Extinction Machine (44 page)

There was a big, clunky gun mounted on the underbelly of the chopper. The distance was too great for me to make out details, but I knew that it would have four curved prongs instead of an open barrel. There was too much noise for me to hear the
tok
sound, but I saw a brief shimmer in the air as a focused beam of microwaves shot from the Closer’s bird and hit the first of the Coast Guard helicopters.

At first I thought that the shot had missed. Then suddenly the lead helo blew apart in a massive ball of intense red flame. It could not have been a full second later that the second helo exploded. It was so fast. So ugly. So thorough. Starbursts of flaming debris flew outward like the petals of some grotesque flower.

I screamed at the sky as the burning wreckage fell in strangely slow motion onto the rifling green treetops below.

I raised the stolen MPP in a foolish, wasteful, suicidal, and pointless attempt to strike back. My finger pulled the trigger.
Tok! Tok!

And then something happened …

Something that seemed completely impossible.

As I fired at the closest Black Hawk—it exploded!

I gaped. It was impossible. At that distance, with the small gun I held—it was impossible. It was so freakishly absurd they wouldn’t have put it in a movie. Only as an afterimage did I see the arrow-straight trail of silver-black smoke.

I whirled to follow the back trail of the smoke to its source.

And there it was.

A gleaming black UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter, the body detailed with lines of red the exact same color of blood. Men crowded the open bay door, hunched over the machine gun. I knew those faces. Even from here, I knew them.

I spoke one name.

“Top…”

You could almost see the other black helicopter freeze in midair in a WTF moment. Then the closer helo spun toward the DMS bird. Both helicopters were evenly matched for this kind of fight. However, there was a moment that echoed the confrontation between the black helos and the Coast Guard—a moment when this could have turned into a shooting match with machine guns.

But I knew Top. He had to have seen the two Coast Guard birds die. All those brave men, incinerated in an instant. Top’s son had been killed in Iraq in the first days of the war. His daughter had lost both legs when her Bradley rolled over an IED. “Fair” was never really part of the kind of war we were fighting. M3 and their killers had opened up on us with no declaration of war, no agreement of rules, no promise of quarter. They’d come like butchers onto the field. The death toll for today was already too high. Hector and the others aboard my chopper, the two Coast Guard crews.

Fair?

Fuck fair.

The DMS Black Hawk blew those sons of bitches out of the sky.

That’s
fair.

Part Five

The Truman Engine

It was the darndest thing I’ve ever seen. It was big, it was very bright, it changed colors and it was about the size of the Moon. We watched it for ten minutes, but none of us could figure out what it was. One thing’s for sure, I’ll never make fun of people who say they’ve seen unidentified objects in the sky. If I become president, I’ll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and the scientists.

—PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER

I can assure you that, given they exist, these flying saucers are made by no power on this Earth.

—PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN,
press conference, April 4, 1950

Chapter Eighty-seven

VanMeer Castle
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Sunday, October 20, 12:31 p.m.

Mr. Bones sat and listened in silence while Howard Shelton had a screaming match with Admiral Xiè, the head of the experimental aircraft division of the People’s Army. Bones sipped an unsweetened iced tea and listened with total fascination.

The call had started with at least a show of civility. Compliments and respectful acknowledgments. All right and proper, all total horse shit.

Once that was out of the way—and once Howard was convinced that Admiral Xiè was alone—Howard became much more direct.

“I trust your spies have been keeping you up to date on certain events around the world?”

“There have been some reports,” agreed Admiral Xiè.

“Like the unfortunate incident in the Taiwan Strait?”

“Like that, yes.”

“What about Dugway? Did you hear about that, too?”

Admiral Xiè was quiet. “Why would you ask
me
about that?”

“Why do you think I’d ask you?” replied Howard.

“I do not know, Mr. Shelton. There is a tone in your voice, or is it a quality of a bad connection?”

“Seriously, Admiral? You want to play these kinds of games? Are you going to tell me that you don’t know a single thing about what happened at Dugway this afternoon?”

“I—”

“And I suppose you don’t know anything about the sightings of a black triangular craft seen buzzing through the skies near Changxing? Right where a certain testing facility is rumored to be located.”

Admiral Xiè said, “What can I tell you, Mr. Shelton? What is it you would like to hear?”

“I would like to hear that you aren’t invading U.S. fucking airspace and shooting down U.S. fucking stealth jets is what I’d like to fucking hear.”

“Are you deranged?” demanded Admiral Xiè. “Running test flights on a prototype craft is one thing, but do you think everyone here has taken total leave of their senses?”

“Don’t you goddamn lie to me, Xiè. We had a deal and—”

“And I kept my part of that deal,” the admiral fired back. “It is you who cannot be trusted to leave your toys in the toy box rather than succumb to the childish desire to play with them.”

The conversation went downhill from there. Mr. Bones spoke good enough Mandarin to appreciate the vulgar acts Admiral Xiè said were common among the female members of the Shelton family. He also liked Howard’s replies, which, though not as flowery, hit home just as solidly. He knew for certain that had the two men been in the same room they would be wrestling on the floor, kneeing crotches, spitting in eyes, and probably biting.

Somewhere in the middle of the shouting match, though, there was a bit of a sea change and it took Mr. Bones a couple of minutes to figure it out. The tenor of the conversation shifted from a straight-up mutual defamation competition to something resembling unqualified attack and unflinching defense.

That was very troubling. What he expected to happen—what Howard had predicted would happen—was that the admiral would reach a point where denial was no longer useful, convenient, or fun and then he’d go on the attack. He’d throw the truth in Howard’s face and make him eat it uncooked.

So … why wasn’t that happening?

Chapter Eighty-eight

Elk Neck State Park
Cecil County, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 12:33 p.m.

I found Junie and Ghost where I’d left them, and I popped a flare for the Echo Team chopper to pick us up. If there were any Closers left in the forest, they steered clear.

Bunny and Lydia and Pete pulled us into the Black Hawk and we dusted off immediately. Everybody wanted to do a lot of back-slapping, but I growled for some damn quiet so I could yell at the pilot.

“Get us the hell out of range of this damn jammer. Pedal to the metal.”

The chopper rose high and turned to the southwest. Ivan and Sam were crouched down behind the two miniguns, the barrels depressed toward the forest.

Nothing and no one shot at us.

We thought we’d come through the fire.

Then we passed out of the jam zone.

I called the Warehouse. And got nothing.

I tapped over to Bug’s channel.

He was there.

He was crying.

He told me why.

Everyone was on the team channel. They all heard it.

It punched the air out of my lungs. The interior of the helo began spinning as if we were trapped in the heart of a cyclone.

“What?” I whispered. “What?”

A big sob broke in Bug’s chest. This was killing him.

“Bug … what about Rudy? What about Church?”

“Oh, Jesus, Joe,” he said, his voice breaking with pain, “I don’t know. The whole area around the Warehouse is gone…”

I spoke to Aunt Sallie, to Dr. Hu. I spoke to several other DMS officials. There was a scramble to get the staff out of every field office. Bomb squads were searching the buildings, inside and out.

No one knew anything.

There was no word about Church and Rudy, or about anyone else who had been at the Warehouse.

Auntie went over everything. Stuff I knew about, stuff I didn’t want to hear. It was all bad. The events at Dugway. The Chinese pilot who got shot down trying to make a suicide run at a carrier in the Taiwan Strait. And the thing that had appeared in both places. A massive, triangular craft that destroyed the Locust and shot down the Chinese fighter and then vanished at impossible speeds. She told me about sightings of UFOs all over the country. All over the world.

And she told me about the warrant out for my arrest on charges that I was a terrorist.

When I told her that I had Junie Flynn and that she was, for all intents and purposes, a living version of the Majestic Black Book, all Aunt Sallie said was, “Okay.”

She ordered me to go to a safe house. I told her that I had one in mind and explained where it was. Then I hung up and went back into the main cabin. We clustered around the computer in the back and listened to the news. Dozens of buildings were on fire, hundreds of people injured. The number of known dead was forty, but the newscasters couldn’t have known that the entire staff of the Warehouse had been called into work. All of them.
Two hundred people.

Gone now.

I felt totally numb.

I looked at Junie, who was huddled in a seat, hugging Ghost to her chest. I looked at the shocked faces and horrified eyes of Top and Bunny and the others.

None of us spoke.

None of us could.

Chapter Eighty-nine

House of Jack Ledger,
Near Robinwood, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 1:17 p.m.

What do you do when your world is turned upside down?

How do you react when suddenly fate in the form of some madman’s will takes a crude scalpel and carves a hole in the skin of your world? What mechanism is there in us that prepares for the moment when dozens of people you know—friends, colleagues, employees, associates—are simply edited out of your day-to-day existence?

We shriek at the sky, demanding how this could happen. Needing to know why it had happened. What was the point?

What did it serve?

Where will it end?

These are unanswerable questions of course. After 9/11, after Haiti and the tsunamis in Thailand and Japan, after hurricanes and tornados, after wars and terrorist bombings, there are millions who have looked up to the sky or inward into personal darkness and demanded those answers. And they, too, were left bereft, adrift, unanswered and afraid.

Junie Flynn came and sat next to me. She took my hand and held it. In many ways she was still a stranger to me, and she knew none of the people at the Warehouse, but her touch was warm and alive. When you are sinking you grab any rope that’s offered. Ghost came and snuggled against me, catching the mood aboard the helicopter, whimpering softly, needing reassurance, giving comfort in closeness and with simplicity.

The pilot asked, “Where, Captain?”

I told him. My uncle Jack had a farm near Robinwood, right on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. I called ahead, told my uncle we were coming. Told him to pack a bag and go visit his daughter in Wildwood, New Jersey. I told him it was a matter of national security. Jack Ledger is a good guy, a retired career cop. I never told him what I do for a living but his brother, my dad, has probably hinted. All he asked me was, “Are you okay, Joey?”

“I’m okay,” I lied.

Maybe the biggest lie I ever told.

Rudy Sanchez was my best friend. He was the only person who knew me. The only one who understood the mysteries of my fractured mind. He was closer to me than my brother, Sean.

I had brought him into the DMS. That meant that, however indirectly, I got that good man killed.

And Church?

Church was the ultimate good guy. He was as close to an actual superhero as this world is ever likely to have. A legendary warrior in a very old and very dirty game. Infinitely dangerous, incredibly smart and wise. If he was dead, then the bad guys had managed to score one of the biggest wins in a long time. Maybe the biggest in my lifetime.

I had nowhere to put all this in my head.

It wasn’t made to fit.

We flew on.

The “farm” was that in name only. Once upon a time it had been a dairy farm, but Jack wanted to be a cop like his brother. He and my dad sold half of the thousand acres, split the money, and my dad bought a big house in Baltimore. Jack rented out the farm while he worked as a cop in Hagerstown, and then once he had his twenty-five in, he gave it up and settled down to paint landscapes. He was very much a loner—just him and his dogs, Spartacus and Leonidas.

I sent the address via encoded text to Aunt Sallie and requested information and any tactical support that could be managed.

She texted back this message: “K”

By the time the Black Hawk reached the farm, Jack was long gone.

Where once there had been miles of grasslands for the cattle, now there was a forest of young pines and hardwoods. Beautiful, serene, and excellent cover.

We touched down behind the barn.

Bunny oversaw the removal of all our gear. Junie went into the house with Ghost. Top and I sat down on the porch while I called Aunt Sallie for an update.

“Do we know if anyone got out?” I asked.

“We’re still waiting on word,” she said. Auntie was an abrasive woman, given to barbed jokes and sarcasm, but not today. Her voice was as subdued as a nun’s. I had the irrational desire to give her a big comforting hug.