The God Wave (34 page)

Matt had a new laptop. He'd paid cash. It was compact enough to fit into a small shoulder bag, and he never let it out of his sight. He'd backed up every bit of important data to an external hard drive and no longer stored anything critical to his private work in the cloud, on the theory that someone might hack his account. He knew the Deeps couldn't do anything at that point; they were completely cut off from their base of operations and all their slick tech. They had only human surveillance at their disposal, but they were working very hard to reestablish themselves.

The news stories bleated about a “terrorist action” that resulted in some sort of environmental disaster at Michaux State Preserve. Clearly Howard had gotten some cover story into circulation, but he seemed to have nothing to do with the government's reaction. Matt suspected that Howard's contact at the Pentagon was at a fairly low level. He even thought he might know who it was: the guy he'd originally contacted about Forward Kinetics—Schell or Snell or something like that.

The Deeps had let all but the technical staff go and kept Brenda's robotics team working ten- and twelve-hour days to build new units. Matt was less a working member of the team than a hostage, but after the first week of watching him with an eagle eye, Howard mostly ignored him. He was a tool of limited use as far as the general was concerned. In fact, his only real duty was to set up as many Brewster-Brentons as they had on hand so Reynolds and the other class leaders could use them to train more troops.

That was problematic. Whatever Howard had been doing to recruit potential adepts was not providing him with huge numbers of them. He had a small standing army or militia, which Matt was beginning to suspect was actually a group of mercenaries, but one of the best-kept secrets about Howard's operation, he had discovered, was that it had far less manpower than it first appeared. Thus the charm of an army of robots: it was clear Howard had intended his drivers to eventually control multiple bots deployed as teams.

So while Howard scrambled to acquire new resources, the zetas were wreaking havoc on all things military. They had shut down anything that flew—including on international bases—and seemed immediately aware of any attempt to pry them out from under their mountain. Howard had pulled out all the stops and, in his legitimate capacity as a consultant, had somehow managed to sell the Pentagon on the idea that there really was some terrorist organization at work beneath Michaux's tree-covered slopes.

One thing Matt was sure of—Howard had come to the same conclusion he had about the alpha zetas: only other zetas could combat them. Howard had also quickly tumbled to the fact that without their robots, his handpicked, combat-ready telekinetics could do very little against those who had trained them. That gave him two options, as far as Matt could see. One: he could try
to get his zetas close enough to the Deep to gain access to their robots and try to assault Sara's team from the inside. Two: he could locate and capture Chuck and his team.

The latter seemed like a long shot to Matt. He was in touch with the escapees and had no idea where they were. That Howard did seemed unlikely . . . until Brenda passed Matt a terse note: “Deeps deploying agents to Pasadena, CA.”

He was in her lab to calibrate a Brewster-Brenton unit to the robot interface at the time. The six-word scribble, wedged between the Brewster-Brenton and its frame, had sent his mind scrambling. Of course. Chuck had earned his first degree from CalTech. Had spoken about a friend there—a college colleague whose name Matt couldn't quite recall.

“When?” he mouthed to Bren.

She held up three fingers and mouthed, “Hours.”

He finished up his work on the unit and took himself and his laptop off to a local bistro for lunch, his “security” sitting not so discreetly by the door. A brief surf of the Web, and he had it: Dr. Douglas Boston. Chuck had said he was a character. He looked more like a reggae musician than a college professor.

Cloaked in the ambient noise of the restaurant, Matt used his shiny new burner phone to call the neuroscientist's office. The professor was in class, so he left a message: “Tell our mutual friend he's going to have scary visitors.” He didn't leave his name.

Then he sat back to think. Only zetas could even hope to corral other zetas. Even with Mini and Lanfen, though, Matt wondered if Chuck had enough coercive power to stop the Deeps from whatever they were ultimately planning to do. They might be all “swords into plowshares” now, but if they were threatened, or their loved ones were threatened . . .

He suddenly thought of Mike's wife and kids.
What has happened to them?

There was one solution to this escalating situation, and it was Chuck Brenton. Matt was certain the zetas trusted Chuck and his team. He knew they'd been passing intel back and forth in the last days before Team Chuck's great escape. If this was going to end without serious disruption of world communication at best and carnage at worst, someone had to find Chuck. That someone, Matt decided, had better be him. If Howard found him first . . . Well, it didn't bear thinking about.

This left Matt with a dilemma. He couldn't leave Maryland without being followed, and no matter the semblance of freedom afforded him, he knew he was under constant surveillance. If he succeeded in finding Chuck and his team, it was a safe bet that Howard would be right there to scoop them all up.

“Dr. Streegman.”

Matt looked up. Brian Reynolds, dressed casually in civvies, stood looking down at him. Behind him, lounging in the doorway of the café, was a female officer Matt had seen around Deep Shield HQ. She, too, was dressed in civilian garb.

“Doctor,” Reynolds told him, “I need you to come with me. We've found the missing group. We may need you to help bring them in.”

Matt said the first thing that came into his head:

“Hell, no.”

“I really don't think you have a choice, sir.”

Matt wanted to hit him. “Fine. Then I have no choice. So much for this being a free country.”

“You signed a contract, sir, which your partner is in breach of. Consider this part of your contractual obligation.”

“Contracts? You're talking about contracts?” Matt laughed out loud. “You can't kidnap someone for breaching a contract—you sue them. If you want to go see a judge, let's go.”

Reynolds was impassive. “Dr. Streegman, I'm not going to ask you again.”

“Screw you,” Matt muttered under his breath. Then he gathered up his gear and followed Reynolds and his companion from the café.

MIKE WATCHED THE ADVANCING TROOPS
with a bizarre mixture of dread and anger. His family was safe, that much he knew; his wife had messaged him through the number Tim had given her. But that they'd had to flee to his parents' in Canada, that they'd had to flee the home he'd built for them—the home they had been renovating since his work at Forward Kinetics had drastically increased his income—that was galling and terrifying. This sort of thing shouldn't happen in America. It was so wrong on so many levels, Mike couldn't begin to articulate it. Anyway he was done articulating. He'd let his actions do the talking.

The man who had caused the uprooting of his family was now sending troops after them. That they thought they could sneak up on the mountain fortress Howard had built was incredible. Mike could only imagine they assumed that the zetas would not know how to make use of the Deep Shield surveillance systems.

He smiled grimly. They did know and were prepared to prove it.

“How close are we gonna let them get?” Tim asked. He was rocked back in his chair at the console he had adopted as his own. His gaze, like Mike's, was on the red dots that represented the two hundred or so soldiers working their way up the mountain. The red dot soldiers blipped through the trees and down the long, broad tunnel that provided egress and regress for the Deeps' vehicles.

Sara stood at the center of the large, half-moon chamber, her
eyes roving from one huge plasma display to another, tracking the invaders. Several of the screens showed live, real-time images of the advancing troops sent from stationary cameras and drones that Tim had sent out to snoop.

“They've reached the secondary perimeter,” she said. “It's time to stop them.”

“Cool,” Tim said, grinning.

He turned to watch Sara for a few moments, though the real show was occurring outside. As she concentrated, things began to happen. Bad things—at least for General Howard's troops.

On the mountain slopes, barrier fences sprang up from the ground, blocking the way for the advancing army. As they halted in momentary confusion, Tim took over.

On the view screen, the game programmer revealed a talent that Mike and Sara had no idea he possessed. Instead of just mentally operating the double gun turret nearest the video drone—which was outfitted with a machine gun and flamethrower—he reconfigured its mechanisms and changed it into the shape of a scaly, metallic dragon. It spat out bullets, blocking and containing some of the oncoming troops, and then used the flamethrower portion to belch out balls of fire, setting the forest ablaze. The scene erupted into chaos. Camouflaged bodies fell, flew, and caught on fire. Bright splashes and smears of red jarred against the colors of earth and tree trunk. It was like a number of video games he had designed, only more lifelike; Mike could almost smell the charred human flesh on-screen. He twisted to squint at the tactical display. Had some of the red dots winked out?

He returned to the real-time views from Tim's drones and saw men withdrawing, burnt and bloodied. He saw one booted foot emerging from a pile of leaves and bark. He saw abandoned weapons strewn on the forest floor.

“Tim . . .”

“Watch this!”

Another double-turret-turned-dragon appeared some yards away, loosing its bullets and fiery barrage. On one screen soldiers ran and tumbled and shouted and screamed; on the other more red dots disappeared.

Tim laughed. “Tremble before the great and terrible Smaug!”

The majority of the troops were now in full retreat, dragging their wounded away.

“Okay, Tim. They're going,” Mike said. “You can stop.”

He didn't stop. Rounds of bullets and flaming breaths roared from the dragon's mouth. Hell had been unleashed on the mountainside. And Tim's fury would not end until the ammo ran out.

Mike found himself laboring for breath. In a horrific way, Tim reminded him of his son, Anton—a child playing with toy soldiers. Only this was not a game, and those were not some plastic pieces fleeing down the mountain. Mike said nothing more, though; they had a more immediate problem: the attackers on the surface had been repelled, but those who had made it into the tunnel were still advancing. They came cautiously along the road, several Humvees in their rear guard, weapons at the ready. Where they met each of the huge shield doors that Sara had closed to keep them out, they employed manual override codes and kept on coming.

Tim was covered in sweat. His metallic dragons had morphed back into now-empty turrets, and he was no longer smiling. “I got nothin' left, Sara,” he told her. “The doors are the big thing in the tunnel, and they've got the hardware codes for those.”

“Shooting blanks, Timmy? I guess it's time for a woman to take charge.”

She studied the structure of the shield doors, her gray eyes hard and narrowed until she hit upon the solution: the soldiers couldn't override a system that was broken.

Sara moved to stand directly before the view screen that displayed the troops advancing toward the next shield door. After that, she knew, there was only one more. The manual controls for each door were to its left, behind a thick metal panel. She knew what was in there; she'd studied not only the architecture but the interior workings. As the leader of the troops approached the barrier, Sara—arms crossed and eyes closed—simply reached into the door mechanism and twisted. When the soldiers opened the control compartment, they found warped scrap metal. While they digested that reality, Sara blew the hydraulic lift mechanism along the top of the door apart bolt by bolt.

Mike exhaled sharply. Surely they would turn back now.

But they didn't. The leader of the Deep Shield troops ordered a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher to the fore.

“What are they doing?” Mike murmured. “They shouldn't do that.”

“It won't work,” Sara said. “I've studied the schematics of this place. That door is too thick. They'd need something far more powerful than that rocket launcher.”

“They're not aiming at the door, dammit,” Mike said.

They fired the portable rocket launcher—once, twice, three times—at the top of the shield door—right at the spot where one of the huge bolts bored into the weakened rock. The third time, the rock above it began to crumble, loosening a patter of stones, some as big as baseballs. Soldiers shouted and began to retreat. Too late. The rock of the tunnel's ceiling groaned, and the patter became a hail of stones the size of men's heads.

Above the soldiers a cleft opened in the roof of the tunnel. The rocky hail became an avalanche. There was a roar like the passing of a freight train, and dust and debris blinded the camera's eye. When the dust began to clear, the shield door was still
intact, but the zetas could see that at least half of the recruits had gone down under the rocks. Blood ran in tiny rivers and pooled on the tunnel floor.

They got a good look at the carnage before the lights in the tunnel flickered and went out. Troops screamed and called for help in the dark.

Mike glanced at Sara and saw her gazing back, her face resolute, her eyes glittering. His lips felt numb. His whole body felt numb. “What do we do? Sara, what do we do?”

She shunted the view to a different set of cameras to see if they could make out anything. “Nothing. They'll have to count on their own people—whoever's left—to get them out. I just hope they've learned their lesson.”