Ragnarok (17 page)

Pierce knew the two White Team scientists in the room, but they were easy to recognize from their white lab coats. White Six was an unusually tall, gangly man. At just under seven feet tall, Six had to duck his head when going through most of the doors in the base. Ironically, the tall man with the dark mop of black shaggy hair hated sports. Especially basketball. When he wasn’t working on chemical analyses for Endgame, the man was building models from toothpicks and popsicle sticks. The structures were incredibly intricate, and when Six chose to design something recognizable, like the Eiffel Tower, the structures were meticulously accurate to every detail. Pierce had joked with the man that he had missed his calling as an architect. Six’s serious response was simply “I know.” But Pierce liked the gentle giant.

White Seven, the other scientist on the team, was a short, burly man with a gruff demeanor. Pierce rarely spoke to the man, but was impressed by the scientist’s wide knowledge of everything but social graces.

The White Team was completed by a weapons expert named Reggie. Reggie was technically callsign: White Eight, but despite Deep Blue’s admonition that White and Black support team members each keep their names to themselves and use only their callsigns, Reggie had introduced himself to everyone at the base as Reggie, so the name had stuck. He was the consummate joker, but the sort whose jokes were more frequently directed at himself. Everyone liked the man. Plus, he knew everything there was to know about every weapon they had on the base. Reggie certainly destroyed any stereotypes Pierce had had about weapons training experts. He pictured most of them to be hard-assed drill instructor types, and he wasn’t surprised to discover that King had thought much the same. Reggie was also the only one around to best King at horseshoes up on the campground.

On the other side of the room, the Black Team was under-represented, because half of them—the pilots, callsigns: Black One through Black Four—were currently out in the field. Two mechanics that repaired the team’s helicopters and the
Crescent
were present. Both men wore bib overalls, and both tended to keep to themselves. Pierce had seen them around the base a few times. They were both short and skinny men, with grease caked under their fingernails from a lifetime of mechanical work. Both men were dark haired, and Pierce occasionally wondered if they were brothers. The men were callsigns: Black Seven and Black Eight.

Black Five was an overweight man of at least sixty years old. Deep Blue had introduced Pierce to the man only a few weeks earlier. Balding and always wearing half-moon glasses, Black Five probably looked older than he was. When Pierce had seen him, he was neck deep in computer programs, on the phone or both. Deep Blue had introduced Black Five as an intelligence analyst, but he had been recruited because he also had a Ph.D. in physics. Deep Blue liked team members to pull double duty, which was why Pierce was expanding his expertise into general history and even paleontology, should dinosaurs ever emerge from Antarctica. Sounded ridiculous, but the ridiculous was kind of their thing.

Black Five stood against the wall, speaking softly to a man Pierce had never met. But Pierce knew this wiry, muscular man in the charcoal suit could only be one person. Black Six was the team’s only former Central Intelligence Agency member. He was a field operative. The team’s very own spy, like James Bond. But due to the nature of his work, he was usually in the field. Pierce had, until this moment, only heard of the man, and never actually laid eyes on him. Black Six was younger than Pierce might have thought—perhaps in his mid twenties. He had a strong jaw and blue eyes, but the cut of his hair was a bit long, and Pierce could easily picture the man sliding undercover as an executive one week and as a surfer the next.

Lewis Aleman cleared his throat.

“We’ve got General Keasling, Deep Blue and King on the line in New York. Bishop, Knight and Black One and Two are also online as they transit to Europe. Mr. Boucher, is on the call from DC. I have the rest of Endgame here with me. Here’s the situation as we have it so far.

“We’re dealing with a threat unlike anything we’ve seen before. I’m afraid most of the news I have is pretty grim…”

“Lewis,” Deep Blue interrupted. “Let’s start with the bad news.”

“Okay,” Lewis said, looking down at the floor. When he looked up again, sorrow hid behind his eyes. “The world is going to end in four days.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

Endgame Headquarters, White Mountains, NH

3 November, 0715 Hrs

COMPLETE SILENCE FOLLOWED. Pierce watched as jaws dropped around the room.

“Come again, Aleman. Did you say the world was going to end in four days?” Deep Blue’s voice sounded rattled.

“That’s what I said. The portals are stabilizing and appearing with more regularity around the world.” Aleman sounded tired, but certain.

“Portals?” Pierce recognized the gruff voice of General Keasling.

“Yes, General. King accidentally entered one in Chicago and came out again.”

“I was only in contact with the portal for a few seconds,” King’s voice came through the speaker as clearly as if he were in the room, and Pierce found himself suddenly missing his friend. “But all I saw was darkness and multiple tangos coming at me before I was swept out by the parachute.”

“Yeah, King,” Aleman continued his briefing, “I’ve been giving that a lot of thought and cross-referencing it against all our other data on these things. Everything fired inside the portals hasn’t come back out. Your F-16 crashed into one and we didn’t see a sign of it after that. You came back out of one alive though. We’re definitely looking at a portal.”

“To, uh, to what Aleman?” Pierce recognized the always-cautious voice of Domenick Boucher, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and one of only a few people left in the current administration that knew of the existence of Chess Team and the entire Endgame organization. “If these energy balls are portals, then portals to what? To where?”

“That is the question, Mr. Boucher. My best guess, based on the information available, is...to another dimension.”

Boucher scoffed on the other end of the call. “Another
dimension
? Like in
Star Trek
or something? You can’t be serious.”

“Dom…” Deep Blue’s voice was stern, and the message was clear:
Give the man a chance to explain and the benefit of the doubt
. Besides being the leader of Endgame, no one on the call would ever forget that this man was also formerly the leader of the free world.

“Sorry, Lewis. Please explain.” Boucher sounded as tired as Pierce felt, and he imagined the Director was up to his neck in briefings of his own, trying to explain to the new President what the hell was going on around the world.

“Theories of other dimensions have been around for a long time. Basically, what you need to do is imagine a bright red shiny ball. The ball is sitting on the ground and it’s casting a shadow. The shadow on the ground is—”

Black Five cleared his throat loudly, cutting Aleman off. He raised an index finger and stepped forward. “Sorry, but that’s a horrible explanation.”

“It was—”

Aleman was cut off again. “Accurate? Maybe. Understandable? Hardly. In layman’s terms, alternate dimensions are multiple possible universes, otherwise known as the multiverse. But there are just as many theories about how it’s possible as there are probably universes. Tegmark’s four-level classification, anthropic principle, cyclic models and my personal favorite, M-Theory, which would be impossible to explain to any of you in a timely manner, unless you all have a working knowledge of p-branes.”

For a moment, Pierce thought that Black Five had just insulted them, but realized that wasn’t the case when the man continued without cracking a smile.

“And no one knows which theory is correct, because we have, until now, never had any tangible evidence that they exist beyond the numeric musings of mathematicians and the insistence of
Star Trek
fans. However, most theories agree that these alternate dimensions could look very similar to our own, with alternate versions of ourselves living similar if not nearly identical lives to our own,
but
that they could also be very different. Alternate dimensions don’t just affect humanity. They affect
everything
right back to the beginning of time. In some dimensions there might not be an Earth, or even a Milky Way galaxy. In others, Earth might exist, but maybe the dinosaurs never went extinct, or the moon was never formed, or life evolved in a way that is totally alien to our Earth, which I believe is what we’re seeing here. The creatures have similar features—eyes, teeth, limbs, claws—things that we recognize as being advantageous to living on planet Earth. But they’re also quite different, which means their Earth is likely quite different. How, I couldn’t speculate.

“It’s even possible that the laws of physics are different there. Human beings are designed to perceive things in only three dimensions. An alternate dimension might simply be a fourth dimension that co-exists but is separated from our own simply because we can’t perceive or experience it. Those that subscribe to this theory believe it to be the root of most ghost stories and poltergeists—glimpses into mirror dimensions caused by gravitational anomalies. Of course, that’s irrelevant. The point is, a human being might view an alternate dimension in a distorted, or skewed way, because our perceptions are limited to experiencing three dimensions controlled by our universe’s laws of physics.”

“I saw something on the other side of that portal,” King said through the speakers in the room.

“You said it was mostly dark, right?” Aleman asked. “If Black Five is right, perhaps light doesn’t work there like it does in our dimension.”

“Or it was just night,” Black Five said with a twitch of his lips.

King sighed. “Right.”

“What does all this information give us? What are we dealing with?” General Keasling’s voice was gruffer than normal, the grav-elly scraping of his voice reminded Pierce of just how long it had been since they had each slept.

“It’s all moot, actually,” Deep Blue interjected. “We need to find a way to stop the portals from opening or to stop the creatures from coming through them.”

“On that front, I have some ideas,” Aleman said. “Fogg and Pierce and I feel convinced from 10
^th
-century evidence that the planet has seen these creatures before. How many times, I can’t say, but there
is
a historical record. We believe the creatures are what the Norse first called dire wolves. We’re still working on finding out how and when the portals closed in the past, as well as efficient ways to kill them.”

Bishop’s meaty voice came through the speaker next. “They
can
be killed. They’re just fast. Enclosed spaces or battlefields with obstacles are our best bet. If they get up to speed, they’re hard to hit.”

Aleman spoke up again. “And their roar is devastating.”

“Any theories on that?” Deep Blue asked.

“Just one,” Aleman said. “Infrasound.”

“Which is?” King asked.

“Any sound lower than twenty hertz, which is right at the fringe of what human ears can hear. For us to hear it, the sound pressure would have to be significant.”

“It’s significant,” Knight added.

“At the right volume, we would actually be able to feel the sound as much as hear it. Several studies I found, published and unpublished, suggest that a seventeen-hertz infrasound, with enough punch, can induce strong feelings of fear. Test subjects reported powerful anxiety, extreme sorrow, revulsion and terror. Physical symptoms ranged from goose bumps to loose bowels, which might have also been a physical effect caused by the low frequency vibrations, rather than an emotional response. As for the hallucinations, they’re probably caused by the adrenaline and other chemicals dumped into the body by the fear response, but it’s worth noting that the resonant frequency of the human eye, according to NASA, is eighteen hertz. Pegging someone with this frequency can cause optical illusions, visual hallucinations and are one of the leading theories for ghost sightings. If they’re pegging multiple frequencies at once, the effects match.”

“That sounds about right,” Knight added. “Good to know I’m not a wuss.”

King, who was the only field team member to be unaffected by the dire wolf roar, was unperturbed. “So if we hear it, we’ll either fight harder or run away? Not that big of a problem.”

“Oh, but it is, King,” Sara Fogg stepped toward the center of the room to speak. Pierce noted that her eyes were still baggy, but her face had come alive at a chance to participate in the conversation on a medical topic, with which she could relate. He also noted that she remembered to use his operational callsign, instead of calling him Jack. “In a life-threatening situation, the human ‘fight-or-flight’ response involves an involuntary increased heart rate, increased blood flow to the muscles, pupil dilation and a whole host of other symptoms. You won’t be at your fighting best, and what’s worse, adrenaline dumps into your lungs, your liver, kidneys and heart. With the dire wolf roar activating such a heightened fight-or-flight, your heart could seize up with adrenaline and crash. You’d drop dead just like with the Brugada strain from a few years ago. The dire wolf roar can actually scare you to death.”

Deep Blue cleared his throat. “Lewis, you said you have a plan for dealing with the dire wolves?”

Aleman replied without hesitation. “Yes sir, I think we should nuke them.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

London, England

3 November, 1600 Hrs

“
THAT’S
NOT GOOD.”

Bishop tilted his head to the side and looked out the open door of the
Crescent
, as it hovered on its thrumming VTOL engines. Rain lashed the late afternoon London sky, but both he and Knight had a perfect view of the River Thames and the 443-foot tall white Ferris wheel, known as the London Eye. The bizarre cantilevered support struts and several of the steel tie rods of the structure were hidden inside a large crackling dire wolf portal that covered over a fourth of the surface of the wheel. Both Bishop and Knight understood that when the portal winked out, it would take the central hub of the giant structure with it.