute had opened and he was now descending vertically.

Webber glanced up to check the inner shell of his black, wing-shaped canopy silhouetted against the pale gray clouds. He confirmed his lines weren't fouled, then looked down, focusing past the REDEYE readout in his goggles.

The layout of what lay below him was exactly as he had memorized during the virtual simulations at Fort Benning: concrete dam, associated hydroelectric-generator outbuildings, and two narrow service roads that wound high into the hills on either side of the installation.

He no longer needed the GPS readouts to find his drop zone.

Webber tugged on his control lines to guide his parafoil to a spot 1,000 feet back from the midpoint of the dam. Ten seconds later, he plunged into the near-freezing, dark water of the Shiyang reservoir. Right on target, deep within enemy territory.

Not that the People's Republic of China was America's enemy.

Yet.

The target was one of twelve sites given the code name Red Cobra.

The first of these sites had a history dating back to the nineties, when China had embarked on a program of building hydroelectric facilities that would dwarf the ambitious construction plans of Chairman Mao and his Great Leap Forward. The gigantic reservoirs were to displace millions of rural Chinese and disrupt vast environmental ecosystems, while priceless archaeological treasures yet to be found would disappear forever. All in the name of modernizing agriculture and efficiently bringing inexpensive, renewable electrical power to the masses.

The agriculture analysts who consulted for the Central Intelligence Agency hadn't thought much of the new Chinese initiative. Their figures indicated the Chinese were building to overcapacity in both irrigation needs and power requirements. Until a low-level civilian analyst in NIMA -- the National Imagery and Mapping Agency -- stumbled upon a small anomaly.

While reconciling geospatial data of China's Gansu province, which had been radar-mapped from the space shuttle in 1994 with the results of the 2000 Shuttle Radar Topography Mission conducted by NASA for what was then the Defense Mapping Agency, the analyst discovered the topography of an otherwise unremarkable valley had significantly changed.

Instead of its earlier depth of almost nine hundred feet, Xiao Valley was registering a new depth of just under three hundred. The computer-comparison program, which was designed to look for topographical changes indicating new roads and construction that might reveal potential new military targets, automatically flagged this difference for a human analyst to review.

Following standard operating procedure, the analyst checked the coordinates' current state through visual imagery provided by the constellation of Keyhole satellites that monitored China on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis. Those images revealed the valley in question was now the reservoir of a large hydroelectric plant constructed sometime between the 1994 and 2000 shuttle missions, in an area where the local population did not appear to be large enough to justify its size.

Seven months after the NIMA analyst had noticed a change in topography, the combined efforts of the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and, finally, the National Security Agency, came to the astonishing though inescapable conclusion that the Chinese had flooded the valley to make it a reservoir, and then had built an underwater installation in it that had escaped satellite detection. The hydroelectric facility was merely a decoy to account for the construction activity associated with the hidden installation.

This sobering discovery led to a thorough review of China's more than 80,000 hydroelectric and reservoir facilities. At twelve of these facilities, signs of other hidden underwater installations were now revealed.

Code-named Red Cobra installations, the twelve sites were subjected to intense, ongoing investigation through orbital imagery, electronic signal intercepts, and, on occasion, on-site observations by clandestine teams of special forces operators.

Overall, the efforts of the American intelligence community were effective in peeling back the layers of secrecy surrounding the twelve Red Cobra targets. Some had been constructed for the assembly of weapons, some for storage of those weapons. Several were linked to high-energy laser- and microwave-weapons research, which explained why considerable power-generation capability had been built in areas where there weren't enough people to use it.

Only Red Cobra 8 had defied explanation.

Then, one month before Mitch Webber and Daniel Varik stepped into empty air over the center of China, 1,000 miles west of Beijing, satellite images showed Red Cobra 8 was being repurposed. From measurements of the height of the shadows they cast, transport trucks were arriving empty, and leaving full. Employee car and bus traffic diminished. Visible offices no longer remained lit at night.

The conclusion was obvious: Whatever activities had been under way at Red Cobra 8 were reaching an end. If America ever wanted to determine what those activities had been, there would be one last chance for a mission. And if Command's current theory of those activities was correct, there was only one person America could send in.

Mitch Webber.

Even as his momentum drove him deep into the near-freezing waters of the reservoir, Webber took action. His first move was to pull the backup oxygen-supply mouthpiece from his buoyancy-control jacket. Blew into it, cleared it of water, then breathed.

The device worked, buying him time to unlatch his parachute harness and unused emergency chute, then swap his jump helmet and goggles for a full-face diving mask, complete with Divelink transceiver for underwater communication. The instant he tugged on his mask, cleared it, and opened the valve on his LAR-V rebreather, time ceased to be critical for the rest of his transition procedure.

Because of the sophisticated computerized mechanisms in the LAR-V, he could now remain underwater for up to eighteen hours as the rebreather constantly absorbed his exhaled carbon dioxide in a soda-lime powder and replaced it with precisely measured volumes of oxygen. Under current conditions, though, Webber knew the actual limiting factor on the length of his dive was not oxygen, but the operational lifetime of the batteries powering the compact heating element strapped against the small of his back. In the reservoir's frigid water, he needed the heatpack's warmth that was circulated by his own blood flow through the rest of his body.

Still sinking, Webber calmly drew twin-vane black fins over his dive boots. Then he rolled up his waterlogged parafoil, jump harness, and unused backup chute, clipped lead weights from his harness to the bundle he'd made, and released it, consigning it to the depths of the reservoir.

Lightened, but still hampered by the drag of 120 pounds of equipment, most of it clipped to his dive harness in black, waterproof immersion bags, he took a bearing from his compass, then began to swim for the rendezvous point.

According to the temperature display on his wrist, the reservoir's water was 38° F. That meant he had a maximum exposure time of four hours, although the mission profile called for him and his baby-sitter to undertake less than sixty minutes of diving time.

If they lived that long.

According to the determinations of the DoD's combined intelligence agencies, inside Red Cobra 8 the People's Liberation Army Air Force was developing the long-rumored, fifth-generation Chinese F-20 fighter. The advanced craft was based in part on the Russian MiG-33 Fulcrum airframe, but reportedly with a radical new single engine design that would leave the American Joint Strike Fighter standing still.

Webber and Varik were tasked first with confirming that theory, retrieving whatever plans and images they could, then ensuring those plans and images reached Freefall analysts. They could accomplish their mission either by physically returning the intelligence, or by scanning and digitizing the intelligence in the field, then transmitting it to Special Operations Command by satellite-burst communications. The second scenario did not require either of them to actually leave Chinese territory in order to complete their primary mission. However, a Fulton skyhook extraction team was already in the air, standing by to pluck them both from the ground by means of balloon-borne cables. The United States Air Force had long ago perfected the sound, radar, and flight vector profiles that allowed them to operate individual aircraft over remote areas of China while remaining invisible to China's antiquated air defense system.

There was an additional task in the mission plan, and it was that objective that had brought Webber to this moment. Varik had been selected for the Freefall assignment because he was a trained special forces operator with exceptional skill and success in conducting infiltration/exfiltration missions. But Webber knew he had been selected because he was, in a word, a thief.

His career had begun eighteen years earlier in the Navy, and he had expertly moved from F-14 carrier operations to test pilot. The wider range of aircraft he flew, the more classes of aircraft the Navy trained him to fly, until he had completed foreign-technology familiarization tours at both Wright-Patterson and Groom Lake, popularly known as Area 51. Those postings had given him the opportunity to fly Russian MiGs and a variety of one-of-a-kind experimental and captured craft, only some of which could be called airplanes.

Halfway through his career, Webber received a strong suggestion from his commanding officer to apply for SEAL training as part of a special program to take technical specialists into the field.

In the past, Navy SEALs and special forces operatives of the other services had been tasked with transporting scientists and engineers to targets within hostile territory, so they could conduct technical evaluations of enemy weapons systems and facilities. Prompted by the alarmingly high fatality rate among those specialists, Special Operations Command created a new program to turn SEALs into expert technicians, and expert technicians into SEALs.

Webber had been one of the first graduates of the program. Subsequently he'd been trained to fly craft he hadn't even suspected existed, from the crewed variant of the Venturestar reusable launch vehicle, to the hypersonic, optical stealth plane code-named Nevada Rain. So far, his training had been put to good use on three occasions, all of which had involved infiltrating enemy territory by water, and leaving at the controls of advanced concept jets. Once, while on detached duty with the Department of Energy's Nuclear Emergency Search Team, he'd even stolen America's own Nevada Rain from Wheeler AFB in Oahu. To Webber's surprise, after six long weeks of debriefing on what was now called the Icefire incident, no charges had been preferred. Instead, he had been presented with an unadorned plaque citing his unnamed contributions to "a significant accomplishment."

Though no one in Freefall Command had seriously thought that he could -- or even should -- attempt to fly a prototype Chinese F-20 from the Red Cobra 8 facility, the mission plan did allow him the latitude to consider the plane a target of opportunity. The fighter's blueprints and specifications were preferred, particularly if they could be obtained without PLA Air Force personnel realizing they had been compromised, but as a last resort, the DoD was willing to accept delivery of an F-20 and deal with the diplomatic fallout later. The American military establishment had not forgotten how China had dismantled a Navy EP-3E surveillance plane after a Chinese F-8 fighter had collided with it over the China Sea. Despite the best efforts of the twenty-four crew members to disable and destroy their onboard equipment under perilous conditions, critical technology had been compromised.

The U.S. military continued to look forward to payback, and SOCOMM knew Webber could deliver.

Less than ten minutes after splashdown, navigating by the twin infrared illuminators mounted to the sides of their masks, Webber and Varik reached the top surface of the hidden underwater facility where it joined the dam's inner wall. Exactly as radar imaging had indicated, there was a large water inlet leading into the facility right at that point.

Webber and Varik adjusted their buoyancy-control jackets so they floated at the mouth of the eight-foot diameter pipe, forty feet below the reservoir's surface. The mission planners had been unable to determine the purpose of the pipe, and its appearance offered no additional clues. Webber and Varik would be first to discover its purpose. After a brief exchange of hand signals, they swam into the unknown.

At sixty feet, the pipe turned sharply upward within the dam's wall. As the two men slowly swam up through the pipe, both watched their depth-gauge indicators closely. The rebreathers released no air bubbles by which their rate of ascent could be visually judged.

At an effective depth of less than fifteen feet, the pipe once again curved to the horizontal. Another fifty feet along, Webber and Varik found four large inlets on the pipe's ceiling, each approximately three feet across. Just past the inlets, their infrared illuminators revealed a metal ladder connected to the pipe wall by metal rods.

Webber and Varik reached the ladder, then looked up to see that it extended into a circular alcove that rose another five feet above the pipe's upper surface. In the ghostly green glow of the REDEYE display, it appeared the alcove was capped by a standard, watertight hatch, complete with large handwheel.

"Depth gauge says that maintenance hatch'll be even with the water level of the reservoir," Varik said. His midwestern twang was mechanically flattened by his Divelink radio's custom voice-recognition chip. It ensured the microphone didn't transmit ambient underwater sound, but sometimes made divers sound like robots. "Best guess: There's a mother of a compartment on the other side of that hatch that's filled with water, and sometimes they have to drain it fast." Then he swam up the ladder, braced his legs and gave the handwheel a twist. Webber could see that it moved easily. A few seconds after that, the water above Webber came alive with a milky blue light that spiked past Varik's dark silhouette as the colonel climbed out through the hatch.

Thirty seconds later, Varik radioed back, "It's clear."

Not knowing what to expect, Webber climbed the ladder, left the water, and sat on the circular edge of the open hatchway's coaming. When he tugged off his mask, he recoiled as a strong smell of chlorine hit him.

When he had wiped his face clear of water, Webber saw that he and Varik were in the bottom of an enormous square-sided enclosure, some forty feet deep, with walls and floor tiled in large, gleaming white ceramic panels. Each of the enclosure's walls had steel ladders, and the three large inlets on its floor corresponded to those in the entry pipe below -- apparently emergency drains, as Varik had surmised.

But the enclosure was not as remarkable as what was in it. Overhead and to Webber's right was what appeared to be a giant white cylinder, at least sixty feet long and fifteen feet across. The cylinder was lying on its side in a dry-dock cradle with supports that suspended it ten feet above the enclosure's white floor. Its surface was patterned with a uniform series of perforations, large and numerous enough for the regularly spaced overhead lights on the room's high ceiling to filter through them, like sunlight through a tin can blasted by buckshot.

At first, the object made no sense. But even as Webber was puzzled by it, Varik ignored it. The colonel was already out of his diving gear and unpacking his infiltration equipment. Then, as Webber kicked off his fins and unfastened the cooling vents on his drysuit, the answer was so suddenly obvious, he felt embarrassed it had taken him this long to make sense of his surroundings.

"Varik, this is a neutral buoyancy training pool for microgravity simulation in space. And that," Webber said as he pointed up to the bizarre cylinder, "is the Chinese space station."

Varik slung an equipment pack over his shoulder, holstered his Heckler & Koch Mk 23 .45 automatic pistol, then tugged on the headband that held his swingdown infrared eyeviewer. For now, he kept the postage-stamp-size transparent screen folded up against his forehead, out of the way until needed. "That doesn't make sense." He nodded to the closest ladder. "Let's move."

Webber grabbed his own infiltration pack and pulled on his IR viewer headband as he hurried after Varik. "Of course it makes sense. Look at that thing. It's even got a mock-up of a Shenzhou capsule."

The Shenzhou was China's workhorse crewed-spacecraft. The name meant "Divine Vessel," and the name suited. It was based on the Russian Soyuz design, and in full spaceflight configuration with solar arrays spread, the craft did resemble a Christmas tree angel. There was a full-size, perforated-metal replica of one docked at the far end of the space station mock-up.

Varik paused at the ladder, looked back at Webber with a tight expression creasing his lean, lined face. "This is a top secret military facility. The whole world knows China has a space program. They've got astronauts up at their space station right now, same as we do. It's no secret."

"Taikonauts," Webber said. "Chinese astronauts are called taikonauts."

"So I've heard," Varik said. He began to climb. Air Force colonels and Navy captains were of equal rank, but for this mission, Varik had the final word for infiltration procedures. Webber followed in silence.

At floor level, everything Webber saw confirmed his conclusion. There were racks of brightly colored standard SCUBA gear for the safety divers who would accompany the astronaut trainees into the pool. Banks of computer consoles were covered with clear plastic tarps. The Chinese National Space Agency might just have well copied the design of this pool from the Sonny Carter Neutral Buoyancy Lab at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

But Varik remained uninterested. He headed straight for a set of three double doors beyond the SCUBA racks. There were black rubber mats in front of them, covering the white-tiled floor. Signs with Chinese characters hung on each door.

Varik pointed a pen-size, flexible snakehead camera at the signs, looked at the display screen on the handheld machine-vision translation unit he carried.

"'Safety station exiting...,'" Varik read as the MVTU scanned the Chinese characters and roughly translated them on its screen. "'Immersion apparatus removed not through these doors.' 'Synthetic training arenas.' 'Advance productive forces.' " He slapped the MVTU to a silent Velcro patch on his equipment harness. "Synthetic training arenas. We'll go there."

But Webber pointed to the pool. "Isn't that what this is?"

"This room is not part of our mission."

"What mission?" Webber asked. "This facility isn't what SOCOMM thought it was. It's a spaceflight training center -- not a military installation. We shouldn't be here. It's a job for the cloak-and-dagger boys."

Without waiting for Webber, or responding to him, Varik opened one door slowly, peered into the corridor beyond. "Let's move," he said, and slipped out.

Webber half expected to hear the stutter of automatic gunfire as a security guard cut Varik down, but he crouched to jam a corner of a black mat into the doorjamb to keep the door from locking, then followed the man anyway, eager to get this fiasco wrapped up quickly. It was one thing to risk his life and the diplomatic relationship between China and America for vital military intelligence that could help maintain peace. It was quite another to risk the same to find out what kind of freeze-dried food Chinese taikonauts preferred.

The corridor outside the neutral-buoyancy training room was as wide as a two-lane road, low-ceilinged, and dark. Only a handful of light fixtures were working. But it was easy to see why there were no guards on patrol. The corridor walls were lined with boxes of all sizes, from cardboard file cartons to wooden packing crates. Whatever the purpose of the facility, Command was right. It was either shutting down or changing venues.

Varik was already on the other side of the corridor, using picks on the lock of another set of wide doors. Beside those doors was what appeared to be a curved security counter with a neatly built-in computer console.

Webber moved silently to take up position next to Varik, then pointed to the Chinese characters on the sign above the doors. "What's that one say?"

Varik concentrated on his lock picks. "Number One Arena."

Webber's eyes narrowed. There was no possible way Varik could know that. The MVTU he needed to translate Chinese was still attached to his harness. He had not had enough time to use the device, then pack it up in the few seconds he had been alone in the corridor.

Varik had come to this door as if he had already known it would be here.

The lock clicked. Varik pushed the door open and entered. Webber followed him into a small dimly lit anteroom with white adhesive sheets covering the floor, sticky side up. He found that another convincing round of evidence for his conclusion.

"C'mon, Varik. This is to take dust off shoes. We're in clean-room conditions."

The colonel barely looked at Webber. He simply pointed at the adhesive sheet by the inner set of doors. "Then why is there more dirt by those doors than by the one we entered through?"

Webber checked the adhesive panels at both ends of the anteroom, saw that Varik was right. The adhesive was to take dirt off the shoes of people exiting this room. But why?

Varik stepped through the inner doors and Webber followed him again, this time into darkness.

Just as Varik did, Webber switched on his infrared flashlight and flipped down his IR viewer. The arm that held the transparent screen two inches in front of his left eye was tipped with a camera lens, its focus designed for infrared. The small wearable computer unit that processed the digital signal from the camera and then created the visual display on the viewer was located on his left shoulder. The small viewer created a pale green image that appeared to float before Webber's left eye, showing him that he and Varik were in a long corridor curving both left and right. The corridor's exterior wall was made of standard concrete block. Its interior wall appeared to be ribbed metal extending upward at least thirty feet. Webber estimated the interior volume of the enclosure it circled had to be at least several hundred feet across. He suspected this section of the facility was built deep within the thick wall of the dam.

"Over there," Varik said. He moved off to the left, to a metal door with rounded corners, raised about two feet above the corridor floor.

Without hesitation, Varik tried the latch handle. The door was unlocked.

There was only one possibility that could account for the colonel's confidence: He already knew what was on the other side of that door.

Varik opened the door, stepped up and through.

Webber matched his action, right behind him, but suddenly stopped. Instead of landing on solid flooring, his feet crunched into coarse sand and gravel.

Webber shone his IR flashlight all around.

In the heart of a sophisticated aerospace installation, he and Varik were standing on a dirt floor strewn with rocks. About one hundred feet away, an object the size of a small cabin stood just at the outside range of Webber's flashlight's IR beam, making most details impossible to see. But not all.

The object was standing on four angled legs. Webber felt the hair on his neck bristle as he fit the last pieces of the puzzle into the overall picture: the Shenzhou capsule, the space station mock-up, and now this -- a lunar landing vehicle. He kicked at the granulated dirt. He was in a training chamber for lunar taikonauts.

Webber turned, using his flashlight to find Varik by an open electrical cabinet, just as the colonel threw a large rocker switch.

Banks of overhead floodlights suddenly flared into life, duplicating the unshielded brilliance of the sun on the airless Moon.

Webber threw up his arm to shade his eyes, stepped back, bumped into something large and heavy.

He spun around to face a taikonaut who had somehow sneaked up on him from behind. Reflexively, Webber lashed out with a kite blow to the man's chest, only to feel his hand hit empty fabric.

"I think you killed it," Varik said.

Webber flipped up his IR viewer. His attacker was an empty lunar spacesuit hanging on a spring-loaded harness used to simulate lunar gravity.

Varik broke out his camera gear. He handed Webber a Nikon digital camera, little more than a large lens with a pistol grip. "You cover the spacesuits and the scientific gear spread out around the lander. I'll cover the rest." Varik trudged off across the simulated lunar surface, leaving Webber with the empty suit.

For a moment, Webber studied the lander. The topmost part looked familiar -- a large, spherical hull studded with a series of small rounded shells, resembling an updated version of the original Apollo mission's lunar module. But the lower half from which the landing legs angled out was unlike anything he had ever seen. What appeared to be outrigger pontoons made from wide curved strips of silvered metal extended from leg to leg. Additional pontoons, if that's what they were, seemed to line the underside of the lander as well.

Varik looked back at Webber. "Ten minutes, Captain. Then we're out." He began to take a series of photographs, turning a half step in a circle after each exposure, creating a panoramic view of the simulated landscape.

Webber switched on his own camera, started photographing the suit, now positive that no one would ever pay attention to the images he took.

More than ever he was convinced that this mission was not what it seemed. No one had expected him to find an advanced concept Chinese fighter in Red Cobra 8. Instead, Colonel Varik had been sent to find the Chinese lunar lander. Which meant, as far as Webber was concerned, both their lives had been put in danger for no useful reason. If this lunar training facility had been shut down, there was a simple explanation -- the time for training had ended.

The Chinese were going to the Moon, and they were going sooner than anyone had suspected.

But the question Webber couldn't answer was why the U.S. military considered that to be a threat.

Copyright © 2005 by Softwind, Inc.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Freefall by Judith Reeves-Stevens Copyright © 2005 by Judith Reeves-Stevens. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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