Extinction Machine (18 page)

To see nothing.

The ship was gone.

That fast, that silently. Gone.

Xiè’s mouth hung open.

When he could speak, when he could command himself enough to form a thought and put it into words, he stammered, “W—where is it?”

The scientist indicated a large status board mounted high on the wall to the left of the bay. Everyone turned toward it. It showed a satellite image of the Shanghai area, with Chongming at the top and the midstream islands, Changxing Island and Hengsha Island, lower down. There were two red lights glowing on the board. One indicated the laboratory here on Changxing. The other identified the craft. As they watched, the second light moved away from Changxing at incredible speed. It flew high, paralleling the G40 Hushan Expressway toward the mainland. Within seconds it was moving toward the heart of Shanghai. And this, Xiè knew, would be the ultimate test. It was a cloudy night and the sky would be a featureless and uniform black. Even so, Shanghai was the most populous city on Earth, with twenty-three million people, and so many of them with cell phones and cameras. If there was one picture, one clip of video, then the great secret would be out.

The craft kept going.

And going.

As he watched, Xiè thought of who he wished he could tell about this. No, not tell … Xiè thought about whose nose he would like to rub in this. It was easy to conjure an image of the man’s sneering face and superior smile. Shelton, who loved to brag about how far along the M3 Project was … and offer false sympathy for the many setbacks in the Dragon Engine’s development. Xiè would have given much to see Shelton’s face at the precise moment when he discovered the truth.

Well,
he mused,
now the worm has turned. And in turning, revealed itself to be a dragon.

Xiè was not a man much given to profanity, but there were moments for everything. As he held the image of Shelton in his mind he murmured, “
Cào n
z
z
ng shíb
dài
.”

Fuck your ancestors to the eighteenth generation.

Admiral Xiè closed his eyes and took a nice, long, deep breath of perfect contentment.

Chapter Thirty-six

The Warehouse
Baltimore, Maryland
Sunday, October 20, 8:38 a.m.

“So,” said Top to the five members of Echo Team, “that’s what we got so far. Questions?”

They were in a mission briefing room and Top had brought them up to speed on the president, the Black Book, the video, and everything else that had happened.

“UFOs?” said Lydia Ruiz, the only woman on the team. “Holy shit.”

Bunny had a pair of Oakleys pushed up on his head, a mouthful of pink bubble gum, and an expression of profound indifference on his face. “We are not alone. Got it. What’s the big?”

The others looked at him.

“Um, dude,” said Sam Imura, the team’s new sniper, “aliens and all? That’s kind of big, wouldn’t you say?”

Bunny shrugged. “After all this shit we’ve seen you guys are actually surprised that this was going to happen at some point? Wait till you cats have rolled with the captain a couple of times, Sam. Aliens don’t even seem that bad. I mean, on my first gig with Echo we did zombies.”

“Read about that,” said Sam. “Zombies. Jee-sus. I wish I could tell my little brother, Tom. He’s a total
Night of the Living Dead
freak.”

“I did genetic supersoldiers when I was on Hotrod Team in Detroit,” said Ivan Yankovitch, a lantern-jawed piece of granite who had transferred to Echo right after the Red Order mess in Iran. “A Russian kill team that had twenty percent more muscle and bone mass. The smallest of them could bench six-fifty. That was some serious mad scientist shit.”

“Well that’s my whole damn point,” complained Bunny. “I mean, after all that stuff, if they told us the op was taking down radioactive cockroach ballerinas I’d just lock and load, but I wouldn’t get my panties in a bunch. I am officially not surprised by anything.”

There was a ripple of laughter, but it all sounded a bit forced. Top said nothing, letting them absorb it and deal with it in their own way.

“But,” continued Bunny, “we have an even longer list of stuff that wasn’t anything at all. ’Member that thing in May, when Al-Qaeda said that Bin Laden’s ghost was advising them? Fricking stooge dressed up as Bin Laden. And remember how everyone panicked when we got a report that there was a
seif al din
outbreak in Times Square on New Year’s Eve? Turned out to be a flash mob dressed as zombies doing the
Thriller
dance. More than half the stuff that comes onto our radar is bullshit. We get all worked up, teams get scrambled, and half the time we find out that our supervillain du jour is some toothless hillbilly cooking meth in a cave.”

“My little Bunny’s got a point, Top,” said Lydia. “Do we even know if this is real? I mean, how do we know if the shit is about to hit the fan or if somebody just farted in a draft?”

“We
don’t
know,” Top said, “but, to paraphrase Mr. Church, do you really think we have the luxury to wait and watch?”

Sam shook his head. “No, First Sergeant, we do not.”

Ivan cleared his throat. “What’s the status? Are we at DEFCON One?”

“We’re in an elevated alert state,” said Top. “The official status for the military is REDCON-2 as part of an unannounced training exercise. The DMS status is FPCON Charlie.”

There were five levels on the Force Protection Condition scale. FPCON Charlie was the fourth level, one used in situations when intelligence reports that there is terrorist activity imminent. Similarly the military had its Readiness Conditions. REDCON-2 had all personnel on alert and ready to fight, but they had not yet kicked the tires and lit the fires on the fighter jets.

Top added, “All of this was initiated when the president went missing because it was presumed that terrorists had somehow infiltrated and therefore compromised White House security. The joint chiefs advised the acting president to maintain that alert for now, at least until we have some confirmation that there is no immediate threat.”

“What kind of confirmation they lookin’ for?” asked Pete Dobbs, a shooter recruited from an ATF team working the drug wars in the Appalachians. “ET hanging ten on a monster wave rolling up Pennsylvania Avenue?”

No one laughed.

The phone rang and Top took the call, listened, said, “Yes, sir.”

As he hung up he grinned at Echo Team.

“Turns out the thugs who pissed off the cap’n this morning work for Blue Diamond Security.” He saw sour and hateful expressions blossom on their faces. Like their chief competitor, Blackwater, Blue Diamond was a global security company, which is a polite way of saying that they provided top-of-the-line mercenaries to power players in American politics and big business. They were the go-to company for everything from protecting U.S. oilmen in Iraq to serving as “advisors” for commercially inconvenient political uprisings in third world countries.

“Mr. Church would like us to go have a few words with them.”

All five of them grinned liked wolves.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Over Maryland airspace
Sunday, October 20, 8:43 a.m.

“Hey, Bug,” I said into the phone. “We anywhere yet?”

He told me what Jerry Spencer had found out about the Blue Diamond connection. “Top’s heading over there with Echo Team.”

“Great, they get to have fun while I heroically sit on my ass in a helicopter.” I sighed. “Look, what can you tell me about this Junie Flynn character? Why’s she so obsessed with UFOs and that stuff? She see a flying saucer once?”

“Not that she’s ever claimed. In fact I bet she’d give a lot to see one. She’s very harsh with people who claim to have seen craft but who Junie thinks are faking it.”

“Why would someone fake a claim like that?” I asked.

“Why do people claim to have seen Bigfoot, Joe?”

“There’s that.” I scratched Ghost between the ears. “Is the Black Book her only message or is she a general interest conspiracy nut?”

“She’s not a nut, Joe. Junie’s one of the most lucid speakers I’ve ever heard. But … to answer your question, the Black Book and Majestic Three are pretty big with her, but she also talks a lot about the need for disclosure. She keeps throwing challenges out to the U.S. government to ’fess up and admit that there are aliens and that we’ve recovered crash vehicles.”

“Good luck with that.”

“She’s been leading up to something. She’s been talking about something she’s going to reveal to the world this week. I think it was on last night’s podcast. I have it taped.”

“Dude, don’t you think we should already be on that?”

“Sure, but you wouldn’t believe how many things the big man has me on right now, just related to the president. Besides, her podcast is like three hours long, so I have to find the time to go through it.”

“Find the time.”

“Yeah, yeah. Oh, and other areas she hits a lot—alien-human hybrids.”

“Really? What’s that all about?”

Bug laughed. “Jeez, you really are clueless.”

“I have that on my business cards. C’mon, Bug, hit me.”

“Okay, Junie says that the reason we haven’t figured out how to make maximum use out of the alien tech is that it requires a biological interface. Now I know you know about that because we sat through that lecture.”

“That was DARPA, not
Plan 9 from Outer Space
.”

“Junie says that DARPA is only one group working on a way to develop technology that will allow a human being to bond with an aircraft on a biomechanical level. Maybe on a psychic level, too. That way a craft will move with the speed of human thought and without the lag time between thought and physical action on, say, a joystick or any other instrument.”

“So how does that involve alien-human hybrids?”

“She said that bodies were recovered from some of the crashes, and that we’ve been trying to do gene therapy with alien DNA so that an alien craft would recognize the pilot and respond according to how the ship was designed. Junie said that the hybridization program began in the seventies and viable hybrids were born or grown or whatever in the mid-eighties. The hybrids were supposedly raised in labs and trained in special camps, but some of them were seeded into the human population so scientists could study how well they blend in.”