Wormhole (48 page)

“A training accident?” Charley Richardson slammed his fist down on the desk as he looked at his executive officer.

Bob Jones shrugged. “Shit happens.”

“Like hell it does. Not on my team. Not to three of my top people.”

Charley got to his feet, stretching his six-and-a-half-foot frame.

“You’re saying Artan and Yuzman both took a tumble while racing on the confidence course?”

“Yep. Right near the top of the high log climb. Artan slipped, tumbled into Hedo, and they both fell.”

“Right on top of Diego.”

“Actually Diego tried to break their fall.”

Charley stood nose to nose with Bob, his gray eyes locking with the other man’s brown ones. “Now tell me the real story. No attribution.”

“Does that apply to the whole team?”

“It does.”

Bob nodded, plopping down on the couch across from Charley’s desk. “You’re going to want to sit down for this one, boss.

“You know how you told the boys to show our new recruit a proper welcome, make sure she has what it takes?”

“I remember.”

“Well, they’ve been giving her the business. Nothing major. Just screwing with her stuff. Sexual comments alternating with the silent treatment. Letting her know the president may have put her here, but she isn’t one of us. Basically making her life hell.

“This morning she’d had enough of it. We were formed up for PT out where we’ve rigged our hand-to-hand-combat training pit, when she stepped out of formation and walked right up beside me, in front of them all.

“I thought she was going to break down, call it quits, start pleading, or something. You could hear the fellas laughing, so I stepped aside and let her have the floor. You know what she said?”

“No, I don’t know what she said, and I don’t want to guess. Get to the damned point.”

“She just stood there, with the team gathered around her in an arc. I’ll never forget her voice if I live a thousand years. It was throaty, smooth as silk, the sexiest voice I’ve ever heard. She looked them all up and down, then said, ‘Let’s make a deal. You pick your best man. If he beats me hand to hand here in the pit, every one of you can have a turn at me, and I’ll be the best piece of ass you’ve ever had.’

“Shit, you could’ve heard a pin drop. There was so much testosterone in the air it was flammable.

“Then she said, ‘But if I win, you’re going to show me the same respect you show each other. Do we have a deal?’”

“And?”

“And she had a deal. The boys argued about who would do the fighting, but finally Diego Vasquez won out.”

Charley nodded. Vasquez was the only guy on the team stronger than he was, and quick as a mongoose.

“So what happened?”

“Diego came at her full bore, just exploded out of the pack. It was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. It was like Inga knew his moves before he made them. She cracked his ribs on that first charge, just used his momentum to add power to her kick. It dropped him to his knees, left him gasping for air.

“But she was already on his back, her arms locked around his neck in a submission choke hold, cutting off the blood supply to his brain. Diego’s eyes just stared in disbelief, then rolled up in his head. Once he was out, she dropped him at her feet.

“I was so surprised, the two Turks charged before I could stop them. Artan reached her first, tried a flying takedown and got a mouthful of his own teeth when her elbow flattened him. Hedo pulled up in a fighter’s stance. He might as well have been blindfolded with his arms tied behind his back. Her first kick broke his kneecap, her next one caved in the side of his face. Once he was on the ground she stomped his rib cage. Thought she was going to kill him.”

“About that time, Artan distracted her by climbing back to his feet. He didn’t stay there long though. Anyway, when she was done, she turned around to face the rest of us. I swear to God, she wasn’t even breathing hard. All she said was ‘Anyone else?’ but she didn’t get any volunteers. Then she turned her back on us and walked away.

“So that’s why those three are in the hospital. Diego’s in the best shape. He’ll probably be released tomorrow. Artan and Hedo are going to be there for a while.”

“I guess she didn’t take kindly to the Turks breaking her deal.”

“I tell you what, boss, I wouldn’t screw with her.”

Charley nodded. “So it was a training accident.”

“Just like I said.”

“Looks like we’ve got a new teammate. Spread the word.”

Bob rose to his feet, opened the door, and paused.

“I don’t have to.”

The door to the command hooch banged closed behind him.

The knock on his door roused Freddy from the light doze that had almost allowed the glass of Crown Royal to slip from his fingers.

Shit. What time was it? The LED lights on the cable box read 11:45. Who the hell would come knocking at midnight?

Freddy thought about grabbing his snub-nosed thirty-eight. But what if it was the Ripper? The thirty-eight would just get him killed.

Setting the glass on the end table, Freddy slid out of the easy chair and stumbled to the door. Wiping a hand over his face, he took a deep breath to clear his head and opened the door.

It took a full five seconds for Freddy’s mind to process the girl standing before him. She was a petite Asian in jeans and a purple camisole that left her navel exposed. At least he didn’t see any piercings.

“Wrong house. The party must be down the street.”

“Freddy Hagerman?”

“What of it?”

“I understand you met with Denise Jennings of the NSA at the Thomas Jefferson Building.”

Now she had his attention. Freddy motioned her toward the couch, but she remained where she was.

“I won’t be here long enough to come in or sit down. I came here to give you this.”

She handed him a leather valise he had mistaken for her purse, and stepped back, her eyes as black as her hair.

“I think you’ll find that I finished the work Denise started. I understand you know what to do with it.”

“Mind if I ask a couple of questions?” Actually, he had more than a couple of questions.

“No need. If the answer isn’t in what I just gave you, I don’t know it.”

“Your name?”

“Good-bye, Mr. Hagerman.”

She turned and walked down the dark driveway and climbed inside a small car. No interior light came on when she opened the door. Neither did she turn on her headlights when she drove away. So much for getting the license plate number.

Freddy stared after her as she turned the corner at the end of his block. Then he closed the door, walked into the kitchen, and spread the valise’s contents across the kitchen table. Three coffeepots later, with the first gray of dawn lightening his windows, he knew that she had spoken the truth.

He also knew that if the Ripper hadn’t told him not to publish the story until after November Anomaly Gateway Day, he would already be on his way to New York.

Donald Stephenson paced the ATLAS cavern like a lion in a cage. It was strangely quiet. He’d given the entire staff eight hours off, instructing the G-Day crew to report promptly at four a.m. to begin the six-hour countdown.

They’d been shocked. The cavern always had a night crew. But tonight, Donald wanted to savor the culmination of his life’s work alone.

As he walked among the massive equipment, his footsteps echoing, and looked up at the steel scaffolding draping the cavern walls, a sudden chill raised gooseflesh on his arms. It reminded him of another November night, so many years ago, when he’d stood in another man-made cavern, alone with the Rho Ship.

The truth was, that moment had been the purest of his life. The sense of discovery, the revelations. The renewed sense of
purpose when, even though many thought him successful, in his mind he had just been spinning his wheels.

Mankind imagined itself a highly evolved species...or, even more bizarrely, as the one, all-powerful God’s greatest creation. But on that first night when Donald had made his way, alone, into the Rho Ship, he had discovered proof of what he had always thought to be true. Man was no more than an adolescent species on a backwater planet in an aging galaxy.

If the Rho Ship hadn’t been so horribly damaged in its combat with the Altreian starship, it wouldn’t have taken Donald so long to prepare the way for mankind’s next evolutionary leap. But through all these years of baby steps and setbacks, Donald had persisted, until those steps had finally deposited him on destiny’s doorstep.

Odd how his fate seemed entwined with Thanksgiving, like some cosmic circadian rhythm. For the first time in a very long time, a genuine smile creased his ageless face.

Tomorrow, on Thanksgiving Day in America, he would change the world.

The Anomaly Transport and Control Center (ATACC) looked nothing like anything Ted Cantrell had imagined. When he and his CNN news crew had arrived to begin setup for the most important broadcast in history, he’d expected to find something like the NASA Flight Control Room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, a room filled with banks of high-tech workstations arranged in a neat grid in front of a wall filled with large display screens. This felt more like the Batcave.

The ATLAS cavern was huge, the walls draped with steel lattice construction, grated metal walkways leading to metal stairs, each of these girded with steel rails that were all that prevented someone from stumbling into a deadly fall. High up along one of the topmost levels, international camera crews and media had been allotted space to set up cameras and on-site reporting stations. Every available space along the long, narrow walkway was
packed with equipment and cables, with open space reserved only for the network anchors.

Eschewing an anchor desk, Ted had decided to stand back against the blue railing, allowing the camera to frame him against the huge cavern that opened up behind him. Despite the tight operating space, the view was breathtaking. Its great form rising thirty meters from the central cavern floor, the Rho Gateway Device resembled an inverted horseshoe magnet, its metal walls five meters thick, its outer surface sprouting appendages that looked like the buds on a potato left too long in its sack. Huge cables snaked out from a massive steel structure that rose three hundred feet from the cavern floor, terminating on those buds or disappearing beneath the ATACC. They were the lines designed to carry more power than any power plant on Earth had ever generated.