The Rift (25 page)

Two Fireflies down.

“You okay?” Roland yelled to Mac.

Mac lifted a hand and gave an unenthusiastic thumbs-up.

Roland moved forward to stick with Doc, who was setting up his laptop short of the Rift, next to the laptop Burns had left behind.

“Eagle, what do you have?” Moms asked over the net.

“Someone is escaping through the forest to your south. Got lots of heat signatures. Yours, deer, others. It’s a mess.”

“Doc?” Moms asked, trying to get some vision back.

“The Fireflies are through,” Doc said. “I’m going to shut the Rift.”

“Spooky, do you have a human moving in the forest to our south?”

On board Spectre, the gunner trained her infrared and thermal sights on Moms’s location. “Roger. I’ve got your team and one more, south of your location, moving toward the road. Also what looks like some deer.”

Burns paused and looked up. Of course, with the thick trees all around him, he couldn’t see anything, but he felt the electronic fingers from above, coursing over his body, like an enemy’s caress, seeking him, finding him, fixing him.

Burns closed his eyes and stood still for a moment. His entire body took on a golden sheen. Then he continued on his way.

“Target gone,” the gunner announced. “It just disappeared.”

“Fire up the deer,” Moms said. “Can you take them out without hitting us?”

“Danger close,” the gunner said, “but roger. Smoking the deer.”

The young woman leaned forward, hand light on the joystick, and began the delicate surgery of blasting the deer scattered among the team members, selectively using incredibly short bursts of 25 mm, a couple chugs of 40 mm, and an occasional 105-mm shell when there was a sufficient safety margin.

It took her twenty-two seconds to blast the remaining five deer.

When she was done, she was sure she could find a deer image pretty easily online. But whether to put them up was the question. Bambi? Really?

Moms had some vision back. She could make out Doc by the Rift and the laptop that had opened it. Roland was flaming what remained of the deer Spectre had blown to bits, destroying the Fireflies.

A small success in a lost battle.

“Keep a count on Fireflies you’ve gotten, Roland.”

“Always.”

She went to the Support net. “All elements, back off, back off. Return to FOB.”

The last thing she wanted was for a Firefly to get into Spooky or one of the Apaches or any of the firepower she had on hand. She headed toward Doc to make sure he was doing what he was supposed to be doing.

The Rift snapped out of existence as Doc shut it.

But it was too late.

Burns was loose; the rest of the Fireflies were free.

How many, they had no idea.

Moms switched frequencies once more. “Ms. Jones, we’ve lost containment.”

Neeley walked in the door to the interrogation room, which doubled as Dr. Golden’s “counseling” room in the Cellar, expecting to see the good doctor sitting on the other side of the table.

Instead, she was surprised to see Hannah waiting, two cups of coffee on the desk. Hannah stood as Neeley came in, offering one cup across the table.

“No hug?” Neeley asked as she reached out and accepted the coffee.

Hannah grinned. “We’re not the hugging type.” She sat down and Neeley followed suit.

“We’re not, aren’t we? Or should that be ‘are we’?” Neeley shrugged. “Grammar was never my strength.”

“You have plenty of other skills to make up for it,” Hannah said.

“Practical ones,” Neeley said. “In a certain world.”

“You had me worried,” Hannah said.

“By dying?”

“Among other things.”

“Where’s Dr. Golden?” Neeley nodded toward the window. “Observing?”

“Yes.”

Neeley sighed. “Charting my childhood trauma?”

Hannah laughed. “We all lived it.” She put down her coffee and leaned forward, palms flat on the table. “Are you done? Do you want to stop?”

It was Neeley’s turn to laugh. “Blunt, aren’t we? I never should have started. Gant wouldn’t have wanted me to. But I didn’t have much choice, did I?”

“Neither of us did. Nero saw to that.”

“Nero’s dead,” Neeley said. “Is his hand reaching out from the grave?”

“It always has been.”

“I didn’t think one got to retire from the Cellar,” Neeley said.

“Retire from field work at least,” Hannah said.

“Do you remember when we were in France?” Neeley asked.

Hannah arched an eyebrow at the abrupt shift in topic. “Of course.”

“You told me about your parents.”

The eyebrow dropped and Hannah couldn’t help but shift her eyes ever so briefly toward the mirror. “I did.”

“Do you still believe betrayal is the only love?”

“So you do remember,” Hannah said. “But don’t misquote me. I said
sometimes
betrayal is the only love left, not the only love.”

“I don’t understand it,” Neeley said. “I thought I did back then. But it makes no sense now.”

Hannah sighed. “I should have been more clear. Sometimes betrayal is the only thing some people are capable of. Your young lover who gave you that bomb. My husband keeping his secrets. My mother. By keeping us ignorant of the terrible things they were doing, perhaps they were showing us all they knew of love.”

“Bullshit,” Neeley said. “They were self-centered assholes using us for their own goals.”

“Is that what I am?”

“If you betray me, it is.”

A long silence played out in the room, the two women staring at each other.

Hannah broke the silence. “I will not betray you, Neeley.”

Neeley nodded. “I didn’t think so, but I wanted it on the table.”

Hannah got up and walked around the table. Neeley stood also. Awkwardly, Hannah put her arms around her taller operative.

“I love you,” she whispered in a voice that couldn’t be picked up by the microphones hidden all about the room.

Neeley’s mouth opened, as if to say something, but no words came. The two stood like that for a moment, Neeley’s arm limp at her side.

Hannah let go and went back to her seat. She sat down and composed herself.

Neeley sat down and picked up her coffee. “Something strange happened in Tennessee.”

“Go ahead.”

“Burns’s eyes changed color,” Neeley said.

“I thought you came up behind him,” Hannah said. “How did you see his eyes?”

“I violated Protocol,” Neeley said.

“That’s why we’re having this discussion,” Hannah said.

Neeley waved off the misdirection. “They turned golden. And…” She paused.

“Go ahead.”

“His face changed.”

Hannah waited.

“I knew about the scars from the mission briefing,” Neeley said. “But his face smoothed out and then it became Gant’s.”

Hannah tapped a finger on the table for a moment, a sign of extreme agitation. “How could that be?”

“I don’t know.”

“We don’t know what Burns is,” Hannah said. “So let’s assume he’s capable of changing his appearance.”

“I don’t think it’s just appearance,” Neeley said.

“What do you mean?”

“I think there’s Burns and there is something controlling Burns. And they’re not the same.”

Hannah considered that. “All right. How would he know about Gant?”

“From me. I felt a slight shock when I put the suppressor up against the back his head.”

“Another violation of Protocol,” Hannah noted, but almost as an afterthought. Both women were off their game, something unprecedented.

The door to the room swung open and Dr. Golden walked in. She nodded at Neeley but went to Hannah’s side of the table and slid a piece of paper in front of her. Hannah read it and a frown creased her face.

“Burns opened a Rift,” Hannah said. “The Nightstalkers shut it but have lost containment on an unknown number of Fireflies and Burns.”

“A cluster fuck,” Neeley summarized. She stood. “I’ll go and deal with Burns. Sounds like the Nightstalkers will have their hands full tracking down the Fireflies.”

Golden finally spoke. “I haven’t cleared you for duty.”

“You can come with me,” Neeley said. “Evaluate me en route and on the job.”

Hannah glanced between Golden and Neeley and then nodded at the latter. “Go. We’ll finish this later.”

Moms had the air force airdrop two F470 Zodiacs into the river. They were layered with Armorflate, an inflatable bulletproof system, and powered by a fifty-five-horsepower, two-stroke pump-jet propulsor.

The team was gathered on the dock, the Snake sitting in the circle at the end of the drive, and a fleet of FEMA personnel were evacuating the inhabitants of Scout’s neighborhood with dire warnings of a train derailment nearby. There were chemicals and bad stuff and enough mumbo jumbo that taillights were making an exodus out of the area.

In fact, Ms. Jones had already had a train “derailed” on the line so that overhead imagery would back up their cover story, and it also closed the rail line in the area to further traffic.

So far, Support was having a better mission than the Nightstalkers.

“All right,” Moms said, surveying her battered team. “The golden glow was going with the river, so let’s assume Burns and the Fireflies are also doing that. I know the clock is ticking, but we’ve already lost containment. We go racing off in the wrong direction, we’re just wasting time. So let’s focus here and hash this out before we move. Everyone feel free to put in their dime’s worth. What’s the target?”

“The Watts Bar nuke plant,” Doc said. “It’s the most obvious.”

“Next most obvious?” Nada asked.

“The dam is closer,” Scout said. “Seems like this Burns fellow would have opened the Rift closer to the nuclear plant if that was his target.”

“Score one for the girl,” Eagle said.

“I am a young woman,” Scout corrected him. “Not a girl.”

“Correction,” Eagle said. “The young woman.”

“Perhaps,” Doc said. “But this golden glow originated here. From Scout’s toothbrush. Originally from the Rift in North Carolina. The question is, how is that connected to Burns, the Rift here, and the Fireflies?”

“And Scout,” Kirk said in a low voice, but Nada heard him and so did Moms.

Nada spoke up. “Is Burns trying to complete what they attempted in North Carolina? Expand a Rift into a Portal?”

Doc held up his pack. “I’ve got the computer Burns used. How is he going to open a Rift, never mind a Portal, now?”

The sound of a chainsaw roared from where the Snake was parked, indicating Support removing the wooden pole from the cargo bay by the most expeditious manner. The pained look on Eagle’s face indicated what he thought of that.

“He might have the program in a thumb drive,” Doc said. “Ivar was working on a remote site from the computer that opened the Rift in Scout’s neighborhood in North Carolina. He shoves a thumb drive in any computer powerful enough, it can generate the algorithm.”

“This doesn’t feel the same,” Scout said in a low voice, which pretty much everyone ignored, especially since it was barely audible above the roar of the chainsaw.

Except Nada. And Moms. And Kirk.

“You know,” Ivar said, “there’s another potential target in this area. Perhaps an even more likely one, and the entire river thing is a diversion.”

“Speak,” Moms ordered.

“North of here,” Ivar said. “Oak Ridge. When the Manhattan Project was formed in 1939, they picked three main sites. Everyone thinks of Los Alamos, but actually Oak Ridge and Hanford, in Washington, were more important in a way because they produced the fissionable material used in making the bombs.”

“Maybe the river isn’t a diversion but a route,” Eagle said. “Oak Ridge is on the Clinch River, which flows into this river down by Kingston. And part of it borders Watts Bar Lake.”

Moms nodded at him. “Thanks. Is Oak Ridge still active?”

“Yes,” Ivar said. “And it has a plutonium core that’s still active. Going through the Archives, I read that the first Rift ever opened used a plutonium core.”

“The demon core,” Eagle said.

“That doesn’t sound good,” Scout muttered.

“Ditto,” Nada said.

“It’s a core that Area 51 appropriated from Los Alamos,” Ivar said. “Killed two researchers.”

“Sounds even worse,” Scout said.

Ivar turned to Eagle. “What is Odessa?”

Everyone stared at the newest member of the team in surprise.

“What are you talking about?” Moms asked.

“The group that opened the first Rift,” Ivar said. “It was called Odessa.”

Eagle had instant access to the pile of useless and useful facts in his brain. “I assumed you meant the group at Area 51 and not the Frederick Forsyth book or the movie adapted from it, which was actually based on a real organization, which the group at Area 51 also used. Roughly Odessa stands for Organization of former SS, which the Nazi and Japanese scientists at Area 51 called themselves. They were led by a former SS officer, Colonel”—Eagle paused, having to access deeper thoughts—“Colonel Schmidt. They all disappeared when they opened the Rift using the demon core.”

Moms held up her hand as she processed all this. “Okay. So. It could be the Loudoun Dam, the Watts Bar nuclear reactor, or Oak Ridge.”

“It ain’t that complicated,” Nada said. He pointed down at the dock. “The river is the key. We go with the river, we follow the golden glow, and I bet we run into the Fireflies and Burns somewhere along the way. First the dam, then Oak Ridge, then the nuke plant. Meanwhile, you get Support to put additional security down at Watts Bar and at Oak Ridge. Especially any water intake. Also, seal off the dam area. We go downriver to the dam.”

Moms turned to Ivar. “You figure out a way to track this golden glow thingie?”

“We don’t even know what it is,” Ivar hedged. “But,” he continued before anyone jumped on his expertise with combat boots, “I’ve rigged this.” He held up a backpack with a long wand attached to it. “It will determine electronic fluctuations, especially in the water. If there’s something in there”—he nodded toward the dark river flowing under the dock—“this will find it.”

Moms looked over her bedraggled team. “We’ve got some hours of darkness left. I want to contain and control this before dawn or else it might go viral. We head downriver. Ivar, you’re in the lead boat with me and Roland and Kirk. Doc, you’re in the second boat with Nada and Mac. Eagle, you fly overhead.”

“I don’t have the chain gun,” Eagle said.

“But you’ve got eyes and imaging,” Moms said. “You’re our eye in the sky and our commo link to Support. Also, I want two Apaches on your shoulders. Can you link and slave their weapons to your control system?”

Eagle thought for a second, then nodded. “Yes.”

“Good,” Moms said. “You control their fire once we make contact.”

“Roger,” Eagle said.

“What about me?” Scout said.

Moms looked at the young woman/girl.

Before she could say something, Scout volunteered an answer. “I can be on the Sea-Doo. Cover your flank or whatever it is scouts do.”

“They scout,” Nada said. “Covering the flank is an appropriate mission for a scout.”